Sholto Byrnes says aha – but his aha depends on a confusion of terms, a lumping together of different words with different meanings as if they all meant the same thing. That kind of aha is not a good kind, because people can just say, sharply or compassionately depending on temperament, ‘oh dear, you’ve made a muddle there.’

Let’s be clear: they could now be afforded rights under law specifically formulated to protect religion and belief. And those are two words that many scientists, rationalists and atheists don’t like to be associated with at all.

Nonsense. We have no problem ‘being associated with’ belief; we don’t claim to have no beliefs or to want no beliefs or to object to beliefs as such. Of course we don’t! Religion and belief are different things.

Atheists in particular hate it when they are referred to as “fundamentalist” or if they are accused of making a religion out of science. I’ve done both in the past, acts that have swiftly been followed by much foot-stamping and name-calling in the blogosphere.

But that’s a different thing. We do object to the first one because it’s just a silly distortion of the word, and we object to the second when, for instance, it’s just a wild assertion about atheists in general, as it so often is. We don’t say that no atheists ever ‘make a religion out of science’; we do say it’s just rhetorical abuse to claim that we all do.

[I]t seems to me that most militant atheists are characterised not just by an absence of belief in a god, but by a trust in science so certain and ardent that it is entirely akin to religious belief — and a highly devoted, if not fanatical, one at that. No, they say, these are not matters of belief. These are facts. Science says so.

No we don’t. We don’t say that. Sholto Byrnes is remarkably bad at accurately characterizing people he disagrees with. He skids into gross exaggeration and over-generalization the minute he puts fingers to keys. He should work on that.

More of Armstrong playing at Grown Up Scholarship. On page 279 she lays down the law about Wittgenstein for almost the whole page.

In his later years, Wittgenstein changed his mind. He no longer believed that language should merely state facts but acknowledged that words also issued commands, made promises, and expressed emotion. Turning his back on the early modern ambition to establish a single method of arrivingat truth, Wittgenstein now maintained that there were an infinite number of social discourses. So it was a grave mistake “to make religious belief a matter of evidence in the way that science is a matter of evidence”

And there we have our first reference: it is to “Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cecil Barrett, Oxford 1966′ – so not something Wittgenstein himself published, but a posthumous compilation. Armstrong goes on for the rest of the long paragraph, making Wittgenstein say much what she says on the subject; the next reference is to the same book, the six after that are to ‘Maurice Drury, “Conversations With Wittgenstein,” in Ludgwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, and the final one is to Ray Monk’s biography.

Not primary core Wittgenstein, in other words, but peripheral, compiled Wittgenstein, and chat, and a biography. One suspects cherry-picking, and one also suspects superficiality. One is not impressed.

Reading Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God is an irritating experience, and not just in the more obvious or predictable way. There is also the matter of her pretense of scholarship, which upon inspection turns out to be rather thin. For example:

Chapter 11, ‘Unknowing,’ begins with three pages of factual statements with names, dates, and other particulars, beginning with the Second International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in 1900 and what David Hilbert said there, what it implied about confidence in scientific progress, what Virginia Woolf said, what Picasso and James Joyce were up to, moving on to the First World War, the depression, and the war after that, with a pause halfway through to sum up: “It was now difficult to feel sanguine about the limitless progress of civilization. Modern secular ideologies were proving to be as lethal as any religious bigotry.”

Then we move to “Modern science had been founded on the belief that it was possible to achieve objective certainty.” We get a brisk mention of Hume and Kant, then James Clark Maxwell, then Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, then Becquerel and Planck, and at last we arrive where we knew we were heading, at Einstein and Bohr and Heisenberg. “Niels Bohr (1885-1962) and Werner Heisenberg (1901-76) developed quantum mechanics, an achievement that contradicted nearly every major postulate of Newtonian physics.”

That, thank god, is the end of the third paragraph. We’ve taken in a lot and are panting slightly. One more paragraph to go, to complete this magisterial survey. “So much for the traditional assumption that knowledge would proceed incrementally…In the bewildering universe of quantum mechanics” and so on, you can write it in your sleep. But what’s interesting about all this is that there is not one reference for any of it. Not one. It’s all poured out of Karen Armstrong’s teeming mind, apparently, so thoroughly assimilated and absorbed that there is no need to reference it – it is just her Knowledge. We do not get a reference until the end of the fourth paragraph of the chapter, three pages in (p. 264), for a direct quotation from Einstein. And what is the reference? Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 356.

In other words, most of that three pages is just a summary of part of a secondary book, a popular history of ideas, but it’s not presented that way. She nowhere says ‘to summarize pages 355-6 from Richard Tarnas’s best-selling book’ or similar – she just spouts it all as if it were an overflow of her vast erudition. That’s not illegal, but it’s not best practice, either. (Apart from anything else, it doesn’t really give Tarnas adequate credit, because it looks as if the reference is just to the direct quotation.) It’s not best practice, and in someone like Armstrong, it’s also deeply irritating. Why? Because she does convey an air of authority and wisdom and deep learning. There’s that ridiculously boastful pile of books on the front cover, for one thing! There’s the third sentence on the first page, in the Introduction, for another: “‘That book was really hard!’ readers have told me reproachfully, shaking their heads in faint reproof. ‘Of course it was!’ I want to reply. ‘It was about God.'” A barely-veiled boast – I Write Hard Books. Well this book at least is not hard, it’s pseudo-hard, and when you look closely at it it also turns out to be pseudo-erudite and inadequately referenced.

The first three pages aren’t an aberration, either; she goes on the same way. Page 266 gets really down to it with Heisenberg and that other fella. “In 1931, the Austrian philosopher Kurt Gödel (1906-78) devised a theorem to show that any formal logical or mathematical system must contain propositions that are not verifiable within that system; there would always be propositions that could be proved or disproved only by input from outside. This completely undercut the traditional assumption of systematic decidability.” Then there’s what John Dewey (dates provided, as always) said in his Gifford Lectures in 1929, then there’s commentary about our limited minds, all reference-free, then there’s a quotation from “the American physicist Percy Bridgman” (dates provided again), including (this must have thrilled Armstrong) “We are confronted with something truly ineffable.” The direct quotation, at last, gets a reference: “Quoted in Huston Smith, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind“. Another secondary source, you see – and one with an apparent agenda. This is thin, second-hand, warmed-over, paraphrased stuff, but it’s not presented that way. Armstrong has a reputation as a scholar, but it’s not always earned.

Udo and Russell have their say on the putative schism between atheist camps.

In a different world, the merits, or otherwise, of religious teachings might be discussed more dispassionately. In that world, some of us who criticise religion itself might be content to argue that the church (and the mosque, and all the other religious architecture that sprouts across the landscape) should be kept separate from the state. Unfortunately, however, we don’t live in that world.

No, we don’t, and furthermore, all the fuming and name-calling from the people who despise the “new” atheists is, perversely or tragically or amusingly, just fanning the flames of “new” atheism. That’s partly because nearly all of the fuming and name-calling is noticeably unfair and inaccurate, and so it just irritates instead of persuading, but it’s also because the intensity and fury awakens our curiosity. It does. I often see people asking – people sometimes ask me – why “new” atheists care, why we’re so interested in theism, why bother, why not just ignore the whole thing. Well this is part of why – it’s because the more fury and unfair rhetoric there is, the more we wonder what’s going on, what theists and fans of theists are so worked up about, what they’re thinking, what all this is based on. So we look into it – and we are interested and perhaps surprised by what we find, so we talk about it, and that’s why we don’t ignore the whole thing.

When religion claims authority in the political sphere, it is unsurprising — and totally justifiable — that atheists and skeptics question the source of this authority. If religious organisations or their leaders claim to speak on behalf of a god, it is fair to ask whether the god concerned really makes the claims that are communicated on its behalf. Does this god even exist? Where is the evidence? And even if this being does exist, why, exactly, should its wishes be translated into law?

Yes, that’s what I mean. Even when religion claims authority in the political sphere in something that doesn’t directly affect us, we still question the source of the authority (some of us do). We’re interested. The louder the claims of authority are, the more interested we are. We start to wonder, or to pay more attention than we used to. What is that about? we wonder. Where does this idea come from, and why do poeple accept it so readily? How do people manage to ignore the many obvious problems with it? So we investigate, and write about our investigations, and then the despisers come along and call us a great many harsh names for doing so, and then we get our backs up. We are allowed to investigate this, and we are allowed to talk about it, and we are not any of those things we just got called. So next time we dig twenty feet down instead of ten.

Michael Brull replies to the elegant vice-chancellor.

The public and commercial prominence and success of atheist writers such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and AC Grayling has been heralded as the rise of a “new atheism”. Yet the response to this could equally be heralded as the rise of a “new theism”. Facing a new attack with an international audience playing close attention, religions have as little rational argument in their favour as ever. There was a time when they could deal with dissent through more draconian measures: the kind that can still be practiced in, say, Saudi Arabia. Having lost the power of the gun in the West, apologists of religion have a new weapon: being offended. Rather than confronting (say) Dawkins’ arguments with counter-arguments, people like Craven, and many others like him, instead cry out: why are you picking on us? All we want is for you to respect our beliefs. And so, the crybaby theists hide behind the demand for respect…The bottom line is that such special pleading is a way for theists to avoid answering their critics.

That and also a way for theists to bully their critics, and that is exactly how they new theists are using it. There is a very strong presumption that we are supposed to ‘respect’ certain kinds of beliefs (religious ones, basically), and the new theists deploy that presumption in their favor with energy and zeal. It’s a great wheeze – no need to make real arguments, and lots of emotive pressure to apply. It’s all good.

[I]n a liberal democracy, people should adjust to the prospect of other people finding their views stupid, immoral, pernicious, or any other terrible thing. …A liberal democracy cannot function without the possibility of discussing which beliefs are good and which ones are not. Crybaby theists wish to be shielded from the normal rough and tumble of arguments about beliefs. There are people who honestly think religious belief irrational, and find aspects of organised religion troubling. If anything is outrageous, it is the arrogance of religious extremists, here and elsewhere, holding that such views should not be allowed open discussion.

And that’s exactly why we keep saying so, as often as they attempt to shut us up via respect-demands or vulgar abuse or a bizarro mix of the two.

See, here’s yet another one – yet another apparently grown-up responsible person who apparently feels quite comfortable saying things about atheists that are not true. I bet she would not feel comfortable saying things that are not true about Other Races, or gays, or Jews, or Muslims, or immigrants, or foreigners. But atheists? Well you say they are bad people, so it’s all right to say untrue things about them. That would appear to be the thinking, at least.

Coming a year after London’s city buses were plastered with adverts that stated flatly, “There’s probably no God. Stop worrying and enjoy your life,” New York City’s subway trains were plastered with similar ads…

But buses weren’t plastered with the ads in either city – that would mean the ads were all over the place, and they weren’t. That’s only the second paragraph. That’s exactly the kind of misrepresentation by silly exaggeration that atheists are subject to all the time these days, starting with all the indignant complaints about a ‘deluge’ of atheist books when the deluge amounts to maybe ten or twelve if you count generously, spread over a few years. Yeah right, atheist books are crowding all other books off the shelves and every bus in the city is entirely covered with atheist ads.

It’s the latest promotional push by a special interest group that has grown increasingly vocal.

‘Special interest group’ nothing – that’s a bit of political rhetoric that doesn’t mean anything except perhaps ‘group with an agenda I don’t share.’ But more to the point is the pointing and frowning at atheists’ daring to ‘grow increasingly vocal.’ More to the point is even mentioning at all, as if it were abnormal and obviously bad.

But not all atheists are comfortable preaching the gospel of the nonbeliever. After all, the New York advertising effort could be seen as something most atheists consider repugnant: evangelizing.

It could be seen as that only because people like Lauren Sandler, and Lauren Sandler herself, keep portraying it like that. This is reminiscent of Chris Mooney’s lamenting that journalists ‘go on impressions and what they’ve heard’ and so keep thinking of Dawkins as Mr Big Atheist, when Mooney has done so much to train them to do just that. The advertsing effort doesn’t really resemble evangelizing very much – but it’s very fashionable to say that atheism looks just like religion only the other way around.

She does it again a few paragraphs later, after chatting to Paul Kurtz and Tom Flynn.

[A]theism, for all its progress, needs to do something to change its image…Even if more than 15 percent of the population believes in what the word represents, they may be loathe to embrace a label that is often preceded by the adjective “rabid.”

She says, doing her bit to make the prophecy self-fulfilling.

My contribution to the Comment is Free question is posted. One or two commenters agreed with my suggestion that I perhaps wrote a little more carefully than Ruse did. It’s funny about that – how often we encounter some I’m-an-atheist-but critic shouting wild insults and demented misrepresentations at us in the very act of telling us to stop being so wild and demented. It causes me to suspect something resembling an agenda, much as I hate to say anything so intemperate and rash.

An erudite thoughtful man by the name of Greg Craven, who is vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University, has written an elegant, reasoned, careful piece on atheism and atheists in The Age. It would persuade anyone who read it with an open mind.

From time immemorial, this world has been troubled by plagues. From bogong moths in Canberra to frogs in biblical Egypt, unwelcome and unlovely creatures have the awkward habit of turning up in bulk. Just now, we are facing one of our largest and least appealing infestations. Somewhat in advance of summer’s blowflies, we are beset by atheists.

That’s a good beginning, don’t you think? Invoking plagues, comparing atheists to moths and frogs, saying we’re unwelcome and unlovely and turn up in bulk, calling us an infestation, then with a flourish comparing us to blowflies and complaining of being ‘beset’ by us.

Clearly I don’t keep up with the news from Australia as well as I should. Are atheists clogging all the sidewalks there, are they gnawing at the foundations of people’s houses, are they worming their way into the plumbing and turning it rusty and leaky, are they crapping on all the food? I had not heard.

[T]he great advantage of designer atheism is that you get to think of yourself as immensely clever. After all, you are at least much brighter than all those dumb-asses who believe in a supreme being, such as Sister Perpetua down the road, Thomas Aquinas, Isaac Newton and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Well there is always that risk, yes, but is that really our fault? (And even though it’s a risk, it’s not an inevitable outcome – it is possible to be an atheist without thinking of yourself as immensely clever. One very easy way to insure this is just to read a page or two of a book by someone really clever.)

For some reason, contemporary Australian atheism seems to consider itself terribly funny. Its proponents only have to wheel out one of the age-old religious libels to lose control of their bladders. To outsiders, of course, it is a bit like watching a giggling incontinent drunk at a party.

Jeez – he’s really very vulgar, isn’t he. I think I’ve had enough.

A credit to his university, he is.

Austin Dacey considers ‘the latest critics of the new atheists: the old humanists’.

Humanists are right to think that there is more to life than atheism, but wrong to think that they are the ones to provide it. It is not the job of religion’s critics to organize a replacement.

Indeed not, especially since we wouldn’t know where to begin (which is part of Austin’s point). It’s not, after all, as if humanists and/or atheists are like theism turned inside out – carrying all the same baggage but with minus-signs replacing plus-signs; it’s not as if we come complete with our own atheist music and atheist prayers and atheist temples and atheist holidays and atheist hats. It’s also not as if the ‘more’ that there is to life is necessarily a peculiarly atheist kind of more. It’s just more. Most of it is every bit as available to theists as it is to us. (I say ‘most’ because there probably are various senses of freedom, liberation, autonomy, that are specific to atheism, in the same way that there are various senses of protection, companionship, cosmic love, that are specific to theism.) We can all revel in poetry, music, nature, landscapes, relationships, conversation, learning, dance, play; feelings of wonder, awe, joy; chocolate, ice cream, weirdly fascinating stupid tv shows about real people being neurotic, chocolate. Other kinds of more are harder to replace, as I said in answer to a ‘Comment is Free’ question, but that’s just how it is. You can’t change something and at the same time replace it so completely that nothing is missing, because then you haven’t changed it.

I’ve christened a new fallacy to give a name to this mistake in thinking: I call it the fallacy of decomposition. The fallacy of decomposition is the mistake of supposing that as the estate of religion collapses, there must be a single new institution that to arises to serve the same social functions it served—that the social space vacated by religion must be filled by a religion-shaped object. Instead, it could be that in the lot once occupied by faith there springs up a variegated garden, a patchwork of independent institutions, each of which fulfills one of those functions.

Exactly – partly because the closer the fit, the more religion-shaped the single religion-replacing object is, the more like religion it will be, and that rather defeats the purpose. But also partly because religion contains multitudes, and much of what it contains is great stuff that we can all enjoy. There are good songs! And I don’t want any dang humanist replacements for them, neither. On the other hand I decidedly do want non-religious versions of nearly all of it.

Thus, for our education, we attend the university; for cosmological clarity, we visit the planetarium; for therapy, the therapist; for beauty, the museum, the concert hall. Good stories? We read the Good Book, sure, but also the good books.

Like that.

When you think about it, organized humanism is a hard sell. Do you like paying dues and making forced pleasantries over post-service coffee cake, but can’t stand beautiful architecture and professionally trained musicians? If so, organized humanism may be for you. Greg Epstein (the “humanist chaplain” at Harvard and the author of Good Without God) is a lovely person, but I’ve heard him sing, and I think I’ll stick to Bach, Arvo Pärt, and Kirk Franklin for my spiritual uplift. Do we really need an institution for people who find Reform Judaism and Unitarian Universalism too rigid? Yes. It’s called the weekend.

Heehee.

Michael Ruse really could have been a good deal more careful. It’s only manners, and it’s also only sensible – flailing at an enemy that doesn’t exist is just a waste of time. (Never mind Don Quixote – he was fun at dinner but he was a bore about the windmills.)

There are several reasons why we atheists are squabbling – I will speak only for myself but I doubt I am atypical. First, non-believer though I may be, I do not think (as do the new atheists) that all religion is necessarily evil and corrupting.

See? That’s really careless. Of course ‘the new athesits’ don’t (all) think that. I’m not sure any of them think that, but we could grant Hitchens just on the strength of his subtitle; but anyone else? No.

I defend to the death the right of the new atheists to their views and to their right to propagate them.

Not really. Not exactly. Not when spending so much time and energy misrepresenting them (us).

Today, nearly a decade after 9/11, terrified as so many still are by the terrorist threat, the atheistic fundamentalists are finding equally fertile soil for their equally frenetic messages. It’s all the fault of the believers, Muslims mainly of course, but Christians also. But don’t worry. In the God Delusion, we have a message as simplistic as in The Genesis Flood. This too will solve all of your problems. Peace and prosperity await you in this world, if not the next.

That’s another hallucination. This, when he had just said ‘unlike the new atheists, I take scholarship seriously.’ Really?! Is that an example?

I have a piece in this series too. I think I wrote a little more carefully than Ruse did.

Good stuff from Jason Rosenhouse.

The problem comes when outreach to religious groups becomes a euphemism for bashing people who take a less cozy view of the science/religion issue. Pointing to the diversity of religious opinion is fine, dismissing as fringe extremists people who dissent from NOMA is not.

What I keep saying. It’s othering, and it’s othering of people who are notoriously already The People It’s Right to Despise.

I believe a long term solution to this problem does not lie in moving people towards relatively more reasonable sorts of religious belief, but rather by moving towards a society in which religious belief is accorded far less respect than it currently is. Certainly that is a very long-term goal, and I do not know precisely how to achieve it. But I do know that making atheism highly visible is a big step in the right direction. Writing polemical books is one way of doing that. Yes, polemical books. Polite, nuanced philosophical treatises are good too, but they just don’t obtain the sort of attention that is needed.

Yes, polemical books, and polemical articles and blog posts, as well as more sedate and gentle ones.

[A]nother thing we can do is have vocal atheists and humanists stand up publicly, and with a bit of anger and confidence say we are not going to kowtow to a state of affairs where the dogmatic pronouncements of religious clerics are treated with crazy amounts of respect. We are not going to accept defeatist talk about how religion will always be with us and about how you can’t change people’s mind on this issue, and that we can only hope to adapt to this reality and work around it by walking on eggshells around their religious beliefs. We can make atheism and humanism so ubiquitous and commonplace that the younger generation does not find them weird and exotic.

Precisely. And that is what we are trying to do. And that is what we are going to go on trying to do, because we think it is already working and will go on working.

I’ve been having a long and interesting discussion with Jean about sensitivities and what one should defer to and how to figure that out.

I do think there’s a prima facie duty to defer to other people’s sensibilities. “Prima facie” means–at first glance. So the rule isn’t absolute, but it’s always in play. Sometimes a violation is “worth it” and sometimes a violation isn’t. Contrary to what Donohue evidently thinks, every transgression isn’t worth a big fuss.

After a lot of words and a lot of consideration, I’ve ended up (for the moment anyway) still fundamentally suspicious of the whole idea, albeit with exceptions for sensibilities that really do matter – around death, mourning, objects with sentimental value, that kind of thing. Beyond that, I think in general people’s sensibilities have to be judged on their merits and so shouldn’t really start with the benefit of the doubt. Harmless sensibilities can be handled with care, but then we nearly all agree with that anyway, so that doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. Other kinds of sensibilities just have to settle for whatever handling they deserve because of what they are. Lots of people are very sensitive about other races, about women running around unsupervised, about blasphemy, about menstrual blood, about all kinds of things. I don’t think such sensitivities get to start from a position of extra deference merely because they are sensitivities.

What do you think, Linda?

Perhaps you saw the unpleasant spectacle of Steve Fuller being more disgusting than one would have thought possible.

Norman Levitt has died…I imagine that Levitt as someone of great unfulfilled promise — mathematicians typically fulfil their promise much earlier than other academics – who then decided that he would defend the scientific establishment from those who questioned its legitimacy. Why? Well, one reason would be to render his own sense of failure intelligible…And yes, what I am offering is an ad hominem argument, but ad hominem arguments are fallacies only when they are used indiscriminately. In this case, it helps to explain – and perhaps even excuse – Levitt’s evolution into a minor science fascist…I believe that Levitt’s ultimate claim to fame may rest on his having been as a pioneer of cyber-fascism.

How about that? Impressive? A long stream of commenters have dropped in to say what they think of it, Ben Goldacre among them. Fuller augments his standing even further by sniggering, talking more trash about Norm, sniggering some more, and pretending to be a persecuted victim.

Nick Matske is as impressed as I am.

Chris Mooney explains that journalists often get things wrong.

Why is Richard Dawkins, promoting his new evolution book, regularly being asked about his atheism, and why he is “strident,” “polarizing,” etc? Is it the media’s fault–or is it Dawkins’? I would actually say a bit of both.

Journalists can be quite irresponsible, and even when they’re not outright irresponsible, they love to be provocative and to stir up conflict. To them, Dawkins is “Mr. Big Atheist,” and thus instinctively seen as a polarizing figure. Many radio or TV hosts, and even print journalists that Dawkins encounters on his tour, will not have read his books carefully; instead, they will be going on impressions and what they’ve heard.

Ahhhhhh yes, that sounds quite likely. Many naughty journalists will be going on impressions and what they’ve heard. And what would those be? Why – partly, they would be impressions assiduously created by none other than Chris Mooney himself! It would be what they have heard from that indefatigable pursuer of Mr Big Atheists, Chris Mooney. As far as I know, Chris has done more over the last five months to create exactly that impression than any other single source of impressions – so it has the faintest whiff of crocodile tears for him to talk of irresponsible journalists going on impressions and what they’ve heard. Didn’t he want them to? Wasn’t that the idea? If not – why was he so dedicated about it? Why so many articles, in so many places? Flogging the book, of course, but he and SK could have done that by talking about Pluto, or Hollywood, instead – but it was atheists atheists atheists, and Dawkins leading the pack.

Finally, atheism is, to a trouble-making journalist, potentially a much sexier topic than evolution. It’s divisive. It’s controversial. It’s much easier to create sparks with culture war questions than it is to patiently allow Dawkins to explicate science…That Dawkins would, after The God Delusion, be framed as a scientist-atheist combo, or even the icon of atheistic science, was as inevitable as night after day. It’s the media equivalent of a law of nature.

Really? Nothing at all to do with the efforts of one Chris Mooney? Or is Chris Mooney writing about himself in the third person – yes maybe that’s it. He’s explaining that he’s part of something that is the equivalent of a law of nature so it was all inevitable and nobody should say he was being ‘divisive’ and ‘controversial’ himself while rebuking everyone in sight for being divisive and controversial. They could all do otherwise; Chris Mooney, being a journalist, was helpless in the onrush of a natural event.

Scientists tell government some pesky facts about drugs; government brushes aside pesky facts, makes decision on other grounds, ‘having taken account of “public perception” and “policing priorities”.’

The refusal to accept the expert views of a council set up to judge the relative harms of different drugs went down badly with the scientific community in general, and Professor Nutt in particular. Today, he warns of the negative consequences of what he calls, a “highly politicised” process…The government view, though, is that they should adopt a precautionary principle. “Where there is… doubt about the potential harm that will be caused, we must err on the side of caution and protect the public,” as Jacqui Smith put it last year. Professor Nutt attacks the ‘safety first’ approach arguing that “it starts to distort the value of evidence and therefore I think it could, and probably does, devalue evidence”. He recalls the scare about the MMR vaccine. “People were concerned, on the basis of false science, that the triple vaccine might cause brain damage. This led to a reduction in vaccination uptake and now children are getting lung and brain damage from measles,” he states. “The precautionary principle with MMR has been clearly shown to be wrong,” he continues. “It has harmed more people than it has helped.”

In other words the precautionary principle isn’t really precautionary, it just seems to be. It seems to be because people so often forget to take into account the risks of doing whatever the alternative is. They think (apparently): MMR, risky; no MMR, no risk. But ‘no MMR’ itself has risks, so thinking all the risk is on one side of the ledger is a mistake.

Nick Cohen takes a look at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office…

The FCO was not and is not standing up to the totalitarian ideas of the Islamist extreme Right, as it stood up to the totalitarianism of the socialist extreme Left in the second half of the 20th century. On the contrary, the establishment has appeased political Islamism abroad and interfered in the domestic affairs of its own country by mounting a covert operation to aid and abet it at home.

Well…perhaps they had some good reason?

The achievement of political Islam in Britain has been to suborn the liberal Left and cut off the most promising escape route for dissidents in the process. An abused woman, a young man fighting religious authoritarianism, an Iranian exile seeking to gain support for the campaign against the Archbishop of Canterbury’s and Lord Chief Justice’s endorsement of Sharia law or a British Bangladeshi trying to bring the Islamist criminals who massacred civilians in the war of independence to justice, would once have looked left for succour. If they do so now, they will find that progressives take their cue from the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami, rather than the best of the liberal Left’s traditions, and dismiss Muslims who fight for values they profess to hold as being at best irrelevances and at worst stool-pigeons for imperialism.

Ah. Well…perhaps it’s just a small enclave of loonies?

Do not make the mistake of believing that such attitudes are confined to the FCO. Only recently, the supposedly left-wing Institute for Public Policy Research was trumpeting “non-violent” Islamism as “the best organised and most popular opposition to existing authoritarian regimes in the Middle East”.

Ah. Oh dear. Well…I’m told the climate is nice in Antarctica.

Randy Cohen points out an oddity:

Last week the Vatican invited Anglicans who are, as The New York Times put it, “uncomfortable with female priests and openly gay bishops” to reunite with the Roman Catholic Church. If a secular institution, Wal-Mart or Microsoft, for example, made a similar offer – Tired of leadership positions being open to women and gay employees? Join us! – it would be slammed for appealing to bigotry.

To say the least – in fact it would also be in trouble with the law, and in this administration I daresay the law is likely to be enforced. But the Vatican, of course, is well known not to allow women to do the jobs that matter and to protect pedophile priests while banning adult males who would be attracted to other adult males. That’s not okay for a secular commercial enterprise but it’s quite all right for the dear old Vatican – not exactly a good thing perhaps, but absolutely not anything to make a fuss about, much less try to change. Why? Well because Jesus…erm…had twelve guys going around with him. That’s why. If women were supposed to be priests there would have been some Mariams and Esthers mixed in with the guys. There weren’t any. Therefore, that’s how things were meant to be forever.

Yet despite the risk of provoking the ire of believers, we should discuss the actions of religious institutions as we would those of all others — courteously and vigorously. This is a mark of respect, an indication that we take such ideas seriously. To slip on the kid gloves is condescending, akin to the way you would treat children or the frail or cats…My political beliefs, my ideas about social justice, are as deeply held as my critics’ religious beliefs, but I don’t ask them to treat me with reverence, only civility. They should not expect me to walk on tiptoe. It is not as if religious institutions occupy a precarious perch in American life. It is not the proclaimed Christian but the nonbeliever who is unelectable to high office in this era when politicians of every party and denomination make a public display of their faith.

Discussion should be free and open. That’s not to say it should be stupid or merely raucous or like sitting at the lunch table with the rowdy section of the third grade class – it’s just to say it should be free and open.

I’ve been tactfully silent about Chris Mooney lately, but I have to murmur a few words about stories and anonymity and credulity and skepticism and how we know what to believe and what not to believe and how necessary it is to pay attention to the difference between the two.

The background is a post a few days ago quoting an anonymous commenter at The Intersection saying

Many of my colleagues are fans of Dawkins, PZ, and their ilk and make a point AT CONSERVATION EVENTS to mock the religious to their face, shout forced laughter at them, and call them “stupid,” “ignorant” and the like – and these are events hosted by religious moderates where we’ve been ASKED to attend. They think it’s the way to be a good scientist, after all.

I saw it at the time, and was tempted to comment, but didn’t. But if I had commented I would have said that I find that anecdote highly incredible on its face (even before we get to the issues about the reliability of the witness). It just sounds stupid. It doesn’t sound like the way real people really behave in public places – it sounds like someone’s bizarro-world idea of how mean horrid nasty wicked ‘new’ atheists must behave because they’re so new and mean and wicked. It certainly doesn’t sound like the way academics behave in public gatherings with conservationists, even if the meetings are held in churches or temples or mosques. It sounds like the way children behave when they’re excited and acting up – but it does not sound like the way sane adults who have jobs in reputable universities behave.

And the commenter is in fact anonymous – but he insists that he is a biologist at “a large, well-known research university” and he expects everyone to take his word for it. But there is no reason for anyone to take his word for it, and it is not reasonable to expect people to do so, and people refused to do so. Hence Mooney’s new post on the subject today.

Last week, the New Atheist comment machine targeted the following post, in which I republished a preexisting blog comment from a scientist named “Tom Johnson” (a psuedonym). In the comment, Johnson had related how some of his New Atheist-inspired scientist colleagues had behaved toward religious folks at bridge-building conservation events. The comment obviously reflected one individual’s experience and point of view, and nothing more. But it struck me as worth highlighting, in light of my many well known concerns about the New Atheist movement.

No, that won’t quite do. The comment ‘obviously reflected’ one anonymous individual’s account of a purported experience, an experience which was implausible on its face. Chris Mooney is a professional journalist – surely he ought to know this very well indeed. Surely if someone phoned him and in a heavily disguised voice gave an avowedly false name and told an implausible story about a controversial subject – he would know that the story was not automatically reliable. Of course he would! Yet this is taken at face value, and not only that, but a group that Mooney dislikes is given a carefully offensive epithet for being skeptical about this story.

So we have a journalist, a member of a profession that is supposed to be trained to be skeptical of anonymous stories that don’t ring true, and one who has just co-written a book about science literacy. Basic science literacy surely ought to include knowing when skepticism is called for!

But mere credulity and verbal abuse (‘the New Atheist comment machine’) aren’t enough – there’s an even more sinister implication.

I’m a bit surprised how much hoopla the simple elevating of a comment into an individual post, with minimal additional commentary, has caused. Clearly, Johnson really touched a nerve. Accordingly, my post unfortunately subjected him to various attacks; fortunately his real identity remains unknown (though I am aware of it).

Geddit? Anonymous Johnson was subjected to attacks by those violent belligerent atheists, but fortunately his identity is still a secret, because otherwise those new atheists might go burn down Johnson’s house or kidnap and torture Johnson’s children or tear Johnson into little pieces while laughing their fiendish laughter.

Nasty stuff.

I’ve had my disagreements with Steven Poole, but his review of three pop-philosophy books is really funny.

I put my theory of the dentist’s waiting room – at once social microcosm and place of interminable transition – to an attractive young woman beside me who was holding the side of her face and wincing. When she did not reply, I embarked upon a lecture on stoicism. The woman scowled and told me to piss off. She was quite ordinary after all.

It’s all worthwhile, because once armed with suitable wisdom, ‘one may face down absurdity and the inevitability of death in all those locations that irresistibly evoke them, such as airports, dentists’ waiting rooms, gyms, dog kennels, and hot-air balloons.’ Quite.

Mary Wakefield assures the nervous frightened Anglicans who can’t stand the thought of female bishops but aren’t quite sure about this Catholic church thingy either even though it does do an admirable job of keeping women in their place – Mary Wakefield assures them, I say, that the only thing they have to fear is fear itself. That, and the sharks, of course.

Well, come on in, I say. The water’s warm. I converted two years ago now, full of cowardly fear about what people might think, and to my surprise, I haven’t regretted it since. But though the water is warm, I’d be lying if I said there weren’t a few sharks around.

Ah. There are sharks around, but come on in? Er – thank you for the thought, but I’m busy that day.

As Catholicism seeps back into Britain (St Thérèse of Lisieux’s UK tour this year, the Pope’s in 2010, the probable beatification of Cardinal Newman, etc), so too our national rage against Catholicism is on the rise…Yes, the church’s history is bloody and corrupt, but so is England’s, and that doesn’t preclude patriotism. Like most other powerful institutions, the church has done some appalling things, but it has also championed women’s rights, campaigned to end slavery, opposed the Iraq war, fed and clothed the poor and sent more and more effective aid to Africa than any other charitable organisation.

Championed women’s rights? The hell it has! It has issued papal declarations that women are Special and Different and Must Not try to deny their femininity and be like men. That’s not championing women’s rights. And how much campaigning to end slavery has it done, when, where? It’s news to me that the catholic church has been prominent in this struggle – and I have a feeling Wakefield is making it up, or just assuming it must be the case. Everybody campaigned to end slavery, nobody supported it, it was all just a big fluke, so of course the catholic church must have been right out there on the front lines next to William Lloyd Garrison.

Anyway that breezy little skip past ‘Yes, the church’s history is bloody and corrupt’ won’t quite do, since a lot of the bloodiness is very very recent, not to say on-going, and the corruption isn’t altogether over either.

I inched towards the Catholic church, baulking like a nervy horse. From the outside, it looked crazy: a mix of dodgy doctrine and arcane ritual. But the closer I crept, the saner, the more light-hearted I felt, and once inside, even transubstantiation made perfect sense.

Once inside – well yes. That’s the problem with going inside.