Contradict yourself much? Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail –

The big mistake is to see religion and reason as polar opposites. They are not. In fact, reason is intrinsic to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Bible provides a picture of a rational Creator and an orderly universe – which, accordingly, provided the template for the exercise of reason and the development of science. Dawkins pours particular scorn on the Biblical miracles which don’t correspond to scientific reality. But religious believers have different ways of regarding those events, with many seeing them as either metaphors or as natural occurrences which were invested with a greater significance. The heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief in the concept of truth, which gives rise to reason. But our postreligious age has proclaimed that there is no such thing as objective truth, only what is “true for me”.

Right – so – religious believers have different ways of regarding Biblical miracles, good, but our postreligious age has proclaimed that there is no such thing as objective truth, only what is “true for me”, bad. Hmmm.

Have you read Allen’s article on PBS and Einstein’s wife? PBS is extremely irritating. It’s doing a bad thing. It’s ignoring its plain duty and responsibility. It’s not doing its job properly. It’s sneaking around. First it was stalling and delaying and making excuses, and now it’s sneaking around. It’s being bad. It has not only failed to take down the Einstein’s Wife website, despite the advice of its own ombudsman and despite telling Allen ‘We are looking for additional scholarly review to help us know how to proceed in making sure that the web site content is as accurate as possible,’ it has now commissioned Andrea Gabor to rewrite it. That’s like commissioning Michael Behe to rewrite The Origin of Species.

As Allen shows by quoting what three knowledgeable Einstein specialists said to him about the website and the ‘Einstein’s Wife’ documentary, PBS could very easily have found the best possible ‘additional scholarly review’ if it had asked for it, but instead of doing that, it asked a highly unscholarly journalist who is a partisan of the very (evidence-free) fantasy that is in dispute. PBS ignored the scholars who have the evidence on their side, and went with a hack who has none and doesn’t know how to evaluate evidence in the first place. This seems to me to be something resembling malpractice. PBS is supposed to be, in part, an educational site; it is not supposed to pass off made-up stories as ‘documentary’ truth; nor is it supposed to urge them on schools and teachers.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the fact that PBS have commissioned to re-write their “Einstein’s Wife” web pages someone so lacking in the scholarly credentials that should be a requisite for such an undertaking indicates that they are intent on preserving the essentials of their deeply flawed website, with its Lesson Plans that come close to being a brainwashing exercise…In the words of Robert Schulmann, who has knowledge in depth of the relevant material, it is unconscionable that PBS be a party to distributing dubious historical claims as classroom material to teachers and students, whose task it is to instruct and learn the proper use of evidence and respect for historical sources.

Annoying, don’t you think?

I wish this oceanographer thought so. He cites the story in a lecture on Science, civilization and society:

In recent years evidence found in personal letters between Einstein and his first wife Mileva Einstein-Maric suggests that Einstein developed the core ideas of relativity in close collaboration with her but did not mention her contribution anywhere and possibly actively suppressed her name from his paper on special relativity.

Allen asked him about that evidence (as well as about several other things) – only to be told this:

“Please cite the evidence …” “Please state what evidence you have …” – if it would only be as easy as that. Evidence is always helpful, but it is not always sufficient to find the truth.

But Professor Tomczak himself says in the lecture, as we’ve just seen, that ‘evidence found in personal letters between Einstein and his first wife’ etcetera etcetera; Allen merely asked him to cite the evidence he mentioned; once you have mentioned evidence, it doesn’t do to brush off requests for the evidence in question. You can’t say ‘evidence suggests’ and then raise a mocking eyebrow at requests for citation. That’s absurd. Imagine a trial lawyer attempting that. ‘We have evidence that my client was seven thousand miles away at the time.’ ‘Please present the evidence.’ ‘I won’t I won’t I won’t.’

The professor says other odd things too, which Allen points out neatly, one two three and so on. I don’t want to diss the professor, who is not PBS, after all – but I do find his reply interestingly…non-responsive. It’s an object-lesson in how not to argue straightforwardly. He shifts the goalposts, he wonders what Allen’s motivations are, he wonders what Allen thinks about Mileva Marić, he says Marić provides an illuminating example for the conditions of women at the beginning of the 20th century; none of which answers any of Allen’s questions.

It is clear – at least to me – that Allen’s painstaking investigation of “evidence” represents one end of the spectrum of opinions about the Maric case. But I do not understand what he wants to achieve with it.

What does Professor Tomczak want to achieve by putting scare quotes on ‘evidence’ as if there were something peculiar about painstaking investigation of such a thing? But even more, what is a scientist doing saying he doesn’t understand what another scientist wants to achieve by a painstaking investigation of evidence? What a very strange thing to say. He wants to find out if there is any evidence or not; he wants to investigate some truth claims that are in the public domain and in fact popularized in various media, such as Andrea Gabor’s book and the tv documentary. It’s sad and a little bit alarming that a scientist would find that hard to understand.

Best of luck, Haluk Ertan.

“Turkey is now the headquarters of creationism in the Islamic World. This is no longer only Turkey’s problem, it is now the problem of the whole civilized world,” says Haluk Ertan, a professor of molecular biology at Istanbul University. He’s one of a handful of Turkish scientists who have been working to counter creationism’s spread in the country.

But if you package pseudoscience nicely enough, it will win.

In the past year, BAV has blanketed several European countries and the US with its glossy “Atlas of Creation,” a lavish 768-page tome weighing more than 13 pounds, sending it to scientists, professors, journalists, and schoolteachers…”Every Islamic bookshop I know of stocks Harun Yahya’s material. It is so glossily produced. It is very attractive and very colorful and outclasses everything else,” says Inayat Bunglawala…”It is having an effect. Even among Muslim medical students there are a number now who are speaking out against Darwin.”

Oh well, doctors don’t need to understand biology.

The series includes titles such as “The Dark Spell of Darwinism” and “Why Darwinism is Incompatible with the Koran.” Oktar’s brand of creationism is not only religious, but also political and even messianic, seeing most of the world’s ills – terrorism and fascism among them – as stemming from Darwin’s theory of evolution…”Folks, there is no such thing as what you call evolution. If there was, it would be in the Holy Bible or the Koran,” added Oktar…”Scientifically speaking, the whole Harun Yahya corpus is a bunch of nonsense, but it is unfortunately very popular,” says Taner Edis, a Turkish physicist who teaches at Truman State University in Missouri. Professor Edis says the success of the Harun Yahya books, at least in the Islamic world, can be attributed to a need for harmonizing modern life with traditional Islamic beliefs.

Sure. The success of a lot of bullshit and nonsense can be attributed to a need for harmonizing fundamentally incompatible things. That’s why people go in for bullshit and nonsense: because they want to harmonize things they want to believe with some obtrusive bit of reality. The reality won’t give way to prayers or persuasion or gentle little dances and passes in the air, so the only thing left to do is harmonize. Then once people get their teeth into harmonizing, they want to pass the harmonization on to schools and universities and the mass media, and pretty soon the entire population has learned that there’s no such thing as evolution because it’s not in the Koran. Maybe if we all work really hard, in a few generations the whole population of the earth will be as ignorant as it was ten thousand years ago. Yee-ha.

Sorry I’m a little quiet. You can thank the spambot, for one thing – it deposits comments (porn ads) on an old N&C, and I have to remove them. The number of comments has been steadily rising; it doubled between yesterday and today. Yesterday I had 8 pages to delete, today it’s 18. It’s a slow process – click ‘check all,’ click ‘delete,’ then wait, then click yes, then wait; repeat. 17 times. It’s slow, because I don’t have broadband. I can do other things at the same time, but it’s jerky and interrupted. Deleting 18 pages takes a very long time.

Anyway, it’s just as well for me to be quieter. I’ve learned that JS has to pay more the more I talk. It had been my understanding that B&W didn’t increase costs, but that was wrong. I have to find some skeptical organization or other that would like to affiliate with B&W and bankroll it in the process. (I tried to insist that I was the one who should pay, but I got nowhere.)

202 spam comments left to delete. 7 pages. More than half finished. That’s only an hour wasted.

Ah well that is reassuring. The Grand Mufti of Egypt explains about apostasy and stuff.

[F]rom a religious perspective, the act of abandoning one’s religion is a sin punishable by God on the Day of Judgment. If the case in question is one of merely rejecting faith, then there is no worldly punishment. If, however, the crime of undermining the foundations of the society is added to the sin of apostasy, then the case must be referred to a judicial system whose role is to protect the integrity of the society.

Excellent. From a religious perspective, no earthly bastards will punish you for apostasy, it’s only God who will. Of course, God will presumably do a pretty thorough job of it, being a jealous and tyrannical kind of shit, but no matter, that’s a few years off probably, unless you get run over by a bus tomorrow. The important thing is that the mullahs and the cops aren’t going to push your door down and take you out for execution right this second. Unless, of course, they are – on account of you done added the crime of undermining the foundations of the society to the sin of apostasy, and that we don’t allow, so up against the wall mothafucka. Because the thing is the sin is God’s business and God will deal with it as and when necessary, but the crime is a whole nother story. The thing is, the integrity of the society has to be protected from the likes of thinking doubting questioning mind-changing you; understand? The integrity of the society is the important thing, not selfish little you and your selfish individualistic atomistic consumerist idea about wanting to think for yourself and make up your own mind and not be compelled to ‘believe’ what you don’t believe. Got that? You don’t matter, the integrity of the society does. No yous matter; all the yous added up don’t matter; what matters is the society and its integrity – in other words its uniformity of thought. Integrity of the individual, poison; integrity of the group, divine Utopia. See? It makes perfect sense if you look at it in the right way.

There’s also of course the familiar irritating boilerplate about women – equal but not the same blah blah blah so actually they have higher status than men which is why they’re not allowed to leave the house or the country without permission from a man.

Islam adopts the perspective of gender equality, but it does not endorse the idea of gender equivalency. Islam affirms the difference between the natural dispositions and constitutions of men and women. Women have the ability to bear and nurse children, whereas men do not, so there is a lack of equivalency in regards to the physical and psychological make-up of men and women…

Therefore…you know the rest.

Research misconduct is in the eye of the beholder; so is evidence; so is replication; so is falsification; so is peer review; it’s all, all in the eye of the beholder. Knowledge is power, therefore I don’t need to make sense.

[T]he firing of Churchill reveals a very pernicious kind of exclusionary dogmatism in scholarly research and writing and media reporting. The firing of Professor Churchill for alleged research misconduct…ignored all Indigenous evidence and perspectives that are critical of Eurocentric versions of the history of the European invasion of the Americas. Research misconduct is in the eye of the beholder. Euroamerican teachers and scholars have taught and written for several centuries that Columbus discovered America. That is a more profound and easily provable case of research misconduct than anything of which Churchill has been accused.

Gary Witherspoon confuses teaching the content of a textbook with research, which is odd, since he is apparently an anthropologist, so one would assume he must have learned at some point along the path to becoming an anthropologist what research is and what it isn’t. Maybe he has a bad memory, maybe he’s just forgotten what research is. Couldn’t someone tell him though?

The whole article goes on in the same vein, citing what a 1987 textbook said, what an 1864 Rocky Mountain News article said (that’s not a typo – 1864, a century and a half ago), what Ben Nighthorse Campbell said about the massacre that the Rocky Mountain News misunderstood a century and a half ago – all apparently in aid of the point that research misconduct is in the eye of the beholder. In other words, these other people over here killed ten people and ate them for lunch, so why are you making such a fuss about my killing one person and eating her for lunch? In other words, it’s infantile and jaw-droppingly stupid. It’s also a pretty brazen example of epistemic relativism in all its tinsel glory.

I wrote this on Thursday but the database broke while I was writing it, so it had to wait.

Norm has an additional thought on my murmurings about truth and the harm principle and enforcement on Point of Inquiry.

The non-enforceability of any responsibility there is not to teach children untruths must surely follow, in liberal societies, from not having public bodies issuing pronouncements as to what is – officially as it were – true and untrue. Even on matters where there is a scientific consensus, that consensus is left open to challenge. But more relevantly, on matters of ethics, politics, metaphysical outlook, there’s no official truth that could be enforced.

Hmmmm. I’m not sure that’s quite true, actually – although it is mostly true. But I think it’s mostly true in part because of…well, a kind of stealth, or evasion, or (not to put too fine a point on it) concealment. I think to some extent liberal societies and public bodies conceal the degree to which they do in fact rely on implicit but binding official truth that can be and is enforced, on matters of ethics and politics at least, even if not on those of metaphysical outlook. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’ you know – it was a public body that issued that pronouncement, and it does colour much of US politics to this day.

I think it could be argued that there is some official truth that could be enforced, that lies behind various laws and policies – at least in the US. Maybe it’s the Supreme Court that makes this seem to be the case; maybe the non-existence of either a Supreme Court or a constitution in the UK means that Norm’s claim is more plausible there than it is here. For instance I think it is something of an official truth here that ‘separate but equal’ is a deeply suspect formula; I also think that possible official truth tends to foster others – about history, and official lying and bullshitting, and (paradoxically) the fallibility of the Supreme Court itself; about the kind of bullshit people will believe when they want to defend their prejudices or privileges or both.

In fact the truth (if I may call it that) that ‘separate but equal’ was a self-serving lie was indeed enforced, with federal marshals, in Little Rock. Enforcement was exactly the issue. Eisenhower and Kennedy both wanted very badly not to have to do the whole enforcement thing; they really didn’t want to have to enforce that truth on people who wanted neither to hear it nor to act on it; but in the end they both had to. There is a limit to our liberalism in that sense; fortunately.

Sorry things went silent for a few days: the database broke, and Jeremy was in New York, so unable to fix it until today. Give the man a nice round of applause (or you could tell him how impressive his biceps are).

Sastra said several interesting things in a comment on Leaving Amherst.

I seldom comment, but read Butterflies & Wheels regularly, and I’m terribly grateful that Ophelia is not only as interesting and provocative as she is, but is a ‘she’ as well. I’ve noticed a distinct “gentleman’s agreement” among the women I know that we really should not disagree. What I call “Thanksgiving Table Diplomacy” promoted around the calendar – avoid controversy and pass the potatoes, bringing up all the lovely things we have in common. “It’s more important to be nice than ‘right.'” Women are supposed to be supportive and reassuring. No debate; no disagreement; no honest discussion of contrary views, unless it is to “celebrate our diversity.” That’s a sign of spiritual maturity, evidently. Even in a discussion group.

Yeah – I know the kind of thing. I blame the ‘Women’s Ways of Knowing’ crowd (as well as anyone else I feel like blaming). This is one reason I am so stroppy (or so interesting and provocative as Sastra put it). I have to be stroppy, I have to compensate for all those women who make themselves into marshmallows!

As the only secular humanist among neo-pagans, New Agers, and Spiritual Seekers, it’s hard. They love to jabber about their beliefs, and back them up with heavy combinations of pseudoscience and postmodernist “all paths to truth are valid” — all paths, except, evidently, rational skepticism, which is apparently the egotistical, narrow, mean one.

I know – being the only fan of reason among woolly thinkers is hard. We learned quite a lot about that from the students at the seminar.

I am a bit of a convention junkie, and have gone to a fair amount of Council for Secular Humanism events. I have yet to do one of the CFI summer sessions, though, and when I found out OB and JS were on the program I was ready to bite myself in frustration. I can’t afford it yet! So you have to do it again!!! I have all your books!!!! Please — even if it’s a Boy’s Club (I was there for the grand opening of the new building, impressive as all get out).

A Boys’ Club is certainly not all it is – and it clearly is a lifeline and a source of hope for a lot of people in small conservative towns in the Bible Belt. Maybe we will do it again – if we’re asked.

I don’t work in an occult bookstore. But it seems as if all the liberal adult women in my area who read, think, and enjoy interesting discussions on topics other than their kids and their busy schedules are “spiritual but not religious” — and this is the catalyst for most of the “deeper” discussions…I live in a small town in a conservative area of the Midwest. I take what I can get.

Many of the students were in exactly that situation, if you swap ‘the South’ or ‘Texas’ for ‘the Midwest,’ and that fact produced a shift in Jeremy’s thinking. We have a running disagreement over the whole subject of what he calls ‘religion-bashing’; it always ends up in the same place: he tells me he just can’t empathize because it’s not like that in the UK; he can intellectually grasp why religion seems threatening in the US but he can’t feel it. I tend to find this slightly exasperating, because I don’t quite see why grasping it intellectually isn’t enough; but anyway he is now able to empathize somewhat more because of his experience over the two and a half weeks at CfI. He got friendly with several people from small towns in conservative areas, and he got a much better sense of how terrible it can be. And at the welcoming dinner that opened the second module – the one at which he was supposed to give opening remarks, the one we were so late for because of lingering too long in Seneca Falls – all the participants were asked to stand up and say a little about themselves; there were several new people who gave rather impassioned accounts of conservative small town life. When it was time for JS to say his few words he said he was feeling rather sheepish – about his long-standing inability to empathize. He meant it, too – he found the whole thing quite moving. So did I, so did Julian; I think so did everyone.

Jonathan Derbyshire points out a problem with anti-foundationalism for people who have moral and/or political commitments. First he quotes John Holbo in a post I would have commented on then if I’d had time –

The real problem is that Rorty’s torn between a ‘Pyrhhonist’…anti-foundational epistemology and a progressive politics, in which he would like to demand lots of social changes, for the sake of social justice. His reformist reach exceeds his justificatory good conscience. He really thinks he’s right, but doesn’t think he can give his opponents rational grounds that they are compelled to accept.

Then he adds:

In other words, Rorty’s philosophical views prevent him from justifying or defending his progressive politics – and that’s politically problematic. So it’s not just that political liberalism needn’t line up with philosophical pragmatism or anti-foundationalism: if our fundamental liberal values don’t rest on certain substantive moral commitments – if, in other words, we’re prohibited from regarding those values as true – then are they really values at all?

To put it another way: if we don’t think we can give our opponents rational grounds that they are compelled to accept, then we have a problem, and the very first thing we need to do is recognize it rather than trying to conceal it or minimize it. I’m not sure myself that we can give our opponents rational grounds that they are compelled to accept, but I see that as worrying rather than cheery, and in either case I think it’s disastrous to pretend that there is no difficulty. But that’s what anti-foundationalists often do. They pretend that ‘we can all agree’ on certain basics and that that’s enough really. But in fact we can’t agree even on certain basics, and it’s a terrible idea to pretend that we can, because then we lose track of the fact that there really are people (lots of them) who truly don’t share our commitments to human rights or equality or women’s rights or whatever it may be.

I’m back. Jetlagged, tired, and back.

I listened to that Point of Inquiry interview this morning and it wasn’t too bad. At the time I thought I was doing more futile muttering than turned out to be the case. As I was leaving the studio (which is in a room at the Center) I was called into the office across the hall by Norm Allen, the reviews editor of Free Inquiry; he wanted me to do a review of Infidel. They seem to like me at that place. Very wise of them.

I tell you what though: it is a boys’ club. I’m sorry to say that, but it is. (You know it is, you CfI people, if any of you are reading this. Look up the hall, look down the hall; look up and down the other hall; you know what you see. Consider, and repent.) That’s probably not entirely its fault though: on average women seem not to be as interested in this kind of thing as men are. I find that highly irritating, and also all the more reason for me to remain very interested, and to redouble my efforts to annoy everyone within hearing on the subject. If there are fewer women, then the women there are have to be all the more noisy and obstreperous.

We took a picture of Jeremy showing off his biceps yesterday, and we’ll post it here eventually. We explored Buffalo on Saturday, walking some 700 miles in the process; he took a picture of me in Delaware Park, hot and sweaty and pleased with myself; we’ll post that eventually too.

I’ll get back to less lame or footling or frivolous posting soon, but give me a minute to get over the jetlag and to catch up on sleep.

You’ve been clamoring and longing for more news from Amherst New York (except for the one of you who has been clamoring and longing for less, of course), so here is some. (Anyone who finds the whole idea lame: here’s a bit of advice: don’t read it.)

I’m in the back hall of the Center for Inquiry (or Centre for Enquiry, if you prefer – Jeremy remarked as we passed the sign outside that it was odd for such a place to spell its own name wrong not once but twice), surrounded by Russian students talking to each other, typing on one of the Center’s spare computers that are available for guests. There is no internet in the guesthouse (no broadband, no WiFi, no anything) which is not always absolutely convenient, such as when Jeremy is working on his next lecture and wants to look things up and find useful video clips, or when he wants me to find and print some relevant quotations from B&W’s Quotations. Dear CfI could do a little better in the, um, organization and equipment department; but never mind.

Jeremy’s lectures are going down very well on the whole, despite the fact that what he is basically doing is undermining or challenging pretty much everything Paul Kurtz has ever said. Well it’s this humanist thing you see – we’re atheists, we’re secularists, but we’re not humanists. People got quite uneasy with determinism yesterday – but that’s how these things fall out.

Joe Hoffmann gave a lovely opening address this morning, which I asked if I could publish here the moment he’d finished saying it, and he said I could, so you have that to look forward to. He’s a very amusing guy, Joe is.

There are a lot of groundhogs here. I’m not used to larger mammals – larger than squirrels. Well I’m used to dogs and cats, but I mean running around on their own authority. It’s fun to see groundhogs. I saw a snake yesterday – I followed it through the grass for awhile, until it vanished under a shrub. I like seeing snakes, and would like to see them more often. I don’t get out much, you know – out in the sense of traveling – so I like to be in a new place, even if it is a slightly Martian one with a bad case of suburban hyperexpansion.

You remember I said about Jeremy the fashion icon? It’s even worse than that – he struts, and he shows off his biceps while lecturing. It’s really quite shockingly immature and embarrassing. He also kept smelling the T shirt he’d worn when lecturing on Saturday – he couldn’t believe what it smelled like and kept going back to confirm; he went on doing that for two days. He wanted me to say that here. Yes I know all this is lame, but I don’t have time to do real posts while I’m here, so I do absurd ones instead. I haven’t posted half the ridiculous things about Jeremy that he’s suggested I should.

Julian’s not as absurd – but he’s quite absurd. He does a broad American accent, and he sings little snatches of song complete with sound effects and similar. He keeps trying to do a Joe Hoffmann imitation which is entirely hopeless, it sounds nothing like him, but he does a good Tony Blair. He went to Toronto then came back here then went back to the UK. I saw Toronto far far far in the distance on Sunday, across Lake Ontario from a town called Niagara-on-the-Lake. It voss pretty.

I gotta go. The building is locking up.

I don’t usually do this, of course, but time is limited, as you know, so I’m just going to adapt a comment I left at Talking Philosophy. Someone had replied to Julian’s remark about being unable to blog much while here with the observation that they have the Internet in Buffalo…

They probably do have the internets in Buffalo, but we’re not exactly in Buffalo (Julian is a little shaky on geography*), we’re in Amherst, which is a suburb of Buffalo. Man is it a suburb. It’s the most suburban suburb I’ve ever seen. It’s like a Platonic suburb. All the roads are four-lane highways (at least) with a speed limit of 45 mph (at the slowest). Even the dang campus of the University (SUNY Buffalo, north campus) is full of 45 mph freeways – which seems very bizarre, to me, used as I am to the campus of the University of Washington where the speed limit is 15 mph. The shops are all chains, and so are the ‘restaurants.’ Still – joy is available – yesterday evening Jeremy and I took the now-familiar long walk up one mini-freeway (which goes under a real freeway, which roars so loudly overhead that we have to stop talking until we reach the other side) and along the one that has all the chain shops and eateries – he wanted a bit of electronic equipment, and he spied a Macy’s so we tried that but it seemed to be all clothes so that was no good and I was just saying why don’t we ask someone instead of walking around in here forever when we got to the far side which opened onto – you’ll never guess – a mall. Jeremy was in instant bliss. ‘I’m in heaven!’ he exclaimed rapturously. He likes malls.

Here’s something you don’t know about Jeremy, and neither did I. He’s a clothes horse. He’s a fashion idol. It’s just T shirts and jeans, but it’s a particular kind of T shirt and jeans. Very amusing.

Anyway, internet is patchy at the Center and non-existent at the guesthouse where we’re living, so we really can’t do much internets stuff.

*(joke!)

Julian did his lectures last week, Jeremy is doing his this week and next; I did the keynote address at the beginning. The three of us rented a car and drove to the Finger Lakes on Thursday; it was great fun, especially since we had the rare perfect weather for it – bright, clear, sharp, ideal for gazing at long blue lakes with rolling country around them. The last bit was slightly hairy, because we dawdled too long in Seneca Falls (the Stoical birthplace of US feminism) and we had to be back by 6:30 because Jeremy was scheduled to give Opening Remarks at the dinner that launched the second set of lectures. Jeremy doesn’t drive and Julian hasn’t driven a huge amount, especially on US freeways, so I drove, and I went 10 to 20 miles faster than I had in the morning, but the time still kept sliding away and our ETA kept changing – 6:00, Jeremy will still have time for a shower; oh dear, 6:10, Jeremy will have to swipe his armpits and let it go at that; uh oh, 6:20, we’re just plain going to be late, but they’ll be eating, the remarks come after the dinner, it’s okay – and then I took the wrong exit, and mass despair took over. But in the event Julian skillfully navigated us through some squalid bit of outer Buffalo and we weren’t late after all and Jeremy smelled like a rose (well not really) and all was well.

He’s been working on his lecture for today, with me kibbitzing (Julian’s in Toronto, and he’s going back to the UK tomorrow); he may use some of the thought experiments he’s done here; we’re talking about Jonathan Haidt on disgust and purity and so on. It should be a very interesting afternoon.

So this is the end of the first module (as they call it). Julian got a (partial) standing ovation – most embarrassing. We went out for a celebratory (or good-bye [to Julian and to Charles Echelbarger]) with Ibn Warraq and Joe Hoffmann and others. Jeremy wondered if he could ask skeptical questions about skeptics and humanists, and the consensus seemed to be that he could and should, though everyone for miles around urged him to be sweet about it. Two women came up at the end and said ‘We have some questions for you’ and I figured it was a delegation from Homeland Secuurity or Animal Control or similar, but it was just a survey about how wonderful everything was or wasn’t. It seemed odd that it took two people, but never mind.

My ‘keynote address’ went better than you might expect considering that it was me giving it, that is to say, it went well, and I didn’t fall down or cry or throw up or anything. Jeremy took pictures of me doing it. Perhaps he’ll stick them on here some time. We’ll see.

I’m here. (Where? Here. Where I said I’d be. At the Center for Inquiry, in Amherst, outside Buffalo, New York.) Jeremy’s here, Julian’s here, Joe Hoffman is here, Paul Kurtz (of course) is here, Tom Flynn, Nathan Bupp, and others. It’s good fun. I’ll tell you more later.

B&W is going to fall silent or near-silent for awhile – until July 23d to be precise. I’m off to this Beyond Belief thing. I’d love to maintain B&W in the meantime but spyware ate my laptop two years ago, so I can’t, although Jeremy has kindly offered to let me use his when he’s not, so maybe I will be able to do a little.

So long!

So I flick to the World Service at 7 and hear that Alan Johnston was released an hour ago . Various people around here cheered rather noisily. I may have been one of them.

Barely had they told us that than he was on the line to tell us about it. It was horrible, ‘as you may imagine’ – in solitary confinement all that time with people who at intervals talked of killing him. He said at the very end they beat him – as they took him to the car to free him, apparently, they had to pound on him. It wasn’t nice.

And as he points out, he’s not the only one.

But anyway – he’s out. Yay.

Funny god these bishops believe in. Arbitrary, whimsical, cryptic, absent-minded, brutal, sloppy, and stupidly vicious. We’d better hope it doesn’t exist. Oblivion is vastly preferable to being bossed around by a petty shit like that for eternity. Funny that the bishops seem to find it attractive. (But not really funny at all of course, since it’s merely a projection of their own petty shitness.)

One diocesan bishop has even claimed that laws that have undermined marriage, including the introduction of pro-gay legislation, have provoked God to act by sending the storms that have left thousands of people homeless…[Graham Dow, Bishop of Carlisle] expressed his sympathy for those who have been hit by the weather, but said that the problem with “environmental judgment is that it is indiscriminate”.

Why yes, it is; clever of the bish to spot that, but therefore perhaps not all that clever to attribute it to a deity he probably wants people to love as well as fear. Typical enough, of the incoherence of church ‘teaching,’ but not all that clever all the same. Also a tad scientifically illiterate – he doesn’t mean ‘environmental judgment’ of course; the technical term is meteorological judgment.

Hassan Butt explains.

By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the ‘Blair’s bombs’ line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology…And as with previous terror attacks, people are again articulating the line that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy. For example, yesterday on Radio 4’s Today programme, the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: ‘What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq.’

He did: here (fast forward ten minutes). He also said, to Ed Husain, ‘You’re absolutely right in what you say about the Wahhabi strand; the way you then demonize a whole load of genuinely representative Muslims is completely wrong.’ But Ed Husain wasn’t doing any such thing, as he kept trying to get Livingstone to see: he was distinguishing between Muslims and Islamists, while Ken was lumping them together.

Hassan Butt explains some more.

[T]hough many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many of my peers to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain, our own homeland and abroad, was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary state that would eventually bring Islamic justice to the world…The centuries-old reasoning of Islamic jurists also extends to the world stage where the rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) have been set down to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war. What radicals and extremists do is to take these premises two steps further. Their first step has been to reason that since there is no Islamic state in existence, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr. Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world.

So when it looks as if the goal is not to extort some concession or change of policy but just to kill as many people as possible – it looks that way because that is how it is. We are all part of Dar ul-Kufr, and we all need to be killed.

I believe that the issue of terrorism can be easily demystified if Muslims and non-Muslims start openly to discuss the ideas that fuel terrorism. (The Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from this state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists.)

Yeah. Let’s do that.

Ed Husain has a very good article in today’s Evening Standard; Allen sent me a copy and also posted a useful chunk of it on the Letters page.

Being a big‑tent liberal is laudable; but to fail to discern the difference between Islam, the religious tradition, and Islamism, the extremist political ideology hell‑bent on destroying the West, is a disaster for us all. By confusing regular religious Muslims with fanatical ideologues, Ken blurs the lines between right and wrong, and allows radicalism to flourish within sections of London’s Muslim communities…While living in Saudi Arabia two years ago, I remember watching in horror television images of Ken walking around with Yusuf al‑Qaradawi, an Egyptian cleric based in Qatar, whose publicly stated attitude is that suicide bombers are martyrs. Yet it was Ken who said that “of all the Muslim thinkers in the world today, al‑Qaradawl is the most positive force for change”. By promoting these extremists, and their supporters, Ken gives them legitimacy. He helps set in motion the conveyor belt to terrorism.

Listen up, Ken.

A beautiful piece (thanks to Allen Esterson for sending me the link). Studded with gems.

[Natalie] Angier’s book is called The Canon, and subtitled ‘A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science’. It is not a long book and it contains, as the title suggests, a breathless Baedeker of the fundamental scientific knowledge Angier believes is the minimum requirement of an educated person…The result is the kind of science book you wish someone had placed in front of you at school – full of aphorisms that help everything fall into place. For geology: ‘This is what our world is about: there is heat inside and it wants to get out.’ For physics: ‘Almost everything we’ve come to understand about the universe we have learned by studying light.’…’Entropy,’ Angier writes, ‘is like a taxi passing you on a rainy night with its NOT IN SERVICE lights ablaze, or a chair in a museum with a rope draped from arm to arm, or a teenager.’ Entropy, unusable energy, leads to the law that states that everything in time must wear out, become chaotic, die. ‘The darkest readings of the Second Law suggest that even the universe has a morphine drip in its vein,’ Angier suggests, ‘a slow smothering of all spangle, all spiral, all possibility.’ No wonder CP Snow thought we should know about it.

One wants to rush straight out the door to find the nearest copy of that book, doesn’t one.

‘Science is rather a state of mind,’ Angier argues and, as such, it should inform everything. ‘It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing for granted.’ It would be hard to argue that this state of mind was advancing across the globe…Numbers of students still studying science at 18 are falling in Britain and America, perhaps because we are becoming generally less motivated to address difficulty. As a culture, we allow ourselves too many excuses. ‘Western parents are quite comfortable saying their children have a predilection for art or for writing or whatever, and allow them just to pursue that. In the Asian education system, if you are not good at something, it’s because you are lazy and you just have to work harder at it. Just because things are hard does not mean they are not worth doing.’

I did that. When I was in school, I did exactly that – I just decided early on that I was a literary type, and that settled the matter. A very stupid way to think. I was determinedly stupid in that way for years and years. I wish I could go back in time and kick myself really hard.

That idea of difficulty, I suggest, cannot really be helped in the States in particular, when all of the presidential candidates of one party stand up in televised debate and say they believe in ‘intelligent design’ and suggest that the world could well have been created by a bearded God a few thousand years ago. Angier laughs, somewhat bleakly. ‘I see all that as a macho kind of posturing. It’s like, I can believe the impossible: look, I can lift a tree! It is a Republican initiation ritual, like having a hook pulled through your cheek and not flinching.’ But no, she concedes, it doesn’t help much.

That’s good – believing the impossible as a kind of macho posturing; I like that.

[John] Brockman perceived a third way. ‘Literary intellectuals are not communicating with scientists,’ he suggested. ‘Scientists are communicating directly with the general public….Third Culture thinkers tend to avoid the middleman and endeavour to express their deepest thoughts in a manner accessible to the intelligent reading public.’ Brockman’s cross-fertilising club, the most rarefied of chatrooms, has its premises on his website www.edge.org. Eavesdropping is fun. Ian McEwan, one of the few novelists who has contributed to Edge’s ongoing debates, suggests that the project is not so far removed from the ‘old Enlightenment dream of a unified body of knowledge, when biologists and economists draw on each other’s concepts and molecular biologists stray into the poorly defended territory of chemists and physicists’.

Why one of the few novelists? Because most novelists go on thinking of themselves as literary types and refusing to take any interest in the other stuff. Chumps.

I wonder why there are still so few literary contributors to Edge, which has remained a predominantly scientific and philosophical forum. Is there not some evidence there that the divide persists? Brockman explains how Edge evolved out of a group called the Reality Club that held actual meetings with scientists, artists, architects, musicians. Ten of the leading novelists in America were invited to participate. Not one accepted.

Stupid. If someone invited me to participate in an actual meeting like that I’d be there so fast the chairs wouldn’t be set up yet. And that refusal is probably why most novels bore me rigid these days; why I give up on them after a few pages. I’ve gotten truly deeply bored with minute descriptions of daily life, and all literary novels are stuffed and clogged with details of Jennifer’s Mood As She Sorts The Socks. Life is short, there’s a lot to learn, and I just don’t care about Jennifer’s mood, I think she should get over herself and go learn some geology or something.

James Watson ends on a hilarious note.

‘I recently went to my staircase at Clare College, Cambridge and there were women there!’ he said, with an enormous measure of retrospective sexual frustration. ‘There have been a lot of convincing studies recently about the loss of productivity in the Western male. It may be that entertainment culture now is so engaging that it keeps people satisfied. We didn’t have that. Science was much more fun than listening to the radio. When you are 16 or 17 and in that inherently semi-lonely period when you are deciding whether to be an intellectual, many now don’t bother.’ Watson raised an eyebrow, fixed me again with a look. ‘What you have instead are characters out of Nick Hornby’s very funny books, who channel their intellect in pop culture. The hopeless male.’

You know, if you combined Nick Hornby and Ian McEwan, you’d really have something.