1. Museum in censorship row over Darwin sign

Comment #238807 by Ian H Spedding FCD on August 28, 2008 at 3:45 pm

I wonder whether there is any possibility of a legal challenge, perhaps under the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights?

2. Poll: Should the motto 'In God We Trust' be removed from U.S. currency?

Comment #231143 by Ian H Spedding FCD on August 15, 2008 at 9:52 pm

Just checked and it's 50/50...level-pegging...even Stevens...a dead heat...

3. Richard Dawkins replies to Libby Purves

Comment #227662 by Ian H Spedding FCD on August 10, 2008 at 12:42 pm

If the series was promoted, at least in part, as Dawkins expanding on the claim he made in The Blind Watchmaker that part of the genius of Charles Darwin was that "... although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." then all well and good and Purves has no case.

If the series was promoted as an examination of Darwin's contribution to science alone, with any religious implications being irelevant, then she has a point. If such work is to be polemical it should be clearly identified as such.

I mentioned Attenborough because I regard him and Dawkins as two of the finest - if not the finest - communicators of science around. As far as I can tell they have similar views about science, evolution, creationism and religious belief. The only difference is that Attenborough says nothing about his personal religious beliefs in his work although, to be fair, he has not attempted the kind of polemical work we have seen from Dawkins.

I should make clear that I have greatly enjoyed all Dawkins's books and TV shows. In particular, when it comes to science and religion, he says what needs to be said courteously but without mincing his words. And what he says is valuable for the same reason gold is valuable because - up until recently, at least - it is so scarce.

4. Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend in Speech

Comment #192290 by Ian H Spedding FCD on June 12, 2008 at 5:26 pm

As another ex-pat Brit, I think it's scandalous that US citizens have had basic rights guaranteed in law since 1787 while Her Majesty's subjects had to wait until the 1990s to get anything remotely equivalent. This is the country that prides itself on being the mother of parliaments.

Now we have the European Convention on Human Rights incorporated into British law so everything is fine, right? The hell it is. It didn't stop the police threatening action against someone wearing a T-shirt that said "Bollocks to Blair" or carrying a placard that called Scientology a cult. A T-shirt slogan, for God's sake? That's the sort of thing that happens when you don't have a freedom spelled out clearly in statute law. It even happens when you do - sort of - if people have become so apathetic about their rights that they no longer bother standing up for them.

The only legitimate basis for any restrictions on freedom of expression is to prevent actual harm being done to the rights and interests of others. Simply stating opinions that others find offensive or even hateful is not enough.

As for the right to bear arms, one of the advantages of living in the US is that I can now pursue my interest in firearms and shooting in a way that is simplyimpossible now in the UK. I have absolutely no interest in shooting any living thing but I would like to try my hand at shooting at targets and clay disks with a variety of guns. The situation in the UK is now so absurd that the host of the 2012 Olympic Games had to grant a special exception to its draconian laws to allow the shooting events to be held there. It woudn't relax them for the British pistol-shooting team, though. They still have to practice abroad.

Maybe some day the British people will stand up and demand that the insufferably smug and arrogant ruling elite provide a written guarantee of all the rights to which they are entitled. I'm not holding my breath, though.

5. Happy Birthday, Richard Dawkins!

Comment #150276 by Ian H Spedding FCD on March 26, 2008 at 4:31 pm

Many Happy Returns, Richard.

Thank you for all you have said and written on behalf of evolution in particular and science in general.

Long may your keyboard click.

6. Discussion on PZ Myers being expelled from Expelled

Comment #148534 by Ian H Spedding FCD on March 23, 2008 at 9:08 am

Speaking as a layperson, I find those animations informative as they illustrate what is going on inside a cell better than a verbal description could. However, I see them as only a first step.

What is arguably more fascinating is to hear scientists try to describe what the inside of a cell would really looke like, assuming we could see at that scale.

From a slightly different perspective, I've long been a fan of TV shows like Star Trek and Stargate. But I would also like to know what a black hole or the mouh of an artificially-enlarged wormhole might really look like. Or what would the Space Shuttle look like whizzing past at 17000 mph or what would we see - if anything - of a space-ship flashing by at half the speed of light?

People are fascinated by the gee-whizz aspects of science, so combining the latest scientific thinking with the latest CGI as in Walking With Dinosaurs seems to me to be a good way to go. make the creationist/IDiot vision look as narrow, dull, limiting and stunted as it really is.

7. Discussion on PZ Myers being expelled from Expelled

Comment #148258 by Ian H Spedding FCD on March 22, 2008 at 1:30 pm

ObNitpick: Isn't it jerry-built and jury-rigged?

8. Discussion on PZ Myers being expelled from Expelled

Comment #148119 by Ian H Spedding FCD on March 22, 2008 at 6:17 am

I seem to remember the Lord Privy Seal gag in a sketch from show like Not The Nine O'Clock News. They had a typical BBC newsreader doing a piece to camera illustrated by silly film clips. When he/she said "Lord Privy Seal" there was a quickfire sequence of a lord, an outside toilet and a seal

9. Earth's Final Sunset Predicted

Comment #135361 by Ian H Spedding FCD on February 28, 2008 at 9:41 pm

Steve Zara wrote:

As the sun warms up and eventually expands, Titan will become pretty Earth-like. It should be habitable just before Andromeda hits, and the solar system is sent on a wild ride either into inter-galactic space, or towards the central black hole of the galaxy.

Didn't Lawrence Krauss just co-author a paper arguing that black holes can't exist?

10. Physicist Neil Turok: Big Bang Wasn't the Beginning

Comment #132281 by Ian H Spedding FCD on February 24, 2008 at 2:45 pm

It's also worth pointing out that 99.9999% of the world (hopefully) doesn't understand a word of this!

...and the 0.00001% that do only do so when their brains come together in perfect alignment with a massive release of creative energy?

11. Archbishop's 8 March centennial message: Let Sharia Law govern women's lives, Amen!

Comment #128715 by Ian H Spedding FCD on February 17, 2008 at 6:33 pm

An ICM poll found that 40 percent of British Muslims favoured the introduction of Sharia law in the UK. I wonder how many of those respondents were women?

12. Charles Simonyi Professorship in the Public Understanding of Science

Comment #126376 by Ian H Spedding FCD on February 13, 2008 at 5:04 am

Perhaps you dare too much! Apart from the recent "science is also based on faith" controversy regarding Davies (in which I feel he was perhaps judged too harshly), I have some personal scientific issues regarding Davies (which I raised with him in the 70s, and which I can discuss if anyone is interested) that would make me uneasy about this. It is these same scientific issues that would lead me to favour Krauss.

If you read Charles Simonyi's manifesto there is nothing in it, I think, that would preclude someone with Paul Davies's views from occupying the Chair. As he writes in the Preface to The Mind of God:

I belong to a group of scientists who do not subscribe to a conventional
religion but nevertheless deny that the universe is a purposeless accident. Through my
scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the universe is put
together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as brute fact.

If a forceful advocate of atheism like Richard Dawkins was - and should be - eligible, why not someone who espouses a form of gentle deism - for want of a better word? Science and atheism are not the same thing.

The fact is, both men are qualified by what they have in common, which is a passionate belief in science as the best way of discovering how this Universe works and superlative writing skills.

I am curious about the "scientific issues" you have with Davies, though.

13. Charles Simonyi Professorship in the Public Understanding of Science

Comment #126226 by Ian H Spedding FCD on February 12, 2008 at 5:02 pm

As a long-time Trekkie I have to go with Lawrence Krauss for "The Physics of Star Trek" but I would also like to nominate Richard Wiseman or Robin Dunbar or - dare I say it - Paul Davies?

14. Islam's Silent Moderates

Comment #95368 by Ian H Spedding FCD on December 8, 2007 at 7:15 am

Personally, I would like to commend Ayaan Hirsi Ali for a command of English which puts to shame that of many native speakers of the language.

In any community as large and diverse as that of Muslims, there must be many who are not as fanatical as the extremists but, like atheists and agnostics, they may be so widely dispersed that it is difficult for them to organize as a group. For individuals or small groups surrounded by a seething mass of violent fundamentalism, the safest course is to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. The chances that they will rise up en masse against the fundamentalists are negligible.

15. Daniel Dennett Debates Dinesh D'Souza

Comment #93314 by Ian H Spedding FCD on December 2, 2007 at 4:35 pm

This is supposed to be a website committed to the values of science. There are a number of scientists who contribute to these discussions. So I ask again: how do you decide who wins such debates? Do they actually serve any purpose, other than to lend an unwarranted respectability to propagandists for religion masquerading as science? However sound the philosophy of the likes of Daniel Dennett, however valid his logic, if his arguments sail right over the heads of a lay audience who judge by style rather than content, what has been achieved?

16. Daniel Dennett Debates Dinesh D'Souza

Comment #92873 by Ian H Spedding FCD on December 1, 2007 at 4:14 pm

I'm wondering what purpose these debates actually serve.

Pretty obviously, you aren't going to resolve any significant scientific or philosophical issues in such a limited format.

It seems more like some sort of 'reality' entertainment show, something like "Philosophizing With The Stars".

But how do you decide who won? You don't have panels of professional judges scoring for style and content or making crushingly dismissive comments about the performers. This has possibilities, though. P Z Myers as the Simon Cowell of the debating circuit anyone?

17. Religion advances despite science (and thanks to Dawkins)

Comment #72980 by Ian H Spedding FCD on September 23, 2007 at 5:05 pm

I suspect Richard Dawkins, being only human, is flattered at being held partly responsible for the advance of religion but, being a scientist and a skeptic, I also suspect he does not believe a word of it. It is a little like saying that the criticism of Nazism and Soviet Communism by Winston Churchill and others helped advance the causes of those hideously perverted ideologies. If only they had shut up then moderate Russians and Germans would have been able to overthrow them in fairly short order.

The picture being drawn in this article is the standard one which argues that the fundamentalists/creationists/Biblical literalists represent an extreme minority of Christians, that there is a vast mass of more moderate Christians who are being herded, sadly and reluctantly, into the arms of the extremists by the circling pack of vicious atheists.

The question being asked by the atheists, of course, is, if there is this vast mass of moderate Christians, where are they? What we see are dwindling congregations in mainstream churches while sleazy televangelists are able to pack their vast and obscene "megachurch" auditoria. Perhaps it is the moderates who are the minority, not the other way round.

If the moderates believe that their faiths are being perverted by the extremists and caricatured by atheists then the solution is in their hands and only their hands. No one else is going to change things for them, neither the extremists, because they believe that they are right, nor the atheists, because they believe that both moderates and extremists are equally wrong.

The problem for Tristan Farrow and his co-religionists is not the uncompromising atheism of Richard Dawkins but the lethargy, even apathy or even existence of the moderate mainstream.

18. Why Christians should take Richard Dawkins seriously

Comment #72589 by Ian H Spedding FCD on September 21, 2007 at 7:45 pm

...theological writers and others can point out at length that what Dawkins does is to set up a straw man – or rather, a straw God – and then demolish it; they can show that Dawkins has not really got to grips at all with a true understanding of God and the religious dimension; but the straw God that Dawkins sets up and then demolishes is often uncomfortably close to the notion of God that we Christians all too frequently seem to talk about, pray to and worship.

For Dawkins notion of God to be a strawman there must first be an agreed definition of this deity of which it is a caricature.

Except there isn't.

As Skinner himself recognizes, there are as many ideas about what God really is as there are faiths and theologians. About all they can agree on is that whatever Dawkins says God is, He isn't.

19. The end of one law for all?

Comment #10668 by Ian H Spedding FCD on November 28, 2006 at 8:54 pm

I wonder how well Muslim countries would tolerate enclaves of Westerners who tried to set up civil courts run on a British common law model, for example?