1. Hints of 'time before Big Bang'

Comment #189646 by Luis_Cayetano on June 6, 2008 at 9:43 pm

According to Victor Stenger, the universe started in a state of maximum disorder for its size. As it expanded, there was more room for order to arise, but only because there was more room to dump the disorder that "paid" for it.

2. Teenager faces prosecution for calling Scientology 'cult'

Comment #183359 by Luis_Cayetano on May 22, 2008 at 1:00 am

SCIENTOLOGY IS A CULT.

That feels better.

3. Richard Dawkins' secular army must be stopped. God is behind some of our greatest art

Comment #160356 by Luis_Cayetano on April 14, 2008 at 1:41 am

"Worshipping"? "Falling at his feet"? Does it not occur to this dunce that perhaps, unlike Jesus (today, if not in antiquity), people DON'T ACTUALLY worship and fall at the feet of Dawkins, but that this was merely colourful language to stand in for people's admiration of him? (well deserved, one would think, for providing a breath of fresh air in this age of nauseating, annoying, dumb-as-shit pop-gibberish)

Do Dawkins' detractors have to resort to such openly pathetic devices as word-play in order to diminish him? And what "secular army" is Ravenhill talking about? (or does he now understand the value of metaphor?) An army has a command and control structure, with a dictator (in the form of a general) at the helm. Dawkins isn't a commander of any sort. He can inspire or spur me to do something, but he can't COMMAND me to do it. Does David Attenborough likewise have a "naturalist army"? The only one even hinting at anything akin to open military conflict is this Ravenhill fuck. None of the well known atheist authors dreams of getting rid of religious art, or of denying it to anyone, just as they don't want to get rid of any other art based on fiction, which everyone acknowledges can be deeply moving without actually having to believe it.

4. Happy Birthday, Richard Dawkins!

Comment #150371 by Luis_Cayetano on March 26, 2008 at 7:27 pm

Have a good one, Richard.

5. Biology prof expelled from screening of 'Expelled'

Comment #147939 by Luis_Cayetano on March 21, 2008 at 4:14 pm

Thank you, creationists, for such fine work on behalf of evolution.

6. Writer Arthur C Clarke dies at 90

Comment #147263 by Luis_Cayetano on March 20, 2008 at 4:55 am

Fair well, Mr Clarke. I feel sorry for not having read any of your books, but your departure will spur me to finally get onto doing so.

7. First 'Rule' Of Evolution Suggests That Life Is Destined To Become More Complex

Comment #147260 by Luis_Cayetano on March 20, 2008 at 4:51 am

I hardly think this qualifies as a "rule" of evolution. Building complex organisms is energetically expensive, so the question is really why selection would have favoured increased complexity in crustaceans. In other groups that have been studied, there was no overall increase towards complexity. I recommend Stephen Jay Gould's "Full House" for a view on this. Just because the crustaceans have undergone across-the-board complexification doesn't mean you can extrapolate to evolution in general and proclaim that you have uncovered a "first rule". I'm not saying that the researchers are wrong, just that until we've done a wider cataloguing and comparison of complexity throughout the biosphere, making these sorts of claims is going to give the impression of undue eagerness. Some parts of this article made me think, "so what? That's meant to be surprising?" Good on them for making this fascinating discovery, but I fear that they're attempting to draw conclusions that aren't warranted. That the Crustacea have become more complex overall is interesting enough. I'm sure some lessons can be drawn from this, but it seems somewhat wank-headed to think you can make sweeping generalisations from it.

8. Religious groups want Russian cartoon channel shut down

Comment #147245 by Luis_Cayetano on March 20, 2008 at 4:28 am

"Christian and Muslim groups are demanding that 2X2 be shut down because it airs cartoons, such as South Park, which they deem to be anti-religious, violent as well as promoting homosexuality."

Then change the channel, fuck wits.

9. A natural phenomenon

Comment #137445 by Luis_Cayetano on March 2, 2008 at 10:04 pm

"Until recently I didn't know about Sir Attenborough, other than he was on the book cover of a book I got at a book fair. The book: Life on Earth."

You're not serious, are you?

10. Don't blame Islam for terrorism, expert says

Comment #131068 by Luis_Cayetano on February 21, 2008 at 9:39 pm

I recommend Tariq Ali's "The Clash of Fundamentalisms". I also think that there is something deeply unwholesome about Christopher Hitchens' support for American aggression; he seems so blinded by the threat posed by fundamentalist Islam that he fails to take into account the proper context for explaining why fundamentalist Islam has become so popular.

11. Fleabytes

Comment #130114 by Luis_Cayetano on February 20, 2008 at 5:36 am

Haha, fleabytes. What do you make of that, Wee Flea?

I mean, effing Christ. Can't you Jesus freaks go a day without distortion?

"You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor." Oh well, I guess some comrades are more equal than others.

12. Pleas for condemned Saudi 'witch'

Comment #127035 by Luis_Cayetano on February 14, 2008 at 6:01 pm

"...the law courts imposed the death sentence again, arguing that it would be in the public interest."

Pathetic, contemptible, and rotten to the core.

13. Why Darwin matters

Comment #124211 by Luis_Cayetano on February 8, 2008 at 7:19 pm

All too often, we see scientists and expositors of science pandering to the supernatural delusions of their audiences, almost anxious to show that "there is no contradiction" between science and flatulent wishful thinking. At my uni, there was a course called "Evolutionary and functional biology". The professor, a splendid expositor of science and a fine palaeontologist, nevertheless felt compelled during the first lecture to drone on about how evolution might be "God's method for producing us". I don't imagine that the good professor himself believes such a thing, but he certainly felt the need to be apologetic in order to avoid hurting anyone's delicate feelings. Not so with Dawkins, who has little time for such pandering, and who gets straight to the facts.

"Never apologise; always explain."

14. What should a scientist think about religion?

Comment #120502 by Luis_Cayetano on February 1, 2008 at 8:43 pm

SteveN wrote:

"This is something that I simply cannot comprehend, this ability to compartmentalise points of view. How one can rigorously demand the highest standards of evidence before accepting a proposition, critically dissecting one's own work and the work of others all day, but not apply these same standards to one's beliefs is beyond me."

Daniel Dennett said something interesting to account for this when he spoke about religious scientists. The reason so many highly intelligent, otherwise rational people still adhere to antiquated beliefs is that they have never been in a position requiring them to defend them. We live in a culture where religion is afforded a special place of privileged non-criticism that isn't extended to other enterprises, and most have come to accept that religion has its proper domain in questions of morality, meaning and "why". Of course, as Dawkins has said, just because a question can be phrased in grammatically correct English doesn't make it meaningful; "why" questions of the sort that religion utilises don't become "profound" just because they can be asked, anymore than "What is the colour of emotion?" is a good question. I suspect that a lot of these religious scientists have never really questioned the legitimacy of their beliefs about meaning and purpose, largely because they've never been compelled to.

15. The Repeater

Comment #120494 by Luis_Cayetano on February 1, 2008 at 8:01 pm

Correction: Gould's essay is called "The Horns of Triton", not "Planets as persons". The latter is the chapter title containing the essay in his book "Bully for Brontosaurus".

16. 'Irrational Atheist' trounces God-deniers

Comment #120491 by Luis_Cayetano on February 1, 2008 at 7:57 pm

"Atheists have felt that science was on their side ever since the Enlightenment, and now they see it slipping away from them. So, this recent explosion of atheist books is not a sign of strength; it's a sign of desperation."

You have GOT to be joking, sir. If it's a sign of desperation, it's because these authors are anxious that the world not revert to pious stupor at humanity's crossroads.

17. The Repeater

Comment #118833 by Luis_Cayetano on January 31, 2008 at 3:47 am

"I don't know of this analysis, but an overall tendency towards increased complexity is easily shown, simply because as evolution progresses, life will explore an ever broader range of configurations of structure, and because life starts off simple at its origin, this means that that as time passes, we will find organisms of ever increasing complexity."

A good case could probably be made that at least SOME lineages will undergo complexification given the enormous number of permutations, but that doesn't mean that life OVERALL will be characterised by complexification. That was my point. We need to look at the "full house" of variation; to this effect we would get a right-skewed distribution; the mean value might well be towards the right, but the mode would still be nearer to the left. The mean isn't an actual "thing" in the world; people have construed it as the "essence" of a system and the variation as a secondary consideration, when in fact it is the variation that is the reality on the ground, and the mean is an imperfect measure of central tendency that doesn't necessarily signify all that much, and which should be qualified with an estimate of variation and skewness.

I think that Gould was clearly wrong in consigning genes to the status of "book keepers", and at least some of his criticisms of the selfish gene theory were based on misunderstandings. But I would like to praise his defence of the role of contingency in life's history (read his beautiful essay "Planets as persons"). I think he was also right in advising vigilance against assuming adaptationist explanations from the outset (here I recommend his analyses of the female clitoris and the size of the Kiwi's egg). And I think he was certainly right about horse evolution, and some of the lessons to be drawn there.

18. The Repeater

Comment #118790 by Luis_Cayetano on January 31, 2008 at 1:41 am

"I think Gould followed the more "traditional" way, which seemed to lead to a lot of sloppy thinking, such as broad support for group selection, the straw man of punctuated equilibrium, the absurd idea of "bauplan" evolution and so on."

I'm going to have to jump in and disagree with you, at least in so far as my impression of Gould's book "Full House" allows me to do so. In it, he presents his case using statistical analyses to show that there is no overall tendency towards complexification (there's a debate about how we should best define "progress" in evolution, but I'm just saying that Gould's analysis for the claim that life's mode isn't characterised by increased complexity was backed up by statistics). I can't speak for his theory of punctuated equilibrium, though judging from what I've read (mainly from detractors who claim that it isn't a radical departure from "orthodox Darwinism", and I'm inclined to agree with them), he may well have deployed some flawed thinking.

Needless to say, he was an elegant writer and passionate expositor of the wonder and beauty of science. I have just finished reading his collection of essays "Bully for Brontosaurus", and I enthusiastically recommend it to anyone interested in science and its history. I learned heaps from it, and I find it impossible to conceive of Gould being a poor biologist.

19. Sentenced to death: Afghan who dared to read about women's rights

Comment #118779 by Luis_Cayetano on January 31, 2008 at 1:07 am

An absolute disgrace. Yet another example of the corrupting influence of religion.

20. George Scales, War Hero and Generous Friend of RDFRS

Comment #111480 by Luis_Cayetano on January 14, 2008 at 6:31 pm

Good on you, mate. Everyone wishes you a speedy recovery, and we are all greatly indebted to your contributions to the things that make this world worth living in. To repay that debt, we will continue to raise our collective voice in the furtherance of everything you have fought for: not only reason, secularism and science, but also freedom, democracy and virtue. You and others like you will never be forgotten, and your valour will act as a spur to direct action in the fight for a better world.

Luis

21. The Group Delusion

Comment #110637 by Luis_Cayetano on January 11, 2008 at 5:33 pm

Professor, I can't thank you enough for making available "12 misunderstandings of kin selection"; the search for that paper almost drove me nuts not too long ago. I would love to see more discussions of this sort. Perhaps a semi-regular column to do with the latest (as well as ongoing) controversies in biology, by Robert Trivers, George Williams, Daniel Dennett, Alan Grafen, and/or yourself would be a nice addition? Or a section outlining common confusions and misunderstandings that continue to trip people up. What does everyone else think?

22. Pope's exorcist squads will wage war on Satan

Comment #104868 by Luis_Cayetano on December 29, 2007 at 8:26 pm

Well, at least he's not sending out death squads. We should count ourselves fortunate that the power of the Church has been so sapped that it is now forced to resort to such transparent idiocy. This is actually a good thing when you think about it. At most, it will turn people off of religion altogether. At the very least, it will make people feel conflicted (at least those whose thought processes haven't been completely hijacked by the virus of faith). We should be fully exploiting this. It's reason to celebrate! Everyone with a blog or website who is reading this: I implore you to talk about this through those mediums, and let the religious trip on their own words as they try to defend or dignify it.

23. Let us kill all the teddy bears

Comment #95618 by Luis_Cayetano on December 8, 2007 at 7:33 pm

"What's wrong with gay Popes? Would a straight Pope be any better?"

I think he was being ironic.

>After all, is God not everywhere, in all things at all times in every possible way?<

"Well, no, actually."

Obviously he knows that; he was making a point about what believers think.

24. Most ancient case of tuberculosis found in 500,000-year-old human; points to modern health issues

Comment #95610 by Luis_Cayetano on December 8, 2007 at 7:04 pm

"It doesn't look good for the Muslims in their head to toe Jedi dress, maybe nature will rid us of them and their iron age mentality."

Does it seem too much to hope that the interludes of reason will rid them of their iron age mentality? Isn't that what we're trying to help them do?

25. Richard Dawkins Replies to David Sloan Wilson

Comment #56760 by Luis_Cayetano on July 17, 2007 at 6:14 am

Does anyone have a link to the article Dawkins is critiquing in "Burying the Vehicle"? Otherwise I'll look it up.

Thanks for the elucidation, Spider Dancer. That did help somewhat, but I still have difficulty imagining what the real controversy is and how someone can "obsess" over a particular explanation for something that can be more parsimoniously explained using another explanation.

26. Richard Dawkins Replies to David Sloan Wilson

Comment #56114 by Luis_Cayetano on July 13, 2007 at 8:31 pm

Hi Steve, thanks for the response. However, you mistakenly attributed that quote to me rather than to Norman Doering, but your point was made.

"Any reasons for optimism anyone?"

Indeed there may be. The "rise" we see in irrationality may not actually entail an increase in the amount of irrationality, but rather an increase in the amount of noise by those who see their archaic mythologies losing respect. For many fundamentalists, it's do or die for their beliefs. But the more they push their narrow-minded dogma onto society, the more buffoonish they appear, and I suspect, the more they turn off potential recruits. Of course, if they don't do anything, they lose anyway, because people are becoming more aware of science and its importance. You've probably heard about the Bishops of the Church of England recently pronouncing that the floods are a wrath from God to punish society for its tolerance towards homosexuality. That they feel the need to risk insulting our intelligence is perhaps a sign that they feel extremely vulnerable rather than emboldened. They are bringing out the big guns (i.e. fear mongering and emotional blackmail) to try to extort society to follow them.
This all has to do with the technological integration of society, where people are being exposed to the implications of technology and science more than ever and the need to be at least somewhat knowledgeable about them in order to make informed decisions as consumers and citizens. The findings of genetics means that people will no longer be able to afford to be ignorant of its basic premises, and that means that, sooner or later, falsehoods like creationism and intelligent design will be cast into the rubbish heap for good. Traditional authority can still be maintained, but at a cost that is becoming increasingly prohibitive: shielding one's children from what's out there and forcing them to remain ignorant.

27. Richard Dawkins Replies to David Sloan Wilson

Comment #55922 by Luis_Cayetano on July 12, 2007 at 10:53 pm

"The examples given by Wilson can be easily understood in terms of the survival value of each individual gene."

Yes, the survival value of each individual gene, but on what entity?

28. Richard Dawkins Replies to David Sloan Wilson

Comment #55895 by Luis_Cayetano on July 12, 2007 at 7:29 pm

Comment 27 by DeLan:

"In fact, Dawkins' method makes clear that his explanation cannot, by its very nature, even begin to address such questions."

That's because such questions are bogus when it comes to the origin of humanity. Just because people yearn for such questions - or just because they can be asked - brings them no loser to being legitimate ones in the sense that they have an answer that the person asking the question would regard as emotionally satisfying. The closest we can come to a "why" explanation would be to understand the evolutionary underpinnings of intelligence i.e. what selection pressures favoured the development of an inordinately large neural processing unit. To think that we are entitled to "more" than that it to plead for a religious explanation, and that is something that science cannot corroborate and in fact has no need for, however much we may personally hanker for it. Personally, I find the Selfish Gene starkly beautiful as an explanation for our existence, and more amazing and haunting than any religious explanation. Of course, if it is your desire, you could subsume it under whatever "ultimate meaning" you like.

Comment 18 by SteveN:

"Now, I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but I am a virologist/immunologist and I find the best example Wilson can give for a modern example of group selection (an experiment published in Nature in which bacteriophages of reduced virulence survived better that virulent variants because their bacterial 'prey' were not wiped out) to be quite logically explained by a 'selfish gene' point of view - I see no need for group selection as an explanation here."

But you're presenting the issue as though group selection was a rival to gene selection (I think?). When we talk about group selection these days, aren't we talking about vehicle selection, and assuming (as I believe Wilson does) that genes are the only true replicators? Can't groups themselves be vehicles for selection?
I though the issue was simply that Dawkins is sceptical of such a possibility (ie. he thinks it unlikely that alleles can be maintained if they confer some advantage onto the group as a whole whilst having a negative affect on the individuals carrying them), and that Wilson is more willing to invoke it. I wish someone could clear this up for me, because so far everyone I ask has been presenting the issue as though the controversy was about groups as rivals to genes for the role of replicator (a controversy that was once more prevalent, and I think that both Wilson and Dawkins agree that is has been quenched). But the issue here (not the religion debate; I'm just talking about genes here) is really whether groups can act as rivals to individuals as vehicles. Am I right?

29. Richard Dawkins Replies to David Sloan Wilson

Comment #55639 by Luis_Cayetano on July 11, 2007 at 8:02 pm

Does anyone here think, though, that Dawkins perhaps hasn't paid sufficient attention to the resurgence of group selection? Is there a respectable case to be made on behalf of it? Wilson cites some studies conducted on micro-organisms, suggesting that group-as-vehicle selection can and does occur, that it is powerful enough to overcome within group selection and thus maintain an otherwise deliterious allele.

30. A force for good?

Comment #55634 by Luis_Cayetano on July 11, 2007 at 7:18 pm

Thanks for the compliments. I've been here for a few months.

31. A force for good?

Comment #55382 by Luis_Cayetano on July 10, 2007 at 11:22 pm

"One of the things I find most intriguing in debates like the one at the Manchester International Festival this weekend, which asked "Is religion a force for good?", is the way that atheists tell me what I believe. They define the God they don't believe in and then tell me it's the God I do believe in. When it isn't. They offer a caricature of religion and then say, there, it's absurd. They always cite the most preposterously extreme examples."

Do we? Is it preposterously extreme to say that God, as he/it has been believed by most believers, now and throughout history, is supposed to be a conscious being who is concerned with misdeeds (and hence is endowed with an emotional apparatus by which to feel offended or outraged at our actions and thoughts), listens to our prayers and offers us salvation in an afterlife? That he manifested himself as a man named Jesus and died for our sins? The author is fooling no one. Perhaps he subscribes to the wishy-washy conception of God he would like us to think is interesting, but to take his own beliefs and equate them with the beliefs of most of humanity and then accuse atheists of "caricaturing religion" is the height of arrogance. It has become fashionable to pretend that God is something more sublime and subtle than what has traditionally been invoked to describe him. "I start with a sense that there is purpose in existence. That we are connected to something bigger than ourselves. That we find greater fulfilment by relating to that and by seeking the shimmer of transcendence. God is not an "invisible being" who "commands, rewards or punishes. God is not to me a particular "being" at all, but rather the power of Being itself. God is a supreme moral ideal to be reverenced for its value not for its controlling power." And I suppose that the anthropomorphic God, who listens to prayer, passes judgement on people that will decide their eternal fates, and who occasionally intervenes in humanity's affairs, is just the figment of an atheist's imagination? That realisation would have spared the unfortunate lot depicted in the Bible a lot of suffering and cruelty that was done in the name of Yahweh, but no matter. We are now to believe that these nomads slaughtered and pillaged each other over "the power of Being". Sure. And things like the Holy Trinity and the Resurrection are just a wrinkle on the surface of this delightfully subtle argument, wrinkles that shouldn't be taken too seriously. Just ask the Pope.

Well, if Vallely's extolling of "the power of Being" and "a great moral ideal to be reverenced for its value rather than its controlling power" is Christianity, then I suppose anyone here could be a Christian. The problem is that the author reverts back to the God of the Bible whenever it suits. In one breath, God is transformed into Existence, the power of Being, love, morality, and so forth. In the next breath, he is spoken of as having human-like attributes. Sorry, but Vallely must think that we were born yesterday if he seriously expects us not to see what's going on. Like most theists, he seems to want to have it both ways, in the sense that PZ Myers explained: "And yes, I know it is the nature of religion that everyone who believes will automatically state that their god isn't the complicated caricature of the Bible or the Torah or the Koran and will retreat to the safety of the Ineffable (but Simple) Pantheistic/Deistic God until the challenge from the atheist subsides. Once the critic is safely out of earshot, though, then they will pray to the fickle deity for the new raise or that their favorite football team will win, and they will wonder if the cruel Old Testament God will torture them for eternity for transgressions against antique laws of propriety. Until that atheist glances their way again…then once more, they will describe God as an abstraction, as Love, as something so nebulous that it is safely removed from any specific attack. It's familiar territory. Get into an argument with someone over Christianity or Islam or any of the dominant monotheistic faiths, and you'll see them flicker back and forth between the abstract and the real god of their religion — their only defense is to present a moving target." How theists come to the grand realisation that this God is a constant shape-shifter is left unspecified. Maybe we'll just take their word for it. I wonder what other wonders of discovery await us by listening to the introspections of these oh-so-subtle-and-interesting theistic minds. Probably nothing, I'll bet.

"Nor is faith something fixed. Von Hugel talked about three stages in religion. As children we need stories, structure and institutions. As adolescents we ask questions and search for consistency and an identity. And in adulthood we explore the mystical element as we work through our layers of inner consciousness, and reach after the incommunicable. We need all three stages at once sometimes. And we move constantly between them. This is not moving the goalposts. The goalposts are just not were AC Grayling put them in the first place."

Sorry, but moving the goalposts is exactly what you're doing. If you rely on a plethora of definitions of God – each one tailored to satisfy a particular suite of needs and wants, or to conveniently deflect the arguments made by sceptics, and which are utterly unlike the other definitions - then your conception of him/it is worthless. It is not just – as you try to dignify it – "unrational". It is utterly irrational, not least because you're simply making things up.

"Critics of religion get stuck somewhere between the infantile and adolescent stages."

Actually, it's theists who more often than not get stuck between these two stages, for they have lost the ability to think critically about what it is they believe in. They cling onto beliefs for much the same reasons as children do: they offer easy answers, emotional security and a sense of belonging. And they get upset when the rest of us don't go along with it. It is hardly surprising that many atheistic challenges will be focused here, for it is the area inhabited most frequently by believers.

"There is a coherent social vision running through the Old and New Testament, focused on a God who demands justice, who takes the side of the poor and the marginalised, and who calls for a radical new understanding of human love, commitment and responsibility. That informs how I behave and treat other people."

Switching back to the anthropomorphic God, I see. Perhaps he thinks we won't notice, or perhaps he himself hasn't notice. I don't know which is worse.

"Yet far more have been killed since political leaders shrugged off their religious traditions to experiment with a range of post-religious ideologies like communism and fascism. Nazism murdered 15 million, Soviet Communism had between 9 and 60 million victims, Maoism killed an estimated 30-40 million. Atheistic totalitarianism has perpetrated more mass murder than any state dominated by a religious faith."

I'm sorry, how was Nazism "atheistic totalitarianism"? This cheap shot is typical of those who, in their haste, want nothing more than to smear all of atheism with the actions of those, who, in any case, subscribed to more-or-less outright religious (in the case of the Nazis) or quasi-religious and illiberal but nominally secular (as in the Soviet Union and China) justifications for their crimes. Is Vallely ignorant of the fact that fascism has had, and continues to have, deeply religious underpinnings? As Sam Harris has said: "No society has ever suffered from being too reasonable."

"Ironically the difference between religion and secular ideologies is that religion understands that humans are flawed and thus always operates with a contingency of grace and forgiveness."

"Always operates with a contingency of grace and forgiveness"? Tell that to the thousands of women in Pakistan who are languishing in prisons for breaking Sharia law by committing the crime of "adultery" (ie. being raped). Tell it to the homosexuals around the world who have been marginalised, ostracised and discriminated against on the basis of Christian dogma. I'm sure they'll be only too relieved to hear about this contingency of grace and forgiveness that fills your own heart with such joy. The author fails to realise that these things are mitigated by the spread of secularism, at the expense of traditional religious authority, and are maintained by religious bigotry and narrow-mindedness.

"When secular movements bump into human failure their own ideology breaks down."

Right, as though the Vatican's stance on AIDS isn't an example of ideology breaking down in the face of human failure. Interesting, one can pick up a book about human nature – like Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate" – and get an eloquent elucidation of the pressing need to acknowledge humanity's flaws as revealed by history and science (something that religious movements all too often try to downplay, twist or distort), and to ensure the continuity of social statutes like the separation of church and state. Secular democracy and secular humanism are inherently receptive to the truth of humanity's flaws and penchant for farce.

"The second logical flaw is the assertion that religion is irrational. Is it any more so than, say, poetry or music, which are taught in our schools without apparent objection from rationalists?"

This has got to be one of the most inane arguments imaginable, and shows the desperate special pleading that theism is obliged to turn to, now that more people are waking up to is logical inconsistencies and bold-faced distortions of reality. Music and poetry aren't systems of belief that are in the business of making grand claims about how the universe came to be. They are things that impress on us a sense of beauty and, to the extent that the contents of particular songs and poems talk about it, meaning. Music and poetry are not systems of belief; they are, at most, expressions of belief.

The author continues: "Religious faith has no quarrel with science. But the two operate in distinct spheres. Science can do much to explain sexual urges. But it can say almost nothing, as Freud acknowledged, about the mysterious workings of love. Religion seeks spiritual truth, not scientific or historical fact. It allows us to cope with ambiguity and uncertainty, with the ultimate mystery of human existence."
Let's bestow upon religion its own domain, its own special place to call its own, simply because it CLAIMS to be able to answer deep questions, and, ummm, because the "explanations" on offer give us comfort and a sense of meaning, and ignore the fact that science can actually corroborate its claims through a careful methodology based on testing, while faith relies on the selfish maxim "to me…". Never mind that, whenever people have tried to explain the workings of the universe through religion, they have invariably been wrong. Never mind that almost half the population of the United States believes that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. No, that has nothing to do with faith, apparently. And never mind that all over the world, religious and superstitious nonsense continues to lead to the unnecessary suffering of innocents, innocents that are sacrificed on the altar of toxic doctrines that deserve only our civilised contempt. The Church's own stance on AIDS, for example, is a disgrace. Instead of spreading disinformation about the effectiveness of condoms, it would do better to act a bit more human and get off its moral high horse. Its stance is in fact utterly immoral by the only criterion that should count: the mitigation of human suffering (or is their obtuse stand something that flows from an appreciation of "the power of Being"?). Again, we see faith standing in the way of rationality and the recommendations of science. The Vatican recently issued a statement calling the new and exciting field of synthetic biology "insane arrogance". And Stephen Hawking, the eminent cosmologist and physicist, alleges that the late John Paul II told him not to inquire into the origins of the universe, because that domain of knowledge belongs solely to God. Yes, the same Vatican. Who is really being unreasonable?

Vallely is pedalling intellectual perversity dressed up as subtle, refined argument. Many times, I have heard it said or implied that a respectable case be mounted in defence of religion. If so, this article is definitely not it. Even so, this is way above the quality of most theistic apologetics I have read.

32. Pope abolishes limbo

Comment #35845 by Luis_Cayetano on April 29, 2007 at 3:39 am

Sorry, the booklet is called "The View From Mount Improbable".

33. Pope abolishes limbo

Comment #35437 by Luis_Cayetano on April 27, 2007 at 6:37 am

Devolved, you should also look into:

1) SINES and LINES

2) the laryngeal nerve

3) the flounder fish Bothus lunatus

4) the Chinese feathered theropods

5) lactose tolerance in human beings

6) biological mimicry, parasitism and disease vectors

7) convergent evolution of placental and marsupial fauna

8) fossils of legged whales, with the sequence of cetaceans becoming progressively more and more like modern whales

9) K and r selection theory, a cornerstone of ecology

10) conflicts of interest between the sexes (which make perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective of genes "striving" to make the most of the levers of power at their disposal, but is difficult to reconcile with the notion of conscious, intelligent design, unless the designer was just trying to mess with our minds, in which case he wasn't incompetent but just evil)

11) the cane toad Bufo marinus and its evolution of longer legs on the western front of its expansion in Australia

12) Read "Climbing Mount Improbable", especially the chapter on the eye (also available as a separate booklet called "The Forty-fold Path to Enlightenment")

13) the use of natural selection models in fisheries

14) viral malevolence, dependent upon how readily viruses can infect new hosts

15) accumulated fossil genes associated with olfaction in our genomes, but with clear functional homologues in other mammals

It's exceedingly difficult to take seriously the notion that a deity could have been mucking around for 3 billion years before hitting upon us. Really, who was this designer trying to impress by leaving things scattered all through the strata, and making life LOOK as though it had evolved?

34. Pope abolishes limbo

Comment #35425 by Luis_Cayetano on April 27, 2007 at 5:51 am

Devolved, you're talking nonsense. You seem to think that evolution is not a well-established scientific theory on the basis that:

""Natural selection… needs some luck to get it (life) started. Maybe a few later gaps in the evolutionary story also need major infusions of luck…" (p141 The God Deluion).

So I discover that far from being a scientific certainty (and I will donate £1000 to a charity of your choice if you can find me one proof that doesn't depend on presupposition) that evolution is a belief system."

How does this make it a "belief system" if there is an abundance of evidence in its favour? How is something needing luck supposed to be a point against it having happened, AFTER it's been demonstrated to have happened? That's like saying that someone didn't win the lottery after they won it, simply because luck was involved. Honestly, you're fretting over nothing here. OF COURSE natural selection needed some luck to get started (and is none the worse for that) because there had to have been an entity that got the game rolling, an entity that exhibited certain characteristics that made it suitable for natural selection to act upon. Perhaps such an entity is exceedingly improbable, but it only had to appear once for evolution to proceed. Once it did get rolling, all else followed, and here we are talking about it.

35. My critics are wrong to call me dogmatic

Comment #22325 by Luis_Cayetano on February 14, 2007 at 7:21 pm

"There is no evidence for God? Please - if this is what you call intellectual debate it is little wonder that the atheist cause is floundering so much."

Evidence? Care to share it with us?

36. Tolerating intolerance is still this country's besetting sin

Comment #20598 by Luis_Cayetano on February 4, 2007 at 10:38 pm

Thanks for the link, SMART. I had a look and I'm pretty excited about it. Remember, people, when you see someone labelling a child with the religion of their parents: "raise the roof", as Dawkins says in The God Delusion. All too many are not even aware that religious indoctrination even is a problem (that itself is part of the problem!). Let's change that.

37. How Old is the Grand Canyon? Park Service Won't Say

Comment #15770 by Luis_Cayetano on January 2, 2007 at 8:02 pm

This is absolutely sickening and pathetic. The Bush administration are nothing but a bunch of lying, opportunistic charlatans who can't be counted on to get anything right.