251. OUT Campaign Launched, 'Scarlet Letter' Shirts Now Available!

Comment #59373 by Robert Maynard on July 28, 2007 at 10:06 pm

I define strength as being dependent on oneself; weakness as being dependent on others (e.g. children, the elderly, the religious).

Dependent in what sense, Henri? I assume you're not saying you generate your own electricity, grow your own crops, make your own lightbulbs and built your own computer.
Furthermore, how does this dependence factor into what it means to be "weak", and how "weakness" should be treated, if you see it in children? Should we aim to protect or extirpate weakness, in your opinion?

252. OUT Campaign Launched, 'Scarlet Letter' Shirts Now Available!

Comment #59365 by Robert Maynard on July 28, 2007 at 9:46 pm

A look at Bizarro's train of thought, while composing his latest contribution -
"Heh, wow, I have nothing to say. I'm still here though. And I will say something, if.. if I think I should. But here? Huh, nope, no need to say a thing. My work's done for me. These folks are talking, and I don't need to be involved. I think I'll just watch, and not post anything. I just don't see the point. Oops, I hit Sumbit anyway! Now they'll know that I didn't think it was worth saying anything, but I'll still have said something!

..I wonder if they think about me."

253. OUT Campaign Launched, 'Scarlet Letter' Shirts Now Available!

Comment #59359 by Robert Maynard on July 28, 2007 at 9:28 pm

Yorker, I must defend Henri on this part at least - in digital terms, the words font and typeface have essentially blurred together, in that (as you've said) you can describe the font as simply being the packet of vector information which is sent to the word processor to render a typeface. But the particulars of the Zapfino typeface are inseperable from the discrete information contained in the Zapfino font. They're not particularly distinct concepts anymore.

..out-pedanted! :P


Hey, at least it isn't Comic Sans, am I right folks? ..Eh? ...

254. OUT Campaign Launched, 'Scarlet Letter' Shirts Now Available!

Comment #59350 by Robert Maynard on July 28, 2007 at 9:05 pm

If people were complaining about the reference to RichardDawkins.net, I could at least understand it.

That's my opinion too. Far be it from me to have a problem with a giant A on my chest, but the address is a bit of a throw-off.
I just have a design problem with it - the address should be small and on the back or something, if only to disassociate the iconography from an advertisement. Insofar as shirts like this are designed as conversation starters, the source of your shirt is a secondary concern. If people are walking past you in the street and see a giant A, they're simply not going to think "..I need more information!" and scour the rest of your shirt for it. The source only needs to come up once intent is established and interest exists.
Plus it excludes outspoken atheists who want to disassociate themselves from Richard Dawkins, for.. whatever reason.

Having said that, I think the very best reason to buy one is to contribute to the RDF. If you have a problem with its meaning and intent, you can just wear it around the house or when you're doing messy things for all anyone cares. No one asked you to wear it to a flippin' rally. But at least you'll be contributing to a group which does intend to be proactive, and in a conversational sense.

Returning to a first page argument Henri, in what dimension are we measuring the alleged weakness of associating yourself with other people?
Obviously you don't mean that the physical or functional strength, of the individual or group, is weakened by association.
Strength of the concept uniting the group? I'm sure you're not saying that the strength of ideas are inversely proportional to the number of people carrying them in their heads. (Their "value" is in a way, mind you - good ideas are destined to become dirt cheap)
And I'm SURE you're not talking about strength of individual/mind, because then you'd be assigning nonequal value to human individuals, and, heh, that would be monstrous! :D

255. Town Hall Seattle: God Is Not Great

Comment #57600 by Robert Maynard on July 20, 2007 at 5:19 am

dgr8test97: I challenge any atheist to lite (sic) themselves on fire and die without as much as blinking.

Displays of painful suicide are not to be admired.
..I don't know why I should even have to say that.

The acts of faithful men like Thich Quang Duc do not impress me, and should not impress anyone who values their lives, any more than the idiotic antics of Johnny Knoxville and friends. I really can't think of a less responsible way to approach designing an act of protest, then committing suicide in the street. I'd even call it immoral on behalf of any children witnesses. It's a bit like a psychological suicide bomb.

256. Kenya: The Death of Religion And Rise of Atheism in the West

Comment #56660 by Robert Maynard on July 16, 2007 at 8:23 pm

geckoman: We should all be worried, because while atheism gains some ground in the developed world, religion is becoming more entrenched elsewhere.

We shouldn't be worried about places like Kenya just yet - more sad and trying to help. Just as religious resistance to science/progress is potentially poisonous to the growth of various technology markets in developed countries, its presence in developing economies will likely result in the sheerest drop into functional irrelevance and impoverished squalor, in the emerging global community. EDIT: I realise Kenya is already considered developed, at least in comparison to its neighbours, but the always trustworthy wikipedia has assured me that their economic history is anything but spectacular. :P ..wait, I mean :(

The litmus test for real concern is possession of the bomb, naturally. ..by anyone, really. :(

257. The fundamentalist delusion

Comment #56299 by Robert Maynard on July 14, 2007 at 8:06 pm

I thought newspapers were supposed to contain reporting. The whole "opinion" thing seems like a manifest disservice to the whole idea of journalism. It should be the job of the reporter to investigate and report and relate a story with the aim of informing readers unfamiliar with the issues. If editors can't do that they should stick to editing.
I got as far as the Michael Ruse thing before exclaiming "This provides no context whatsoever. The man is simply dealing in half-truths, not "grappling with the issues", and I can't figure out why these words are being printed under the banner of a NEWSpaper, rather than some forgotten corner of the blogosphere." (don't bother pointing out that spheres have no corners)

"Dennett", "anti-religious diatribe"?
I am at last reading Breaking the Spell (last book left out of the "four musketeers"), and so far it's just as calm and thoughtful as his other books - it adopts a loose kind of memetic approach and makes the very clean and obvious point that the darwinian success of religious ideas is not an indicator of their fitness for humans, but of their fitness at propagating themselves (though I do miss the footnotes).

Here is the leaked exchange between Ruse and Dennett, so you can go read it yourself
Uncommon Descent: Remarkable exchange between Michael Ruse and Daniel Dennett (yeah, you read right - that's William Dembski's blog - Ruse simply gave the exchange to Dembski. Is there possibly a less ambiguous way to declare misplaced loyalties?)

The lesson I got was: Ruse is a crazy s.o.b, and Dennett is interminably polite.

The "disaster" of D & D basically refers to the argument of the framing issue, articulated by Mooney and Nisbet a while back in the Washington Post (http://richarddawkins.net/article,880,n,n), which posits that the so-called New Atheism of Dawkins and co. has dealt a blow to science advocacy by explicitly associating things like evolution with atheism. As Dawkins pointed out in an anecdote in the TGD, the Dover-Kitzmiller case was helped by arguing that affirming evolution does not have to affect ones metaphysical beliefs - even though it.. really should.
There is no escaping the connection between evolution and atheism (or at the very least the seeds of doubt) as far as Dawkins, Dennett are concerned, along with those of us on the side that thinks of the "framing" debate as an exercise in backsliding cowardice.
Dennett puts it with crystal clarity in Darwins Dangerous Idea: mind-first teleology is the antithesis of evolution.
Positing minds at the bottom of evolution is a contradiction of evolution itself. There is simply no getting around this, people!

If that stands as a problem for science advocacy, we'll just have to deal with that by pressing on - not waving our hands and saying "No, no! Evolution does not infringe on a deep conviction of Skyman!"
This in itself would be condescension of the same degree as the "we're too intelligent, but regular people need religion!" argument. It is true that scientists are divided over the "framing" debate, but I do not believe that Ruse is representative of the current - he is representative of a bedfellow appeaser (to use the dreaded sectarian terminology), a shill who happily leaked his personal correspondence to William f'in Dembski to demonstrate.. what, dissent in the "ranks"? Expose the "controversy"? You dumb bastard.

..bad article.

258. Believing the Unbelievable: The Clash Between Faith and Reason in the Modern World

Comment #56097 by Robert Maynard on July 13, 2007 at 6:28 pm

mpslg: I'm not complaining because I love hearing Sam speak, but I think I've heard all of these points in every lecture he gives.

I feel the same way, but really.. they're pretty good points, and they deserve repeating - he is almost certainly speaking to a different audience every time, many of whom have probably never heard of him.
Meanwhile we have a dubious privilege, what one might call the Roadies Dilemma, where we can follow our favourite speakers like a rock star from show to show. After a while of touring I imagine even the best setlist starts to seem pretty dry.

259. Christians disrupt Hindu Prayer at Senate Invocation

Comment #56094 by Robert Maynard on July 13, 2007 at 5:55 pm

The group said in a statement: "The Senate was opened with a Hindu prayer placing the false god of Hinduism on a level playing field with the one true god, Jesus Christ. This would never have been allowed by our Founding Fathers."

Removing "false" and "the one true god" would make this sentence an entirely accurate description, but I think for a different reason than they imply.
As Chris said, they shouldn't be praying there at all. I feel sorry for the dude though - talk about feeling isolated. Large sections of the Senate probably felt the same way as those noisy jerks.

Although it obviously wasn't orchestrated for this effect, this was a nice way of demonstrating the point that as soon as you try and incorporate religious observance into democratic government, all viewpoints are necessarily equal.
Either it's all okay, or none of it's okay.

260. Inferior Design: Richard Dawkins reviews Behe's lastest book

Comment #55923 by Robert Maynard on July 12, 2007 at 11:08 pm

I think we all tried to earnestly articulate answers to Paul's question(s). When he didn't find these satisfying, we phrased it in a different way, he dutifully kept implying our systems were too impoverished to condemn Hitler; or we slighted his morality as being no better (probably a less constructive tactic).

There are at least two possibilities for why this dialogue fell apart - our answers might have been good, but didn't sink in because Paul is dull (or unwilling, or something), or our answers may have been logically lacking, and no amount of rephrasing would make them transparently satisfying to Paul.

It should really have been enough to note that healthy human brains find happiness more easily in love rather than hate (Sam Harris's treacly phrasing), but then we have to take the time to explain obvious things, like our 'objective' basis for measuring "healthiness in brains". Paul, I can't figure out why, given your admirable penchant for inquiry, you couldn't grasp that secular morality is based on evidence-based contingencies rather than immutable Platonic "ideals".
Like cement, the thick sludgy paste of immutable truth only sets in when our minds stop churning ... ideas. (That was kind of an awkward analogy, but it sounded great in my head)
Contingencies are flexible and no less 'objective' than scientific theories.

261. Inferior Design: Richard Dawkins reviews Behe's lastest book

Comment #55729 by Robert Maynard on July 12, 2007 at 5:09 am

I am saying that it is possible to have a set of beliefs about Iain Banks, and for a different person to have a different set of beliefs about Iain M. Banks, but that doesn't make him two different people (even if the believers are convinced that Mr Banks is two different people). Likewise, I have a set of beliefs about the creator of the world, and so does a Muslim and so does a Sikh. That doesn't mean that there are three creators, but that people have different beliefs about the creator.

Except that Iain M. Banks (the author, I presume) is a physical person in observable space, whom independent observers can confirm is a single person, and whom independent claims about his person can be examined and falsified. When multiple people have differing beliefs about Iain M. Banks, at least one of them is wrong, and demonstrably so (potentially by Banks himself).

On the contrary, a creator is not a physical object in observable space and, as a consequence of this empirical poverty, you as a matter of fact can't demonstrate that Yahweh, Allah and Baal don't actually co-exist, or any other pantheon combination. Nor can you, granting their existence, demonstrate that any of them are responsible for any creation.

The Iain M. Banks thing is not a valid analogy, because YOU'VE ALREADY GIVEN HIM AN IDENTITY IN STATING THE ANALOGY. A valid analogy may have been about people having differing beliefs regarding the author of an anonymous work of literature. The relation drawn between a Universe and a book plays well into the design argument too. There is an author of this anonymous book, whose characteristics people may disagree on, but there is only one correct answer. I'd make a pretty good quack.

There are two important things to note however. For starters, it has not been satisfactorily demonstrated that the Universe is, like a book, authored.
Secondly, alongside the lack of verifiable existence of any creator, the candidates for Creator of the Universe are not limited to those documented in our mythologies, and all of them can be entirely incorrect.

Different parties asserting the existence of a supreme being with similar capacities does not automatically reduce the identity of the suspect to a single figure, unless you assume from the start that there is such a being, and that there is only one of them. No one can actually do this, without overstating their knowledge of the situation.

Suppose there is a murder, and three eyewitnesses report seeing a suspicious person near the scene of the crime. What you're doing, as a detective, is assuming, from the beginning, that there is just one murderer, that any or all of the eyewitnesses did indeed see that murderer, and on top of that, assuming that they are all describing the same person.

The lunacy of claiming all religious traditions are interpretations of a single creator falls apart as soon as you start talking about where the creeds of these beliefs come from - they are said to come from revelation, insight provided to founding figures by the deity itself.
We (and by that I mean you) have several options at this point. Among the ones I can think of, you can
1) discount the veracity of all revelation,
2) discount the veracity of all revelations except the ones relevant to your religious beliefs, or
3) grant that some (as in more than just those pertaining to your religion) or all revelations are equally valid.

Needless to say, I have decided that the first is the most honest option. The second is to basically answer my original question with "Yes, they are worshiping a false, non-existent entity."

If you choose the third, there's a further interesting choice. Either there are multiple gods providing testimony, one god providing deceitful testimony to many, or a schizophrenic quantum god simultaneously composed of all human (and perhaps) alien interpretations of god, provides sincere, but radically divergent testimony to all. The last one is sort of like a twisted version of that childrens fantasy that magical things exist by virtue of belief in them. God could be like Galactus from Marvel Comics, taking on the appearance of whatever species is looking at him! ...or not?

..what I'm basically trying to say is that Iain Banks is a lousy author.

262. Inferior Design: Richard Dawkins reviews Behe's lastest book

Comment #55553 by Robert Maynard on July 11, 2007 at 1:55 pm

[Phillip cheerfully describes his own slight genetic defects, we all have them - I for instance have pretty standard myopia, allergic to sulfur, and one of my adult teeth never grew, prompting the need for braces and a titanium bound implant.. anyway!]

I would like to reply on behalf of the Creator.

"Who are you, mere mortal, to question the perceived deficiencies of your own perfect design? Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world? Rumble rumble rumble. I apologise for nothing. You don't understand, rumble. cut off your foreskins, rumble. I cannot bear your words, they are too tiny. Good day ... or is it?" *musical sting*

263. Inferior Design: Richard Dawkins reviews Behe's lastest book

Comment #55466 by Robert Maynard on July 11, 2007 at 7:42 am

As I said before, I only believe in one God..

..So are you implying that religious people of other creeds are vainly worshiping non-existent gods, or that they are all worshiping interpretations of the same god, of which only yours is correct (and in a non-trivial way)?
Either possibility seems kind of condescending.

If I was an atheist, I would be inclined to break the rules.

It is probably for the best, then, that you are not an atheist.

264. Inferior Design: Richard Dawkins reviews Behe's lastest book

Comment #55183 by Robert Maynard on July 10, 2007 at 7:56 am

You can't say a dishonest person is a bad person unless you know what a person is for.

I'm sorry, "for"?
I had been labouring under the misapprehension that you were agreeing with Kant - that people are (cosmically or personally) not means to an end but ends in themselves, and (quite obviously) develop and define their own purposes. In this sense I've been referring to purpose (and evolved purpose) as individually defined 'goals' or 'ideals', as opposed to notions of tool-like functionality.

..I will review our discussion with this context in mind.

265. Inferior Design: Richard Dawkins reviews Behe's lastest book

Comment #54840 by Robert Maynard on July 9, 2007 at 5:02 am

Paul: So, to be absolutely clear, we can get at morality by observing human nature (as my example about the relic was intended to show).

Then we are using exactly the same means to determine what is right and wrong: start by looking at what humans like and don't like - after all, we are simultaneously our own clients and target audience in this task.

If God wasn't the author of the universe, it would not necessarily be right to follow human nature.

This just pops out of nowhere. Why not? I think that's precisely the only thing we can try and follow in the absence of a creator - it ties in quite neatly to the general philosophy of humanism - that we're basically the best thing in town, so who better to turn to for guidance than ourselves?

If I'm following this right, you're saying that if a creator didn't supply humans with 'purpose', they would be unable to develop their own, and so in a godless universe, human nature would be an unreliable guide for morality.
This suggests to me that you believe that notions of meaning and purpose cannot evolve.

Similar to the way intelligent design proponents argue that there are physical components apparently too complex to incrementally emerge in stepwise fashion, you seem to be implying that grand abstractions like "purpose" can't incrementally emerge from simpler, unconscious animal imperatives like evasion of hurt and gene transmission, and must have been designed into humans.

Is this accurate?

P.S. I don't actually know your stance on biological evolution, so could you clarify that, too?

266. Inferior Design: Richard Dawkins reviews Behe's lastest book

Comment #54768 by Robert Maynard on July 8, 2007 at 11:02 pm

Paul: [substitutes 'suffering' for 'tax returns' to conclude that "taxes are bad" is an ethical principle]

We could do the same thing with rotten apples and flat tires, but needless to say, "suffering" isn't a single thing, and it's also subject to gradations of severity, as we'll see.

Of course paying taxes are a negative experience.
Fortunately for us, they have nothing to do with morality, and everything to do with the maintenance of civil systems which have ultimately helped prevent suffering at the hands of nature for most of our history.

In the same way that our ethics are not designed with the prevention of papercuts in mind, paying taxes are not as severe a form of suffering as living without access to power grids and clean water might be.

My point is that we do not need revelation to work out what the creator wants for humans.

Conceded and well clarified. I went off track there.
I didn't mean to say you need revelation, I said you weren't claiming to have it, and the question that followed assumed that you've gotten your information some other way. This question dealt specifically with the process by which you could deduce by observation what the creator wants, and how you can remove your personal bias from your observations to distinguish between what you want and what the creator wants.

EDIT: Of course, you could reason that you are part of the creation, and so the personal bias in your own observations can be accounted for as an expression of what the creator wants, as a cheap kind of intrinsically available revelation, but then we'll both be in the land of circles. :|

267. Inferior Design: Richard Dawkins reviews Behe's lastest book

Comment #54764 by Robert Maynard on July 8, 2007 at 10:25 pm

Paul: We also know that suffering is bad. Why? Because that's what we made up at the beginning.

We "made up" that suffering is bad? That's honestly pitiful.
Tell you what, go put on a kettle and stick your hand in it - we'll resume when you're ready to admit that the negative nature of suffering is a baseline assumption for you and the majority of people. Once we all agree that we dislike personal suffering, is it really a leap to agree that people that make other people suffer for kicks are lousy jerks? Is it really a huge leap to say that the more people whose suffering you cause, the worse a person you are? If I came and MADE you put your hand in a hot kettle, you wouldn't like me very much. If I were to murder you, your surviving relatives wouldn't like me at all. This is basic, basic stuff, and to claim that such an easy epiphany is arbitrary and circular is simply stupid.

To pre-empt any charges of intolerance towards sadists and masochists and happy pairings of the two, neither partner in these situations are unduly suffering within their personal context, nor are they inflicting suffering on others in the privacy of their homes.

[regarding a lack of information about what creators want] We have found an ancient relic from a forgotten society. Given that we have no 'revelation' as to what its creator actually wanted it for, we've decided not to examine it in any way, and have left it on the shelf gathering dust. I mean, how would examining something possibly be able to help us to understand what its creator actually wanted it for???

Bzzzzt! You're beginning with the assumption that humans or the natural world are designed artifacts with intended function/purpose, without precedent. You're saying the only way to learn what the creator wants is by first assuming such a creator exists, again without precedent.

268. Don't Mince Words: The London Car-Bomb Plot Was Designed to Kill Women

Comment #54596 by Robert Maynard on July 8, 2007 at 3:19 am

pewkatchoo: Islam is un-reformable

It must be reformable..
I think a big step would be eroding their hard-on for the death penalty. When new ideas aren't stifled by lopping off the idea-carrying head, there's no limit to how benign bad ideas can become.

Then again, the only way I can imagine us assisting with this is by setting an ethical example and shaking off our dependence on their black, viscous exports... so it's not a short term solution. :P

269. Inferior Design: Richard Dawkins reviews Behe's lastest book

Comment #54594 by Robert Maynard on July 8, 2007 at 3:01 am

My point is that if God is necessary for there to be morality, the picture you get of morality by leaving God out may be inaccurate.

That is a pretty big "if". It's a god sized one, in fact.

How can you have any discussion about morality from an atheistic standpoint? How do you reach SHOULD [as in arguments of ought/is]?

When discussing a system of ethics for human beings living together, all we need to get started is consider what this system is meant to achieve. I hope it's been established elsewhere that you can actually start doing that without getting the speculative wishes of a speculative creator of the universe involved.

To turn this around and make sure this remains a discussion, rather than an interview with atheists; I may be wrong, but I understand you've identified yourself as a deist rather than a member of any specific religion. Assuming you are not claiming to have received personal revelation, you basically have no information on what the creator you believe in actually wants for humans.
How do you make a distinction between what you have simply imputed into the mind of god, drawn from your own personal morality, and what this creator actually wants?

Or if I'm getting you completely confused with someone else, my apologies.

270. Ah, the fervour in returning to my flock

Comment #54562 by Robert Maynard on July 7, 2007 at 7:28 pm

Good for you, Lisa! :)

..Hey, wait, why was this published in a newspaper?

271. Inferior Design: Richard Dawkins reviews Behe's lastest book

Comment #54081 by Robert Maynard on July 5, 2007 at 8:53 am

Bizarro:

"In light of the scientific challenge to free will, the concept of "choice" becomes silly, and with it, the idea of morality and ethics."

Bzzzt.
Claiming sanctuary in the flow of naturalistic determinism won't spare you if others agree that something you or anything else is doing is wrong, or negative, or simply "not good". They'll work to stop you, simple as that, whether you're an incoming comet or a serial killer.

Although your actions are causally determined by your environment (and especially your environment during your initial development), your brain is such a complicated processing instrument that it would be next to impossible to isolate or rank the most direct external causes to your actions, be they people, artifacts of people, or other stimuli.

More importantly, the extremely advanced experiential agency enjoyed by human brains has led some of them to grant themselves and each other entitlements, usually called rights, to safeguard against rogue human brains, less capable animal brains, and preserve our continued happy function. Rights carry responsibilities, and certain rights are rescinded when responsibilities are not respected.

Even if we could isolate every external non-living stimuli that went into your brain to make you kill a baby, we don't hold things of lesser agency than human brains "responsible" for their actions, because it's understood they simply don't understand why what they've done is wrong according to us.

Your brain, "naught but a chemical mass" (as if that were derogatory), is responsible for its actions, and your brain is you.
If it's demonstrable that your brain is not entirely "you", and suffers from severe functional problems owing to mutation or incident, your brain is not fully responsible for its actions, and we can give you the care you need as an unfortunate human with a less-than-good brain.

If you deny the causal nature of our "free will", you're essentially denying the known relationships between physical problems in the brain and psychopathology.
If you do that while glorifying weird metaphysical ideas of choice, right and wrong - you won't be very well equipped to understand psychopaths as anything more than twisted repositories of pure chaos or evil; willing pals of Satan.
...This would be false, by the way.

272. Don't Mince Words: The London Car-Bomb Plot Was Designed to Kill Women

Comment #53903 by Robert Maynard on July 4, 2007 at 3:33 am

Xenocratic said:

Care to name all these "millions" who have been saved by kind US assistance?

What a silly demand. In order to quantify it, we'd need to be able to figure out exactly how many people would have died if aid which was supplied by the US had not been. In other words, you're asking Goldy to present statistics for scenarios that didn't happen, so we can compare them to what actually happened. :|

Don't let me defend US foreign policy for a moment, but a lot of the "case studies" on that page were pretty weak .. the entries for Hungary, Pakistan, and Yugoslavia come to mind.

Besides that, I think you and your "ilk" fail to make a critical distinction between the callous actions of the CIA and various iterations of the executive branch, and the rest of the government - not to mention the US citizenry in general. There's even a historical note on that page about how respectably Congress has been able to act when they learn of these unethical projects. But whether or not you intend it, these analyses typically conclude that the CIA is made up of some 300 million Americans, and all are equally culpable.

Unless you're itching to make some hollow arguments about transference of guilt, I would argue that the people of the United States (and being a democracy, the nation IS the people) do not have blood on their hands, precisely because of how unaware the majority are kept of illegal covert actions carried out on other nations by the powerful manipulators at the helm of their country. The citizenry of the US or UK or any Western nation isn't "to blame" for Islamic terrorism, and they don't deserve it either. Nobody deserves terrorism.
Defending it by bringing up the nation-building crimes of the CIA during the Cold War is a cowardly and masochistic equivalence. It's indefensible to basically argue that the West is due for some form of payback, and it's given a bizarre pretense of karmic justice by blurring the public with their covert intelligence agencies.

I don't think even Hitchens would disagree that there are real problems with how the executive branch of US government can be used to (further) undermine and abuse and tarnish the resources and reputation of the United States.

273. Inferior Design: Richard Dawkins reviews Behe's lastest book

Comment #53769 by Robert Maynard on July 3, 2007 at 4:50 am

Shild

He concluded that pretty much all differences within a species and between species in a genera are the result of accumulated differences by Darwinian processes, most differences between Genera are Darwinian, many differences between Families are Darwinian, some differences between Orders are Darwinian, and almost no differences between Classes are Darwinian.

That really just strikes me as the purest myopia.
If he embraces common descent, and variation at the species level, how could he not conceive of the roots at the splits of higher levels of categorisation as originally being incredibly similar species? It's not like animals are born every so often that are so fundamentally different that they immediately bypass species, genera, and orders, and spawn a whole new class, a new phylum, which will grow independently from that moment on. All differences which eventually grew to define a separate section of life, began just like all species do, slightly different versions of an existing creature. I'm pretty sure that it is not claimed that actual evolutionary processes take place at some meta-level above organisms and their immediate environment. The long term and large scale change in nature is due to evolutionary processes, but I'm pretty sure all the dirty work is carried out at the level of organisms and genes and their immediate selective environments.
All Behe needs to grant is the possibility of variation at the level of the organism, and we're done. It is a corrosive concession, to borrow the terminology from Darwin's Dangerous Idea. All my knowledge about TEOE has been received through terse reviews, but I'm aware that Behe realises how corrosive it is to admit variation on lower scales, and just as the creationists have struggled to explain what macroevolution is if not stacks of accumulated microevolutions, he takes pains to put a cap on the "universal acid" that is Darwinism.

This was my personal favourite review in dealing with these attempts
Good Math, Bad Math : Behe's Dreadful New Book: A Review of "The Edge of Evolution"

Behe basically claims that observing the evolutionary changes these fast reproducers go through over a short period of time is analogous to observing less numerous living things over a long period of time, since the number of generations is about the same.

Well, it really, really isn't. I'll try and explain why after the rest of the passage-

He concludes that since genetic changes do not accumulate enough in these studies to produce big differences, then such changes are too unlikely to accumulate among higher organisms in the same number of generations.

Take the following analogy. It's a little clumsy, but it should be illustrative of the problem.
Suppose we track the social interactions of two people for a year, Joe and ..Neo. Joe is an accountant, who interacts with the world in real time, and lives an ordinary life, while Neo is the messianic hero from the blockbuster action film The Matrix - he can move much faster than a regular person, and for the duration of this analogy, will only interact with the world in the movies famous "bullet time", where his relative speed makes everything else appear to move slowly. Let's put a number to it - Neo's speed lets him perceive the world at 1/10 of its real time rate, so the equivalent of ten years will pass for Neo in the time it takes for the Earth to orbit the Sun once.

Given that Joe is interfacing with his environment at the pace of the environment, and Neo is operating at high speeds in a world full of glacial, non-responsive ghosts for ten years, who will have made more friends when the year concludes?

Viruses evolve faster than their hosts, but it should be pretty clear that a virus which evolves too fast will ruthlessly kill its hosts, kill its chances of transmission, and die with its victims. I shouldn't have to say it: adaptations which cause you to die are not beneficial. Natural selection will clearly favour a more throttled approach to rampant parasitism, forcing even the fastest reproducing parasites to adopt mutation rates which "respect" the defenses of the things they use to propagate themselves. Failure to do so is about as futile as trying to make real-time friends while acting in bullet-time.

The review I linked to mentioned Behe's attempts to define fitness landscapes as unchanging, thus presenting an abstract limit to variation. If his main arguments are dealing with varieties of quasi-organism that operate on timescales so rapid as to render the rest of the natural world in a kind of biological bullet time, then it's starting to make sense why he would say something so silly.

For a virus, the fitness landscape really is operating in slow motion, and for long stretches of generations really is fairly static. If their hosts happened to develop advanced techniques to combat their afflictions, and improved their defenses faster, viruses would be happy to ratchet up their rate of change and learn to dodge fast acting counter attacks as Neo did bullets (this is exactly what some diseases are doing today), but the fact is that natural selection would compel most to throttle their bullet-time and muffle their potential rate of mutation.

It is not analogous.

274. Inferior Design: Richard Dawkins reviews Behe's lastest book

Comment #53719 by Robert Maynard on July 2, 2007 at 9:29 pm

Unless you have an underdeveloped or atrophied amygdala (or a range of other dysfunctions), you have some degree of empathy for the suffering of others - you have an intuitive "sketch", in a sense, of what seems right and wrong, based on your knowledge, and what you think would be bad if it happened to you. YOu really can trust yourself, and unless you live in a society predominated by psychopaths, you can trust the clear majority of your fellow humans. Our naturally functioning brain provides us with an enormous demographic of people whose subjective morality will be found in agreement on some very simple principles, including: suffering is bad and should be avoided. A relative consensus doesn't render a principle 'objective', but functionally it really is close enough. Our laws are designed to prevent suffering (in an abstract sense), or punish those who visit suffering on others, for being so criminally indifferent to it.

As to your example: No matter how much one twists in the wind, with a principle like this in mind it is impossible (or at least very difficult) to ethically justify subjecting adult human subjects to procedures you know are beyond a threshold of acceptable danger to their health, even when they are volunteering themselves for money.

275. Inferior Design: Richard Dawkins reviews Behe's lastest book

Comment #53574 by Robert Maynard on July 2, 2007 at 4:51 am

Shild

Behe's "Tentative Edge" of evolution includes Orders, Families, and Genera.
...
Now all you need to do is demonstrate that a mutation beyond Behe's "Edge" has in fact occurred..

It's an interesting challenge Shild, but upon examination it carries a conceit similar to the demand for "new information".

For example, when creationists demand evidence of a mutation that has "increased" the "information" in a genome, people will often start out by mentioning the studied effects of even minor gene mutations - some of which have been found to result in adaptive phenotypic effects. Unfortunately, that apparently doesn't count: a duplicated gene isn't "new", since it's coming from the stuff that was already there. Unlike ...that other source?
What's more, even if we were allowed to credit it as new, it's an incidental effect that doesn't qualify as a functionally "new" part of the organism. When you push them on it, (as we've pushed devolved on this site for example), they'll basically demand a mutation that has resulted in a fully functional physical structure. Because they refuse to credit the capacity for single gene mistakes to accumulate incrementally and eventually become fully functional physical structures, over long stretches of time and many mutations, this demand really is referring to a single-step, one generation event - a mutation that produces something out of nothing.
Which ironically means they are demanding that scientists produce evidence for impossible events which would support their case.

Here you are demanding evidence for a mutation which takes place beyond the "tentative edge of evolution", up in the realms of Classes, or Phyla. ..There are a few problems with this.

Just to get warmed up, it's a mistake to consider taxonomic distinctions strict, non-arbitrary, and non-contingent. These are discontinuous thresholds, utterly invented to assist cataloguing a vast, hazy and continuous stream of variation.
Behe says classes are beyond the "edge" of evolution. But what this even means is unclear to me, and what is meant by your call for "a mutation beyond Behe's "Edge"" is even less clear.
What's critical to clarify here is whether you literally mean "a (single) mutation" or are allowing for "a string of successive mutations, incrementally beneficial or neutral, preserved in multiple generations over millions of years".

Species are like the twigs on the ends of trees, separated from other twigs by a greater degree the further apart we look. It is impossible for mammals to evolve into birds, thus crossing classes from Mammalia to Aves, for example. Their lineages are well and truly separated by eons of divergence from a primeval common ancestor, and they are well and truly irreconcilable. Of course, this doesn't for a moment rule that mammals are unable to evolve flight (as bats clearly attest) - over many generations, of course, not one. But no matter how birdlike any group of mammals became, they would never "cross" over to the class Aves, any more than a tree branch can grow to rejoin a branch it split from years earlier. I doubt this is what Behe means though, because that would be.. completely meaningless, and not what evolutionary biologists have ever claimed! :D

So what is being implied?
Does his edge lie deep in the past, as lineages converge?
Just to lay it out, the class Synapsids evolved into the class Mammals. Bang.
But this shouldn't be viewed as some kind of gigantic shift from mammal-like reptiles into mammals. It took place incrementally, at the level of the species, over millions of years.
While generations of mammal-like reptiles carried out their short, strange lives, imperceptibly changing over generations to resemble what we now call mammals, the taxonomist hovers above with a keen eye and a pin with the notice "MAMMALS BEGIN HERE", because there simply must be a point in classification, a post-synapsid period, where we can safely start talking about some animals being mammals instead of synapsids. This change would have been a subtle one, a tiny one, an utterly meaningless one for the animal, but in the eyes of taxonomy it has world-shifting implications, when a lineage transformed from one class into another.
If Behe is saying that it is impossible for the synapsids to have evolved into mammals, even when a fairly smooth gradation of somewhat arbitrarily labeled points has already been described, he's really is just placing too much emphasis on the discontinuity of classification.

But honestly, I don't know what the hell he's saying. I did a double take when I saw "location of planet in Solar System" and "amount of matter in the Universe" as significant properties that lie outside Contingency in Biology.
"You think?"
Hey, you know what else lies beyond the edge of evolutions capacity to explain our world? Black holes. Explain black holes, biologists!

276. Inferior Design: Richard Dawkins reviews Behe's lastest book

Comment #53244 by Robert Maynard on June 30, 2007 at 9:52 am

The Rottweiler strikes again!

277. God Hates the World

Comment #53072 by Robert Maynard on June 29, 2007 at 7:56 am

Welcome to the site Frank!

I would like to expunge religion from my vocabulary, not because it is blasphemy but because it is nonsense. For example, where I might have concluded this by saying "God, I hope no one calls me a douche bag for posting this!"
could I say: -
"Darwin, I hope no one calls me a douche bag for posting this"?
This may seem trivial but language is important.

Language is important insofar as you're trying to communicate actual meaning. 'God' is really just a couple of sounds, and it can only become easier to say when its emptied of meaning.
There is something to be said for economy of language - using "god" to denote exasperation or thinking out-loud, for example, is much easier than saying "Darwin". Half as many syllables, for starters. :P
Not only is it easier to say, it's easier for other people to understand what you're expressing.
You're not speaking to Darwin, and Darwin can't hear you, so why even get him involved in your day-to-day utterances of irritation, shock or amazement? It's not like you're currently addressing anyone or anything else by saying "god", and this makes you uncomfortable.

A friend of mine once tried to start saying "By the Void!" to replace saying "Goddammit!" all the time, but it just didn't work out.
For most of us, "God" or "Jesus" are just sounds we make when we're at a loss for useful words. It doesn't hurt anyone to use them when we don't believe in them, nor does it lend any credence to belief in them.
They're cultural quirks so inconsequential it seems a waste of time to get rid of them. This might change in the future, but I don't think it's a big enough deal. *shrug*

278. God Hates the World

Comment #53061 by Robert Maynard on June 29, 2007 at 7:08 am

I hadn't followed this for a while, but here it is!

David: Sweet, naive and hopelessly out of touch. If you look over this thread you will see clearly the inductive argument that has been put forward by Richard Dawkins and which has been accepted by his followers. This is an example of religious abuse. Religion is terrible. In order to stop abuse we must defeat religion.

To quote Stephen Colbert: "WOOO, I CALLED IT!" *balloons fall from the ceiling*
You said what I predicted you would say!
Although I have demonstrated clearly that Dawkins hadn't made any inductive arguments with the words he used, the fact that others here have, is (for you) evidence that a clearly inductive argument was transmitted by Dawkins to "his followers", through some hitherto unspecified means besides words. I wonder if your consistent misunderstanding of "consciousness raising" speaks of an anxiety that atheists have developed telepathy?
Stated simply, you are making the classic statistical mistake of confusing correlation with causation. That is, you are observing two things happening, and assume that they are not simply occuring in tandem, due to other factors or causes, but that one caused the other. For example, in this case Dawkins did all of two things (at most) - asked Josh to put the video up, and commented on it. His role in the first instance isn't even clear, as the video was sourced from Pharyngula, which I believe is one of America's highest read science blogs. The only evidence for the claim is that no one is credited for the submission.
I have already clearly demonstrated a lack of inductive arguments put forward in the words of Dawkins' comment, and I see no need to repeat them.
How have you concluded, from this, that Dawkins is literally responsible for the inductive arguments, many of them unrelated to 'religion as child abuse', made by various posters? Especially when there is a much more likely hypothesis: that we are individuals, with varying thresholds of sensitivity to outrageous media, reacting emotionally to a distressing video?
I have seen no answer for this since I put it forth on page 3, and my sweet naivete will not spare yours.

Something for you to reflect on while I am away - what is evidence? ... You are fundamentally a logical empiricist, fundamentally a naturalist and therefore you cannot and will not accept lots of evidence because it goes against your fundamental presuppositions.

Very broadly - evidence is unambiguous information which can be used to support or falsify speculation.
Unless there is some kind of brand new information you are presenting as "evidence" that atheists "ignore", the regular faith-based arguments in circulation have not been demonstrated to be unambiguous and inexplicable by existing naturalistic theories, and they are not impressive.

The assumption that we can only learn new things by observation is a pretty safe 'presupposition', even moreso when the observations of our own minds teaches us to caution ourselves against trusting the reliability of our own senses - further demoting subjective experience. Not only is naturalism the most useful assumption, being responsible for every technological advance ever made, it is also the most honest assumption, given the limits of our investigation.

279. Lecture on Neo-Darwinism

Comment #52843 by Robert Maynard on June 28, 2007 at 7:37 am

It finds its source in the shrouds of Internet lore.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon#Background

280. Lecture on Neo-Darwinism

Comment #52832 by Robert Maynard on June 28, 2007 at 6:48 am

Right, because people choose to be black, gay or atheist, in much the same way they choose to study and pursue a career in engineering.

If you feel too old for LOL, I recommend a :P - it is a timeless disclaimer and appeal to nonseriousness. ... :P

281. God Hates the World

Comment #52108 by Robert Maynard on June 26, 2007 at 7:29 am

Although Dawkins never made the connection between WBC and "all religion", David would most likely argue that because some other posters have connected the Phelps with all religious traditions - as we should, while retaining an appreciation for the very real spectrum of natural variation in philosophy and character this obviously includes - this is evidence that Dawkins' "tactic", however phrased, has somehow wrought the effect David describes.
But David needs to recognise that these posters also form part of a spectrum of personality variation amongst atheists; I don't think the more radically angry posts here are testimony to dogmatism, so much as variation in our willingness to beat around the bush and avoid declaring the core issue from the rooftops: religious 'moderates' (including David, by comparison at least) are forestalling effective criticism of groups like the WBC because they're working from the same books, and this needs to change.
I think David also needs to recognise that distancing himself from these weirdos and calling it poor form to try and draw connections between them and more diluted forms of the same thing, isn't going to work, and isn't going to improve any situation.
You can't criticise fundamentalists of your own faith, without having the guts to step away from the scriptures you're both using. It's their textbook, but it's just your CliffsNotes.

282. Germany imposes ban on Tom Cruise

Comment #52098 by Robert Maynard on June 26, 2007 at 6:35 am

I knew someone would say that, but it isn't necessarily so. Scientology is structured around private counseling sessions rather than groups or communities, and while many religions do encourage tithing and other such donations, these are explicitly voluntary within the practicing of religion and mainly carried on by peer pressure (or should I say.. pew pressure? ..no? okay). Meanwhile the session-driven and "progress" oriented nature of Scientology can become ..quite expensive. While the practices are informed by nonsense metaphysical (and historical) claims, they're not nearly as critical, and the structure and delivery of the teachings is.. really very different. It's like some kind of 'stealth' religion. I guess you could compare it to one of those ancient "mystery" cults. *shrug*

So national governments are quite happy to throw rocks at them - the reason not many beneath that level do is because of how viciously litigious and intimidating the group is to critics.

283. Germany imposes ban on Tom Cruise

Comment #52095 by Robert Maynard on June 26, 2007 at 6:20 am

This isn't six degrees of separation folks, the article is really only related to Scientology and Nazis.

On that note, bitbutter, Tom Cruise is the most aggressively scientologist celebrity around. He has essentially been dubbed Scientology's 'head prophet' by senior leaders in the organisation. He'll denounce psychiatry whenever someone is willing to let him drift off topic, and claim that things like drug addiction are solely caused by body thetans, which can be teased out through 'expert' auditing. The man is a menacing clown, which (I think we can all agree) is the worst kind. :P

As the article states, Germany is one the European countries openly opposed to Scientology, basically by describing it as a criminal organisation of frauds. They can really do whatever they want with their military sites, to be honest.

284. An Inquisition in science's name

Comment #52091 by Robert Maynard on June 26, 2007 at 6:03 am

..they published that?
No honestly, that shouldn't have made it past the editors desk. Does The Sun have an editor?

..Theory of Relatively?

"Hey Rich - can I call ya Rich? - why are you so dumb and stuff, Rich? I'll bet you infinity to twelve you're some kind of dude who doesn't know what he's talking about - unlike Einstein. He knew his stuff, relatively and all that. Have you ever crossed over, how can you know there's no God? By the way, I do know. There is. Jerkface.

Alright, that's a wrap!"

$$

285. God Hates the World

Comment #52034 by Robert Maynard on June 26, 2007 at 1:54 am

I didn't actually articulate "delight". I expressed disappointment that I missed the beginning of the argument, and I described the landslide of criticism you've received (in my opinion, most of it entirely defensible)

In regards to your latest comment, I only found this part worth remarking on:
"You are not engaging in 'good journalism' – any more than a journalist who films a nutty black supremacist group which believes in raping white women, would be engaging in 'good journalism' when he then went on to state that such a group shows that black people are inherently evil."

I'm sorry, this is a false analogy, because it simply doesn't describe the particulars of the situation. There are no inductive arguments taking place here on the part of Dawkins. Certainly you've described several people generalising the Phelps to be indicative of all religious tradition, but we could return to that later.

Dawkins: I have been attacked for using the phrase 'child abuse' about certain aspects of religious indoctrination.

Here's a wording that would've helped your charge make a little more sense -

I have been attacked for using the phrase 'child abuse' to describe religious instruction. Here it is, plain as day - religion teaches children everywhere that god hates the world. Disgusting.

How about this one?

Dawkins: I defy any civilized person to watch this video and then deny that 'child abuser' is a completely appropriate description of the little girl's parents

And here's the passage through Robertson-Goggles^TM

I defy any civilised person to watch this video and deny that 'child abuser' is completely appropriate for everyone who believes in supernatural entities. Seriously, they suck so bad. GRRR

Of course, you will argue "Don't be a fool Robert, he doesn't have to spell out the implications of what he means to achieve by posting this video. Unless he accompanies this with at least 16 videos of well adjusted, clever children in religious households - it is crystal clear what he's trying to say here. It's an unfair treatment. I mean, if I found a video of an atheist parent BEATING HIS KID WITH A PLANK OF WOOD, you certainly wouldn't see me pointing to it and sneering 'oh, nice secular morality, dickface!' No! Because I'm respectful enough to understand that it would not be representative of atheists at large. Just like those unidentified individuals who threw rocks at my church windows - did I assume without evidence they must have been atheists, and were evidence of atheist hatred? Have I ever claimed that the posters on this website are mostly dogmatic cultists? Have I ever explicitly associated atheists and atheism with Stalin, or Mao? Have I ever charged that secularists can just as easily become suicide bombers (even when they were actually Hinduists?) Well, have I?"

Then, while I am apparently in control of your embarrassing exposition, you'd hit yourself with a frying pan.

286. God Hates the World

Comment #51994 by Robert Maynard on June 25, 2007 at 8:59 pm

Darn, it looks as though poor David went away before I woke up. Talk about a beating. You're obviously upset David, but it's really remarkable to me the reasons you're upset.

The ideas in the Bible have consequences - this concept of a furious and judgmental deity didn't just pop into Phelps head one morning. You simply cannot make the argument that it is the people of WBC who are at fault, while completely excusing the repeatedly cited source of their inspiration and philosophy. The oft-invoked "human capacity for evil" is directly throttled by ones upbringing and environment. This is freewheeling, seething hatred siphoned straight from the pages of the Original Gangsta Testament, and you simply can't make a case that this is not so.

Then of course you do your usual thing of "woah, real nice - how old are you, mr. rational-pants?" when people fly off the handle and abuse you for being an annoying brat. I've said as much to you before, it is unfortunate that we are not more patient with belligerent detractors. Nobody's perfect. At the end of the day, you are repeatedly showing up to make passive-aggressive slights at Dawkins and atheists in general, you spend so much time chiding posters as immature while bandying brick-dumb labels like "fundamentalist atheist" and "secular capitalism" (as opposed to, y'know, that other kind?) instead of making arguments, and when you do make arguments, they have the constitution of wet potato chips. It's ...really very frustrating.
For example, here you're demanding a retraction and an apology for posting this video - as if this will make everything okay. What are you imagining?
*delete* "Whew, now that this video has been removed, and atheists have been made to apologise for it existing and being distributed by a religious group, no one will be able to find it anywhere else on the internet and be shocked by it!"
It's hosted on a video hosting site, it was posted by PZ Meyers of Pharyngula, and it's sourced here, on Richard Dawkins' website, presumably because he saw it on Pharyngula and was all "son of a bitch!"
You're essentially trying to restrict what information someone can source, in part to support their arguments, on their personal website. "I demand you apologise for exposing people to this information; it is irresponsible of you to present supporting evidence for your arguments! It's devastating to my case! I'm totally disgusted that you seem to think you can just do whatever you want on your own website. Yucky icky poo!" Do you see what I meant by wet potato chips? The entire concept is intellectually insulting.

I encourage you to churn your stomach and cry like a little girl. You're welcome to return when you can handle what the chefs are serving. Oh, and free speech, apparently.

287. Doctors' beliefs can hinder patient care

Comment #51768 by Robert Maynard on June 24, 2007 at 8:01 pm

Fair enough and understood.

As to your analogy being about why discussing 'ALL' options is not a good idea, I think it's fairly clear that the concept of "all options" is to be taken with moderation, and with respect for the confines of financial practicalities and civil law. As I suggested before, there are many solutions to any given problem which exist in the realm of physical possibility, but a lot of them should not be considered practical or legitimate options. The principle of 'advising patients on all options' obviously involves some measure of common sense.

Discussing how doctors should handle ethics from situation to situation obviously grows to become a 'complicated issue', as does any issue when put under a microscope.
However, I do not agree that denial of care on the grounds of personal beliefs is a complicated issue. If the situation is taking place in the "First World", it's really no big deal - it's free enterprise, if a doctor decides not to offer a service, it should be okay - someone else will. Just say "screw that noise!" and go to another doctor who will care for you.
If it is in the developing world, or any situation where there is a scarcity of available doctors, say due to financial difficulties, it's basically unacceptable. Someone basically needs to dismiss those guys and replace them with better doctors. That's really all there is to it. Carrying out that solution is likely to be more complicated than stated, but the answer to the situation is straightforward.

As for confusing vaccines with cures... *smacks forehead*

288. Doctors' beliefs can hinder patient care

Comment #51645 by Robert Maynard on June 23, 2007 at 11:41 pm

They may have the well-being of their patients' eternal souls in mind.

A physician's expertise simply does not extend to metaphysical concepts. I can't say it any simpler - they don't teach that in medical school - it isn't medicine. In this regard the doctor is no better than a layperson in terms of information, yet they are exercising an experts level of authority. Advice that enters 'eternal soul' territory has explicitly left the doctors expert purview, and they are authoritatively speaking about things no one could possibly know - including existence after death. This is.. highly unethical.

If there are any metaphysical beliefs a doctor should respect, it is those of the patient. Doctors are not priests, and they do not treat unwell "souls" - they treat unwell bodies.

EDIT: I realise you were addressing Corylus about 'options', but your counter-argument makes no sense. A doctor is encouraged to use his medical training to provide a patient with expert perspective on any situation, especially if he is concerned the patient is making an uninformed or poor decision. That's their job.
The first paragraph should have dealt with that dust eating nonsense, but let's turn to the second one.
In your example of the tuberculosis vaccine, if the doctor did not "screen, quarantine and drug" the patient according to national policy, he would be betraying his own expert perspective, as he is surely breaking some rules and endangering others by recommending they leave the country.

To draw this out in comically bizarre fashion, if there were an ebola vaccine in another country, which was not endorsed or stocked by their own country, it would be the purest criminal idiocy for a doctor to recommend that an ebola-infected patient should leave expert care and try to reach that cure by their own means.

"You have tuberculosis/ebola? My advice - leave this hospital and GET ON THE NEXT PLANE out of here. Just.. try not to cough."

Ethical responsibilities don't end with the individual patient. Doctors aren't like criminal defense attorneys, who must always work in the best interests of their client, even when these interests are in direct opposition to those of the public at large (defending a known murderer, for example). If a doctor recommended a potentially terminally infectious individual leave professional care, and increase their potential sphere of transmission, he or she would be the worst doctor ever. It is no more a legitimate "option" than suggesting murder as a source of organs needed for transplanting.

That was such a stupid example, kamisama, honestly.

289. Doctors' beliefs can hinder patient care

Comment #51558 by Robert Maynard on June 23, 2007 at 11:50 am

This IS a very complicated subject - but not to the fundamentalists who want to impose their atheistic morality on everyone else.

Impose what, exactly? "Atheistic morality", insofar as it should be considered as something separate from 21st century moral philosophy (it shouldn't), is not an imposition on anyone. It holds the simplest precept in the Hippocratic oath paramount - "do no harm", better phrased as "suffering sucks - help each other avoid it".

It is literally free of any impositions precisely because it is a system which (at its core) seeks and encourages the freedom and happiness of all individuals, and guards against actions which visit suffering on others. I cannot see why you consider the guarantee of personal liberties an imposition.

When a physician denies any treatments based on personal beliefs, he is imposing his beliefs onto his patients, and he is clearly and unambiguously 'doing harm' by refusing to give them what they want. A doctor is certainly encouraged to use his medical training to provide a patient with expert perspective on any situation if he is concerned the patient is making an uninformed or poor decision. But at the end of the day, so long as the patient understands what they are doing, anything less than serving that patient is an unethical imposition.

In other words, I think your claim that -

if medicine was left to atheists and secularists then we would be in a pretty poor state

really makes no sense at all. I don't understand what you're basing it on.

290. His word: Attacking religion can seem like breaking a butterfly on a wheel

Comment #51553 by Robert Maynard on June 23, 2007 at 11:14 am

I didn't mean that you have to crucify those who deviate even slightly from the True Faith!

David, you are again running up against the problem that atheism does not have any doctrinal cohesion from which to 'deviate'.
You're also comparing derisive commentary to an ancient method of execution so intensely painful the word 'excruciating' was invented just to try and relate to it, but (quite worryingly) this is the least of your problems.

291. His word: Attacking religion can seem like breaking a butterfly on a wheel

Comment #51522 by Robert Maynard on June 23, 2007 at 8:57 am

Jesus guys, it's just a light-hearted fluff piece in an entertainment column..

It's arguable whether it was worth posting to the sites newsfeed, but we should be considering its context.

292. An Inquisition in science's name

Comment #51222 by Robert Maynard on June 22, 2007 at 1:57 am

Let's be clear - neither am I. :|

293. An Inquisition in science's name

Comment #51217 by Robert Maynard on June 22, 2007 at 1:41 am

Bizarro

If the Universe has somehow defied logic and existed for eternity past, then it seems that, based on the 2nd law's implications, stars would no longer exist, nor would any organized energy and matter. The Universe would have reached the state of heat death an eternity ago, but this is obviously not the case as I am writing you right now as an organized mass of matter and energy.

This is a misunderstanding. The 'universe has existed in some form forever' argument does not entail that stars and other loosely organised systems in space have existed in state forever - it merely requires that the energy has been present forever. This is, after all, the first law - energy cannot be created nor destroyed (Is it worth mentioning that God must necessarily break the first law of thermodynamics to create the universe out of nothing? That dude just won't play by the rules)
All the evidence on the movement of objects in space (and background microwave radiation) implies that everything used to be much closer together - converging on a singularity - precluding the formation of anything more complex than a fiery maelstrom. So, yeah, the 'eternal universe' argument has nothing to do with eternal complexity, just the energy.

The universe is a closed system (in that it is not being supplied with new energy). But no, the coalescence of gases into stars, and stars venting material which coalesces heavier elements that coalesce into planets, is not a violation of the second law. Spacetime itself carries an energy gradient, the weakest part of which serves to draw matter towards other matter, in the form of gravitational attraction. You may have heard of it. It is not a violation of the second law because these formations of organised systems are not efficient, and do result in the NET 'loss' of functional energy, while gaining localised regions of increased complexity.
A heat death is inevitable because gravity is not enough to deal with the fact that all the matter in the universe is accelerating away from wherever the Big Bang singularity occured, which will separate all things, sap all energy into useless radiation, and ultimately obey the second law.

294. Bill O'Reilly and Kirk Cameron on Atheism

Comment #51186 by Robert Maynard on June 21, 2007 at 10:01 pm

Cameron's argument is the purest Paley, and it should be refutable in less than 20 questions.

- So where did the camera designer come from? Their parents, I suppose.
- Was he or she born with the knowledge necessary to design a camera? Of course not
- So where did the knowledge come from? They learnt it.
- From who? College, probably.
- Where did the college get it from? The contemporary state of engineering and electronics knowledge, and stuff like that.
- Contemporary? So it changes over time? Well yeah, we couldn't always build a flashy camera.
- I see. So you're saying it incrementally improved over time, with effective solutions being kept and faulty ones discarded? Yes. But there was still a first camera designer, of a pinhole camera or something of the sort - you have to admit that.
- Well, maybe. I think an idea that simple could be discovered by practically anyone. So the contemporary designer of the TV camera owes his intelligent complexity to generations of previous designers, but then does that 'first' designer of a pinhole camera necessarily deserve credit for the intricacy of modern TV video cameras? Well no, that's kind of unfair..
- Right. So the camera's "ultimate" designer isn't really responsible for the complexity of modern TV cameras, rather their intricacy is the result of subsequent improvements in the course of a collaborative, incremental, evolutionary process? The credit mainly goes to the process of selection itself, carrying on across multiple generations.
..I ..well, yes.

Okay good. Now shut the fuck up.
(Well, it probably wouldn't go that smoothly with a real person, but you could ask 11 more questions before you hit 20)

295. An Inquisition in science's name

Comment #51067 by Robert Maynard on June 21, 2007 at 10:45 am

There are yawning chasms of silliness here that I'm sure others will pounce on with reliable passion - for my part I think the critical misstep is this:

What was our great mistake? It was to assume that the church had an absolute monopoly on how truth was to be defined

I actually think a bigger problem in their thinking was assuming that 'redemption' could not be facilitated in a way that didn't end in execution. Conversation is all a good idea ever needs to spread - good ideas are contagious. The ideas atheists are criticising are demonstrably bad, because they can barely stand on their own merits.

Our world is driven forward by technology - ideas to alleviate suffering, and ideas to support our ponderous bulk as a species on this planet. If we stop anytime soon we'll die out fairly quickly. Persistent scientific illiteracy in this world can only lead one down a path of economic and intellectual impoverishment and obsolescence.

So if one is intent on looking for a parallel to the 16th century Inquisition in the 21st century, they need look no further then our global marketplace of ideas. Agents in the market that disagree with the highly useful and insightful findings of science, will be dealt with most coldly, by an indifferent market that gorges itself on innovation and discourse.

It's by no means a clever or an insightful parallel - it makes it sound like we must toil against our will in service of these wonderful ideologies of progress, lest we be tortured - when in fact it is a highly rewarding process we as a species are compelled to participate in - but that's what happens when you're stretching a lousy parallel.

296. Opus comic

Comment #50579 by Robert Maynard on June 18, 2007 at 10:27 pm

Hehehe, cute.
Thanks for the scan.

297. A Compass That Can Clash With Modern Life

Comment #49966 by Robert Maynard on June 14, 2007 at 9:54 am

"life destroying gibberish"

298. Can we really learn to love people who aren't like us?

Comment #49923 by Robert Maynard on June 14, 2007 at 5:46 am

Google Notebook is the prolific commenters friend.

299. Can we really learn to love people who aren't like us?

Comment #49718 by Robert Maynard on June 13, 2007 at 6:22 am

I've encountered many people in life, who are so dull they cannot even conceive of a world without gods, and so they refer to peoples deference to other causes or beliefs as "making gods" out of capitalism, sex, drugs, or in this case, luck. In their eyes, it is pitiable idolatry on our part, to 'worship' 'gods' of our fleeting material existence, when a 'real' and transcendent god is available (and by available I mean threatening you for non-compliance).

Short answer: Luck is not a god.
We have been over this before devolved, but I understand it didn't end with much agreement, and I won't link bomb you to old exchanges.

But I'm simply at a loss to figure out how to proceed on this particular topic if you can't understand what luck is, what probability involves, and by extension what the anthropic principle explains.

300. Republican candidates range from ignorant to dishonest, part 2

Comment #49327 by Robert Maynard on June 11, 2007 at 1:44 pm

Shigawire:

California Republicans Endorse Paul
Key California Republican Group Endorses Ron Paul

That's fantastic, and I hope the sentiment spreads among the public. But this just seems to be an advocacy club. I mainly meant Republican representatives. Ron Paul claimed in an interview with Tucker Carlson recently that he had been "asked to leave" by member(s) of the Republican Congress in the past. I'm just worried he won't fit in with the neocon sentiment, even if he captures the hearts and minds of Americans. :|