Category Archives: Philosophy

Philosophy, Reason, Science

We are ‘Star-Stuff’

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Carl Sagan on the set of Cosmos13 years ago, on this day, Carl Sagan lost a long struggle against myelodysplasia and passed away at only 62. His tragic death left the global community of astronomers and scientists of all fields with an immense feeling of loss. Never has one person brought to so many, with so much enthusiasm the grand story of our origins, and of course, the origin of the Universe. Thankfully, he left us an incredible legacy and continues to inspire with every passing day through the multitude of outstanding books he authored, and perhaps most important of all, the Cosmos television series.

First broadcast in 1980, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage remains the pinnacle of the documentary genre, encompassing the history of science, life, the Earth, the stars and the Universe, as well as our place therein and our future. Central to this 13-hour masterpiece, Sagan approached these subjects with the wonder and excitement of a child, exploring through imagination, but with the depth and understanding of a brilliant scientist. To his fans, his stirring and at times even romantic elocution would trump that of the greatest poets. And as one of them (a fan, not a great poet), I am left unable to express how much I want the world to see this series. I believe it should be shown in every school, in every country, and broadcast at least once a year for the world to see again. If I had the money and power to achieve this, I wouldn’t give it a second thought. Fortunately, we are part way there, as many people discover Sagan’s work circulated on the internet every day. Even in our humble corner, we’ve seen users of this forum meet and embrace Sagan’s philosophy having never previously heard of him. It seems appropriate that on the anniversary of his death, we should celebrate the birth of his legacy, a candle in the dark burning brighter than ever.

Philosophy, Reason, Religion, Science

The Qur’an . . ? Really?

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The day I’ve had.

Cold, so very bitterly cold. Anyone who’s been any closer to outside than their own bedroom knows it’s been cold enough to freeze the smile of a Catholic priest in an orphanage. Cold enough to make people who should know better wear beanies. You get what I’m saying; coldness.

Walking down Kilburn high road (note to foreign types; Kilburn high road is a shopping street in London that contains a pub called The Cock, and this is all you need to know) I noticed a couple of trestle tables with brightly coloured pamphlets. A few people stood behind these tables, picking up a sheet from the ground. Initially I thought they’d been breakdancing, poppin’ some sweet moves in the grindstreet dustcore scene, yo.

Nope. Muslims! Continue reading The Qur’an . . ? Really? →

Philosophy

The Psychology of Plagiarism

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When I was at university, a friend of mine was taking a course which I had taken the semester before – the Bible as Literature or Ancient Judaism, I can’t exactly remember  – and, because he tended to be lazy, he one day told me that he hadn’t started writing a paper that was due the next day and, consequently, would almost certainly fail the class. He showed me the assignment, a page long description of some obscure theory of interpretation which he was supposed to apply to some obscure primary text and the technical requirements for the paper itself, and I realized that the assignment was unchanged from the previous semester and that, somewhere in my files, I had a paper that would meet his assignment’s exact demands. I cannot recall if initially it was his idea or mine – nor do I suppose that it matters since ultimately my decisions and their consequences are my own – but, before long, I had committed to rewriting the paper (and perhaps getting a better grade) and allowing my friend to submit it as his own – I had decided to cheat.

The episode remains among the few knowingly wrong actions I have taken, wrong in my eyes then and now, distinguishing itself from those actions I later realized to be wrong or those actions that are only wrong in the eyes of others. And so, I return, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” into that moment, in which, despite being able to recall with unreal vividness the scents in the dormitory air, the temperature of the room, the texture of my desk, and the sounds of my keyboard, I can only say that I do not know why. Our wrong and unequalizable commerce concluded karmically; the paper received an A and was submitted by the professor for a departmental award and won and my friend was appointed a student fellow and I was left to adjust to a life lived with a humble measure of unsoftenable contrition.

Continue reading The Psychology of Plagiarism →

Culture, Philosophy, Reason, Religion, Science

If Science Is A Conspiracy, Why Does This Computer Work? And Other Stories

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Believers.

Why can’t I just leave them alone, eh? Why can’t I keep my mouth shut?

Ok . . . because some of them think I’m going to hell, think I have no morals, and think my life is meaningless until I open my heart/wallet to Jesus/Allah. I find that fundamentally impolite. It’s hard to say who casts the first stone in these cases, but since I tend not to take issue with the fuzzy sort of believers – y’know, the nice ones who believe in love and redemption rather than bigotry and scientific wank – I only ever attack someone as a result of something they’ve said.

Then the issue was raised of “who’s to say who is right? Creationists take things on faith, atheists take things on scientific proof. Who’s right?”

It’s generally about this point that my brains start to drop out of my ears. Science is right. It has even been suggested to me that, since I haven’t analysed the data myself, scientists are feeding everyone bullshit.

Two words. Peer review.

Continue reading If Science Is A Conspiracy, Why Does This Computer Work? And Other Stories →

Culture, Philosophy

…about that last bit

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I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while now and today a number of tangentially related posts over on the excellent Pharyngula blog reminded me that I hadn’t, plus they also gave me some great up to date examples to use as ammunition when making my case. A few weeks ago now I had to attend a mandatory Equality and Diversity training course at the place where I work. Even before it started I knew that I was going to find some of the things they said objectionable. After all I live in the UK, that great fortress of “multiculturalism” and all the subtle racist undertones that idea incorporates. In this country we are told that outright de facto respect for all beliefs and opinions is more important than rationally evaluating those beliefs to see if they are beneficial or harmful to the society in which we live. As such I was not at all surprised when, early in the training, a slide was put up that gave the following description of how the company views diversity (emphasis original):

 

Diversity is about recognising, accepting and valuing difference. It is an appreciation that while we are all part of a single nation with shared rights and responsibilities we are also individuals with our own talents, ambitions and priorities.

 

Reading that my hand immediately went up with a question. Why, I asked, had they applied special emphasis to the word “valuing“? I continued by stating that I had no problem with recognising and even accepting the fact that other people hold different views and beliefs to me but why was I expect to value those different beliefs, especially if said beliefs were in direct opposition to beliefs I myself hold? A look of mild horror crossed the face of the lady doing the training and I got the feeling that no one had ever questioned her on this before. Somewhat reluctantly she explained that she didn’t know why the word “valuing” had been singled out like that and that they were not really expecting us to value beliefs that directly conflicted with our own. Now if she had left it there I might have, begrudgingly, let her get away with it. However she continued with this wonderful sentence.

 

“By valuing what we mean is that we expect you to be tolerant of the beliefs of others.”

 

You can bet my hand shot up with more questions about that one.

 

Continue reading …about that last bit →

Entertainment, Philosophy, Random, Reason, Religion

Speaker’s Corner

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Some of you may have heard of Speaker’s Corner, in Londonbox – an area of Hyde Park where, for over 100 years, people have turned up (generally on Sundays) to speak their brains about whatever they feel is important. The majority of this consists of religious nutbarness, as you might expect, but with a smattering of political, social and ecological viewpoints.

You’re not protected by law, as many people seem to think – but police do tend to steer clear, so as long as you don’t try to wash the colour off a black man or anything similarly importunate you’re probably ok.

Continue reading Speaker’s Corner →

Philosophy, Religion

YouTube’s TheoreticalBullshit

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“A simple, apostolic yearning for a genuine biblical revival in our day,” Revival Conference, an event held throughout the year, around the world, and with no cost for admission, is an extension of the ministry of SermonIndex.net, both being frequent platforms for Paul Washer, the founder of and Minister of the Gospel, his actual title, at Heart Cry Missionary Society. Revival Conference, SemonIndex.net, Paul Washer, and Heart Cry Missionary Society express non-denomitionalism, but an affiliated church, the Grace Life Church of the Shoals in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, expresses, with emphasis, a devotion to the historic Baptist doctrine and references the Rev. John Newton Brown’s 1833 New Hampshire Confession, although, with doubtlessly unintended irony, it is modified slightly. And, so, while this event and these organizations and this person and, indeed, a great many more, may express non-denominationalism, they are certainly not beyond categorization and one can trace the theological and culture ideologies which inform their current iteration; non-denominationalism, however, is not a theological argument, but an ecclesiological argument.

Continue reading YouTube’s TheoreticalBullshit →

Philosophy, Reason, Religion

“Established Facts.”

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But there are actually three established facts recognized by the majority of New Testament historians today which I believe are best explained by the resurrection of Jesus.

– William Lane Craig

One can imagine the impact on an untutored mind of a phrase as commanding as “established facts’ or the idea that to challenge these facts is to challenge the consensus of historians; one would have to be crazy to go against the mainstream findings of an academic discipline, setting aside Creationism for a moment. Unlike many of the arguments for the existence of God, which are essentially matters of pure philosophy and therefore, while I would prefer to preserve them for the experts, we are all on some level capable to engaging them, the Argument for the Existence of God from the Historicity of the Resurrection requires some skill as an historian to refute and one must have access to substantial library. Offering the Argument for the Existence of God from the Historicity of the Resurrection, however, requires almost no skill as an historian, which is not to suggest that only the unskilled offer it; I am reminded that nonsense is the one of the few things that is harder to destroy than it is to create.

I stopped into a library to see if I could put my hands on a book about the historicity of Jesus, his life, times, death, the near effects of this death, and possibly his resurrection, ‘possibly’ because I can predict that a certain level of skepticism might reject the proposition that history is capable of establishing the existence of a miracle. Charmingly, because it feels like it’s becoming antiquated, the library utilized the Dewey Decimal Classification (it’s no longer a system, as I remember being taught in elementary school) and I made my way to the 232s, putting my finger on The Historical Figure of Jesus by E.P. Sanders. Libraries, I have long believed, are sacred places, mausoleums, on the one hand, and full of life, on the other; it is here, after all, that we store the longest lasting effects of our species’ best minds, and here, inevitably, where we go to better our own. This particular library pleases me: it is small, which means the librarian has to take considerably more care in selected which books which fill the shelves, and, on a personal level, I sat on the committee which hired our current librarian.

Continue reading “Established Facts.” →

Philosophy, Reason, Religion

“Fundamentalism is always sporadic.”

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Recently, there has been a renewed flurry of interest in the date of Jesus’ execution, and I have added an appendix on this topic. Here I wish to comment generally on the mistakes (as I perceive them to be) of the scholars who bring forth extreme proposals on such points, such as that Jesus was executed in 26 or 36. Since the evidence is diverse and hard to reconcile precisely, there is a tendency to seize on one point, to say that is determinative, and then to beat the other pieces of evidence into the necessary shape. That is, there is a danger of sporadic fundamentalism in studying ancient texts – not just the Bible. ‘Fundamentalism’ refers to the notion that some ancient text – or ancient literature in general – tells the precise and unvarnished truth. Fundamentalism, however, is always sporadic: fundamentalists believe that some people never exaggerated, made mistakes or mislaid their notes; or, at least, that some sections of some texts are perfectly reliable. Reading chronological studies on the New Testament reveals a lot of fundamentalism – usually sporadic. A scholar will maintain, for example, that John’s chronology is better than Mark’s and Matthew’s (and thus that theirs is not true.) Next, he or she will accept John on the numerous points where that gospel disagrees with the other three: there were three Passovers during Jesus’ public career rather than one, he was executed on 14 Nisan rather than 15 Nisan, and during his ministry he was in his forties (he was ‘not yet fifty’, John 8.57) rather than in his thirties, as Luke has it. Having dismissed the chronology of Matthew, Mark and Luke, some scholar then seize upon Matthew’s story of the star that stood over Jesus’ birthplace, and they try to match it with the appearance of a comet – apparently not noticing that this particular star, according to our only description of it, did not blaze across the heavens, but rather ‘stopped over the place where the child was’ (Matt. 2.9). Why take the star of Matthew’s story to be a real astral event and ignore what the author says about it? Why pay attention to Matthew’s star anyway, since he was wrong about the date of Jesus’ death (which John got perfectly right)?

“External Sources,’ The Historical Figure of Jesus, p. 55. E. P. Sanders.

Philosophy, Reason, Religion

Certainty.

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Most scholars who write about the ancient world feel obliged to warn their readers that our knowledge can be at best partial and that certainty is seldom attained. A book about a first-century Jew who lived in a rather unimportant part of the Roman empire must be prefaced by such a warning. We know about Jesus from books written a few decades after his death, probably by people who were not among his followers during his lifetime. They quote him in Greek, which was not his primary language, and in any case the differences among our sources show that his words and deeds were not perfectly preserved. We have very little information about him apart from the works written to glorify him. Today, we do not have good documentation for such out-of-the-way places as Palestine; nor did the authors of our sources. They had no archives and no official records of any kind. They did not even have access to good maps. These limitations, which were common in the ancient world, result in a good deal of uncertainty.

“Preface,’ The Historical Figure of Jesus. E. P. Sanders.