A few months ago, I was invited by The Guardian to debate Lord Robert Winston in London on the question:

Is religion the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress?

The debate was supposed to be videotaped for later webcast, but their technical folks let them down, and even the audio recording was, I am told, botched, so the actual debate will have to live as best it can in the memories of the two or three hundred people in attendance. Not a particularly insightful occasion in any case, but my opening salvo made a few points that I think deserve a wider audience:

Read more here.

I am reasonably good at working my way through complex logical problems, at least after my morning infusion of caffeine. A wolf is good at running for miles without tiring. Which ability is better? If we are going to decide this, we are going to have to work out what �??better’ means. Indeed, if we are to evaluate whether the ability to reason in the way humans do is better than the ability to run in the way wolves do, then we are going to need some common standard of evaluation that gives sense to the word �??better’. But not only is there no such standard, it is difficult to imagine what this standard could possibly be.

Read more here.

Current debate typically presents us as being faced with a stark choice between a farcical religious fundamentalism, based on faith and hostile to reason, and a secular humanism that allies itself with science, reason, and impartial evaluation of evidence. I doubt the choice is as simple as this. I have no quarrel with secularism - my attitude toward supernatural entities is generally to never believe in them unless I absolutely, positively have to. But humanism is a different matter entirely.

Chambers Pocket Dictionary tells us that humanism consists in “Seeking, without religion, the best in, and for, human beings”. Collins Concise Dictionary tells us that humanism is “The rejection of religion in favor of the advancement of humanity by its own efforts.”…

Read more here…

Co-sponsored by NYSEC and CFI-NY
New York Society for Ethical Culture and Center For Inquiry New York. Atheism Tapes presented by Alive Mind and Secular Philosophy.

Saturday May 31 2pm-4pm screening and Q&A, 2 West 64th Street, New York.
Door open at 1:30 Free (Donations encouraged) Open seating.
Starts at 2pm with 1/2 hour DVD interview with Colin Mcginn.
Following at 2:30 with 1/2 hour DVD interview with Daniel Dennett.
Moderated Q&A by Dr Massimo Pigliucci with Danial Dennett from 3 to 4.
Attendees encouraged to meet afterwords. Details at the event.

“It’s hard to imagine a more well-rounded and engaging portrait of
modern atheism than what is presented by The Atheism Tapes.”

“The Atheism Tapes attempts to provide an intelligent-yet-accessible examination
of atheism, and it succeeds. Thus, this series comes highly recommend to those
who take philosophy, theology, faith, or atheism seriously.”

Read the rest of the review here…

Click here to learn more about The Atheism Tapes

I recently finished reading Donald Palmer�??s Why It�??s Hard to Be Good, a nice little introduction to the basics of ethical theory (marvelously illustrated by funny cartoons drawn by Palmer himself). Toward the end of the book the author discusses the broad school of thought of �??contractualism,�?? the idea that morality is a matter of agreement among the members of a society. Contractualism�??s most notorious exponent is, of course, Thomas Hobbes, who famously quipped that human beings got together to live in societies because otherwise, in the state of nature as he called it, life would be �??solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.�?? (Well, presumably one would hope one�??s life were to be short if it had to be solitary, nasty, etc.)

Read more here…

Following on from Colin McGinn’s interesting blog of last week (Enemies of Thought), here is a related question. Who are the real enemies of science? By �??real’ I mean �??most dangerous’. Is it the religious zealot who insists on blocking some or other scientific arena on the grounds that it offends his silly religious sensibilities? Or is it simply scientists?

Does anyone really believe what most scientists say any more? There is a growing wave of skepticism about the pronouncements of scientists, and this, I suspect, is because the great unwashed have pretty much got the buggers worked out. Scientists have to earn money just like anyone else. So, if someone comes up with a study suggesting, for example, that eating tomatoes is the best thing anyone can ever do - then, we suspect, their research has been paid for by someone who finds themselves with a lot or tomatoes to move. Or if someone produces a study suggesting that biofuels will save us all from global extinction, then that study has been paid for by someone with more corn fields than he knows what to do with.

Read more here…

My son Bruno told me yesterday that he’d just been watching a video of me on Youtube. Eventually it became clear what this video was of: a discussion I participated in a few years ago at the Philoctetes Centre in New York about evolution, consciousness, and the meaning of it all. I hadn’t even remembered that it was being filmed, but it’s a mark of our digital times that it has now shown up on the internet to be accessed by my son 3000 miles away. But that’s not the point I’m most interested in making here; because Bruno observed that the scientists present were generally disagreeable and closed-minded (he actually used a much stronger word to describe them). And he’s a scientist himself–a doctor (ENT). This prompted me to ponder who is more deplorable among us: the superstitious zealots who limit their knowledge to what the Bible tells them or the scientists who are unable or unwilling to take any question seriously which has no scientific answer–which includes most of the questions I as a philosopher spend my time on. Specifically, several of those present hated my bringing up the point that we have no good scientific theory of how consciousness evolved in the first place (or how it arises in the brain of every human being at some point or another–and not just human brains). Why are people so incapable of stepping outside the narrow world-view of their specific range of expertise–either the Bible or their particular scientific discipline? Is it fear, narcissism, laziness, bloody-mindedness?

Read more here�?�

What if there was a way of reducing global warming emissions by 18%? 18% is more than total percentage of emissions produced by all forms of transport. To do this, we would have to accept some small modifications in the way we lived but nothing too drastic in the great scheme of things. Wouldn�??t you have thought the press would be all over this? Wouldn�??t you have thought at least some politicians would be exhorting us to make these changes, and telling us that we owe it to future generations? But it�??s well known how to reduce global warming emissions by 18%, and it has been well known since a United Nations report published in 2006. We stop eating meat. Just the news vegetarian Hummer drivers have been waiting for it seems.

Read more here…