Questioning the conventional wisdom
I was brought up with the idea that God is love. This was the centerpiece of Christianity.
Judging by what some conservative Christians have been saying, this is now changed to “God is torture” (see this recent slacktivist post).
There doesn’t seem to be much Christianity remaining. Thankfully, Fred Clark’s “slacktivist” blog still makes a case for the “God is love” view.
In spite of the title, this post really isn’t about teaching creationism. It is about the responsibilities of a teacher. I use creationism only as an example.
Adam Laats raised the issue in a recent blog post “Firing Creationist Scientists“. Laats mentions the case of Mark Armitage at CalState. As to exactly why Armitage lost his job, I do not know. Presumably that’s a personnel matter at CalState Northridge, and full details are not usually made public though they might come out at a later court hearing. Laats surmises that Armitage probably lost his job because he was teaching creationism.
To me, this raises the question of what a responsible teacher should present to his/her students. So let’s suppose, hypothetically, that a scientist comes up with his own theory X in his discipline, and strongly believes that his theory is true. How should that affect what he teaches?
My view is that the students are there to learn the consensus science. So the scientist has a responsibility to his students to teach them what is that consensus science, even if he disagrees with that consensus.
A few posts worth reading:
Some choice quotes:
In evangelical home schools by the millions science is treated as toxic. Meanwhile in the secular public schools education has been mugged by corporate utilitarianism.
and
If the British had reacted to Hitler’s bombing of London the way we overacted to 9/11 the entire city of London would be one vast memorial…
You can count me as siding with Kaci Hickox on this.
I’m not sure that I agree with Coyne’s diagnosis, though I agree that there is a decline.
I frequently receive email from the NY Times, asking me to subscribe. But I probably read less than one article per day, on average, so I’m not inclined to answer their ads. I get much of my news from NPR, and I do contribute to my local NPR station. If the NY Times, the Washington Post and several other newspapers could get together in a consortium, and offer a subscription that would give on-line browsing access to all of those papers, I might sign up for that. I won’t subscribe to the NY Times only, because I don’t like the idea of a single source.
By now you will have heard of the Supreme court ruling on the Hobby Lobby case. I believe this was a terrible decision from the right wing ideologues on the court.
Fred Clark (Slacktivist) has a good account of the history leading up to this case:
It started with a bad court decision on Peyote, back in 1990. At the time, I thought that decision (written by Scalia) was a bad decision. Congress then enacted RFRA, in an attempt to undo the Peyote decision and some subsequent mistakes. And now Scalia and others are using RRFA to allow Hobby Lobby to force the owners religious views on employees.
I lost a lot of respect for this ideological court back in 2000, when they wrongly interfered in the Bush vs. Gore election. And now I have lost any remaining respect.
On Monday May 05, the US Supreme Court ruled that it is okay for the town of Greece, NY to open their meetings with prayer. I’ve seen a number of blog posts that express unhappiness with this decision.
The court decision was what I had expected. And I do not find it at all troubling.
Remembering back to my teenage years, when I was an evangelical Christian, I would not have wanted this decision. As I would have seen it at that time, this kind of public prayer only debases prayer. It teaches people that prayer is the reciting of meaningless mumbo-jumbo.
(The spell checker did not like “mumbo-jumbo”. It turns out that it is a mainly British (and Australian) phrase that means roughly the same as “gibberish”. So I have linked the wikipedia page.)
As a consequence, I do not see the court as having given anything of value to religion.
There has been some recent discussion of abortion, following a statement by Dave Silverman about the secular case against abortion.
My current inclination is to agree with Libby Anne, who points out the secular argument against abortion is just the argument against abortion. There is nothing especially secular about it. Perhaps the catholics have a specifically theistic argument, based on declarations from the papacy. But evangelicals do not. If anything, their holy book seems to approve abortion in at least some circumstances.
So what am I to make of the post by Massimo Pigliucci:
In that post, Massimo writes:
Of course there are logical, science-based, and rational arguments against abortion.
The argument against abortion is a moral argument. I’ll grant Massimo that there are rational arguments, because we do reason about moral questions. But I fail to see that there are logical arguments. Morality does not emerge from the use of logic. When we apply logical reasoning, the moral points can be found in the premises, not in the logic.
I really wonder about his comment on a science-based argument against abortion. Is this the same Massimo as the one who disagreed with Sam Harris’s claim that there is a scientific basis for morality?
So what’s my position on abortion? I personally am opposed, except for special cases such as whether the mother’s health is threatened. But, frankly, this is a cheap position for me, as a male, to hold. The decision on abortion should be made by the pregnant woman. Nobody else is entitled to make her moral judgments. So call me pro-choice. The best way to deal with abortion is to avoid unwanted pregnancy. So call me pro-birth-control.
In summary, I’m not sure what the flap is all about, other than politics. The abortion issue has received far more discussion than it warrants.
Is there a biological basis for religion?
There has been some speculation about this, following a recent report:
In this post I will express my opinion. I want to be clear that what I write here is opinion.
First, some comments on the Science Daily report. It says:
“Religious belief is a unique human attribute observed across different cultures in the world, even in those cultures which evolved independently, such as Mayans in Central America and aboriginals in Australia,” said Deshpande, who is also a researcher at Auburn’s Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research Center.
There has been a lot of hand wringing, of late, over the apparent decline of the humanities. So I read, with interest, an article on that topic by Alex Rosenberg:
Early in the article, Rosenberg diagnoses the problem, with:
For the problems of the humanities are self-inflicted wounds well recognized by their colleagues in other faculties.
I am inclined to agree. I recommend reading Rosenberg’s article. In this post, I’ll just add some of my own observations.
It came to my attention, this morning, that David Gelernter has a strange rant on “Commentary” (h/t Uncommon Descent):
Gelernter is a well known computer scientist at Yale.
I already knew that Gelernter was a critic of AI (Artificial Intelligence). Since I also criticize AI, that was no reason for concern. One might hope for a thoughtful discussion piece, but this turned out to be little more than a rant.
Gelernter writes:
That science should face crises in the early 21st century is inevitable. Power corrupts, and science today is the Catholic Church around the start of the 16th century: used to having its own way and dealing with heretics by excommunication, not argument.
Finally, an attempt to correct a gross injustice:
Far too little, far too late. Still, it’s welcome.
The Heretical Philosopher 