The Spinning Dancer

 

This image of The Spinning Dancer pops up frequently in advertisements on ScienceBlogs. I find it fascinating. If I concentrate hard I can make the dancer switch from spinning right to spinning left (and vice versa) but I can't tell you how to do it and I can't always succeed.

How about you? Can you make her switch? Is it easy or hard? Do you prefer one direction over another? I my case, I have trouble switching her from clockwise spinning to counter-clockwise spinning but not the other way around.

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What Is Naturopathy?

 
A lot of people have asked me about naturopathy and what I think of it. I've usually said that some of it might be okay since it's based on herbs and things that might actually contain real medicine. In fact, I really don't know much at all about the differences between "naturopathic medicine" and quackery.

So I decided to look at an authoritative source, the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine right here in Toronto. The college, "offers a rigorous four-year, full-time doctor of naturopathic medicine program."

Here's how CCNM describes naturopathy.

Naturopathic medicine is:

... a distinct system of primary health care that addresses the root causes of illness, and promotes health and healing using natural therapies. It supports your body's own healing ability using an integrated approach to disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention that includes:

o acupuncture/Asian medicine
o botanical medicine
o physical medicine (massage, hydrotherapy, etc.)
o clinical nutrition
o homeopathic medicine
o lifestyle counseling

Good. Now I know the difference between naturopathy and other forms of non-evidence based medicine (i.e. alternative medicine, quackery).

There isn't any.

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[Hat Tip: Respectful Insolence: A highly revealing quote from a naturopath]

The Parting of the Red Sea: Science vs. God

 
Yesterday's TorontoStar had an article on the parting of the Red Sea. Apparently, strong winds could account for making a pathway that the chosen people used to cross the sea ahead of the pursuing Egyptians. God wasn't necessary.

My colleagues and I had a good chuckle. What's the point of a "scientific" explanation for an event that never happened? What's next—a "scientific" explanation of how Little Red Riding Hood can survive being eaten by a wolf?

Little did I realize that the newspaper article was based on a paper that got published in a (formerly) reputable journal. One of the authors is a devout Christian who is determined to reconcile science and the Bible.

Read all about it on Jerry Coyne's blog [Parting the Red Sea] or on PZ Myer's blog [Inventing excuses for a Bible story, and getting them published in a science journal?]. This is a pretty clear case of science in the service of religion. It's bad science. It's probably bad religion as well but I'm not an expert on proper superstitious beliefs.

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Come As You Are

 
Arriving at the train station this morning I was greeted by an Anglican priest in full regalia. He and his buddies were handing out pamphlets urging us to attend church this Sunday. He was delighted to have his picture taken and took it all in excellent spirit, even though he knew I wasn't religious.

The train station event was part of a "back to church" campaign on behalf of the the Church of England [Bishops' call to 'come as you are' this Sunday].

Don't worry about dressing up. They'll be happy to see you no matter what you're wearing.

Cute idea. If you have to go to church next Sunday then your local Anglican church in Canada or the UK is far better than some of the alternatives.

The fact that churches are having to advertise is a very good sign. It brought a smile to my face and made my day.

Cool outfit, by the way.

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Four Nails in Darwin's Coffin

 
Charles Darwin died on April 19, 1882 and he was buried in Westminster Abbey on Wednesday, April 26, 1882.

The IDiots have just realized that Darwin is dead. Tonight they will celebrate the event by presenting four discoveries that are not very well explained by Darwin's original theory of natural selection, published in 1859. (That's 151 years ago.) The "four nails" will be revealed at an event being held at Southern Methodist University.

I predict these "nails" are either gross misunderstandings of real science or discoveries that are explained by modern evolutionary theory. I'm pretty confident about this prediction since I know the reputation of the four hammers at the conference. They are ...

Douglas Axe, who thinks that the evolution of new protein folds is impossible.

Richard Sternberg, worries about what a gene is and about the relationship between genotype and phenotype.

Jonathan Wells, who's fond of making up elaborate tales about why evolution is wrong.

Stephen Meyer, who thinks that 2oth¹ century biochemistry and molecular biology disprove evolution.

I wonder if we're going to get any honest reporting on this event or whether journalists will rely entirely on DISCO press releases?

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1. No, this is not a mistake. Meyer hasn't yet made it into this century. Neither have the other IDiots.

On Describing IDiots as Creationists

This is from Satirizing Scientism a blog whose goal is "Mocking Scientism, Evolutionism, and the Arrogance of the Academy." A posting from last month has advice for evolutionists [Presenting: An op-ed piece from Dr. Strangelove].

5. Do not hesitate to mischaracterize ID's motives. Although ID proponents, unlike creationists, are really quite good about sticking to scientific arguments, it is to your advantage to not distinguish between the two. In fact, we recommend that you always append the term "creationism" to ID so that it reads intelligent design creationism.

Since we have succeeded in getting the courts to discredit creationism (thank you, ACLU!), this has the effect of (a) immediately attributing religious motives to ID, (b) implying that that ID has no more scientific basis than creationism, and (c) immediately diverts the discussion away from scientific evidence to fears of Taliban-like imposition of religious dogma. Because scientists are objective and open-minded, dogma should be ours to impose and hopefully that will increasingly be the case.

I'm one of those people who use the term "Intelligent Design Creationism."¹ I think it's quite appropriate to distinguish between various forms of creationism. There's Young Earth Creationism, Old Earth Creationism, and Scientific Creationism, so why not Intelligent Design Creationism? What all three have in common is belief in a creator. Theistic Evolution is another example of creationism.

It's extremely difficult to draw nice neat boundaries around these various kinds of creationism—especially Intelligent Design Creationism and Theistic Evolution Creationism. However, it's quite easy to distinguish between all forms of creationism and real science.

There is another point of view on this issue. Some people, including many theists and some atheists, think that the word "Creationist" should be reserved for Young Earth Creationists who believe in the literal truth of the Bible. By this definition, the other theists who believe in a supernatural designer would not be creationists even though their "designer" is also a creator, and, in fact, the same God that the Young Earth Creationists believe in.

From this perspective, the advocates of Intelligent Design can avoid being called creationists and they can continue to pretend that their beliefs are scientific and have nothing to do with God.

The Theistic Evolutionists also like this tactic. It allows them to avoid the creationist label as well. Accommodationists tend to avoid referring to Theistic Evolution as an example of creationism but they often dump Intelligent Design into the creationist tent. The logic behind this is to steer clear of alienating theistic evolutionists by pointing out that they are creationists. Apparently, theistic evolutionists are insulted when confronted with the truth.

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1. Those who believe in Intelligent Design are characterized as IDiots—this is just a short-hand way of referring to them since "Intelligent Design Creationists" is too hard to type.

Richard Dawkins Has a Few Words to Say About the Pope

 

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[Hat Tip: Pharyngula]

The Accommodationist Position

 
Some people are confused about the accommodationist position. Here's a good example from Janice Taylor published in The Times (London) and reproduced on RichardDawkins.net. The standard accommodationist rhetoric comes from atheists (secularists) who direct a great deal of anger toward the vocal atheists but go out of their way to excuse their religious friends.

I never thought I could utter this sentence, but I agree with the Pope. Like him I feel distaste for “aggressive forms of secularism”, although maybe I’d term it differently. I’d call it macho atheism as preached by unholy warlords.

...

Dawkins, Hawking, Hitchens: these male (always male) demagogues, bashing their anti-Bibles on to bestseller lists, smugly uncloaking the magician to show his act is mere incense smoke and mirrors. As if the rest of us require professors of theoretical physics or evolutionary biology in order to ponder the big questions of human existence, any more than we need a priest.

At least Christopher Hitchens, a US citizen, must maintain his thunderous volume to be heard above the American Tea Party movement’s Creationist tumult. (Although I thought it inconceivable that the mighty Hitch could ever be boring until I read his book, God is Not Great, a monotone, unreadable harangue.) But the other two are here in Britain. How are their crass insults to decent, thinking Catholics adding to a sane and necessary discussion about religion’s place in our public life?

...

Like the majority of British people, I have little religious faith, but the peace I feel in, say, a spartan Suffolk church connects me with my northern chapel-going ancestry. While I may not believe, the peace and quietude, the sense of something transcendent that makes my life on Earth seem at once precious and utterly insignificant, gives me sympathy towards those who do. My devout Catholic neighbour, who worked unpaid delivering babies in an African clinic, the born-again Christians who befriended my lonely aunt, even the Jamaican ladies in church hats who bring me tracts depicting in colourful line drawings the very moment the dead will rise again — they don’t make me long to assert my moral superiority or slap them round the head with Darwin.

And I’d guess the majority of my fellow heathens, those who don’t have iconoclastic non-fiction to flog, would agree. Secularism needs to stand behind the progressive movements within the Catholic Church, already challenging its policies on women, contraception, homophobia and child abuse, not run ahead of them screaming. It might concede that the Pope has a point that secular values have struggled in the past decade when morality was wholly defined by the free market.

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Atheists Must Apologize for Hitler

 
The Catholic League has just posted this on their website [ATHEISTS MUST APOLOGIZE FOR HITLER].

Catholic League president Bill Donohue reacts to the way British atheists are handling Pope Benedict XVI's trip to their homeland:

The pope cited Hitler today, asking everyone to "reflect on the sobering lessons of atheist extremism of the 20th century." Immediately, the British Humanist Association got its back up, accusing the pope of "a terrible libel against those who do not believe in God."

The pope did not go far enough. Radical atheists like the British Humanist Association should apologize for Hitler. But they should not stop there. They also need to issue an apology for the 67 million innocent men, women and children murdered under Stalin, and the 77 million innocent Chinese killed by Mao. Hitler, Stalin and Mao were all driven by a radical atheism, a militant and fundamentally dogmatic brand of secular extremism. It was this anti-religious impulse that allowed them to become mass murderers. By contrast, a grand total of 1,394 were killed during the 250 years of the Inquisition, most all of whom were murdered by secular authorities.

Why should atheists today apologize for the crimes of others? At one level, it makes no sense: apologies should only be given by the guilty. But on the other hand, since the fanatically anti-Catholic secularists in Britain, and elsewhere, demand that the pope—who is entirely innocent of any misconduct—apologize for the sins of others, let the atheists take some of their own medicine and start apologizing for all the crimes committed in their name. It might prove alembic.

The accommodationists are going to be all over this one. They'll rip Bill Donohue to shreds, right?

Waiting ....

Meanwhile, let's follow the logic. Atheists are people who don't believe in god. According to people like Bill Donohue, if you've failed to be convinced by any of the arguments in favor of superstition then you have to take the blame for the actions of everyone else who hasn't fallen for the common delusions of religion. (Including imaginary non-believers like Hitler.¹)

Okay. Where does this sort of logic take us? Bill Donohue and the Pope don't believe in the tooth fairy. Neither did any of the people who flew airplanes into buildings on September 11, 2001. .... Do you see where this is headed?

Donohue's "logic"—using the word in its loosest sense—is based on a false premise. He assumes that atheists (those who haven't accepted religion) share a common moral and ethical position that makes them collectively responsible for the actions of every atheist. In other words, he thinks that atheism is a religion like Roman Catholicism or Voodoo. That's just plain nonsense.

Why is it so hard for believers to understand the absence of belief? After all, every single one of them doesn't believe in hundreds of Gods. The Pope doesn't believe in Thor or The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Neither did Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. When can we expect an apology from the Pope?

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[Hat Tip: Why Evolution Is True]

1. PZ Myers has just posted a list of Hitler quotations proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Hitler was a firm believer in God. Very likely the same God that the Pope and Bill Donohue believe in.

Tom Chivers' Top Five Books on Evolution

 
Tom Chivers has posted a list of his top five books on evolutionary biology [Best evolutionary biology books, from Stephen Jay Gould to Richard Dawkins]. Here they are ...

1. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989)
   Stephen Jay Gould
2. The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life (2004)
   Richard Dawkins
3. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (1999)
   Matt Ridley
4. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1995)
   Daniel Dennett
5. The Blind Watchmaker (1986) Richard Dawkins

I agree with Wonderful Life but it's a little bit dated. I agree with The Blind Watchmaker—it's a must-read book for anyone interested in evolution. The Ancestor's Tale is okay but it doesn't make my list. Genome has nothing to do with evolution. Darwin's Dangerous Idea is just about the worst book on evolution that's ever been written. Dennet's version of evolution is conceptually flawed and his diatribes against Gould are simply a vehicle for demonstrating his (Dennet's) misconceptions about evolution.

Here's my list of the top five trade books ...

1. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989) Stephen Jay Gould


2. The Blind Watchmaker (1991 edition) Richard Dawkins


3. Why Evolution Is True (2009) Jerry Coyne


4. Reinventing Darwin: The Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory (1995) Niles Eldredge


5. Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? (1991) David M. Raup

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Get the Popcorn!

 
According to Wikipedia, Karl Giberson (right), "... holds two Bachelor's degrees from the Eastern Nazarene College, and both a Master's degree and PhD from Rice University." He teaches courses on religion and science at Eastern Nazarene College.

He also writes articles defending religion. His latest appears on the BioLogos website [Doing Battle with Jerry Coyne’s Army of Straw Men]. The purpose of that posting is to take on Jerry Coyne of Why Evolution Is True. Jerry Coyne, as most of you know, is one of those atheists who dares to challenge theists, even moderate ones. Coyne is definitely not an accommodationist.

Apparently Coyne and the other vocal atheists (I am one) are insufficiently versed in the subtleties of religion and science and Karl Giberson is going to set us straight in a series of upcoming postings. (You'll need several bags of popcorn to watch this.) Like many before him, Giberson is going to try and prove that the vocal atheists are attacking strawman versions of religion and not the really good stuff that intelligent people believe in. Have we heard this before? [The Emperor's New Clothes and the Courtier's Reply] [On the Existence of God and the Coutier's Reply]

Here's what Giberson finds most objectionable.

Some of the arguments I want to examine include:

1. The tendency of the New Atheists to lambast laypeople who acquired some wrong ideas in Sunday School studying religion, but to let them off the hook for the wrong ideas about science they acquired in the public schools. Most Americans spend way more time studying science in school than they do studying religion in church. So why is “religion” to blame for bad religious ideas but science gets off the hook for dumb science ideas?

Speaking of strawmen, has anyone ever met a New Atheist like this? All the New Atheists with a science background (e.g., Jerry Coyne) are vigorous opponents of bad science. Some of us have reserved our harshest criticism for those who don't understand science, especially those theists who claim that religion doesn't conflict with science.

2. In our debate on USA Today, Jerry Coyne contrasted the complicated theological doctrine of the incarnation—the most mysterious idea in all of theology—to the function of penicillin—one of the best-understood ideas in biology. This is not an appropriate juxtaposition at all.

Shame on you Jerry Coyne! That's not an appropriate comparison at all. The appropriate response to a theist who raises "the complicated theological doctrine of incarnation" is, "Who the fu heck cares!" First theists need to establish that God exists and only then can they advance arguments about how their god behaves. The argument with atheists is about the existence of God, not incarnation. Atheists don't give a damn about incarnation, or original sin, or how many fairies can dance on the head of a pin. Show me the fairies.

3. The phrase “philosophical consistency” is tossed around like it represents some simple set of rules that allow us to see how religion is cheating. If only it were that simple. Science all by itself has issues with philosophical consistency that Coyne apparently doesn’t see because, if I may hazard a guess, he hasn’t spent a lot of time wrestling with the deeper issues of science.

Oh Boy! This is going to be fun. Apparently science is just as philosophically inconsistent as religion! Can't wait to find out about that.

Stay tuned folks.

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What the Pope Said

 
The current edition of the leader of the Roman Catholic Church is visiting Britain. It's a state visit, for reasons that aren't clear.

The Pope delivered a speech when he arrived [Pope's Holyroodhouse Speech Transcript]. Here's part of what he said ...

Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a "reductive vision of the person and his destiny" (Caritas in Veritate, 29).

...

Today, the United Kingdom strives to be a modern and multicultural society. In this challenging enterprise, may it always maintain its respect for those traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer value or even tolerate. Let it not obscure the Christian foundation that underpins its freedoms; and may that patrimony, which has always served the nation well, constantly inform the example your Government and people set before the two billion members of the Commonwealth and the great family of English-speaking nations throughout the world.

Accommodationists take note. The Pope has just told us that "extreme atheism" and Nazis can be lumped together in the same paragraph. He has just announced that "aggressive forms of secularism" don't respect or tolerate the cultural values of most Britons.

I expect the same criticism of the Pope that I see from accommodationists when they think "New Atheists" have stepped over the line.

Waiting ......

Meanwhile, the British Humanist Society responds [BHA Reacts to Pope's first remarks on state visit].

The notion that it was the atheism of Nazis that led to their extremist and hateful views or that somehow fuels intolerance in Britain today is a terrible libel against those who do not believe in god. The notion that it is non-religious people in the UK today who want to force their views on others, coming from a man whose organisation exerts itself internationally to impose its narrow and exclusive form of morality and undermine the human rights of women, children, gay people and many others, is surreal.

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