NewsTrust - Science and Religion - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

A Confraternity of the Fatherless

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0700

thehumanist.org - By Rebecca Goldstein - Nov. 01 (Speech) - When I think about religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Fatherless one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. And as I look around, I feel like we are a realization of poor Oscar Wilde’s wistful fantasy—this order of those who can’t believe, the Confraternity of the Fatherless. And I wonder about the ambiguity of this phrase, “can’t believe.” Is this inability to believe an incapacity or is it an endowment? Is it a sign of failure or is it a sign of strength?

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When politicians distort science...and outright reject it.

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

thebulletin.org - By Robert Socolow - Oct. 20 (Opinion) - We must not underestimate the threat now looming. Another age of darkness could lie ahead. In what may someday be called the Science Wars, our opponents present science as dogma and construct a symmetric conflict: their dogma vs. our dogma.

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The Republican war on science is un-American

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - Oct. 16 (Opinion) - In his new book, “The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America,” (Bellevue Literary Press), Jonathan D. Moreno delivers an impassioned defense of scientific study. “The alternative to experimental confirmation is, in a word, dogma,” he writes. “Dogmatic statements may have many fine qualities. They may be beautiful, inspirational, and convey a kind of wisdom, or at least the impression of wisdom. But they can never be verifiable and self-correcting in the manner of science.”

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The Baloney Detection Kit

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

YouTube - By Michael Shermer - Jul. 06 (Opinion) - With a sea of information coming at us from all directions, how do we sift out the misinformation and bogus claims, and get to the truth? Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine lays out a "Baloney Detection Kit," ten questions we should ask when encountering a claim. The 10 Questions: 1. How reliable is the source of the claim? 2.Does the source make similar claims? 3. Have the claims been verified by somebody else? 4. Does this fit with the way the world works? 5. Has anyone tried to disprove the claim? 6. Where does the preponderance of evidence point? 7. Is the claimant playing by the rules of science? 8. Is the claimant providing positive evidence? 9. Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory? 10. Are personal beliefs driving the claim?

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Al Gore and the Referees

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Kevin Drum - Jul. 02 (Opinion) - Walter Russell Mead, in yet another lengthy critique of liberals who think that facts and empirical evidence ought to be taken seriously, explains to Al Gore the role of the referee in professional wrestling: Among other things, professional wrestling works as a kind of folk satire — and well meaning progressives and professionals like Mr. Gore are among its targets. The clownish referee represents exactly the well intentioned bumblers who seek to arbitrate and rationalize the endless competition between the good and the bad guys. It is the way much of the working class looks at ivory tower intellectuals, nanny state do-gooders. ....In other words, the referee in a professional wrestling match strikes a chord in popular culture in part because he is a representation of the class which sets itself up in our society as the arbiter and judge: the professional elite, the expert and the chattering classes. The referee at a wrestling match is a populist portrait of the FCC, the NLRB, NPR, the New York Times editorial board and everyone else who does exactly what Al Gore would like to spend his whole life doing: judging mankind impartially and ruling them well. The referee is part of the entertainment who is funny in part because he thinks he is above the fray.

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The Non-Science That Explains What’s Wrong with Science Explaining Non-Belief in Science

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Easily Distracted - By Easily Distracted - Apr. 26 (Opinion) - It is not irrational or unreasonable to regard scientific claims which recommend or insist upon particular public policy initiatives with sharply pronounced skepticism across the board. Not because science itself requires a particular form of skepticism (though it does) but because such skepticism is evidence-based, derived from the history of the relationship between policy, the modern state, and science, a history which even non-experts have often viscerally experienced or witnessed.

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Overcoming political polarization… but not through facts

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

my heart's in accra - By Ethan Zuckerman - Apr. 25 (Opinion) - A recent New York Times poll suggests that Americans are in a dark mood. 70% of people think the country is moving in the wrong direction, a number not seen since the peak of the Great Recession two years ago. Their frustration may stem from higher gas p

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A Holiday Message from Ricky Gervais: Why I'm An Atheist

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

blogs.wsj.com - By Ricky Gervais - Dec. 19 (Opinion) - Why don’t you believe in God? I get that question all the time. I always try to give a sensitive, reasoned answer. This is usually awkward, time consuming and pointless.

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Proving the Existence of God

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Pajamas Media - By Frank J. Tipler - Sep. 14 (Opinion) - In 1966, Stephen Hawking published his first — completely valid — proof for the existence of God. Over the next seven years, he followed this with even more powerful valid theorems proving God’s existence. So how did Hawking, who successfully proved God’s existence, remain an atheist? Simple. He simply denied that the assumptions he used in his proofs were true. As a matter of logic, if the assumptions in a proof are not true, then the conclusions need not be true. What assumptions did the young Hawking make? He assumed that the laws of physics, mainly Einstein’s theory of gravity, were true.

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Deferring to Experts

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

rationallyspeakingpodcast.org - By Massimo Pigliucci, Julia Galef, Benny Pollak - Aug. 29 (Opinion) - At a talk he gave at TAM 8, Massimo argued that non-experts in a field aren't qualified to reject an expert consensus, such as that on anthropogenic climate change. Most recently, he has taken Jerry Coyne to task for making a philosophical argument without having the necessary expertise. This raises a number of questions: Are there fields that have no experts, or that have pretend experts? If there is a lot of disagreement among experts on a topic, should we take any individual expert's opinion less seriously? How much consensus is required before a non-expert should say, "OK, looks like this question really is settled"? Perhaps noted expert George Carlin had it right when he said: "I have as much authority as the pope, I just don't have as many people who believe it."

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When God is Watching, People Are More Generous.

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Psychology Today - By Gad Saad - Nov. 09 (Opinion) - One argument in support of religiosity is that it makes people more moral. I am not particularly moved by this premise, as I find it a lot more impressive to be ethical, moral, kind, honest, and decent for reasons other than the fact that a "celestial dictator" (to borrow Christopher Hitchens' brilliant term) is watching over me. Moral and immoral acts are committed both by atheists and believers so neither group holds a monopoly over either form of behaviors.

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Bob McChesney interviews Chris Mooney, blogger for Discover Magazine and author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

will.illinois.edu - By Bob McChesney, Chris Mooney - Sep. 13 (Interview) - Chris Mooney is a visiting associate in the Center for Collaborative History at Princeton University and the author of The Republican War on Science, Storm World and, with Sheril Kirshenbaum, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. Chris's blog can be found at blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection

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The God of Eth (Skeptical Inquirer September/October 2005)

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

csicop.org - By Stephen Law - Feb. 14 (Advocacy) - Most people who believe in God assume their belief to be pretty reasonable. “Perhaps God’s existence can’t be conclusively proved,” they’ll say, “but it’s a fairly sensible thing to believe—far more sensible than, say, belief in fairies or Santa Claus.” But are they right? Christians, Muslims, and Jews all believe that God is both all-powerful and all-good. Indeed, God is often characterized as an infinitely loving father. Yet most of the popular arguments for the existence of God allow us to deduce little if anything about his moral character. Take the argument from design, for example. Even if it can be shown that the universe does show signs of design, what’s the evidence that its creator is all-good? There is also a well-known argument that, even if the universe was created by an all-powerful being, that being is not all-good. The argument is called the problem of evil, and runs roughly as follows: if God is both all-powerful and all-good, why is there so much suffering in the world? Why does God inflict earthquakes, floods, famines, and the Black Death upon us? Why does he give small children cancer? Why does he make life so grindingly miserable for so many? Why does he arrange for millions of us to end our lives horrendously scarred—in many cases both physically and psychologically crippled—by the world he created for us? This hardly sounds like the behavior of a supremely compassionate and loving father figure, does it? Surely, there’s overwhelming evidence that the universe is not under the control of a limitlessly powerful and benevolent character.

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A sustainable world

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

The Christian Century - By James Halteman - Dec. 16 (Review) - Speth devotes an entire chapter to research showing that material growth not only fails to enhance human welfare but in many cases diminishes the quality of life. When workers migrate in search of higher pay and living standards, families and communities are fractured. Lonely people are surrounded by goods, the production of which has destroyed the environment. Much of this production has come from large corporations which are legally and socially constructed in ways that give them power in markets and policy circles where the interests of the wealthy are promoted first. Sensitivity to social concerns is low on the list of goals for most corporations, according to Speth. That is why it is appropriate to change the rules of the game so corporations are not privileged in their operations. But regulations that achieve this goal are not enough. Mere tinkering with incentives will have only a limited impact on the environmental crisis.

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Sarah Palin's Creationism Will Rape the Environment

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Chip Ward - Sep. 23 (Opinion) - Evolution is largely about connection and interaction -- the linear connection of one species evolving into another (speciation), but also how species fill niches created by one another, how they interact, exchanging energy and information, how they compete as well as cooperate, and how all of them -- from microbial soils to migrating birds -- form dynamic communities that, in turn, are also woven together, web within web within web. Pull one thread of that living tapestry and you tug at so many others, which is why precaution is so wise.

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How Anti-Intellectualism Is Destroying America

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Terrence McNally, Susan Jacoby - Aug. 18 (Interview) - "It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant." Barack Obama finally said it. Though a successful political and electoral strategy, the Right's stand against intelligence has steered them far off course, leaving them -- and us -- unable to deal successfully with the complex and dynamic circumstances we face as a nation and a society.

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Connecting the Holy to Health: the Link between Religious Beliefs & Well-Being

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

CNW Telbec - Apr. 19 (Press Release) - "Dr. Pargament has been a leading figure in the effort to bring a balanced perspective of religion and spirituality to the attention of scientists and professionals," she said. "We are also actively conducting our own research locally on spiritually based psychotherapy at the IMHR, so his findings are definitely of interest to us." The author of four books and more than 156 articles on the link between health and spirituality, Dr. Pargament's current research examines how elderly people who struggle with their religious beliefs and hold negative perceptions about their relationships with God have an increased risk of death.

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Religion can make you honest

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

British Humanist Association - Apr. 11 (Opinion) - One of the major claims made by advocates of religion is that it promotes good behaviour. Believers, so it is claimed, are nicer people - they are more generous and more honest, for example. A number of studies support this hypothesis, at least on the surface. But many of these studies are weak because they are based on self report (i.e. what individuals say about themselves in questionnaires). Self-report is notoriously unreliable as a measure of what a person actually thinks. Not only do people sometimes not tell the truth, but frequently they don't actually know what's going on inside their own head (in other words, their beliefs about how they behave can differ quite a lot from how they actually behave).

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Religion: biology, psychology, sociology, history

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Gene Expression - Apr. 01 (Review) - On the most recent bloggingheads.tv you can watch Paul Bloom explaining why he thinks the propensity for theism is an innate bias of our species. Several years back Bloom wrote a piece for The Atlantic, Is God an Accident?, where he makes a similar case. But the general outline of Bloom's line of thinking is actually most powerfully argued in Scott Atran's In God's We Trust. The cognitive psychologists and anthropologists who work within this paradigm operate under some background assumptions in regards to our mental architecture. First, human cognitive states are strongly biased by innate tendencies which have a biological origin. Perception and language acquisition are easily explained by nativist treatments, but Atran and others have argued that more obscure biases such as folk biology also exist, while other domains such as theory of mind are broadly accepted within the scholarly community.

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Gay Scientists Isolate Christianity Gene

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

TheDailyTube - By Michael McGregor - Mar. 30 (Comedy News) - After hearing this insightful piece of biotechnology news, we are a bit worried that we might hold the "Christian gene." Simply put, gay scientists have discovered that Christianity is in our genes. Thankfully, it's not our fault for choosing the faith. It's nature, not nurture. Thus, we will be skipping mass for the 462nd Sunday in a row. Running Time: 1:16

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Morality and Religion

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Bloggingheads.tv - By Paul Bloom, Joshua Knobe - Mar. 30 (Interview) - Is morality hardwired into us? (11:41) Could we learn truly arbitrary moral rules? (05:04) The big booming voice inside you that says God exists (12:12) The mind-body dualism of children (10:07) Do you need to have a body to get pissed off? (09:01) The morality of killing gods and robots (06:46)

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Flying spaghetti monster defeats anti-evolution FL school board

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0800

Daily Kos - By davidkc - Dec. 26 (Opinion) - Enter the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. If you aren't familiar with the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it asserts that an omnipotent, airborne clump of spaghetti intelligently designed all life with the touch of its "noodly appendage," and that He appears in "full pirate regalia." The Pastafarians, as the Church's believers call themselves, first came to national attention in 2005, when the Church's leader, twentysomething Bobby Henderson, wrote an open letter to the Kansas Board of Education when the evolution flap was going on there, insisting that students also be taught about the Flying Spaghetti Monster. (You can read more about the Church in this recent Wired Magazine article). The Pastafarians appear to have grown in numbers quite a bit since 2005, and soon after the Ledger story appeared, Polk school board members were deluged with e-mails demanding that Flying Spaghetti Monsterism's version of intelligent design be taught in the classrooms alongside evolution and the "alternative" ID theory.

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Truthdigger of the Week: Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 09:22:55 -0800

TruthDig - Nov. 18 (Opinion) - Truthdig tips its hat this week to South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who took the Anglican Church to task for what he called its "homophobic" attitude, declaring in a recent interview with BBC Radio 4 that, "If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God." Archbishop Tutu zeroed in on church leadership in his critique, lamenting that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, has not promoted the idea of a "welcoming God" to all members. Instead, Tutu charged, Williams and other top officials have unduly focused on the subject of gay priests, which cropped up again in the controversy about the openly gay bishop of New Hampshire, Gene Robinson, when much bigger considerations should be given top priority. "Our world is facing problems--poverty, HIV and AIDS--a devastating pandemic, and conflict," the 76-year-old Cape Town clergyman told the BBC. "In the face of all of that, our Church, especially the Anglican Church, at this time is almost obsessed with questions of human sexuality."

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Freeman Dyson speaks with Salon

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Onnesha Roychoudhuri - Sep. 29 (Interview) - Such broad-spectrum thinking, particularly for a scientist, usually puts you in one of two camps: quack or genius. Dyson has been called both. Yet his penchant for challenging conventional wisdom is matched by a sense of humor, a necessary attribute for any scientist who has seen seven decades' worth of scientific hits and flops -- some of them his own.

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Manufacturing belief

Tue, 15 May 2007 12:55:47 -0700

Salon - By Steve Paulson - May. 15 (Interview) - In Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass," Alice tells the White Queen that she cannot believe in impossible things. But the Queen says Alice simply hasn't had enough practice. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." That human penchant for belief -- or perhaps gullibility -- is what inspired biologist Lewis Wolpert to write a book about the evolutionary origins of belief called "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast." Wolpert is an eminent developmental biologist at University College London. Like fellow British scientist Richard Dawkins, he's an outspoken atheist with a knack for saying outrageous things. Unlike Dawkins, Wolpert has no desire to abolish religion. In fact, he thinks religious belief can provide great comfort and points to medical studies showing that the faithful tend to suffer less stress and anxiety than nonbelievers. In Wolpert's view, religion has given believers an evolutionary advantage, even though it's based on a grand illusion. He has a theory for why religion first took root. He thinks human brains evolved to become "belief engines." Once our ancient ancestors understood cause and effect, they figured out how to manipulate the natural world. In essence, toolmaking made us human. Similarly, early hominids felt compelled to find causes for life's great mysteries, including illness and death. They came to believe in unseen gods and spirits.

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