Dawkins strikes again

"The creationists’ fondness for “gaps” in the fossil record is a metaphor for their love of gaps in knowledge generally. Gaps, by default, are filled by God. You don’t know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don’t understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don’t go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, don’t work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries for we can use them. Don’t squander precious ignorance by researching it away. Ignorance is God’s gift to Kansas."

Link

So true

If god knows everything that means that he knows every one of his thoughts and he knows all of his thoughts that he has ever known. In fact he knows every thought that he’s thinking and he knows that he’s thinking every thought that he’s thinking. If god is eternal how can he possibly know every eternal thought that he’s ever had? It would take him an eternity to remember an eternity!

Does Gödel Matter? Sort of..

What is it about Gödel's theorem that so captures the imagination? Probably that its oversimplified plain-English form—"There are true things which cannot be proved"—is naturally appealing to anyone with a remotely romantic sensibility. Call it "the curse of the slogan": Any scientific result that can be approximated by an aphorism is ripe for misappropriation. The precise mathematical formulation that is Gödel's theorem doesn't really say "there are true things which cannot be proved" any more than Einstein's theory means "everything is relative, dude, it just depends on your point of view."

link via slate

Good words from PZ

"Science differs from religion in that it rejects faith as a source of information or as part of the process of acquiring evidence. We replace it with skepticism. Emphasizing faith as a component of science tells us nothing but that Townes doesn't know much about what he's doing.

And babbling about "wonderful things" coming from both science and religion doesn't make sense, either. No amount of faith-based, religious thinking was going to come up with a laser or the structure of DNA or the sliding filament model of muscle contraction. In his list of "observations, thoughtful assumptions, faith and logic," one thing stands out as singularly useless: faith. Non-scientists can use the others to accomplish good things, but "faith" is nothing. Nothing but delusion and blind inertia.

I know what religious people are going to claim: that maybe science can come up with a laser, but it takes religion to come up with purpose and wonder and joy and sacrifice and service. That's baloney, and is one of my pet peeves; those are human concerns that are warped and filtered and twisted by the straightjacket of religion. Humanists, atheists, and agnostics develop excellent human values without the foolishness of faith or the gobbledygook of god. And religion has always been as good at inspiring evil as it does good."

link

Gould's gym

"Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists -- whether through design or stupidity, I do not know -- as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. The punctuations occur at the level of species; directional trends (on the staircase model) are rife at the higher level of transitions within major groups."

-Steven J Gould

Some Battle

Battleground Analysis - Congratulations!

You have been awarded the TPM medal of distinction! This is our second highest award for outstanding service on the intellectual battleground.

The fact that you progressed through this activity without being hit and biting very few bullets (2) suggests that your beliefs about God are internally consistent and well thought out.

A direct hit would have occurred had you answered in a way that implied a logical contradiction. The bitten bullets occurred because you responded in ways that required that you held views that most people would have found strange, incredible or unpalatable. However, because you bit only two bullets and avoided direct hits completely you still qualify for our second highest award. A good achievement!

test here

Such is the power of illusion, that even the would-be wise are sometimes consumed. C.S. Lewis declared that man needed god--and was partly right. People need an explanation, and they need hope in the face of failure and suffering; hope and an explanation they are given, in the place of improved condition and knowledge.

The failures believe they are blessed, and so curse the successful as failures. That which is written in flesh is declared false, and falseness declared absolute truth.

"Democrats: Always standing up for what they later realise they should have believed in." -Jon Stewart, the Daily Show

New Scientist interview with Jamie Whyte

NS: In your book you are quite harsh on religion. Aren't people entitled to their faith?

Jamie Whyte: This is one of my favourite errors. An interesting change has happened, at least in the west. It used to be that people would argue for a particular religious dogma or a clear religious doctrine. That is no longer what happens. The world is increasingly dividing into those who have "faith" and those who don't. It doesn't really matter what the faith is. That is why you now get "faith groups" coming together from all kinds of different religions. The weirdest manifestation of this new tendency is when people say: "I'm not a Christian but I believe in something." Then I say: "Of course, I believe in many things, like there is a chair there and a table. What are you talking about?" And they reply: "Well, you know, something more." But what "more"? What they mean is something more than we have any good reason to believe in.

NS: That really seems to get to you!

Jamie Whyte: What amazes me is that they like to set themselves up as having a slightly finer sensibility than you or me but in fact they are completely intellectually irresponsible. They used to come up with very bad arguments for their faiths but at least they felt that there was something they should provide. Now mere wilfulness has triumphed. This is what I describe as the egocentric approach to truth. You are no longer interested in reality because to do that you have to be pretty rigorous, you have to have evidence or do some experimentation. Rather, beliefs are part of your wardrobe. You've got a style and how dare anybody tell you that your style isn't right. Ideology is seen as simply a matter of taste and as it's not right to tell people that they've got bad taste, so it's not right to tell them that their opinions are false. I'm afraid that the cast of mind of most people is the opposite of scientific.

Link