(5 out of 5) (5 out of 5) (5 out of 5) (5 out of 5) (5 out of 5) (5 out of 5) (5 out of 5) (5 out of 5) (5 out of 5) (5 out of 5)John Wilkins has another great post for our Recommended Reading category. As everybody knows, the ad hominem fallacy is an invalid argument. But what do you do when your opponent really is an ignorant fool? And when is an argument from authority not a case of the “argument from authority” fallacy? Dr. Wilkins explains all.
There’s an interesting discussion over at the NoGodBlog on the topic of “Nontheistic Churches.” Basically, the poster raises the question of whether or not atheists ought to build “churches” and hold weekly meetings, like the believers do. The goal would be to grant unbelievers the same social and legal benefits (e.g. tax exemptions) as theistic churches enjoy. Is this a compromise of atheistic principles, though?
The discussion in the comments is particularly interesting as different people weigh in with their perspectives.
John Wilkins has a very worthwhile post entitled Fun with Christians and worldviews, over at Evolving Thoughts. He discusses a debate he had with a group of Christians that involved the “competing worldviews” meme. After pointing out that “bald is not a hair color” (i.e. atheism and agnosticism are not religious worldviews in competition with other religions), he writes:
The other error is more widespread. I was in effect accused of having a worldview that precluded the existence of God, and the audience was invited to compare that with my opponents, who had one that permitted God. But the simple fact is, I don’t have a worldview. In fact, neither do they. I don’t think worldviews exist. They are a gross oversimplification of what is actually going on inside people’s heads, and are mere abstractions. If one believes in God, one might still believe things that are inconsistent with a belief in God. Intellectual schemes are not whole cloth, and you can entertain incompatible ideas, and in fact I think you must, because nobody gets a simple set of coherent ideas handed to them at birth, free of all confounding beliefs.
Christians, who have an extensive body of traditional dogma which they like to reassure themselves is true and consistent, like to think also that everybody has something like this. Religions are “rationally reconstructed” as sets of dogma by the Christian tradition (e.g., when doing anthropology by missionary) when in fact there is no dogma at all, just stories, rituals, and ways of life. The idea that one has a worldview by necessity is one that is made by analogy with a false view of themselves…
Recommended Reading.
(2 votes, average: 3 out of 5)
Loading ...Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide when he found out the FBI was preparing to accuse him of sending anthrax-tainted letters that killed 5 people, wrote a number of letters to his local newspaper during his career. These letters are now available online, thanks to the Frederick (MD) News-Post, and they make for some fascinating reading. Dr. Ivins, it seems, was no Richard Dawkins.
August 24, 2006
Rabbi Morris Kosman is entirely correct in summarily rejecting the demands of the Frederick Imam for a “dialogue.”
By blood and faith, Jews are God’s chosen, and have no need for “dialogue” with any gentile. End of “dialogue.”
And there’s more.
Via the “Incoming Links” section of my blog stats, I see there’s a post about Evangelical Realism up at thinktoomuch.net. Not only does he say nice things about the blog, he also takes a thoughtful look at how meaning and purpose can come from a God like Alethea, who is actually just a personification for Reality itself.
Recommended Reading.
Via Grrlscientist, the story of a creationist who learned, and who has paid the penalty for learning.
Reading this article makes it easier to understand why religious fundamentalists of all faiths have so much difficulty in accepting the truth since they stand to lose everything, including their very identity.
Contrast this with Mike Adams’s claim that “Accepting Christianity… is far more likely [than Islam] to have come from a rational appraisal of the evidence. And it is far less likely to have come from the threat of the sword.” But there are other threats besides swords, and more compelling.
A Blog Around The Clock has some thoughts up about The so-called Facebook Scandal, in which he addresses some very interesting points.
Science is supposed to be a collaborative activity. Why is it organized (and taught) as if it was a competitive activity? How does that affect science? Negatively, by increasing secretiveness and sometimes outright fraud.
The Web is changing all this. The teenagers already grok that the old selfish notions of intellectual property are going by the way of the dodo. They naturally think in terms of networks, not individuals. And thinking in term of newtorks as opposed to a linear, hierarchical, individualistic focus, is necessary for speeding up the advancement of knowledge and societal good.
In other words, it is not important what each individual knows or does, it is important what the interactions between individuals can do, and how the group or community (or global community) learns and acts upon the knowledge.
Thus, education, especially science education, from Kindergarden through post-doc and beyond, should be organized around collaborations, teaching people and letting them practice the networking skills and collaborative learning and action. Individuals will make mistakes and get punished by the group (sometimes as harshly as excommunication). They will learn from that experience and become more collaborative next time. The biggest sin would be selfish non-sharing of information.
I’ve been reading slactivist’s ongoing review of Left Behind for some time now, both because it’s fun to read his ascerbic comments on the non-quality of the writing and because I enjoy finding out what’s in the book without having to endure slogging through it myself. The latest installment, however, opens with a particularly trenchant analogy.
Imagine trying to convince yourself that curling and cricket were more popular in the U.S. than baseball and (American) football.
But that’s not the good part.
Settle down you numerophobes. Daylight Atheism has a very fascinating exercise in critical thinking, and it’s worth reading whether you’re a mathematician or not. If you have a positive result from a blood test that’s 95% accurate, and it says you have a very rare disease, what are the odds you really have it? Surprisingly low!
A more intuitive way to explain this result is this: the test is highly accurate, but the disease is rare. Therefore, the vast majority of people who are tested won’t actually have it - and the number of false positives from that group, though small compared to the size of that group, is larger than the relatively small number of people who actually have the disease and correctly test positive.
Recommended Reading.
Daylight Atheism has another excellent post up. Here’s just a real brief excerpt:
[T]rust in inerrancy is not a solution to the problem: it is a refusal to face the problem.
Recommended reading!