News

Michael Crichton lecture on whether aliens cause global warming

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This lecture delivered by Michael Crichton, an atheist, at Caltech is a classic.

Consider this excerpt about “nuclear winter”, which is a myth that “scientists” like Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich invented in order to scare the public into voting for leftist foreign policies:

In 1975, the National Academy of Sciences reported on “Long-Term Worldwide Effects of Multiple Nuclear Weapons Detonations” but the report estimated the effect of dust from nuclear blasts to be relatively minor. In 1979, the Office of Technology Assessment issued a report on “The Effects of Nuclear War” and stated that nuclear war could perhaps produce irreversible adverse consequences on the environment.

[…]At the conference in Washington, during the question period, Ehrlich was reminded that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists were quoted as saying nothing would grow there for 75 years, but in fact melons were growing the next year. So, he was asked, how accurate were these findings now?

Ehrlich answered by saying “I think they are extremely robust. Scientists may have made statements like that, although I cannot imagine what their basis would have been, even with the state of science at that time, but scientists are always making absurd statements, individually, in various places. What we are doing here, however, is presenting a consensus of a very large group of scientists…”

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.

This is very relevant considering the latest news about Climategate. Liberals view science as a tool to get the public to enact policies that they think are enlightened, like socialism and secularism. Often, public sector scientists will advocate for policies that attack business and grow government, so that they will get bigger grants and higher salaries. But they also use “science” to try to undermine traditional morality and religion so that public policy does not prevent them from acting immorally. They want to be evil and they don’t want to be judged or punished.

News

Catholic church will stop all charity work if same-sex marriage passes in DC

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From the Washington Post. (H/T Weasel Zippers via ECM)

Excerpt:

The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn’t change a proposed same-sex marriage law, a threat that could affect tens of thousands of people the church helps with adoption, homelessness and health care.

Under the bill, headed for a D.C. Council vote next month, religious organizations would not be required to perform or make space available for same-sex weddings. But they would have to obey city laws prohibiting discrimination against gay men and lesbians.

Fearful that they could be forced, among other things, to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, church officials said they would have no choice but to abandon their contracts with the city.

“If the city requires this, we can’t do it,” Susan Gibbs, spokeswoman for the archdiocese, said Wednesday. “The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular. For us, that’s really a problem.”

This happens all the time with other charities like Catholic adoption agencies and hospitals. The left wants to force the people who actually do good to change their worldview to atheism. But self-sacrificial acts of charity are not rationally grounded by the atheist worldview. Atheists are NOT just like religious people when it comes to morality. The only standards of morality that are grounded by atheism are personal preferences and cultural fashions. Morality isn’t real, on their view. There is no objective ground for moral values and duties.

The problem with the atheistic worldview is that their purpose in life is hedonism. And there is no reason for them to care about the consequences of their actions on other people’s rights since rights are illusory on atheism. They want to pursue happiness, avoid moral obligations, and have others pay for the social consequences of their actions. They don’t care about how their selfishness hurts vulnerable children, born and unborn. And they are willing to use government to force religious people to subsidize and celebrate their selfish immorality.

The great moral accomplishment of atheists in the last 100 years has been to murder 100 million people. And this is not counting the millions of deaths caused by abortion, and environmentalist bans on DDT. It also doesn’t count the millions of broken homes caused by the sexual revolution, or the social costs of raising children without fathers who go on to commit crimes. Perhaps they should just mind their own business instead of interfering with the charity done by those whose worldview actually grounds morality rationally.

Podcasts

Audio clips and post-debate interviews from latest Dawkins debate

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From the latest episode of the Unbelievable radio show.

The MP3 file is here.

Details:

Atheists Richard Dawkins, and AC Grayling recently squared up against Christians Richard Harries and Charles Moore for a debate on the motion “Atheism is the new fundamentalism”.

Justin Brierley reviews the debate with audio clips from the speakers and Q&A session, as well as interviews with those who attended, including AC Grayling and the Chair of the debate Anthony Seldon.

For the full debate visit http://www.intelligencesquared.com/

Justin has a lot of audio clips of the speeches and Q&A from the debate. This was a public debate. He also conducts post-debate interviews with one of the speakers, and some of the people in the audience. The people representing Christianity in the debate are totally useless. Justin also interviewed some “Christian” woman after the debate who is not even an orthodox Christian!

I think that in the UK, people are not really orthodox in their Christian beliefs. They seem poorly trained in theology and apologetics. I think that political correctness and multiculturalism has really weakened Christianity in the UK. At the end of the show Justin says that he will be focusing on the movie Expelled in the new year and so I hope they will get some good Christian scholars – not like John Lennox and Richard Swinburne!

Justin – if you’re reading this – please don’t put any more pastors on to defend Christianity. C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton types are not effective against the New Atheists. Please get Paul Copan, Keith Yandell, Craig Evans, Jonathan Wells, Stephen Meyer, Jay Richards, Guillermo Gonzalez, William Dembski, Darrell Bock, Dan Wallace, James Sinclair, and Doug Geivett instead. Or William Lane Craig, but that goes without saying.

My thoughts on why atheists are fundamentalists

I want to say a little something about atheists and the word “science”. Atheists don’t really value science, they value naturalism. Science is a method of inquiry that helps people to discover the way the world really works. Naturalism is a philosophical pre-supposition that says that every effect in the universe is the result of natural law and matter. And they cling to this pre-supposition as strongly as Muslims cling to their beliefs. There is no evidence that will shake them from their blind faith in the efficacy of naturalistic mechanisms.

Consider this quote from an atheist named Richard Lewontin:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

When an atheist says that they like science, what they really mean is that they like naturalism (= materialism). When the progress of science demonstrates the need for a Creator of the universe, a Designer for the fine-tuning, an intelligent cause of biological information, etc., then atheists jump off the science bandwagon and begin to talk about how science is a very limited, tentative enterprise. They do this in order to save their religion of naturalism from being tested against scientific discoveries.