Good Reason

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Popes don’t do science

30 June 2009 / Daniel Midgley / 1 Comment

Pope Benedict XVI said scientific tests confirmed shards found in the underground chamber at the church of St Paul’s-Outside-the-Walls in Rome were from the apostle.
…
Pope Benedict XVI announced the findings during a service at the basilica, as Rome prepared to celebrate the Feasts of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.

“This seems to confirm the unanimous and undisputed tradition that these are the mortal remains of the Apostle Paul,” he said.

And what scientific tests did they do, you ask? Oh, well, obviously they compared the DNA from the shards to another DNA sample that was known to have come from Paul… oh wait. There’s your problem right there. There aren’t any.

I wish the Pope would quit molesting science like it was some kind of child or something. I wish he’d just said he’d prayed about it and got the answer that way. It would still fool the believers, and it would be just as immune to critical scrutiny.

Three/four colour illusion

25 June 2009 / Daniel Midgley / 3 Comments

It’s almost time to get going on my Linguistics 102 class, ‘Language as Cognitive System’. It’s about brain, language, and perception. What better way to start than a fascinating optical illusion. Your eyes tell you that the big swirly lines are alternately blue and green. But your eyes are mistaken. They’re really the same colour. If you’re not convinced, pull down the file to your desktop and zoom in on it until the context is gone and the two colours merge into one.

Our visual system — indeed our human brains themselves — are pretty amazing devices that work pretty well most of the time. They work by showing us a view of reality not as it is, but close enough to be useful to us. Optical illusions exploit the bugs in our system.

This has a certain degree of relevance to me right now. I’m visiting with my family. They’re True Believers™, who rely on ‘spiritual experiences’ for evidence of their religious beliefs, which they are convinced cannot be wrong. This optical illusion is compelling evidence that our experiences, convincing though they seem, can be illusory.

Dogma keeps you in the dark

20 June 2009 / Daniel Midgley / 1 Comment

Orthodox Jews don’t turn on the lights on the Sabbath. They tie it back to Exodus 35:3, which prohibits lighting fires.

But what about when a sensor turns the lights on automatically?

A couple have taken legal action after claiming motion sensors installed at their holiday flat in Dorset breached their rights as Orthodox Jews.

Gordon and Dena Coleman said they cannot leave or enter their Bournemouth flat on the Sabbath because the hallway sensors automatically switch on lights.

The couple’s religious code bans lights and other electrical equipment being switched on during Jewish holidays.

They have now issued a county court writ claiming religious discrimination.

My religious background instilled in me an ability to weasel my way around arcane rules. I can think of all kinds of ways around this, and if they can’t, it means they’re not trying.

First, isn’t there any leeway for intentionality? If you don’t trigger the light on purpose, are you really turning on the light? Or how about compartmentalising? You’re triggering the sensor, but it’s really the sensor that’s turning on the light. It’s not your fault if your action instigates a chain of events that results in a light going on.

And, in my experience, religious people are really fond of attributing all technological advances to a god, as in “God made modern medicine and the Internet.” Why not capitalise on that? It’s not their fault that the light; it’s actually God that invented the sensor that’s turning the lights on. “Oh, Lord, if you do not want the lights to go on, you have the power to stop them.” Guess it’s okay by him.

But if they can’t come up with any of these rationalisations on their own, then I say they can just sit in their flat in the dark. Perhaps they could use the time to ponder the idiocy of adopting a stupid and unworkable philosophy.

Daniel font sightings

19 June 2009 / Daniel Midgley / Comments Off

It’s fun to stay at the YMCA, but if it’s the Quebec YMCA, there’s an extra bonus: they use the Daniel font on their website. I think my handwriting looks quite nice in French.

If you’re a fan of fantasy, you can find Yataghan on the cover of ‘Fall of Thanes’ by Brian Ruckley. In fact, it would appear to have been used on all three books in the “Godless World” trilogy. Now there’s a title I can get behind, although I hope he doesn’t mean that in a godless world there’s constant combat and it’s always cold.

They may be onto us already! Memorise this URL and then destroy it!

18 June 2009 / Daniel Midgley / 5 Comments

That, or hostage negotiator.

13 June 2009 / Daniel Midgley / 2 Comments

Are you thinking of going on a mission for the LDS Church? Here’s an idea of what kind of job you’ll be qualified for afterward.

Six days a week, in fair weather and foul, two-dozen door-to-door salesmen, all of whom live clustered together in an apartment complex in this suburb west of Chicago, pile into S.U.V.’s and cars and head into the big city, bent on sales of home security systems.

And on Sunday, their one day off, they drive together to the nearest house of worship of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The salesmen are mostly former Mormon missionaries from Utah who cut their teeth — and learned their people-skill chops — cold-calling for their faith. In Chicago and in its suburbs where their employer, Pinnacle Security of Orem, Utah, has shipped them for the summer sales season, they are doing much the same thing, but as a job.

“It’s missionary work turned into a business,” said Cameron Treu, 30, who served his mission in Chile and was recruited into D2D (that is door-to-door in sales lingo) by another former missionary.

After the mish, I never wanted to tract again. Imagine going from that to sales. At least as a missionary, I had someone else to talk to.

However, it was during the mission that I realised I liked teaching, so maybe that was one positive. There would have been better ways to go about it, though, like getting into my program and teaching as a tutor or something. An LDS mission makes a lousy gap year. Or two.

Is there an owl on the American dollar bill?

12 June 2009 / Daniel Midgley / 13 Comments

Owl-spotters: Have a look at a US simolean, and see if you can spot the owl.

I noticed this item on Tom Ellard’s site, and I was intrigued. I happened to have a nice crisp US dollar bill in my possession, so I set my scanner to ‘insane’ setting (19200 dpi), and here’s the scan. Click to enlarge.

So… is it an owl? I don’t know. To me it looks like a place where a bunch of curlicues intersect. The ‘head’ has three holes in it, which to our human brains might look like two eyes and a nose (or beak). And maybe a couple of bumps for ears. Too bad the corresponding pattern on the other side of the bill is covered up.

What’s more interesting to me is why most people who have a web page on this topic are either loopy about Masons, Jesus, or the Illuminati. I suppose if you’re spending your nights looking for sinister symbolism in money, you’re heading for one of two options: John Birch meetings, or muttering to yourself in bus stations. Not much difference, really.

English gets its infinitieth word, right now.

10 June 2009 / Daniel Midgley / 3 Comments

Language Log has done a much more thorough beatdown of this story than I could, but it’s still worth mentioning.

English contains more words than any other other language on the planet and will add its millionth word early Wednesday, according to the Global Language Monitor, a Web site that uses a math formula to estimate how often words are created.

It is a silly claim, especially when you realise that English already has an infinite number of words right this instant. You can paint a fence, and then you can re-paint the fence, and then if you have any paint left, you can re-re-paint the fence. In fact, you can keep adding re- as many times as you like, on to infinity, and each one of those will be a separate word.

Or you can have a great-grandmother, and a great-great-grandmother, and a great-great-great-grandmother, on and on to infinity.

That’s one of the things about English morphology: it allows some prefixes to be used recursively. Recursion is why English (or any other language, pace Everett) can have an infinite number of sentences. You can walk and walk, or you can walk and and walk and walk, making the sentence longer and longer and longer, on to infinity.

Quibble about hyphens, if you like. I could argue that a hyphen, not being whitespace, does not constitute a word boundary, and thus words containing them are kosher. If you wanted to push it, you could even consider multi-word expressions as words themselves. After all, ‘ice cream’ contains a space, but it represents just one thing. It can be found variously with a space, a hyphen, or all smashed together. Your definition of ‘word’ will influence your count.

People discover things, religions don’t.

5 June 2009 / Daniel Midgley / 4 Comments

I’m going through President Obama’s Cairo speech. I’m very encouraged by his commitment to undo the misdeeds of the past administration.

As an atheist, though, I’d be remiss if I didn’t correct one point that the president brought up about Islam.

As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam – at places like Al-Azhar University – that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed.

This focus is misguided. Islam did not give the world algebra, the compass, printing, the ballpoint pen with erasable ink, or anything like them. Individuals can and do discover and invent such things; religions do not. Religions qua religions are not capable of advancing human knowledge because they are non-empirical belief systems. They get their data not from the physical world, but from supposed revelations. As such, they are no more likely to be right than random chance.

Religions may on occasion offer interesting hypotheses about the world or human behaviour, which someone might test. But then that’s science, not religion.

Religions have acted as a repressive force on human progress more often than a promoting force. The library at Alexandria was a repository of the great learning amassed up to that time. Its destruction over centuries is one of the great crimes against humanity. The responsible parties are the ravages of time, public indifference, conquering kings, and people acting under the influence of religion.

As Christians gained dominance in the region, they felt uncomfortable with pagan temples full of pagan documents. In 391 AD, Theophilus, the patriarch of Alexandria, urged a mob to destroy the temple at Serapis, presumably at the same time destroying whatever books were left in the daughter library. This was hailed as a great victory of the Christians over the pagans.

The final fire was in 645 AD, when the Moslem caliph Omar conquered Egypt. The story is that Omar was asked what to do about the books in the library, and gave the reply: “If the books agree with the Koran, they are not necessary. If they disagree, they are not desired. Therefore, destroy them.” According to tradition, the scrolls were used as fuel to provide hot water for the soldiers’ baths for six months.

The story may be bunk, but the sentiments are real. In the days of Galileo, churches tried to suppress knowledge. It didn’t work. Now they attempt to wall off their theology from scientific scrutiny (perhaps by saying that their god is ‘outside of science’), or they offer up ersatz science with fake facts to misinform.

I see human progress as the triumph of empiricism and reason over superstition. The credit belongs to the people who invented and discovered, not to the religions that for too long have stood in the way.