Just watched the 3rd part of The Genius of Charles Darwin (presented by Richard Dawkins) and I must say that this was Richard's best TV performance yet.The tone and pace of the programme was perfect. I'm now getting less frustrated by the collection of ignorant creationists, as Richard's technique of letting them talk their way into deeper and deeper holes just makes them look like the idiots they are.
I was not impressed by the wishy-washy science teachers who didn't want to offend the feelings of their students by emphasizing the truth of scientific evidence over the 'evidence' of their religious beliefs.
I thought the segment with the Archbish of C was quite funny. He really was squirming when Richard pushed him on whether he thought that the virgin birth was a scientific fact and all but admitted that his views were a bit silly and didn't make any sense as a truthful representation of the world. It was good of him to appear on the programme, but if he is the top guy in the C of E, then we don't have much to worry about!
Monday, 18 August 2008
Sunday, 17 August 2008
Why does ethics have to equal religion?
I've been keeping a close eye on the lead up to the US elections. I'm not sure whether I've become more politically aware, or whether I've just been following more US blogs and podcasts over the last few months. One story that I spotted today was on the good old BBC, however. It was a debate between McCain and Obama. Nothing unusual so far. The odd thing in this case was that it was billed as a 'religious forum', hosted by the pastor of a mega church (that phrase makes me shudder) called Rick Warren.
The reports I've read so far don't really spell out why the questions asked of the candidates were particularly religious and why they couldn't have equally been asked in a secular context on the ethical and moral beliefs of the two men. Abortion, same-sex marriage, teen pregnancies and, more personally, "What was your greatest moral failure?", "Who are the three wisest people in your life?", "Why do you want to be president?".
Why do questions like this need to be asked in a religious setting? If I wanted to vote for someone, I would want to know how he came to hold his views on a particular subject. If somebody is against same-sex marriage or abortion in any situation, then I'd expect to hear reasonable argument about why that is a sensible position to hold. Just saying "That's my position because my religion says so" doesn't give me a lot of confidence in someone who has to make important decisions based on many sources of evidence and opinion.
To pick out one of these "moral" issues, I find the obsession with same-sex marriage particularly annoying. Apart from the obvious point that it's nothing to do with anyone else, the argument often seems to over a matter of semantics. Obama was quoted as saying that marriage should only be a "union between a man and a woman", but he supported same-sex civil unions. If there is no legal difference between a marriage and a civil union, then is the argument just over m-word? Some even argue that the only true marriage is a religious one. Of course, what they mean by this is a Christian marriage ceremony, pushing away other religions as well as secularists.
I once heard someone from one of the humanist organizations suggesting that we could leave the word 'marriage' as the description for the Christian ceremony and everyone still goes has to go through a civil process to formalize their union. At first I thought this was a good idea. Of course, everyone would still refer to the civil unions as 'marriages' and 'weddings', whatever the formal designation. The other reason it would be a bad idea is that marriage didn't ever start off with religious connotations. Marriages were going on long before it became a Christian ceremony in the Middle Ages. The Romans even had legal same-sex marriages!
It would be interesting if any politican who made a statement on a moral matter actually explained why they held that view rather than just refering to the standard line of the party they belong to or the religion they happened to be born into.
The reports I've read so far don't really spell out why the questions asked of the candidates were particularly religious and why they couldn't have equally been asked in a secular context on the ethical and moral beliefs of the two men. Abortion, same-sex marriage, teen pregnancies and, more personally, "What was your greatest moral failure?", "Who are the three wisest people in your life?", "Why do you want to be president?".
Why do questions like this need to be asked in a religious setting? If I wanted to vote for someone, I would want to know how he came to hold his views on a particular subject. If somebody is against same-sex marriage or abortion in any situation, then I'd expect to hear reasonable argument about why that is a sensible position to hold. Just saying "That's my position because my religion says so" doesn't give me a lot of confidence in someone who has to make important decisions based on many sources of evidence and opinion.
To pick out one of these "moral" issues, I find the obsession with same-sex marriage particularly annoying. Apart from the obvious point that it's nothing to do with anyone else, the argument often seems to over a matter of semantics. Obama was quoted as saying that marriage should only be a "union between a man and a woman", but he supported same-sex civil unions. If there is no legal difference between a marriage and a civil union, then is the argument just over m-word? Some even argue that the only true marriage is a religious one. Of course, what they mean by this is a Christian marriage ceremony, pushing away other religions as well as secularists.
I once heard someone from one of the humanist organizations suggesting that we could leave the word 'marriage' as the description for the Christian ceremony and everyone still goes has to go through a civil process to formalize their union. At first I thought this was a good idea. Of course, everyone would still refer to the civil unions as 'marriages' and 'weddings', whatever the formal designation. The other reason it would be a bad idea is that marriage didn't ever start off with religious connotations. Marriages were going on long before it became a Christian ceremony in the Middle Ages. The Romans even had legal same-sex marriages!
It would be interesting if any politican who made a statement on a moral matter actually explained why they held that view rather than just refering to the standard line of the party they belong to or the religion they happened to be born into.
Monday, 11 August 2008
Atheist Blogroll
My blog has been added to The Atheist Blogroll. You can see the blogroll in my sidebar. The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information.
Sunday, 10 August 2008
Name that tune
When I was watching the Olympic highlights on the BBC yesterday, I thought I recognized the music they were playing. I realised that it was Hong Kong Garden by Siouxie and the Banshees (incidentally, the first single I ever bought), but played in a plinky-plonky Chinese style. I wonder what they are planning for London 2012? Anarchy in the UK performed by the London Symphony Orchestra?
Liquid Engineering?
I've never quite understood advertising and sponsorship deals. I was looking at the Castrol website for work the other day and I found out that Castrol were the official suppliers of engine oil to the Euro 2008 Championships. Would you be more inclined to put certain oil in your car (or, in our particular case, aircraft landing gear) because they were connected with football? Anyway, at least we now know what Christiano Ronaldo puts on his hair...
Thursday, 7 August 2008
No, No, No (Noe, Know...?)
Common spelling mistakes should be accepted into everyday use, not corrected, a lecturer has said. Ken Smith of Bucks New University says the most common mistakes should be accepted as "variant spellings".
I'll accept this when I accept that Bucks New University (formerly High Wycombe Discount Carpet Warehouse) is a genuine centre of learning.
More ALife
I posted yesterday about the Artificial Life conference in the UK this week and I was surprised about how little the subject seems to have moved on since I was involved a decade ago. One of the things I did back then was to interview a futurologist at BT, Chris Winter. Chris had a tank full of ants in his office and he told me how he was studying them so he could use the ants' method of simple individuals following a small number of simple rules to produce a complex, self-regulatory, self-repairing network.
BBC's second ALife story in two days talks about the same ideas from BT and they don't seem to have got much further either...
BBC's second ALife story in two days talks about the same ideas from BT and they don't seem to have got much further either...
Wednesday, 6 August 2008
That's (Artificial) Life
My news aggregator picked up this story today. It's all about the efforts of a German university to use Artificial Life techniques to evolve realistic animal and human motion. The basic idea is that you build a model that has the same constraints as a real system, then genetic algorithms and neural networks to get your model come up with the best solution to the goal that you have set. It looks quite nice, but it doesn't seem to have moved on a great deal since the work of Karl Sims that I first encountered a decade ago. This was back in the good old days when I was involved with Artificial Life as part of my job.
The reason that the BBC picked up the story is because ALife XI is taking part in Winchester this week. I attended Alife V in Los Angeles a few years back and it was great fun. It was such a contrast to the normal academic conferences that I was used to. As well as the engineers and scientists there were also biologists, film makers and performance artists. Watching how the evolution of biological systems or whole ecosystems could be modelled and powerful and efficient the evolutionary process could be was fascinating.
Perhaps the brainwashed closed-minded students that Richard Dawkins had to deal with in his latest TV program would benefit from seeing how exciting and interesting ALife and evolution can be.
The reason that the BBC picked up the story is because ALife XI is taking part in Winchester this week. I attended Alife V in Los Angeles a few years back and it was great fun. It was such a contrast to the normal academic conferences that I was used to. As well as the engineers and scientists there were also biologists, film makers and performance artists. Watching how the evolution of biological systems or whole ecosystems could be modelled and powerful and efficient the evolutionary process could be was fascinating.
Perhaps the brainwashed closed-minded students that Richard Dawkins had to deal with in his latest TV program would benefit from seeing how exciting and interesting ALife and evolution can be.
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