If God Wrote my Name in the Stars…

By Notung • • 11 comments

…would I believe He existed?

The question of what it would take for me to believe that God exists comes up from time to time, and I think it’s good to have an idea of what sort of evidence would be acceptable to me. Now, if I knew that God wrote my name in the stars, then I would believe, simply because such knowledge entails the existence of God. The question then really ought to be whether or not I’d believe that it was God who wrote my name in the stars, if indeed my name is written in the stars.

Regarding Sylvia Browne & Co.

By Notung • • 3 comments

After the happy news that three women missing for about a decade were found alive in Ohio, many noted that ‘psychic’ Sylvia Browne had told Amanda Berry’s mother that her daughter was dead. Tragically, Amanda’s mother died falsely believing this to be so.

There isn’t a lot to say about this. We know how effective psychics are – they simply can’t do it. We haven’t only just discovered that Sylvia Browne was wrong – she was wrong to say that Amanda was dead, regardless of whether Amanda was in fact dead, because she didn’t know. She had no way of knowing.

Browne’s attempt to describe Amanda’s condition is no more disgraceful given what we know now than it was at the time. If Amanda had turned up dead, then Browne would still be guilty of talking about incredibly sensitive issues she had no knowledge about – she would simply have got lucky with the facts. She might have imparted true beliefs, but not justified true beliefs.
The fact that she didn’t accidentally strike truth is, in my view, of no consequence to how we view her treatment of anguished families.

The Issue of Hate Speech: IV. Waldron’s Argument

By Notung • • 3 comments

Jeremy Waldron in his recent book The Harm in Hate Speech suggests that there are kinds of hate speech that are justifiably regulated. He concentrates his arguments on a particular kind of harm; harm to the ‘dignity’ of individuals. ‘Dignity’ in this context has a special meaning; it reflects the social standing of an individual, and “entitle[s] them to be treated as equals in the ordinary operations of society.”2. Unless otherwise stated, I will use the term ‘dignity’ in the same way. What sort of ‘hate speech’ are we talking about? Waldron is primarily concerned with the visible environment that any individual must live their lives in. By ‘visible environment’ Waldron means the sort of society in which there are cross burnings by members of the Ku Klux Klan, leaflets handed out containing racist propaganda (which we might call ‘defamatory’), neo-Nazi parades through Jewish neighbourhoods, and so on3. It is this kind of outward expression of hateful views that has the most significant impact on the dignity of a member of a (say) racial minority. A member of a minority ends up going about their lives in such an environment, is put into a position of having to explain the hate speech to their children, and so on. This, according to Waldron, justifies the existence of hate speech regulation; we ought to protect these minorities from having their dignity impacted in this way.

On the ‘I Believe In One Fewer God Than You Do’ Meme

By Notung • • 10 comments

My co-SINner Damion has a post up criticising this familiar atheist meme:

“I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” – Stephen Roberts

His criticism is this:

THE REASON THEY DISMISS ALL THE OTHER GODS IS THAT THEY’VE BEEN TRAINED FROM BIRTH TO ACCEPT ONE RELIGIOUS DOGMA AND NEVER EXAMINE THOSE BELIEFS CRITICALLY.

I think this is true in many cases, but I’m sure Damion is aware that this is an over-generalisation – there are some who converted later in life for instance. But let’s assume that even in these cases the reason for not accepting the existence of, say, Donner* is because of His incompatibility with the worldview of the religion they converted to. Damion adds:

Let us not pretend for a moment that theists made a survey of all the gods and then picked out the ones with the most evidential backing.

Right. Of course, we shouldn’t rule out the idea that they came to their beliefs by weighing up the evidential basis of each position, but this probably applies to the vast majority of theists. So should we, therefore, ‘stop using this meme’, as Damion requests?

I think not. I’m not a fan of spouting memes and slogans to defend my position (it’s rather lazy and can get very boring after the first ten times you hear each one), but I think there’s at least some value in the ideas contained in this one. I’ll divide the meme in half:

Winged Horses and Respect

By Notung • • 2 comments

Yesterday, on the academic symposium Twitter, there was a bit of drama when Richard Dawkins (with his usual commitment to dispassionate inquiry) started questioning our treatment of weird beliefs.

I think the question he asked is an interesting and reasonable one, even though I think it was gratuitously personal, and so a little out of line.

SINergy!

By Notung • • 2 comments

  Today, I discovered that the bloggers on this network aren’t just intelligent machines that generate text on a page…

I Still Don’t Understand What Skepticism Is

By Notung • • 15 comments

I was recently prompted to think again about the meaning of ‘scientific’ skepticism after reading Daniel Loxton’s recent article about skepticism and atheism (also see fellow SINner Russell Blackford’s discussion). I have a slight confession to make – although I’ve been a fan of the work of skeptics, and have read books and articles on the subject, I still don’t really understand exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about ‘skepticism’.

The Criminality of a Schoolgirl’s Silly Tweets

By Notung • • 8 comments

The police and crime commissioner for Kent, Ann Barnes, recently appointed, as she pledged during her campaign, (now) 17 year old Paris Brown to the role of youth PCC so that she can represent younger people and offer insight into the problem of youth crime.

Yesterday, she resigned under pressure, as a result of media scrutiny over her Twitter activity. You can read some of the tweets here. Yes, they’re silly and obnoxious. However, they were sent by someone no older than 16, and while it’s easy to criticise them, I wouldn’t want anyone looking over my text messages I was sending when I was 16.

Still, there’s a valid concern over someone who is in a position of such responsibility, presumably on merit, conducting herself in that way. She’s young and has a lot to learn (as most 16 year-olds do). I’m not really interested in her suitability for the position – and it seems there are arguments on each side.

What really got my back up was this decision; for Kent Police to investigate her tweets for ‘criminal’ content.

The ‘Atheist Skeptic Dialogue’ Will Fail

By Notung • • 37 comments

Many people are becoming increasingly fed up with what I will call ‘the Rift’ that has occurred in atheist and skeptic communities. Largely, the Rift is confined to online spaces, but seemed to originate around mid 2011 in the conference scene. It seems to only affect a subset of atheists and skeptics, as when I speak to atheists I encounter in my ordinary life (and by far most people I know are ‘non-card-carrying atheists’), they have no idea that it even exists. So the problem, albeit something we should try to fix, is not really something that affects atheists or skeptics as a whole, but just those who inhabit one corner of the internet.

Michael Nugent, of Atheist Ireland is one of the people fed up with the Rift. He would like to move beyond it, and has admirably taken the trouble to propose a dialogue to try to sort things out. I strongly believe that it won’t work, for two main reasons:

In this situation, a dialogue is in principle non-workable.
The dialogue itself is not structured in an appropriate way for its purpose.

I want to start with the second reason, as it is the weaker of the two.