In a civilized and thought-provoking debate that took place just this past week in Toronto, former British Prime Minister and recent Catholic convert Tony Blair defended the motion that religion is a force for good in the world. Opposing the motion with all his cerebral might was his compatriot, the journalist and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens.
As the eager audience seems to have correctly anticipated, the intellectual engagement was stimulating, challenging and amusing. Best of all, Hitchens and Blair both managed to steer away from cheap shots, ad hominem attacks and appeals to emotion (for the most part...). Their mutual respect for one another helped their arguments focus on the relevance of the ideas supporting their position, and the result was a highly entertaining and educational exchange.
Whatever side you agree with, you're in for a mental treat.
I've totally neglected this type of blog entry for a while, but maybe now I'll get it started again. Anyway, this is from an essay on gay rights, written by Jonathan Rauch, quoting James Q. Wilson:
Of all the institutions through which men may pass--schools, factories, the military--marriage has the largest [domesticating] effect.
Rauch then argues that the domestication of men ought to be one of the top three social functions of marriage. Wow...
Unless you live in hillbilly territory, it's difficult nowadays to be a creationist and not get immediately laughed at. So, what do you do if you believe in the half-baked idea that some designer designed biological organisms as they are? You dress it up with sophisticated-sounding technical terms like 'irreducible complexity', and you also make sure to surround its mention with liberal-sounding principles like tolerance of other views, teaching the controversy, keeping an open mind, or even --and this is as ridiculous as it can possibly get-- letting the children decide, as if empirical knowledge were a question of personal preference or popularity...
The fact is, however, that once you strip the intention behind irreducible complexity (lest you commit the circumstantial ad hominem fallacy), the idea, fancy as it may originally sound, is still ultimately nothing more than an argument from personal incredulity: taking your own inability to explain a phenomenon or process, or your lack of imagination, or simply your ignorance of the scientific literature, as the basis upon which to pretend to have found an answer that's just conveniently consistent with your religious beliefs.
And when it comes to evidence, even the examples shown by its proponents turn out, surprise surprise, not to be irreducibly complex...
And just remember that if you want to draw an analogy between a human designer and god as a designer, logical consistency requires that in both cases the designers must be more complex than their designs, in which case you'd be 'explaining' complexity by presupposing even more complexity.
Call me silly, but 'solving' a mystery with a bigger mystery only aggravates the problem, it doesn't solve it...
Update: QualiaSoup, the creator of this and other wonderful animations, has also produced a response to 'objections' creationists have voiced against his portrayal of irreducible complexity:
As one commenter said, you don't fuck with QualiaSoup :) .
Philosopher Denis Dutton, however, thinks that he has found a possible answer: the Darwinian mechanisms of natural and sexual selection can offer the promise of guiding us in the direction of a general theory of beauty: where it comes from, why we experience it the way we do, as well as what kinds of things we could predict to have aesthetic value. He spells out some of these ideas in the following animated TEDTalk presentation:
Man, these animations are getting better and better :)
Although it sounds appealing in some respects, I can't be sure that Dutton's theory is any more than one of those 'just-so-stories' that one can conjure up to 'explain' some range of phenomena.
While I'm skeptical of it, I however, I do find it interesting and worth exploring further. I might just have to read his book... .
Remember that time Scooter Libby dressed up as a giant turkey and got a presidential pardon from G.W. Bush? You might have thought of such an act as the epitome of political corruption and sleaziness... but not all pardons are political acts of self-interest, and sometimes doing the right thing, especially if you're Obama, requires that you set aside political considerations and poll rankings, and just get down to the business of non-partisan righteousness :)
Imagine standing blindfolded on an open field and being told to walk in a straight line for a considerable distance. Could you do it?
Of course, any hypothetical answer about our own abilities is likely to be biased, wrong and completely unjustified, so the way to really try to answer this question is by testing it, and being the highly visual creatures that we are, it turns out, when we can't see where we're going, we humans can't help but start walking in circles. Robert Krulwich reports:
Now, you might have a hypothesis as to why this happens, but your hypothesis has most likely already been tested and shown to be wrong:
Any other guesses? And how would you test for them? .
There has been a huge outcry recently over the new security measures being implemented on American airports. Thanks to douchebags like the guy who tried to conceal a bomb in his underwear, it may now become standard procedure for a TSA agent to cop a feel whenever you want to fly... for national security purposes, of course.
Now, before we start ranting about the obvious violation of privacy these security measure represent, let's remember, as Saturday Night Live does, that by banning such measures, we may be discriminating against a significant (and perhaps lonely) segment of the population...
And if you can't afford to fly, or wouldn't mind taking care of business yourself, you might as well get in shape in the comfort of your own home :)
Many of us whose job it is to educate young minds do it because we think it's important and because we want to make a real difference in the world. In fact, in some cases we decide to teach even at the expense of personal well-being and practical benefits. Trust me, I'm not an academic for the chicks or for the money...
So it is especially disheartening, though hardly surprising, when we discover that students cheat, in tests, papers and projects. And with exponential advances in technology and access to information and resources, this trend of dishonesty is metastasizing out of control. Here is a recent chilling article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, for instance, that confirms what many of us already know and detest.
What students don't seem to realize, however, is that we weren't born yesterday. Whatever they think they know, we know better. And without divulging many secrets, we have accumulated over time many tools, strategies and abilities for making sure that our students' grades ultimately reflect their own performance and not someone else's.
They also don't seem to be smart enough to realize that the same technological advances that allow them to think they can cheat are in many cases the very same tools that instructors can use to detect them... Case in point:
Unfortunately, messages like this usually fall on deaf ears. No matter how much I talk to and warn my own students not to be intellectually dishonest, there's not a single semester that goes by without a few schmucks trying to get away with cheating, only to cry me a river once they've been caught.
I never humiliate anyone in public, but I'm starting to wonder whether that might be a deterrence strategy worth trying... .
Don't you just hate it when a once fun-loving friend either becomes a Born-Again-Christian or joins Alcoholic Anonymous, and then starts constantly moralizing and preaching his newly discovered sense of black and white righteous indignation?
Man, it's like you can't be a bigger party pooper than a former drunk. And The Onion pundits argue that when sobriety turns you into a sanctimonious jerk, it's time to get on the sauce again :)
Some of you bleeding-heart-equal-rights-for-everyone hippie types may have been inspired by the anti-bullying It Gets Better campaign. Interestingly, even Cindy McCain was brainwashed by this socialist message of equality and basic human decency (as you can see by placing your mouse over this bubble).
Luckily, independent-minded 'mavericky' straight-shooters like her husband, Senator John McCain, are experts at juggling rationalizations to avoid the obvious consequences of taking their own disingenuous statements seriously:
It would be no overstatement on my part to argue that Rene Descartes was one of the most intellectually ambitious men who have ever lived. Not content with the amazing contributions he made to the fields of mathematics, physics, anatomy and physiology, as well as optics, he also set himself the enormously challenging task of arguing against the skeptics while simultaneously articulating a solid foundation for the very possibility of science. In the process, he would become the father of modern philosophy.
Continuing his fascinating philosophical conversations with leading intellectuals about the Masters of Philosophy, Bryan Magee discusses with Bernard Williams some of the most insightful ideas discussed in Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, as well as their general importance and subsequent influence. This is a conversation that you can't afford to miss...
And if you want a lighter treatment of Cartesianism, maybe comedian Mark Steel is more your style :) .
Ok, so today's entry is a bit different from usual: it's all about me :)
A while ago I was commissioned to write a chapter for a book on The Onion and Philosophy (basically, what you can learn about philosophy by laughing your ass off). Anyway, it looks like the book has just been officially published. It's a great read, so go buy it!
And you don't have to take my word for it. It's being highly recommended by luminaries such as Sarah Palin, who called it "a real page-turner... the best book I've read since Principia Mathematica" :)
In case you're curios, the chapter I wrote, partly inspired by this Onion story, is entitled "Pope Admits: 'God Ain't Said Shit to Me'."
It's an analysis of various arguments for the existence of God, and how The Onion deals with them: it's a hilarious bloodbath that can hopefully teach you some lessons in critical thinking and how to evaluate different kinds of evidence for all kinds of claims according to reasonable and reliable standards.
Apart from Sarah Palin, the book has also received positive reviews from God himself, as well as from philosophers such as Peter Singer (seriously), Elliot Sober, Steven Nadler and Robert Paul Wolff. .
So, something looks a bit strange in the sky, we have no idea what it is, and we know that sometimes a lack of reference points can mess up with our depth perception and produce optical illusions.
This can only mean one thing for the media and conspiracy 'theorists': let's just make shit up, backed by absolutely no evidence whatsoever, and then take our wild guesses as a real source of news and as a platform to start asking viciously circular questions. Jon Stewart and Wyatt Cenac investigate:
Imagine how Edward Everett (the politician and famed orator who had been invited to deliver the Gettysburg Address) must have felt when, after having delivered a carefully crafted speech lasting around two hours, was suddenly upstaged by Abraham Lincoln in just two minutes when the latter delivered what would turn out to be one of the most celebrated speeches in American History.
In those two famous minutes, Lincoln masterfully captured the principles of freedom and equality espoused by the Declaration of Independence, and emphasized both the importance and the cost of our unprecedented experiment in democracy, as well as our debt to those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of those noble ideals.
In case you need a reminder of the speech, here it is in typographic animated beauty for your viewing and listening pleasure:
When I think about current politics, I usually get frustrated and amazed by the fact that so many disenfranchised people are being manipulated by the rich and powerful into creating growing political movements that seek to preserve the interests of the rich at the expense of the poor.
It's like paying them to kick themselves in the ass... without actually paying them. Recently elected official Rand Paul is a case in point:
Sure, asteroids may look like like nothing more than glorified rocks that make their way around the solar system and crash into larger celestial bodies every now and then. If they're large enough and happen to hit earth, they have the power to drive most life into extinction. Just ask the dinosaurs... oh, right :)
If you take an asteroid that's not headed for us, and examine its structure scientifically, you might just stumble upon some incredible discoveries about the early solar system, as the following clip shows.
Like it or not, decisions are both ubiquitous and inescapable. If you think about it for a second or two, the outcome of our own lives, the welfare of our society, the fulfillment of our relationships and the success of our careers, ultimately depend to a very large degree on the quality of the choices we make. It's a huge responsibility...
In our everyday lives, we may think from time to time about the choices we have to make, but we very seldom think about the process of decision-making itself. What drives it? Are we really in charge of our decisions, or is it ultimately just an illusion? Is there some heuristic we can use in order to consistently reach better decisions? Should we follow our gut or our reason?
Combining the hard-earned wisdom learned from various scientific disciplines, best-selling author Jonah Lehrer explains in the following fascinating lecture (based on his latest book, How We Decide) the evolutionary insight that the brain is composed of different and highly specialized modules, and that learning how to make better decisions requires metacognition: the process of thinking about thinking, and learning when to deploy some modules while restricting others.
In other words, it's not simply a question of emotions vs reason, but of when each is appropriate, given the circumstances and the general nature of the case, and there is a fascinating logic to this apparent madness and chaos. Here is a brief intro:
And here is the entire lecture:
And if you want to see some hilarious footage of the marshmallow test, you've got to check this out. .
There are those, perhaps a great majority of people even, who think that a universe devoid of God would be cold, meaningless and lonely...
Then there are also those whose physicalist and atheistic worldview actually makes them feel more connected to the universe and to each other through the recognition of their shared origin and nature, and it is to this latter group that I dedicate today's inspiring video:
I'll ignore the teleological language, agency attribution and ontotheological presuppositions for now, and just let the guy enjoy the beginning of his journey toward intellectual and emotional maturity... .
Ok, so last time we talked about the properties of light on this blog, in the Light Fantastic documentary series, we saw Thomas Young was able to account for color by arguing that light must be some sort of wave: different frequencies would produce different colors.
Well, given its strange history, it should come as no surprise to you by now that light would conceal even more mysteries. In the following short clip, Brian Cox explains Einstein's photoelectric effect and his challenge to the wave theory of light, all of which opens the door for an explanation of one of Richard Feynman's greatest contributions to physics: quantum electrodynamics, as well as the justification for building the Large Hadron Collider.
Of course, if Brian Cox isn't your cup of tea, you can also hear a description of QED from Feynman himself in this classic jewel. .
Philosophy has traditionally been done from the proverbial arm-chair. Sure, we may not have fancy science labs, or Large Hadron Colliders, but what we lack in physical equipment, we try to make up for with sheer mental power and exquisitely designed thought experiments.
And if you've ever taken a few philosophy and/or ethics courses, this cartoon will make soooo much sense to you... or bring back some painful memories :)
And you get extra points if you got all the references.
In a civilized and thought-provoking debate that took place just this past week in Toronto, former British Prime Minister and recent Catholic convert Tony Blair defended the motion that religion is a force for good in the world. Opposing the motion with all his cerebral might was his compatriot, the journalist and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens.
