@Randy - blog

Cosmos. A true Journey. - @randy

Sat, 06 May 2017 04:37:04 -0400

Watch. Listen. Enjoy. Learn. Understand. Grow. Become a better human being.

How small and insignificant. - @randy

Wed, 23 Dec 2015 00:14:28 -0500

How vast these Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is compared to them. A very fit consideration, and matter of Reflection, for those Kings and Princes who sacrifice the Lives of so many People, only to flatter their Ambition in being Masters of some pitiful corner of this small Spot.
Christiaan Huygens, New Conjectures Concerning the Planetary Worlds, Their Inhabitants and Productions, c 1690

More Thoughts of Richard Dawson from his book 'The God Delusion', Mono and Polytheism - @randy

Thu, 15 Oct 2015 19:16:10 -0400

Polytheism
It is not clear why the change from polytheism to monotheism should be assumed to be a self-evident progressive improvement. But it widely is - an assumption that provoked Ibn Warraq (author of Why I Am Not A Muslim) wittily to conjecture that monotheism is in turn doomed to subtract one more god and become atheism. The Catholic Encyclopedia dismisses polytheism and atheism in the same insouciant breath: 'Formal dogmatic atheism is self refuting, and has never de facto won the reasoned assent of any considerable number of men. Nor can polytheism, however it may take hold of the popular imagination, ever satisfy the mind of a philosopher.'
Monotheistic chauvinism was until recently written into the charity laws of both England and Scotland, discriminating against polytheistic religions in granting tax-exempt status, while allowing an easy ride to charities whose object was to promote monotheistic religion, sparing them the rigorous vetting quite properly required of secular charities. It was my ambition to persuade a member of Britain's respected Hindu community to come forward and bring civil action to test this snobbish discrimination against polytheism.
Far better would be to abandon the promotion of religion altogether as grounds for charitable status. The benefits of this to society would be great, especially in the United States, where the sums of tax-free money sucked in by churches, and polishing the heels of already well-heeled televangelists, reach levels that can only be described as obscene. The aptly named Oral Roberts once told his television audience that God would kill him unless they gave him $8 million Almost unbelievably, it worked. Tax-free! Roberts himself is still going strong (NOTE, this book was written in 2006 when Roberts was still alive) as is 'Oral Roberts University' of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It's buildings valued at $250 million, were commissioned by God himself in these words: Raise up your student to hear My voice, to go where My light is dim, where My voice is heard small, and My healing power is not known, even to the utter-most bounds of the Earth. Their work will exceed yours, and in this I am well pleased.'
On reflection, my Hindu litigator would have been as likely to play the 'If you can't beat them, join them' card. His polytheism isn't really polytheism but monotheism in disguise. There is only one God - Lord Brahma the creator, Lord Vishnu the preserver, Lord Shiva the destroyer, the goddesses Saraswati, Laxmi, and Parvati (wives of the Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva), Lord Ganesh the elephant god, and hundreds of others, all are just different manifestations or incarnations of one God.
Christians should warm to such sophistry. Rivers of medieval ink, not to mention blood, have been squandered over the 'mystery' of the Trinity, and in suppressing deviations such as the Arian heresy. Arius of Alexandria, in the fourth century AD, denied that Jesus was consubstantial (i.e. of the same substance or essence) with God. What on Earth could that possibly mean, you are probably asking? Substance? What 'substance'? What exactly do you mean by 'essence'? 'Very little' seems to be the only reasonable reply. Yet the controversy split Christendom down the middle for a century, and the Emperor Constantine ordered all copies of Arius's book should be burned. Splitting Christendom by splitting hairs - such has ever been the way of theology
Do we only have one God in three parts, or three Gods in one? The Catholic Encyclopedia clears the matter up for us, in a masterpiece of theological close reasoning;
In the unity of the Godhead there are three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, these three Persons being truly distinct one from another. Thus, in the words of the Athanasian Creed: 'the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there are not three Gods but one God'
As if that were not clear enough, the Encyclopedia quotes the third-centuray theologian St Gregory the Miracle Worker:

There is therefore nothing created, nothing subject to another in the Trinity: nor is there anything that has been added as tough it once had not existed, but had entered afterward: therefore the Father has never been without the Son, nor the Son without the Holy Spirit: and this trinity is immutable and unalterable forever.
Whatever miracles may have earned St. Gregory his nickname, they were not miracles of honest lucidity. His words convey the characteristically obscurantist flavor of theology, which - unlike science or most other branches of human scholarship - has not moved on in eighteen centuries. Thomas Jefferson, as so often, got it right when he said, 'Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man has ever had a distinct idea of the Trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.'
Richard Dawkins. Portion of Chapter two of 'The God Delusion"

More Richard Dawkins. Selected chapters and thoughts of his from his best selling book 'The God Delusion.' - @randy

Wed, 14 Oct 2015 23:13:45 -0400

A deeply religious non-believer
I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe to at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.
Albert Einstien
Deserved respect
The boy lies prone in the grass , his chin resting on his hands. He suddenly found himself overwhelmed by a heightened awareness of the tangled stems and roots, a forest in microcosm, a transfigured world of ants and beetles and even - though he wouldn't have known the details at the time - of soil bacteria by the billions, silently and invisibly shoring up the economy of the micro-world. Suddenly the micro-forest of the turf seemed to swell and become one with the universe, and with the rapt boy contemplating it. He interpreted the experience in religious terms and it led him eventually to the priesthood. He was ordained an Anglican priest and became a chaplain at my school, a teacher of whom I was fond. It is thanks to decent liberal clergymen like him that nobody could ever claim that religion that I had religion forced down my throat.
In another time and place, that boy could have been me under the stars, dazzled with Orion, Cassiopeia a Ursa Major, tearful at the unheard music of the Milky Way, heady with the night scents of frangipani and trumpet flowers in an African garden. Why the same emotion should have led my chaplain in one direction and me in the other is not an easy question to answer. A quasi-mystical response to nature is common among scientists and rationalists. It has no connection with supernatural belief. In his boyhood at least, my chaplain was presumably not aware (nor was I) of the closing lines of The Origin of the Species - the famous 'entangled bank' passage, 'with birds singing in the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth.' Had he been, he certainly would have identified with it and, instead of the priesthood, might have been led to Darwin's view that all was 'produced by laws acting around us':
Thus from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with it's several powers, having been breathed into few forms or one; and that, whilst the planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been made.
Carl Sagan, in Blue Dot, wrote:
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better then we thought! The Universe is much bigger then our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
All Sagan's books touch the nerve-endings of transcendent wonder that religion monopolized in past centuries. Consequently I hear myself often described as a deeply religious man. An American student wrote to me that she had asked her professor whether he had a view about me. 'Sure," He replied "He's positive science is incompatible with religion, but he waxes ecstatic about the nature of the universe To me, that is religion!' But is 'religion' the right word? I don't think so. The Nobel Prize winning Physicist (and atheist) Steven Weinberg made the point as well as anybody, in Dreams of a Final Theory:
Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that "God is the ultimate' or 'God is our better nature' or that ' God is the universe.' Of course, like any other word "God" can be given and meaning we wlike. If you want to say "God is energy,' then you can find God in a lump of coal.
Wienberg is surely right that, if the word God is not to become useless, it should be used in the way people have generally understood it: to denote a supernatural creator that is 'appropriate for us to worship.'
Much unfortunate confusion is caused by the failure to distinguish what can be called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion. Einstein sometimes invoked the name of god (and he is not the only atheistic scientist to do so), inviting misunderstanding by super-naturalists eager to misunderstand and claim so illustrious a thinker as their own. The dramatic (or was it mischievous?) ending of Stephan Hawking's A Brief History of Time, ''For then we should know the mind of God', is notoriously misconstrued. It has led people to believe, mistakenly of course, that Hawking is a religious man. The cell biologist, Ursula Goodenough, in The Sacred Depths of Nature, sounds more religious then Hawking or Einstein. She loves churches, mosques and temples, and numerous passages in her book fairly beg to be taken out of context and used as ammunition for supernatural religion. She goes so far as to call herself a 'Religious Naturist.' Yet a careful reading of her book shows that she is as staunch an atheist as I am.
'Naturalist' is an ambiguous word. For me it conjures up my childhood hero, Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle (who by the way had more than a touch of the 'philosopher' naturalist of the HMS Beagle about him). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, naturalist meant what it still means for most of us today, a student of the natural world. Naturalists in this sense, from Gilbert White on, have often been clergymen. Darwin himself was destined for the Church as a young man, hoping that the leisurely life of a country parson would enable him to pursue his passion for beetles. But philosophers use 'naturalist' in a very different sense, as the opposite of super-naturalist. Julian Baggini explains in Atheism: A Very Short Introduction the meaning of an atheist's commitment to naturalism: 'What most atheists do believe is that although there is only one kind of stuff in the universe and it is physical, out of this stuff come minds, beauty, emotions, moral values - in short the full gamut of phenomena that gives richness to human life.'
Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections of physical entities in the brain. An atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is someone who believes that there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles - except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don't yet understand. If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it now imperfectly understood, we hope to eventually understand it and embrace it within the natural. As ever, when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.
Richard Dawkins. First part of chapter one, first four and a half pages of his book 'The God Delusion'
I have published this part now as it has occurred to me that there will be many people who will not understand other parts of chapters or thoughts of his without understanding him as an atheist more closely. And that this is a very serious subject, not given to easy cliches.

Dawkins. Selected chapters and thoughts of his from his best selling book "The God Delusion. - @randy

Wed, 14 Oct 2015 03:51:11 -0400

Why there is almost certainly no God.
The Priests of the different religious sects...dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivisions of the duperies on which they live'
Thomas Jefferson
The Ultimate Boeing 747
The argument from improbability is the big one. It is the traditional guise of the argument of design., it is easily today's most popular argument offered on favor of the existence of God and it is seen, by an amazingly large number of theists, as completely and utterly convincing. It is indeed a very strong and, I suspect, argument - but in the precisely the opposite direction from the theist's intention. The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving the God does not exist. My name for the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is the Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit.
The name comes from Fred Hoyle's amusing image of the Boeing 747 and the scrapyard. I am not sure if Hoyle ever wrote it down himself, but it was attributed to him by his close colleague Chanra Wickramasinghe and is presumably authentic. Hoyle said that the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater then the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard would have the luck of assembling a Boeing 747. Others later have borrowed this metaphor to refer to the later evolution of complex living bodies, where is has been a spurious plausibility. The odds against assembling a fully functioning horse or beetle or ostrich by randomly shuffling it's parts are up there in 747 territory This, in a nutshell, is the creationists favorite argument - an argument that could only by made somebody who doesn't understand the first thing about natural selection: somebody who thinks natural selection is a theory of chance whereas - in the relevant sense of chance - it is the opposite.
The creationists misappropriation of the argument from improbability always takes the same general form, and it doesn't make any difference if the creationist chooses to masquerade in the politically expedient fancy dress of 'intelligent design' (Intelligent design has been unkindly referred to as creationism in a cheap tuxedo). Some observed phenomenon - often a living creature or one of it more complex organs, but it could be anything from a molecule up to the universe itself - is correctly extolled as statistically improbable. Sometime the language of informational theory is used: the Darwinian is challenged to explain the source of all of the information of living matter, in the technical sense of information content as a measure of improbability or 'surprise value'. Or the argument may invoke the economist's hackneyed motto: there is no free lunch - and Darwinism is accused of trying to get something for nothing. In fact, as I shall show in this chapter, Darwinian natural selection is the only know solution to the otherwise unanswerable riddle of where the information comes from. It turns out to be the God Hypothesis that tries to get something for nothing. God tries to have it's free lunch and be it too. However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the ultimate 747.
The argument from improbability states that complex things could not have come about by chance. But many people define 'come about by chance's as a synonym for 'come about in the absence of deliberate design'. Not surprisingly, therefore, they think improbability is of design. Darwinian natural selection shows how wrong this is with respect to biological improbability. And although Darwinism may not be directly relevant to the inanimate world - cosmology, for example - it raises our consciousness in areas outside of it's original territory of biology.
A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance., and teaches us to seek out growing ramps of slowly increaseing complexity. Before Darwin, philosophers such as Hume understood that the improbability of life did not mean it had to be designed, but they couldn't imagine the alternative. After Darwin, we should all feel deep in our bones, suspicious of the very idea of design. The illusion of design is a trap that has caught us before, and Darwin should have immunized us by raising our consciousness. Would that he had succeed with all of us.
Richard Dawkins. The God Delusion. Beginning of chapter four.