The BBC’s head of tv news, Peter Horrocks, last week wrote this on his blog:

BBC News certainly does not have a line on climate change, however the weight of our coverage reflects the fact that there is an increasingly strong (although not overwhelming) weight of scientific opinion in favour of the proposition that climate change is happening and is being largely caused by man.

This is good stuff. The media generally fails spectacularly at science coverage because the usually-reasonable journalistic standard of ‘fairness’ requires them to present an opposing viewpoint. In the 90’s the whole of the medical industry was screaming that MMR was safe, yet every reporter felt it necessary to interview one of the very few crazies on the basis that it’s a balanced view, often followed by ‘viewers get to decide’. Unfortunately, this decision is the necessarily based on a misrepresentation of the facts.

It’s the same today with global warming: the vast majority of climatologists think it extremely likely that a) global warming is happening (actually, nobody doubts this) and b) it is very likely that man is causing it, yet the deniers get just as much coverage, if not more. The problem is that, unlike politics, a scientific consensus has genuine authority.

Because the process of science is so ruthless - the job of your colleagues is to destroy your arguments - and disparate - hundreds of countries with thousands of independent organisations and millions of scientists from every part of the political spectrum - a consensus of opinion is genuinely valuable, and isn’t suddenly turned into a 50/50 probability when a lone-hero / complete whackjob (take your pick) starts claiming everybody else is wrong. The scientific method will assess the validity of their arguments, because that’s the only authority with the expertise to do so. The results cannot be published by any ultimate authority, because science has no such authority¹ but must be gleamed from consensus opinion. It may even turn out to be wrong in the long run, but it’s the only way that can possibly work. No journalist can accurately assess the merits of a scientific claim, given their lack of time and expertise, so the only sensible approach is to report in a way correlated with the scientific opinion.

To hear exactly such a conclusion coming from a head of BBC news was very encouraging. Then came this:

The BBC has scrapped plans for Planet Relief, a TV special on climate change.

The decision comes after executives said it was not the BBC’s job to lead opinion on climate change.

(…) But against the backdrop of intense internal debates about impartiality, senior news editors expressed misgivings that Planet Relief was too “campaigning” in nature and would have left the Corporation open to the charge of bias.

“It is absolutely not the BBC’s job to save the planet,” warned Newsnight editor Peter Barron at the Edinburgh Festival last month.

Head of TV news Peter Horrocks, writing in the BBC News website’s editors’ blog, commented: “It is not the BBC’s job to lead opinion or proselytise on this or any other subject.”

The BBC clearly feel happy to present the opinions of climate-change activists in a large way - Live Earth shows this - and to balance their news output according to scientific opinion, but are uncomfortable with organising anything themselves. This almost seems reasonable, but how does it fit with Comic Relief? There are plenty of conservatives who might argue that the suffering of children in other countries is nothing to do with us Brits - how dare the BBC ‘proselytise’? Of course, most people consider this morally unambiguous - of course the BBC should do everything it can to help people who are suffering.

But what’s the difference between campaigning against African suffering, and campaigning against a climate change that will cause similar suffering in the future? Is it the immediate visuals? I doubt it. I think it’s more likely what’s alluded to in the above - the BBC would be left open to a charge of bias. Because climate change is so politicised, and because much of the country thinks, wrongly, that there’s some major scientific debate as to whether it’s man-made, the standing of the BBC probably would suffer if it were to take an active position. It’s not an easy position for them.

I must point out that the BBC have said:

Our audiences tell us they are most receptive to documentary or factual style programming as a means of learning about the issues surrounding this subject, and as part of this learning we have made the decision not to proceed with the Planet Relief event.

Instead we will focus our energies on a range of factual programmes on the important and complex subject of climate change. This decision was not made in light of the recent debate around impartiality.

Which isn’t unreasonable. It’s certainly better than Channel 4’s outright promotion of global warming deniers.

I have no problem with an activist BBC, when it comes to scientific issues. Their news departments may not want to ‘lead opinion or proselytise’, but, providing it’s done according to evidence, I don’t see why the BBC shouldn’t lead the way. They have a huge amount of influence, and even, possibly, a moral duty.

Rather than a Comic Relief-style show, how about an evening of detailed analysis? The BBC have a huge expertise when it comes to presenting knowledge in an accessible way - why not put this into explaining, as clearly as possible, why the climatologists are correct? You could even have a section explaining why the deniers are wrong. I guess people might not watch, but I suspect there are many people with the interest but without the time or knowledge to do any research themselves. Which is perfectly understandable. I wonder whether it could work.

1. enormous UN studies nonwithstanding [↩]

I believe some people get their science news from the Daily Mail:

The colour of your eyes could determine your achievements in life, say scientists.

They claim those with blue eyes are more likely to sparkle academically than those with brown.

They are more intelligent and gain more qualifications because they study more effectively and perform better in exams.

The ’scientists’ are a study by the University of Louisville. Little more information is forthcoming on their website. The Guardian thinks it’s probably a bogus conclusion. I suspect they’re right. But the DM forges on, boldly going where no brain has gone before:

The discovery might help explain the success of such disparate individuals as Stephen Hawking, Alexander Fleming, Marie Curie, Stephen Fry and Lily Cole.

Yes. Scientists have for years been in need of ‘help’ to explain this phenomenon. These people don’t look anything like each other - what could possibly explain their shared success? It must be their blue eyes - it’s so obvious!

I’d planned the post in my head. I was going to talk about Richard Dawkins’ new Channel 4 show: The Enemies of Reason. The Telegraph describes it with:

The 66-year-old scientist has investigated a range of gurus and therapists, including faith healers, psychic mediums, angel therapists, “aura photographers”, astrologers, Tarot card readers and water diviners, and concluded that Britain is gripped by “an epidemic of superstitious thinking”.

I was going to predict responses to the show. I reckoned there’d be a couple of types. Comment Is Free might have a few “science is a faith and doesn’t have all the answers and there’s actually something to all this stuff”, and the Guardian itself would have “yes of course it’s all nonsense, but don’t you see that it makes people happy and it’s a bit mean to attack it. Also Richard Dawkins is a fundamentalist and the show would be better presented by someone else”. But I wasn’t quick enough: Melanie Phillips got in there first¹.

I know she’s usually a bit, um, extreme, but this is just nuttery of the highest order. And it starts off so well:

In a TV programme to be shown later this month, Dawkins looks at a range of ludicrous therapies and gurus, including faith healers, psychic mediums, ‘angel therapists’, ‘aura photographers’, astrologers and others. Not surprisingly, he is horrified by such widespread irrationality, not to mention an exploitative industry that fleeces people while encouraging them to run away from reality.

He is right to be alarmed. What previously belonged to the province of the quack and the charlatan has become mainstream. The NHS provides funding for shamans, while the NHS Directory for Alternative and Complementary Medicine promotes ‘dowsers’, ‘flower therapists’ and ‘crystal healers’.

She agrees! Wow. I was expecting the first type of response.

Disturbing indeed. But where Dawkins goes wrong[...]

Right, here we go.

But where Dawkins goes wrong is to assume this is all as irrational as believing in God. The truth is that it is the collapse of religious faith that has prompted the rise of such irrationality.

What? Seems like a non-sequitur, but whatever. The collapse of religious faith is to blame for the rise in irrationality? This seems immediately unlikely as much of the irrationality has been around for a long, long time. The murder of Abraham Lincoln prompted massive conspiracy theories. Astrology has been around for centuries. Alternative medicine could only really be seen for what it is once evidence-based medical science came into being, but would seem to be far more in response to that than anything religious. In Britain religious faith is down, but it’s had a massive resurgence in the US, which is also a major stronghold for all types of the irrationality being discussed. So I’m not sure the timeline really works. But let’s see how she backs this up…

We are living in a scientific, largely postreligious age in which faith is presented as unscientific superstition. Yet paradoxically, we have replaced such faith by belief in demonstrable nonsense. It was GK Chesterton who famously quipped that ‘when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.’ So it has proved. But how did it happen?

Proof by repeating yourself, apparently. All right then, how did it happen?

The big mistake is to see religion and reason as polar opposites. They are not. In fact, reason is intrinsic to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The Bible provides a picture of a rational Creator and an orderly universe — which, accordingly, provided the template for the exercise of reason and the development of science.

So, let’s get this straight. The whole world has stopped believing in god, apparently. Everybody sees religion and reason as opposites, so they’ve taken up irrational things in its stead, despite having rejected religion for rational reasons. I’m not really following this. But, anyway, it’s not even true because religion and reason aren’t opposites. We know this because it says so in a magic book, and we should believe anything written in magic books.

Dawkins pours particular scorn on the Biblical miracles which don’t correspond to scientific reality. But religious believers have different ways of regarding those events, with many seeing them as either metaphors or as natural occurrences which were invested with a greater significance.

I wonder if she’s been reading Alister McGrath - he’s always going on about ’significance’. Still not sure what her point is. Magic book says things happened. Dawkins says they probably didn’t. Melanie Phillips says they didn’t and are of course metaphors. So? Presumably she doesn’t deny all the miracles - virgin births, a child of a god, resurrection etc. etc.? If she denies it all, she has little in common with most Christians I’ve read. She’s using the initially-persuasive idea that the Bible can be interpreted in such a way as to make logical sense. Which still doesn’t mean it’s true, but would be a start. Sam Harris and others would argue that the Bible is such a mess of contradictions that there’s no way to interpret it without simply ignoring the parts you don’t like. But I digress.

The heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief in the concept of truth, which gives rise to reason. But our postreligious age has proclaimed that there is no such thing as objective truth, only what is ‘true for me’.

Knew we’d get to relativism eventually. Note that Dawkins isn’t mentioned here. Not one of the ‘New Atheists’/'Fundamentalist Atheists’/whatever has any truck with relativism. Nor do the vast majority of scientists, as far as I’m aware. I never understand how people so willing to read Christian theology can be so ignorant of secular philosophy, which pretty much rejects relativism outright. I also strongly doubt that any sizeable percentage of the population think there’s no such thing as objective truth (outside of postmodernism students, anyway), but then I can’t really back that up.

That is because our society won’t put up with anything which gets in the way of ‘what I want’. How we feel about things has become all-important. So reason has been knocked off its perch by emotion, and thinking has been replaced by feelings.

This has meant our society can no longer distinguish between truth and lies by using evidence and logic. And this collapse of objective truth has, in turn, come to undermine science itself which is playing a role for which it is not fitted.

What? Scientists now don’t believe in objective truth, so science doesn’t work any more? What? I’m not a sociologist, but I’m pretty sure all her statements about society are complete nonsense.

When science first developed in the West, it thought of itself merely as a tool to explore the natural world. It did not pour scorn upon religion; indeed, scientists were overwhelmingly religious believers (as many still are).

Oh, for crying out loud. Yes, Newton was religious. With the information he had, it made sense. Before the theory of evolution came along it was pretty damned hard to see any other explanation. But now, with the evidence we have, religious belief is undoubtedly irrational. If Newton were around today, it’s reasonable to think he wouldn’t be religious.

In modern times, however, science has given rise to ’scientism’, the belief that science can answer all the questions of human existence. This is not so. Science cannot explain the origin of the universe. Yet it now presumes to do so and as a result it has descended into irrationality.

No it doesn’t. That’s just not true. There are plenty of questions on which science hands over to philosophy. There are incredibly speculative ideas as to how the universe started, sure, but nobody with scientific credibility claims to have actually explained it. I don’t think it’s necessarily a question outside of science, though. We just don’t know. Presumably she doesn’t mean ‘how the universe started’, she means ‘why there’s something rather than nothing’, but the same applies.

The most conspicuous example of this is provided by Dawkins himself, who breaks the rules of scientific evidence by seeking to claim that Darwin’s theory of evolution — which sought to explain how complex organisms evolved through random natural selection — also accounts for the origin of life itself.

No he doesn’t. This is also completely false. In fact he specifically says that evolution doesn’t account for that. Biochemistry is investigating that particular problem. It depends what she means by ‘the origin of life’, of course. Does she mean consciousness? Cells? Things that evolve?

There is no evidence for this whatever and no logic to it. After all, if people say God could not have created the universe because this gives rise to the question ‘Who created God?’, it follows that if scientists say the universe started with a big bang, this prompts the further question ‘What created the bang?’ Indeed, if the origin of life were truly spontaneous, this would constitute what religious people would call a miracle. Accordingly, this claim in itself resembles not so much science as the superstition that Dawkins derides.

I’m not sure she isn’t confusing the origin of the universe with the origin of life, but whatever. It might be that the origin of life is extremely unlikely - indeed, it seems that it took millions and millions of years for (presumably) one chance event to occur - but that’s not ’spontaneous’ any more than the weather is ’spontaneous’.

Moreover, since science essentially takes us wherever the evidence leads, the findings of more than 50 years of DNA research — which have revealed the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life — have thrown into doubt the theory that life emerged spontaneously in a random universe.

Uh oh. She’s not going to…she wouldn’t, would she?

These findings have given rise to a school of scientists promoting the theory of Intelligent Design, which suggests that some force embodying purpose and foresight lay behind the origin of the universe.

She did. I don’t believe it.

While this theory is, of course, open to vigorous counter-argument, people such as Prof Dawkins and others have gone to great lengths to stop it being advanced at all, on the grounds that it denies scientific evidence such as the fossil record and is therefore worthless.

A bit, but not really. The problem with intelligent design is that it’s not science. It makes no predictions. It has no causal mechanisms. It hinges completely on the idea that if evolution is wrong, god must have done it. It occupies the infinite space of crap-I-made-up-ness. I could say that the process of evolution is actually controlled by an intelligent and incredibly tiny bumblebee named Gordon. It’s possible, but a) if evolutionary theory is wrong, it doesn’t mean Gordon is real, and b) until I can provide any kind of experiment that would provide a different outcome for evolution vs. Gordon’s Design, how can we know? There are an infinite number of things that could be true, and we believe what the evidence suggests and nothing more. The reason scientists and rational thinkers have tried to stop intelligent design progressing is that it has no substance.

Yet distinguished scientists have been hounded and their careers jeopardised for arguing that the fossil record has got a giant hole in it. Some 570 million years ago, in a period known as the Cambrian Explosion, most forms of complex animal life emerged seemingly without any evolutionary trail. These scientists argue that only ‘rational agents’ could have possessed the ability to design and organise such complex systems.

Oh, man. There are any number of books which explain the Cambrian explosion. It’s actually really, really cool. I’m surprised she didn’t bring up punctuated equilibrium, but then she has just claimed all scientists are incapable of performing science. I like how she mentions the Cambrian problem, then tries to get out of it:

Whether or not they are right (and I don’t know), their scientific argument about the absence of evidence to support the claim that life spontaneously created itself is being stifled — on the totally perverse grounds that this argument does not conform to the rules of science which require evidence to support a theory.

There is no such claim, so their argument is bogus. You don’t need to be a scientist to understand this point.

As a result of such arrogance, the West — the crucible of reason — is turning the clock back to a pre-modern age of obscurantism, dogma and secular witch-hunts. Far from upholding reason, science itself has become unreasonable.

And thus, the whole of science is now ‘unreasonable’ because of, even from her viewpoint, a spat limited to evolutionary theory.

So when Prof Dawkins fulminates against ‘new age’ irrationality, it is the image of pots and kettles that comes irresistibly to mind.

Aha! I knew it!

So: the world went all rational and rejected religion. Religion, though, is secretly rational, and people are therefore rejecting rationality. So they now believe in all sorts of crap. This breaks science, because all scientists no longer believe in objective truth and think they can explain everything without using any kind of logic. This results in heroic evolution-deniers being silenced by conspiracies. Yes, looking at this evidence it does seem like religious belief lends itself to rational thinking. Also, Richard Dawkins is wrong about everything, and the program would better be presented by someone else.

I know it was fish in a barrel. I know I probably shouldn’t pay attention to such nonsense. But it was an incredibly annoying fish.

1. I wrote all the below before showing the article to my girlfriend, who said ‘yeah, it’s Melanie Phillips’. Which is a fair point. But as it’s written I might as well publish [↩]

This is interesting: the results of a large electrosensitivity study will be published on Wednesday, and both sides of the debate are looking forward to its findings. Panorama recently cited it as positive evidence, despite its results not being available, and it’s been widely publicised as a consequence. The methodology is known, and (to my, non-expert) eyes seems to be valid:

We tested 56 people who suffered from EHS as well as 120 people who did not. In order to be scientifically valid, the study was conducted under “double-blind” conditions. This simply means that neither the person conducting the research, nor the person being tested knew when the base-station was “on” or “off”. Once we had completed the data collection phase (testing all our participants) we were able to “crack the code” and see to what extent the electromagnetic fields affected a variety of symptoms that people had reported, as well as measures of blood pressure and heart-rate.

Full details here, including the power output of the ‘base station’.

The electrosensitivity blogosphere has apparently been making noises about this study, and skeptics-hero Ben Goldacre has proposed an agreement: everybody write their analysis of the methodology before the results are published, then commit to covering the results, no matter which way they go. Assuming they don’t reveal a load more information about the methodology tomorrow, this should make ad hoc refutations blindingly obvious, on either side.

There have been many studies of this kind before. According to Mr Goldacre negative studies outweigh the positive, and the latter are all either statistically flawed, contradictory or have results that can’t be repeated by the same researchers. But it doesn’t seem to have helped much, and more evidence is always good. Either way, the results will be interesting. Electrosensitivity, coupled with the supposed dangers of phone masts, are increasingly prevalent in the public consciousness, and if an effect really exists it would clearly be a major health issue. If it doesn’t, though, it needs to stop being bandied about by the media as a scare story. Also, people are clearly suffering with something, and more evidence of what is isn’t can only help narrow down what it is.

Written ‘live’, so not particularly coherent:

—–

Is anyone else watching Panorama? They’re scaremongering over wifi radiation. The notorious Powerwatch just got a plug, and various permutations of ‘electromagnetic smog’ are turning up every couple of minutes, along with calling routers ‘mini-masts’. It’s pretty strong stuff - some guy just claimed it could cause chromosome damage, cancer etc. - but it’s pretty appalling journalism, imho.

They’re talking to many ‘world-renowned experts’ who are for some reason only available via the internet. They keep throwing out phrases like ‘its safety is not yet proven’. Now they’re talking to electrohypersensitives! This is mixing implausible but vaguely plausible health worries with very fringe ideas. There was just an odd look at a study into whether ‘hypersensitives’ can detect radiation gave ‘inconclusive’ results, which were skipped over in favour of the test subject’s own personal feelings on the matter (she’s installed silver foil all around her bedroom). I have sympathy with ‘electrohypersensitives’ in that they’re clearly suffering, but from what I’ve read the symptoms - headaches, trouble sleeping etc.. - are generic problems that can be caused by many many things. And radiation exposure has been studied a lot. As has electrosensitivity, as people have had exactly the same fears since TV started broadcasting.

We’ve now got (made up) figures indicating over two million UK electrohypersensitives that - profound tone of voice - the government is ignoring. And now we’re slagging off the World Health Organisation in favour of one UK investigator.

They have at least interviewed one of the (apparently) head scientists in charge of setting health limits, but poisoned the well by claiming he’s a controversial figure as he testified on behalf of mobile phone companies who want to place masts in controversial areas. But the danger of such radiation is the very issue being discussed! He claims that the weight of scientific evidence is very much in favour of there being no danger, but the programme is heavily hinting that this is not to be believed. Why aren’t they paying attention to the huge number of studies which show no problem? I thought this was meant to be a serious programme?

—–

I’m glad to see it’s not me being sensitive: the Bad Science forums and now the front page are talking about it. They both want to know why the background of the head scientist was queried, but the Powerwatch guy was given a free ride. There’s also a sensible rebuttal in today’s Guardian.

We’ve had various discussions on organic food here, and the BBC today has a short article looking at the evidence for industry claims. It pretty much comes to the same conclusions: ‘organic’ is a wide-ranging term that can’t be easily summed up, but plenty of the claims are dubious at best. One part is particularly telling. The British Nutrition Foundation studied the topic and came to the conclusion that there is not enough evidence to claim organic food is healthier. The Food Standards Agency agree. Yet here’s the official response:

But science alone cannot prove the point, says Lord Peter Melchett, a director of the Soil Association, who believes consumers must trust their instincts.

“Science doesn’t tell us the answers so some of it we have to go on feelings,” he says.

Yes, it’s out of context. But still, that’s a hell of a thing to say when simultaneously marketing organic food as being the healthier option.

Last night we went to see Sunshine - Danny Boyle’s new sci-fi action thriller. We both enjoyed it. In a future where the sun is dying, a spacecraft sets out to reignite it using a payload with the mass of Manhattan. I can’t think of any valid physics behind this either, but it’s one of those premises you just have to accept. Once you do the rest of the science is perfectly valid - none of the innovative situations the crew found themselves in were solved using completely ridiculous ideas or ghosts in the machine, and I thought it was rather clever on the whole. The only exception was such a massive ship being quite so maneuverable, but that’s not so big a deal. I want better AI on my spaceship, though.

I thought it was well-crafted and fairly unpredictable. It was stylish with gorgeous visuals, and the atmosphere confined without quite being claustrophobic. Space was black and deadly - it was very Alien in this respect - and the sun a horror. The special effects were seamless, of course, and never brought you out of the film. I’m told Cillian Murphy is as pretty as Rose Byrne, too. Recommended by me.

From the BBC:

Celebrities have been asked to check their facts before lending support to scientific research and campaigns, rather than risk misleading people.

Some celebrity-backed campaigns have done more harm than good, such as linking the MMR jab to autism, says the charity Sense About Science.

Seems like a worthy sentiment. Then comes this:

[An advice pamphlet] offers advice such as “if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is”, and lists a phone number for concerned celebrities to call if they want to discuss anything with experts.

A helpline for celebrities requiring scientific advice. For some reason I find this incredibly funny.

I first saw Contact at a small cinema in eastern Australia when I was 14. I remember that it appealed to me because of Robert Zemeckis, still one of my favourite directors, as well as the obvious charms of Jodie Foster, but the film completely blew me away - far more than I was expecting. I’ve seen it many times since, and pick up on more with each screening, but one particular scene has stuck with me from that first time. During the last act Ellie Arroway looks through her spacecraft window to see the Milky Way. And it’s wondrous. The filmmakers got it just right, and I remember my breath catching at the awe-inspiring sight. The movie ends with the words ‘For Carl’, which I didn’t understand at the time.

A year or two later I came across the novel, which expands upon the film’s many themes and adds much more scientific detail. I found it a fascinating read, and was intrigued by the short biography of its author, a scientist called Carl Sagan. Who was this guy? Since when did scientists write fiction? And not just any old fiction, but stories of aliens and messages from other planets! Isn’t that scientific heresy?

His name turned up from time to time as I grew up, until I became properly interested in science at 19 and suddenly he was everywhere. It seemed that in the US he was responsible for inspiring a whole generation of scientists in a tv show called Cosmos. I felt like I’d missed out. If the show ever made it to the UK, I’d never seen it mentioned. I’d never seen his books on the shelves either, yet again and again I came across the same sentiment: read The Demon-Haunted World.

Not really available in the UK, the book languished on my wishlist for a while. I finally picked it up at a Kansas bookstore in 2004. I was reading it when ambushed by an evangelist in a Yosemite laundrette - I figured it would have been a betrayal not to fight back - and finished it on the flight home as everybody around me slept. Carl Sagan’s widow, Ann Druyan, recently told an interviewer that The Demon-Haunted World was written as Carl underwent three bone-marrow transplants. The host was audibly shocked, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a remarkable piece of work.

The Demon-Haunted World is an impassioned plea for reason, for the inherent virtue of truth and the power of skepticism. Along the way he demolishes, politely and eloquently, tales of alien abduction, ghosts, telepathy and other popular fictions. But more importantly The Demon-Haunted World is an ode to wonder. Carl Sagan was primarily an astronomer, and more than anybody I’ve read he manages to evoke in words a fraction of the feeling you get when looking at the stars. His enthusiasm for life oozes from every page:

The blueprints, detailed instructions and job orders for building you from scratch would fill about 1,000 encyclopedia volumes if written out in English. Yet every cell in your body has a set of these encyclopedias. A quasar is so far away that the light we see from it began its intergalactic voyage before the Earth was formed. Every person on Earth is descended from the same not-quite-human ancestors in Easy Africa a few million years ago, making us all cousins.

Whenever I think about any of these discoveries, I feel a tingle of exhilaration. My heart races. I can’t help it. Science is an astonishment and a delight. Every time a spacecraft flies by a new world, I find myself amazed. Planetary scientists ask themselves: “Oh, is that the way it is? Why didn’t we think of that?” But nature is always more subtle, more intricate, more elegant than we are able to imagine. Given our manifest human limitations, what is surprising is that we have been able to penetrate so far into the secrets of Nature.

Ellie represents us all when she gazes into the galaxy. Contact the novel ends with the discovery of a message encoded in the digits of pi, not because Carl believed in a higher power but to blast open by an order of magnitude the wonder we could appreciate. Imagine if we discovered evidence that the base laws of nature had been deliberately constructed - it doesn’t mean we have to start worshipping anything, it means that we get to explore further than we ever thought possible. It’s akin to Hubble realising the smudges in his telescope were not fuzzy stars but entire galaxies. Reality just squared itself. Googoled itself, perhaps.

But coupled with this celebration of the universe is a fierce adoration of our own experience. Like Richard Feynman, Carl despised the idea that explanation reduces wonder. Even if we can one day fully explain a mother’s love for her child, it’s still love and no less beautiful for it. More so, in fact, because we can look in awe at its workings.

This is what Carl Sagan means to me. To talk of awe and love is considered almost childish in the current climate, and cynicism and pessimism often rule the day. I’ve seen nobody who stood more firmly and brightly against it. One of the final sentences of Contact always brings me to tears:

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

Carl died ten years ago today, and this post was written as part of the the memorial Blog-a-thon. Thanks, Carl.

Thanks to Ed for pointing out a BBC article on the supposed health risks of wireless networks. Some guy goes on about their ‘transmitting a microwave into your brain’, then says:

“I see no evidence to suggest they could be harmful, but it takes an enormous amount of evidence to prove anything. I don’t understand the medical side very well but I do understand the technical side - that of frequency and power. That’s why I decided against installing a wireless network.”

Isn’t that a truly great quote? It’s broken in so many ways! The inventive use of ‘but’; the second sentence cancelling out what it’s trying to suggest; the definitive non sequitur at the end. Inspired.

Others claim they immediately started having headaches after a wireless network was enabled. Every time this is mentioned it’s difficult not to notice that knowledge of the wireless network came before the headaches, never the other way around. It’s very much like people who claim to suffer from ‘electrical sensitivity’, but can’t replicate it under controlled conditions. It all has an air of woo that has apparently turned up with with the introduction of many technologies, such as the original radio transmissions, or ozone from laser printers, or radiation from the first computers. It seems that once these things become commonplace the symptoms disappear.

After giving plenty of time to anecdotes, the article ends with a spokesman for the Health Protection Agency:

“In classrooms, a typical exposure is at 20 millionths of the guideline levels, whereas a mobile phone is 50% of guidelines,” says Dr Michael Clark, science spokesman for the Health Protection Agency.

“Twenty minutes on a mobile phone call is equivalent to a year in that classroom. It’s a completely different level of exposure. These are non-ionising radio waves. They’re not X-rays, or gamma rays, or ultra violet. It’s completely different in energy terms. I’m looking outside now and that’s electromagnetic radiation - visible light. Radio energies are a million times less energetic than ultraviolet light.”

The HPA finds no evidence of health risks, even for people using wifi-enabled laptops on their, um, laps. The World Health Organisation agrees. As the spokesman said, the average power density from using a mobile phone is much greater, but there seems to be no reasonable basis for thinking they cause harm either. As far as I can tell, even the evidence from the most extreme what-would-happen-if-we-glued-twenty-mobile-phones-to-a-baby’s-head-for-a-month studies is inconclusive. I think it’s fair to put this kind of low-frequency EMF radiation way down the scale of things to worry about.

The National Secular Society says:

Former Today editor Rod Liddle is set to launch a broadside against atheism in a programme for Channel 4 entitled The Trouble with Atheism – which will be broadcast on 18 December. Mr Liddle says he will demonstrate how similar atheism is to religion.

Sounds interesting. However, this is the guy who recently wrote, in the course of a Spectator interview with Richard Dawkins:

Which brings me to the difficult stuff — and Darwinism. It is a creed to which Dawkins cleaves with the fervour of the fundamentalist, the true believer. And it is the real chink in his armour. For example, because Darwin showed us that life forms progress from the simple to the complex over hundreds of thousands of years of gradual modification, it therefore follows (according to Dawkins) that there cannot have been a divine being present before the amoebae swam in those soupy oceans at Earth’s toddler stage — because he would have had to be more complex than those organisms which followed him. And that doesn’t fit with the theory.

What? Aside from the dubious characterisation (which is contradicted by the next paragraph anyway) I don’t think anyone’s ever argued that a deity couldn’t have existed at the primordial soup stage because it would have been more complex than that which followed it. That’s a strange argument, and there are indeed multiple problems with it. I’ve never heard it suggested that evolution actively disproves deities, it’s more that evolution provides an explanation for probably the largest evidence for the existence of a deity, namely that the natural world looks like it’s been designed. A deity becomes superfluous, so why believe in one? It’s possible he’s simplifying a superficially similar argument to do with the rather large question of the beginning of the universe, but that’s still to do with the probability of an inherently complex deity versus a simple process, not that it wouldn’t be possible due to increasing evolutionary complexity (not that evolution necessarily makes beings more complex, anyway).

Mr Liddle seems to have misunderstood the issues to the extent that he thinks the entire basis for disbelieving in a god hinges upon Darwin’s theory being entirely correct:

But what if the theory, in its entirety, doesn’t hold — as Dawkins concedes might be possible? Even now, a century and a half after Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, the notion of gradual, cumulative change in every case is being challenged (most recently by the evo-devo school, which believes that sudden change can occur within species within a single generation). Like all scientific theories, Darwinism will be amended — perhaps beyond recognition. Perhaps it will be discarded entirely. Either way, disavowing a divine being because it doesn’t quite fit in with another here-today-gone-tomorrow theory seems a tad peremptory. The question Dawkins can never satisfactorily answer is: what if Darwin was wrong? And yet, as a scientist, he must be aware that the likelihood is that Darwin was wrong here or there. In which case, where does that leave his philosophical argument?

“[T]he notion of gradual, cumulative change in every case is being challenged”? Ok, maybe, but it’s a long way from overturning current theory, and there’s more to evolution than just gradual changes. I don’t know all that much about the evo-devo school, but I’m pretty sure it still works on the basis of natural selection, no matter how large the generational mutations. But even if Darwin (and modern theory) somehow turned out to be wrong, it would make little difference to atheistic arguments because they’re not built upon evolution in the way Mr Liddle thinks. Sure, you’d have to find another explanation for the life’s complexity, but it would have to explain the vast amount of evidence showing ‘evolutionary’ lineages, and there’s no reason to immediately turn to a deity for this.

You also can’t just say that because scientific theories are continually revised - or ‘here-today-gone-tomorrow’ if you like - anything that follows from them (which the non-existence of god doesn’t anyway) is unreliable. That’s getting it backwards. The point is that predictions can be tested, and the theory is altered, supported or even discarded accordingly. By revising theories science hones in on the truth, and that’s very different from the “things change therefore there’s no point making predictions” attitude that Mr Liddle suggests. If all the evidence fits with a theory, it’s perfectly reasonable to come to tentative conclusions based upon it.

The whole article is really quite odd. I’ll watch the atheism show, but if it’s anything like the above I don’t hold out much hope.

Update on 19/12: I’ll update this when I’ve actually watched the show, but anybody looking for responses could do worse than see here (and not just because somebody in the comments linked to me), here and the comment thread here.

Some guy has managed to get onto BBC News with the standard evangelical gambit of ‘teach the controversy‘:

He says the GCSE syllabus requires children to appreciate how science works and understand the nature of scientific controversy.

“The government wants children to be exposed to scientific debate at the age of 14 or 15.

“All the Truth in Science stuff does is put forward stuff that says here’s a controversy. This is exactly the kind of thing that young people should be exposed to,” Mr Cowan added.

You can’t just make up scientific controversy. If I flooded schools with leaflets saying the Earth was flat, and as evidence quoted misunderstandings of round-earth-theory, this wouldn’t constitute a scientific controversy. What would? Hard to say, but if scientific literature was full of discussion of the topic that’d be a start. But, it’s not. Global warming is a good example of scientific controversy, but Intelligent Design is as scientifically controversial as Bigfoot. The article sums it up with:

Advocates of intelligent design say there are things that cannot be explained by evolution and so argue for the existence of a supernatural intelligence behind the creation of the universe.

Which is accurate, but not very informative. Intelligent Design does do this, but doesn’t actually provide any reason to go from one to the other. The approach is “evolution is wrong, therefore god”, which doesn’t follow logically. And, of course, the arguments against evolution don’t hold water.

He told the BBC: “Darwin has for many people become a sacred cow.

“There’s a sense that if you criticise Darwin you must be some kind of religious nut case.

“We might has well have said Einstein shouldn’t have said what he did because it criticised Newton.”

Talk about missing the point. Einstein didn’t criticise Newton, he put forward a theory that refined Newton’s work and, crucially, made predictions that could be used to test the veracity of the claims. The predictions were tested, and found to be true. Intelligent Design makes no predictions and provides no evidence for an alternative to evolution. It’s completely useless.

Mr Cowan is identified in the article as an ex chemistry teacher. There’s no mention of his being a young-earth creationist who thinks the reason there’s no evidence of dinosaurs and humans living simultaneously is that “they didn’t live near each other”.

Happily, it looks like the government isn’t paying any attention to this kind of nonsense, at least for the general curriculum. It’s possible they’re turning a blind eye elsewhere, as evidenced by Tony Blair’s odd recent comments (via TLH).

How long has the BBC been showing a UK-ified version of Mythbusters? It just came on after It Takes Two and was a very pleasant surprise. A bunch of US podcasts I listen to mention this show all the time. It involves two ex-special effects experts who test out urban myths. Today they’re firing thawed and frozen chickens into plane windscreens at 130mph and putting crash-test dummies into killer washing machines. They had to replace the washing machine motor with one from an electric car to even get it to spin with a person inside. My kind of show!

Hmmm, the wikipedia entry says it’s been going since July! Don’t know how I managed to miss that.

You know you’re in for an entertaining read when the first sentence of an article is:

We are witnessing the rise of an arrogant secularist rhetoric founded on belief in the supremacy of reason and absolute faith in science and progress, dogmas which arouse ridicule in serious academic and intellectual circles nowadays.

Fun or what? Beware of logical explosions in the following paragraphs:

“Reason” itself, whose praises they sing night and day, is a perpetually changing mixture of many overlapping elements. It is neither abstract, nor intentional and does not confront the rich, labyrinthine human world as its other. It is quintessentially imbedded therein, in its emotions, languages, historical experiences, religious traditions and cultural heritage. There is no such thing as an ahistoric reason.

I don’t think this makes any sense. Maybe it’s been ghost-written by the Pope.

This means that we do not have one but many rationalities, the Christian European, the Islamic, the Chinese, the Indian to name a few, each stamped by the specific conditions of its evolution, and in turn incorporating a multitude of sub-rationalities. Neither do these traditions of rationality exist isolated from each other. They have much in common, the product of the interactive and communicative activity of cultures.

Aristotle’s logos, Descartes’ intellect and Kant’s transcendental reason, are illusions, which no self-respecting thinker can afford to defend in the 21st century. The truth is that today’s self- proclaimed guardians of enlightenment and rationality are offshoots of the intellectual poverty of eighteenth century positivism and scienticism, who disfigure philosophy and thought, history and reality. They are the victims of what may be referred to as a sick secularist consciousness.

There are people who really say this stuff to each other, you know. I like the argument of redefining a word out of all meaning as an attempt to claim something doesn’t exist.

This feels unfinished. Something’s missing…what could it be…

Secularist dogmatism is no less dangerous than its religious sibling. Secularism itself can be, and indeed has been in many historical instances, highly destructive. We should remember that Europe’s modern history is scarred with the brutality of secular totalitarianism. Neither the Jacobites, fascists, Nazis or Stalinists were priests or theologians. They were fanatical secularists who worshipped in reason’s grand temple and sacrificed hundreds of thousands for the god of progress, fervently vowing to create a new man and a new world on the ruins of the old.

Ah yes, there we go No article of this nature is complete without mentioning Stalin at least once. Normally, though, the argument sounds at least vaguely plausible, even if it turns out to be a bit silly. Stalin, as far as I know, wasn’t acting as a result of non-belief in god, he was just your average dictator with access to 20th century technology. He was only using ‘reason’ in the same way that some Muslim fundamentalists ‘reasonably’ think that blowing themselves up guarantees them access to paradise. The problem is in the initial assumptions, which we can attack though logic and reason!

Nobody’s saying that religion is the only reason for hate and violence, just that it’s a major one. Simultaneously accusing ’secularists’ of attacking straw-men while saying things like “[c]ommunication, they insist, is only possible within uniformity.” is a little ironic, too.

All these words. Why are people so scared of having to back up their ideas? If you want to believe in a fairy in the sky, go right ahead, just don’t tell other people they have to think the same thing. If you want to do something that affects other people, you need back it up with evidence and a logical argument - some people call this ‘reason’, but you can call it rumplebumpkins if you like, it doesn’t change what it is. What’s wrong with that?

Don’t bother reading the whole thing, it’s just depressing.

I always say there’s no better way to spend a Saturday morning than to read a lecture given by the Pope. A recent speech has caused something of a fuss by mentioning Mohammed in relation to violence. It is apparently a huge shock that the Pope doesn’t like Islam much. It’s not like he’s head of a Church who think they have the monopoly on the truth and all other religions are wrong, or anything.

The pertinent point about Mohammed is made in setting up the idea of the argument between religion and reason. It’s not really making any statements about Islam, and actually works ok as a point, but let’s not pretend there aren’t thousands of other ways of introducing the idea. No matter what I may suspect about the critical faculties of the Vatican, there’s no way nobody realised that mentioning Islam in this context would cause a stir. It’s hard to see it as anything but deliberate.

Much of the reaction is because of the ‘offensive’ nature of the remarks. As articulated by the Labour Humanist, the demands for an apology are stupid. It’s a point of view; if you disagree you should argue with the idea, not the person’s right to say it. Some are complaining about the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church making comments about violence and religion, but that’s also silly - hypocrisy is always a crap argument as it says nothing about the question itself.

But the rest of the lecture is fascinating to read as an insight into the mind of a high-ranking religious official. Half of it is a description of the philosophical insanity that results from trying to insert unjustified faith into a rational worldview, and then comes a full-on attack on the idea of scientific reasoning. It reads like the ramblings of a madman. How else to explain this kind of thing:

In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God’s voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God’s freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazn and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God’s transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which - as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated - unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos [reason] and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, “transcends” knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul - “8@(46¬ 8″JD,\”", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).¹

During GCSE maths my teacher wrote down a formula and using valid mathematical logic ‘proved’ that 2=3. He asked us to show him why it was wrong, which stumped even the best in the class. It turned out that the initial formula he’d given us was simply incorrect. Garbage in, garbage out. Working from a baseless premise results in the above nonsense. The time and effort put into jumping through philosophical hoops to try to link conjecture with the real world just results in statements that sound profound but in fact mean nothing at all. “between God and us…there exists a real analogy, in which…unlikeliness remains infinitely greater than likeliness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language’. What? What on earth could that possibly mean?

After this we’re off into more standard territory, which really boils down to tantrum.

This gives rise to two principles which are crucial for the issue we have raised. First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity. A second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.

Pre-scientific? Anyway, this is followed by:

[I]f science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by “science”, so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective “conscience” becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it.

Stalin. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. No mention of the entire middle east, where the complete opposite is true. A return to good old-fashioned authoritarian morality is what we need. We can’t have people thinking for themselves, or using levels of human happiness to inform their morality. Far better to be told what to do by an inconsistent, morally-bankrupt-by-any-standards, made-up deity.

And finally, in the conclusion, we come to the throwing-the-toys-out-of-the-pram moment:

Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought - to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding.

Hasn’t philosophy been dealing with this for hundreds of years anyway? Hume? Russell? This is really just having a strop that unjustified faith has been rejected by modern philosophy and that the scientific method doesn’t allow people to make shit up and say it’s true. Why aren’t people paying attention to me?! There’s no need for me to provide evidence, because there just isn’t! Anyway, religious tradition = data!

It’s like me demanding the entire idea of empirical evidence be dropped because I can’t prove there’s a dragon in my garage. No matter how broad, ancient or popular the idea, you still have to provide evidence. Science is a truth machine open to all, not a dogmatic cult, and you can’t rewrite the rules just because it suits you.

1. I don’t know what the “8@(46¬ 8″JD,\” is all about. I guess the pdf couldn’t format something properly, unless it’s a way of referencing that I’ve never seen before. [↩]