Thu 25 Aug 2011
Eppur si muove
Posted by anaglyph under Australiana, Religion, Science, Skeptical Thinking
[11] Comments
I snapped this sign in front of St Paul’s Cathedral, in inner city Melbourne last week.
The duplicity of the intent here is only eclipsed by its inanity. Professor Nancey Murphy is the author of ‘Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will’. She is also an ordained minister of The Church of the Brethren, a Christian sect so confused that it has split into numerous splinter groups that are, apparently, able to interpret the Word of God to be whatever suits their personal agenda. ((It should be said that The Brethren are not alone in this pursuit. Christianity itself is really just one big collection of groups that have decided that what God meant is dependent on your point of view.)) If Prof Murphy is a hard core member of The Brethren, though, she believes that the Bible is the inerrant word of God (with all that entails).
My brain finds it hard to contain the idea that someone can take that stance and still call themselves a scientist. Her interpretation of what science is, seems, apparently, to be as flexible as the interpretation of God’s Word among members of her belief system.
As for ISCAST, ‘a think tank exploring the interface between science and Christianity’, I have prepared a little diagram illustrating what I see as the principal difficulty in exploring that interface:
You see, when you accept the idea that a magical being created us and everything we see for inscrutable purposes of its own, you have abandoned all notions of science. Now, personally speaking, I don’t care one whit if Professor Murphy or anyone else cares to invent such fanciful stories, but it pisses me off when:
1: They think they have the right to push those ideas down my throat, and,
2: They think their ideas are better than everyone else’s ideas because their magical being told them so, and,
3: They attempt to conflate those ideas with science.
But I said ‘duplicity’ didn’t I?
I was intending to make this post a humorous jab at a daft sign, but in looking up St Paul’s Cathedral I inadvertently stumbled upon one of the most worrying, irrational, fearful and misleading documents I’ve seen in a long time. St Paul’s, it appears, is affiliated with an organization called Transforming Melbourne, a group that defines itself as ‘a Movement of Christians praying and acting together with the vision that God will renew His Church and not only bring new life to the people of our city, but transform its culture and society.’
Praying? Not a lot of science there, that’s for sure.
The document I mentioned is called ‘The Vital Role of the Church and Christian Faith in Our Society’ by Rob Isaachsen, Founder of Transforming Melbourne, and is something of a manifest of the group’s ideals. The preamble to it on the Transforming Melbourne site begins:
MPs, Christians and others have no idea that
OUR SOCIETY DEPENDS ON CHRISTIAN FAITH AND THE CHURCH
It then lists some ‘statistics’ that are supposed to convince us of how terrific the Christian Church is, before concluding:
The highly intentional atheist and secular humanist movements are seeking to influence governments to remove the freedom of the Church and Christian agencies to provide their community support, and Christian education programmes and Chaplaincy in schools which foster Christian values in society.
If they succeed in restricting Christian care and education the result will be the undermining of society itself.
This kind of addled fear-mongering makes my skin crawl and my blood boil. Yes folks, what it comes down to is that the people behind Transforming Melbourne believe that the EVIL ATHEISTS are attempting to get rid of the WONDERFUL CHRISTIANS because, for some reason, the EVIL ATHEIST agenda is to ‘undermine society itself’. Do these people really think like that? Are they really that simple-minded? Because if that’s the case it’s pretty damn clear why I don’t want Christian chaplains giving moral advice to my kids.
So it turns out that the real reason that the Cathedral is having Science Week is nothing at all to do with science (surprise) but is in fact a sleight-of-hand designed to give the appearance of open-mindedness and acceptance. There is no intent to explore an ‘interface’ between science and religion here. Make no mistake: these people do NOT care about science. If it was up to them, they’d as soon see their God wipe this troublesome ‘science’ thing from the planet.
What’s happening here is that they are afraid. Scientific thought represents the biggest real threat that religion will ever face. And now, with atheists and humanists asserting their human rights to create communities that are not built on superstition and fear, but instead on critical thinking, scientific inquiry and rationally considered ethics and morals, the Christian Church is resorting to one of its favourite techniques: instead of facing their challengers bravely, ((For surely, if their God is actually right as they claim, they have NOTHING to fear…)) they are attempting to subsume them. To make them feel at home. To feign charity. To pretend they’re on their side. But all they are really concerned with is promoting their agenda.
It has worked many times in the past when their competition was also fearful and held irrational beliefs, but this time it won’t.
(I’m going to examine some of the Transforming Melbourne document in the next post. It’s full of such egregious and erroneous claims that it simply can’t go unconfronted.)
I like your illustration. It is easy to understand.
Why do other people find it confusing?
[shrug]
How the beejeezlehoop did she get a Ph.D ????
Bloody god-botherers!
My former neighbour(no training or formal education at all) used to conduct Religious Instruction classes once a week at a State school.She cast her vote in State elections solely on the basis that the pastor’s wife admired Bjelke-Petersen.
She has a PhD in Science and a Doctorate of Theology. Holding a Science PhD, though, is not the same as practising science. You don’t need to have any scientific rigor to get a PhD.
Someone like Professor Murphy should not be underestimated. I’m sure she is a persuasive speaker. For all I know she is also a nice person. The problem is that she is not a scientist if she believes in irrational things. If she is unable to see why that is (and I’m sure that is the case) then she should not be speaking for science.
Given her credentials, I imagine that her idea of science is that it is a point of view. A kind of existential question. Like religion.
It is nothing of the sort.
oh poo. Went to http://www.iscast.org/vision
Am now demented…
You only have to visit their ‘Creation & Evolution’ page to see what kind of ‘science’ they endorse. This site is redolent of New Age woo. There’s everything from ‘An Atheist’s Defense of Intelligent Design’ to ‘Christian Views of Extraterrestrial Inelligence’. I’m surprised there isn’t something about the ‘Quantum Explanation of God’.
As you know, I am not a big fan of religion. But as with all this stuff, I’d have a lot more admiration for what people believe if they had the courage of their convictions. This attempt to roll science into their belief system is exactly the same as ShooTag doing it, or Pestrol, or Steorn. They want the endorsement of science, because they KNOW it works, but they don’t want the discipline of science. They want science to tell them they’re right, but don’t want to listen if it tells them they’re wrong.
http://www.iscast.org/Smith_M_2010-10_Spherical_Cows
and very round.
The whole ‘spherical cows’ things ticks me off too. This idea was originally concocted by some science wag as a joke: a physicist is called in to figure out some problem with a farmer’s cows and comes up with a solution that explains the problem precisely, but ‘only for spherical cows in a vacuum’.
Somehow, though, the woo crowd have picked it up as a kind of ‘reality’. Or at least an ‘example’ of how physicists see the world. Only, physicists DON’T see the world like that, which is of course the whole point of the joke. Scientists understand very clearly the problems of modelling. Better than everyone else, in fact.
But it’s in keeping with the arguments of religious people to try to reduce the visions of science into mechanistic, cold, clinical views of reality. It suits them to try and remove all the value of science, particularly if it treads on what they see as ‘their’ territory.
oxymoronic bullshit. Your illustration is great though. It’s kind of kreepy if you think about it. God is stirring your brain cells and neurons? Or is it more like “if you think god doesn’t exist it is because the devil is stirring your neurons! Or if you did something bad it was really a demon!!”
pppfffttt – too late in the working day to try and make sense of this.
The problem with the idea of God mucking around with the way you view the world is that it quickly decays into Existentialism. If God is making people think a certain way, where is free will? If there is NO free will, then it doesn’t matter much what anybody does ever, because God is just controlling us all like puppets.
If it’s a battle between God and the Devil, again it doesn’t matter what WE do, because they are supernatural beings and can literally make us think anything they like.
If there IS free will, then God is not omnipotent because we can do things He doesn’t expect.
There is NO LOGIC in this kind of scenario, and it is therefore not approachable by rational methods.
The thing is, purveyors of irrational worldviews desperately want it to be rationally endorsed because that’s the way we experience reality. Otherwise they would just call it magic and be done with it.
Saw a joke once. A crane is offloading a large crate from a barge. The crate is labelled “existential material – all sides up at once.”