Dreamer Easy

I cannot now remember where I first encountered the idea that two people of equal intelligence, given the same facts, can in complete good faith reach different conclusions. It's a simple truth about the enormously complex process of trying to make sense of an enormously complicated world. I'm not just talking about opinions shaped by experience, training, prejudice, or habit: even scientists, whose basic tools are facts and logic, often disagree, sometimes spectacularly, and it takes a great deal more fact-finding and logical thinking to show which of them was right.

Which is why it's infuriating when a scientists insists on telling people what their religious beliefs are. Quoth Dawkins, re Pat Robertson, re Haiti: "Loathsome as Robertson's views undoubtedly are, he is the Christian who stands squarely in the Christian tradition."

I actually share Dawkins' view that linking catastrophe to human behaviour is a dubious, hazardous theology. We behave messily because we live in a messy universe, and not the other way around. But how the heck we're supposed to get from "the Bible describes Jesus casting out demons" to "Haiti made a pact with the Devil" I have no idea. Presumably the idea is that having accepted one supernatural event, you then accept them all. And you wondered why there has never been any controversy over theological opinions! How is this illogic any different to insisting that accepting evolution must inevitably lead to, for example, eugenics?

"Just read your own Bible," chides Dawkins. The Southern Baptist he disparages uses the Bible as a direct riposte to Robertson: "Is the judgment of God something we can claim to understand in this sense... No... Jesus himself warned his disciples against this kind of presumption." (I assume he's referring to Matthew 7, but my theology's very slender. Help?)

This is what I'm referring to when I say that militant atheists and fundamentalists have, in a sense, the same beliefs. Or, to borrow from Alan Watts, nobody believes in God like an atheist. ;)

By now you may've seen the Pew Forum's graph showing the proportion of people in the US of different religious beliefs who accept evolution, but for me more interesting is their overview of different religion's official stances on evolution.

Very many Christian denominations see no contradiction between God's role as the creator of the universe and life and the scientific fact of evolution: the Catholic Church, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Episcopal Church (which explicitly rejects Creationism!), the Evangelical Lutherans... even when it comes to the group with the lowest proportion of those who accept evolution, the Mormons, the Pew Forum reports: "several high-ranking officials have suggested that Darwin's theory does not directly contradict church teachings".

This official acceptance stands in stark contrast to the widespread attitude that acceptance of the fact of evolution, and Christian belief, are mutually exclusive. I think that attitude can distort our understanding of the general public's thinking on evolution. Many Westerners believe that some combination of natural selection and divine action resulted in life and human beings, from those who believe in God but take a wholly naturalistic view of evolution, to people who accept that evolution occurs but see it as directed by God, to those who are frankly a bit puzzled by the whole thing.

The Biology of Panic, Discover magazine, April 2002

In the shadow of fear, New Scientist, 6 September 2003

Gay genetics, New Scientist, 16 October 2004

Well, reading, doing my tax, and struggling pathetically with the housework day.

Right now I'm reading up on human pigmentation genetics for cluelessch1x0r. I want to be able to convert the technical stuff into English, but I'm not sure how much jargon I can get away with. So here's a straw poll:

[Poll #1031901]

In other news, I'm even more convinced that scientists would be wise to rename certain genes, because I just stumbled across the genetic explanation for cyclopia - 1 in 16,000 live human births, 1 in 200 miscarriages, always fatal. (Remember the one-eyed kitten? Holy shit.) Once your heart-breakingly deformed baby has passed away, you don't need some counsellor telling you the responsible gene was sonic hedgehog.

Spectacular skies continue here in Sydney, with Venus and the new crescent moon in proximity last night - just gorgeous.

This afternoon, you should be able to see Venus in the daytime - in the afternoon, about three fingerwidths above the moon. They'll be in the north of the sky around 3 pm. Make sure the sun is well-shielded from your view, not just for safety, but because the glare will make it hard to see the faint moon and planet.

I'm going to try and spot them - let me know if you do!

Reading about embryos and such at the moment for Quiet Game. Some of the questions this stuff provokes is like messing around with the rules in a role-playing game: when two embryos fuse spontaneously fuse to form a single chimeric individual, as occasionally happens, how many souls does the resulting human being have?

Lots of fun: John Barrowman visits the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. (He also goes shopping with his sister and meets a horse with a rude-sounding name. Further updates as we have them.)

Guess who's building nuclear power plants.

Bonus! The walrus and bucket saga continues: Day 76 without bucket and the terrifying MAH BUCKET.

Inspired by sarichan, I've joined the World Community Grid, using my home computer's spare processing power to do medical research. I even joined the Pagan Power team. This is not as exciting as SETI@Home, admittedly, but probably more useful. :-)

Sez former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, calling for anti-asteroid measures:

"Historically, the largest of such cosmic impacts have led to the virtually instantaneous extinction of a majority of species alive on the planet at the time of impact".

Um, no.

I mean, if a dinosaur killer hit tomorrow we'd be boned (har har), but, um, no.

(You want to fight mass extinction, cycle to work.)