Linda's first CO2 experiment

Holy. Shit.

This is awesome.

Lack of belief in gods

Re: BREAKING NEWS: THE GOVERNMENT WANTS TO POISON CHILDREN!

There's a post over at SkepticBlog. I wanted to leave a comment - however, my wireless router functions as a proxy, and SkepticBlog won't let me comment from behind a proxy. :(

So, here's the response I wanted to make, just in case it gets noticed.

My sense is that it’s probably futile for my friend to “provide the evidence” that he pretends to be interested in seeing. How, then, do we reach such people, people who are out actively advocating against public health? I put the question to you.

Deepak Chopra Flyers

Too long ago, I uncharitably tut-tutted the guys over at The Crommunist Manifesto.

On Friday, June 4th, Vancouver was the recipient of Dr. Deepak Chopra – quantum mystic, magic thinker, and purveyor of high-quality woo. In the interest of promoting the cause of evidence-based science and thought, skeptics from Vancouver’s chapter of the Center for Inquiry were on hand to engage the audience on their way into the event. We were armed with flyers (which can be seen here), and voices of reason. For more background on the event, you are invited to read the pre-event coverage from this blog.

I thought better of my tut-tutting and offered to put together a new flyer that might have proved more effective. I was supposed to do this over a month ago - but hey, better late than never, yeah?

Firstly, we need to consider two things:

1. Who is the intended audience?
2. What is the intended purpose?

'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss, AAI 2009

Youtube-heavy day today.

If atheism is true, then where did the universe come from? Something can't come from nothing!

Sound familiar? If you've ever argued religion with a theist - particularly online - chance are are you've heard something like this before.

Typically, my response has been to dismiss the claim as an argument from ignorance: Just another example of the old and easily dismissed claim that since we don't know how X happened, God must have done it. This dismissal is sufficient and justified - but unfortunately it is unsatisfactory in the mind of the theists that like to raise it.

However, it turns out we have an answer. Lawrence Krauss spends an hour discussing contemporary cosmology. Eventually, he considers the question: Why is there something rather than nothing? His answer:

There had to be. If you have nothing in quantum physics, you'll always get something. It's that simple. It doesn't convince any of those people - but it's true.

Give it a go. I promise that it's one of the best uses you'll ever find for spending a free hour of your time - you can't have sex and eat icecream all day.

Carl Sagan: Consider Again That Pale Blue Dot

Nothing much to add to this one.

Reza Aslan gets it exactly wrong

Reza Aslan has submitted a recent Washington Post article: Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett: Evangelical atheists?

It is no exaggeration to describe the movement popularized by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens as a new and particularly zealous form of fundamentalism--an atheist fundamentalism.

Reza is unexpectedly correct on one thing, however. Describing contemporary atheism as fundamentalism isn't an exaggeration at all. To the contrary: It's flat-out wrong.

Fundamentalism only means to be in strict adherence to certain precepts within a prescribed text. Atheism does have a body of literature - but no text is prescribed as sacred or fundamental in any way. Without a sacred, ideologically prescribed text, atheism simply cannot be a fundamentalist world-view. It fails to meet the single necessary (and sufficient) criterion for the qualification.