It seems barely a day can pass without coming across more examples of religious hatred, intolerance and the mockery that the “faithful” make of their own gospels.

Now, I have been asked a few times recently why Christianity bears the brunt of my attacks here, rather than the other two crackpot, abrahamic religions. This is especially relevant as most of my vitrol towards religion is based on its refusal to accept science and its abhorrent intollerance. On the face of it, Christianity is “more” tolerant than Islam or Judaism, so why do I attack Christianity the most?

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Karl Popper’s classic characterisation of scientific thought as providing hypotheses which can be falsified provides a pretty unarguable definition of science as far as I can see. There used to be much debate about this in A level sociology courses (which is where my limited knowledge of epistemology comes from) and there are other valid descriptions of how science works.

However, what distinguishes science from other types of thought is that scientific theories can be tested.

Intelligent design cannot be tested. I can’t really bring myself to say that the Theory of Intelligent Design can’t be tested. I don’t think it constitutes much of a theory, in that it doesn’t explain anything. I can’t even understand why believers feel threatened by evolutionary theory, which basically comes down to –

An organism that is best fitted to its environment is more likely to survive and reproduce than one that isn’t. It is likely to pass on the characteristics that helped it to survive to its offspring. This means that, over time, groups of that organism will tend to show more of the traits that favour survival and the characteristics of the population will change.

I know this is a simplistic interpretation (due to my limited understanding) but it is a theory that can be tested. Quite simply, if populations of organisms didn’t adapt to changes in their environments, it would be easy to spot this.

But, Intelligent Design? It is an “explanation” that cannot be tested. Anyone is entitled to believe whatever they like about the unknowable. I believe hundreds of eccentric things myself. Even I would have a problem if someone suggested that my ideas should be taught in schools as alternatives to science.

This was sparked by TW’s posts intelligent-design-in-the-uk and blogwar.

After the last monster post (which Technorati seems to want to ignore), I think a short one is called for. On beliefnet.com there is an ongoing blog-debate between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan on; Faith, Religious Tolerance, Moderates, Islam and Atheism.

While it started very polite and civil, it certainly turned into the sort of debate you would hope for. While page three (Sam Harris’ latest post) is the most entertaining, you can always start from the beginning.

Some days I am embarrassed to be British. Fortunately this is rare, but it does happen, the Big Brother farce was one occasion and today I found another. (Steve Fuller’s Strange Arguments)

During the US Intelligent Design trial in Dover, there was a UK based [sometimes referred to as “British” but I am fairly sure he is an American who lives over here] “Philosopher of Science” who was brought out for the defence (i.e. he was there to convince the Judge that ID should be taught as a science) called Steve Fuller. Apparently he is a professor in the Sociology Department at Warwick University and was an “expert witness” as the result of specialising in the history and sociology of science. Now, I am going to refrain from commenting on the crackpottery which took place in the trial (of which Prof. Fuller was a prime example, sorry, I tried) but highlight some newer points he has raised. More worryingly he appears on a blog called ID in the United Kingdom which is what really shames me as a Brit but more later.

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I had planned to not write many blog posts today but, as always, there are more crackpots out there than you realise.

Thanks to the wonders of myspace, I found this delightful person writing a blog: (as always, emphasis is mine, spelling is verbatim)

Are you ever sick of turning on the tv and seeing rappers or the news that a black person has killed another black person? I sure know that I am. I just want to get one thing clear in no way am I a raccists, I am just very proud to be white, and I have ever right to be.

I am so sick of going down to the corner shop and seeing the people working there, they are all immagrants and what makes its even worse is that I grew up going to that shop, my fathers friend used to own it.

I love my race and I really dislike things that destroy it like gays and jews. These are only my views on the matter but in my opinion the jews promote race mixing and the gays stop reproduction of the race. How can my race continue if we are mixed with other race’s as in a black man married to a white woman, if they have a child it will not be part of the white race. Do you see my point and why I am angry please feel free to object to my views I really am doing this to see some opposing views on the matter. thats all from me. Bye

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Pascal’s Wager floats around the Internet and USENET as a fairly common reason to “believe in God.” In a nutshell the argument from the wager runs that:

1. God either exists or does not exist. (In this context it is the Christian God being debated)
2. If you believe in God and he does not exist, you have lost nothing and gained nothing.
3. If you believe in God and he does exist, you have lost nothing and gained everything.
4. If you do not believe in God and he does exist, you have lost everything and gained nothing.

This is supposed to lead the thinker to the conclusion that the only sensible course of action is to “wager” God exists and believe. In some respects, this early example of Game theory (remarkably similar to the prisoners dilemma), is quite ingenious and serves as good grounding in logical thinking. Some of the people who trumpet this line of “logic” do so without knowing the source and may even have developed it themselves (aren’t they clever).

While Pascal’s Wager is superficially sound and appealing, it really does not hold up to scrutiny. While it may have been considered brilliant logic (although this is in doubt) in the seventeenth century, it certainly does not do so today.

The wager has some implicit assumptions which significantly undermine its logic. For example, the presupposition that God exists and is willing to punish non-believers is the basic assumption. If, for example, the God portrayed in Islam exists belief in the Christian God will ensure a life time damnation on a par with non-belief. Religions with mutually exclusive tenets cause all manner of problems for the “logic” of the wager

More importantly, it changes the nature of the belief. Even if (and it is a big if) the basic assumptions are correct and the Christian God exists or doesn’t exist, the idea that people who “believed” based on the wager would be rewarded as the faithful makes a mockery of the whole concept. Faith, surely, is not something which can stem from a logical argument?

There are lots of sites on the internet which will provide more detailed dissection of the logical flaws in Pascal’s Wager so I will stop now.

A shorter one now, and probably less links…

I have noticed, reading through the blogs by scientists that there seems to be a strange trend when Evolution (or anything with “anti-religious”, yet scientific, sentiment) is discussed. Now, we all know that creationists / ID proponents / fundamentalists are more than willing to resort to technology to meet their subversive aims. The sheer weight of “I love God” blogs on MySpace means they are probably not all 15 year olds like they claim.

However, there is a trend for IDer participation on blogs (sadly not on this one…). They start off with an innocuous post, claiming to be an enthusiastic amateur. This post will normally put some odd spin on the topic but ask why the legitimate question / debate is not being entered into. This obviously ignores the fact science is not resolved by democracy. Some example terminology is: “This seems (on the face of it, to me, an amateur) like a legitimate question, but if it’s not, why not?” (I am not saying the person who made this particular comment is an IDer or anything, it is an example!)

Generally people will respond, trying to explain the scientific method or the like and then things go haywire with the creationist often demanding to know why evolution is a “theory” not a “law” if it is so well supported by evidence. At least at this point the crackpot nature become obvious.

The thing which still eludes me, is why go through the farce at the early stages? It happens on USENET all the time: a crank posts something asking an apparently innocent question, then when people innocently reply, the crank goes postal on them.

Is it valid (morally, scientifically?) to assume all creationists are somewhat insane to begin with?

It has been a while since I rounded on the Religious crackpottery which so often serves as a benchmark for humour on this site. I will seek to make amends today.

During the recent hiatus, I have been neglecting Pharyngula which is a shame as this is a wonderful source of entertaining madness. Today, I have tried to catch up but the sheer weight of posts is likely to defeat me.

One I can not pass up is titled “Kent Hovind: 10 Years” and is basically about the ultracrackpot Kent Hovind and his tax evasion. In itself that would be a poor example of religious-crackpot-humour and certainly not worthy of blogging. But there is this, from “Shelley The Republican,” certainly is: (this is the extract quoted on Pharyngula, I have added emphasis)

We conservatives have grown accustomed to liberal activist judges perverting justice for their own evil ends. Last year Judge Jones betrayed us all when he passed his verdict in the Dover school-book case. Shortly afterwards, our dear friend Kent was convicted of tax evasion.

U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers will sentence the Hovinds at 9 a.m for the alleged crime of tax evasion. They claim that he and his lovely wife Jo owe the state almost one million dollars in unpaid taxes. A quick review of the case show that the federal court unfairly denied Hovind’s sensible and truthful defence: Kent owes no tax because everything he “owns” is really property of God. This is a fact that we would all do well to remember!

So please dear friends, join me in prayer this morning. Let us pray to Jesus that Kent and Jo will be allowed to continue their important ministry and continue teaching young scientists about the many flaws in Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Those are the two sentences which “entertain” me the most.

First off, Kent should not have to pay tax because everything he owns is the property of God. Amazing. This really is mind boggling. Now, few if any people like paying taxes, but claiming you shouldn’t because everything you own belongs to God is madness.

Now there seems to be some debate as to the Shelly The Republican being legit or parody, but that doesn’t really matter. The real humour value is that Hovind tried to use the line as a defence!

Better still, parody or not, people will have tried to pray for Hovind to get off or get a light sentence. Strangely the nutter was given 10 years, followed by three years probation, must pay IRS $640,000 and pay $7,078 costs. Brilliant.

Just shows what prayer will get you.

According to the Pensacola News Journal, Hovind really did show his true colours at the end: (emphasis mine)

“If it’s just money the IRS wants, there are thousands of people out there who will help pay the money they want so I can go back out there and preach,” Hovind said.

He is saying that if the court lets him go, he will fleece his “followers” and get them to pay the tax bill. I think he really does not get the whole concept. He is far from poor, but still wants others to foot his bills.

If the Christian God does actually exist, Hovind is going to hell.

The good (in an odd way) funny Korean monster movie, “The Host,” sparked this post. The villains in this movie are all Americans. (I did say it was Korean, didn’t I?)

It’s certainly not a political movie, but it has an occasional wry political subtext. Part of which is that the villains – the pathologist who dumps the chemicals that create the monster; the doctor who lobotomises the ineffectual and narcoleptic hero Gang-du; and the military team who dump “Agent Yellow” on the monster and on the demonstrating students – are all Americans.

You don’t need a degree in Media Studies to work out that there’s something being communicated here.
Obviously, the Koreans have a long history of US involvement that’s left at best some ambivalence. You might expect them to cast American actors as villains. But it got me wondering why the villains in US TV and movies are always English men. It may be that the US public expects the Queen’s redcoats to turn up at any moment and demand all that unpaid tea tax plus interest. (After all, they have laws allowing each citizen the right to bear arms, on the off-chance that the UK will suddenly remember it used to be our most lucrative colony.)

Far from posing a threat, England has been uniquely co-operative – some would say slavish at points – to the US for well over 200 years. So why do they hate us so much that any male actor with an RSC-style delivery will never be out of work if he moves across the Atlantic? There is such a thing as bearing a grudge too long, surely.

Ah ha! They don’t hate us. They hate Europe. And we’re the only Europeans who speak a language they can understand.

Europe is big. It’s rich. If it stopped its internal squabbling long enough to look out for its continental interests, it would be the global superpower. Obviously, the European continent is, and has always been, a squabbling mass of tribes. We hate each other much more than the Americans hate us and we’ve had LOADS of practice.

Europe doesn’t act as a global ruler, so other countries don’t hate us much any more. In fact, we can project a sort of cuddly moral high ground image as the continent that has the Geneva Convention, the Red Cross and the International war crimes courts.
Other continents usually don’t speak English and would provide villains that might really feed on the anger of Americans. If every villain were Chinese or African or South American or Indian, there would be some reasonable questions raised about stirring up a nationalist frenzy. Europeans are OK because they aren’t going to war with us any time in the foreseeable future. That was “with” as in “against,” of course.

Aside: Why use British actors, at all? We all know that the average American 10- year-old can out act almost any British Shakespearean actor. In fact, our current TV and movie productions are generally so teeth-grindingly poor that we couldn’t compete against an evening’s HBO schedule with the best from a year’s worth of UK output. (You may be arguing “What about Mike Leigh or Ken Loach or the Office or whoever?” I said “generally.” ) Our films are so bad that we even infected Samuel L Jackson. He usually has the capacity to make even movie excreta watchable (e.g The Man) Put him and Robbie Carlyle (also a pretty good actor) together in a British movie and you have The 51st State. Need I say more? (OK, if I must then, Brad Pitt in some execrable London gangster movie where he was a gypsy bare-knuckle fighter) Point taken, I think.
Why do they hate us and yet let us humiliate their best actors? That will have to be another blog.

As mentioned previously, the software which “backends” this site has been upgraded from 2.0.7 to 2.1. It has (so far) been as painless here as it was on the Compuskills Web Design Blog but there have been one or two odd effects. The main impact has been in how the visual editor works when it comes to writing posts. On this blog (maybe due to the theme) it is disabled by default, but can be turned on in the user profiles, but even when the visual editor is working it wont let you hyperlink any more.

This strikes me as very strange for blog software!

Other than that, the upgrade seems fine. If any one knows why Technorati wont index the previous post on this subject, please let me know! Strangely it refuses to acknowledge the updates to the Sci-Tech RSS feed as well. Well, just goes to show, Technorati is mad.

It seems about 21 hours ago, version 2.1 (Ella) of WordPress was released. We will look at installing it here in over the next day or two, so things may go a little odd for a while.

As previously mentioned, I am the “proud” owner of a Nokia N73 phone (which unfortunately suffers from a few “build quality issues”). As this is a phone with more functionality than a PC I bought ten years ago (512MB disk space for example), and it runs on the Symbian OS I am curious about its susceptibility to virus attacks.

The Nokia N73 is used for mobile email (thanks to 3) and came with a free trial of F-Secure AntiVirus. This has now run out. The free trial was excellent, however given that it was for about six weeks duration and during that time, my phone was not set up for mobile mail it seems to have been a bit wasted.

Turning to the wonders of the Internet for inspiration, I thought it would be fairly easy to find a free Anti Virus package for the phone. A trip to AVG (Grisoft) was no use, as while they do many versions for Linux, BSD, Windows etc, there was nothing which would run on the phone.

So, off to the search engines. A quick run on Google found a post on Mobiledia.com which claimed Symantec had released a free AV package for Symbian phones. Looks good to me, so off to the URL in the article, I go. Sadly this simply redirected to the Vista PublicBETA page which needs Vista and a PC to work. Not much use for my Nokia N73. Searching the Symbian site finds an AV for Symbian but it is $44.95 rather than free – and a quick look at the Mobiledia.com site shows the post was made in March 05. Ah. Back to Google.

Continued searches on a variety of engines seems to only throw up conflicting data. Some sites assert the S60 V3 operating system on the N73 doesn’t need AV yet (strikes me as madness, Nokias are popular phones and as such major targets for virus writers) and most of the others are posts by people looking for N73 AV software. I have found a few sites which offer it although none for free (lots free for V2 of the OS though). Just as despair was about to set in, I found the BullGuard Mobile Antivirus site. Could this be the answer? A download later, and I am pushing the .SIS file through the Nokia Application Installer. After a few seconds, the installer pops up “Please finish the install on the phone user interface” so I look at the phone.

Sadly the phone says “Installation of BullGuard_S60.sis not supported” and quits out.

Back to the drawing board. If you know of any free AV packages for N73 phones PLEASE let me know. Also if you know of any plugins which allow the N73 / Lifeblog software to talk to WordPress I will be your friend for life.

Seem to have overlooked this in the past, so need to make amends now. The New Humanist Magazine seems very interesting, and certainly readable, if it’s website is anything to go by. On the forums for that site there are certainly some entertaining debates (“Atheism is a pretty pointless creed” is one example).

This was an amusing post on The Register, if for nothing else than the volume of emails I have had over the weekend starting “Chinese missile shot down US satelite.” The Register post is titled Storm Trojan gang declare start of World War III and is certainly entertaining.

After a busy weekend, there isn’t much to blog about (that hasn’t already been blogged!), so while a new round of Intelligent Design and Identity Card rants builds here are some interesting links:

• An old favourite: stock.xchng
• Dispatches from the culture wars (blog)
• Colour version of the image below
• An oddly attractive CSS-Zen garden entry – odd in that most of the recent ones have been awful. It is getting bad enough I almost feel able to submit one myself!

And, for those who like historical-type photographs:

Lastly, Compuskills Web design are looking into an overhaul of their portfolio sites. Now is the time to get in touch with any comments and feedback.