Why Dont You Blog?

Well there is a rant brewing, but sadly here in the Ivory Why Dont You Towers we are short on spare time so I can not do justice to a video posted by what seems to be the single most objectionable person I have ever had the misfortune to see. PZ Myers has posted on Pharyngula about it and pretty much says everything which needs to be said. Check it out for the full details.

In a nutshell, this snotty, arrogant kid called Kelly Tripplehorn (snope entry for background) has posted a video in which he claims his “corporation” will offer US$1000 to anyone who can solve the philosophical problem of Induction. Yeah, that is correct. $1000. Wow. Alfred Nobel, eat your heart out. Barely enough to buy a low end laptop to solve one of the major philosophical problems.

To crown things off, the nutcase Tripplehorn goes on about how “he” solves the problem by invoking God. What absolute madness. He demands a reasonable, self consistent, internally logical argument from Atheists but not his own reasoning.

I would like to go on record, having noted his only requirement is “without invoking God” to say the problem is solved, and the universe is logical and ordered because it is the will of Freya. She is neither the Abrahamic God Tripplehorn talks about, nor a generic “God” (as she is a Goddess…).

I await the US$1000. Hopefully I can use it to buy a new SatNav…

Popularity: 28% [?]

Popularity: 28% [?]

From the wonders of Photoshop is this slightly enhanced statue at Stourhead. Basically all I have done is a box blur on the background, a slight enhancement of the white levels of the statue and increased saturation and contrast.

Personally, I think it looks quite nice and I look forward to the day when the crazy monotheistic religions are overhauled and we all get back to worshipping the likes of Neptune (or Poseidon if you are feeling particularly classical today).

We should get back to a time when Gods were proper Gods, not the wet blankets we have today. More thunderstorms! Anyway, all joking aside, I would have liked to have shown the original for comparison but in a fit of foolishness, I saved the changed file JPG over the original. Doh.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Popularity: 32% [?]

Continuing the discussion about the book by Chris Smith and his co(ghost?) writer. Like the previous poster, I have not read it either, but since when has that stopped a reviewer? (I’ve read a review in the Guardian.)

Their premise appears to hang on a “big idea,” always a cause for suspicion, especially when one is trying to generalise about culture. There is a huge conceptual error in assuming that belief in a single god is in anyway associated with a commitment to solving problems logically (leaving aside the excellent point made in the previous blog that Christianity hardly has a monopoly on monotheism).

Didn’t the ancient Greeks invent all our categories of logic? How many gods did they have? Isn’t the Socratic method the basis of scientific and philosophical enquiry? Didn’t the Romans devise technical solutions to practical problems that are still used today? How many gods did they have? These examples do not even extend beyond “western” culture. If one also considers the scientific achievements of the ancient Chinese or Egyptians or any number of civilisations throughout history, it is clear that religious belief has little to do with development of practical science and technology.

Max Weber argued for a connection between religion and social development, in his 19th century work on the Protestant work ethic. He was arguing, however, that some elements of the Protestant world view led people to to reject external religious authority and value their own practical achievements in the real world. Very briefly, the Protestant religion supported the scientific and social development of industrialisation, whereas a Catholic world view was more closely associated with social stagnation because of its values of respect for authority and reward in the afterlife.

From this perspective, Weber was building an analysis of industrial society that could accomodate the role of ideas, as well as production and social organisation. There have been many more recent analyses of the interaction of social change and the realm of ideas and beliefs (e.g. Gramsci)

These issues are very complex and much of the writing is difficult to follow. However, none of it draws a simple line connecting belief and technology. Technology is a social creation. Its nature is inextricable from the social relations in which it is developed. Beliefs are also part of social relations. Hence there are interactions between belief systems and scientific and technological advances. However, a recognition that they are connected in various subtle ways does not support a simplistic assertion that belief A leads to technology B.

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Popularity: 20% [?]

This is the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere (and the shortest in the Southern Hemisphere). This is as good an excuse as any to go to visit megalithic sites. A few thousand people were at Stonehenge and smaller number at Avebury and, no doubt, people went to many sites around the UK and Europe. Some of these people are so engagingly and entertainingly eccentric that you want to capture them for your own private zoo. Most are just people with a developed sense of history.

It’s hard to quarrel with anything that gets people enjoying visiting prehistoric sites. The automatic association between the summer solstice and megalithic sites is sometimes a little doubtful though. Some sites appear to be better understood as midwinter sites, anyway. I just object to the way that practical considerations rarely enter into our thoughts about these sites. No one considers that they may have been used in any other way than the rituals we project onto their builders, thus distancing us from any sense of their builders as just like ourselves. Which inadvertently opening the conceptual gate for those who think the stones were levitated into place or dropped by aliens.

We happily believe that generations of people would do the enormous amounts of work needed to construct these monuments, just for the sight of the sun coming up in one location on one particular day of the year (if there are no clouds - which is rare in the UK). If this were the sole purpose of these constructions, I suspect a simple sundial would have sufficed.

One of my cavils is with the idea of ceremonies being held on a specific day (the Solstice) and of people having to travel miles to attend them.

We are asked to contemplate people with no clocks or calendars except the likes of Stonehenge. So how do they know they are leaving on the right day, for a journey that may take weeks, until they get there?

You can only solve this problem by imagining a scenario where the religious leaders have to check the sun’s alignment everyday as it approaches midsummer, then have to send out messages to all their potential congregation a couple of weeks or so before the Solstice to tell them the time is close. Otherwise, everyone would have to have their own mini solstice clocks so they could tell when it was 5 to midsummer and start planning their journey.

Yes, this blog is ridiculous. It’s just a challenge to accepting whatever the latest archaeological fashion says is the purpose of these awe-inspiring creations.

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Popularity: 20% [?]