Anyone who has spoken to me in real life, on Internet forums or even on Twitter cannot help but have noticed that I am very much an anti-theist. I mention it here again at the start of this article so those who prefer to rest in the comfort of their faith can turn away now. This post is directed toward you and your more rabid compatriots but I know not all of you will want to hear it.
I was in a bookshop today. It was a very nice bookshop with a significant portion of its shelf space devoted to science, including popular science. I like to browse this section of the bookshop because I like to learn things. I like to know what makes the universe work and I like to explore the fringes of modern scientific progress.
I also browse there because it is far from the religion section, which I despise. Today however, I was not able to keep away from the religious delusions I hate so much. Why? Because the people who continue to peddle that bullshit will not stay out of science.
I found a book called The Dawkins Delusion today. Having read the blurb on the back, I was dismayed to see that the publisher had the nerve to suggest this drivel was “science”. It is anything but. The blurb starts with an attack against a living human being and then goes on to claim allegiance to Christianity, a religion whose major tenet is being nice to people. Clearly this must be a comedy, then? Unfortunately not.
I read a few sections of this pathetic tome, quickly finding it both rambling and incoherent. There is no cogent argument to be found in it and I’m sure I did not miss one because it is a very thin book and therefore there are only so many places it could have been hiding. The only humour in it was clearly unintentional, since it completely failed to live up to the standards its own claim to faith requires.
Why was this book in the science section? I can only assume the publisher thought it would lend some shadow of legitimacy to the ranting contained within its pages. I am here to say it does not. It not only shows up the publisher, SPCK Publishing, as being utter fools for printing this crap, but it demonstrates that its author is a hack. Science requires high standards of its adherents, including the ability to lay out an argument in as clear a method as possible. Science also does not sit well with blatant attacks on another person simply for their beliefs, or lack thereof.
This book is not science. It does not belong in the science section. It belongs in the religion section along with all the other drivel about invisible superheroes, talking snakes, cursed fruit and abhorrent behaviour undertaken in the name of said superhero.
Keep religion out of science. Magic and superstition do not belong there.
Can you list the author, it turns out there are over a page of books called that? Pathos? Hey, when did superheroes end up in religion? Does that mean Comi-con is a religious convention, and so tickets to it and travel can be considered tax deductable? I think I know many people into science who worship at the thiest grove of Star Trek and the groves of Geek.
“Science also does not sit well with blatant attacks on another person simply for their beliefs, or lack thereof.” – odd, that’s never been the Academic departments I or other people in science are familiar with. Most often the ‘flavor’ of explaination is directly linked with the popularity of the presentor and the fevor of the disciples. Indeed, Scientific presentation often is like something out of ‘little god’ from Terry Pratchett or Street of the Gods by Simon Green. First there are the Posters, where you stand/sit by a Poster hoping others will ask you out of interest what your belief system/discoveries are, then on to the pursuation, and then collecting followers, and if enough followers, then a subsection or a class, a section within a department and you are on the way to having your idea diefied.
Of course part of this is to attack others ideas, and while attacking the person presenting is a clear fallacy of rhetoric, it still happens so frequently to be standard.
I personally have felt that once science wanted to take the aspect of humanities where not only the results are found, but then explained, (Sciences were to find the data, Humanities to explain the significance) bias was wed into science. And so people like Bailey run around obsessed with doing experiments no one else can duplicate showing who is gay and who isn’t so they can be eliminated in the womb (unlike the centuries of scientists who failed to note the rampant same sex sexual stimulation in Butterflies and 600 other species due to ‘personal beliefs’ on how that might reflect on the butterfly).
One of the books with that title had subtitle starting with ‘Athiest Fundamentalism’ – oh goodness, does that mean that there is Athiest Evangelicalism, Athiest Fundi’s with signs chanting slogans about bio soup and hybrid stands not Adam and Eve before crashing church picnics? Maybe a mixture of the two and Athiest Spiritualism where you get the ectoplasm coming out of the air, but don’t believe it has any meaning. I just find the idea of an author representing oneself as a Athiest Fundamentalist humor in the extreme.
I agree that the debate seems heated, and I am not sure why. Put science back with science, humanities with humanities and belief in things we don’t understand back into why we talk to our computers and beg our cars not to die on us.
The authors are Alister and Joanna McGrath. I didn’t want to put their names in this piece because I didn’t want to give too much free advertising to this joke of a book.
I’m surprised to hear your experience of the scientific world is so different from mine; although maybe that’s due to the fact that I was never knee-deep in the scientific world. I published no papers while I was a physicist and left academia in favour of joining the civil service (a move I now regret). Since then I have moved on to study law, so I’m now even further from the scientific world.
Nevertheless, I stand by my statement. Science itself is about discovering the theories and laws that govern the universe. The fact that scientists sometimes choose to attack a person rather than their theories in order to deal with theories that are a) wrong and b) held on to too strongly by some scientists should not be seen as a mark against the principles of science itself. Nasty, lazy people spoil many things but they should not be allowed to spoil something so important as science.
As for Bailey, he’s a tosser not a scientist. His research is deeply flawed, follows none of the basic tenets of scientific research and he’s only taken seriously by tossers like him. The sooner he dies, retires or gets a clue, the better. Same for Blanchard and his autogynephilia faux-science theory. The pair of them are ridiculous and I would not be surprised to find they conduct their ‘research’ wearing big, floppy clown shoes.
I agree about Bailey and Blanchard and the Canadian research which put gender clinics IN with pedophile councelling and clinic for sex offenders who would reoffend, in places like Montreal (where Bailey got his training). From my friends who are full professors, and often dismissed because they are female, or not connected to those who are ‘hip’ (and there does seem to be a wave of ‘hip’ science always), I get all the skull-dugery stories, I didn’t think for example there could be supressing evidence and politics involving dinasoar (sic!) DNA but yeah, it is very political.
I think science will always have those bias’ because people are involved and people come out of societies, and from the greek theories, there has always been a mixture of science theory and social theory embedded. At least that how I see it. So getting a ‘pure’ science is challenging. Right now, in the US, there seems to be some sort pendulum back-swing to Christianity (I mean, a guy stayed in the white house by saying Gay marriage was worse that terrorism), which includes some scientists I guess. In Europe the pendulum swings regarding politics, or funding or different things. I don’t disagree that it should have been in science fiction instead of science but for every great book on theory, there seems to be 40 on ‘pop-science’ or theories with personal or other motivations.
As for athiesm and agnostism, I strangely don’t put it in the same section of my brain as I do observing things in nature or fractals or math, it tends to go in the, ‘basic tenets’ or ‘basic assumptions’ aspect along with stuff like, ‘People should look past the differences to the similarities’ or ‘Diversity isn’t scary in people, it is interesting.’