The story is continued from here.
My agent, Andrew Lownie, sent the new proposal to another reader. He really liked it and most importantly, recommended that Andrew continue to try selling it. We then had a hiatus for a few months as the end of the year approached. Andrew needed to spend all his time closing deals and I had to finish my PhD.
With the new year, I am hoping that we will see some developments. The title Genesis of Science has been ditched for the more informative Before Science: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science. Any book with 'genesis' in the title sounds too much like The Holy Blood and Holy Grail material (whose authors are back in court, I hear). My wife thought God's Philosophers had a good ring and might well be appropriate for the American market. We also liked the title Newton's Giants but it is probably a bit too opaque. Newton famously said "If I have seen a little further then it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." The giants that Newton refers to are Descartes and Robert Hooke (who wasn't very big and in dispute with Newton so the reference may be sarcastic).
Unbeknown to Newton (the remark was a commonplace in his time), it was first coined in the twelfth century by the philosopher Bernard of Chartres. This means it suits my purpose very well. Not only is Newton's debt to the natural philosophers of the Middle Ages unacknowledged, but even his most famous remark was a medieval invention.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Monday, January 22, 2007
Friday, January 19, 2007
Finally, a Positive Review (But Still a Bad One)
The Times Literary Supplement have given The God Delusion the thumbs up. Hardly surprising given that their review was written by the neo-atheist Steven Weinberg. Weinberg is a poster boy for the neo-atheist movement because he is, unusually, a distinguished scientist in his own right. He won a Nobel Prize for his work on cosmology and has also written well regarded popular science books on the subject.
This all goes to show that even Nobel Prizewinners can look foolish if they step outside their boundaries of expertise. He begins his review with a rehash of the old science/religion conflict hypothesis. Staggeringly, he actually tries to resurrect the flat earth myth by mentioning Theophilus of Antioch and Clement of Alexandria. Theophilus is an arguable case (you can read the relevant passage here) because he describes the heavens as a dome. However, the context is a heavily figurative piece of biblical commentary, not a work of natural philosophy. Clement however is not a flat-earther. At least Weinberg concedes that by the 'High Middle Ages', educated Christians believed the earth was a sphere. He should have mentioned that, with very few exceptions, all educated Christians at all times had thought the earth a sphere.
The rest of his case for an eternal conflict is based on anecdote divorced from context. He wrongly thinks that Christians objected to Copernicus moving the earth from the centre of the universe because this demoted its importance. Then he tries to imply that John Hutchinson's mosaic physics commanded support for a century after Newton's death. This mixture of exaggeration and misdirection is just the trick that Draper and White tried to pull off a century and a half ago. It simply shows that Weinberg has no understanding of the history of science. Therefore, it is ironic that later on in his review he writes,
Judging by Weinberg's own howlers, I think Nagel and Eagleton have a point. It would avoid public embarrassment if scientists did not pontificate on subjects they know nothing about.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
This all goes to show that even Nobel Prizewinners can look foolish if they step outside their boundaries of expertise. He begins his review with a rehash of the old science/religion conflict hypothesis. Staggeringly, he actually tries to resurrect the flat earth myth by mentioning Theophilus of Antioch and Clement of Alexandria. Theophilus is an arguable case (you can read the relevant passage here) because he describes the heavens as a dome. However, the context is a heavily figurative piece of biblical commentary, not a work of natural philosophy. Clement however is not a flat-earther. At least Weinberg concedes that by the 'High Middle Ages', educated Christians believed the earth was a sphere. He should have mentioned that, with very few exceptions, all educated Christians at all times had thought the earth a sphere.
The rest of his case for an eternal conflict is based on anecdote divorced from context. He wrongly thinks that Christians objected to Copernicus moving the earth from the centre of the universe because this demoted its importance. Then he tries to imply that John Hutchinson's mosaic physics commanded support for a century after Newton's death. This mixture of exaggeration and misdirection is just the trick that Draper and White tried to pull off a century and a half ago. It simply shows that Weinberg has no understanding of the history of science. Therefore, it is ironic that later on in his review he writes,
I find it disturbing that Thomas Nagel in the New Republic dismisses Dawkins as an “amateur philosopher”, while Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books sneers at Dawkins for his lack of theological training. Are we to conclude that opinions on matters of philosophy or religion are only to be expressed by experts, not mere scientists or other common folk?
Judging by Weinberg's own howlers, I think Nagel and Eagleton have a point. It would avoid public embarrassment if scientists did not pontificate on subjects they know nothing about.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Monday, January 15, 2007
The only Thing Worse than being Talked about is not being Talked about
A couple of weeks ago, my name came up on an Internet Infidels discussion thread. Several correspondents kindly alerted me to the matter, but I decided to stay out of the debate as I boycotted IIDB some time ago. As usual, I was accused of doing things like 'justifying the inquisition', which I have never done. Clearly, trying to put it into historical context and get at the facts over the Black Legend is too much for those for whom the inquisition is a precious myth. One post, by a certain Dr Rick, does need a reply.
Rick, whoever he is, is untroubled by the need to refer to historical sources for most of his allegations. Words like 'vast', 'just a fraction', 'tens of thousands' and 'huge numbers' slip from his keyboard unencumbered by data. His main source is Juan Antonio Llorente who was indeed once secretary to the Inquisition in Madrid and had full access to the archives. What Rick declines to tell us is that when he wrote his history, Llorente was a collaborator with the French Bonapatist regime occupying Spain. After Napoleon was defeated, Llorente had to go into exile in France and it was there that his history was written. Consequently, he is not in any way an objective source. Rather his history must be read as vindication of his own treasonous conduct.
Dr Rick also gives us some details on torture. Ordeal by fire was, of course, banned by the church in 1215 (or at least, the clergy were forbidden to take part). As for the pear, I have actually seen one of these in a collection of other surgical instruments in Athens. It is true that medieval medical equipment can be quite scary to look at, so the person who misidentified the 'pear' as a torture implement can be forgiven. It was been renamed the "Pope's pear" on the internet where Dr Rick undoubtedly got his information. The Spanish Inquisition did use torture, most frequently in the sixteenth century. Sometimes, it was used in 10% of cases (Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 1997, p 187) which is a high proportion. It is shocking that the church did not issue a blanket ban until 1816, which was considerably after it had stopped being used in practice (Llorente says it was dropped before his day).
The Inquisition is not something I would ever try to justify. Torture and execution are both abhorrent. That does not mean that we can use it as cheap propaganda or fail to study it in its proper historical context. The Church has apologised for this blot on its past and now that all the records are open to scholars we can hopefully fully understand what happened. Those who simply want to use it for black propaganda, like Dr Rick, do not help with this process.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Rick, whoever he is, is untroubled by the need to refer to historical sources for most of his allegations. Words like 'vast', 'just a fraction', 'tens of thousands' and 'huge numbers' slip from his keyboard unencumbered by data. His main source is Juan Antonio Llorente who was indeed once secretary to the Inquisition in Madrid and had full access to the archives. What Rick declines to tell us is that when he wrote his history, Llorente was a collaborator with the French Bonapatist regime occupying Spain. After Napoleon was defeated, Llorente had to go into exile in France and it was there that his history was written. Consequently, he is not in any way an objective source. Rather his history must be read as vindication of his own treasonous conduct.
Dr Rick also gives us some details on torture. Ordeal by fire was, of course, banned by the church in 1215 (or at least, the clergy were forbidden to take part). As for the pear, I have actually seen one of these in a collection of other surgical instruments in Athens. It is true that medieval medical equipment can be quite scary to look at, so the person who misidentified the 'pear' as a torture implement can be forgiven. It was been renamed the "Pope's pear" on the internet where Dr Rick undoubtedly got his information. The Spanish Inquisition did use torture, most frequently in the sixteenth century. Sometimes, it was used in 10% of cases (Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 1997, p 187) which is a high proportion. It is shocking that the church did not issue a blanket ban until 1816, which was considerably after it had stopped being used in practice (Llorente says it was dropped before his day).
The Inquisition is not something I would ever try to justify. Torture and execution are both abhorrent. That does not mean that we can use it as cheap propaganda or fail to study it in its proper historical context. The Church has apologised for this blot on its past and now that all the records are open to scholars we can hopefully fully understand what happened. Those who simply want to use it for black propaganda, like Dr Rick, do not help with this process.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Got a Copy at Last
My wife refused to allow me to further inflate Richard Dawkins's bank balance, so I wasn't able to buy The God Delusion. Now, a friend of my parents has lent me a copy for as long as I need it so I'll be able to read it and post a review in the next month or two. I thought the introduction was very funny in an arrogant sort of way and I hope that the rest lives up to its comedy value...
I must now ask my wife to read my own book outloud to me twice, while praising her sensitive tuning to the music of language. Maybe she'll be as good at it as Lalla Ward.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
I must now ask my wife to read my own book outloud to me twice, while praising her sensitive tuning to the music of language. Maybe she'll be as good at it as Lalla Ward.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Monday, January 08, 2007
Who wrote the Works of Shakespeare?
All right, I won't keep you in suspense. The answer is William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon with the occasional help of some collaborators. Some readers might be surprised to hear that for the last 150 years shelves of books have appeared arguing that Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford or Christopher Marlowe actually wrote the plays. Of course, this is all so much pseudo-scholarly garbage. If you want chapter and verse then look up Brian Vicker's destruction of the "anti-Stratford" position in August 2005 in TLS or Jonathan Bate's excellent The Genius of Shakespeare.
The question of the authorship of Shakespeare's works is interesting to this blog, not because of any real doubt about the answer, but what it teaches us about another pseudo-scholarly conspiracy theory - whether Jesus existed. Both theses are pushed by amateurs or people expert in other fields. Anti-Stratfordians are often novelists because they imagine writing a play is the same sort of process as writing a book. Shakespeare was an actor who drifted into writing and his plays were obviously written by a man intimately involved in the production of theatre. Jesus Mythers usually have some literary training too, but they are never professional historians. They misunderstand the way historical evidence is analysed and replace it with literary constructs not supported by the facts.
Also, anti-Stratfordianism and Jesus Mythology are both based on a silence. In the case of Shakespeare, the whole edifice is constructed on the lack of any original manuscripts by Shakespeare. The reason they don't exist today is that they never did. All there ever were were the working copies used by Shakespeare's theatre company. The printed editions of the plays were put together from performances and eventually gathered together by Shakespeare's colleagues after he died. With Jesus Mythers, the missing evidence is Paul talking about the historical Jesus. Again this is based on the misconception that Paul ought to have discussed such matters at length in letters that set out to answer specific problems and provide encouragement to converts.
The bad news from the anti-Stratfordians is that they never go away. After a century of scorn from the academy, long, bad and sad books claiming so and so wrote Shakespeare continue to appear. From this, we can be sure that the Jesus Myth will not die either. We are stuck with it so may as well get used to it. A full-length scholarly refutation is now long overdue.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
The question of the authorship of Shakespeare's works is interesting to this blog, not because of any real doubt about the answer, but what it teaches us about another pseudo-scholarly conspiracy theory - whether Jesus existed. Both theses are pushed by amateurs or people expert in other fields. Anti-Stratfordians are often novelists because they imagine writing a play is the same sort of process as writing a book. Shakespeare was an actor who drifted into writing and his plays were obviously written by a man intimately involved in the production of theatre. Jesus Mythers usually have some literary training too, but they are never professional historians. They misunderstand the way historical evidence is analysed and replace it with literary constructs not supported by the facts.
Also, anti-Stratfordianism and Jesus Mythology are both based on a silence. In the case of Shakespeare, the whole edifice is constructed on the lack of any original manuscripts by Shakespeare. The reason they don't exist today is that they never did. All there ever were were the working copies used by Shakespeare's theatre company. The printed editions of the plays were put together from performances and eventually gathered together by Shakespeare's colleagues after he died. With Jesus Mythers, the missing evidence is Paul talking about the historical Jesus. Again this is based on the misconception that Paul ought to have discussed such matters at length in letters that set out to answer specific problems and provide encouragement to converts.
The bad news from the anti-Stratfordians is that they never go away. After a century of scorn from the academy, long, bad and sad books claiming so and so wrote Shakespeare continue to appear. From this, we can be sure that the Jesus Myth will not die either. We are stuck with it so may as well get used to it. A full-length scholarly refutation is now long overdue.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
A Special Award to Services to Apologetics
Until this Sunday, John Cornwell was not someone I had a lot of time for. He is best known for his inaccurate and agenda-driven book, Hitler's Pope that converts scurrilous rumour and gossip into history to claim that Pius XII was in hock with the Nazis. These silly claims have been trashed so often (most recently by Michael Burleigh) that it is a surprise that Cornwell hasn't got the honesty to admit he got it wrong. His latest book, Seminary Boy, is a memoir about how beastly Catholic schools and seminaries used to be. Needless to say, Cornwell is most at home attacking Catholicism and all its works (he is, himself, a liberal Catholic of the sort who wants to remake the Church in his own image).
H. Allen Orr is one of Darwinism staunchest defenders. He has lambasted Intelligent Design with great effectiveness. While not a Darwinian extremist like Dan Dennett, he rejects any non-scientific explanations for anything. Andrew Brown and Terry Eagleton are hardly friends of organised religion either. One a self-declared atheist, the other a Christian Marxist of sorts.
I could go on, but you are getting my point. Not only has Richard Dawkins finally persuaded the Church of England to defend Christianity (a task previously regarded as impossible by many Christians), he has even united many of traditional Christianity's opponents in castigating his book, The God Delusion. Cornwell, with typical modesty, takes on the role of God himself in the Sunday Times. Orr's review in the NYRB is the most effective I have seen so far. I've already linked to several other reviews including Brown's and Eagleton's. In Prospect Magazine's list of most over-rated books of the year, Brown's submission was The God Delusion and his commentary on his choice just one word "Of course".
There is nothing wrong with bad reviews. If I ever get my book published, I'd give my eye-teeth to be trashed by A.C. Grayling. But when your natural allies unite against you, when your enemies finally make common cause, you have failed utterly in what you set out to do.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
H. Allen Orr is one of Darwinism staunchest defenders. He has lambasted Intelligent Design with great effectiveness. While not a Darwinian extremist like Dan Dennett, he rejects any non-scientific explanations for anything. Andrew Brown and Terry Eagleton are hardly friends of organised religion either. One a self-declared atheist, the other a Christian Marxist of sorts.
I could go on, but you are getting my point. Not only has Richard Dawkins finally persuaded the Church of England to defend Christianity (a task previously regarded as impossible by many Christians), he has even united many of traditional Christianity's opponents in castigating his book, The God Delusion. Cornwell, with typical modesty, takes on the role of God himself in the Sunday Times. Orr's review in the NYRB is the most effective I have seen so far. I've already linked to several other reviews including Brown's and Eagleton's. In Prospect Magazine's list of most over-rated books of the year, Brown's submission was The God Delusion and his commentary on his choice just one word "Of course".
There is nothing wrong with bad reviews. If I ever get my book published, I'd give my eye-teeth to be trashed by A.C. Grayling. But when your natural allies unite against you, when your enemies finally make common cause, you have failed utterly in what you set out to do.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
The Trouble with Atheism
Last night Channel 4 broadcast a show hosted by Rod Liddle that was highly critical of the new atheism. I watched it and thought it was really good. No surprise there, as I am a fan of Liddle's journalism and he was preaching to the choir. It was also good to put some faces to several names. I had never seen Michael Burleigh or Denis Alexander before.
Liddle made four points. The first was that the new atheism is an intolerant creed with its fair share of nutters. He met a man in New York carrying a plackard outside St Patrick's Cathedral saying "God Does Not Exist" in an exact counterpoint to the "The End of the World Is Upon Us" plankard carriers we all know and love. He also met an intense woman who runs American Atheists and bears an unnerving resemblence to Ann Coulter. She had her own cable show on which Liddle appeared as a guest. Liddle himself is the man for whom the word shambolic was invented. He has bad hair, bad teeth and appalling dress sense. The least appealing aspect of the Trouble with Atheism were the frequent shots of Liddle walking up and down, clutching his chin and looking thoughtful. Frankly, thoughtful is not a look that he can do.
His second point was that science has nothing to say about whether or not God exists. Of course, this is true and Liddle found plenty of scientists ready to say it. John Polkinghorne and Denis Alexander appeared and demonstrated that there are plenty of religious believers who are distinguished scientists. This led to the quote of the show. Peter Atkins, a neo-atheist, was asked what he made of scientists who believe in God. He called them sad half-scientists. This made him look like a prat.
Liddle's next point was the weakest. He noted that Darwin's Origin of Species is a sacred text to neo-atheists and set out to find if the scientific theory of Darwinism was nearing its sell-by date. This made me nervous. Liddle's anti-creationist credentials are unimpeachable, but I still thought that he was falling into a trap that will allow neo-atheists to caricature him as anti-scientific.
His last point was the best. At the end of The God Delusion, Dawkins sets out a new ten commandments. They are, frankly, a bit wishy-washy. Dawkins admitted as much as said that the point of morals is that they change and are specific to particular cultures. Peter Singer was wheeled in to make the same point. Liddle used this as his cue to examine the periods in history when Christian morality was overthrown for a more 'rational' alternative. Michael Burleigh supplied us with the shocking facts on the French Revolution and we saw how Francis Galton's eugenics had led directly to the Nazi's Final Solution. Dawkins denied that anyone killed because of atheism but Liddle had already shown that this point (actually untrue) was irrelevant. The point, which I have made before, is that when you throw out our moral system, or undermine it by claiming all is relative, you open the door to horrors far worse then you would imagine possible.
Dawkins ended the show by admitting that maybe human beings are so weak that they need religion to guide them. St Augustine would have agreed.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Liddle made four points. The first was that the new atheism is an intolerant creed with its fair share of nutters. He met a man in New York carrying a plackard outside St Patrick's Cathedral saying "God Does Not Exist" in an exact counterpoint to the "The End of the World Is Upon Us" plankard carriers we all know and love. He also met an intense woman who runs American Atheists and bears an unnerving resemblence to Ann Coulter. She had her own cable show on which Liddle appeared as a guest. Liddle himself is the man for whom the word shambolic was invented. He has bad hair, bad teeth and appalling dress sense. The least appealing aspect of the Trouble with Atheism were the frequent shots of Liddle walking up and down, clutching his chin and looking thoughtful. Frankly, thoughtful is not a look that he can do.
His second point was that science has nothing to say about whether or not God exists. Of course, this is true and Liddle found plenty of scientists ready to say it. John Polkinghorne and Denis Alexander appeared and demonstrated that there are plenty of religious believers who are distinguished scientists. This led to the quote of the show. Peter Atkins, a neo-atheist, was asked what he made of scientists who believe in God. He called them sad half-scientists. This made him look like a prat.
Liddle's next point was the weakest. He noted that Darwin's Origin of Species is a sacred text to neo-atheists and set out to find if the scientific theory of Darwinism was nearing its sell-by date. This made me nervous. Liddle's anti-creationist credentials are unimpeachable, but I still thought that he was falling into a trap that will allow neo-atheists to caricature him as anti-scientific.
His last point was the best. At the end of The God Delusion, Dawkins sets out a new ten commandments. They are, frankly, a bit wishy-washy. Dawkins admitted as much as said that the point of morals is that they change and are specific to particular cultures. Peter Singer was wheeled in to make the same point. Liddle used this as his cue to examine the periods in history when Christian morality was overthrown for a more 'rational' alternative. Michael Burleigh supplied us with the shocking facts on the French Revolution and we saw how Francis Galton's eugenics had led directly to the Nazi's Final Solution. Dawkins denied that anyone killed because of atheism but Liddle had already shown that this point (actually untrue) was irrelevant. The point, which I have made before, is that when you throw out our moral system, or undermine it by claiming all is relative, you open the door to horrors far worse then you would imagine possible.
Dawkins ended the show by admitting that maybe human beings are so weak that they need religion to guide them. St Augustine would have agreed.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
A.C. Grayling attacks Terry Eagleton
A poster on my yahoo group kindly brought A.C. Grayling's reply to Terry Eagleton's deprecatory review of The God Delusion to my attention. The original review and Grayling's letter are in the London Review of Books.
Grayling's letter is probably the most embarressing document to fall from the pen of a so-called philosopher since Ayn Rand hung up her quill. One of his points needs to be annihilated because it shows Grayling misunderstands science, experiment, reason and argument. In his review, Eagleton takes Dawkins to task for ignoring almost all the best theology and religious scholarship in favour of bashing fundamentalists and erecting strawmen. Grayling says that Dawkins is quite justified in neglecting any sort of academic theology because, as he writes,
Well no. Professor Grayling seems to imagine that Dawkins has carried out a rational investigation of religion by concentrating on easy targets. he hasn't. If I wanted to carry out such an investigation of astrology, I would not pick up the Daily Mail and analyse the mutterings of Jonathan Cainer, their resident sage. Rather, I would research the topic and seek out the best possible exemplars that I could find. I would ask whether sidereal or tropical astrology gave the best chance of a positive result, or whether I should prefer planetary astrology to sun signs. I would give astrology every chance to win me over, subject to not fiddling the results. To test astrology, I must allow it to present its most promising case, rather than only paying attention tobog-standard horoscopes on the grounds that most people just read their sun signs.
Dawkins only investigates the religious equivalent of a tabloid horoscope and Grayling thinks this is fine. This sort of reasoning is a disgrace from people who claim to be at the forefront of rational investigation. They wouldn't know what it was if it bit them on the nose.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Grayling's letter is probably the most embarressing document to fall from the pen of a so-called philosopher since Ayn Rand hung up her quill. One of his points needs to be annihilated because it shows Grayling misunderstands science, experiment, reason and argument. In his review, Eagleton takes Dawkins to task for ignoring almost all the best theology and religious scholarship in favour of bashing fundamentalists and erecting strawmen. Grayling says that Dawkins is quite justified in neglecting any sort of academic theology because, as he writes,
if one concludes on the basis of rational investigation that one's character and fate are not determined by the arrangement of the planets, stars and galaxies that can be seen from Earth, then one does not waste time comparing classic tropical astrology with sidereal astrology, or either with the Sarjatak system, or any of the three with any other construction placed on the ancient ignorances of our forefathers about the real nature of the heavenly bodies.
Well no. Professor Grayling seems to imagine that Dawkins has carried out a rational investigation of religion by concentrating on easy targets. he hasn't. If I wanted to carry out such an investigation of astrology, I would not pick up the Daily Mail and analyse the mutterings of Jonathan Cainer, their resident sage. Rather, I would research the topic and seek out the best possible exemplars that I could find. I would ask whether sidereal or tropical astrology gave the best chance of a positive result, or whether I should prefer planetary astrology to sun signs. I would give astrology every chance to win me over, subject to not fiddling the results. To test astrology, I must allow it to present its most promising case, rather than only paying attention tobog-standard horoscopes on the grounds that most people just read their sun signs.
Dawkins only investigates the religious equivalent of a tabloid horoscope and Grayling thinks this is fine. This sort of reasoning is a disgrace from people who claim to be at the forefront of rational investigation. They wouldn't know what it was if it bit them on the nose.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Are we very big or very small?
How small is the smallest thing in the universe? How small is a quark? A superstring? Actually, no one knows but the smallest possible length in the universe is the universe is called the Planck length of about 0.000000000000000000000000000000000001 metres. This figure is a fundamental axiom of quantum mechanics and represents the 'lumpiness' of the universe that means that in quantum mechanics you can never be entirely certain of where something is.
How big is the biggest thing in the universe? That must be the universe itself. Latest figures suggest it is about 10,000,000,000 years old. It started from a point at the Big Bang and so the size of the whole universe is the distance that light could have travelled in the 10 billion years available. Light being very fast, this comes to about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 metres.
Of course, these big numbers are very unwieldy so we tend to use exponentials to tidy things up a bit. The Planck length is expressed as 10^-35 metres, the size of the universe 10^25 metres. How big are we? About 1 metre tall or 10^0 metres. So comparing our absolute size to the smallest and biggest possible things in the universe, we are about three fifths of the way up the scale. In other words, we are of medium to large size using the exponential scale, the only scale that makes any sense in physics.
All this makes nonsense of one of Carl Sagan's arguments, also picked up by Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking and lots of others who should know better. In Pale Blue Dot and elsewhere, Sagan invites us to believe that the universe is very large (true) and that we are very small (not true, as we have seen). This apparently means that we are not very important and God doesn't exist. Not only does this argument assume that value and physical size are directly comparable (which, obviously, they are not), but it also uses the wrong scale to determine what is big and what is small. Given that Sagan spent his career trying to explain why science sometimes doesn't say what common sense says, it is annoying that here he uses the everyday arithmetical scale to make a silly point which is invalidated by a scientific view of the universe anyway.
Another of Sagan's mistakes was to assume that when Copernicus moved the Earth from the centre of the universe, he was demoting it. This is also untrue as this paper shows. My thanks to the correspondent who sent me this link and thus inspired this post (which picks up on a point in the second half of the linked paper).
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
How big is the biggest thing in the universe? That must be the universe itself. Latest figures suggest it is about 10,000,000,000 years old. It started from a point at the Big Bang and so the size of the whole universe is the distance that light could have travelled in the 10 billion years available. Light being very fast, this comes to about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 metres.
Of course, these big numbers are very unwieldy so we tend to use exponentials to tidy things up a bit. The Planck length is expressed as 10^-35 metres, the size of the universe 10^25 metres. How big are we? About 1 metre tall or 10^0 metres. So comparing our absolute size to the smallest and biggest possible things in the universe, we are about three fifths of the way up the scale. In other words, we are of medium to large size using the exponential scale, the only scale that makes any sense in physics.
All this makes nonsense of one of Carl Sagan's arguments, also picked up by Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking and lots of others who should know better. In Pale Blue Dot and elsewhere, Sagan invites us to believe that the universe is very large (true) and that we are very small (not true, as we have seen). This apparently means that we are not very important and God doesn't exist. Not only does this argument assume that value and physical size are directly comparable (which, obviously, they are not), but it also uses the wrong scale to determine what is big and what is small. Given that Sagan spent his career trying to explain why science sometimes doesn't say what common sense says, it is annoying that here he uses the everyday arithmetical scale to make a silly point which is invalidated by a scientific view of the universe anyway.
Another of Sagan's mistakes was to assume that when Copernicus moved the Earth from the centre of the universe, he was demoting it. This is also untrue as this paper shows. My thanks to the correspondent who sent me this link and thus inspired this post (which picks up on a point in the second half of the linked paper).
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Friday, December 08, 2006
Rod Liddle on the Trouble with Atheism
Rod Liddle is my favourite journalist. He is a very witty writer who has no truck with political correctness, but also sees himself as a left-winger. His idiosyncracies have led to his being better suited to writing for right-wing publications. A few years ago, the conservative press were calling for Liddle to be sacked from his position as editor of a radio programme at the BBC for his clear idiological bias (the BBC is supposed to be neutral, although this is actually a bit of a fantasy). When he duly resigned, the same publications that had called for his head promptly employed him.
Liddle is also a Christian of an irreverent sort. He is undogmatic and made a programme for Channel 4 attacking creationism. Channel 4, by hosting this show and Richard Dawkin's recent screed The Root of All Evil, has become somewhat notorious among conservative Christians. Now the worm has turned and Liddle is hosting a show on 18th December called The Trouble with Atheism. For non-UK readers, you can read Liddle's interview for the show in this week's Spectator (free until next Thursday). It is quite fun although I'd have liked to see Dawkins squirm a bit more on morality and determinism.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Liddle is also a Christian of an irreverent sort. He is undogmatic and made a programme for Channel 4 attacking creationism. Channel 4, by hosting this show and Richard Dawkin's recent screed The Root of All Evil, has become somewhat notorious among conservative Christians. Now the worm has turned and Liddle is hosting a show on 18th December called The Trouble with Atheism. For non-UK readers, you can read Liddle's interview for the show in this week's Spectator (free until next Thursday). It is quite fun although I'd have liked to see Dawkins squirm a bit more on morality and determinism.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
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