Religious SF

I'm interested in science-fiction written from a Christian perspective, but here's a website about Judaism in SF and here's another about Islam in SF.

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More Sad News

Tony Judt, whom I wrote about a few months ago, has died. Like many of the secular left, he was a good man who could not understand why his fellow human beings would not live up to the ideals he set for them. And his criticism of US policy towards Israel sometimes veered too close to being a conspiracy theory.

There is an appreciation in the Observer today.

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2010 Faraday Lectures

Following on from my post on the Faraday Summer Course below, here are links to some of the other talks. Unfortunately, not all of them were filmed so some are available only in audio (for copyright reasons, I understand). Search for "Summer Course 5".

http://graphite.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/faraday/Multimedia.php

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Royal Excess

In these times of fiscal austerity it’s perhaps worth contemplating the excesses of British Royal Courts of both the Tudors and Stuarts. When the Earl of Danby introduced measures to restore the fiscal credit of Charles II’s regime there was one area he failed to penetrate; the royal household. Charles was especially generous to his favourite mistress Barbara Palmer, the Countess of Castlemaine and the 1st duchess of Cleveland. The Countess was awarded her salary as a lady of the queen’s bedchamber of at least £200 pounds a year; in other words Charles forced his wife to accept his favourite mistress as a lady in waiting. He also paid her:

• Ten thousand pounds a year out of customs revenue;

• Ten thousand pounds a year out of the beer and ale excise;

• Five thousand pounds a year out of the post office;

• A thousand pounds a year out of first fruits and tenths (a tax which used to go from the clergy to the Pope).

• Individual debts which were amounts that ranged up to thirty thousand pounds. These were mostly gambling debts.

• Grants of royal lands and the right to dispose of and sell places in the customs.

Castlemaine was only the most prominent of an army of mistresses, courtier and household servants, all of whom had their hands in Charles's pockets. You might say it’s a good thing we don’t still operate this kind of system. Imagine having to pay a subsidy to Camilla Parker Bowles or Monica Lewinsky every time you send a letter or buy a pack of beers. Mind you there was that Tory MP who claimed for the £1,645 duck house.

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My week at the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion

I spent the week before last at a Summer Course at the Faraday Institute where I gave a presentation on the importance of medieval science. I had a wonderful time, meeting loads of people who ranged from legendary academics like Ernan McMullin and Simon Conway Morris, to ordinary people who are just interested in the topic of science and religion.

Unfortunately, work commitments prevented me from attending all the talks. But, of those that I did make, the stand out presentations included the following (in no particular order):

Professor Peter Harrison of the University of Oxford, spoke about science and religion in the early modern period and gave a fantastic introduction to the topic. He was particularly interesting on how religious commitments could legitimate and inform scientific investigation.

Professor Jeff Schloss from Westmonst College gave a fascinating talk about the evolution of altruism and the various theories that have been put forward to account for it. His comments on group selection (which I now finally understand) explained how Richard Dawkins has got the wrong end of the stick over this issue. Time for me to revisit David Sloan Wilson's work in this area since I had previously been convinced by Dawkins' critique.

Professor Peter Clark from the University of Lausanne made the case for a physical theory of the mind being compatible with Christianity and the Resurrection. I agree with him that it is compatible, although I’m still something of a dualist myself. But Peter said he thought many Protestant theologians had now accepted a physical mind (what is technically called monism as opposed to dualism) as linking biblical doctrine to modern science most effectively.

These talks will soon be available on the Faraday Institute website as videos. I’ll post a link when they are up.

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Sad News

In his Daily Telegraph blog, Damian Thompson has revealed that Christopher Hitchens' throat cancer is terminal and that he does not expect to live long. The Hitch has written at length about his illness in the next issue of Vanity Fair. By all accounts, the approach of death has not mellowed him.

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Faraday Institute of Science and Religion

Here is a link to a video of the talk on medieval science I gave at the Faraday Institute summer course a couple of weeks ago. I'll post some more thoughts that came out of the excellent week I had there soon.

My talk on The Importance of Medieval Science.

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Gödel's Revenge

Via Transterrestrial Musings.

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Atheist schools?

The BBC reports that the English education secretary (who is actually Scottish but has no say in Scottish schools), would be very interested if Richard Dawkins tried to set up an atheist school. The school would really describe itself as freethinking or sceptical or similar, but the name hardly matters.

I would welcome this as well, for two reasons. Firstly, we might get less whining from atheists that Church schools are good and popular. Secondly, Dawkins Academy would give us an objective test to discover if a Christian ethos really does improve the performance of schools. However, I hope the atheist school is a bigger success than the school, Beacon Hill, that Bertrand Russell tried the run in the 1920s. The less said about that fiasco, the better.

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This is funny

I just received a book that is extremely obscure that I've been wanting for some time. I learned of it by reading J. P. Moreland's book Scaling the Secular City: A Defense of Christianity, in his chapter on the argument from mind. He addresses, at one point, the claim that naturalism -- or alternatively, determinism -- is self-defeating. It takes away any reason why we should accept naturalism or determinism because it takes away reasons. In defense of this, he quotes the existentialist philosopher and theologian Hans Jonas from his book On Faith, Reason and Responsibility. I've looked for this book periodically on AbeBooks but there has never been a single entry for it when I did. I looked for it on WorldCat, but I could only find two libraries that have it, both in California. However, a few months ago I tried Amazon.com (yes, it should have been obvious) and I found a copy from a used bookstore. Now I have it on my desk and am very happy.

The quotation Moreland uses is from pages 42-3 and deals explicitly with epiphenomanlism, the view that all that appears in the mind is a by-product of what the body is doing. Thus, the mind has no power itself to act; it may seem like it does, but when we decide to do something what is really happening is that the mental by-product that appears tricks us into thinking it came before the action it allegedly led to. In fact, the action appeared first, and the mental by-product appeared afterwards. It had to, unless we give the mind some sort of self-motive power, and this conflicts with naturalism and determinism. Here is the quote in full:

So much for the internal critique of the concept of epiphenomenon. More devastating still are the consequences which flow from it for everything else: for the concept of a reality that indulges in this kind of thing, for a thinking that explains itself by it, and for itself as a thought of that thinking. Here the charge is not inconsistency but absurdity.

First, what sort of being would that be which brings forth, as its most elaborate performance, this vain mirage? We answer: not a merely indifferent, but a positively absurd or perverse being, and therefore unbelievable. If living behavior were nothing but a deaf-mute pantomime, performed by supremely sophisticated physical systems without enjoyment of subjectivity, it could well be termed pointless but not strictly absurd. The show becomes absurd when it accompanies itself with music as if its predecided paces were set by it. A lie can have a function, but not here: the mechanical needs no bribe. And yet it should sound -- in will, pleasure and pain -- a siren song with no one there to seduce? A song that only sings its error to itself, including the error of being the singer? Something devoid of interest in the first place, and with no room for its intercession in the second, should stage the grandiose comedy of interest, shamming a task that is not there and a power it does not have? The sheer, senseless futility of such an elaborate hoax is enough to disqualify it as a caricature of nature. He who makes nature absurd in order to circumvent one of her riddles has passed sentence on himself and not on her and has forfeited the right to speak any more of laws of nature.

Even more directly than via the slander of nature has he passed judgment on himself by what his thesis says about the possible validity of any thesis whatsoever and, therefore, about the validity claim of his own. Every theory, even the most mistaken, is a tribute to the power of thought, to which in the very meaning of the theorizing act it is allowed that it can rise above the power of extramental determinations, tat it can judge freely on what is given in the field of representations, that it is, first of all, capable of the resolve for truth, i.e., the resolve to follow the guidance of insight and not the drift of fancies. But epiphenomenalism contends the impotence of thinking and therewith its own inability to be independent theory. Indeed, even the extreme materialist must exempt himself qua thinker, so that extreme materialism as a doctrine be possible. But while even the Cretan who declares all Cretans to be liars can add, "except myself at this moment," the epiphenomenalist who has defined the nature of thought can not make this addition, because he too is swallowed up in the abyss of his universal verdict.

Thus we have a twofold reductio ad absurdum, according to the twofold question of what to think of a reality that brings forth this futile mirage and what of the attempt of this self-confessed mirage to establish a truth about that reality. Nature as an impostor on the one hand, a theory destroying itself on the other, was the outcome of the scrutiny.

Now, the title of this post is "This is funny" yet nothing funny has been mentioned yet. Here's what's funny. I typed the above quote and planned to post it as a Quote of the Day. In doing so, I went back to Amazon.com and found the page with this book on it. As I copied the URL address, I looked at the picture of the book presented on Amazon. It's my book. I don't mean it's the same edition or the same publisher as the book I just bought, I mean it's numerically the same book. It has the same folds in the cover, the same discoloration on the top.

It just made me laugh.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)
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