Archive for the 'News' Category

By Alex Rosenberg via 3:A Magazine

‘This is a book for atheists’. Rosenberg makes this explicit in the preface. Atheism requires a whole view of the world based on science that is ‘demanding, rigorous, breathtaking.’ There’s a feeling you get when reading Rosenberg that he’s fed up with atheists who avoid facing up to the big persistent questions such as: ‘what is the nature of reality, the purpose of the universe, and the meaning of life? Is there any rhyme or reason to the course of human history? Why am I here? Do I have a soul, and if so, how long will it last? What happens when we die? Do we have free will? Why should I be moral? What is love, and why is it usually inconvenient?’ Rosenberg demands that atheists just stop arguing with theists, for one because ‘contemporary religious belief is immune to rational objection’ but also because it eats into the time atheists should be taking to work through the implications of their own worldview. Atheists need to spend more time getting to grips with what they should know about the reality we inhabit because science reveals it is ‘stranger than even many atheists recognise.’

So he’s just not all that interested in going over the old arguments that keep getting reheated by lazy atheists who haven’t any news but do have a publishing deal. The God Delusion, God Is Not Great, Letter To A Christian Nation and so on are dull books that probably make more sense in the USA than from where I am but they bring nothing new to the table, play to a home crowd and change no one’s mind. Rosenberg is doing something different from being a cheerleader. He’s bringing a few home truths to the table. I suspect some atheists will not be able to swallow them whole and that just like the theists will also find ways of ducking the question.

So what are his answers to the persistent questions, as he calls them, the ones at the head of this article and his book, the ones we have that begin early in life, get crowded out by thoughts of sex in adolescence and then come steaming back afterwards? There is no God. Reality is what physics says (and evolutionary biology). There is no purpose to anything, anywhere. Never was, never will be. There is therefore no meaning to life. I’m here because of dumb luck. Prayer doesn’t work. There is no such thing as a soul. There is no freewill. When we die, everything stays the same except without us. There is no moral difference between good and bad, right and wrong. You should be good because it makes you feel better than being bad. Anything goes. Love is a solution to a strategic coordination problem. It’s automatic, programmed so there’s no need to go out looking for it. History has no purpose (see above) because the future is less and less like the past. Ditto economics. Technology makes predicting the future a guessing game and their rational choice theories are outrageously bad psychology.  More…

By Pervez Hoodbhoy via The Express Tribune

Pervez Hoodbhoy

The news from CERN was stunning: the European nuclear science laboratory had just discovered (September 2011) that particles known as neutrinos — called so because they are neutral and carry no charge — habitually travel a little bit faster than light. This threatened to shake the very foundations of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which had laid the basis for the atomic bomb, nuclear energy, and most of modern day physics. Relativity theory starts from the postulate that the speed of light is the absolute maximum that anything can travel at.

Pakistanis are generally unmoved by developments in the world of science. But this time the excitement was palpable. A TV channel called me up, requesting an interview. Fine, I said, specifying the time when I would be available. The producer was profoundly apologetic: this was exactly when they would be interviewing Dr Zakir Naik, an Islamic scholar who frequently pontificates on issues of science and religion. Would I therefore please give another time? Since the good doctor’s claim to fame is his understanding of religious texts rather than of physics, I declined and do not know what transpired subsequently.

Speed of light issues have often moved sections of religious people in rather strange ways. Way back in 1973, as a young physics lecturer at Quaid-i-Azam University, I had been fascinated by the calculation done by the head of our department. Seeking the grand synthesis of science and faith, this pious gentleman — who left on his final journey last month — had published calculations that proved Heaven (jannat) was running away from Earth at one centimeter per second less than the speed of light. His reasoning centred around a particular verse of the Holy Quran that states worship on the night of Lailat-ul-Qadr (Night of Revelation) is equivalent to a thousand nights of ordinary worship. Indeed, if you input the factor of 1,000 into Einstein’s famous formula for time dilatation, this yields a number: one centimeter per second less than the speed of light!  More…

Murray Kempton from The New York Review of Books on The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice by Christopher Hitchens…

Eric Partridge has informed us that “the missionary position” is an expression of South Sea islander coinage. If Christopher Hitchens did not share the widespread misapprehension of blasphemous intent in his grand remonstrance against Mother Teresa, he could scarcely have chosen to present it under a rubric so resounding with echoes of pagan disdain for piety’s disabling effect upon investigative curiosity.

Hitchens would have little cause to boast or blush if he were indeed the blasphemer that he mistakes himself to be. It is by no means a certainty that blasphemy is a trespass that much disesteemed by the Maker of Heaven and Earth. His complaints to Isaiah against the stiflings of His nostrils by incense powerfully suggest zests for the combat mode that would much prefer contending with Athalia’s heartful Baalist conviction to coughing with the smoke of Saul’s unfelt oblations. More…

From Richard Madsen at The Immanent Frame…

For almost one hundred years, all sociologists of religion have taken Max Weber’s great work on comparative religions as a primary point of departure. Whole libraries of scholarship have been produced to explicate Weber, expand on Weber, disagree with Weber, revise Weber. In the next hundred years, I think, the point of departure will be Robert Bellah rather than Weber. Bellah’s new masterpiece, Religion in Human Evolution is comparable in scope, breadth of scholarship, and depth of erudition to Weber’s study of world religions, but it is grounded in all of the advances of historical, linguistic, and archeological scholarship that have taken place since Weber, as well as theoretical advances in evolutionary biology and cognitive science. There is enough complexity in Bellah’s work to generate as many academic inspirations and controversies—and, inevitably, oversimplifications and misunderstandings—as have arisen from Weber’s, but Bellah’s will have more resonance with contemporary issues than Weber’s century-old scholarship. Even more fundamental, however, is that Bellah’s new book is in style and pathos more in tune with the spirit of the early twenty-first century than Weber. What are some of the key contrasts between Bellah and Weber? First of all, having deeply absorbed the perspectives of Durkheim, Bellah is focused much more on religious practice, especially ritual practice. This puts him in line with the dominant contemporary trends in the anthropology of religion, trends that see religions mainly as ways of life rather than systems of ideas. Weber doesn’t ignore religious practices, but puts much more emphasis on the ideas that animate the great world religions. Bellah by no means ignores religious ideas, but he emphasizes how thinking about religion grows out of doing religion. More…

Photo by Religion News Services

By Kimberly Winston from USA Today

Late one night over pizza, University of Dayton students Branden King and Nick Haynes discovered neither of them believed in God.

Surely, they thought, they couldn’t be the only unbelievers at the Roman Catholic college.

Last year, King and Haynes and a couple of other like-minded students applied to the administration to form the Society of Freethinkers, a student club based on matters of unbelief.

The university rejected their application — and rejected them again in September. Without university approval, the group cannot meet on campus, tap a student activities fund, participate in campus events or use campus media.

For now, they meet at a Panera cafe off campus, relying on word-of-mouth to draw members, up to about 15 now. And they are appealing the rejection.

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