Learning Chinese

Thought I would start blogging again. Things have changed in the middle. I'm now married, back in Australia, and writing this on an Android phone.

I never had a phone before, but I'm really liking this one. The great thing about it is that you can program it. I wrote Chinese Tap to learn Chinese. It works nicely. Today, coming home from work I learnt the colours.

If you'd like a copy, you can get one (for the price of half a can of softdrink) from https://market.android.com/details?id=com.nopaniers.chinese. Hope you enjoy it!

A wiki for apologetics

After a search through the internet to try to find some apologetics wikis, I couldn't find any. Although there are some really informative and active wikis for Christianity in general (like WikiChristian) there didn't seem to be any for apologetics. So I've started one of my own. It's Apologetics-Wiki and everyone is welcome to edit it.

The same issues come up over and over again when we're talking about Christianity. Christianity is attacked for the same reasons, and often the same answers are given in response. A lot of what is repeated over and over again on the internet has been deeply thought about. I was hoping that apologetics wiki would be a place where Christians and people who were seeking answers to the big questions could go to find out some of the answers.

Right now, it's just started. The hardest thing will be finding people to contribute to the website. Once it is big enough, and there are some regular contributors it will take a life of it's own. But right now it's just me. I need some help, and I'm not sure how to get it on the internet...

The God Delusion

I finished reading this book a while ago, and up to now haven't got around to posting my thoughts. That's not a surprise, because the book just starts wide of the mark, and just gets wider. It simply doesn't apply to any of the questions I am interested in. That makes it a plain boring. Yes, there's vitriol. Yes, there's way over the top statements. But there's only so many empty statements you can read before you start to wish you were doing something more interesting - like watching paint dry. At least paint doesn't insult everyone else.

So what makes Dawkins views so uninteresting?

His central argument requires God to be a complicated material object. Dawkins paints God as an enormously complex material object. He says,

However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the
Ultimate Boeing 747.

It doesn't matter that the statement is incorrect about probabilities. What's more worrying is that Dawkins assumes that God is not spiritual, but a material object - his very definition of complex implies something, like the 747, which is made of many parts.

This is totally irrelevant to a rational person. Christians don't believe in a God who is a material object made of material parts. A material object could not be the Christian God. A famous Christian argument states that material object isn't the first cause. A material object couldn't have any of the properties of God, and couldn't be responsible for actions ascribed to God. It's not the same God who acts in my life, and not the God who has acted in history. So if Dawkins is trying to argue against God, why does he define his god in a way which doesn't apply to a Christians or Jews?

In fact, this exactly the opposite of what Christians believe. We don't believe in gods which are material objects. We don't believe in sacred raisin cakes. We don't think that idols created the universe.

Dawkins also equates the word "faith" with irrational belief.

Faith means blind trust, in the absence of evidence even in the teeth of evidence.

That's not how Christians use the word where faith is trust in God. It doesn't reflect the way it is used in the Bible (see Hebrews 11 for examples). We certainly do trust God, but we're not blind. How could you describe Abraham as having blind trust when God appeared to him? Abraham would have been blind if he couldn't see God. Abraham knew that God existed, and did as God commanded.

Dawkins continues with weak arguments and aggressive rhetoric will make his case true. He is constantly putting words (his own) into others mouths - which comes across as distinctly fishy when you've read the original authors.

When he addresses C. S. Lewis he does so for about half a page, before dismissing him. How does he do it so easily? Easy. He says that Lewis didn't consider the possibility that Jesus was just a morally good preacher - but that's exactly what C. S. Lewis does consider. It makes you wonder whether Dawkins even read what he was writing about...

Dawkins points out there are terrible things (shock, horror) that happen in the Bible. For example, he dwells on Lot's incest at length and so says that we can't have got our moral lead from the Bible. He tries to claim that because it is Lot (Abraham's nephew) who is doing it that we should follow. The Christian view is that people aren't perfect, and that goes (especially!) for people whose lives are reported in the Bible as well as for us today. In fact, if he'd bothered to read a little further he would have seen how badly Lot's actions were condemned and what consequences they had. But like so many things, he conveniently left that out...

There are so many bad arguments here, that don't even seem to even engage straightforward Christian responses, (2, 3, 4) to his writing while insulting their intelligence. It makes me wonder if his real aim is to promote his chosen view of science and religion: That they are in conflict. He's obviously gone to great lengths to present himself as a scientist fighting against religion. In a sense then, it doesn't matter to him what people reply. For him, I suspect it's more important to have a heated and hate filled argument - to prove that "science" and religion are at odds - than to search out the truth.

I could go on and on boring anyone who stumbles on my blog to tears, but I won't. The God Delusion isn't worth it. Do something more worthwhile with your life.


Thanks to TwentyHertz for the world's most boring CCTV camera view, and Bart Koop-Henzen for a material, but complicated, 747 and J0nny_t for the war photo.

The God Delusion: Chapter 1

When I was younger, the Iron curtain divided the world and I used to listen to propaganda broadcasts from around the world. I used to particularly enjoy shortwave radio from Poland, Uzbekistan and the BBC. Science in Action was my favourite program. The most far out station I ever heard though was Radio Pyongyang from North Korea.

"The God Delusion" seems to come from the North Korea style of propoganda. Radio Moscow was subtle, and so it was slightly believable. Not so for DPRK. They were full of anecodotes about how corrupt and horrible the West was and void of real information. Living in the West it seemed laughable. That training is very useful for reading "The God Delusion".

The main point of the first chapter is:

Great scientists... who appear to be religious usually turn out not to be.

Off the top of my head I can name many scientists with religious beliefs. Let's see:

Coperinicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Bacon, Kelvin, Maxwell, and in quantum mechanics specifically: Max Planck, Born (a Jewish convert to Christianity) and Heisenberg (who was a Lutheran).

I have always thought that people who resort to "Proof by Einstein" is a completely bogus way to argue anything. He treated his wife abysmally - having a mistress, and not even mentioning her in his scientific work - so he's not the sort of person I'd take a moral or religious lead from. I certainly wouldn't expect a Proof by Einstein from a scientist. But that's exactly what Dawkins does.

I think Dawkins portrayl of Einstein as an atheist is best refuted by the Einstein himself:

My position concerning God is that of an agnostic.

A thoughtful agnostic of the type that Dawkins reserves some of his most vicious vitriol for.

We don't have to put up with the type of wishy-washy anecdotal claims from Dawkins about the blanket beliefs of scientists being atheist. There are valid scientific studies into the religious beliefs of top scientists. For example this one:

Our study data do not strongly support the idea that scientists simply drop their religious identities upon professional training, due to an inherent conflict between science and faith.

There are more atheists who become scientists (as a proportion) than in the general population, but the study concludes that this is self-selecting:

It appears that those from non-religious backgrounds disproportionately self-select into scientific professions.

In fact the biggest increase (as a proportion) of people who become leading scientists is not among atheists, but among Jews (2% of the general population compared with 15% of scientists).

The rest of chapter 1 is an anecdotal rant against muslims. It could be taken from any far right wing magazine, and I don't have much time for that type of hatred directed at anybody.

So far this book is only notable because it's rude. Hopefully it will improve...

White Man's Burden

A tribute the Kipling's White man's burden. Some people think that white man's burden has something to do with the US invasion of (previously Spanish) Philippines. I just think Kipling was a frustrated office worker:

Take up the White Man's burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go, bind your sons to offices
To serve their bosses' need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
You're new-caught sullen peoples,
Half caffeine and half child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In queues to abide,
To veil the threat of error
By cheque and show and pride;
By open speech rejected,
An hundred times made plain:
We seek another's profit,
And work for no one's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Pointless flame wars of hate--
Fulfil the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness wait;
And when your goal is nearest
The end of waiting sought,
Watch sloth and office Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But foil of serf and sweeper--
In even common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go demand of them your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
To blame those who do better,
To hate those who guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought it us this bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not aim for art--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To free your human heart;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh on God and you.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold edged, but dear-bought paychecks,
Will trade your life for beers.

Poverty

We can get a £0.01 flight across Europe. It is a similar distance to people in Sudan and Sub-Saharan Africa. How can we possibly have let things like this happen?

Francis Colins

Francis Colins is the leader of the Human Genome Project. This was a really interesting talk that made some good points both about science and Christianity. He read Mere Christianity and it had a deep impact on him, as it is having on me. It is inspiring to see someone so brave to cross the gap between Christianity and science when atheists are on the war-path trying to silence people like him, to claim science as their own.


Among the more interesting things he says in this video:

I find not a shred of conflict between what I know as a scientist and what I believe as a believer. I know that surprises a lot of people. I think that is unfortunate, because the public often only hears about the conflict - about the idea that there are irreconcilable differences between believers and scientists.

I could quote of lot of what he has to say, because it is relevant to me:

The idea that He would be threatened by our puny minds trying to understand how creation works just doesn't make a lot of sense... If in the process we discover things which don't fit with our preconceived notions, then we have to struggle with that - and we should do so with all great intensity. But I don't think we have to worry that in the end somehow truth is going to end up being in conflict with truth.

But maybe it's best if you watch the video yourself.