C. S. Lewis wrote that

Faith is holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.

When someone says “I can’t believe it’s Tuesday” he really means that he does believe it’s Tuesday, but it takes effort. His emotions are telling him that it is some other day, but he chooses to accept that it is Tuesday for other reasons.

It takes faith for me to believe that men walked on the moon in 1969. I’m convinced that it happened, but it doesn’t seem true to me. It doesn’t seem plausible that 1960’s technology could have accomplished this, even though I know that it did.

It takes faith for me to believe that Ernest Shackleton and his crew survived their exploration of the Antarctic. I don’t doubt the historical accounts, though they are hard to believe.

It takes faith for me to believe some mathematical theorems even though I have carefully gone through every line of their proofs. I am convinced that these theorems are true though they do not seem true. Other mathematicians have commented on the same experience. For example, Jerry Bona once joked that

The Axiom of Choice is obviously true; the Well Ordering Principle is obviously false; and who can tell about Zorn’s Lemma?

The three statements he mentions are logically equivalent, though the Axiom of Choice is the easiest to believe and the Well Ordering Principle is the hardest to believe.

It takes faith for me to believe in God. At times it doesn’t feel like God exists, though there are reasons to believe that He does. I have found these reasons convincing, and I hold on to my conclusions in spite of my changing moods.

The latest Carnival of Africans – the Phoenix Edition – is well worth a read.

• 01 and the universe
• Acinonyx Scepticus
• Amanuensis
• Ambient Normality
• ASSAf Blog
• Botswana Skeptic
• Bomoko and other nonsense words
• Communicating Science, the African Way **new**
• Defollyant’s AntiBlog
• Effortless Incitement
• Ewan’s Corner
• Geekery
• Grumpy Old Man
• Hello Universe, This is Nessie
• Ionian Enchantment
• Limbic Nutrition
• Lenny Says
• McBrolloks **new**
  
• Nathan Bond’s TART Remarks
  
• Orion Spur
  
• Other Things Amanzi
• Pickled Bushman
• Psychohistorian
  
• Reason Check
• Retroid Raving
• Scorched
• Shadows Hide
  
• Stop Danie Krügel
• Subtle Shift in Emphasis
• Synapses
• Tauriq Moosa
  
• The Science Of Sport
• The Skeptic Black Sheep
• The Skeptic Detective
• Turn 2 Reason
• Word of the Blog

The same-sex marriage debate has been going on for some time, but preventing same sex couples from adopting children is a new low – the saddest, most ignorant and intolerant outcome I have ever seen. This from the same state whose state fruit and vegetable are the tomato, home of Bill Clinton and model of racial integration.

These so-called “religious conservatives” are giving Christianity, humanity and religion in general a bad name – time for a refresher course on the top 10 reasons why gay marriage is wrong.

“There is enough of the population that is alarmed at the general breakdown of the family, that has been so inundated with images of homosexual relationships in all of the media,” said Mr. Hunter, who gave the benediction at the Democratic National Convention this year, yet supported the same-sex marriage ban in his state. “It’s almost like it’s obligatory these days to have a homosexual couple in every TV show or every movie.”

*sigh*

* NYT – Bans in 3 States on Gay Marriage

* Flag photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamison/3005985912/ (flag flying at half mast in Castro, San Francisco on Wednesday 5th November 2008).

One of the core questions posed by the study – “is Islam to blame for terrorism?” – will hopefully help educate and inform otherwise naive people who are often sucked in by hate-and-ignorance powered sites like “the religion of peace” (I’m not going to do them the favour of linking to their website – Google the name if you want to find it – but be warned, it’s ugly).

Then I come across a blog entry by one Zsuzsanna in Tempe, Arizona which blows me away – another example of ignorance, malice, religious intolerance and another terrible advertisement for Christianity.

Zsuzsanna attacks local blogger Tertia of So Close fame for using IVF, calling her a monster, inappropriate, vulgar, and a psycho. WTF? In the same breath she extrapolates from this MSNBC (AP quoted) article, thoroughly demonstrating her ignorance of Africa, African people, statistics and Christianity in general.

Tertia’s response (Apparently I am a monster, inappropriate, vulgar and a psycho) is great and happily her blog is showered with mostly sane responses from hundreds of readers, Christians and not. If Zsuzsanna wasn’t already exposed as a grade A nutter, her blogged response makes it very clear.

*sigh*

“P.P.P.S. You may be unable to understand, or unwilling to accept, that evolution occurs. And yet, life evolves! [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_pur_si_muove] From the content on your website, it is clear that you, like many others, view God as the Creator of the Universe. I respect that view. I find it baffling, however, that someone can worship God as the all-mighty Creator while, at the same time, denying even the possibility (not to mention the overwhelming evidence) that God’s Creation involved evolution. It is as though a person thinks that God must have the same limitations when it comes to creation as a person who is unable to understand, or even attempt to understand, the world in which we live. Isn’t that view insulting to God?”
—Richard Lenski

“I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.

I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and in many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here, and what the question might mean. I might think about a little, but if I can’t figure it out, then I go to something else. But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.”

—Richard Feynman

Personally, I am all for SETI continuing – the concept fascinates me (on both a scientific and religious level), the money spent on SETI is a drop in the ocean, and I really do believe it is our responsibility to search and look outwards. Success would change the world – there is no arguing that – and I believe overall for the good (it could give us the focus we need as a species, and put a few things into proper perspective – local xenophobia may vanish for example. We can hope).

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence seems a lot like a religious belief to me – both require faith from supporters, neither can be proved to be pointless by science, and the payoff for “success” in either case is huge no matter how you look at it :-)

I don’t follow the shallow “religion will collapse if we find intelligent life elsewhere” idea that so many people seem to subscribe to – as a Christian myself I can’t believe God created this wonderful universe just for us (in the same way God didn’t give us a huge curiosity and fascination with “out there” and the desire to explore, learn and understand).

As a fan of science fiction (“Contact” is one of my all-time favourite novels and films) I have thought and dreamt about all kinds of first contact scenarios, from beneficial through benign and on to disastrous – and plenty of reasons contact / proof hasn’t happened yet. Personally I sway towards beneficial. I definitely don’t believe we should “hide” from nasty aliens – I don’t believe anything we could do would help us hide from anything that could directly affect us anyway.

Slashdot coverage of the article includes all sorts of different viewpoints as always, including:

“How interesting it would be if we finally make contact with an alien race and the first thing they ask us is whether or not The Creator has sent a “Messiah” to us yet.”

SETI’s success may very well be an Outside Context Problem for our species (and an OCP could obviously still happen even without SETI), so it deserves to be discussed and explored. I love this quote from Excession, a scifi novel by the brilliant Iain M Banks:

“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass… when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.” —-Iain M Banks, Excession.

Links:

• Space.com SETI FAQ
• Review: Contact with Alien Civilizations
• Meet the neighbours: Is the search for aliens such a good idea? (which includes a literary and Hollywood guide to “First Contact”)
• The other side of the Fermi paradox

“TULSA, OK—In a major coup for the growing field of creation science, the perfectly preserved remains of a 5,000-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex were delivered Monday to Tulsa’s Creationist Museum of Natural History.”

From The Onion (January 2003, but relevant now because of the recently opened Creation Museum - see Adam and Eve in the Land of the Dinosaurs [NYT]).

Also see today’s Slashdot article “A Field Trip To the Creation Museum“.

1. Both initially nearly failed as business ventures, then went on to become very profitable
2. Membership fees
3. Your family / friends (unless they too are members) get upset when you join
4. Both see you spending large amounts of time attached to gadgets, which purport to make you feel better
5. Both have been the theme of Southpark episodes
6. Both are never-ending – the more you take part, the more you discover, and in turn more is revealed to you to keep you hooked
7. Both ban you for talking about drugs
8. If you post either manuals on the Internet, you get sued
9. Both have a leadership which periodically updates material
10. Both encourage you to level-up :-)
11. If you die in either, you get reincarnated without your stuff (and it costs you money to get it back).
12. Famous people – Branden Routh (Superman) plays WoW, Tom Cruise plays Scientology
13. Both have popular newsgroups
14. Both feature cool looking armor :-)

Some (imho) interesting reading:

Travolta Hospitalized With Critically Low E-Meter Reading

The Beginner’s Guide to L Ron Hubbard (Google Video) – also see Bare-Faced Messiah [The true story of L Ron Hubbard] and of course Wikipedia’s L Ron Hubbard article.

Scientology and Germany

And finally A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant :-)