This Post Has 2 Comments

1. 

   Tim Hogan January 2, 2013 Reply

   I had a dream that I had invented a new type of particle accelerator; one which used two opposing coils of descending size, much like the funnel one rolls a coins into at the Science Center, to accelerate the particles inside a super magnetic field and finally shooting them at one another at a point between the opposing “funnels.” I guess my head was trying to get around the necessity for a 26K circular particle collider built 100 meters underground between France and Switzerland. Anything like that out there?

2. 

   Ben January 3, 2013 Reply

   “I’m calling out Higgs as an intellectually dishonest man.”

   It’s not just some of the traditional reasons for belief that are undermined by science—it’s all of them. Bit by bit, as we understand more about our universe, we find no room for—no evidence of—a God. What reasons for belief remain? Only wish-thinking, revelation, and tutelage—which are reasons, but not good ones. And if Higgs imputes his atheism to “family background” rather than rationality, he’s making the same mistake that those fundamentalists do: going along with what you were taught instead of thinking for yourself.

   I’m calling out Higgs as an intellectually dishonest man. He is a great physicist, and yes, deserves his Nobel Prize, but he doesn’t know squat about accommodationism. He is going along to get along, knowing that it’s always safer in the eyes of a religious world to coddle the godly.

   http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/peter-higgs-the-boson-man-takes-out-after-richard-dawkins-for-the-usual-reasons/

   http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/keith-kloor-lumps-me-with-dawkins-as-sneering-strident-and-simplistic/

   First of all, we’re not making an enemy of the whole world—only those religious people who cannot tolerate the merest criticism of their faith. I don’t think, for instance, that Karl Giberson, whom I go after repeatedly (and who goes after me in turn) is my “enemy.” We’re both civil enough to know that this is a debate about belief and reason, and we have respect for each other as people. Let us also remember that those who spearheaded the drives for civil rights and for women’s rights were once “making enemies of the whole world.” Presumably Kloor would have cautioned the early suffragettes to stifle themselves, as they were making enemies of almost everyone. Every moral advance in this world begins with a small minority of vocal people.

   Further, by saying that people like Dawkins and me are lumping together all religions as equally pernicious, Kloor reveals himself as abysmally ignorant. Neither of us, nor any of the New Atheists, have done that: we all recognize that there are degrees of perniciousness among the faiths. For example, I’ve often said that I have little beef with the Amish and Quakers compared with Muslims or conservative Catholics. I decry faith to the degree that its adherents try to impose their views on the rest of us. Now many of us do criticize the more “moderate” religions for enabling the extremist ones, or for trying to impose their own unsubstantiated views on the rest of us through the political process.