Stephen Law

I will be on the Steve Wright Radio 2 show tomorrow afternoon (show starts 2pm). Deborah Harry is also on. It's then available for a week on iplayer. PS Well I was SUPPOSED TO BE ON, but wasn't - odd. Maybe tomorrow. POST SCRIPT Well I am now down for Friday 27th. Fingers crossed... 27 May 2011 14:00 BBC Radio 2 27/05/2011 Steve and Tim chat to Gloria Hunniford and author Stephen Law. Postscript. Well I was on for about 2 mins. Still, I plugged the book and the college. at 2 hrs 33 mins: here for a week.

Believing Bullshit published today in the UK. Amazon.co.uk are alresdy out of stock for couple of weeks but it is widely available elsewhere if you cannot wait, such as at Blackwells online. Here is the link . PS I heard yesterday that the books are in the country so the delay to delivery will be very short.

Has any one seeen this? I want to see it in 3D but must have missed my chance I think. Herzog is one of my favourite directors. Always interesting, if not always good. I liked Grizzly Man and Fitzcarraldo is perhaps my favourite film. Along with Toy Story 3. PS Just found out it is on this week Odeon Covent Garden....

Just heard this afternoon that the paper I mentioned in the previous post will be published in Analysis , January 2012, which is great news. The paper is called "Naturalism, Evolution and True Belief". I will send copies out on request. Email me. It's better than my Religious Studies paper on Plantinga, I think.

This is a very nice talk by Plantinga explaining the latest version of his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. I attack a part of an earlier incarnation of the argument in the latest issue of Religious Studies . I have an attempt at refuting this version currently under review at another journal (Stop press 4.45 pm - just accepted in Analysis ) Here's the key thing re the latter paper - I think I can show that, even if semantic properties of neural structures are epiphenomenal, as Plantinga supposes they very likely are given naturalism, it turns out surprisingly enough that natural selection will still favour some belief contents over and others, and will in fact favour beliefs that are true. That sounds impossible, doesn't it? Surely natural selection can only favour those properties of neural structures that causally effect behaviour, right? And semantic epiphenomenalism entails that such properties as being a true belief cannot causally affect behaviour. But actuall...

The Daily Mail Reported: Calling themselves 'ambassadors', the church members point to baffling biblical codes to demonstrate their reasoning. Speaking to CNN the group's leader, 89-year-old Harold Camping, is adamant that the date is accurate. [F]or anyone harbouring doubts over the accuracy of the prediction, the group has a cast iron answer - 'the Bible guarantees it'. He said: 'I know it's absolutely true, because the Bible is always absolutely true. 'If I were not faithful that would mean that I'm a hypocrite.' Despite his conviction, Camping has predicted the world would end before - on September 4 1994. That, he says, was a mistake, a misreading of the biblical codes used to decipher the exact date of the 'rapture'. In order to get the warning out in time he fudged his calculations, a mistake he maintains he did not make this time. Read more . I find these kind of cases fascinating. The really interesting bit, psychologically speak...

There's a kindle edition of Believing Bullshit now on www.amazon.com.