Stephen Law

The recipe for generating a successful new religion or conspiracy theory usually involves two key components: 1. identify supposed 'mysteries' that an appeal to your preferred unseen intelligence (MIB, God, gremlins, fairies, the CIA) operating behind the scene easily solves (e.g. why the twin towers came down like that, how life began, why you can't find your keys). 2. be ingenious at explaining stuff away . Any apparent evidence against your theory can alw ays be accounted for given some ingenuity , e.g. if you believe in young earth creationism, cook up explanations for the fossil record, etc.; if you believe in a good, loving god, cook up explanations for all the horrendous suffering we see in nature; if you believe the royal family are alien shape-shifters, cook up explanations for why they're never spotted in alien form, how they could possibly have got here, infiltrated the royal blood line, etc. Consistency with the available evidence can alw...

January 11th – 365 Days Of Philosophy Podcast – An Interview With Stephen Law Kylie Sturgess The interview for January is with Stephen Law. http://365daysofphilosophy.libsyn.com/rss Download audio here: January – Interview With Stephen Law Stephen Law (BA, BPhil, DPhil) is a philosopher and senior lecturer at Heythrop College in the University of London. He also edits the philosophical journal Think , which is published by the Royal Institute of Philosophy and aimed at the general public. Professor Law is the author of a number of books, including  The Philosophy Files, The Outer Limits, A Very Short Introduction To Humanism, The War For Children’s Minds  and  Believing Bullshit.  He is also the  Provost for the Centre for Inquiry, UK . He blogs at Stephen Law and  Believing Bullshit , and uses Twitter at https://twitter.com/stephenlaw60 . For this interview, I opened with a question that my students always ...

Here is the final bit of my book Believing Bullshit . What follows is a cautionary bit of fiction, inspired by C.S. Lewis's fiction The Screwtape Letters , Letters from a Senior to a Junior Devil , which are entertaining and often very insightful. I don't claim my mirror letters are as good as Lewis's, but they are offered in the same cautionary spirit. I refer in places to specific mechanisms explained in the book, such as "I Just Know!" and Going Nuclear (follow these links if you are interested, or better still buy the book!) The Tapescrew Letters Letters from a Senior to a Junior Guru (Inspired by C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters ) Preface I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands. One or two details have been changed to save reputations, but the letters are substantially unrevised and intact.    Bear in mind that the author—an eminent guru within some minor, recently...

Interesting row developing in Australia about alternatives to religiously-based ethics teaching. Go here . Almighty row over ethics in schools: Democracy and the welfare of children By Dr Simon Longstaff The Sydney Morning Herald (Saturday 26 September 2009) is to be congratulated for having helped to initiate public debate about discrimination against children whose parents make a conscientious decision that they not attend classes in special religious education (scripture). It is unfortunate that, rather than engage with the serious arguments advanced on behalf of many parents and their children, Mark Hillis of the InterChurch Commission on Special Religious Education in Schools (ICCOREIS) is reported as having said “I don’t see how having a small interest group coming into a school and ramping up things helps”. But who is this small interest group to which he refers? The NSW Federation of P & C Associations has been promoting a review of NSW Education Department policy since 200...

Giles Fraser has been explaining over at the Guardian why Wittgenstein appeals so strongly to some religious types (like Sam Norton, I suppose - what do you think Sam?). Here is part 1 of his three part essay. Back in the early 80's, I spend many an afternoon in a cramped and stuffy office in King's College, London, with an informally gathered group of mostly graduate students, going through Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations paragraph by paragraph, line by line. It was often terribly slow going. We might ponder two or three sentences for a couple of weeks, coming back to the same point several times. It felt a bit like Bible study. Some might have wondered how much was being achieved in this group or what the point of it all was. But for me it was absorbing, thrilling, adventurous. My eyes were opened and my life was changed. The professor at the centre of this little group was the genial Texan philosopher Norman Malcolm, a lifelong friend of Wittgenstein and one ...

Interesting, controversial article. By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent, Telegraph UK Published: 5:45PM BST 08 Oct 2009 Available here . The notion of God as the Creator is wrong, claims a top academic, who believes the Bible has been wrongly translated for thousands of years. The Earth was already there when God created humans and animals, says academic. Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis "in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth" is not a true translation of the Hebrew. She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world -- and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals. Prof Van Wolde, 54, who will present a thesis on the subject at Radboud University in The Netherlands where she studies, said she had re-analysed the original Hebrew text and placed it in...

For the story go here and here . Pope Benedict XVI has said that handing out condoms is not the answer in the fight against HIV/Aids, as he makes his first visit to Africa as pontiff. Speaking en route to Cameroon, he said distribution of condoms "increases the problem". I previously posted on this topic here . Perhaps this is one area where we can say, more or less without qualification, that religion is dangerous.

I previously provided advice to "aspiring cultists" - pointing out a bullshitter's technique commonly employed by religious folk . But what is a cult? And how does it differ from a mainstream religion? Clearly the term has a negative connotation - there's something sinister about cults. Trouble is, when we try and identify what is sinister about them (there's a family of or cluster of characteristics - see cult checklist ), we find many mainstream religions also qualify. This leads some to reject the use of the term "cult" as obviously there is nothing objectionable or sinister about mainstream religion (heaven forbid!). Here for example, is a bit from wiki on "cults" : According to professor Timothy Miller from the University of Kansas in his 2003 Religious Movements in the United States, during the controversies over the new religious groups in the 1960s, the term "cult" came to mean something sinister, generally used to describe a ...

This is a very strange story. Death threats issued to student who smuggled a cracker out of Eucharist....

This is a brief response to the several comments Ibrahim Lawson has made here and here . Ibrahim has been defending Islam by suggesting that Islam is mystical, beyond the reach of reason, etc. Hello Ibrahim The appeal to mystery and the mystical has of course been a bog-standard technique of cultists and other purveyors of snake oil down through the centuries whenever they are accused of talking cobblers. Pointing out that their belief makes no sense provokes such responses as - "But you are arrogantly applying Western-techno-rationality, yet failing to acknowledge its own limits." "It does all make sense - only in some profound way inaccessible to us mere humans." and so on... In this way, the cultists make a virtue of the fact their belief system doesn't make any sense (indeed a logical contradiction in what they believe is considered a plus!) The failure is not theirs for believing a load of patent nonsense, but ours for failing to be humble enough to reco...

You can hear me on "Reporting Religion" on BBC World Service this week - here . I am quoted at the beginning of the programme, but the relevant bit is toward the end. The programme has me debating faith schools with the education officer of the British Council of Muslims.

I promised Chris something on the incarnation. This is from The Xmas Files. Are we, at Christmas, celebrating the birth of an entity as contradictory as a round square? Christmas is a celebration of the incarnation. Jesus of Nazareth is supposed to be God incarnate: both God and man. That might seem a fairly straightforward sort of claim. People may argue over whether it is true, of course. But that what is being claimed is clear and coherent is largely taken for granted on both sides. Which is odd, because the dispute over exactly how divinity and humanity are combined in the person of Jesus is actually one of deepest and most-ill-tempered in Christian history. Philosophers and theologians have been struggling to make sense of the incarnation for over two thousand years. The early church fathers fought bitterly over the issue and it remains a source of contention to this day. So what, exactly, is the difficulty? Here’s an analogy. Suppose I tell you that I have drawn a circle on a she...

Each Christmas, churches that usually stand empty are suddenly brimming with people happily singing carols, kneeling for the prayers and celebrating along with the priest or vicar. Many of them are atheists. Isn’t there something deeply hypocritical about non-Christians celebrating Christmas in this way? Or is Christmas something we should all be able to participate in, whatever our beliefs? Some Christians are annoyed by the presence of atheists at Christmas services. ‘If they don’t believe in God,’ they ask ‘then why do they come? They’re hypocrites, standing awkwardly at the back and hoping we won’t notice them. This is one of the most important events in the Christian calendar and it’s being treated as a concert – they’re only here for the music and lights.’ On the other hand, many Christians don’t just tolerate non-Christians at these events, they positively encourage them to come along. Pascal on going through the motions The philosopher Blaise Pascal’s thinking on religious beli...

On Saturday I was involved in a debate on The Resurrection of Religion at the RCA. I defended the secular society. Here are some of the points I made, for what they are worth... What is a secular society? It is, roughly, one that is neutral between different views about religion. It protects freedoms: the freedom to believe, or not believe, worship, or not worship. It is founded on basic principles framed independently of any particular religious, or indeed, atheist, point of view: principles to which we ought to be able to sign up whether we are religious or not. An Islamic or Christian theocracy is obviously not secular, because one particular religion dominates the state. But then a totalitarian atheist state, such as Mao’s China, is not secular state either. A secular state does not privilege atheist beliefs. Because you live in a secular society, your right to believe in a particular God, worship him, etc. is protected from those atheists, and those of differing religious views, ...

I just received a letter, forwarded by The Guardian, from a Dr Danielian, who takes me to task for maintaining in letter (go here and scroll down) to The Guardian that, contrary to what another letter had suggested, Galileo and Bruno were hauled before the Inquisition for their scientific views. Here's my response. I'll add to it in the next post, as exactly how some Catholics try to justify the view that the Church was not concerned with Bruno's and Galileo's scientific views is worth unpacking... Dear Dr Danielan I just received your letter to The Guardian . Thanks for taking the time to respond to my letter. I can’t say I agree with you, though. The issue I addressed, remember, was whether Galileo and Bruno were hauled before the Inquisition for their scientific views, or merely their theological views. I rejected the claim that it was only their theological views that were of concern to the religious authorities. I pointed out that, as even Koestler says, Galileo ...

PASCAL’S WAGER [taken from my forthcoming book for Quercus, Greatest Philosophers , out next month (and which, in my opinion, is a bargain at under £6 for a 200+ page, larger format, illustrated book. In fact I'm not sure it isn't too cheap.)] According to Pascal, there are no rational grounds available to settle whether the Christian faith is true or false. Reason cannot settle the matter one way or the other. So should we believe, or not? Pascal suggests we approach this question as if it involved placing a bet. We have two options: we can believe, or we can fail to believe. What do we stand to win or lose in each case? Well, if I believe, and there is a God, then I win big. My reward will be eternal happiness. But what if there is no God? Then obviously I won’t receive that fantastic reward. But still, my loss is not so very great. Little more than those Sunday mornings I had to spend in church. If, on the other hand, I fail to believe in God, and God exists, I lose big, f...

I have had a chat going on about Catholics, condoms and HIV with onthesideoftheangels, here (scroll down) He defends the Catholic Church's position not to recommend condom use (except in v special medical circumstances), not even in Africa, where, I suspect, they might save millions of lives by blocking the transmission of HIV. Thought it now worth dragging into the main postings. Here's my latest comment: So now let's suppose condoms are 90% effective in preventing infection. That seems an underestimate, in fact. Here's one quote I found: "In a study of discordant couples in Europe, among 123 couples who reported consistent condom use, none of the uninfected partners became infected." Seems condoms are pretty effective in preventing infection when used properly, doesn't it? In which case, were those having sex outside of marriage in Africa to use them, millions of cases of infection could be prevented. That is current medical opinion, isn't it (at ...

Here's something I wrote on Kierkegaard from a forthcoming book of mine called "Greatest Philosophers" (Quercus 2008) ABRAHAM: THE KNIGHT OF FAITH An authentic Christian faith Kierkegaard’s book Fear and Trembling is a fascinating, and to my mind rather disturbing, account of what Kierkegaard considers to be authentic Christian faith, as opposed to the watered down “Sunday Christianity” that he thought most of his contemporaries had. Kierkegaard points out that most people who describe themselves as Christians are born into their faith, and that their involvement doesn’t extent much beyond attending church on a Sunday. Danish Christians, thought Kierkegaard, were churned out by the Danish State Church “with the greatest possible uniformity of a factory product”. This, according to Kierkegaard, is not true faith. Nor is the true Christian one who rationally recognizes the truth of religious claims, in the way that many Christian philosophers, including, for example, Aquina...

Sebastian made an interest comment on my " The Jesus Light ". I reproduce it here for discussion... I think the bishop's argument was shortcircuited by the overly ambitious heading of the talk. Trying to prove "Jesus is our Saviour" in a philosphical discussion is impossible. However, making a strong - even winning - argument for the existence of God, even a personal God, is a different matter, and that talk about 'feeling an inner light' is a very strong argument indeed. We humans have something like a sex-drive towards God: If there were only male men on earth, and they had never seen a woman, they would still be yearning for women. They couldn't describe them. They wouldn't exactly know what it is they desire, but they could give you an idea: "Something gentle, beautiful, that you can take in your arms and in your bed, something you can talk to and sleep with.." etc. Well, it's kind of the same with this other thing we yearn for,...

While we run the "atheism is a faith position too" competition, perhaps we should also, to be fair, try and see what the strongest argument for this claim might be. We looked at some really terrible ones back here ( The Dawkin's Delusion 's author Alister McGrath 's version is pretty awful [well, it's an assertion, not an argument], despite his Oxford don credentials). But perhaps the theists can do better. Here's an opening suggestion or two from me. (1) Science is dependent on inductive reasoning. It is based on the assumption that what has happened up till now provides us with a good, if not a fool-proof, indication of what will happen in the future. Unfortunately, as Hume points out, this assumption cannot be justified. But then inductive reasoning cannot be justified. In which case science cannot be justified. It too ultimately rests on "faith" - faith in that background assumption. And if atheism is based on science, then it too rests on a...