feste_sylvain

It may surprise some of you to know that I'm on several left-wing mailing lists. Some of their offerings I can easily delete unread ("Help Socialist politicians win in Europe!"), but most of the time, I read about issues and can find useful data in what people consider important, even if I disagree with their proposed solutions.

But this morning had a lot of woo in the headlines. Let's start with this one:
Will Science Rule Out the Existence of God?"

Of course not. "The existence of God" is not disprovable. It's not an hypothesis which can be scientifically tested.

Worse, delving into the article itself, the reporter claims that theoretical cosmologist (as opposed to "practical cosmologist", I suppose) Sean Carroll is claiming that science will "provide conclusive proof that there is no God."

Somebody please strap this reporter to a chair and run the Ludoviko method on him until he experiences extreme nausea upon making such statements.

What Sean Carroll actually said was:

Most modern cosmologists are convinced that conventional scientific progress will ultimately result in a self-contained understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe, without the need to invoke God or any other supernatural involvement. This conviction necessarily falls short of a proof, but it is backed up by good reasons. While we don't have the final answers, I will attempt to explain the rationale behind the belief that science will ultimately understand the universe without involving God in any way.

Get that: he explicitly does not "provide conclusive proof that there is no God." That's not even what he's trying to do. Because he's a scientist. I recommend reading his actual essay.

Moving right along, the leftie animal-rights letter asked, "Do Animals Have Souls?" and pointed to this scientific article which... never asks that question. It does explore some fascinating aspects of neurotheology, and I'd offer that dogs or coyotes howling at the moon may well qualify as "a spiritual ritual", but none of this touches on whether we have magical ghosts.

The other headline I ran into was "Global Warming Isn't Up For Debate", and I was going to rant that there are no wholly settled issues in science ("You think gravity is a settled issue? Great. Tell me how it works."), but then I saw that it was just an appeal to get Jim Lehrer to include the topic of global warming in the presidential candidates' debate that he'll be moderating. <Litella>Never mind.</Litella>