On 19 April 2012 in London, Atheist Ireland chairperson Michael Nugent debated Sami Zaatari of the Muslim Debate Initiative. The topic was: Is religion less relevant to modern society?
Here are Sami and Michael’s opening contributions to the debate.
And here is the rest of the debate, including three rounds of rebuttals by each speaker, questions from the audience, and summaries from both speakers.
I have long heard claims being made, specifically in the Catholic faith, that during certain ceremonies, when certain propitiations are made, that normal Cracker Bread is changed “literally” into the body of a long dead Jewish Human Male who displayed later Zombie tendencies to refuse to stay in the grave.
There are those of course that claim that the transformation is symbolic not literal, which I have not concerned myself with here as they are essentially saying nothing. I limit my inquiry only to those who claim a literal transformation.
I decide some time ago therefore to investigate over a 2 year period these claims. Since the results of this have been sitting on a shelf for some time I thought it useful to disseminate a short summary of my tests and summary of my results to the internet. The hope is that further testing can be suggested that I might have missed and which I can now take up the mantel again and continue to engage in.
Experimental setup:
As a setup I obtained “normal” and “consecrated” hosts in sufficient numbers and continued to do so over the 2 year period to make sure that I was working with both “fresh” and “dormant” samples. Both are surprisingly easy to obtain as those that have them seem keen to be rid of them.
As the transformation was meant to be into something resembling human flesh I, where possible, also used volunteer skin samples in my tests.
Blind experimentation:
To remove and risk of bias in the experiments I performed ALL experiments in the following fashion. I used 4 cracker samples in all cases.
Sample A: Chosen randomly by me from the “normal” pile.
Sample B: Chosen randomly by me from the “consecrated” pile.
Sample C: Chosen randomly by a third party from either pile without informing me which it was from.
Sample D: Chosen randomly by a third party from the other pile without informing me which it was from.
Sample E: Collection of random skin samples from human volunteers, myself included.
The order of the samples was then hidden and mixed from me by another separate party so that until the results were in I would not know if the results connected to samples A, B, C or D.
Sample summary of Experiments performed:
The samples were then subjected to many tests of which this is a random but not exhaustive sample list:
1 ) Burning tests, testing energy released in burning, burning time, change in mass of sample between before and after burning, color of flame (light wavelengths measured).
2 ) Chemical testing: Disolving in various chemicals and measuring energy releases, mass changes, chemical composition of diluted samples.
3 ) Degradation testing: Observing the differences in samples left to their own devices to measure differences in chemical breakdown due to food “going off” etc.
4 ) Luck testing: Engaged in various tests of luck in the presence of, or following the consumption of Samples from each group. Dice Games. Lottery Ticket use. Guessing Games and much more.
5 ) Emotional testing: Gauged personal subjective impression of mood changes in a group of volunteer subjects in the presence of, or following the consumption of, Samples from each group over 24 hour periods.
6 ) Priest testing: Proffered Samples to a selection of priests who were unable to identify which crackers were “normal” and which were “consecrated”.
7 ) Float testing: Tested the floating properties of each Sample.
8 ) Mass testing: Tested for differences in mass, density and other physical properties between samples, including aerodynamic abilities and resistance to physical stress such as piercing with nails (rusty and normal), tearing, toasting, hammering, bending, stamping and more. It has been suggested to me independently a number of times… seriously by those of a theistical bent, and jokingly by those who are not… that I rename this section the “Torture Testing”.
Summary of Results:
There was in ALL tests absolutely NO difference between the samples at any stage except for minute expected differences in mass between all samples (even internally among each sample group) which are within expected tolerances for normal human food manufacturing variances.
There was in ALL tests NO significant overlap of comparative results between any crackers and any human skin samples.
Conclusion:
There is no basis at this time apparent to support any claims that there is any form of “literal” transformation in the “consecrated” samples.
Further Study:
I still posses a number of samples of each time and am more than happy to engage in further testing should anyone manage to submit a test idea that I have not yet engaged in.
Atheist Ireland is proud to be hosting the 2011 Atheist Alliance International Conference in Europe.
We will keep you posted as soon as the full program and other details are confirmed.
With Science Minister Conor Lenihan winning our September Really Truly True Believer of the Month Award for planning to launch an anti-evolution book by creationist John J. May, here are two excellent videos by Shane Owen that will confuse both the Minister and the author with, what do you call those things, oh yes, I remember now… facts.
Gorillas and girls
Derek Walsh reviews the launch of the anti-evolution book that Ireland’s Minister for Science had planned to formally launch.
I arrived a little late at the book launch of The Origin of Specious Nonsense to find the author John J. May, already in full swing, railing against the “offensive” letters from skeptics that had appeared in newspapers. He defended the right of the Minister for Science Conor Lenihan to launch his book which, he claimed, was to be done in a personal capacity and was not an endorsement of the contents of this book. He did not seem to understand why so many people were so vehemently opposed to this. The problem, of course, is that a government minister has a duty to consider whether something he does – even in a personal capacity – conflicts with his position. In this case, his apparent endorsement of an anti-scientific book was an issue of considerable concern and justified anger.
The Argument from Lucy the Pig
While being filmed for a documentary about his book, the author says he was asked about Lucy and whether this discovery did not provide evidence for evolution. May dismissed it as a hoax, saying that it was made from a pig’s jawbone and that this was a well-known fact. At this early stage, this bizarre comment was mostly greeted with rolled eyes and suppressed giggles. As May continued presenting “facts” of this calibre, the objections from the audience were to become louder and more sustained.
The claim that Lucy is a hoax is of course nothing new but the reference to a pig bone was certainly new to me. Having investigated, I can find it nowhere else and suspect that May has conflated the case of Nebraska Man which involved a pig’s tooth with a lingering but mistaken belief among creationists that Lucy’s knee bone was found some distance from the rest of her skeleton. Possibly he was also incorporating elements of the famous Piltdown Man hoax. May’s embarrassing lack of knowledge of his chosen subject only became more obvious as the evening wore on.
The Argument from Being Amazed
May invited the audience to “judge [his] book by the cover” which seems more than fair. The glaring grammatical error on the front cover and the spelling and punctuation errors on the back cover should provide some preparation for those brave souls who wish to undertake reading the whole book. The author appears to have invented several new words as well as misspelling some old favourites. It may seem churlish to criticise someone for poor spelling, grammar and punctuation but to go to the expense of publishing a book (and it was self-published) without employing a copy editor seems extremely foolish.
The bulk of May’s argument – such as it was – consisted of a sort of beginner’s guide to embryology with a focus on how amazing certain aspects of it were, each followed by a loud and emphatic claim that chance could not be responsible, but that it must be the work of a great scientist (or Great Scientist). May claimed to have been greatly influenced by three books. He mentioned four, however. The first was Lennart Nilsson’s A Child is Born, a photography book charting the development of the human embryo and foetus from conception to birth. This certainly influenced him, as he uses nine of its photographs and a large chunk of the text in the sample chapter of his book available online, but I don’t think it was one of the books he claimed as an influence in his life.
Of the other books he mentioned, the first was the Bible – and while he was quick to claim that he did not believe all of it and did not follow the bloodthirsty god, described therein, he seemed to be impressed by its mere antiquity; and then irrelevantly and inaccurately claimed that there is no evidence that humans have been around for more than a few thousand years.
The Argument from Counting Words
The next was Darwin’s The Origin of Species which he claimed to have read “forensically”. One audience member challenged him on what he meant by that, and the answer was somewhat unclear (at least to me) but what he seemed to mean was that he studied it in detail. In this frenzied forensic examination, he discovered more than 1,500 suppositions. The exact nature of these suppositions was also unclear but it seems that he simply counted instances of words such as “if” “possibly” and “likely”.
Of course, it’s really not that surprising or concerning that the foundational text of a theory, especially one with such explosive implications, should be written in a somewhat tentative manner. May seems unaware of the thousands of other books that have been written on the subject of evolution in the past century and a half that fill in most of the gaps that were there in Darwin’s day.
The final book mentioned was “Darwin’s Black Box” by Michael Behe, something that has clearly influenced May deeply in that it validated his existing skepticism of evolution by coating it with a thin quasi-scientific veneer, and provided him with several of the “facts” he mentioned. He even had a mousetrap with him to demonstrate irreducible complexity but thankfully didn’t delve any further into the argument.
The Argument from Fancy Dress and Tennis Balls
It was around this time that Darwin, King Kong and two busty models in form-fitting t-shirts arrived. (A fellow skeptic later showed me a photo of Darwin that he had taken at the earlier photo shoot. That Darwin was a ruddy-faced fellow, in contrast to the swarthy gentleman I saw. I can only conclude that these are actually Darwin’s helpers, the real Darwin being too busy to come to every creationist book launch himself.)
May had a glass bowl filled with 15 tennis balls which he announced he would dump on the floor, and if they arranged themselves in a perfect circle, he would stop the meeting. Unsurprisingly, the balls arranged themselves quasi-randomly as everybody expected. I’m not sure exactly what this was supposed to demonstrate but nobody seemed impressed. The theatrics only worked against May as the large skeptical contingent in the audience became increasingly more exasperated and increasinly vocal about it.
Like many creationists May argued against chance, and at one point specifically claimed that Darwinian evolution was entirely based on chance. This led to an objection from a member of the audience. When May asked what it was based on if not chance, I questioned how he could claim to have read The Origin of Species in such depth and not know the answer. When he asked what I meant, I referred to natural selection. He replied that natural selection doesn’t exist. He then said that the word natural implies intelligence.
This was greeted with derision by most of the audience. One boisterous young man in the audience began loudly jeering May, calling him, among other things, “an imbecilic idiot”, leading to a loud and angry exchange in which May and his antagonist both swore at each other, and May attempted to have him removed but then relented as other people managed to calm the interloper down.
The Argument from Subjectively-Judged Prizes
May then invited questions from the floor. Prompted by another Twitterer, I asked about the €10,000 prize on offer and whether a prize fund actually existed. May claimed that his brother has the money, and his brother who was in the audience confirmed this. It’s not exactly a cast-iron guarantee but I didnt pursue the issue further. I then asked what one needed to do to win it, whether it was simply to provide evidence that speciation has occurred.
May confirmed this, so I offered the example of Drosophila which – at least when I referred to them as fruit flies – May claimed to be familiar with. He quickly dismissed this as just variation and then quoted Lynn Margulis as having challenged biologists to name a single example of speciation by the accumulation of mutations, claiming they have to date been unable to do so. I didn’t know at the time that this lie also came from Behe but it is discussed here for those interested.
He was interrupted by another audience member who pushed him on exactly what the criteria for winning the money were, whether it was just the beliefs of one scientist, or whether the beliefs of other scientists – the overwhelming majority of whom would disagree with May – would be taken into account. May told him that the sole criterion for getting the money was convincing him, not anyone else.
I managed to steer things back to Drosophila and informed May that several instances of speciation had been observed and meticulously recorded, that these were not merely examples of “variation” as after several generations the flies were not just morphologically different but could not interbreed with the parent stock, that this was widely reported and studied and could be tested as the direct evidence still existed. May’s response was: “A fruit fly will never turn into a rabbit”. I think his money is safe.
The End of the Arguments
Shortly after that the talk ended abruptly when the young man May had threatened to eject became rowdy again and couldn’t be calmed down. May declared the event to be over. The young man left, whether voluntarily or not I don’t know but most of the audience stayed for the “Gorillas and Girls” party. As the sole gorilla had already left, the title was somewhat inaccurate but there were quite a few attractive young ladies present, so it wasn’t a total washout.
The author’s brother (I believe the one who was holding the prize fund) came over to me and introduced himself. He said he found my questions interesting but then told me he was a creationist. His reason was that his daughter was severely physically handicapped and belief in a god gave him hope. This of course is a heartbreaking but irrelevant reason for believing in something. I pointed this out as tactfully as I could and expressed my hope that modern medicine would some day be able to help his daughter.
I also spoke briefly to one of the author’s sons, who surprised me by admitting he knew nothing about evolution – not in the sense his father knows nothing about it – but literally nothing at all. He asked me if it was the idea that humans came from monkeys. I tried to give him a slightly more accurate idea, but I found it odd that he had never discussed the subject with his father.
The End of the Party
I took advantage of the free wine and sandwiches and had some interesting conversations with a few other people. From what I could tell, a large minority, perhaps as much as half, of the attendees were May’s friends and family, while most of the rest were atheists and skeptics. There were a few evangelicals and perhaps a handful of people who had wandered in from the bar in search of free drink.
I managed to speak to the author briefly, and thanked him for an entertaining evening. I advised him I was still interested in the money and referred him to the Talk Origins website for numerous examples of speciation. Tellingly, he didn’t seem to have heard of this website.
John May is a charming man, a rebel and a maverick, a dynamic individualist who has always refused to follow the herd, and has in the past acted according to his conscience at significant personal cost. He’s not a lunatic, an imbecile, an idiot or a religious fundamentalist but neither is he an expert on evolution and this book is unlikely to make any impact even among creationists. He is deeply, laughably, and embarrassingly wrong but I think his motives are pure.
As the free wine dried up and people started leaving, some going home, some including May and his entourage to the hotel bar I found myself among the last to leave, along with another atheist, arguing information theory with two Hare Krishnas, while “Darwin”, now beardless, carried away armfuls of unsold books.
You are a pig...
Update: Irish Science Minister Lenihan withdraws from launching anti-evolution book http://bit.ly/atOXec
Conor Lenihan, Ireland’s Minister of State for Science, is to launch a book this Wednesday that describes evolution as a scientific hoax. He says he is doing this because the author is a friend of his. This is an abuse of his Ministerial position, and an attack by the Irish government on both scientists and science education.
Last year Minister Lenihan told a Science Foundation of Ireland summit that
“The relevance and value of science must be continually communicated to the general public, and how it is articulated is vital in defining how science is perceived. The task of communicating the message that ‘science matters’, that ‘science delivers’ and, above all, that investment in science in Ireland is value for money and an integral part of our economic development must be addressed by all across the scientific community.”
Minister Lenihan is now advancing this noble vision by attending a ‘Gorrillas and Girls’ party and a photo shoot with Charles Darwin and King Kong, where he will launch the book, The Origin of Specious Nonsense, written by his friend John G May. This is the type of argument that appears in the book to which Minister Lenihan is giving the credibility of his Office:
“The Empire State building cannot be supported on a styrofoam coffee cup from Dunkin Donuts, nor a rocket go to the moon on a litre of petrol from Shell, nor the sea fit into a child’s bucket on a Californian beach, yet there is more chance of all three happening (which never will) than for the awful soul destroying fiction of evolution to be true. The frog never changed into a prince, the gods of Egypt are fantasies, Dracula never existed, the King was naked, and evolution is a demonstrable hoax just as surely as Santa Claus.”
Of course, this is the same Conor Lenihan who five years ago described Turkish workers in Ireland as ‘kebabs’ during a Parliamentary debate. Lenihan was then Minister for Overseas Development and Human Rights; in the magical world of Irish politics, he was later appointed Minister for Immigration policy.
Minister Lenihan is always liable to surprise us. Perhaps he will change his mind about promoting attacks on scientists and science education. Or perhaps he will fall asleep while launching the book, as he did during a live telephone interview on TV3 in 2005.
Book launch Wednesday 15 September 2010
Buswells Hotel Dublin
http://www.theoriginofspeciousnonsense.com/
“Life is peculiar,” said Jeremy.
“Compared to what?” asked the spider.
– Men Who Play God (1968), by Norman Moss.
The recent discovery by NASA of the amino acid Glycine in dust from a comet in the outer Solar System has been a shot in the arm to the idea that life here was seeded by organic matter in meteorites, about 3.8 billion years ago. The technical term for this is Panspermia (meaning “seed everywhere”), of which no less a scientist than Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, was an ardent supporter, arguing that the time interval between the formation of our planet and the appearance of life (in the shape of microscopic fossils) was too short for the genetic code to have evolved de novo. Thus, the raw materials must have arrived here from elsewhere in the Galaxy. Many scientists remain unconvinced; and hot on the tail of the aforementioned discovery came the latest hypothesis on life’s terrestrial origins, in transparent Zinc Sulfide ‘bubbles’ which would have allowed access to the energy of sunlight for early replicating matter.
The evidence may never conclusively weigh down on either side, but that doesn’t make this any less fascinating a debate. It’s one of the few ‘big’ questions left in biology, and obviously intrigues us for sentimental reasons. Most people believe that life must be relatively common in the Universe, and we’re rightly excited by the idea of ever finding it, but a real understanding of the science teaches us a word of caution on this front: life may indeed be common, but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t fundamentally “alone” in the only sense that matters to us. It stems from a common misconception about evolution, perpetrated by the Victorians in Darwin’s time and carried through today by human vanity: the notorious “ladder of ascent” fallacy. We wish to believe that, in spite of our unceremonious origins, the entire history of evolution has a pathway paved to our supreme intellect; as inevitable in its trajectory as Newton’s falling apple. But this betrays a crude misunderstanding of the essence of Darwinism: evolution lacks all foresight. It strives for nothing. If we “replayed life’s tape” from the beginning (to paraphrase Stephen Jay Gould), the end result would be strikingly different! Chance trumps necessity in the game of life, and intelligence is no more inevitable an evolutionary invention than the stripes of a zebra.
To convince ourselves than this, we can go one better. Tracing the history of life on Earth as our science reveals it, we can pinpoint the most chance-contingent events, that statistically should have halted the passage to animals, mammals, and humans if we were to rewind the tape and replay it a hundred million times. All complex cellular life is called eukaryotic, meaning “true nucleus”; the genetic material is bound in a membrane-enclosed section of the cell, the nucleus, but the details needn’t bother us here. What matters from our perspective is that without this eukaryotic cell structure, multicellular life could never have arisen on this planet: not so much as a worm or a sponge. The reason for this is simple: eukaryotic cells (but not prokaryotic ones, essentially meaning bacteria) house energy-generating units called Mitochondria inside them. These energy-generating units are the “powerhouses” of the cell, and are present in many hundreds or thousands of copies, depending on how ‘busy’ the cell is in the body; muscle cells have many, bone cells fewer. They take in all food particles, break them down, and give out energy. In contrast, prokaryotes generate their necessarily-limited supply of energy across their external cellular membranes.
We now have very compelling evidence to suggest that these Mitochondria in our cells were once themselves free-living bacteria which entered into a symbiotic relationship with another bacterium. The matrimony produced us; all eukaryotic life. The crucial point is this: the union between the two was contingent on pure chance, it depended on a very particular set of environmental conditions which prevailed in a certain subsection of the Earth for a limited amount of time. It was as far from inevitable as you’ll get. The cells which came together had lived independently for upwards of a billion years and showed no signs of change. Further, no other such union is to be seen between prokaryotic cells now, and none is recorded in the fossil record.
Beyond this, we can point to such events as the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis and the K-T mass extinction which elimated the dinosaurs (apart, technically, from modern birds). It’s unequivocally accepted that this extincion paved the way for a flowering of mammalian diversity, leading to the Monotremes, Marsupials and Placentals (including us). But the meteorite which struck at that particular time was far from the only such one to ever hit Earth, and we have the similarly-sized crater impacts to prove it. What allowed this particular impact to reek such devastation was no more than a chance coalition of plate-techtonics and the angular rotation of Earth at that point in time; oxygen levels were at an all-time high of 35% according to geologists and so the impact caused massive fire-and-brimstone-esque desolation. The dinosaurs showed no signs whatsoever of evolving human levels of intelligence, and presumably would still happily dominate the land if not for this indifferent meteorite’s strike, with mammals still limited to nocturnal shrew-like creatures that they had been.
The point is twofold. When “moderate” religious people tell us that their theism is entirely compatible with belief in evolution, we should critically analyse this claim in light of what history tells us. Does it seem likely that a beneficent, intervening deity would have been so careless, so capricious in her ‘design’ plan? If any theistic incarnation of god had humans in mind when creating the Universe, she has gone out of her way to conceal this fact, and so it should be surprising that the majority of us confidently affirm this to have been the case. Further, we should proceed with caution when we hypothesise about how plentiful life may be in the Universe, and consider exactly what we mean by this. I can’t deny the romanticism of pointing our radars to the skies and looking for signs of communication in the form of radiowaves, and I’m in awe of Carl Sagan’s pioneering work with SETI (the Search for Extraterrestial Intelligence). Unfortunately, though, it’s difficult to shirk the conclusion that the pervasive image of extraterrestrial civilisations much like our own is no more plausible than a bearded don in the heavens.
by Adam Dinan
“The remarkable fact is that the values of these [fundamental] numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life. For example if the electric charge of the electron had been only slightly different, stars either would have been unable to burn hydrogen and helium, or else they would not have exploded.” – (Hawking [1988], p. 125)
With the possible exception of the poetic license he allowed himself when describing humanity’s aim to understand the mind of God, there are no quotes from Physicist Stephen Hawking that are so keenly mined and misinterpreted as this.
Even such Atheist house hold names as Richard Dawkins have said that of all the arguments for the existence of gods the appearance that the Universe is fine tuned is the closest thing to a good argument they have ever been exposed to for the proposition.
I find this an interesting topic to discuss on many levels. Firstly because it is a seemingly false assertion that has grabbed the minds of many. Further, it is an interesting example of how the Human mind works backwards. On top of all this it is an interesting example of how different human minds can operate as I disagree wholly with Dawkins on this one by saying that it is in fact one of the LEAST convincing arguments I have been exposed to.
Finally, I find it a useful topic as a way of giving a concrete example to the dishonesty that prevails in some of those who argue for the existence of god, and when I highlight where and how this dishonesty manifests itself it will better arm those who will benefit from noticing the same tactic in other scenarios.
Dinesh D’Souza is the perfect example and any of his online debates will serve as evidence as this argument and the quote above serve as a staple part of the argument he presents. The claim Dinesh and others make is that if you change one of the finely tuned constants of the universe then the universe will cease to be and hence everything MUST be as it is now.
The tactic here is to append a falsehood at the end of a truth with the objective of slipping it in. It is, in fact, a lie and one Dinesh and others tell with impunity.
Yes it is true that Hawking said if you change one the universe falls apart. It is NOT true that he has said therefore that everything has to be as it is now. Let me use a simple example to show why. Imagine, if you will, a tug of war between two identical twins who are identical in EVERY way. The tug of war is a stalemate and will never end or be won.
It is therefore correct to say that if I change one value… say the strength of one of the twins, by the smallest amount that the deadlock will be broken. This is the truth of the matter and the truth that Dinesh tells.
The lie is to say that everything must therefore be as it is. What if I change the strength of one and then the other? I have ANOTHER deadlock situation. What if I change the height of one giving an advantage, but the body weight of the other to balance that advantage? There is, therefore, not one but an infinite number of combinations of the constants that will result in a given scenario. Dinesh and others have NO grounds upon which to claim this is otherwise for the Universal Constants of our Universe.
The “remarkable” fact that Hawking refers to throws an interesting light on how the human mind works. The only reason it is “remarkable” is that we have subjectively deemed it to be so. There is no other reason. The best way to highlight this is to take a deck of 52 cards and lay them out one at a time and note the order. The order is not “remarkable” to you; it is just the way it is. The same is true of the state of our Universe. It is just the way it is.
However if you claim it is remarkable and then claim it is a very unlikely thing to happen, you would be correct in both cases. Try it. Try and mix the cards up and have the same result again. Even getting the same first 2 cards is a 1 in 2652 chance. The first 5 cards brings you to 1 in 311875200. My own admittedly cheap calculator gave up after the first 15 cards.
So if the claim that the universe’s state is something of note is to be allowed, then we cannot allow it in one case and dismiss it in others. It is not one rule for convenience and one rule for everything else. Every single card game you ever play should be eviscerating your consciousness with the sheer remarkable unlikelihood of the game having finished the way it did and the total improbability that if you were to play the same game again for another billion lifetimes it would ever end that way again.
All in all I am decidedly unmoved by the claims of “Fine Tuning” but it serves as a useful warning to those who are convinced by people with the level of honesty of Dinesh D’Souza to keep an eye out for blatant falsehoods being appended to the end of established truths in an attempt to slip them in under your radar.
I for one am content with the hand we have been dealt and I live in joy of the game being played without having to attach a false sense of awe that the cards presented to us have landed the way they have. This is our game and it will likely never be played this way again.
by Gavin McBride
So not only is our earth not the centre of the universe, but now there might also be life on Mars. This particular field of enquiry started nearly four thousand years ago, when a long-forgotten man gazed inquisitively at the night sky over what is today near Baghdad, and started to record the movement of the stars.
Today NASA has mapped the oldest lights in the universe, the superstitious omens that the ancient Babylonians derived from their stargazing have evolved into vacuous horoscopes, and various religions have embedded their respective gods into seasonal celebrations of nature.
Throughout time, this is the pattern of the quest for human knowledge. Inquisitive and rational thinking has steadily helped us to understand more about how nature works, while superstitious and dogmatic thinking has hindered and corrupted this quest for knowledge.
As ever, the mainstream religions will adapt their theology to incorporate whatever science proves about life on Mars. In 1992, Pope John Paul II apologised for his church’s denouncing of the work of Galileo. Just last month, Pope Benedict XVI praised Galileo, and said an understanding of the laws of nature could stimulate appreciation of God’s works.
The Vatican’s chief astronomer, Father Jose Gabriel Funes, has already said that extraterrestrial brothers and sisters would still be part of creation. He accepts that God may have created some aliens who might be free from original sin. And the Islamic Society of North America has pointed out that the Koran refers to Allah as the God of ‘worlds’ and not just one world.
Religious fundamentalists may have greater difficulties. Life on Mars would put a big dent in the Adam and Eve story. But a little imagination might well reveal that God put the methane on Mars to test our faith, after he had put all those fossils into the earth of animals that never existed for the same reason.
Meanwhile, the finding will delight the Roswell conspiracy theorists who see alien faces on pictures of planets and moons, in the same way that religious people can see the face of Jesus on their unevenly burnt toast at breakfast, or that Father Ted Crilly claimed to see the face of Bishop Ned Brennan on the skirting board of the parochial house on Craggy Island.
The 2007 NASA Rover Spirit probe showed an image on the surface of Mars of what might look like a man sitting down, who incidentally might also look like Jesus. Having examined it closely, I believe that Father Dougal Maguire painted the image with watercolours onto the surface of Mars, the day after he had painted Bishop Brennan’s face onto the skirting board of the bedroom on Craggy Island.
As far back as the 1970s, the American pseudoscientist Richard Hoagland argued that the Viking space probe had photographed a large face on the surface of Mars, which Hoagland claimed had been built by an advanced alien civilization. Later photos showed that the shape was a mountain, the face image was a trick of light and shade, and the other side of the mountain didn’t look like a face.
Hoagland countered that the new photos were doctored by the US Government, and that the asymetry showed that the image was half man and half cat. More recently, Hoagland claims to have used hyperdimensional physics to predict the election of Barack Obama. So will Obama release the hidden data about life on Mars? You can find out by buying Hoagland’s latest three-hour, two-dvd-set for the excellent price of $39.95!
by Michael Nugent
Michael Nugent on Newstalk Radio panel discussion about religion and science
On Wednesday 6 June, Michael Nugent was on a panel discussion about religion and science on the Marc Coleman show on Newstalk Radio. The other panelists were Michael Kelly deputy editor of the Irish Catholic newspaper, Donal O’Sullivan Latchford of the Irish family and Media Association and Dublin City Councillor Dr Bill Tormey of Fine Gael.
These are some edited highlights of Michael’s contributions to the discussion:
And here is the full discussion: