You believe in WHAT?!

Hell in a handbasket

Radio 4 yesterday included giving air-time to people protesting the new play Paul at the National Theatre. While I support people's right the their opinion, I feel I must object to this one.

There's a difficult balance to be drawn here. While Trust-me-Tony is encouraging the UN to ban all incitements of terrorism, which may or may not be a good thing, invoking the spectre of blasphemy outlaws any critique or analysis at all of any belief! This must be wrong - if any belief, proof, truth or whatever is worth anything then it can only be strengthened by inspection...

I think I'm going to try to make Thursdays "Science and Philosophy" day - which is really just an excuse to dust off my full-blown, number 3 soap box...


In the beginning

"But atheism is just a belief too which makes it a religion" they say with the self satisfied, smug sneer of the ignorant who think they've just made A Really Good Point.

As a strong atheist I have to disagree with this - science is the search for truth and proof after all, there's no space for belief (well, not as a proof anyway even though lots of hypotheses start out as hunches of course). Besides, it's not belief I object to just super-natural explanations.

But, unable to ignore a puzzle, a lot of sitting on the toilet, having showers and other good thinking times were spent on the problem: "What is the one irreducible belief an atheist needs?"

I think it's this:

The constancy of nature.

I don't mean that nature is unchanging, just that the way it behaves doesn't alter for no, or other supernatural, reason. If the apple falls from the tree today then it fell the same way yesterday and will fall the same way tomorrow.

This follows Occams razor nicely and all the other observations and laws of science seem to fall out from it. Newton's First Law of Motion is this constancy of Nature in a nutshell.

But that doesn't give us much moral guidance, so how about:

Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you.

Great, the smallest assumption possible and just one rule. We'll see how that works out in future posts...