God vs. “The God Particle”

Pictured: God’s Colonoscopy

When Leon M. Lederman gave the theoretical Higgs Boson the nickname “The God Particle,” it was simply to illustrate its importance to science, even if it was slightly tongue in cheek. The Higgs Boson, if proven to exist, would be the mechanism by which all the chaotic particles in the beginnings of the universe would’ve finally managed to coagulate into something other than fiery destructive chaotic death. In short, old Higgy was the host of the orgy that spawned life, the universe, and everything.

Higgs Boson Discovered!

JesusLovesBags here with my inaugural post at AtheistHobos.  Excited to be a contributor and for this news item…

At 4am Eastern Time, scientists of CERN laboratory (home of the LHC) announced the discovery of the Higgs particle at a conference in Australia.

I also got a text:

Secret Communist Subliminal Messages! Supermoons! God Lives in Ohio! And More!

“It’s a Supermoon, dicknose!”

Tomorrow there will be a full moon, and it’s going to be the biggest one of the year. It’s one of those Supermoons. And it’ll be on May 5th, 2012 (5/5!!). Does this mean the Moon will grow so much that it will reverse the Earth’s magnetic poles, causing massive earthquakes and tsunamis which will then awaken the sleeping Mayan god Quetzalcoatl? And will Quetzalcoatl then destroy the world in accordance with the unwritten ancient prophecies? Probably!

That’s the kind of thing you get with Supermoons. At least that’s what happened last year during another supermoon, so we can probably expect it again.

Sanal Edamaruku Interview #2

Sanal Edamaruku is the founder-president of Rationalist International and our first repeat guest. We talk about how he recently debunked a Catholic miracle claim in Mumbai and the blasphemy charges against him that ensued. You can donate to the Sanal Edamaruku Defence Fund and support free expression in India here.

Free Will & Other Fairy Tales

[I should probably point out that I started writing this post before I heard that Sam Harris just released a short book / long pamphlet about this subject. You’ll just have to take my word for it.]

Being a connoisseur of crazy ideas carries with it a sort of demarcation problem. Is there a clearly defined line between a belief being totally unreasonable and kooky, and a belief which is just simply wrong? What kind of method can we use to tell the difference?

Sometimes it can be tough to distinguish between one unjustified belief categorized as crackpottery while another equally unjustified belief escapes unscathed simply because it’s popular. As it goes with pornography and Supreme Court justices, we might not be able to clearly define woo, but we can know it when we see it. As hazily defined a term as it is, maybe it would help the cause to expand its definition to the point where it makes more people re-examine their positions.

When I was doing a little research to prepare for an interview with Sarah Posner a couple weeks ago, I stumbled across a blog post on her site Religion Dispatches called Dear Scientists: Please Stop Bashing Free Will! by John Horgan. Horgan writes for Scientific American, so it’s not like he’s stupid. But even smart people can be tricked into believing stupid things for stupid reasons. Free will is one of those unjustified beliefs that’s so ubiquitous that even a science writer will openly defend it using the kinds of arguments he’d be among the first to counter when used to promote creationism or cryptozoology.

Emily Lakdawalla Interview

Emily Lakdawalla is a former planetary geologist and current science writer for the Planetary Society blog. We talk about robots, space exploration, robots exploring space and other cool astronomy stuff.

Flat-Earthers Are Probably Smarter Than You

Flat Earthers believe our planet looks something like this.

“It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.” -Thomas Paine

Last weekend my Twitter timeline blew up when Kirk Cameron showed up at CPAC to lecture at the attendees about creationism and the worldwide mad deadly evolution conspiracy. But the mocking wasn’t coming from scientists or secular activists who work at keeping religion out of science classrooms. Those people tend to not show up at events like CPAC. No, it was coming pretty much exclusively from liberal political activist bloggers and journalists. And not only that, it was also exclusively coming from bloggers and journalists who, as far as I could tell, have never once written about biological evolution or the fallacies involved in creationist arguments. I speculated that most of them have never even opened a text on evolution before.

Blessed Are The Cheesemakers

So it’s getting close to the end of 2011 and like every other group of dipshits in the known universe, science-religion accommodationists are releasing lists of people and things which have warmed their hearts over the past 12 months. Like this one in Religion Dispatches, for instance.

It’s by some guy I’ve never heard of called Paul Wallace who appropriately enough writes at the nauseatingly terrible Huffington Post. Someone who shares a masthead with Jenny McCarthy and Deepak Chopra is trying to tell us the roles of science and religion. That’s cool…

5 Ways 9/11 Truthers Are Like Creationists

On the Origin of Conspiracy Theories By Means of Natural Stupidity

Happy 9/11 anniversary everyone! This year is going to be extra special because we have ten fingers and we’ve set up our numerical system based on that arbitrary amount. The news media is going to capitalize on this hard: Fox News has a special on it about how George W. Bush killed Osama bin Laden on September 12 with only night-vision goggles and a sword. MSNBC has one about how we antagonized the Muslim world by locking up “suspected terrorists” indefinitely without charges and invading a few Middle Eastern countries. And the most outrageous of the tragedy opportunists are planning a march in Manhattan to mark the 10 year anniversary of everyone’s favorite act of mass murder.

Paley’s Watchmaker

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. (…) There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. (…) Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.
–William Paley, Natural Theology (1802)

That’s how this teleological argument for the existence of God was most famously articulated. It’s also known as the argument from design. Like Pascal’s Wager, it’s one of those bits of theology that’s often repeated ad nauseum by laypersons, and usually ones who’ve never read the original citation above. And also like Pascal’s Wager, there are so many problems with it that it’s difficult to know where exactly to begin.