This article from Rosamund Urwin in the Evening Standard seems to have come out of nowhere. I can only guess since its Christmas time she must have thought what better time to stick a metaphorical finger up at atheists for daring to question her faith. The title of her article, “So I’m religious. That doesn’t make me stupid” implies that she has been called stupid for being religious, although it is clear from the first paragraph that this is a thinly veiled mechanism for her to play victim.

“I believe in God. Right, that’s a few more points scrubbed off my estimated IQ by the most zealous atheists. It gets worse, though. I don’t just harbour some vague notion of a kind-hearted deity; I am a church-going Roman Catholic — I believe in Jesus, Mary and the donkey too.”

Or to paraphrase – ‘Look at me, I’m so persecuted by the evil zealous atheists because not only to I believe in God I also go to church. The horror!’ You know what Rosamund? I don’t care. I don’t care that you go to church, I don’t care that you believe in God, I don’t care that you believe in all that other Roman Catholic jazz either.

What I do care about, and what does tend to piss atheists off is when you go an say something silly like this;

“But what I’m most tired of hearing is that my faith is irrational. […] With two of the great intellectuals of philosophy of religion, Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne, now in their seventies, what theists need is a younger breed to argue for faith’s rationality.”

Of course people are entitled to believe whatever the hell they like; some people think that West Ham are the best  football club in the world or that the Conservatives cuts are fair. I could provide evidence against these things but everyone is entitled to think what they like. But when someone is trying to make an argument that her religion doesn’t make her stupid and then in that argument tries to make out that faith isn’t faith based at all but a rational belief then we have a problem.

Even if Rosamund did come to her faith position supposedly objectively during her study of the ‘philosophy of religion’ and when she “read and weighed up works by the anti-God Squad, the Doubting Thomases and the faith brigade.” at some point she still had to make a leap of faith to believe in something for which their is no empirical objective evidence for. That isn’t a rational position that is a faith position.

There is nothing wrong with being irrational, being irrational doesn’t make you stupid it just makes you irrational. I support Southend United, I know all about blindly following something that takes up a large proportion of my weekend and gives very little back in the way of joy. So yes there are plenty of irrational intelligent Roman Catholics out there I’m sure, just like there are plenty of irrational intelligent Atheists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews and Jedi*.

So yeah I’m an atheist. That doesn’t make me think all religious people are stupid, just you Rosamund Urwin.

*OK maybe not Jedi

It was a mammoth conference and so I will split this review into the various morning and afternoon sessions. Some talks are covered in more detail than others!

Day One Morning Session

The host and compare of the weekend was the excellent Richard Wiseman. More on him later.

The event kicked off with a performance from the Amateur Transplants, Dr Adam Kay and Dr Suman Biswas. They performed a series of parody comical songs mostly dealing with medical subjects. Perhaps best known for their parody of The Jam’s Going Underground, they were an unexpected highlight from Saturday and were the perfect tool for disarming an audience that was perhaps a little worse for wear at having to get up rather early on a weekend.

James Randi then took to the stage to a standing ovation, I understand a similar gesture was made last year to a video presentation when Randi was unable to attend due to ill health. So it was fantastic for the audience to get to show their appreciation in person and to see him in such good health. It was an honour to be part of such a genuine show of affection for a man that has done so much for skepticism. After a short opening speech Randi passed back over to Wiseman who introduced our first speaker;

Susan Blackmore

A wiki introduction: PhD, (born 29 July 1951) is an English freelance writer, lecturer, and broadcaster on psychology and the paranormal, perhaps best known for her book The Meme Machine.

Title of talk: Corners

Choice Quote: “What if it is all bunkum?”

Detail: Susan’s talk described her adventures as a parapsychologist and her long quest to try and prove the existence of psychic abilities. It all started for her when she was at university and had a “life-changing” out of body experience. Susan pointed out that these experiences should not be simply dismissed as hallucinogenic since to the person that has the experience they are deeply real and indescribably profound. It was such an experience that made Susan become a true-believer and led her on her journey.

She went onto describe the various tests she performed over the years and the subsequent failures; each failure leading to a new corner of investigation. These were;

Corner 1. Testing students in a lecture hall

Corner 2. Testing kids

Corner 3. Testing twins

Corner 4. Testing ‘real’ psychics

Corner 5. Testing Tarot Readings

Corner 6. Testing ESP in the Ganzfeld

Corner 7. Out of body experiences

Corner 8. Alien abductions.

Susan’s tests always came out showing no results or none better than chance despite other people in the same field getting ‘positive’ results, most likely down to their poor experiment construction. Such was Susan’s reputation that she became known as the psi-inhibitory experimenter!

References: Charles Honorton (Ganzfeld), Carl Sargent (Ganzfeld), James Basil (‘Alien implant’), Olaf Blanke (Scientist who recreated out-of-body experiences using electrodes on the brain)

Best Bit: Either the story of the person that asked Susan to bake an apple crumble to attract his aura to her kitchen (food tastes great in the other realm)! Or the gradual realisation from the audience as they interpreted the results of the mass spectrometer of James Basil’s ‘alien implant’ which showed it was a simple tooth filling.

Final Thoughts: Susan was a great way to start TAM London, her journey from true believer to skeptic was one that I think we all have some experience and sympathy with. Her delivery was a little erratic, occasionally jumping topics, and while I know this troubled some I thought it added to her charm as a speaker and merely emphasised the wealth of experience she has as a parapsychologist.

Richard Wiseman then took to the stage to quickly describe why Teletubbies are evil before introducing the next speaker;

Richard Dawkins

A wiki introduction: FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941) is a British ethologist and evolutionary biologist. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.

Title of talk: Evolution: The New Classics

Choice Quote: “Science is the poetry of reality”

Detail: Richard was on top form and delivered a speech that was a call to arms for a discipline that remains under threat from the religious right. His speech made the case that like the classics of Ancient Greece, evolution is in fact an interdisciplinary subject. From it a whole host of other subjects can be taught;

Teaches us our rootsHow to present and argue a case – not just due to attacks from religious groups but from controversy within the subject. As a science it is still developing/learning.

Taxonomy – “puts us in our place and punctures the balloon of self-importance.”Geology – the evolution of the planet and with that humility of our place within it.

Philosophy – “The evolutionary perspective makes you realize that it’s a sheer accident that we able to set up a morality that is so human-centred.”

Politics

Geography – distributionPhysics – dating of fossils by radioactive isotopes

Engineering – designing for economy, this is why bridges are so beautiful. He also talked about the evolution of flight and the trade off between stability and manoeuvrability. How this same trade off is represented in nature and in manufactured flight.

Computer Science

Mathematics

Statistics – “If more of our political masters understood statistics, the world would be a better place.”

Anthropology

Medicine – how antibiotics fighting off infection are a perfect opportunity to explain evolution

Psychology

Agriculture – selective breeding for high/low oil content in maize.

Cosmology – although he did point out that saying stars evolved was a slight misinterpretation

Linguistics

History of Ideas

For each topic Dawkins made a compelling argument and gave a real sense of how important evolution is as an idea. Not just in nature but as a tool that can be applied to give us a fundamental understanding of many systems from artificial to abstract.

References: There were loads so sorry if I’ve missed a few. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennet, Peter Singer author, Ingo Rechenberg (evolutionary engineering), Sewell Wright (mathematics, also may have accidentally used guinea-pig as blackboard eraser!), Sir Ronald Fisher (statistics), Evolution and Healing: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine by Randolph Nesse and George C Williams, Steven Pinker (linguistics)

Best Bit: Hard to say. At one point Dawkins talked about our ancestral linage and that if we held hands with our mothers, and they with theirs, back to our common ancestor with chimps the chain would only be 200 miles long. That image has kept with me since.

Final Thoughts: “Science is the poetry of reality [...] we teach it for the good of their souls” these words really capture the heart of what makes science so exciting and important. Dawkins talk was peppered with advice that was not preaching but almost conducting. He spoke a few times of how evolutionary theories are humbling and put us as humans in our place. What I always admire about Dawkins is the poetry and emotion of the language he uses that define him out as one of the great science communicators of our time.

Cory Doctorow

A wiki introduction: (pronounced /?k?ri ?d?kt?ro?/; born July 17, 1971) is a Canadian blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organisation, using some of their licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.

Title of talk: Didn’t really give one so I’ll call it Copyright in a Digital Age

Choice Quote: “Yesterdays pirates are today’s admirals”

Detail: Doctorow talked about the current problems with copyright law in an internet age. He discussed the recent Digital Economy Act in the UK. He then spoke about the very worrying development in France of the HADOPI law which is means if you are found guilty of three acts of copyright infringement then you are cut off from the internet for a year. Other countries, including the US, are looking into bringing in similar laws. He discussed how the current copyright laws for music, TV and film are perhaps unnecessary. Using the example of fashion, in fashion they have copyright laws that allow for copying and yet money is still invested in the top designers and people still pay a premium price for labelled products. Despite this branded clothes are often made in the same factories as their rip-offs.

Doctorow said copyright laws should encourage diversity. At the moment Viacom are suing Google (youtube) for not checking all 29 hours of material that their users create per minute, an impossible task, on the basis that some of that material is theirs. Why should this service be shut down to protect someone that creates 20 hours of footage per year?

He said how people that controlled the previous method of sharing creative content always accused the new method of piracy. Records were piracy, then radio was piracy, then tapes or VCR’s were piracy, now the internet. “Yesterdays pirates are today’s admirals”

A copyright system should be evidence based, that protects peoples’ right to get a fair price for their creative output should they want to but also allows for diversity of participation in culture.

References: HADOPI law

Best Bit: I though the question and answers session brought out some really good answers from Doctorow. Especially when he was asked what he thought the future of copyright should be. Paraphrasing – “We definitely shouldn’t extend copyright retrospectively, which is what they are trying to do now Elvis and The Beatles copyright is coming up; I mean how many more records is Lennon going to make if we extend his copyright for another 20 years?”

Final Thoughts: Doctorow spoke quite quickly and coupled with his Canadian accent I found him hard to follow at first. Once he got going though I got used to the sound of his voice and found myself becoming more interested in what he had to say. Despite effecting all of us, I thought copyright law would be quite a dry subject but Doctorow did a fantastic job of keeping it interesting. He really came alive in the question and answer session and, in this respect was perhaps the best of all the speakers at TAM London. I didn’t know much about Doctorow before TAM, but he was a highlight for me and I will be checking out his books.

Adam Rutherford

A wiki introduction: Adam Rutherford does not exist according to wiki. Other sources revel that he is a professional geek. He is an editor at the science journal Nature, and presents television and radio programmes, most recently ‘Cell’ for BBC4. The views he expresses here are entirely his own and are not necessarily those of the journal Nature

Title of talk: I’m going to talk to you about Jesus

Choice Quote: Rutherford’s life philosophy was fantastic, see a picture below.

Detail: Rutherford’s talk detailed his experience of the Alpha Course. He started by outlining a recent survey by Pew Research that showed atheists and agnostics are the most knowledgeable about religions, although Christians and Mormons know the most about Christianity. There are something like 70% of Brits that consider themselves Christians but most of these are ‘dechurched’, the Alpha Course is designed not to convert agnostics or people from other religions but to turn one type of Christian (those that don’t attend church) into another far more passionate believer.

The whole strength of Christianity relies on the existence of Jesus, what is interesting is that there is no compelling evidence for the existence of Jesus. This point is rarely raised by historians, Rutherford theorised they probably can’t be bothered will all the attention and hassle such a study would bring.

There are two key texts to the Alpha Course, bizarrely these are Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. They tend to use seemingly profound quotes like “You can only destroy death from inside” like Frodo, but really these don’t actually mean anything. Rutherford confessed to hating the Narnia books and said that Lord of the Rings was boring it is essentially “a story about walking”.

There are hypocrisies within the teachings of the Alpha Course, while they reject all forms of demonism or witchcraft all diocese are required to have exorcists.

There is plenty to suggest that the Alpha Course is fundamentally homophobic, they say that “homosexual orientation is something acquired or learnt” and when Rutherford went to quiz the founder of the Alpha Course Nicky Gumbel he said on homosexuality “God created us good and we have fallen away from that”

References: Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, Lord of the Rings by J.R.Tolkien, Pew Research on Religious Knowledge, Nicky Gumbel

Best Bit: Two highlights, when Rutherford was explaining how most of us have a basic knowledge of Christianity he managed to get a room full of atheists to recite the Lord’s Prayer. Rutherford’s story about when he went to meet the founder of the Alpha Course Nicky Gumbel and he had some jam on his trousers. “I’m suspicious of people in power, doubly suspicious when they’re nice, and triply suspicious when they have jam on their crotch.”

Final Thoughts: Rutherford was engaging, funny and knowledgeable about his subject. His talk was one of the best of the weekend however he seemed uncomfortable during the question and answer session. Particularly when Dawkins asked a question, which I guess would be daunting for anyone. Maybe I am being unfair, I would welcome another take on this. Given the strength of Rutherford’s talk I was surprised he seemed so nervous under questions from the audience.

That was the end of the Saturday morning session.

Here is a quote from the speech below, I hope it attracts your interest to take the time to listen to it all.

“No God, no religious text, no organised system of faith is better at dictating right and wrong than that compass we are born with in our heads, the instincts that are coded in our genes. I’ve seen much good come from man but very little from God. If I must place my faith somewhere then I choose to place it in reason and thank God (!) I have the freedom to choose.”

Full speech here

“Does NASA’s photograph of Pulsar B1509 capture the Hand of God or neutron star?”

No, no it doesn’t.

Idiots.