Good ol' BBC - what would you do?

[RandomMusings]

Good ol' BBC keeping up it's high quality and proper journalism

http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/newsb ... 961224.stm

[orudge]

To be fair, it is on the Radio 1 Newsbeat site... it is still most read and most shared though, which I think says something about the readers of the BBC News more than the BBC themselves.

[sejanus]

it is still most read and most shared though, which I think says something about the readers of the BBC News more than the BBC themselves.

As of this moment, it's also the 2nd most viewed story on Telegraph.co.uk today after "Jennifer Aniston ended relationship with John Mayer because of his Twitter `obsession`"... what does that say about Telegraph readers?

(Current #1 stories: The Times gives us "UK population must fall to 30m, says Porritt"; the Guardian "Premier League: Sir Alex Ferguson's Aston Villa fixture gamble betrays anxiety over Manchester United title defence"; and the Independent, "Stars come out for Boat That Rocked premiere". Does this qualify for funding as a sociology experiment?)

[orudge]

As of this moment, it's also the 2nd most viewed story on Telegraph.co.uk today after "Jennifer Aniston ended relationship with John Mayer because of his Twitter `obsession`"... what does that say about Telegraph readers?

I misread that as "Jennifer Aniston ended relationship with John Major". Rather a disturbing image, really.

[Fawksie]

So did I.

[Duggeh]

I'd have Jen over Edwina.

[orudge]

I think John Major would have, too, given the choice.

[Humphrey]

(Current #1 stories: The Times gives us "UK population must fall to 30m, says Porritt"

!?!?!?! WTF

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/p ... 950442.ece

And how does Porritt plan to achieve this exactly?.

Anyone got any ideas for getting rid of those 30+ million people?. Now where is my copy of Malthus?.

[Haunted]

Anyone got any ideas for getting rid of those 30+ million people?

What sort of time scale do I have to work with?

[munchingfoo]

Anyone got any ideas for getting rid of those 30+ million people?. Now where is my copy of Malthus?.

?

[Humphrey]

Anyone got any ideas for getting rid of those 30+ million people?. Now where is my copy of Malthus?.

?

Is that an Eco Town?

[munchingfoo]

Albany Park.

[Hennessy]

Albany Park.

I thought I smelt burning today...
Commandant Da Silva and SS Oberführer Marlene were overseeing upgrades to the barrack rooms, which mainly seemed to involve drilling a series of symmetrical holes in my house.

As for the population estimate, I think it shows up just how nutty some of these enviro-mentalists are, it's on par with the conservative think tank that encouraged people to abandon the North and move South to boost economic prosperity.

Give me a thousand Albany Parks, the subscribers list for the Guardian and the allegiance of every boy scout and girl guide in the country and I think I can eliminate the problem that's eating Britain, and it isn't global warming.

[Humphrey]

Albany Park.

Hmm, I had a think about this while watching 'Heston's Roman Feast' and I think the most equitable way to halve the population would be the following. Divide up the country into pairs (you would arrange this by things like age, personal income and athletic ability). You then send letters to each pair telling them to hunt down and kill each other within a certain period, perhaps including some handy information like their address, personal weaknesses, favourite pub etc. The member of the pair that kills the other one first wins. Hey presto, 60 million becomes 30 million. Think I should mail that suggestion to Greenpeace.

[Haunted]

As an aside Humphrey. What do you make of A.C. Grayling's scathing review of Polkinghorne's new book?
http://newhumanist.org.uk/1998

[Admin]

On a side note, is it time for another round of Assassins?

[munchingfoo]

Albany Park.

Hmm, I had a think about this while watching 'Heston's Roman Feast' and I think the most equitable way to halve the population would be the following. Divide up the country into pairs (you would arrange this by things like age, personal income and athletic ability). You then send letters to each pair telling them to hunt down and kill each other within a certain period, perhaps including some handy information like their address, personal weaknesses, favourite pub etc. The member of the pair that kills the other one first wins. Hey presto, 60 million becomes 30 million. Think I should mail that suggestion to Greenpeace.

Trouble is, as the Nazi's found out, disposing of millions of bodies is no mean task. If you killed 30 million people in the UK like that it's very likely that the other 30 million would die of disease.

[RedCelt69]

The member of the pair that kills the other one first wins. Hey presto, 60 million becomes 30 million. Think I should mail that suggestion to Greenpeace.

And to get around the problem of corpse disposal, the winning person gets to eat the loser.

At the risk of combining threads... stick another granny on the barbie, Bruce.

Long pig anyone?

Note: As vegetarians wouldn't eat their opponent, they auto-lose the competition. Although I pity their opponent's gastric reward. Would bring a whole new meaning to the concept of vegie-burgers.

[Humphrey]

As an aside Humphrey. What do you make of A.C. Grayling's scathing review of Polkinghorne's new book?
http://newhumanist.org.uk/1998

Well I was a bit scathing about it yesterday, but reading it again in the cold light of day I am inclined to be more charitable. I have had a chance to look over ‘Questions of Truth’ on google books, and I think some of his points are valid. Furthermore all of its content is on the faq section of the starcourse website ( http://www.starcourse.org/jcp/qanda.html ). Nothing appears to have been elaborated on. It seems to serve mainly to promote other books (including those written by the President of the Royal Society!).

Grayling I think is right about the ‘free process’ defence being a bit shoddy. Yes I can see why blind natural processes like plate tectonics are a good idea for renewing the earth’s surface, and also for the purposes of evolution. But the analogy that springs to mind is if I happened to let a drunk guy drive my wife home in the car. Sure it’s a way of getting home and she might get home ok, but there is a moral negligence there. The other response Beale and Polkinghorne have is the ‘Book of Job’ (really an ancient Hebrew play rather than supposed revelation, although perhaps the inerrantists think that’s the ‘word of God too!) , in which one simply throws up ones hands and says, ‘God is simply bigger than me and I can’t know his purposes’. Well, one imagines the Russians looking over when Stalin was starving the Ukrainians and saying ‘that looks a bit harsh, but you know, Stalin is bigger and mightier than me, so he must have some higher purpose in mind I can’t comprehend’. Not very satisfying. Another one they seem to have is ‘well, evil exists, but Jesus died on the cross for our sins, so God must care about us’. Not sure I follow. If say I happened to program a website in cold fusion (very unlikely because I can’t program for shit) and it contains a number of serious errors, inevitably customers will run into difficulties. It would be no consolation for me to fix a few trivial errors, get ripped off by the site myself and then blow my brains out. The customers would be entitled to say ‘that was a bit of an over-reaction, why didn’t you just fix the site and give us the money back?’. So looking over the responses I can see why Grayling got pissed off. I don't think evil is an insurmountable problem, but the bad responses do more harm than good.

I think A.C is partly right that a lot of these answers are ‘god of the gaps’ type stuff. Since God is supposed to be an ultimate explanation, a being outside of space and time which interacts with us; it’s always going to be dwelling in an enormous ‘gap’ in our knowledge. That being the case, it’s an issue of interpretation of evidence. You would have to make a compelling case that the sum total of our knowledge about the natural world suggests there is something beyond it. You would then have to consider all naturalistic explanations and then show why they don’t work and yours is better. That’s inevitably going to be ‘God of the Gaps’ and ‘inference to the best explanation’. I think that’s ok in terms of an ultimate explanation (which I think is what Polkinghorne and Beale restrict themselves to; but I can’t see the relevant parts of the book), but not where you come across supposed ‘irreducible complexity’ or difficulties with the origin of life. When it comes to the origin of life you can either sit on the sidelines sneering like the creationists, or you can do what the Catholic scientist Martin Nowak has done and get stuck in to try and solve the problem. I know which one I think is going to be eventually vindicated.

What does he get wrong?. Well he trivialises the anthropic principle (perhaps understandable, it’s supposed to be a bio-centric principle, not something which inevitably leads to five fingered homo sapiens). He doesn’t like the sound of dual aspect monism which actually sounds a lot like David Chalmers property dualism. Chalmers dualism is credible, it is winning over a number of figures in the philosophy of mind (e.g Jaegwon Kim has shifted his position), and finally Chalmers is an atheist so he can’t be accused of special pleading for the soul. Plus he is seriously cool. I think Grayling’s accusations about Genesis being simply made mythical to avoid religion being falsified are rubbish. Strict literalism was uncommon in the patristic era (e.g Origen).

The last point is that, playing to the gallery, Grayling harps on about ‘the superstitious lucubrations of illiterate goatherds living several thousand years’. I find this odd. His cause celebre is supposedly human rights. One of the contributions of the ‘illiterate goatherds’ was the concept of ‘the image dei’, that human beings are created in the image of God. In the hands of Locke, Grotius, Huguccio, de Las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria this would go on to become the foundation of the legal concept of natural rights (later human rights). One should give credit where credit is due. Lastly it seems a bit odd to criticise the Royal Society for allowing religion on the premises when its founder members and a large proportion of its most famous scientists were what we would consider to be religious fanatics (e.g Robert Boyle set up a series of lectures to ‘protect the Christian religion’ against ‘notorious infidels’). They should be allowed to whore themselves out to whoever they like (except the Discovery institute).

I think the accommodationist line Beale and Polkinghorne take is a good one. Ultimately I think the evidence is beginning to show that religion is somehow 'hard-wired' into our cognitive faculties (i.e selected for), perhaps something akin to Pinker's language instinct rather than a simple misfiring or malignant memetic virus. If that's the case, confrontation may just promote more fundamentalism.

[Hennessy]

*essay-length post*

997 words, I take it you have work due?