Opinion

Dear Andrew Smith MP, I am writing to you concerning the education reforms that your government is steamrolling through. I strongly disagree with faith-based selection. I think the whole idea of insulating people from other cultures, other peoples, and other ideas is actually quite abhorrent. Yet this is what faith-based schools do. You can't mandate one hour a week for studying multiculturalism or religious education, that is simply not enough to integrate people. The only way to integrate, appreciate and respect one another's cultures is via contact with other people. My prejudices quickly melt away after spending just ten minutes with someone from a different background to myself. I can understand that some parents may want their children to grow up to be good Catholics or Muslims, but I would rather that the decision was taken by the child, not by the parents. I find the differences between the faiths to be largely artificial, and forcing it upon children at an early...

Are atheists moral? It is often claimed that atheists have no morality, that morality only makes sense through God, that a universal morality exists through God, or that God gave us morality. All of this is nonsense. (Hey, it's my blog, I can be as blunt as I like!) Let us deal with the last point, that morality comes from God. This statement is meaningless, since God is "everything we don't understand", which says that we don't understand morality. This is factually false, evolutionary psychology does give us a reason for morality. Even if God for some reason wanted us to behave in certain ways (why exactly he would want that escapes me), then how would that be communicated to us? Through prayer? Through stones carted down from Mt Synae? Through the Bible? The problem with appealing to God is that there are differing religions, each telling their flock different things. There is no reason to suppose that one religion has a connection to God, whilst other...

Intelligent design? Do things ever occur that are unexplainable by science? This is almost Godel's incompleteness theorem: some things cannot be proven using the laws in any sufficiently complex system. The fallacy is always the same: what cannot be readily explained, is "unexplainable", therefore must have been performed by an intelligent action. Both of those steps are logical fallacies. Underlying intelligent design is the idea that some things could not have occurred naturally. Eyes, flagella, DNA, are deemed to be statistically impossible to have arisen. The problem is that for every specific case where such an example is given by the creationists, it is possible to refute it. For example, a small part of a flagellum is still extremely useful to a bacterium. Evolution is a great theory, not because it is necessarily true (although it is overwhelmingly likely that it is), but because it can withstand such criticism, and win every time. Intelligent designers are...