Ask for Evdence

Happy heathens might like to know about the Ask for Evidence campaign recently launched by the group Sense About Science, which is supported by the British Humanist Association.

Let`s see if I can get the link right ;

https://humanism.org.uk/2014/01/09/bha-supports-ask-evidence-campaign

Sounds like a very wise idea.

Very wise indeed. 'Scuse me while I address between 21 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations) and 4,200 (http://www.examiner.com/article/the-exact-number-of-religions-the-world-is-unknown) letters to the world's major churches.

You're just going to get a stack of scripture in return :)

>4 Amtep: LOL

Don't forget all the departments of English and artists in the country. Make sure they provide evidence as well for the truths they seek to convey.

(After all, if it ain't scientific, it ain't jack!)

Funny, I haven't seen a lot of novelists and artists making scientific claims. When they do, usually it says "science fiction" right on the book.

>6 Arctic-Stranger: Don't forget all the departments of English and artists in the country. Make sure they provide evidence as well for the truths they seek to convey.

Well, since the campaign specifically targets scientific statements, the odds are it won't be an issue: " The campaign encourages ordinary people to write to organisations and public figures which make scientific claims, to ask them for the relevant evidence."

Although I have to say, every time someone tries to tell me that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare, I ask for positive evidence. To date, there hasn't been any. --Does that count? :)

Dear John Keats,

Can you show me relevant evidence that beauty is indeed truth, and that truth is, in fact, beauty?

I can probably show you a counterfactual claim. Just google "models photoshopped" or some variant thereof.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/10/30/model-before-and-after-photoshop_n_41790...

http://www.beautyredefined.net/photoshopping-altering-images-and-our-minds/

The campaign may target that, but I was aiming my post at the person who said, most likely tongue in cheek, that he wanted to send the letter to all religious organizations.

#9:

David Deutsch made a pretty convincing case for truth being beauty, in The Begining of Infinity. (The chapter "Why are flowers beautiful?"). He made a distinction between parochial beauty (the kind that humans like because of human peculiarities) and objective beauty (the kind that flowers show). He suggests that we have barely begun to discover objective beauty.

P.S. I don't think he meant "parochial" in the religious sense. Please forgive him, he's British :)

forgive him, he's British

For a U.S. view, some synonyms for parochial from Merriam-Webster:

illiberal, insular, Lilliputian, little, narrow-minded, narrow, petty, picayune, provincial, sectarian, small, small-minded.

Easy to see how "the religious sense" immediately springs to mind.

He's also a bloody SHE!

No, Arctic, not tongue in cheek at all. And yes, the rule should apply to every kind of organisation that attempts to present belief as fact though, like weener, I seem to have missed most of those instances as far as novels and poetry are concerned - possibly because these things are generally presented as fiction or opinion. If your problem is with the theories/practices that are commonly used to discuss and debate those works then the university I went to made it quite clear that these were methods for criticism, all of which may contribute something to the understanding of texts yet none of which is evidence of anything, perhaps yours had a different take?

The whole basis of religion, however, is the insistence on presenting uncorroborated stories as fact and it would therefore seem to me to be the obvious place to start. Many atheists, when asked the question "what would it take to make you believe?" will cite "Evidence. Just one really good piece of evidence will do it." so you really would think that if believers had such a thing they'd be falling over themselves to present it. The fact that so many people who say they believe in the existence of their 'gods' are incapable of understanding the difference between the words 'belief' and 'evidence' illustrates the problem perfectly.

ETA - That first sentence refers to myself , in response to the sex-change attributed to me by Arctic Stranger, not to David Deutsch as it probably seemed.

Thanks for clearing that up. I have not yet met a woman named David, although I could one day.

Perhaps I see religion more as an art than a science, and so to compare them is like comparing English (or French) to physics.

Oddly enough, there are people that look for even their fictions to make sense. You know, like the common complaint against Ayn Rand and her work that people constantly have sex and no one gets pregnant. Where she argued that pregnancy wouldn't have furthered the story in her didactic tomes.

I wasn't aware that lack of pregnancy was a common complaint against Rand.

Given all the other flaws, that one strikes me as trivial.

#14: Yeah I think he meant an abstract kind of "localized"

Pregnancy is the fatal flaw in Rand's view of the world. A friend of my brother's used to really be into Rand, until he had a daughter. All of sudden personal selfishness took on a whole new meaning--as did altruistic love.

#20

I would say one of the many fatal flaws in Rand's worldview.