Or a series of mutations that led to a skull optimised for brain size but with some serious but non-fatal flaws?

Wise words.

By the way, I’m all in favour of teaching “intelligent design” in schools. My lesson plan would go something like: this is “intelligent design”; it’s a hypothesis; why it can’t be tested; in science we need to be able to test our hypotheses; here are some examples of testable hypotheses; is “intelligent design” a scientific theory?; discuss.

If we accept for a moment that god does exist, the next question is whether we consider that the appropriate action is to worship such a cruel, violent and psychopathic entity.

A similar sentiment was expressed by Slocum, further down. Nick (South Africa) adds:

The problem of suffering and evil is indeed a valid question for those who posit any omnipresent, omnipotent, benevolent deity – the stock answer of ‘god works in mysterious ways’ leaves me for one considerably unimpressed, indeed it’s a cop out just like the cosmological argument.

Nick’s other comments are worth a read, too. A full discussion of theodicy can be found on Wikipedia.

Lord, we cleared this land, we ploughed it, sowed it, harvested it. We cooked the harvest. It wouldn’t be here, we wouldn’t be eating it, if we hadn’t done it all ourselves. We worked dog bone hard for every crumb and morsel but we thank you just the same anyway, Lord, for this food we’re about to eat. Amen.

Taking credit for your own hard work seems like the right attitude to me!

He’s got a very serious point to make:

Whether we believe in psychic ability, crystal energy, alien abduction, talking to the dead or Christianity, we are rightly or wrongly buying into a very powerful belief system. I’m not interested in attacking anyone’s beliefs but I think as intelligent human beings we should be prepared to question our beliefs — and the people who encourage us to make life decisions based on the information they give us.

And that’s what grabbed my attention and greatly elevated my impression of Derren Brown. Skepticism and critical thinking can’t be promoted enough, and I think it’s fantastic that he is using his considerable talents to promote these ideas. His aim is to test the skepticism of the people he confronts. Each time he carefully explains that as soon as one of them asks him if he’s tricking them he will own up.

The first people he meets are some psychics who teach psychics (to be psychic?) at the Sedona Creative Life Centre in Arizona. He asks one how she deals with the responsibility of giving people advice on important decisions. She answers that if someone is “guided” to her to ask for advice then she must be qualified to give it, which is certainly an interesting outlook.

Brown does the usual image projection test in which a viewer in one room projects an image to a receiver in another room. Scientific tests of this have always come up with no better results than you’d get from guessing, but Brown gets it right every time. How he does this I don’t know. It’s one of his best tricks. At one stage he says, “just let differemt images sail through your mind, don’t go overboard on detail”, and the woman draws a boat. Can saying the words “sail” and “overboard” really induce someone to draw a boat? If so it’s astonishing. But there is obviously more going on, it’s just hard to find out what because Brown’s shows are very cleverly edited, so we don’t get a chance to analyse completely what he’s doing.

Of course, all the psychics are thoroughly convinced. One of them goes so far as to say, “as a person who trains psychics, I would have [my students] watch that film and say ‘this is how you do it.’”

Next up, Brown goes after the Christians. He doesn’t hold back.

I used to be a full on, happy clappy Christian until my mid 20s, and then I started to realise that my belief was just as prone to circular logic and self fulfillment as all the new-age nonsense which bugged me. And then reading the New Testament as a historical document finally rid me of any religeous belief.

.

But the real point he is making is this:

But if I can convert people through non-spiritual methods, how many people are out their doing the same thing in their own way?

He goes to Rhode Island to visit Curt Nordhielm of Restoration House Ministries, whose speciality is evangelising to immigrant communities. Nordheim writes in some ministry blurb, “The huge influx of foreign people groups into this nation can be viewed in two ways. They can be seen as a threat to our way of life — both spiritually or culturally. Or they can be viewed as an opportunity for evangelism.”

What Brown appears to do is quite unbelievable. He invites a bunch of atheists, agnostics and other doubters to come to a meeting, and then apperently converts them instantly. After he gets one girl to switch from talking about how religion was forced on her by her family and she never accepted it, to talking about how she had felt a spirtual inner hug when Brown put his hand near her face, half of the meeting, including Nordhielm, walk out.

But Brown continues on. One guy voices my exact problem with religion:

How could you believe in or worship a higher being [...] that’s supposed to be loving, that’s supposed to be merciful and kind, but [people] talk about free will [...] well it wasn’t a three-year-old’s free will to die of leukemia. And things of that nature. That’s what makes me just not buy it.

Next thing, the same guy is standing up, facing away from Derren Brown, who holds up his hand and pulls at the air. This apparently induces the guy to fall over and then, when asked, start saying how his previous beliefs and opinions were incorrect. It’s all very odd.

It looks like Brown has hypnotised these people, but I don’t believe in hypnotism. I’d say actors were used but a caption at the start of the program claims that no stooges or actors were used in its making. This scene has me wondering on how many levels is Derren Brown a fraud, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt because it seems even more unbelievable that the whole sequence was faked. It’s more likely that there’s a very clever trick I don’t understand.

But Brown picked the wrong target in Curt Nordhielm, who is visibly shocked and skeptical about Browns antics. I think if this had been tried with a faith healer like Benny Hinn then the result would have been more convincing.

Things pick up when Brown visits Lorraine DiFelice, a publisher of a new-age magazine and organiser of a Vegas convention. He convinces her that a metal box with a switch, battery and bulb, is reading her dreams. She uses it for a week and he then attaches electrodes from it to his head and tells her what she dreamt about. Afterwards you can almost see the dollar signs spinning in her eyes when she talks about letting Brown come on her radio show and publish whatever he wants in her magazine.

As for how he did it, it seems likely Brown used cold reading techniques. He pulls a similar trick on UFO researcher and author Ann Druffel whose medical history he somehow reconstructs, a talent he tells her he had since he was abducted by aliens. Dollar signs spin in her eyes too — she wants his story published in “the most respected publications”. The best part of this section, though, is when Brown is interviewing Druffel. She tells him that abductions usually start when the victim is in a “dream state”. When he suggests that “some people” might say that the whole abduction was a dream, Druffel just looks confused and lets her friend Vince Uhlenkott answer (he mumbles about “grey areas”).

Finally, Derren Brown meets spiritualist medium and teacher Rev Janet Hohavec. He does the standard cold reading talking-to-the-dead trick, and makes a big show of how uncomfortable he is about doing it.

I personally believe, given my knowledge of the psychic industry, that I’m using techniques here used by pretty much any successful medium. But you’re going to watch this knowing that I’m fake. And if that makes you feel uncomfortable, then that is kind of my point.

And it’s a good point, because Brown’s victims get quite upset hearing about their dead loved-ones. At the end a caption states that everyone involved was told the true nature of what happened and agreed to appear in the programme. “Real” mediums (media?) would never admit what they were doing, of course. Our medium thinks Derren Brown has a gift, but (dollar signs), “to move it to another level would be incredible.”

The programme was a facsinating display of Derren Brown’s edge-of-your-seat, how-did-he-do-it? trickery, mixed in with a very serious and important message.

At the start of this post I wrote that the people Derren Brown confronted were Charlatans, but there may be more to it. That they were apparently so willing to believe him means that to a greater or lesser extent they really do believe in what they’re doing.

I can’t think of anything more depressing and pointless than dedicating your life to a falsehood, which is why I think it’s so important to maintain a healthy, active skepticism.

I wouldn’t mind the owners of a privatised Trafalgar Square using it for whatever they want, but seeing as its upkeep is paid for with taxes letting special interest groups continually hijack what should be a public space for everyone to enjoy strikes me as taking liberties just a bit. Whose square is it, Ken?

The notion that Christ died and suffered for the sins of others is a morally worthless one. If I whipped and then shot myself because Robert Blake killed his wife, my suffering and death would not make Robert Blake a better person, excuse his crime, or bring his victim back to life.

James Randi opines about all kinds of mumbo jumbo, and importantly, has got together a million dollars as a prize for the first person that can demonstrate any kind of supernatural phenomenon in a lab. That the prize is so far unclaimed is a useful snippet to use in discussions with believers in nonsense.

Best of all, there is a weekly commentary with archives going back to 1999, and Randi is an entertaining writer so there’s plenty to keep you busy during those quiet periods at work! Don’t miss some intriguing puzzles [scroll to the bottom] in some of the earlier articles.

Finally, I wish I’d known about Randi’s site when I wrote about magnet therapy back in April. Randi expounds on this very topic in several articles, including one in which shoemakers Florsheim withdraw claims about their magnetic shoes. This last one includes a link to an Onion peice entitled, Revolutionary New Insoles Combine Five Forms of Pseudoscience. Enjoy!

Cerebros points out this highlight:

Jehova: you just singlehandedly slaughtered 1/4 of #Earth’s population

I gave up having imaginary friends when I was five. I believe in what I can see, hear and touch. It’s no good asking God for answers, because there is none.

The source of this wisdom? Jesse from Home and Away. Who would have thought it from an otherwise mostly vacuous daytime soap? Perhaps it’s something to do with Auatralians: I seem to remember a character from Neighbours ranting in a similar way after his wife died and someone tried to tell him it was okay because she was in heaven. I have to go back as far as last February to find a similarly brave British programme.

From 1 December it will be unlawful to discriminate against workers because of their sexual orientation, whether they are bisexual, lesbian, gay or heterosexual.

Religious organisations are exempted from these new rules.

[From 2 December it will also be unlawful to discriminate on the grounds of religion, religious belief or similar philosophical belief.]

So these new laws say you have to be tolerant of gay people and religion, including those religions that promote intolerance of gay people. The doublethink involved here is almost beyond belief. Isn’t it a good job we have the government to tell us how to think?

In case you missed it, the idea is that by turning the original hebrew version of the Bible into a giant word search and finding words made from equidistant letters that intersect each other, you can predict future events. So, for instance, since the word “Kennedy” intersects the phrase, “assasin who will assinate”, we can predict that Kennedy will be assasinated. Presumably God or the aliens who wrote the Bible inserted the messages for some reason or another.

The code was discovered by three Israelis, including Eliyahu Rips, who published a paper on it. They found that the names of famous rabbis intersected with their dates of birth, and came up with a method of measuring the probablility that this could happen by chance. This probability was very low: 1 in 65,000. What they didn’t mention was that there were numerous ways to spell the rabbis’ names, presumably helped out by the fact that the Bible as written in Hebrew contains no vowels (something the Horizon programme didn’t mention). When the experiment was repeated with alternative spellings it failed. The probability came out at somewhere between 1 in 2 and 2 in 3, indicating that the names were selected by Rips and co. to get the wanted results.

Cue Michael Drosnin who, thoroughly taken in by Rips, published a book or two on the subject. He was spurred on by his prediction that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin would be assasinated, and now thinks there will be a nuclear war in 2006 unless he can get to George W first and stop it. This is slightly scary because W is a religious loony and will soon be making major policy decisions from Bible codes if Drosnin gets his way.

Drosnin once challenged the skeptics to find predictions in Moby Dick. Statistician Brendan McKay, whose website contains much detailed information, did. He points out that the problem with Drosnin’s method of making predictions is that he looks for a name, and then looks for anything interesting that appears near that name. Given the lack of vowels in the Hebrew, and enough controversy over just how you spell “Tony Blair” in Hebrew anyway, and, well, you can see…

I thought this post might turn into a rant about how biased the Horizon programme was in favour of Drosnin. He did get much more air-time than the skeptics. But the weakness of his argument, essentially just repeating how unlikely were these combinations of words he’d chosen to be found near each other, was so obvious that he did most of the skeptics’ work for them. Couple that with Rips’ hopeless attempt to make out that a few accidental errors could cause the results of a follow-up experiment to be out by four orders of magnitude, and it’s quite clear who won the documentary.