Train stations, not just for trains anymore.

This may be the greatest thing I’ve seen in a week or so.  I don’t know the story, I don’t know the reasons, and I don’t care.  All I know is that it is absolutely awesome.  

Via: Althouse

Stripping Hyperbole.

I’m addicted to adjectives.  It started when I was young.  I remember a friend saying to my siblings and I: “You guys use a lot of adjectives, do you really mean what you say.”  It stuck with me.  What I’ve discovered in my turn to twitter is that adjectives are the first things to go.  Twitter forces you to distill what you want to say to its fundamental meaning.  Hopefully it will help me in that regard.  

Speaking of Twitter, WordPress has just added a twitter widget which you will find to your right.  You can follow me at twitter.com/liamkinnon.

Going to see U2!

I have waited for this opportunity since the time I was around ten and heard “Where the streets have no name.”   That song still makes me hide my face for a second or two.  It will be incredible to finally see The Edge in real life.  To be honest I had been hoping to get field seats at Skydome (now known as the Roger’s Center) which were a surprisingly reasonable price.  Alas it was not to be, and after reading that they sold out almost immediately I’m just grateful I’ll get to see them.  Although I’ll have to take my binoculars. 

List of Concerts I want to see before I die.
The Police
U2
Peter Gabriel

Scienceless Science Minister?

I have been waiting a little while to weigh in on this one.  My good friend Matt, not to be confused with other Matts, who has become my most regular commenter here asked my thoughts on this.  For those who don’t know about it, Canada’s minister for Science and Technology, Gary Goodyear, refused to say he believed in evolution.  His response was that he didn’t feel the need to discuss his religious beliefs.  As someone who has spent 88% of his life in secular education I can understand playing your cards close to the chest when it comes to a question like this.  There are two fundamental issues with his answer though.  The first is that evolution is an undisputed fact of science.  The (legitimate) dispute is over degree.  This is where clarification over macro and micro evolution comes into play.    As someone who is not in science I can only say that I sit somewhere between the camp known as Intelligent Design* and a secular understanding of evolution.  The fact that Goodyear didn’t have an appropriate answer for this question means that he had not thought about the question except to decide against evolution.  

The second issue is that Goodyear has now given ammunition to those who think Christians are a bunch of idiots.  This is unfortunate on a large scale because there are theists, atheists, and many in between who are not happy with where evolutionary theory is being used.  Where Popper’s idea of the ideological revolution has replaced the scientific revolution it rightly was.  On a smaller scale this story is unfortunate because it ends up downplaying Goodyear’s credentials as a chiropractor (who go through the same anatomical training as doctors), and his studies in Biomechanics and Psychology at Waterloo.  By not thinking through his position he ended up allowing himself to be cast as antiscientific.  There is a lesson in this for all of us.

*Intelligent design is not the same as creationism.  If you haven’t bothered understanding the difference it breaks down quite simply.  Creationism sees the world as 6,000 years old, static, and divinely ordered on a literal biblical model.  Intelligent Design generally encompasses viewpoints from Macroevolution to Creationism, focusing only on the difficulties of accounting for the beginning of life, the cambrian explosion, and complexities of the cell as happy accidents and instead explaining them as the products of intelligence.

An Atheist and a Christian walk into a bar.

This thought has reoccurred to me a number of times. It is kind of simple and definitely in need of refinement. It is essentially related to the problem of evil. When you ask nonbelievers why they don’t believe in God, especially those who once did, you frequently get an interesting response. “If there is a God look at all the pain he’s caused, all the evil he allows. How could anyone believe in him?” They blame the God who doesn’t exist for the problems in the world. But there is a disconnect. Without God being responsible for evil we are left with two possible conclusions as to evil’s existence. There is no evil, or evil is humanity’s fault.

In the first category you have Nietzsche and Richard Rorty. Evil is merely a definition that varies according to person or the powerful. This is, so far as I can tell, the most logical outcome of true atheistic ethics. However, if you don’t subscribe to that outcome of atheism you are left drawing the same conclusion as the Christian.  We’re responsible.

This is where exitential guilt comes in.  Every time I lie, every time I take an action that in some way injures someone else, it is my responsibility.  I can blame no one else.  This guilt seems to be little felt in the West, where the consequences for something as simple as buying a cup of coffee or pair of sneakers are so far removed from us we don’t see them.  But we’re contributing to the mess of the third world by our mere existence.  Forget pollution, try and imagine everyone on earth producing as much physical trash as we do, there isn’t the landfill space for it.

Christianity, and Judaism before it, had and has a word for this problem: sin.  We are responsible for the problems of the world, merely by existing.  The atheist doesn’t agree with us on the terminology.  But if they believe that evil exists in the world then we are on the same page.

Canadian Banks, Something to be proud of.

I had been thinking about this a lot recently.  Some of the more right wing people I read from the States have been arguing that this crisis does not mean that the markets need to be regulated.  While I have tended to agree with this I’ve often wondered about what regulations mean.  Then I read this article from the Globe and Mail and could not help but think maybe I’m wrong.

Former central bank governor David Dodge agrees. Canadian bank executives keenly remember that period, “and there was therefore perhaps a degree of prudence, a lack of aggressiveness, in comparison with major banks around the world,” he said.

And he gives top marks to the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, Canada’s banking regulator, for being more conservative than those in the U.S. or Britain. “I think that, from a regulatory point of view, you can say that the Canadian banks were more appropriately regulated.” (Emphasis mine)

The idea of the free market only really makes sense if you do not have powerhouses, like the American banks, that can manipulate the system.  When it comes to corporations or the Government having controls I’ll choose the Government; at least when they screw up the little guys can fire them.

What is no news?

No news is good news goes the old maxim. Maybe it is true. I’ve spent the last two days in a much smaller world. Catching up on the news tonight I’ve been struck by how hopeless everything feels. There is so much to comment on, but maybe the most important comment is this. There is hope.

I have hope in Jesus, in my ongoing struggles with doubt I cannot help but understand how truly broken the world is, how broken I am, and the need for redemption. This is primary for me, without it any hope is as useless as the universe.

But there are other causes for hope. Being welcomed into the home of a stranger when you’ve gotten the car stuck in a deserted corner of Nova Scotia. How could I describe the beauty of someone agreeing to take me and the woman I love in for an hour to await a distant tow-truck.

I find myself questioning my conception of our inherent evil. Humanity is broken, but in a strange way. We see dimly, and the vague impressions give us hope for a day when our sight will be restored. Sometimes we take in the stranger, other times we watch them freeze outside.

And so it begins…

If you didn’t already know.  China is the largest holder of US debt.  This strikes me as the first time in a long time that another country has the power to make suggestions about US domestic policy and know that they will be heard.

China’s premier didn’t say it in so many words, but the implied warning to Washington was blunt: Don’t devalue the dollar through reckless spending.

Premier Wen Jiabao’s message is unlikely to be misunderstood at the White House. It is counting on Beijing to help pay for its stimulus package by buying U.S. bonds. China already is Washington’s biggest foreign creditor, with an estimated $1 trillion in U.S. government debt. A weaker dollar would erode the value of those assets.

via The Associated Press: China ‘worried’ about US Treasury holdings.

Two days, same underlying issue.

Today I’ll be much more direct, thanks to Father Raymond J. DeSouza’s article from Full Comment.  He discusses how the most promising stem cell research isn’t coming from embryonic stem cell research but from discoveries like reprogramming adult stem cells to be pluripotent, (to develop into any tissue).  He goes on to say:

So the science is clear. Adult stem cells (which generally are not pluripotent) have already produced many successful human therapies.  Embryonic stem cells have not. And if pluripotent stem cells are still desired, then they can now be produced without having to destroy embryos.

Yet despite the science and ethics increasingly being on the same side, namely against embryo-destructive research, Obama chose to go with politics. Indeed, while the President spoke at length about his funding announcement on Monday, he was curiously silent on another action he took at the same time. He reversed a Bush executive order from 2007 which directed funding toward adult stem cell research and reprogramming research — that is, research that offers the same promise with no ethical objections. President Obama had no pretty words for that part of his policy. While presenting himself as a champion of science, he moved to reduce federal funds to stem cell research that is more promising than ESCR. Obama’s stem cell policy is positively hostile to research that does not destroy embryos. It is perverse on the science, and disingenuous on the politics.

Somehow the victory of science begins to look much more like the victory of rhetoric.  Read the whole article.

Ethics, Science, and Power.

Today in my History of Psychology class we were discussing (or perhaps being discussed to) Neitzsche.  I’m fascinated by his view of the consequences of atheism on ethics.  So far as I can tell from Beyond Good and Evil Neitzsche* believed that when ethics meets relativism right is decided by the most powerful.   So where does this fit in with Science?  Wired published an article on the trouble of the terminology surrounding Obama’s lifting of Bush’s restrictions on stem cell research.  Phrases like Bush’s decision being a “really, really unwelcome intrusion of politics into science” proliferated in the wake of Obama’s decision.  In a democracy though, laws are ostensibly the tools of the citizens to ensure distasteful actions do not occur.

What Wired missed though was a much deeper issue.  In the penultimate paragraph Brandon Keim says this,

But there will be plenty of cases in the future when the aims of science — or, to be more precise, certain scientists — conflict with widely held values. And if the legacy of the stem cell debate is to label all conscientious objection as anti-science bias, it will be a toxic legacy indeed.

The idea that “widely held values” is enough to define morality runs into trouble not just with science (imagining how people from a hundred years ago would have viewed embryonic stem cell research might cast light on this), but also with much larger issues.  The atrocities in Rwanda were perpetrated by the majority.  We have in a situation like Rwanada a clear demonstration of the poverty of “widely held values.”

So here is my question.  Knowing that Hitler’s policies enjoyed support so wide it even surprised him.  His reaction to Krystalnacht is one demosntration of this.  Also while keeping in mind that most in Europe and the wider world did not go to war because of Hitler’s racial ideology but because of his aggressive militarism.  What would have been the case to intervene in Germany assuming they never invaded another country?

*I’ve yet to read much of it, although I’ve tried.