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If, as Sacks argues, science is about the how and religion the why, then scientists are not authorities on religion at all. Hawking's opinions about God would carry no more weight than his taxi driver's. Believers and atheists should remove physicists from the front line and send in the philosophers and theologians as cannon fodder once again.

But is Sacks right? Science certainly trails a destructive path through a lot of what has traditionally passed for religion. People accuse Richard Dawkins of attacking a baby version of religion, but the fact is that there are still millions of people who do believe in the literal truth of Genesis, Noah's Ark and all. Clearly science does destroy this kind of religious faith, totally and mercilessly. Scientists are authorities on religion when they declare the earth is considerably more than 6,000 years old.

But they insist that religion is no longer, if it ever was, in the business of trying to come up with proto-scientific explanations of how the universe works. If that is accepted, science and religion can make their peace and both rule over their different magisteria, as the biologist Stephen Jay Gould put it.

People have been making a lot in the past few days of Hawking's famous sentence in A Brief History of Time: "If we discover a complete theory, it would be a triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God."

Hawking's "mind of God" was never anything more than a metaphor for an understanding of the universe which is complete and objective. Indeed, it has been evident for some time that Hawking does not believe in anything like the traditional God of religion. "You can call the laws of science 'God' if you like," he told Channel 4 earlier this year, "but it wouldn't be a personal God that you could meet, and ask questions."

there is no room in the universe of Hawking or most other scientists for the activist God of the Bible. That's why so few leading scientists are religious in any traditional sense.

This point is often overlooked by apologists who grasp at any straw science will hold out for them. Such desperate clinging happened, disgracefully, in the last years of the philosopher Antony Flew's life. A famous atheist, Flew was said to have changed his mind, persuaded that the best explanation for the "fine-tuning"of the universe – very precise way that its conditions make life possible – was some kind of intentional design. But what was glossed over was that he was very clear that this designer was nothing like the traditional God of the Abrahamic faiths. It was, he clearly said, rather the Deist Deist God, or the God of Aristotle, one who might set the ball rolling but then did no more than watch it trundle off over the horizon. This is no mere quibble. The deist God does not occupy some halfway house between atheism and theism. Replace Yaweh with the deist God and the Bible would make less sense than if you'd substituted Brian for Jesus.

it is not true that science challenges only the most primitive, literal forms of religion. It is probably going too far to say that sciencemakes the God of Christianity, Judaism and Islam impossible, but it certainly makes him very unlikely indeed.

to think that their findings, and those of other scientists, have nothing to say about the credibility of religious faith is just wishful thinking. In the scientific universe, God is squeezed until his pips squeak. If he survives, then he can't do so without changing his form. Only faith makes it possible to look at such a distorted, scientifically respectable deity and claim to recognise the same chap depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. For those without faith, that God is clearly dead, and, yes, science helped to kill him.

Religious belief is a very different kind of thing. It is not restricted only to those with a certain education or knowledge, it does not require years of training, it is not specialized and it is not technical. (I’m talking here about the content of what people who regularly attend church, mosque or synagogue take themselves to be thinking; I’m not talking about how theologians interpret this content.)

while religious belief is widespread, scientific knowledge is not. I would guess that very few people in the world are actually interested in the details of contemporary scientific theories. Why? One obvious reason is that many lack access to this knowledge. Another reason is that even when they have access, these theories require sophisticated knowledge and abilities, which not everyone is capable of getting.

most people aren’t deeply interested in science, even when they have the opportunity and the basic intellectual capacity to learn about it. Of course, educated people who know about science know roughly what Einstein, Newton and Darwin said. Many educated people accept the modern scientific view of the world and understand its main outlines. But this is not the same as being interested in the details of science, or being immersed in scientific thinking.

This lack of interest in science contrasts sharply with the worldwide interest in religion. It’s hard to say whether religion is in decline or growing, partly because it’s hard to identify only one thing as religion — not a question I can address here. But it’s pretty obvious that whatever it is, religion commands and absorbs the passions and intellects of hundreds of millions of people, many more people than science does. Why is this? Is it because — as the new atheists might argue — they want to explain the world in a scientific kind of way, but since they have not been properly educated they haven’t quite got there yet? Or is it because so many people are incurably irrational and are incapable of scientific thinking? Or is something else going on?

Some philosophers have said that religion is so unlike science that it has its own “grammar” or “logic” and should not be held accountable to the same standards as scientific or ordinary empirical belief. When Christians express their belief that “Christ has risen,” for example, they should not be taken as making a factual claim, but as expressing their commitment to what Wittgenstein called a certain “form of life,” a way of seeing significance in the world, a moral and practical outlook which is worlds away from scientific explanation.

This view has some merits, as we shall see, but it grossly misrepresents some central phenomena of religion. It is absolutely essential to religions that they make certain factual or historical claims. When Saint Paul says “if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is in vain and our faith is in vain” he is saying that the point of his faith depends on a certain historical occurrence.

Theologians will debate exactly what it means to claim that Christ has risen, what exactly the meaning and significance of this occurrence is, and will give more or less sophisticated accounts of it. But all I am saying is that whatever its specific nature, Christians must hold that there was such an occurrence. Christianity does make factual, historical claims. But this is not the same as being a kind of proto-science. This will become clear if we reflect a bit on what science involves.

The essence of science involves making hypotheses about the causes and natures of things, in order to explain the phenomena we observe around us, and to predict their future behavior. Some sciences — medical science, for example — make hypotheses about the causes of diseases and test them by intervening. Others — cosmology, for example — make hypotheses that are more remote from everyday causes, and involve a high level of mathematical abstraction and idealization. Scientific reasoning involves an obligation to hold a hypothesis only to the extent that the evidence requires it. Scientists should not accept hypotheses which are “ad hoc” — that is, just tailored for one specific situation but cannot be generalized to others. Most scientific theories involve some kind of generalization: they don’t just make claims about one thing, but about things of a general kind. And their hypotheses are designed, on the whole, to make predictions; and if these predictions don’t come out true, then this is something for the scientists to worry about.

Religions do not construct hypotheses in this sense. I said above that Christianity rests upon certain historical claims, like the claim of the resurrection. But this is not enough to make scientific hypotheses central to Christianity, any more than it makes such hypotheses central to history. It is true, as I have just said, that Christianity does place certain historical events at the heart of their conception of the world, and to that extent, one cannot be a Christian unless one believes that these events happened. Speaking for myself, it is because I reject the factual basis of the central Christian doctrines that I consider myself an atheist. But I do not reject these claims because I think they are bad hypotheses in the scientific sense. Not all factual claims are scientific hypotheses. So I disagree with Richard Dawkins when he says “religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims.”

Taken as hypotheses, religious claims do very badly: they are ad hoc, they are arbitrary, they rarely make predictions and when they do they almost never come true. Yet the striking fact is that it does not worry Christians when this happens. In the gospels Jesus predicts the end of the world and the coming of the kingdom of God. It does not worry believers that Jesus was wrong (even if it causes theologians to reinterpret what is meant by ‘the kingdom of God’). If Jesus was framing something like a scientific hypothesis, then it should worry them. Critics of religion might say that this just shows the manifest irrationality of religion. But what it suggests to me is that that something else is going on, other than hypothesis formation.

Religious belief tolerates a high degree of mystery and ignorance in its understanding of the world. When the devout pray, and their prayers are not answered, they do not take this as evidence which has to be weighed alongside all the other evidence that prayer is effective. They feel no obligation whatsoever to weigh the evidence. If God does not answer their prayers, well, there must be some explanation of this, even though we may never know it. Why do people suffer if an omnipotent God loves them? Many complex answers have been offered, but in the end they come down to this: it’s a mystery.

Science too has its share of mysteries (or rather: things that must simply be accepted without further explanation). But one aim of science is to minimize such things, to reduce the number of primitive concepts or primitive explanations. The religious attitude is very different. It does not seek to minimize mystery. Mysteries are accepted as a consequence of what, for the religious, makes the world meaningful.

Religion is an attempt to make sense of the world, but it does not try and do this in the way science does. Science makes sense of the world by showing how things conform to its hypotheses. The characteristic mode of scientific explanation is showing how events fit into a general pattern.

Religion, on the other hand, attempts to make sense of the world by seeing a kind of meaning or significance in things. This kind of significance does not need laws or generalizations, but just the sense that the everyday world we experience is not all there is, and that behind it all is the mystery of God’s presence. The believer is already convinced that God is present in everything, even if they cannot explain this or support it with evidence. But it makes sense of their life by suffusing it with meaning. This is the attitude (seeing God in everything) expressed in George Herbert’s poem, “The Elixir.” Equipped with this attitude, even the most miserable tasks can come to have value: Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws/ Makes that and th’ action fine.

None of these remarks are intended as being for or against religion. Rather, they are part of an attempt (by an atheist, from the outside) to understand what it is. Those who criticize religion should have an accurate understanding of what it is they are criticizing. But to understand a world view, or a philosophy or system of thought, it is not enough just to understand the propositions it contains. You also have to understand what is central and what is peripheral to the view. Religions do make factual and historical claims, and if these claims are false, then the religions fail. But this dependence on fact does not make religious claims anything like hypotheses in the scientific sense. Hypotheses are not central. Rather, what is central is the commitment to the meaningfulness (and therefore the mystery) of the world.

while religious thinking is widespread in the world, scientific thinking is not. I don’t think that this can be accounted for merely in terms of the ignorance or irrationality of human beings. Rather, it is because of the kind of intellectual, emotional and practical appeal that religion has for people, which is a very different appeal from the kind of appeal that science has. Stephen Jay Gould once argued that religion and science are “non-overlapping magisteria.” If he meant by this that religion makes no factual claims which can be refuted by empirical investigations, then he was wrong. But if he meant that religion and science are very different kinds of attempt to understand the world, then he was certainly right.

The biggest effect was with those people who scored high on the "God as locus of health control" measure - that means people who agreed with statements like "Whether or not my HIV disease improves is up to God." Although this had no effect on medication taking at 3 months, the halfway point of the study, by the end of the study (at 6 months) people who scored high on this measure were 42% less likely to be taking their medication regularly.

This study is interesting because these aren't folks who have any crazy ideas that medicine is useless. Remember, they signed up to take part in a drug study, presumably because they thought they might benefit. What's more, they stayed in the study right to the end, and did take their medicine most of the time. It's just that they were more likely than others to 'forget' it.

Now, this is a complicated picture in other ways. People who are at death's door (unlike the mostly healthy people in this study) seem to be more likely to ask for 'heroic' interventions to try to keep them alive if they have strong beliefs in God's will.

Maybe confronting your own imminent death triggers some reconsiderations about the mysterious workings of the almighty!

She said she hoped that her conclusions would spark "a robust debate", since her finds are not only new, but would also touch the hearts of many religious people. She said: "Maybe I am even hurting myself. I consider myself to be religious and the Creator used to be very special, as a notion of trust. I want to keep that trust." A spokesman for the Radboud University said: "The new interpretation is a complete shake up of the story of the Creation as we know it." Prof Van Wolde added: "The traditional view of God the Creator is untenable now."

What are we to say of the Indian company, Vivo Biosciences Inc, which takes advantage of such religious naivety – in which presumably its scientists do not for one moment believe – in order to gain approval for its £97m joint venture with a state-owned Malaysian biotech company?

The chief minister's comment is yet another illustration of the generally regressive influence that religion has on ethical issues – whether they are concerned with the status of women, with sexuality, with end-of-life decisions in medicine, with the environment, or with animals.

The people with this attitude aren't just fringe fundamentalists who are fearful of messing with God's Plan. Many of them are prestigious professors and authors whose arguments make no mention of religion. One of the most prominent examples is political theorist Francis Fukuyama, author of End of History, who published a book in 2003 called “Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution.” In it he argues that we will lose our “essential” humanity by enhancing ourselves, and that the result will be a loss of respect for “human dignity” and a collapse of morality.

Fukuyama's reasoning represents a prominent strain of thought about human enhancement, and one that I find doubly fallacious. (Fukuyama is aware of the following criticisms, but neither I nor other reviewers were impressed by his attempt to defend himself against them.) The idea that the status quo represents some “essential” quality of humanity collapses when you zoom out and look at the steady change in the human condition over previous millennia. Our ancestors were less knowledgable, more tribalistic, less healthy, shorter-lived; would Fukuyama have argued for the preservation of all those qualities on the grounds that, in their respective time, they constituted an “essential human nature”? And even if there were such a thing as a persistent “human nature,” why is it necessarily worth preserving? In other words, I would argue that Fukuyama is committing both the fallacy of essentialism (there exists a distinct thing that is “human nature”) and the appeal to nature (the way things naturally are is how they ought to be).

Writer Bill McKibben, who was called “probably the nation's leading environmentalist” by the Boston Globe this year, and “the world's best green journalist” by Time magazine, published a book in 2003 called “Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age.” In it he writes, “That is the choice... one that no human should have to make... To be launched into a future without bounds, where meaning may evaporate.” McKibben concludes that it is likely that “meaning and pain, meaning and transience are inextricably intertwined.” Or as one blogger tartly paraphrased: “If we all live long healthy happy lives, Bill’s favorite poetry will become obsolete.”

President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics, which advised him from 2001-2009, was steeped in it. Harvard professor of political philosophy Michael J. Sandel served on the Council from 2002-2005 and penned an article in the Atlantic Monthly called “The Case Against Perfection,” in which he objected to genetic engineering on the grounds that, basically, it’s uppity. He argues that genetic engineering is “the ultimate expression of our resolve to see ourselves astride the world, the masters of our nature.” Better we should be bowing in submission than standing in mastery, Sandel feels. Mastery “threatens to banish our appreciation of life as a gift,” he warns, and submitting to forces outside our control “restrains our tendency toward hubris.”

If you like Sandel's “It's uppity” argument against human enhancement, you'll love his fellow Councilmember Dr. William Hurlbut's argument against life extension: “It's unmanly.” Hurlbut's exact words, delivered in a 2007 debate with Aubrey de Grey: “I actually find a preoccupation with anti-aging technologies to be, I think, somewhat spiritually immature and unmanly... I’m inclined to think that there’s something profound about aging and death.”

And Council chairman Dr. Leon Kass, a professor of bioethics from the University of Chicago who served from 2001-2005, was arguably the worst of all. Like McKibben, Kass has frequently argued against radical life extension on the grounds that life's transience is central to its meaningfulness. “Could the beauty of flowers depend on the fact that they will soon wither?” he once asked. “How deeply could one deathless ‘human’ being love another?”

Kass has also argued against human enhancements on the same grounds as Fukuyama, that we shouldn't deviate from our proper nature as human beings. “To turn a man into a cockroach— as we don’t need Kafka to show us —would be dehumanizing. To try to turn a man into more than a man might be so as well,” he said. And Kass completes the anti-transhumanist triad (it robs life of meaning; it's dehumanizing; it's hubris) by echoing Sandel's call for humility and gratitude, urging, “We need a particular regard and respect for the special gift that is our own given nature.”

By now you may have noticed a familiar ring to a lot of this language. The idea that it's virtuous to suffer, and to humbly surrender control of your own fate, is a cornerstone of Christian morality.

it's fairly representative of standard Christian tropes: surrendering to God, submitting to God, trusting that God has good reasons for your suffering.

I suppose I can understand that if you believe in an all-powerful entity who will become irate if he thinks you are ungrateful for anything, then this kind of groveling might seem like a smart strategic move. But what I can't understand is adopting these same attitudes in the absence of any religious context. When secular people chastise each other for the “hubris” of trying to improve the “gift” of life they've received, I want to ask them: just who, exactly, are you groveling to? Who, exactly, are you afraid of affronting if you dare to reach for better things?

This is why transhumanism is most needed, from my perspective – to counter the astoundingly widespread attitude that suffering and 80-year-lifespans are good things that are worth preserving. That attitude may make sense conditional on certain peculiarly masochistic theologies, but the rest of us have no need to defer to it. It also may have been a comforting thing to tell ourselves back when we had no hope of remedying our situation, but that's not necessarily the case anymore.

I think there is a seperation of Transhumanism and what Massimo is referring to. Things like robotic arms and the like come from trying to deal with a specific defect and thus seperate it from Transhumanism. I would define transhumanism the same way you would (the achievement of a better human), but I would exclude the inventions of many life altering devices as transhumanism. If we could invent a device that just made you smarter, then ideed that would be transhumanism, but if we invented a device that could make someone that was metally challenged to be able to be normal, I would define this as modern medicine. I just want to make sure we seperate advances in modern medicine from transhumanism. Modern medicine being the one that advances to deal with specific medical issues to improve quality of life (usually to restore it to normal conditions) and transhumanism being the one that can advance every single human (perhaps equally?).

I agree with all your points about why the arguments against transhumanism and for suffering are ridiculous. That being said, when I first heard about the ideas of Transhumanism, after the initial excitement wore off (since I'm a big tech nerd), my reaction was more of less the same as Massimo's. I don't particularly see the need for a philosophical movement for this.

if people believe that suffering is something God ordained for us, you're not going to convince them otherwise with philosophical arguments any more than you'll convince them there's no God at all. If the technologies do develop, acceptance of them will come as their use becomes more prevalent, not with arguments.

we should welcome this decision even though it protects bigots of limited reasoning ability about cause and effect who are indifferent to the feelings of the recently bereaved. The best response to hateful speech is surely counter-speech. At many recent military funerals, counter-protestors have arrived early in their thousands and occupied the prime spaces in the surrounding area. That is a far better reaction than a legal gagging order.

what is surprising is that she found a third factor that was even more important that religion and social support. That factor was "Existential Well-Being", which relates to things such as feeling fulfilled and satisfied with life, and finding meaning and purpose in life.

Existential Well-Being remained important even after taking into account hopelessness, depression and social support. In other words, even if you feel hopeless, depressed, and alone, existential well-being (unlike religious well-being) can ease suicidal thoughts.

this does seem to fit in with other studies which have shown that spirituality does not reduce suicidal thoughts,and that feeling close to God is linked to a history of depression, whereas existential well being is linked to dramatically less depression.

Results from the present investigation indicate that many college students did not demonstrate high involvement in organized religion. Yet they reported high levels of spiritual well-being, especially existential well-being, and low levels of suicidal ideation. Furthermore, results highlighted existential well-being as an important factor associated with lower levels of suicidal ideation among college students. Overall, these findings suggest that a strategy for reducing distress and preventing suicide among college students may involve exploring mechanisms that nurture a sense of meaning in life in individuals for whom organized religion remains unimportant. Health professionals may have more success in improving young people’s sense of meaning and purpose by methods other than an increase in faith, participation in organized religion, or other indicators of religiosity.

religion becomes its own secular catalyst, or, rather, secularization itself is the result of religion. This approach will mature in the most elaborate formulation of what Habermas calls the “linguistification of the sacred,” in volume two of The Theory of Communicative Action. There, basing himself on Durkheim and Mead, Habermas shows how ritual practices and religious worldviews release rational imperatives through the establishment of a communicative grammar that conditions how believers can and should interact with each other, and how they relate to the idea of a supreme being. Habermas writes: worldviews function as a kind of drive belt that transforms the basic religious consensus into the energy of social solidarity and passes it on to social institutions, thus giving them a moral authority. [. . .] Whereas ritual actions take place at a pregrammatical level, religious worldviews are connected with full-fledged communicative actions.

The thrust of Habermas’s argumentation in this section of The Theory of Communicative Action is to show that religion is the source of the normative binding power of ethical and moral commandments. Yet there is an ambiguity here. While the contents of worldviews may be sublimated into the normative, binding of social systems, it is not entirely clear that the structure, or the grammar, of religious worldviews is itself exhausted. Indeed, in “A Genealogical Analysis of the Cognitive Content of Morality,” Habermas resolves this ambiguity by claiming that the horizontal relationship among believers and the vertical relationship between each believer and God shape the structure of our moral relationship to our neighbour, but now under two corresponding aspects: that of solidarity and that of justice. Here, the grammar of one’s religious relationship to God and the corresponding community of believers are like the exoskeleton of a magnificent species, which, once the religious worldviews contained in them have desiccated under the impact of the forces of secularization, leave behind a casing to be used as a structuring shape for other contents.

Metaphysical thinking, which for Habermas has become untenable by the very logic of philosophical development, is characterized by three aspects: identity thinking, or the philosophy of origins that postulates the correspondence between being and thought; the doctrine of ideas, which becomes the foundation for idealism, which in turn postulates a tension between what is perceived and what can be conceptualized; and a concomitant strong concept of theory, where the bios theoretikos takes on a quasi-sacred character, and where philosophy becomes the path to salvation through dedication to a life of contemplation. By “postmetaphysical” Habermas means the new self-understanding of reason that we are able to obtain after the collapse of the Hegelian idealist system—the historicization of reason, or the de-substantivation that turns it into a procedural rationality, and, above all, its humbling. It is noteworthy that one of the main aspects of the new postmetaphysical constellation is that in the wake of the collapse of metaphysics, philosophy is forced to recognize that it must co-exist with religious practices and language: Philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will be able neither to replace nor to repress religion as long as religious language is the bearer of semantic content that is inspiring and even indispensable, for this content eludes (for the time being?) the explanatory force of philosophical language and continues to resist translation into reasoning discourses.

metaphysical thinking either surrendered philosophy to religion or sought to eliminate religion altogether. In contrast, postmetaphysical thinking recognizes that philosophy can neither replace nor dismissively reject religion, for religion continues to articulate a language whose syntax and content elude philosophy, but from which philosophy continues to derive insights into the universal dimensions of human existence.

Habermas claims that even moral discourse cannot translate religious language without something being lost: “Secular languages which only eliminate the substance once intended leave irritations. When sin was converted to culpability, and the breaking of divine commands to an offence against human laws, something was lost.” Still, Habermas’s concern with religion is no longer solely philosophical, nor merely socio-theoretical, but has taken on political urgency. Indeed, he now asks whether modern rule of law and constitutional democracies can generate the motivational resources that nourish them and make them durable. In a series of essays, now gathered in Between Naturalism and Religion, as well as in his Europe: The Faltering Project, Habermas argues that as we have become members of a world society (Weltgesellschaft), we have also been forced to adopt a societal “post-secular self-consciousness.” By this term Habermas does not mean that secularization has come to an end, and even less that it has to be reversed. Instead, he now clarifies that secularization refers very specifically to the secularization of state power and to the general dissolution of metaphysical, overarching worldviews (among which religious views are to be counted). Additionally, as members of a world society that has, if not a fully operational, at least an incipient global public sphere, we have been forced to witness the endurance and vitality of religion. As members of this emergent global public sphere, we are also forced to recognize the plurality of forms of secularization. Secularization did not occur in one form, but in a variety of forms and according to different chronologies.

through a critical reading of Rawls, Habermas has begun to translate the postmetaphysical orientation of modern philosophy into a postsecular self-understanding of modern rule of law societies in such a way that religious citizens as well as secular citizens can co-exist, not just by force of a modus vivendi, but out of a sincere mutual respect. “Mutual recognition implies, among other things, that religious and secular citizens are willing to listen and to learn from each other in public debates. The political virtue of treating each other civilly is an expression of distinctive cognitive attitudes.” The cognitive attitudes Habermas is referring to here are the very cognitive competencies that are distinctive of modern, postconventional social agents. Habermas’s recent work on religion, then, is primarily concerned with rescuing for the modern liberal state those motivational and moral resources that it cannot generate or provide itself. At the same time, his recent work is concerned with foregrounding the kind of ethical and moral concerns, preoccupations, and values that can guide us between the Scylla of a society administered from above by the system imperatives of a global economy and political power and the Charybdis of a technological frenzy that places us on the slippery slope of a liberally sanctioned eugenics.

I lack any belief in any deity. More than that, I am persuaded (by philosophical argument, not scientific evidence) to a high degree of confidence that gods and an afterlife do not exist.

do try to distinguish between my work as a science writer and skeptical activist on the one hand, and my personal opinions about religion and humanism on the other.

Atheism is a practical handicap for science outreach. I’m not naive about this, but I’m not cynical either. I’m a writer. I’m in the business of communicating ideas about science, not throwing up roadblocks and distractions. It’s good communication to keep things as clear, focused, and on-topic as possible.

Atheism is divisive for the skeptical community, and it distracts us from our core mandate. I was blunt about this in my 2007 essay “Where Do We Go From Here?”, writing, I’m both an atheist and a secular humanist, but it is clear to me that atheism is an albatross for the skeptical movement. It divides us, it distracts us, and it marginalizes us. Frankly, we can’t afford that. We need all the help we can get.

In What Do I Do Next? I urged skeptics to remember that there are many other skeptics who do hold or identify with some religion. Indeed, the modern skeptical movement is built partly on the work of people of faith (including giants like Harry Houdini and Martin Gardner). You don’t, after all, have to be against god to be against fraud.

In my Skeptical Inquirer article “The Paradoxical Future of Skepticism” I argued that skeptics must set aside the conceit that our goal is a cultural revolution or the dawning of a new Enlightenment. … When we focus on that distant, receding, and perhaps illusory goal, we fail to see the practical good we can do, the harm-reduction opportunities right in front of us. The long view subverts our understanding of the scale and hazard of paranormal beliefs, leading to sentiments that the paranormal is “trivial” or “played out.” By contrast, the immediate, local, human view — the view that asks “Will this help someone?” — sees obvious opportunities for every local group and grassroots skeptic to make a meaningful difference.

This practical argument, that skepticism can get more done if we keep our mandate tight and avoid alienating our best friends, seems to me an important one. Even so, it is not my main reason for arguing that atheism and skepticism are different projects.

In my opinion, Metaphysics and ethics are out of scope for science — and therefore out of scope for skepticism. This is by far the most important reason I set aside my own atheism when I put on my “skeptic” hat. It’s not that I don’t think atheism is rational — I do. That’s why I’m an atheist. But I know that I cannot claim scientific authority for a conclusion that science cannot test, confirm, or disprove. And so, I restrict myself as much as possible, in my role as a skeptic and science writer, to investigable claims. I’ve become a cheerleader for this “testable claims” criterion (and I’ll discuss it further in future posts) but it’s not a new or radical constriction of the scope of skepticism. It’s the traditional position occupied by skeptical organizations for decades.

In much of the commentary, I see an assumption that I must not really believe that testable paranormal and pseudoscientific claims (“I can read minds”) are different in kind from the untestable claims we often find at the core of religion (“god exists”). I acknowledge that many smart people disagree on this point, but I assure you that this is indeed what I think.

I’d like to call out one blogger’s response to my “Standard Pablum” post. The author certainly disagrees with me (we’ve discussed the topic often on Twitter), but I thank him for describing my position fairly: From what I’ve read of Daniel’s writings before, this seems to be a very consistent position that he has always maintained, not a new one he adopted for the book release. It appears to me that when Daniel says that science has nothing to say about religion, he really means it. I have nothing to say to that. It also appears to me that when he says skepticism is a “different project than atheism” he also means it.

Other Anonymous targets include the Church of Scientology and, most recently, cyber-security company HBGary, which attempted to infiltrate Anonymous. In response, the lose-knit hacker group released 71,800 HBGary emails, which revealed highly dubious activities by the company, almost instantaneously destroying HBGary’s reputation and potentially setting it on a path to financial ruin.

Ptolemy’s portrayal of Kurzweil is unmistakably positive, but to his credit he includes several critics from both religion and science. From the former, a radio host named Chuck Missler, a born-again Christian who heads the Koinonia Institute (“dedicated to training and equipping the serious Christian to sojourn in today’s world”), proclaims: “We have a scenario laid out that the world is heading for an Armageddon and you and I are going to be the generation that’s alive that is going to see all this unfold.” He seems to be saying that Kurzweil is right about the second coming, but wrong about what it is that is coming. (Of course, Missler’s prognostication is the N+1 failed prophecy that began with Jesus himself, who told his followers (Mark 9:1): “Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.”) Another religiously-based admonition comes from the Stanford University neuroscientist William Huribut, who self-identifies as a “practicing Christian” who believes in immortality, but not in the way Kurzweil envisions it. “Death is conquered spiritually,” he pronounced.

On the science side of the ledger, Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sagely notes: “What Ray does consistently is to take a whole bunch of steps that everybody agrees on and take principles for extrapolating that everybody agrees on and show they lead to things that nobody agrees on.” Likewise, the estimable futurist Kevin Kelly, whose 2010 book What Technology Wants paints a much more realistic portrait of what our futures may (or may not) hold

Kelly agrees that Kurzweil’s exponential growth curves are accurate but that the conclusions and especially the inspiration drawn from them are not. “He seems to have no doubts about it and in this sense I think he is a prophetic type figure who is completely sure and nothing can waiver his absolute certainty about this. So I would say he is a modern day prophet…that’s wrong.”

Transcendent Man is clearly meant to be an uplifting film celebrating all the ways science and technology have and are going to enrich our lives.

An especially lachrymose moment is when Kurzweil is rifling through his father’s journals and documents in a storage room dedicated to preserving his memory until the day that all this “data” (including Ray’s own fading memories) can be reconfigured into an A.I. simulacrum so that father and son can be reunited.

Although Kurzweil says he is optimistic and cheery about life, he can’t seem to stop talking about death: “It’s such a profoundly sad, lonely feeling that I really can’t bear it,” he admits. “So I go back to thinking about how I’m not going to die.” One wonders how much of life he is missing by over thinking death, or how burdensome it must surely be to imbibe over 200 supplement tables a day and have your blood tested and cleansed every couple of months, all in an effort to reprogram the body’s biochemistry.

RD: There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can't cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity.

DA: A physicist will tell me that this armchair is made of vibrations and that it's not really here at all. But when Samuel Johnson was asked to prove the material existence of reality, he just went up to a big stone and kicked it. I'm with him.

RD: It's intriguing that the chair is mostly empty space and the thing that stops you going through it is vibrations or energy fields. But it's also fascinating that, because we're animals that evolved to survive, what solidity is to most of us is something you can't walk through.

DA: Yes, there was a letter in the paper [about Stephen Hawking's comments on the nonexistence of God] saying, "It's absolutely clear that the function of the world is to declare the glory of God." I thought, what does that sentence mean?!

What is the most difficult ethical dilemma facing science today?DA: How far do you go to preserve individual human life?RD: That's a good one, yes.DA: I mean, what are we to do with the NHS? How can you put a value in pounds, shillings and pence on an individual's life? There was a case with a bowel cancer drug – if you gave that drug, which costs several thousand pounds, it continued life for six weeks on. How can you make that decision?

the original letter submitted by Mr Tobin read (emphasis):"The reality in societies around the world is that there is either no difference between non-believing youth and the religious youth in their propensity toward violence or there is actually higher levels of violence among those who identify themselves as "religious" or "faithful." [See, for instance, the studies cited in Michael Shermer’s book “The Science of Good and Evil” 2004 pp. 235-236]"

Back in the Bronze Age, or the deserts of sixth-century Arabia, it was sensible to act this way. You needed to know your meat was fresh and the animal was not sick, so you made sure it was alive and alert when you killed it. As Woody Allen once said, it wasn't so much a commandment as "advice on how to eat out safely in Jerusalem". But we have much better ways of making sure meat is fresh and healthy now. Yet for many religious people it has hardened into a dogma, to be followed simply because it was laid down in their "holy" texts long ago by "God".

Of course, they claim that this practice isn't cruel at all. Henry Grunwald, chairman of the main body overseeing the certification of kosher meat, Shechita UK, says that when you slash an animal's throat "there is an instant drop in blood pressure in the brain. The animal is dead." Similarly, Raghib Ali, of the Oxford Islam and Muslim Awareness Project, says: "It's not cruel, it is better for the animal."

This has been proven by science to be false. The Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC) is the Government's senior panel of independent scientific experts on this area, and their investigation found that "the prevailing scientific consensus that slaughter without pre-stunning causes very significant pain and distress". The FAWC chairwoman, Dr Judy MacArthur Clark, explains: "To say [the animal] doesn't suffer is quite ridiculous."

Kosher butchers never numb their animals. Most halal butchers now use some stunning, but the RSPCA warns that it is at a much lower dosage to guarantee the animal is still alive when it is killed – so it doesn't properly protect them from pain.

in Britain this kind of animal cruelty is becoming standard. Over the past few years, there has been a dramatic abandonment of the numbing of animals before killing them, in the name of "respect" for a religious minority.

The halal and kosher meat industries are fighting even tepid proposals by the European Union to ensure that all meat made from unstunned animals must be clearly labelled. They claim this will render their businesses "economically unviable". Isn't that an extraordinary confession – that if people knew what they were buying, the companies would go bust?

Atheists who criticise religion are constantly being told we have missed the point and religion is really about compassion and kindness.

But here's an example where most members of a religion choose to do something pointlessly cruel, and even the moderates demand "respect" for their "views". Their faith makes them prioritise pleasing an invisible supernatural being over the screaming of actual living creatures. Doesn't this suggest that faith itself – the choice to believe something in the total absence of evidence – is a danger that can lead you up needlessly nasty paths?

It is true that, at the moment, there is a frightening rise in real bigotry against Muslims and, to a lesser but still significant extent, Jews.

But the only consistent position is to oppose viciousness against these minorities, and to oppose viciousness by these minorities.

We need to be much more self-confident in criticising religious claims. Your ideas do not deserve any special status because you say they came from an invisible, supernatural being.

However, a greater concern lies in the notion of climate change itself. Climate change is in essence one kind of nature-society relationship, in which humans influence the climate through greenhouse gas (particularly CO2) emissions, and the climate strikes back by heating up and going crazy at times. This can be further simplified into a battle between humans and CO2: reducing CO2 guards against climate change, and increasing it aggravates the consequences. This view is anchored in scientists’ recommendation that a ‘safe’ level of CO2 should be at 350 parts per million (ppm) instead of the current 390. Already, the need to reduce CO2 is understood, as is evident in the push for greener fuels, more efficient means of production, the proliferation of ‘green’ products and companies, and most recently, the Cancun talks.

So can there be anything wrong with reducing CO2? No, there isn’t, but singling out CO2 as the culprit of climate change or of the environmental problems we face prevents us from looking within. What do I mean? The enemy, CO2, is an ‘other’, an externality produced by our economic systems but never an inherent component of the systems. Thus, we can declare war on the gas or on climate change without taking a step back and questioning: is there anything wrong with the way we develop?  Take Singapore for example: the government pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 16% under ‘business as usual’ standards, which says nothing about how ‘business’ is going to be changed other than having less carbon emissions (in fact, it is questionable even that CO2 levels will decrease, as ‘business as usual’ standards project a steady increase emission of CO2 each year). With the development of green technologies, decrease in carbon emissions will mainly be brought about by increased energy efficiency and switch to alternative fuels (including the insidious nuclear energy).

Thus, the way we develop will hardly be changed. Nobody questions whether our neoliberal system of development, which relies heavily on consumption to drive economies, needs to be looked into. We assume that it is the right way to develop, and only tweak it for the amount of externalities produced. Whether or not we should be measuring development by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or if welfare is correlated to the amount of goods and services consumed is never considered. Even the UN-REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) scheme which aims to pay forest-rich countries for protecting their forests, ends up putting a price tag on them. The environment is being subsumed under the economy, when it should be that the economy is re-looked to take the environment into consideration.

when the world is celebrating after having held at bay the dangerous greenhouse gas, why would anyone bother rethinking about the economy? Yet we should, simply because there are alternative nature-society relationships and discourses about nature that are more or of equal importance as global warming. Annie Leonard’s informative videos on The Story of Stuff and specific products like electronics, bottled water and cosmetics shed light on the dangers of our ‘throw-away culture’ on the planet and poorer countries. What if the enemy was instead consumerism? Doing so would force countries (especially richer ones) to fundamentally question the nature of development, instead of just applying a quick technological fix. This is so much more difficult (and less economically viable), alongside other issues like environmental injustices – e.g. pollution or dumping of waste by Trans-National Corporations in poorer countries and removal of indigenous land rights. It is no wonder that we choose to disregard internal problems and focus instead on an external enemy; when CO2 is the culprit, the solution is too simple and detached from the communities that are affected by changes in their environment.

We need hence to allow for a greater politics of the environment. What I am proposing is not to diminish our action to reduce carbon emissions, for I do believe that it is part of the environmental problem that we are facing. What instead should be done is to reduce our fixation on CO2 as the main or only driver of climate change, and of climate change as the most pertinent nature-society issue we are facing. We should understand that there are many other ways of thinking about the environment; ‘developing’ countries, for example, tend to have a closer relationship with their environment – it is not something ‘out there’ but constantly interacted with for food, water, regulating services and cultural value. Their views and the impact of the socio-economic forces (often from TNCs and multi-lateral organizations like IMF) that shape the environment must also be taken into account, as do alternative meanings of sustainable development. Thus, even as we pat ourselves on the back for having achieved something significant at Cancun, our action should not and must not end there. Even if climate change hogs the headlines now, we must embrace more plurality in environmental discourse, for nature is not and never so simple as climate change alone. And hopefully sometime in the future, alongside a multi-lateral conference on climate change, the world can have one which rethinks the meaning of development.

the state’s reaction is typical: legitimise the violence by classifying the purported article as the culprit rather than those who took offence at it and engaged in violence. While our laws on speech undertaken with the malicious intent to give offence, or those governing attempts to produce enmity, are well intentioned, they have made the climate for free speech more, rather than less, precarious.

the simple fact that the state signals that it will easily punish those who engage in offensive speech creates incentives for offence mongering. Instead of sending a signal that a very high bar has to be crossed before speech is proscribed, the state essentially tells the people: if you can incite violence, or show that you are deeply offended, you will have your way.

A lot of representations of religion are needlessly gratuitous. But if we legitimise the taking of offence there will be more provocations, not less. The law should send a clear message that we live in a world where people cannot be protected from assorted things like Danish cartoons, Husain paintings, burqa lampoons or speculative novels on godly love. And religious believers commit the ultimate blasphemy by thinking that they need to protect their gods rather than their gods protecting them

3.      “That’s it. Finished. There’s a “consensus” on global warming. It’s immutable and correct.” No – where have I said this? In fact, you must have seen my tweet this afternoon: “I might be wrong, the climate consensus might be wrong, but the probability that the consensus is correct is +90% on the key points.”

5.      “What sickens me is the hypocrisy of people who claim to be in favour of speech, claim to believe in empiricism, claim to be sceptics yet refuse to accept room for an honest, open debate on one of the most important political issues of our time.” No - where have I said this? All I have done is disagree with you, point out your lack of qualifications and mock you. I did not threaten to silence you or sue you. In fact, my approach was quite the opposite – you must have seen my tweet this afternoon encouraging further debate: “V happy for me & climate expert to meet you to discuss consensus, record it & put it in online unedited.”

To answer your question and explain my tweet; you denied Nurse’s explanation of the role of consensus in science and you dismissed Nurse’s perfectly valid analogy about consensus … so you do indeed seem to think you are in a better position than Nurse to understand how science operates.

7.      “What I am saying, and I say almost every day, is that the evidence is not as robust as the “consensus” scientists claim” Okay, that’s what you say. James Delingpole, English graduate. You might be right. Those who think that the consensus is very likely to be valid include, as far as I know, all of the following and more: Paul Nurse, Ben Goldacre and myself, who you have come up against this week (but we are very small fry). Editors of the world’s foremost science journals, Science and Nature. The most senior science editors in UK national broadsheet newspapers. The overwhelming majority of science Nobel Laureates. All the world’s national academy’s of science. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists. Also, I must stress that all of the people/groups above will have questions about elements of the consensus and realisethat the models have uncertainties, but they also agree that the broad consensus is very likely (90%) to be correct. In short, the uncertainties are small enough to derive some fairly solid conclusions.

8.  “Yet despite apparently knowing nothing more about me and what I do than he has learned from a heavily politicised BBC documentary, and maybe heard from his mob of Twitter bully chums or read in the Guardian, Singh feels able to decide that Paul Nurse is right on this issue and I’m wrong.” No – I have followed your rants for quite a while from afar.  I am not saying that Paul Nurse is right and you are wrong. Instead, both Paul Nurse and I are saying that we are not convinced by your views, but we are convinced by the sheer weight of evidence behind the consensus that has gathered over the course of three decades