Brent Kearney

Sam Harris recently gave a talk at the TED conference on how the scientific method can be employed to answer moral questions. It was a wonderful and thought provoking lecture! I have no idea how it relates to one of technology, entertainment, or design (TED), but who cares? :) I will return and elaborate some of my thoughts on this subject, but for now I will simply post the video, and encourage you to leave comments at Sam’s Blog.

The question I have for Sam, which I will post on this blog and hope for a reply, is: what makes him think that a super computer will never be able to help us make moral decisions? Does he think that the field of artificial intelligence is a fool’s errand, or does he subscribe to some theoretical basis for it’s limits in this regard? (I know it’s completely unrelated to the point of Sam’s talk, but I just wondered where he’s coming from with this remark!)

American Pentecostal Christians recently approached the Kenyan National Museum to request a change. The museum has a world-famous collection of hominid fossils, which clearly shows the evolution of humankind. The exhibit in question is simply a display of fossils. The Creationists apparently requested that the fossils be moved to a back room, where few people would see them. The evidence is apparently damaging to their dogma that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that humans appeared out of thin air, as-is.

Prominent paleo-anthropologist Richard Leakey, former director of the museum, was interviewed on the CBC’s December 8th episode of As It Happens. He described the exhibit in question, and the problem that the church has with it:

There are a tremendous number of fossils, many of which my wife and I collected, and other people have collected as well. They represent a span of the human story from present time back to where it is really hard to discern whether its human or ancestral human, or simply ape. And what I think that the museum is proposing, is to show some of the more important specimens — not in any attempt using them to try to prove evolution — but simply to establish that we have in Kenya some of the finest fossils of early stages of human ancestry. You can interpret them as you will; the fossils are real, they’re on the table, you can pick them up and measure them.
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The problem that these God-people have is that the fossils, the further back you go in time, look less and less like us, and I guess that’s what they’re worried about. But there’s no question that the fossils exist, and there’s no question that over the last 200,000 years they’re very like us, the last 4 or 500,000 years they’re less like us, and if you go back to several million, they’re not at all like us. Now, you can interpret that any way you like…

For your convenience, I have excerpted the part of the December 8th episode of As It Happens that contains the Richard Leakey interview, and you can listen to it here:

Alternatively, you can download the file and listen to it locally.

It is simply astounding that religion is so resistant to modernity, and that people can still respect an institution which would advocate hiding evidence because it contradicts their position. They appear to have no regard for truth, but the fact is, their whole notion of truth is warped. The concept of truth has been hijacked by the church so that instead of its nominal meaning, congruence with reality, it means — to the believers — alignment with church dogma.