Dennett, Dawkins and Itchy Ghosts

I am on the train home from three days of lectures and hiking around museums in the capital, beginning with the superlative lecture given by Daniel Dennett at Conway Hall, home of the South Place Ethical Society in Red Lion Square, titled A Darwinian Perspective on Religions: Past, Present and Future, part of the Darwin 200 series of events put on by the British Humanist Association. I think that it was one of the two most enjoyable lectures that I have ever attended, the other being the lecture given by Richard Dawkins with his wife Lalla Ward in Leeds as part of his 1998 book tour to promote Unweaving the Rainbow. I have met at least one other Humanist who attended the 1998 lecture and for whom the talk spurred them on to be involved in organised Humanism as it did me. Dawkins was chairing the meeting on Thursday evening which was the icing on the cake. Other favoured luminaries such as Susan Blackmore (author of the Meme Machine and A Very Short Introduction to Consciousness) were conspicuous attendees (who could miss that hair?). Dennett was mesmerising and the gravitas of his delivery will probably go with me to the grave as a memorable day, one which might not have come to pass as Dennett almost died in November 2006, surviving a major heart bypass operation. This near death experience did not prompt a religious conversion - quite the opposite.
I visited the Natural History Museum on Friday to see the Darwin Exhibition. I also intended to visit Darwin’s memorial in Westminster Abbey but the last admission was at 15:30 and I missed the opportunity. Probably just as well - the entrance fee was £12 - to visit a church!
On Saturday was the second Centre for Inquiry UK event organised by it’s provost, the philosopher Stephen Law, titled God in the Lab. The morning session with Emma Cohen (do ghosts get itchy?) and Michael Jackson (not that one) was particularly good, exploring experiments to investigate religious experience. I thought that Miguel Farias’ experiments on religious belief and analgesia seemed flawed, as did several of the audience members, but hey, I’m not the PhD educated Oxford scientist.

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

Thanks to the editors of the excellent Butterflies and Wheels website (see side panel) which featured my Monday morning blog entry titled Thought for the Day for Everyone. I didn’t realise I had been exposed to the worlds fighters of fashionable nonsense until I looked at the viewing statistics for my blog site which had suddenly increased from the usual dozen to over 600 in a couple of days. It’s nice to know someone thinks that what I have to say is worth reading, or perhaps it was a slow news day.
The Butterflies and Wheels website takes its name from a quotation from the Richard Dawkins hating philosopher Mary Midgley who wrote:

Up till now, I have not attended to Dawkins, thinking it unnecessary to break a butterfly upon a wheel.

I have found that this patronising and dismissive tone is often adopted by the philosophically and theologically trained when contemplating the good professor who has recently retired. I have read Midgley’s Science as Salvation. She thinks that people like Dawkins are guilty of scientism, turning evolution in to a quasi-religious ideology. The lady doth protest too much, methinks. Dawkins is no butterfly and was voted the top public intellectual in the UK by the readers of Prospect Magazine in 2005. Though he is an ethologist and evolutionary biologist, he is sometimes referred to as "the philosopher" by his friend the philosopher Daniel Dennett. I think it is just the case that some people who are trained in philosophy or theology don’t like people with a background in science encroaching on their turf.

Photo by Fir002, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Australian_painted_lady_feeding.jpg