Fine-Tuning Disappointment

I should not pretend to be totally disappointed.  I've been pursuing Luke Barnes, albeit intermittently, for a couple of years now and so, when I began reading his latest "Fine-Tuned Critique of William Lane Craig" I experienced a blend of joy and discomfort.  The joy was due to the fact that, finally, Barnes was picking Craig up on some of his nonsense.  The discomfort was related to the fact that this seemed to indicate that I would be required to eat humble pie and accept that I'd been unfair to Barnes - that perhaps he was not a god-bothering apologist supporter after all.

So, when I got to the end of the post, my disappointment was moderated a little by relief.  Barnes still appears to be a god-bothering apologist supporter, as evidenced by his last paragraph in which he writes "the science upon which Craig wants to make his case is sound, in my opinion".  I can put away that serve of humble pie, keeping it ready for another day - a day that will most surely come - when I will be required to feast upon it, although maybe not related to Luke Barnes.

It's not all bad news.  Craig overstates the case for fine-tuning, as I discussed about sixteen months ago in Fine-Tuning Towards Ignorance, and Barnes picks him up on it somewhat more convincingly than I did.  Bravo.

What Barnes fails to do, and perhaps it isn't his role as a cosmologist, is pick up Craig on his fundamental misuse of fine-tuning - namely the use of Standard Theory to claim that god must exist and must be responsible for what is undeniably fine-tuning (when it's not so clear that a god exists or that fine-tuning is undeniable).

I'm guessing that I will learn to live with what little disappointment this failure brings me.

Patently Paradoxical Pabst's Perplexing Performance

I recently looked at an article by Adrian Pabst posted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), titled Politics of paradox: Reclaiming the radical centre.  I remain unconvinced that this is not some sort of hoax, Sokal-style.  Try to see if you can read more than a couple of paragraphs without stumbling across such nonsense as:

"The events of 11 September 2001 marked the displacement of secular terror by religious terror and the clash of fanatical faiths that are secretly collusive."

The clash of secretly collusive fanatical faiths?  What?

When doing a bit of research to see whether Adrian Pabst was a real person, I stumbled across a similar article posted two years ago at a centre-left policy think tank.  Interestingly, however, at that time Pabst made no mention of "the uprising of civil society and the Church against authoritarian regimes and state-orchestrated atheism" or that his work was based on "the tradition of Platonism and Christian Neoplatonism".

What's going on here?

And don't get me started on the ABC's decision to lump religion together with ethics ...

(For those wanting something less brief, I recently posted My World View - Part 1.)