Then on 22nd Jan I took in three objects in the Secret Deep List during a break in the cloud.  NGC 2022, the kissing crescents nebula, was a pleasing sight: best at higher powers, but a lovely fuzzy round patch that reminded me very much of a smaller version of the ring nebula. At high power I fancied I saw spotting in the centre: the central star?

The next planetary nebula was IC 2149 in Auriga. Many planetaries are obviously non-stellar at first sight. This wasn’t: it looked like a star until I cranked up the mags, and then detected (quite easily) nebulocity around it.

My last object on 22nd Jan was open cluster NGC 2343, the double-mint. This was a nice tight cluster with several very bright stars and fainter surrounding stars. I didn’t have time to fully appreciate these as the clouds then rolled in.

Next day, 23rd Jan, I took in three Caldwell objects that were new to me. First up was globular cluster NGC 2419, the intergallactic wanderer.  This is notoriously difficult for smaller scopes and indeed I had previously failed to see it. This time around however transparency was good and I gave my eyes a good 45 mins to dark adapt, and tried a variety of eyepieces. I fancy I did catch glimpses of a slight grey blurr in the right place. Only 60% certain of this but it was better than nothing, and good fun trying.

Then I went for two open clusters in Monoceros: NGC 2506 (C54) was my kind of OC: a few brighter stars but then a mass of faint ones that created a nebulous fuzz. Tantalizing twinkling on the edge of averted vision. Loved it.

Finally NGC 2360, C58, Caroline’s cluster. This was lovely: a cone shaped splash of stars with a bright core and a twinkling mass of fainter stars around.

A great end to a great few nights observing.

NGC 1514 (the crystal ball nebula) is a planetary nebula in Taurus.

It was decent at medium power but I did wonder if I’d have spotted it as nebulous without being told.

NGC 1746 is a large open cluster in Taurus that’s visible with binoculars. It’s now been redesignated NGC 1750 + 1758. Through the 6-inch it’s a decent sight.

NGC 1788, the foxface nebula, is an emission nebula in Orion. This looked like a slightly dimmer star than it’s several flanking stars to me, until I cranked up the power and it became slightly nebulous. Would not have spotted this myself.

On 14th I took the opportunity of some free time in the early evening to pick up both Venus and Jupiter.

Venus as ever left huge diffrcation spikes as it’s very bright, but was noticably off white and in gibbous phase.

I drew Jupiter as the arrangement of the moons was very nice: Callisto, Io, Ganymede and Europa to the right.

Here’s how the face of the planet looked.

Then later in the evening I took in two very lovely open clusters in Monoceros: The Christmas tree cluster NGC 2264.

Nebulocity was evident around the northern stars. Then the fantastic cluster NGC 2301, also known as Hagrid’s dragon.

Well worth a visit in future. I could easily see why it got its name with the long chain of stars making the head-body-tail and wider loops the wings. A superb end to some very cold viewing.

The reason why the southern part of Oceanus Procellarum is busy with such crater rims is probably because the lava was shallower here than elsewhere, and that may be because the region lies on the edge of a putative giant impact basin  known as Gargantuan: elsewhere the surface was lower and lavas deeper.

On the 5th January when I observed Flamsteed P for the first time, seeing was pretty terrible, despite good transparency. I did however pick up most of the larger rim segments and many of the smaller craterlets surrounding it. Some low hills poking about the mare lavas just appeared as white spots. The central peaks of Flamsteed were not visible: possibly they were in shadow.

America’s first soft lander spacecraft, Surveyor 1, landed within Flamsteed P, at the spot marked by the X.  It was important in demonstrating that the lunar regolith was stable and thick enough to support a spacecraft, as renowned lunar scientist Tommy Gold had predicted that the dust layer would be so thick that any spacecraft would sink without trace. He was wrong, and the rest is history.

NGC 1528 and 1545 form a close pair of clusters in Perseus. They have contrasting characters, but are both great telescopic objects.

1528 is a very condensed cluster of mostly faint stars visible through binoculars. It has that mystical twinkle that many of the best open clusters have.

There are some nice strings and loops of stars in it.

1545 is more dispersed and consists of both bright and fainter stars without obvious strings or loops. Nonetheless it makes a very pleasing visual scene.

Orion’s head is formed from a wide open cluster known as Collinder 69.  To the east of the main bright stars of the head known since ancient times, which include lambda orionis, are a beautiful scattering of fainter stars that again make a very pleasing visual scene.

I spent a good hour on these three, drinking in their visual spendour. Very inspiring and invigorating….only the tiredness of 1st January night could tear me away.

So, both school inspection reports were very positive, in the sense that the inspectors saw what they wanted. At the Xmas play, commenting on this, John Sentamu said “what more could you want from a school?”

I’ll tell you what one could want: inclusivity and a respect for truth. If I don’t want my kids to get their daily dose of Christian dogma, wrapped up as truth, then I have to exclude my kids from their community every day. That’s a terrible thing to do to a young kid, but, apart from changing schools, that’s the option I have. And, because I wouldn’t inflict that on my kids for love nor money, they sit through the dogma, and I don’t want them to. What would be satisfactory from my perspective would be non-religious daily assemblies, which uphold shared human values, and RE that was teaching “about religion”, rather than taking the kids to church. Could I be a teacher at this school? No; I could not uphold the “values” I would be required to uphold, and what is more, couldn’t do what was required with a clean conscience: I can’t do those things to kids, and I’m glad that as a university lecturer, I’m not asked to do these things. They would either not employ me, or I’d be asked to leave, or I’d leave on my own. It’s not inclusive for pupils and it’s not inclusive for teachers either. As for respect for truth, see below.

So, the Ofsted report says:

“A major strength is pupils’ outstanding spiritual, moral, social and cultural development, reflecting the school’s Christian foundation.”

There is the insult again. I actually don’t think that Christianity is moral, but fortunately the kids get a version that is like weak tea. What they get is shared human values dressed up in Christian clothes plus a bit of supernatural dogma to justify it. They all leave believing that Christianity is the best thing on Earth.

Now to the really scary part: the SIAS report. Here are some quotes.

“The acknowledgement of the presence of God and the Christian values seen in action in the practise and policy of this school results in pupils making outstanding academic and personal development”.

There we go again: any positive influence on the kids get the “”God” or “Christian” label. It’s an insult, and it’s, at the least, positive spin.

“Focus for development: ensure that values have a greater explicit link to Christian teachings”. In other words, ensure that the kids know that they anything good comes from the Bible and Jesus. This seems sinister and divisive to me. Will they grow up thinking that non-Christians can’t be good?

“Everyone is recognized as a unique individual created by God”. Unsupported dogma, therefore anti-educational.

“The links between the daily life of the school, collective worship and religious education result in a celebration of faith at the heart of the school “like writing through a stick of rock”.” Faith is and has been the major hindrance to the positive development of human society: to celebrate it is tantamount to celebrating ignorance and theocracy. Kids should not be taught to celebrate faith: they should be taught critical thinking and a healthy skepticism.

“They confidently explain that in RE “we learn about the Christian faith and links with worship allows us the choice to learn how to be a better person””. In other words, they have been successfully indoctrinated, and will spend the rest of their lives trying to escape this early life experience. They have successfully been conditioned to think that Good=Christian. This is probably harmful to society.

“They…understand that their school is unique because “we all learn about and from God””. I’m curious how they learn from God, given that there’s no evidence for his existence. I wish their school was unique in this respect: actually I wish no school was like this at all.

“Pupils understand the need for forgiveness and a fresh start because Christian values underpin the rewards and sanctions policies.” This is very worrying. If they think that forgiveness stems from Christianity, what will they do when they give it up later in life, or how will they expect non-Christians to treat them? This seems socially divisive.

“Although school displays are effectively used to reinforce the distinctiveness of the school and promote pupils’ thinking, they sometimes lack links to specific Christian teachings”. Not enough positive spin then. But to be fair, I think that whenever they see something bad, they should also link that to specific Christian teachings too. It’s not hard to find them in the Bible.

“Worship is central to the life of the school as a time to “come together to learn about God””. A God, for which there is no supporting evidence. Therefore this is anti-educational. Is this statement consistent with the CofE’s own website which claims that its schools do not indoctrinate children? It certainly sounds as if these kids are indoctrinated, and it certainly sounds as if the inspectors want them to be.  

“The atmosphere and quality of worship takes pupils to the threshold of worship, however the interest and deeper thinking of pupils allows them to fully engage with the worship and love of God”. People who think like this should not be allowed to inspect educational establishments.

 “Pupils describe the high profile of prayer in school as “time to talk to God and say thank you or sorry””. They have clearly found their invisible friend.

“They make good use of opportunities to use the prayer corners in each classroom for personal reflection”. What will they do when God does not answer their prayers? Is this good for kids?

“The personal faith of the headteacher ensures that “the love of Jesus is central to the life of this school because God wants us to be the best we can””. Could I become headteacher of this school? I think not.

If I got a report like this I’d be shocked and immediately be putting into action measures to give the kids a real education based on evidence and shared human values. Unfortunately the school is proud of it, and immediately sent a copy to all parents. Hence this rant.

First up were a pair of close open clusters which may really just be a single cluster: SD20 & SD21 (NGC 1807 and NGC 1817), otherwise known as the Poor Man’s Double Cluster. These lie on the border of Taurus and Orion just above Orion’s shield.  

NGC 1807 is bottom left and is brighter. NGC 1817 is on the right. Only the brightest stars are visible in this wide field view. Overall it was a pleasing sight.

Next were another close pair of objects, though I was just unable to fit them both in a wide field view: the Spider and the Fly (SD22 and SD23). The spider is an open cluster (Stock 8) and associated nebula (IC 417).

The spider was a pretty mixture of bright and fainter stars, and the associated nebulocity was obvious around the brighter stars and detectable with dark adapation all over the vicinity.

The fly was a very tiny misty patch, resembling a planetary nebula, which however resolved into a trio of stars and much wider nebulocity. Here it is at high power.

As before cold and wind, and this time a damp behind, forced me inside sooner than I would have liked.

I made a pretty poor choice for my first object: SD9, Open cluster NGC 1245 in Perseus. This was horrendous to find as it was right overhead, making using the finder scope and lining up the scope a feat of gymnastics. More than that, the cluster is small and faint, and situated right in the milky way. I really couldn’t have chosen a more difficult object.

I think I found it:

It wasn’t the worst cluster I’ve ever seen by a long way, and in medium power did tantalise the eye with flickering stars at the edge of vision. But I’m not sure it’ll be first on my list of targets for the future.

I then turned to something a bit easier to find, and this certainly was: the rubber stamp nebula, NGC 1999 (Hidden Treasure 33) in Orion. This was really great: a tiny fuzzy patch, easily spotted through the finderscope. It resembled a planetary nebula, but is actually a small reflection nebula. Well worth a visit.

Finally, I tried for the Rosette nebula, and failed to see it (it needs very good seeing, and my OIII filter didn’t help). So I drew the cluster (NGC 2244) instead.

Bright and rectangular, with plenty of field stars to feast on. Nice.

Now, in case you hadn’t noticed, it was pretty windy out last night, and the wind was pretty chilly. So, with frozen hands, I called an end to the night’s obs.

My first target was the Perseus Lenticular Galaxy, NGC 1023. The galaxy is quite bright, but small, and is about 20 million light years away.

!

A pleasing sight. Next I turned to the brightest supernova remnant in the night sky, the crab nebula (M1).

This was as bright as I have seen it, and notably flatter at the top than at the bottom.

I had a brief look at Jupiter, which was a grand sight, but I didn’t spot any noticeable cloud features so didn’t draw it. Then I turned my attention to the orion nebula, M42 and surroundings.

M42 is best seen around the Trapezium, a quadruple star which lights up the brightest section of the nebula. M43 is the smaller cloud to right of frame, whilst Iota Orionis is the bright star to the top left of the picture surrounded by nebulocity. Together these elements make up the southern section of orion’s sword. A beautiful winter sight.

Since this’ll probably be the last post I make before Xmas, I’ll take the opportunity to wish all my readers a very happy one, and all the best for the new year’n.

In compliance with the creative commons license under which the report was created, I link to the original article here and encourage my readers to look at it.

The report first presents evidence on how many people believe in evolution, as the background to investigating whether theists who reject evolution are right; whether evolutionary biologists who reject theism are right; or whether theists who accept evolution are right. The main thread of the report is that Genesis never was meant to be taken literally (so fundamentalist creationists are wrong); that evolution does not demand atheism (so evolutionary atheists are wrong); and so there is no reason for theists to be anti-evolution (i.e. liberal theists are right). Let’s see if the authors are right about this.

Chapter 1 is about Darwin and God. The main point of this chapter is to show people that Darwin was not an atheist. In turn, the main reason for this is to show that you don’t have to reject theism just because you accept evolution, or vis-versa. Quotes from Darwin attempt to show that Darwin was, in his latter years, agnostic, and open to the idea of divine creation. I think there are some debateable points in this chapter. First, most atheists are not closed to the idea of a deity either. They simply won’t believe in such a thing until sufficient evidence is presented. The universe is indeed totally compatible with divine creation (not however, I would argue with creation by the Christian God or other Christian claims), or with it all being a fantasy in some alien computer programme. There is simply no evidence for either hypothesis, so they should not be accepted. Also missing from this and the next chapter was an honest consideration of the character of Darwin and his social context on his views on religion. Darwin was a very mild man and hated confrontation. He was not a natural stirrer or pusher; he just wanted a quiet life of study. He was not going to go to war with establishment. Many scientists today have a similarly non-confrontational stance to religion, but, importantly, this does not mean that they accept religious claims, as Darwin also did not. To use Darwin to advance a pro-theist position seems to me to be twisting his position.

Chapter 2 is about God after Darwin and attempts to show that the church did not oppose Darwinism but broadly accepted it. My initial reaction is that the church would itself disagree. Read  this statement by the Church of England in 2008, a year before the publication of this essay:

“Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still. We try to practise the old virtues of ‘faith seeking understanding’ and hope that makes some amends.”

The church itself clearly thinks it was anti-Darwinian. Oh well.

The rest of Chapter 2 charts the modern rise of creationism in the UK and America. The authors here hardly mention a scientist without also mentioning that they were also a Christian. Clearly, whilst many scientists in the past were theists, and whilst some scientists today continue to be theists, the current association between science and atheism is clear for all to see. For example about 95% of fellows of the National Academies of Science of the UK and USA are atheists or agnostics. This essay portrays those scientists who accept evolution but reject theism as radicals. In fact, such people are the scientific mainstream.

A final point to note about this chapter is that the blame for the rise of creationism in the UK and USA is placed squarely in the hands of the Darwinists, scientists and the atheists themselves. People didn’t like the idea of a bleak scientific world, it seems. There is absolutely no responsibility laid at the feet of the people themselves. There is no criticism of the idea that you are permitted to deny the nature of reality if it doesn’t make you feel so good. Shouldn’t peoples’ cosmological positions be responsible to evidence, rather than their feeling of what’s nice?

I’m going to skip over chapters 3 and 4 which are about acceptance of evolution today. They are statistical in nature. The chapters make out the case that there is a problem with non-acceptance of evolution in modern society, and there is indeed a problem.

Chapter 5 is the meat of the argument in this essay. In it, the authors develop two points: that Genesis was never meant to be taken literally; and that evolution does not necessitate atheism.

Let’s deal with how to interpret Genesis. Here the authors draw on Biblical literary criticism to argue that the writers of Genesis were not trying to make scientific statements, but rather statements “about meaning”. The authors use quotes to show that even very early Biblical scholars and theologians rejected literal interpretations of Genesis. I have a few points to make about this position. First, what is interesting about the context of the early Christian statements on these issues was that they were complaining about how so many people did interpret Genesis literally. In other words, literal interpretation was widespread.

Even today if you attend an Anglican church service, there is no health warning attached to the Genesis story. Take for instance this opening statement from the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from Kings, Cambridge 2010.

“Let us read and mark in Holy Scripture the loving purposes of God from the first day of our disobedience unto the glorious redemption brought us by this holy child”.

No health warning there then. And I’ve experienced it also with my own children: they are taught by my parish priest, of Adam’s fall and original sin as central to the Christian faith. No mention that it’s not a fact. So, if Biblical scholars have always been convinced that Genesis is not to be taken literally, they certainly don’t make much effort to get it across to people. They probably don’t want to hurt any creationists’ feelings, or court a controversy. They just hope it will “be assumed”.

Things were surely much worse in the days when, to question the authority of the Bible was to court torture and death.

Finally, a point not deal with at all by the authors is the problem of how to know when to interpret Biblical passages literally.  The church’s case for Christianity rests on the authority of the Bible, as the Archbishop of Canterbury makes clear at the end of the essay:

“Christians understand the primary location of God’s revealing Word to be the history of God’s people and above all the history of Jesus Christ, whom we acknowledge as the Word made flesh, to which the Bible is the authoritative and irreplaceable witness”

If Genesis is not meant to be taken literally, then that opens up the possibility that the rest of the Bible isn’t meant to be taken literally. But if that’s true, Christianity falls.  This issue is a major one for most fundamentalists. Given that fundamentalists are a major target audience, this is a major omission.

I do, of course, agree that Genesis should not be taken literally. But this is not the impression you get from a church service today, it was not what the majority of Christians believed before Darwin, it was not what the church taught for hundreds of years, and if it’s true it might actually make fundamentalists less likely to accept evolution, or give up Christianity altogether. Not a smart argument given what the authors wanted to achieve.

Let’s now go onto the idea that evolution doesn’t necessitate atheism. In a technical way this is, of course, true, for there are theist evolutionary biologists, as the essay never misses an opportunity to tell us. But these are very much the minority, which it doesn’t tell us.

The authors begin by trying to define science. On the whole they do this well, but I take issue with this statement:

“Science, in its methodologies, excludes questions of ultimate purpose, value and significance.”

This statement is used to suggest that religion is about those things and science is not. It is true that science, methodologically, does not generally try to make statements about purpose or value. But science should certainly inform us on those things. Science can, for example, tell us whether it is legitimate to ask if there is a purpose to the universe. If there is a creator of the universe, then the question is legitimate. If not, it isn’t. How do we establish if there is a creator? Evidence-based reasoning is the only way. Finally, religion is not just about meaning and purpose. All religions make claims about the way the universe is which need supporting evidence. None of them have any.

Later on we have this statement:

“The goal of the scientific community is to generate a body of reliable, constructed

knowledge that is deliberately restricted in its ambition to explain the physical properties of

things. Science achieves clarity only at the price of looking away from the layers of nature available to other kinds of experience.”

I see my remit as a scientist more broadly than this: as understanding the way the universe is and works. In case you, like me, wondered what the other “layers of nature” were, we are told a bit later:

“The scientific level of understanding tells us how things work and where they come from; the moral and ethical level addresses what we ought to do in the world; the aesthetic level gives insight into our understanding and appreciation of beauty; the personal level addresses the ways in which we construct our biographies, and so forth. At the religious level the key questions are: Does life have any purpose in an ultimate sense? Does God

exist? Why is there a universe anyway? Or, in the words of Stephen Hawking, referring to the equations that define the fine-tuning of the physical constants that render the universe feasible, “what breathes fire into the equations?”

This is an interesting view of nature that is being put across, but I have to say that it sounds made up and confused. Is there really a “moral and ethical level of understanding”? Surely ethics is just a restricted field of inquiry, like any other, rather than a way of understanding the whole of nature? It’s a distinct set of questions (e.g. how should humans live the good life?) that can be informed by our understanding of nature and is itself a product of nature, and therefore understandable through science. Similarly, aesthetics is about what humans appreciate, and because it’s the product of the mind, it’s in principle understandable through science. The same with consciousness (the personal level). The religious level is also not distinct from science: the only way we can reliably state if God exists is through evidence based reasoning. Other techniques don’t work. The only way we’ll find out why there is a universe is through science, for the same reason. I’m afraid this whole schema of nature is not written by someone who has a clear or informed view of nature, or human experience, or of human fields of inquiry. They just made it up. It doesn’t impress me and it shouldn’t impress anyone else.

Soon after comes this statement:

“Each branch of human knowledge has its own well-established criteria for rational justification: legal beliefs require legal justifications; historical beliefs require historical justifications, and so forth. Well-justified belief, which includes religious beliefs, is not just the provenance of science.”

This had my bullshit detector firing on all cylinders. Are there such things as legal beliefs? Are historical beliefs distinct from science? I would argue not: they are based on evidence and reason. Religious belief is then slipped in to hide under this cover. But unfortunately, the bases for religious beliefs (intuition, revelation, authority, tradition) cannot demonstrate any success at finding out the way the universe is. In short, this sentence reveals quite a lot about the confused mindset and flawed arguments that the authors put forward.

This is all the authors have to put forward to argue that science cannot adjudicate on the God question. God is the domain of religion, and science is separate from religion. Q.E.D. All I have to say in return is: “bollocks”.

The essay then goes on to consider whether the universe is incompatible with God. The authors first consider the issue of wastefulness. There are some very unconvincing arguments made here. First, the authors argue that the universe needed to be old and vast to create life. This is clearly contradictory and too self-assured.  If you expect to receive life after death, clearly you think that there are other ways to have life that do not rely on atoms and stars and supernovae. Do the authors really know that there is no other way of producing life in this broader and purely hypothetical sense? I don’t, because I don’t accept such a broad definition, but perhaps they know better than me. Perhaps they know better than their God. This claim therefore is simply insupported in the truly holistic sense in which they use it.

They then try to counter apparent wastefulness in the history of life: “Why should millions of years of biological growth and variety be deemed wasteful?”

I’ll tell you why: Christians think that humans are the point of God’s creation. 13.7 billion years of no human life is a very long time to hang around not getting to the point. If God was enjoying himself with his creation in the meantime (though only in a watching, not doing, sense clearly), clearly humans were not as important to him as Christians make out: clearly he was happy enough with the rest of it: for 13.7 billion years. A seven day creation would be much more convincing if humans were the point. The whole point of evolution is that it makes the idea, of humans being the whole point of the universe, less convincing than it was before.

But this argument doesn’t seem persuasive to the authors, who move on to the role of chance in evolution. Here they refer to the one evolutionary biologist who has views that are concordant with theirs: Christian evangelist Simon Conway Morris. Conway Morris is impressed by convergence in evolution: for example over the history of life there have been herbivores and predators and detritivores, for hundred of millions of years, even though the precise species doing those jobs have changed a lot. Most evolutionary biologists would be with him so far. But Conway Morris has gone further and actually stated that the rise of humans is also therefore inevitable. This clearly doesn’t follow. The reason we believe predators would re-evolve if they were suddenly all made extinct is because we can see that that has happened in the past: predators have repeatedly evolved from many different ancestral groups to fill a vacant niche. But the whole point is: that has NOT happened with humans. There was no human or primate equivalent swinging through the trees in the Mesozoic. Most evolutionary biologists would therefore strongly disagree with Conway Morris here. One suspects that he takes this view to help justify his Christian faith. Either way, the authors here are being selective about the evolutionary views that they consider to be mainstream. Re-run evolution with very slightly different starting conditions. Would humans inevitably re-evolve? The past leaves us with no reason to believe that they would.

What about theodicy: the inconsistency of suffering with a benign all powerful God? The authors suggest no new or adequate solutions here. They argue that pain is necessary for survival (which I agree), but sidestep the question of painful circumstances, which apparently are absent in heaven but not on Earth. On why such circumstances exist on Earth, they have no defense at all. The best they can come up with is that pain can often motivate compassion and altruism. Some consolation if you are dying a painful death, and no consolation at all for the majority of non-human creatures that have suffered over 500 million years. At this point the authors wash their hands of the real world and resort to “theology” as “another legitimate source of data”. Sorry, but theology is not a source of data. It is simply the process of thinking up excuses to believe in bullshit. The authors then go even further and admit that theology does not have all the answers. In fact, it is worse than that: has no means of knowing whether anything it says is correct, except by reference to science. In conclusion, the authors state:

“But such reflections do offer tentative and hopeful answers to the accusation of

incompatibility that evolution can lay at theism’s door. The idea that this life in all its

biological complexity is a necessary preparation for a future one casts a very different light

on the evolutionary story.”

Sorry, but there are no good arguments here, there is no positive evidence for your position, and you are indulging in wishful thinking based on your faith in the Bible, which is unwarranted.

Before I leave this section, I want to address four issues about evolution that the authors of this report do not address. The first is the issue of the need for a designer in the universe. Evolution through natural selection shows that you can generate  immense complexity, and the illusion of design, through simple natural forces. This, in my opinion, should cause considerable doubt that creation as a whole requires a designer. Remember that the whole atheist position is simply one of pensive open doubt.

Second there is the issue of the soul. Christians claim that humans, uniquely, are imbibed with a soul that survives their death. But the evolutionary view is that evolving brains have developed consciousness and unique animal personalities over hundreds of millions of years that give the illusion of the soul. There are no sharp transitions in evolution human evolution that would justify why a modern human would have a soul, but our Homo erectus ancestors 2 millions years ago would not. And then if them, why them and not our common ancestors with other apes? Evolution implies to us that souls are just made-up, primitive attempts to explain consciousness.

Thirdly, evolution shows us the power of rational and scientific approaches to answer our questions about where we came from and why we are here.

Finally, there is the issue of evolved morals. Modern evolutionary biology provides us with convincing explanations for why animals should behave altruistically and cooperatively, and for why animals should benefit from empathy for the feelings of other creatures. In short, it provides us with a natural explanation for human morals. Overall, evolution seriously erodes the pillars of religious faiths by replacing the divine and the theological with the natural and the scientific.

In their final conclusion the authors make a plea for the debate between theists and atheists to be more like that of the very civil correspondence between Darwin and Asa Gray, who was, surprise surprise, a devout Christian. I actually think that the “aggressive atheists” that they refer to here, most notably Richard Dawkins, are immensely pleasant company and very very civil.  But they do call a spade, a spade. The problem with keeping the conversation too civil is that it creates the impression that this isn’t something that really matters. But this is not just a mere academic matter of cosomological views. Faith has no internal reality checks, and it permeates our whole society, causing immense harm. If we just have a civil academic discussion, nothing will ever change. We need to show our restrained anger, and force people to wake up to these issues. Temporary ill-feeling, which is probably inevitable when you question peoples’ faiths,  is a price worth paying for positive social change, as history shows us all too well.

This essay was designed by the authors to show that evolution does not conflict with religious faith. It fails. It fails because evolution does conflict with religious faith in numerous ways. In attempting to demonstrate a lack of conflict between evolution and faith, the authors are forced to ignore major areas of conflict altogether; to cherry pick quotes, data and personalities that support their position against the scientific mainstream; and use weak, logically inconsistent, and unsupported arguments. They present a confused and incoherent framework of the modes of human experience and the disciplines of rational inquiry, and they ignore major arguments against their position. If this report is typical of the research that Theos produces, then I don’t think much of it.

It’s interesting because of the stripey coloured tones on the crater floor that tell an interesting story. Some time in the past, after the crater was formed, lava flooded the crater floor. Later, the huge orientalis impact splatted light coloured highland material across its floor and secondary craters on its southern floor. After that, lava erupted again forming two dark patches that covered some of the light material on its floor.

Despite some wobbly air last night, the different tones came out well.

And here’s  a labelled version.