Russia's federal space agency has announced that it will start working on plans to divert the asteroid Apophis from hitting earth within the next few decades.  The chances of such a collision are very small (estimated at 1 in 250,000 in 2036), but the possible effects of such a collision are thought to be so bad that they are worth preventing, even at such a low risk.

This may sound impressive, or even exciting.  We will certainly need the ability to divert asteroids at some point in the near future.  Small but significant asteroid (megatonne energy) impacts are frequent, but generally occur over the sea or unpopulated land, and usually go unnoticed.  However, an impact on a city could kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

But, we need to be cautious.  The ability to divert an asteroid away from impact is also the ability to divert an asteroid towards impact.  What greater and more convenient weapon of mass destruction could there be than a rock from space that could be nudged towards a particular city, or continent, years in advance?

All attempts to alter the orbits of asteroids should be subject to international planning and monitoring.

It took some effort to get onto the flight. I don't like being confined. But this journey was vital. I don't remember the boarding. It was so long ago. Somehow, I found my seat, and opened my eyes to discover the place from which I would experience the journey.

.….

So, here I am. Airborne life is good right now. Reasonable food, and even internet connections have started to work. I have been finding out about flight. I want to know how it all works. I'm looking at the designs of engines when someone decides to change seats and sits down beside me.

“Hi” he says.

“Hello” I reply.

“Isn't this amazing” he says.

“I find it kind of scary” I answer.

“Why should you?” He asks.

“It's a fragile situation. The engines have to keep going, and there can be turbulence.” I reply.

“Nonsense, we are in the ideal environment” he says; “We are warm, fed, entertained. Flight is wonderful.”

“If you say so”. I feel uncomfortable with the conversation.

“It's far more than that” he insists. “Flight is the essence of everything. How could we not be in the skies?”. He shows me his ticket: “The Ideal Flight Experience” it says.

I take out my ticket. It says “the flight of a lifetime”.

….

Some time later, it seems like a very long time  to me, the plane starts to descend. It has taken a while for me to understand my situation, but I now realise what the landing means. The lights have become dimmer. I look out of the window, and see the wings judder, and the occasional spark fly from the engine.

Some passengers talk of a landing, and a re-launch. They expect to lift off into new skies, and journey forever. Others think that past the check-out desk is the best and longest holiday anyone can ever imagine.

My Ideal Flight companion says that descent is an illusion. “How can it be otherwise when flight is the essence of all we are?” he insists.

I contemplate the descent. Whatever it may bring, I am happy to have had the chance to fly.

Earlier this year a drama-documentary was released called "The Age of Stupid".  Narrated by someone in the year 2055, facing the extinction of humanity, it was about how climate change could have been avoided.

This year, at the Copenhagen conference on climate change, Al Gore claimed that the Arctic could be free of ice in summer within five years.

Both of these scenarios are complete scientific nonsense.  They aren't based on any reputable scientific data or predictions.

I have no doubts that climate change is a very serious matter that needs to be dealt with.  If we do nothing, there is likely to be at least 3C change in global temperature within a century.  That will change our world in many ways, and it results in the death of tens or hundreds of millions.

But that is bad enough, and we must not exaggerate the consequences.  Global warming will not boil the oceans.  It won't change Earth into Venus.  It won't wipe out humanity.  It won't even destroy our civilization. 

Humanity has faced major threats.  One happened a few centuries ago.  It was called the Black Death.  The Plague swept across the world, and killed nearly a third of humanity.  It was a terrible time, but we survived, and civilization continued.

I urgently want some sort of deal on the reduction of CO2 production.  I want action on climate change.  But I refuse to support exaggeration and outright lies to get that done.  We need to present what is likely to happen as a result of climate change.  That is bad enough.

Again and again I come across the statement that there is something mysterious about consciousness from people who are naturalists, who believe that consciousness is purely a result of brain activity.  These statements are usually linked to the anthropic principle (that our presence in the universe somehow determines its nature) or quantum mechanics (are things real unless observed?).

What I want to show is that if you are a naturalist, then it is inconsistent to suggest that there is this kind of mystery.

A naturalist believes that the world is physical; that there is no extra magic.

So, let's consider the statement "there is something mysterious about consciousness".  A naturalist must believe that this statement was a result of nerve activity in the hands and arms resulting from signals from the brain.  They must also believe that those brain signals resulted purely from a combination of other brain signals and stored information (synapse states, chemicals in neurons, etc.).  There is nothing "magic" added.

This now looks like a very odd statement.  It is as if a computer printed out the message "there is something mysterious about my software, processors and memory".

If "consciousness" has any meaning at all for a naturalist, it must refer only to certain brain states and activity.  So where is the mystery?  There can't be any.  Thoughts, and so statements made, can only be the result of brain activity, which is simply physics and chemistry.  Now, this may not "feel" like consciousness.  But for a naturalist, feelings are also just the activity of nerve cells in the brain.  So the feeling is not an indication that anything special is happening. 

The question a naturalist who believes that consciousness has some special properties needs to ask themself is this:  If all thoughts about consciousness could be shown to be the results of brain cells acting according to physics and chemistry, where and when do the special properties appear?

The man sits in his warm cave. He has distant memories of wandering in, a long time ago, but they are fading. He loves his perfect cave. It is just the right size, warm and cosy. It was surely made for him, and the cave creator is generous. Occasionally wood will get blown in, just the right amount for fires that keep him from dying of cold. Rarely, large animals wander in and die, their skins perfect for clothing and blankets. There are always rats and snakes, which make a fine meal. Water trickles down one wall, clearly there to satisfy his thirst. How could life be any better?

The presence of the creator cannot be doubted. When the man shouts "hello", a distant voice replies "hello" a second later. Once, while cooking several rats over a particularly large fire (it had been a good day for hunting) the man looked at a distant wall and saw a dark image framed in a glow. He waved, and it waved back. The creator knows of his thoughts, and approves. He shouts "women should be the slaves of men" and hears the creator whisper in agreement.

He hasn't always been alone. A while ago, someone else who seemed like him entered the cave. Things seemed to go well, although the talk of things outside made little sense. The rot set in when the other fellow disagreed with the man's views of women (and, indeed, many other things). The argument grew in volume, and to the man's horror, the creator was speaking the stranger's views as well as his own! This could not be true. The creator was surely not that wicked. It must be sorcery. Still, there are ways to deal with those who corrupt the words of the creator. The creator had provided rocks of just the right size.

There is a distant light that can be seen from certain positions in the cave. But curiosity is wasteful when there are rats to hunt.

Why don't I believe? Because I stepped outside of the cave, saw the magnificence of the world, and realised that you can't trust echoes and shadows.

It is frequently argued that religion and science are compatible. Such arguments take many forms, and I am going to discuss two of the most common: That God is supernatural, beyond the natural universe that science studies and so not accessible to the methods of science; and that the non-existence of God cannot be proved, and so science should not dismiss theism. I'm going to examine these arguments along with the nature of the supposed evidence for theism, to show that that the position of atheism can be considered a scientific fact - something that is backed by so much evidence that it would be perverse to deny it.

I'm going to start with the idea that God is supernatural, and so beyond Nature. This argument is strange in many ways that may not seem obvious because the language used is so common. Some of the words used don't have meanings that are as clear as they may seem. For example, what exactly is 'supernatural'? It is supposedly anything that is beyond the natural, a different reality, where the rules are different and magic is possible. It is the subject of our dreams and poems, the realm of religion. It seems such an obvious idea, and yet when looked at closely, it becomes increasingly elusive.

People have been exploring the world since the origin of our species. Throughout most of history the way we have explored the world is through our human senses and imaginations, and the combination of our brains and our ability to communicate ideas through language has given us a detailed and reasonably accurate awareness of the world we evolved in.

However, as we looked beyond the world we live in to realms we could not reach we were left with only our imaginations as a way of finding truth. The richness of the human imagination filled the seas with monsters and the skies with gods. Our frustrating inability to investigate these distant worlds led to a new strategy for the exploration of the unknown: theology. We can't reach the heavens, but being sure that God is there, we can try and understand His nature. The division between the natural and the supernatural seemed clear. This imperfect and often hostile place we live in is Nature; the unreachable and hidden places are domains of magic – the supernatural.

But, only a short time ago, in recent history, new technologies were developed to extend our senses, and new strategies developed for focusing human thinking in ways that correct for our prejudices and over-active imaginations. This combination of science and instrumentation has, over the centuries, not just expanded the reach of our senses beyond what we could have imagined, and has also expanded what we can imagine beyond measure. The increasing strangeness of the reality revealed by scientific investigation shows how limited our imaginations have been in the past, and how insignificant our concept of the natural world has been for almost all of human history. For almost all the time people have been present on Earth, we have had no idea at all of the true nature of the universe in which we live. Ask a priest from a thousand years ago about the limits of Nature and he would have described something like a small universe only a few Earth diameters across. Beyond that, was God's heaven. But, when Galileo revealed the moons of Jupiter and Newton described the mechanics of the cosmos, heaven vanished. Conveniently, heaven was then shifted into some other place, location not on any map of the Earth and skies.

No matter where the supernatural may be, there is supposed to be evidence for its existence within the natural world around us. There is no need for me to go into details about how the supposed evidence for theism has been more than adequately dealt with by science and reason, but a brief summary is in order:

The existence of miracles to support theism can be dismissed because of the fallibility of our minds, the known skill of illusionists throughout the ages and the insoluble problem of classifying evidence of an event as not being of ultimate natural origin.

The appearance of design in living things and in the universe can be dismissed because we know how apparent design can be generated in physical and chemical and biological systems. As Hume pointed out, once we have seen that one case of apparent design (such as the sculpted beauty of a snowflake) is no such thing then the argument from design fails as evidence for a creator. Darwin magnificently proved this point with his discovery of Natural Selection.

Ontological arguments for the existence of God fail because they either deal with concepts that we know scientifically make no sense (such as the idea of a personality not based on a physical system), or they lead to some concept of a creative essence so vague that it barely exists, and is certainly not a 'being'.

Arguments from beauty (“the world is so beautiful it must have been designed”) fail because we know that the experience of beauty is subjective and evolved.

Arguments from morality (morals from God) fail because there are good evolutionary explanations of why we have a moral sense.

I could go on, but the message here should be clear. None of the evidence for theism stands up.

So where does this leave the idea of a supernatural realm? With no location and so no foundation. Continuing to insist that it is beyond nature is not good enough when what we understand as nature has changed so dramatically and still keeps changing. Nature has moved on from a world surrounded by crystal spheres containing the stars, from the deterministic clockwork universe of Newton's mechanics, and it will also at some time move on from the strangeness of Einsteinian relativity.

None of these moves have been predicted by supporters of the supernatural, and yet if the supernatural is some domain that supporters of the idea believe really exists then these supporters should have been able to make such predictions. The supernatural becomes nothing more than an endless shifting of goalposts, a continual desperate refrain of “no, it's not that” when science discovers yet another mind-stretching aspect of the universe. The same lack of coherence applies to the claim that God is outside of the universe, beyond space and time. How can that idea make sense when we are still exploring the nature of space and time? What does it even mean to be beyond the relative space and time of Einstein?

It should now be clear the phrases “God is beyond Nature” and “God is beyond time and space” are really just words arranged so as to produce a feeling in the minds of theists. They are nothing more than bad poetry.

Does God exist? We can't say no, because our empirical exploration of reality can't prove a negative. But if there is a deity, what a strange god it would be. Existing in some undefined place It would not have interacted with the world we experience, and certainly not human minds, in any way that we can detect. There is no need for it to have directed evolution, or formed the stars, and indeed no mechanism we know for it to have achieved this. We have no idea where it is, and no evidence for it having done anything at all. Whatever this being might be, it is certainly not the god of theists.

And yet, the idea of this God is often used by those defending theism, in the strange argument that a belief in God is reasonable because science can't prove a negative. This is truly a bizarre position to hold. It comes close to insisting that absence of evidence is evidence for existence.

This argument is so often made, I want to examine it in detail by analogy.

Supposing someone really believes that Luke fought Darth Vader in a galaxy far, far away and long, long ago. There is a question that they have to answer: How did George Lucas know? Was there some ancient and abandoned starship discovered somewhere on Earth within which some documents were found, revealing the tale after years of decoding of Luke Skywalker and his family? There needs to have been such a discovery because no matter how much faith there is in The Force, there needs to have been some reason for that faith in the first place, and some ongoing experiences of the world that keeps faith going. When asked why they have faith, a believer will give some sort of “because”.

But now imagine that there is a strange group of Jedi followers who strain the credibility of theists and atheists alike. They insist that there was a galaxy pervaded by the Force but refuse to name it, or point to it in the skies. They won't point to any ancient scripts that Lucas must surely have discovered. “Star Wars is just a story” they insist “you can't prove it isn't true – it is beyond the reach of any telescopes”, even if George Lucas insisted that he had no scripts from the sky. The comparison with theism should be clear. Luke's galaxy is God and Lucas' denial of an alien message is the scientific refutation of the evidence in nature for theism. Would anyone sane deny the absurdity of these Jedi Theologists? Is there any question that they should be considered cranks (albeit probably harmless)? All it takes is the film-maker's rejection of the message for us to consider the truth of Star Wars to be proven false. We should surely take the same approach with theism.

[As aside, I admit to being mystified why so many people I respect, including significant supporters of science and reason, are, to persist with the analogy “Jedi Accommodationists”. They insist that people who declare their belief in the goodness of Luke Skywalker should have a special role in helping us understand reality (in subjects other than psychology). They insist that evolution need not deny the role of the Force, and that biochemistry does not rule out the effects of the midichlorians that give the Jedi their power.]

My conclusion is this: science has explored the natural and all signs of the activities of gods have been found to point nowhere. Science has explored the regions that have been previously labeled as supernatural, and found them full of wonders but empty of gods. The discussion should be over. We should not accept further craven attempts to hide gods outside of space-time or beneath the quantum. Absence of evidence certainly is evidence of absence when what has been called evidence has turned out to be absent.

We have as much proof as we need to be able to state that theism is false, and that science shows atheism is true.

I admire those, like Miranda Celeste Hale, who have the stamina to deal with the nonsense of people like Deepak Chopra.

I don't.  The reason is that I find it hard to know where to start, because it is clear that there is something amiss.  The world people like Chopra live in seems not quite connected to reality, and so I find it hard to mentally focus on their ideas.  How disconnected from reality are they?  Again, that is hard to tell.

What are the symptoms of this disconnection?  Let's have a look at a single sentence from Chopra's latest article:
http://blog.beliefnet.com/intentchopra/2009/11/the-perils-of-skepticism.html

"No skeptic, to my knowledge, ever made a major scientific discovery or advanced the welfare of others."

This sentence sort of hangs in the air.  It is like some shocking work of art, around which people stand, jaws dropped, squinting and twisting their heads in a futile attempt to get a perspective on the object that isn't quite as repulsive as it seems at first sight.

There must be something wrong somewhere.  Some mistake, surely?  Because, Chopra has, in a single sentence, dismissed the Enlightenment; centuries of science, medicine, philosophy, politics..

I can only come up with the following alternatives:

1. Chopra has some deep misunderstanding of the words 'skeptic', 'knowledge', 'scientific', 'discovery', 'advance' and 'welfare'.
2. Chopra comes from some parallel reality in which the Enlightenment did not happen and discoveries appeared out of thin air, by magic.

Some might come up with a third option:  that he is deliberately spouting nonsense.  But surely that can't be the case.

This illustrates the problem I have with trying to deal with the writings of people like Chopra.  Almost every sentence is like a vast cliff of mind-mangling absurdity on the way up an interminable mountain of nonsense.

I am glad that people like Hale have the energy and stamina to scale that mountain.