freeinfidel

The four votes on aspects of the Embryology Bill in the UK presented an opportunity for the religiously blinkered to put narrow-minded dogma before compassion and scientific progress. They were soundly and properly trounced.

It’s always good to see reason prevail. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill represents the most important development in fertility law in the past 20 years.

The UK, being largely free of the religiously inspired shackles that hamper scientific progress in other countries (including the US) is already a world leader in areas like stem cell research. This is important science: advances in embryology offer the possibility of cures for crippling and fatal diseases.

But not everyone is happy about this. The Roman Catholic church, for example, did its best to cripple this bill. It lobbied hard, placing enough pressure on the Government to force a free vote, so that Catholic members of Parliament could do their best to impose that church’s prejudices on the whole population of the UK.

There were four key issues:

• The use of hybrid or ‘admix’ embryos. This is where the nuclei of human cells are inserted into the egg of an animal, treated so that no characteristics of the animal remain. The resulting embryos are kept for only 14 days, in order to harvest stem cells.
• Tissue typing of embryos so that parents can choose to give birth to a ’saviour sibling’. This would happen where a current child has a disease that could be alleviated or cured by having a sibling with the right tissue type.
• The removal of the need for a father when considering the eligibility of applicants for IVF treatment. This paves the way for lesbian couples and single women to receive the treatment.
• The reduction of the limit for abortions from the current 24 weeks to 20 weeks.

Each of these issues attracted an amendment attempting to ban the process or (in the case of abortions) lower the limit. All four amendments were defeated by very healthy margins.

In most cases, those opposed to the processes or treatments presented their case based on junk science or dubious statistics. It was painfully clear, however, that the motivation for the amendments was not built on evidence or reason but on religious prejudice.

In the case of hybrid embryos there was much gibberish talked about ‘Frankenstein’ babies and the creation of freaks. Yet these embryos would never be viable and are, in any case, destroyed after two weeks.

People argued that the creation of ’saviour siblings’ is wrong. They talked about bringing a child into the world purely to provide ’spare parts’ for an existing child. This argument is just as cretinous. It suggests that arms or livers might be harvested, which is pure nonsense. The saviour sibling provides bone marrow and other cells. And any idea that the saviour sibling might not be loved equally by his or her parents is clearly wrong: if anything, they are likely to love it even more for its role in saving the life of the older child.

The opposition to the changes in the IVF law centred around the idea that it would somehow marginalise men. I noticed that this argument was mostly put forward by men. It ties in with that tired old idea that a family is not complete without a father. That would be more convincing if all fathers were perfect. The truth is that, regardless of whether IVF is involved, many children are raised very successfully without one parent or the other. So this amendment was inspired by notions of the family that belong in the Victorian age, not in the 21st Century. And I think there was an unhealthy dose of faith-based homophobia in there too.

Abortion is a more emotive subject and one where the desire of a religious minority to impose its views on the whole of society was most clearly evident. The 24 week limit was set in 1990, based on the best scientific evidence about the viability of the fetus up to that point. Nothing has changed. No new evidence has come to light. Yet there were two attempts to push the limit back - first to 20 weeks and, when that failed, to 22 weeks. That failed too.

Some MPs wanted the limit reduced to 12 weeks, which is where it stands in some (mostly Catholic) countries, such as Spain. Many women don’t even know they’re pregnant at 12 weeks.

The statistics make for interesting reading, though. In the UK, some 55% of abortions are carried out at under 9 weeks. This type of abortion usually involves nothing more than an injection. The fetus is reabsorbed by the body. (So much for its being a fully fledged human life. Could you have a clearer illustration of the fact that it is nothing more than a bunch of cells?) A very high percentage of pregnancies also spontaneously abort within this period, too - often without the woman ever knowing she was pregnant. That, too, doesn’t sit very well with the religious viewpoint and is a fact largely avoided by the anti-choice faithful.

A further third of abortions are carried out in the 9-12 week range. That means that 89% of abortions happen at 12 weeks or less anyway. In fact, only 1.5% of abortions happen in the 20-24 week band. And the vast majority of these are carried out for reasons of health complications or problems with the fetus.

So the ‘moral’ objection that so many proclaim is nothing of the sort. It is simply an attempt by a self-righteous few to impose their irrational, superstitious and medieval ideas on the whole of society. That’s arrogant and, given that they wrapped their arguments in pseudo-science and bad statistics, deeply dishonest.

Fortunately, rationality prevailed. So did compassion for those whose suffering may be relieved and whose lives may be saved by the science that will result from this bill.

A measure of mankind’s progress is not simply how long we’ve been on this planet, but how far we have come intellectually in that time. The advance of science offers us one scale by which to judge ourselves.

Most smart people have already given up on the BC and AD calendar designations. Before Common Era (BCE) and Common Era (CE) are considered less religiously chauvinist. However, as useful as they are for simple dates, they give no idea of the quality of a culture or society - of its progress towards reason or its grasp of knowledge.

The advent of true science, however, is a valuable watershed for determining when a culture emerged from the darkness of superstition, when it fully embraced the intellectual potential of our species. Dating a culture by reference to the number of years before and after its adoption of scientific rigour allows us to have an intuitive grasp of its maturity.

After all, think about how we often express our feelings about a particular time and place. “Oh, back then people still believed in [insert irrational nonsense of your choice]” or “yeah, but they thought [some risible superstition here]”.

This is not one scale applicable equally everywhere. The point where one era switches to the other varies not just from place to place, but from group to group within a society. After all, some people still believe in silly ideas like sin, heaven and talking snakes. In fact, there will be no clear change - in many places the two scales will run side by side, with the pre-science part diminishing as scientific thought gains ground.

Nevertheless, all that is truly valuable to us in terms of knowledge can be found on the plus side of the graph marked After Science, or AS (as a mnemonic, think “AS it really is”). Everything else, of course, is BS.

Scientific materialism is often condemned by religious believers as being reductionist, as though perceiving the essential truth of something were a bad thing. But does it justify this pejorative abuse of the term?

What do people of a scientific inclination see when they look at the world? They see the complex bonding of elements. They see the intricate play of physical forces. They see the comprehensible strangeness of the quantum realm, the staggering immensity of the universe, the eternal truth of natural laws, the sublime irrationality of pi.

Our accumulated scientific wisdom is vast - so huge, in fact, that no-one today can simply be a ’scientist’, not even just a physicist, chemist, biologist. To have any chance of fully comprehending and utilising any branch of science means specialising.

But this enormous treasury of knowledge is not enough for scientists. They want more. Every true scientist is driven by what he or she does not know. The existence of science as a discipline is an acknowledgment of our ignorance, but also our desire to leave that condition. It is an assertion that ignorance is undesirable, a form of failure, a primitive state that we, as evolved life forms, should leave behind. All true knowledge is valuable, even if we can’t put it to use immediately. Talking about the curiosity that motivates mathematicians, E C Titchmarsh said:

It can be of no practical use to know that pi is irrational, but if we can know, it surely would be intolerable not to know.

Scientists are explorers, constantly expanding our horizons. So how can a discipline that is almost incomprehensibly vast and complex, and to which we are adding every day, be reductionist? Such an accusation is oxymoronic at best. In fact, you can probably drop the ‘oxy’.

What does the believer comprehend while gazing on the magnificence of nature, with all its complexity?

God did it.

This, surely, is the ultimate in reductionist thinking. As an explanation for the world and all it contains, it is disappointingly banal, feeble, simple-minded, crude, unimaginative. Frankly, it’s a bit silly.

The faithful complain when rationalists ‘explain away’ the mysteries of the spiritual realm - when they provide logical, supportable, real-world mechanisms by which apparent visions or miracles come about. But these explanations are made possible by that accumulated wisdom, acquired painstakingly by innumerable explorers after truth, collected and refined over centuries. Even the simplest assertion in science is built on a sophisticated foundation of knowledge that was hard won and required vast effort.

In this sense, no rational explanation of a supernatural phenomenon is ever ’simple’, however easy our fund of knowledge has made it. Flying from Paris to New York is simple. All you do is sit on a plane for several hours. What could be easier? But start thinking about the effort and knowledge required to build a flying machine, jet engines, the seat-back video, and you will understand that there is nothing simple about it.

On the other hand, the believer would ‘explain away’ the miraculous (and even those things that scientists already understand) with nothing more than “it’s god’s will” or worse, “we can never understand this. It’s not for us to know”.

The so-called ‘mystery’ of religion is nothing more than glorified ignorance. Can anyone explain the benefit of not knowing something?

If you enjoy the experience of standing in awe and wonder at the magnificence of the universe, try learning some science. There is nothing so splendid as the complex truth of nature.

Pope Benedict XVI has had to cancel a visit to Rome’s leading university over suggestions that he approved of the church’s treatment of Galileo. The truth, as always, is somewhat murkier, but perhaps it’s just as well. Popes and science are not a good mix.

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The ‘intelligent design’ trial in Dover, Pennsylvania was a landmark case. It established that ID is just a dishonest re-badging of creationism and has no place in a science class. It was an important victory for rationalism, commonsense and science.The video above is the 2006 BBC Horizon programme on the case and the underlying issues.I would also strongly recommend ‘40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, Oxycontin, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania’ by Matthew Chapman - a personal, often funny, scrupulously fair and sensitive account of the trial and the people involved.

There seem to be almost as many definitions of atheism as there are atheists. Perhaps that’s because it is a proposition that frees the mind rather than constricts it.

Many definitions of atheism embrace science as the framework for knowledge and understanding of our universe. Many adopt humanist codes of ethics and humanitarian principles as guides for our behaviour in the world. These are all valid and worthwhile practices, but they are unnecessarily complex as definitions of the atheism that enables them.

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If you ever want an example of just how convoluted, crazy and illogical religious thinking has become, you can usually depend on the Catholics. Take the comments by the Pope’s astronomer, Guy Consolmagno, who has just accused creationists of being pagans.

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