Sweden to ban religious ideas as truth in all schools.

I stumbled another article on the teaching of religious ideas in schools. Apparently the Swedish government has made it illegal for schools, both private and public, to teach religious doctrine as if they were true. The entire article is reposted below with a link to the source.

I support this decision in the case of public schools. If you are attending a public school, managed by a government run board of education, then the separation of church and state should be maintained. The only fair way to do this is to remove all religious teachings from the classrooms except in the case of classes devoted to studying world faiths or literature. However, in the case of private schools, I cannot support this move. It is a clear violation of the spirit of free speech, and that is dangerous territory.

One argument put forth for this law is that it helps combat the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, the logic here being that Islamic schools indoctrinate children at a young age, before they have the mental ability to properly assess ideas. I recognize that the same argument can be against any religion. As many people have noted, religion is generally not learned later in life, but rather passed on to children at an early age by their parents. So, if preventing the induction of young minds is the goal, then the precedent set by this law sets is a terrible one. The law won’t do much to prevent the teaching of religion to young minds since this will still occur at home. The next step would be to ban the teaching of religion all together, violating free speech for the majority of the people in the world.

The way to combat religious fundamentalism is not to silence the opposition. Instead, you have to open the door to real criticism and discussion. What if the roles were reversed? What if they outlawed the teaching of evolution as truth in secular schools? The whole reason atheism is beginning to take root is because of free speech and this is an ideal we should hold dear even if we don’t agree with what is being said.

By Andrew Brown
Original Source

The Swedish government has announced plans to clamp down hard on religious education. It will soon become illegal even for private faith schools to teach religious doctrines as if they were true. In an interesting twist on the American experience, prayer will remain legal in schools – after all, it has no truth value. But everything that takes place on the curriculum’s time will have to be secular. “Pupils must be protected from every sort of fundamentalism,” said the minister for schools, Jan Björklund.

Creationism and ID are explicitly banned but so is proselytising even in religious education classes. The Qur’an may not be taught as if it is true even in Muslim independent schools, nor may the Bible in Christian schools. The decision looks like a really startling attack on the right of parents to have their children taught what they would like. Of course it does not go so far as the Dawkins policy of prohibiting parents from trying to pass on their doctrines even in their own families – and, if it did, it would certainly run foul of the European convention on human rights. It does not even go as far as Nyamko Sabuni, the minister for integration – herself born in Burundi – would like: she wanted to ban all religious schools altogether. But it is still a pretty drastic measure from an English perspective.

The law is being presented in Sweden as if it mostly concerned fundamentalist Christian sects in the backwoods; but the Christian Democratic party, which represents such people if anyone does, is perfectly happy with the new regulation. There is little doubt that combating Islamic fundamentalism is the underlying aim, especially in conjunction with another new requirement that all independent schools declare all their funding sources. This would allow the inspectors – whose budget is being doubled – to concentrate their efforts on those schools most likely to be paid to break the rules.

In the background to these announcements comes the release of a frightening documentary film on Swedish jihadis, which follows young men over a period of two years on their slow conversion to homicidal lunacy.

The question is whether we in Britain will come to see this as a necessary move in the struggle to contain Islamist ideologies. Can a defence of freedom convincingly be mounted by a state that takes such a firm view of what is or is not true? Or can freedom not be preserved without such measures? The dilemma makes no sense from a completely liberal position, where it is assumed that the truth will always win out in fair competition, and that the state is almost always to be distrusted. But Swedes have never really been liberal in that sense, notwithstanding the fact that the two ministers involved here are members of the Liberal party.

Superficially, the British position could not be more different. The British government’s strategy with Islam or protestant extremism in Ulster has been – so far as we have had one – flattery and corruption, or what Microsoft, in another context, calls “embracing and extending”. Find the leaders, flatter them, and draw them into the ruling class in the hope that they will then cooperate and see that their followers do too. The gamble that the government is taking on faith schools is that if religious groups are given their own schools to run, they will do so in ways that will turn out for the benefit of society as a whole, as well as of their pupils. Certainly this works quite well with the Church of England. Anglican schools are happy, by and large, to teach religion as if it were not true; to put it in a more flattering light, they concentrate more on the fruits of the spirit than on dogma. However, no one supposes that society is threatened by a terrorist movement nurtured in C of E primary schools.

Demanding that Muslim, Jewish, and Catholic schools stop teaching their own religions as if they were true, which is essentially the Swedish position, looks an impossible task for a British government. But I think it might also be a necessary one. It is certainly the only way to discover whether the parents of such schools really want the “ethos” or the pseudo-factual beliefs and what exactly it is that the people who fund them think they are buying with their money.

An Introduction to the Many-body Problem

If you have taken a highschool-level physics course then you are familiar with the two-body problem; two masses which interact with one another through some mediating force such as gravity. At that level the problem is relatively simple and you often treat one of the masses as large and stationary. For example, when computing the motion of the earth around the sun you generally ignore the motion of the star and calculate the elliptical orbit of the earth. In an university-level introductory mechanics course you will go one step further and consider the motion of both bodies by moving to a center of mass frame. But what you might be surprised to learn is that you never move to the next problem. You’re never taught how to solve the three-body problem analytically.

As it turns out, three interacting bodies proves to be an unsolvable problem on paper. It can be done approximately if one of the masses small compared to the others so that its influence on the others can be treated as a perturbation. It can also be done in the limit that one of the masses is large and stationary. But the general problem, treated without approximation, has yet to be solved. Instead one is forced to employ numerical (read computers) techniques in order to obtain a solution. This poses a slight problem since physicists are generally interested in many-body problems.

Galaxies and solar systems involve tens to thousands (if not millions) of masses all exerting gravitational forces on one another. Studying the formation of these systems using even classical Newtonian gravity is a computationally intensive effort. In solids the problem becomes much worse. There you are dealing with Avogadro’s number (6.022×10^23) of electrons, all interacting with one another via electrostatic forces. Solids also have the added complication of the atoms forming the underlying crystal lattice, which each have a motion of their own and interact with the electrons.

In a first pass one can make approximations to make these problems more tractable. For example, in solids you often start by neglecting the motion of the crystal lattice and the mutual repulsion between the electrons. At this level, the only many-body effects come from the Pauli exclusion principle, which prevents two electrons from occupying the same state at the same time. This might seem like a gross approximation, you have neglected the bulk of the interactions, but it does a surprisingly good job of accounting for some properties such as a material’s compressibility. At the next level of approximation you can introduce the motion of the lattice and its interaction with the electrons. This level of approximation will give you an understanding of conventional superconductivity (which I will expand upon in a future post).

The last levels of approximation, the inclusion of the electron-electron repulsion, is at the forefront of modern research. There is a whole class of materials, classified as strongly correlated systems, where the repulsion between the electrons is the dominate interaction and cannot be neglected. This interaction also appears to give rise to very complex collective states and a great deal of new and interesting physics is emerging from this such as high-temperature superconductivity or collosalmagnetoresistance.

My own research is in the area of strongly correlated systems and over the next few weeks I hope to do a series of posts describing some of the interesting aspects of many-particle physics. So please, stay tuned.

The Natural vs Supernatural

Many people define science as the study of nature. Some go one step further and define it as the search for truths about the nature. I fall into the second group. In the pursuit of science one examines the natural world and studies only phenomena that can be reliably and independently reproduced in order to find truth about nature that is independent of the observer. This procedure, by definition, precludes phenomena that could not be explained by any natural means – the supernatural. However, one must be careful because not all things that appear to be supernatural at first glance remain so once attention is brought to bear on the problem.

Throughout the course of human history our knowledge base has been expanding and there have always been things which we did not understand. However, due to our pattern recognizing nature, we often looked for underlying causes even in the absence of genuine understanding. Before we had a working knowledge of the weather, massive storms at sea would be attributed to angry gods of the sea. Before we had a working germ theory of disease, things such as the plague were thought to be punishments brought to us by our creator(s). Before we had the theory of evolution, the diversity of life was largely attributed to a designer. All of these things had supernatural explanations which eventually gave way to the natural, and this occurred because people only utilized what was reproducible and verifiable in their study of these events.

This modus operandi is far more than a dogma or faith assumed by the proponents of science. It is a necessity. When one allows for genuine supernatural explanations for something, they are no longer able to independently verify it. And without verification we have no way to determine which explanation is correct. For example, suppose we accept that storms are in fact the wrath of an angry sea god. How would one decide which god it was or what he was angry at? I could easily claim that the responsible deity is “Aaron” and he was angry about camp fires while you could just as easily claim that its Poseidon, angry about things Poseidon hates. Neither of these can be verified and so you if you accept one then you must accept the second with equal weight while the only reason you have been given is our respective word. And here I have only listed two possible supernatural causes. Insert your favorite friend as the god and make up whatever inane reason you want – they all must be accepted with equal weight. The same goes for miracles that defy the known laws of physics. The only way we can discern between claims of genuine physical events and those that are made up by the observer is by requiring physically verifiable evidence be put forth in favour of the claim.

It is for these reasons that science does not entertain supernatural explanations and waits for evidence before trying to understand something. Yes, this a decision which has been made a priori but it is one that is required if you want to get anywhere in a search for truth that is independent of the observer. It is also worth noting that this method of inquiry has been remarkably successful. You owe your longer lifespan to it. You owe your computer to it. In fact, you owe just about everything in modern life to it.

(On a side note, while writing this post I was listening to the new Booka Shade album “The Sun & Neon Light”. It’s quite good.)

Judge says UC can deny class credit to Christian school students

I was stumbling pages between my code runs today and came across this. It fits well with some of the things I have been discussing here and thought I would repost it.

I am happy to see that universities are looking critically at what is coming out of the high school curriculum. If your biology class taught you creation along side or with evolution you were done a disservice. But I am not so sure the students should be punished for that. Rather, universities should be putting some kind of pressure on high school boards to have their curriculum changed. But I admit I don’t have an idea as to what form that pressure should take at the moment. I just worry because I wonder how many students are going to suffer or be denied access to university because their board did not provide them with a quality education?

Source

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge says the University of California can deny course credit to applicants from Christian high schools whose textbooks declare the Bible infallible and reject evolution.

Rejecting claims of religious discrimination and stifling of free expression, U.S. District Judge James Otero of Los Angeles said UC’s review committees cited legitimate reasons for rejecting the texts – not because they contained religious viewpoints, but because they omitted important topics in science and history and failed to teach critical thinking.

Otero’s ruling Friday, which focused on specific courses and texts, followed his decision in March that found no anti-religious bias in the university’s system of reviewing high school classes. Now that the lawsuit has been dismissed, a group of Christian schools has appealed Otero’s rulings to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

“It appears the UC is attempting to secularize private religious schools,” attorney Jennifer Monk of Advocates for Faith and Freedom said today. Her clients include the Association of Christian Schools International, two Southern California high schools and several students.

Charles Robinson, the university’s vice president for legal affairs, said the ruling “confirms that UC may apply the same admissions standards to all students and to all high schools without regard to their religious affiliations.” What the plaintiffs seek, he said, is a “religious exemption from regular admissions standards.”

The suit, filed in 2005, challenged UC’s review of high school courses taken by would-be applicants to the 10-campus system. Most students qualify by taking an approved set of college preparatory classes; students whose courses lack UC approval can remain eligible by scoring well in those subjects on the Scholastic Assessment Test.

Christian schools in the suit accused the university of rejecting courses that include any religious viewpoint, “any instance of God’s guidance of history, or any alternative … to evolution.”

But Otero said in March that the university has approved many courses containing religious material and viewpoints, including some that use such texts as “Chemistry for Christian Schools” and “Biology: God’s Living Creation,” or that include scientific discussions of creationism as well as evolution.

UC denies credit to courses that rely largely or entirely on material stressing supernatural over historic or scientific explanations, though it has approved such texts as supplemental reading, the judge said.

For example, in Friday’s ruling, he upheld the university’s rejection of a history course called Christianity’s Influence on America. According to a UC professor on the course review committee, the primary text, published by Bob Jones University, “instructs that the Bible is the unerring source for analysis of historical events” and evaluates historical figures based on their religious motivations.

Another rejected text, Biology for Christian Schools, declares on the first page that “if (scientific) conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong,” Otero said.

He also said the Christian schools presented no evidence that the university’s decisions were motivated by hostility to religion.

UC attorney Christopher Patti said today that the judge assessed the review process accurately.

“We evaluate the courses to see whether they prepare these kids to come to college at UC,” he said. “There was no evidence that these students were in fact denied the ability to come to the university.”

But Monk, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, said Otero had used the wrong legal standard and had given the university too much deference.

“Science courses from a religious perspective are not approved,” she said. “If it comes from certain publishers or from a religious perspective, UC simply denies them.”

Video: Solar Power Harvested In Space

Here is an interesting video I recieved from one of the people involved in the project.  I think the idea of harvesting solar power from space is an interesting one.  I have always felt that installing solar panels on an industrial scale could be damaging to the ecosystems and this certainly removes this problem.

In a related note, I have stumbled a number of interesting videos on alternative methods of power generation. I am going to try to put them together into a longer post at a later date.

Happy August everyone!