Please Tell William Lane Craig...

My RSS feed tells me that William Lane Craig will be debating a philosopher named Alexander Rosenberg. WLC is a Christian apologist whose debates are like car accidents: horrible to see, hard to look away. I had never heard of Rosenberg, but after a little background surfing I am looking forward to seeing him and his ideas (one of which is "good nihilism") go up against WLC.

WLC will ride the Gish Gallop all over Rosenberg, of course. He will quote many things Rosenberg has written and said, completely out of context. He will quote other learned people, especially scientists, completely out of context. And he will conclude by gloating over Rosenberg's failure to refute any of the "proofs" he's trotted out for the evening. 

I felt compelled to write Prof Rosenberg in advance of the debate, and here's why: William Lane Craig makes a point in every single one of his debates that is so offensive to me that I want his next opponent to be on guard for it and ready to tear it down when it appears.

The point comes up in WLC's assertion that God exists because objective morality exists. He starts from the position that, on atheism, there is no objective morality.  I understand the philosophical point he is trying to make, distorted as it may be. 

But then he personalizes the attack, saying things like, "The atheist believes humans are just animals," and "An atheist can't know whether rape is moral or not." That is, he takes the philosophical argument and twists it to demean an entire class of real people.  

The things he says to make his point are as insulting as "The Jew is motivated entirely by money. A Jew can have no spiritual aspirations." Or "The Negro has a child-like mental disposition and therefore needs a master. A Negro cannot appreciate freedom."

If I were debating WLC, I'd nail him on three counts: First, a defender of Christianity can't know what atheists think any more than Nazis could know what Jews thought. Or than white slavers could know what Negroes thought.

Second, he's using a theoretical point as a smokescreen while lobbing the equivalent of ethnic slurs. Sure, there is a philosophical connection between atheism and nihilism. But that does not make it okay to assert that actual atheists can't tell whether rape is right or wrong.

Third, there is a moral consequence of maligning atheists the way he does. What William Lane Craig says finds its way into church sermons, and from church sermons into bar arguments. More Americans own guns than ever before, and more Americans hate atheists than ever before. Just how much of WLC's rhetoric will it take to push America's theist vs. atheist antipathy to the level of Ireland's Catholic vs. Protestant, or Rwanda's Hutu vs. Tutsi?

I did get a reply from Prof Rosenberg, but it was succinct to the point that I couldn't tell whether he'd actually read my email or not. In any case, I'll have to watch the debate (probably on YouTube, after the fact) to see whether he gives WLC any pushback on his slurs about atheists and rape.

What IS That Smell???

After several weeks of bitter cold weather and torrential rains here, I got the flu. And at about the time I came down with it, I thought I noticed an odd smell in one of the bedrooms. Coming from the linen closet. Did the cat hide a dead mouse in there, I wondered? But then the flu took over my respiratory faculties and I couldn't smell a thing.

When I recovered a few days later, the smell was impossible not to notice. I took everything out of the linen closet, found nothing. It was a very unpleasant, yet familiar smell. The linen closet shares a wall with the bathroom, but there was no smell in the bathroom, and no stains or moisture to be seen in the closet.

It was night when I noticed that when I closed the closet door, the smell built up inside. And when I opened the door again the smell was concentrated at the top of the closet. Hey, natural gas rises. Could it be a gas pipe leak?

At this point in my recovery from the flu, I felt okay. But my voice was 100% gone. I was loathe to call PG&E and try to whisper the situation to them over the phone. Was my house going to blow up the next time I flicked a light switch? Well, it hadn't blown up so far. So I went to bed.

In the morning, I had two vocal notes to work with, "do" and "re". So I called PG&E, and in a near-monotone, told them I smelled gas. They promised to send someone. I puttered around the house. The smell persisted. I left the bedroom windows open. I worked on my taxes. I made some dinner. I practiced the accordion. Finally, at 11:30 at night --- I had just started turning out lights to go to bed -- a  PG&E truck rolls up in front of the house.

Up the stairs comes a guy with a gas-detecting wand. He steps into the house, and not even looking at his device, he says, "That's not gas." He tromps from room to room, waving the wand around... Nope, no gas.

"So what is that smell?" I ask him. (By now my vocal chords have recovered another note -- I can go as high as "mi".) "Sewage." He says.

Oh, yuck. The next morning, I gird my will with coffee to go into the crawlspace under the house and take a look. I crawl. I find a furnace filter that needs replacing. I smell nothing. But the  house's bathroom plumbing is on the other side of the furnace, in the smallest part of the crawlspace. I just don't have the resolve to shimmy into it. So I call a plumber.

The plumber shows up, and he crawls under the bathroom. I hear him scuffling around down there, knocking into things.  He hollers up for me to flush the toilet a couple of times. He's down here for a good twenty minutes. Finally he comes back out and pronounces, "Your plumbing is in really good shape. Oughta last you another thirty years!"

No sewage leak? Nope. No smell down there? Not that he could find. No moisture even? Yes, lots of damp soil, probably percolating moisture from surrounding areas saturated by the rains. But no, no sewage.

"So what is that smell?" I ask him. "Something dead," he says. "Maybe a rat died in the wall, or in the attic."

I don't agree with him. A dead mammal smells like a package of meat left in a fridge after a three-day power outage. That's not what I smell in the linen closet.

Nevertheless, I tackle the attic next. This involves removing all the clothes from another closet, removing the closet rod, bringing in a ladder, and lifting up the ceiling hatch. I do all that. I stand head and shoulders into the attic. Smells lovely -- just redwood and dust, the way an old attic should smell. I can see the joists right over the linen closet and there is no dead rat among them.

By now my sense of smell is recovering, and I am beginning to recognize the odor in the closet. It's what the water in a vase of flowers smells like if you put off dumping the vase until long after the petals have dropped. Decaying vegetable matter, to be exact.

On the other side of the linen closet wall is the bathtub. There is still no noticeable smell in the bathroom. But still, could there be something unpleasant going on behind the tile around the bathtub?

Soap Dish: Portal to Another World

Channeling my inner Dr. Quincy, I remove the soap dish from the tile wall. I stick my nose into the dark space and inhale. Ah, yes... There is the smell!

I bravely stick my arm into the hole and feel around. I can feel the tub support rail, the wall joists, and the lath and plaster of the opposite wall. Nothing slimy and wet. No spongy, rotting spots in the wood. I can feel the side of the cast iron tub, but I can't quite reach down to the subfloor below it. Not that I'd want to. If something has died, that's probably where it's lying right now.

In a stroke of brilliance, I grab my camera, set the 10-second timer, wrap the loop around my wrist, and dangle it down into the dark space. I take a few pictures. I bring the camera back up and look. I can't really make out what is on the floor under the tub because the area seems to be littered with dead leaves.

Dead leaves? Decaying vegetable matter? Well, there you have it!

Here is my conjecture: An animal has built a nest of leaves in the space under the tub and above the subfloor. This could have happened recently, or years ago. More recently, the tile around the tub has finally lost its integrity and shower water is trickling down behind it. Right behind the wettest part of the shower is the linen closet wall. And at the foot of that wall, in a completely unreachable space under the tub, is a pile of composting leaves.

Middle Earth

On the plus side, now I have a really good excuse to remodel the bathroom.

Dinesh D'Souza Repudiates Stephen Hawking and Imaginary Numbers

I like to have a little background conversation on when I putter around in the studio. The other day I listened to The Great God Debate: Dinesh D'Souza vs Dan Barker. Nothing like a nice long dust-up between a Christian apologist and an atheist. This one featured a delicious moment of inanity:

Dinesh D'Sousa: Here's what Hawking says. He says maybe the universe came into existence in what he calls quote "imaginary time". Is there such a thing as imaginary time? No. Where does the idea of imaginary time exist? Pretty much in Stephen Hawkings' imagination. (Part 1, 29:39)

Dan Barker: You're misconstruing what Hawking meant by imaginary time. He's using the word "imaginary time" in the same way that mathemeticians use the phrase "imaginary numbers". (Part 1, 39:56)

D'Souza: Stephen Hawking, just to say a word about him. Just to give you an idea of the, in a sense, nonsensical arguments to which atheists are reduced. What's an imaginary number?  Dan spoke of an imaginary number. An imaginary number is something like the square root of negative 2. Now, theoretically, it's a concept, I agree. You can do mathematics with the square root of negative 2. But if somebody were to ask you, "Do you have the square root of negative 2 dollars in your pocket?" you would say, "No, that's ridiculous!" It's a concept, but it has no equivalent in actually existing reality. Stephen Hawking admits that. (Part 2, 00:20)

An Evening at Club Serge

Lori invited me over to play with the serger yesterday. I melded one cotton cardigan and three old t-shirts to produce this single item:

Front

Back

On the model

Unfortunately, I don't think this garment is going to make it through the wash. A couple of the cotton knits I used are too fine for those beefy serger needles. 

Wimpy cotton knit pulling apart at the serged seam

If one were going to do this with any sense of purpose, one would probably want to have a variety of needle sizes on hand. But then one would have to rethread the serger. Noooooohhhhhhhh!