Hi Everyone,

Sorry about the sparse updates of late, here are the events we have coming up in the next week or so:

1. I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist
2. Faith(less) – What leads people to embrace or reject faith?
3. Centre for Inquiry Canada’s First National Conference

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1. I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist

Join the UTSA for an evening of entertainment, courtesy of the Morning Star Christian Fellowship. On the evening of Thursday, February 25 (7-9pm), we will be attending one of their events on faith, covering the questions “Are Miracles Possible?” and “Is The New Testament True?”. Some UTSA members will be going to see this event, and if you’re interested in joining us, please contact me today or tomorrow so we can arrange a place to meet and head down together. If interested, send me an email at m.gerskup@utoronto.ca.

More information can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=294256372152

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2. Faith(less) – What leads people to embrace or reject faith?

Join us for a panel discussion on Inter-faith dialogue and understanding.

Panel speakers:
Mark Kingwell / U of T Department of Philosophy
Rabbi Aaron Katchen / Hillel of Greater Toronto
Rodd Rudd / Campus For Christ
Ghan Chee / True Peace Sungha at U of T

Presented in partnership with:
Multi-Faith Centre, Muslim Students’ Association, Campus for Christ, Hillel of Greater Toronto, U of T Secular Alliance, True Peace Sangha at U of T

http://harthouse.ca/hh/shownewsitem.php?id=388

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3. Centre for Inquiry Canada’s First National Conference

March 4 – 7, 2010.

Meet freethought leaders from across the country and hear from academics on a broad range of exciting topics! Includes a comedy show and a magic for skeptics!

The Centre for Inquiry Canada is excited to announce our first national conference entitled “Art and Science: Freethought at the Intersection of Two Worlds”.

This Conference will consist of two parts: a Leadership and Organizational Conference on Friday, March 5th (with Registration starting in the afternoon, Thursday, March 4th) and an Educational Conference on Saturday, March 6th. We will also be holding Annual General Meetings for CFI Canada and the Canadian Secular Alliance on Sunday, March 7th.

You can register for one or both days on our website at www.cfiontario.org

On Thursday evening, we will be hosting a reception and an art exhibit with works that display the intersection of art and science.

All day Friday will consist of presentations and group discussions with student leaders, CFI representatives and heads of various organizations. Discussion topics will range from promotions and fundraising to politics and free expression. Come and participate in the discussion about how to be a leader in the freethought movement!

Friday night will include a catered awards banquet with awards being given out for humanism, skepticism and more. Following this we will host an Atheist Comedy night featuring comics Hunter Collins, Nick Beaton and others.

The Educational Conference on Saturday will start with registration at 8:30 am. There will be 4 different panels including:

Panel 1: Art, Prehistory and Evolution
Panel 2: Science and Art
Panel 3: Atheism, Skepticism and Philosophy
Panel 4: Science and Ethics

Speakers include CFI Founder Paul Kurtz, anthropologist Dr. James Harrod, artist Paula Gardner, philosophers James Robert Brown and Guillaume Loignon, and ethicists Dr. Byron Williston and Chandler Davis.

Our keynote speaker, Dr. Christopher diCarlo, will speak in the afternoon on the topic of the emergence of art and its implications on consciousness and evolution.

The day will conclude with a Skeptics Magic Show with local magician Jeff Hinchliffe.

Sunday will consist of a CFI Canada AGM, a catered lunch and a Canadian Secular Alliance AGM.

To register and for more info please check out our website: www.cfiontario.org

Out of town student and community leaders may apply for a travel grant from jtrottier@cficanada.ca

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That’s all for now. Hopefully I’ll see you at some of the events!

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Mitchell Gerskup
University of Toronto Secular Alliance

Last Tuesday, I attended to The Great Time Debate, an event hosted at the University of Toronto by the Centre for Inquiry Canada and the University of Toronto Secular Alliance, to listen to cosmologist Dick Bond, theoretical physicist Lee Smolin, and philosophy professor James Robert Brown discuss the nature of time. The talk, moderated by award-winning science journalist Dan Falk, took the form of a panel discussion/debate, in which each of the speakers was given 20 minutes to present their views, followed by a discussion with the moderator and questions posed by the audience.

Interesting speakers. Terrible presentation designs.

Though the debate itself was relatively tame, it was apparent that opinions on whether or not time was “real” varied across the board. As did the definitions of what it meant for something to be real. Whereas Bond and Brown argued that time was not “real” in the sense that we usually envision (i.e. the Newtonian notion of a “universal clock”), whereas Smolin argued for the existence of time as real – though not quite in the Newtonian sense. I’ll admit that I didn’t fully understand much of what was said, but you can find a moderately detailed account of the talk via twitter (under the hashtag #timedebate).

What did I learn? The exact nature of time is not a simple question, and we still don’t quite know how it fits in to the giant tapestry of physics. This isn’t to say that we merely haven’t made any progress — merely that it’s too early to say whether you really could travel back in time to kill your own grandfather (or grandmother).

The panel of experts.

Once the panelists had finished their presentations and had answered a few questions from the moderator, the panel took questions from the audience. One particularly insightful audience member asked (something along the lines of) how it was possible to use physical inquiry to determine the nature of time, when physicals is premised on a certain notion of time. Or, in other words, if we start out assuming that time works a certain way in order to get to where we are today in physics, how can we then turn around and use that physics to find out the nature of time in a way that isn’t biased by our initial assumptions?

The panel agreed that, due to the circular (i.e. self-correcting) nature of scientific investigation, this didn’t pose a serious problem in the long run. The time available for a response was quite limited, so the panelists didn’t get to explain their answers in too much detail, but I believe it is an important question that warrants a more thorough response.

The panel’s point was that scientific inquiry could only function with a certain set of assumptions about how the world works. These assumptions might be informed by other scientific knowledge, intuition, or in theory (if not in practice) by wild guessing. The important thing is not that the original assumptions are correct, but rather whether investigation using these assumptions provides coherent results, i.e. coherent with our other beliefs, the rest of science, etc. If they are not, then the original assumptions are revised (or abandoned), much in the same way that we would abandon an unsuccessful scientific hypothesis.

A good example of this is the assumption built into Newtonian physics of absolute time and space. Simply put, these are the notions that time and space are neutral to physical events, and serve as more of a stage upon which these events occur. We now know these assumptions to be incorrect, due to this view of time and space being superseded by Einstein’s special relativity. More importantly, though, is that this original incorrect assumption was still able to yield relative scientific results in certain instances, and the transition from Newton to Einstein didn’t prove disastrous to the field of physics. What matters isn’t that the original assumption was correct; merely that it yielded correct predictions, and when a better theory (with different underlying assumptions) came along, our understanding of the universe was improved, rather than cast into doubt.

Then the question arises of how we know what the truth is, if our starting points are arbitrary. Isn’t this just a form of coherentism? To which I say, “yes”. However, that isn’t a problem insofar as science works and allows us to make testable predictions within a coherent framework, whatever that framework may be. Maybe one day, philosophers will discover a direct way to access logically certain truths about the universe, but until then, we might as well use the next best thing.

Originally posted on Skeptic North.