yppahpeek

It has been a busy week here in Science Communication. While the Sci Comm’ers have completed and presented our Group Projects, the Science Media Production team have completed their Documentaries and Radio Packages. All of the projects had to communicate an aspect of the courses covered last term (‘Philosophy of Science’ and ‘The Media Representation of Science’) and could do so either through a film or audio product, or through a more artistic product. And they were all brilliant. I was a bit worried when we started these projects, especially since some of the previous years’ projects were shown to us were so cleverly executed (see, The Scientist , Maps of Knowledge  and Ros the Rat and the Paratime Shifts ). Many of the groups this year produced art works and I think this made a refreshing change from the animations and videos from last year (perhaps this a cyclical pattern?). It was great to see the different takes on the ideas presented in class. My group decided to...

I read the God Delusion about five years ago. And I remember thinking that the ideas were really inspiring. It felt, to my late-teenage, hormonal self, that there was a great religious conspiracy which threatened to topple reason and science and society as we know it. Dawkins provided people like me, mostly agnostic/atheists with a voice and with the confidence to question religions. We were actively encouraged not to give two-hoots about respecting religious beliefs since they were ‘stupid’ and ‘irrational’. I went around like this for a while, genuinely believing that religion couldn’t answer anything and yet had a lot to answer to. For some reason, perhaps because it is the best description we have for describing how we arrived in this existence, evolution got pulled into the religion versus no religion debate. Horror, this was now a religion versus science debate. Both sides of the argument ran to opposite ends of the debating chamber, ready to charge at each other. There wer...