I am now an official contributor at Social Media Law Student, a blog for law students to write on social media issues. In the invitation letter I was told "Legal professionals across the world have been using our blog and law schools are directing their students to our blog for best practice tips."

My first article is currently the lead article on the site but because it won't stay there forever so here is a permalink to it, The Right to Online Privacy v. Defamation Law. It is a short piece asking, "How far does the cyber-right to privacy extend? Does it stand when people use it as a shield to harm others, to damage their reputations? Last week Google was forced by the court to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger who had defamed another."

In a previous post, God, Darwinian Evolution and The Teleological Argument, I argued that evolution does not refute the teleological argument. Also, even if it did, a lot more significant philosophical work over and above any appeal to natural selection would be needed to infer from this that theism is rationally untenable. There is, however, a second concern lurking in this area; it is that Darwinian evolution shows that evolution occurs by chance. Chance is incompatible with design; hence, Darwinian evolution shows that biological organisms were not created by God. Del Ratzsch summarises the argument succinctly,

[I]f it is genuine evolution, then the theory itself demands that the processes be governed by natural law and random chance … On the other hand, if its genuinely guided [by God], then the process must involve not chance but deliberately designed intervention.[1]

The argument has two premises,

[1] If evolution is guided [by God] then the processes must not involve random chance;

[2] Genuine evolutionary theory demands that the processes be governed by natural law and random chance.

I think this argument is mistaken. To be a valid argument, the word “chance” would need to be used the same way in both premises. The kind of chance that is incompatible with creation in [1] would have to be the kind of chance that is part of genuine evolutionary theory in [2].

Alvin Plantinga has argued that when one examines how the word “chance” is being used in this kind of argument it is evident that the word is not being used the same way in both premises and that when the ambiguity is cleared up the kind of chance that is involved in contemporary evolutionary theory is compatible with the idea that God created human beings.[2]

Let us turn to the first premise; [1] the claim that if evolution is guided [by God] then the processes must not involve random chance. This statement is true only if chance is defined a certain way, both that its existence is incompatible with the idea that God caused the event to happen (either immediately or indirectly via normal secondary causation) and that God did so intentionally and with purpose. To say then that an event occurs by random chance, on this definition, is to say the event was not caused, intended or planned by God.

The problem is that if chance is defined this way premise [2] is false; genuine evolutionary theory does not demand that mutations are not caused by chance, when chance is defined in this way. According to Eliot Sober, when the word chance is used in the context of evolutionary theory it means, “there is no physical mechanism (either inside organisms or outside of them) that detects which mutations would be beneficial and causes those mutations to occur.” Ernest Mayr makes a similar point, “When it is said that mutation or variation is random, the statement simply means that there is no correlation between the production of new genotypes and the adaptational needs of an organism in a given environment.”

Defined in the manner of Mayr and Sober, chance is entirely compatible with the idea that evolution is caused, intended or planned by God. The fact that there is, “no correlation between the production of new genotypes and the adaptational needs of an organism in a given environment” and “no physical mechanism (either inside organisms or outside of them) that detects which mutations would be beneficial and causes those mutations to occur,” does not mean that the events had no cause and it certainly does not mean that they were not intentionally caused by God.

To show that evolution occurred by chance, where chance is incompatible with divine design, contemporary biologists would need to show not just that no physical mechanism detects which mutations are beneficial and causes them and it would have to do much more than fail to produce a correlation between the “production of new genotypes and the adaptational needs of an organism in a given environment.” It would have to show that there was ultimately no supernatural cause to the process that intended evolution of human life to occur. Contemporary biology has not done this and it is certainly very difficult to see how it could do so without stepping outside the bounds of science, as currently practised, and venturing into controversial areas of philosophy and theology.

[1] Del Ratzch Battle for Beginnings: Why Neither Side is Winning the Creation Evolution Debate (Downers Grove IL: Intervarsity Press, 1996).
[2] Alvin Plantinga "Evolution and Design" in For Faith and Clarity: Philosophical Contributions to Christian Theology ed. James Beilby (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006) 201-217.

This post draws from parts of my paper "Does Evolution Make Belief in God Untenable?" given at the recent TANSA conference, Faithful Science? – Just How Well Do Science and Faith Get Along?

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God, Darwinian Evolution and The Teleological Argument

Matt spoke at Thinking Matters Auckland on 28 May 2009 on Moral Relativism.

A popular view of ethics holds that actions are right or wrong only if a person or a community believes that they are right or wrong, and that it is inappropriate to apply your own standards to others. This position is known as moral relativism. In this talk Matt looks at the common arguments for relativism, argues that relativism is a mistaken view of ethics and shows how relativism fails.

In impeccable timing, this afternoon I heard the announcement that ACT MP John Boscawen’s Bill to amend Section 59 of the Crimes Act, in line with the Borrows amendment that defined reasonable force, had been drawn from the ballot.

However, John Key swiftly announced that National would not back it to Select Committee trotting out the flawed "the law is working" argument; basically, smacking is illegal but we promise to not enforce it as long as we are in government, which is somehow supposed to reassure parents. NOT. So the bill appears dead in the water.

Hopefully Boscawen will elect to delay its first reading until just before the next election.

Following on from More Evidence of Student Association Delusions of Grandeur, where I shared Auckland University Students Assocation's (AUSA) unfathomable intentions to incorporate the UN Declaration of Human Rights into their constitution, a fellow student and reader of this blog, brought my attention to today's email to all University of Auckland students which he described as "bribery now to get what they want." I must concur:

Student apathy was at its worst today when we failed to get 200 people to turn up to the quad to hold the AUSA Winter General Meeting. However, all is not lost - we are going to try again!

So come to the quad at 1pm on Thursday the 27th of August (tomorrow) and vote in favour of putting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into the AUSA Constitution! We were only about 20 people short so I cannot stress enough that YOU REALLY WILL MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE!

Even if the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not your thing, we will be giving out candy! FOR FREE! Maybe even a few muesli bars for the health-conscious amongst you. All you need to do is bring along your uni ID card and flash it in favour of human rights!

SEE YOU IN THE QUAD AT 1PM, THURSDAY 28 AUGUST. DO IT.

Again I am left wondering how on earth this move can "MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE" for human rights.

Again we see the disregard for proper constitutional process in the statement "All you need to do is bring along your uni ID card and flash it in favour of human rights!" AUSA membership is voluntary, as such, possession of a Uni ID card does not mean that you are an AUSA member and are entitled to vote but they do not seem to care about this detail.

So basically you can receive material benefits if you vote the way they want you to (doesn't matter if you're not really to eligible to vote) and all this is in the name of AUSA's strong commitment to human rights.

This would be funnier if I wasn't paying for it.

The law criminalises smacking, the best and most faithful reading of the law deems any use of force for the purposes of parental correction criminal; experts in legal interpretation agree on this. The people have objected loudly and all you have done is issue a promise to not enforce the law; a promise that can only be kept for as long as you govern, a promise that offends the duty of a government to ensure that the law is enforced.

Your so called “safeguards” offer no long term protection. What happens to those safeguards in the future if the Greens hold the balance of power? Or is that what is really going on - you won’t change the law because you want it to be easy to eradicate smacking long term in New Zealand?

I am not fooled. Courts are primarily directed by the black letter of the law not promises to not enforce it made by past governments. This government has a chance to offer parents protection that a future government will find harder to undo and it will fail if these “safeguards” are all it does.

Promises to not enforce a law that criminalises smacking are not good enough. If the government does not wish for parents who lightly smack their children for the purposes of correction to be prosecuted then it must change the law now, before the possibility of a new government arises.

Regards,

Madeleine Flannagan

The Hon Murray McCully emailed me (I suspect generically) this morning in response to my first email, Dear Cabinet,. The above is a response, sent to all members of Cabinet, to Mr McCully's email to me which is pasted below,

The Prime Minister has announced that the Government is introducing safeguards to give parents comfort they will not be criminalised for lightly smacking their children.

The safeguards follow the Citizens Initiated Referendum on smacking. The referendum result reinforces the message that New Zealanders do not want to see good parents criminalised for a light smack.

To give parents comfort that this will not happen, Cabinet has agreed on a number of measures. These are:

The Police and Ministry of Social Development chief executive will lead a review of Police and Child, Youth & Family policies and procedures, including the referral process between the two agencies, to identify any changes that are necessary or desirable to ensure good parents are treated as Parliament intended. The Commissioner of Police and Ministry of Social Development chief executive will seek an independent person to assist in the conduct of the review and will report back by 1 December 2009.

We will be bringing forward the delivery of the report from the Ministry of Social Development chief executive on data and trends and the effect of the law change from the end of the year to late September/early October. The Minister of Social Development will table the report in Parliament.

The Government will invite Police to continue to report on a six-monthly or annual basis for the next three years on the operation of the law, and invite Police to include data on cases where parents or caregivers say the force used on the child was reasonable in the circumstances.

If future Police data indicates a worrying trend, the law will be changed to ensure that good New Zealand parents are not criminalised for lightly smacking.

The Government believes the law is working as intended, but we want to give parents an assurance that a National-led Government will continue to monitor the way the law is being implemented.

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