News Front

Zoe Marshall Slammed by doctor for drinking her placenta

Where: www.stuff.co.nz

Who: Unknown When: 05/04/2018

Skeptic summary: Zoe Marshall, radio host, and wellness advice 'influencer' on Instagram, (who has now split from Rugby League star Benji Marshall), drinks a placenta shake after giving birth. Dr. Nick Fuller of the University of Sydney says the drink is ‘unsafe' and could cause ‘potential harm'. Zoe Marshall was in the news earlier this year when she turned to Chinese herbal medicine, and a starvation diet to help her conceive. In an NZ Herald article, “TV star Zoe Marshall resorts to "drastic measures" in bid to get pregnant“ the diet was criticized by the Chair of the Fertility Associates board in Australia, Dr Mary Birdsall, who warned calorie depravation can be harmful to the health of the child long-term.

NZ Scientist to discover what lies within Loch Ness

Where: www.rnz.co.nz

Who: John Campbell When: 21/05/18

Skeptic summary: Prof. Neil Gemmell does an excellent job of explaining the job of a scientist to gather samples and undertake double blind testing to find out what is in the waters of Loch Ness. Talking with John Campbell who seemed like he wanted to believe in a Loch Ness Monster, Neil used CSI as a way of explaining the science behind the investigative process. He explained if there was a monster, it would be creating 'pee and poo' which they would then be able to detect in the water. He explained how the idea of ‘sea caves' had been used to explain how a monster could live, breed and die for a million years without detection.

Are water ionisers money down the drain?

Where: www.rnz.co.nz

Who: Jesse Mulligan When: 28/05/2018

Skeptic summary: Alison Campbell talks to Jesse about Kangan water aka “alkalized water” and sums up by saying it's an expensive way to get your daily water - you'd be better off drinking good chilled tap water.

Why Elon Musk was dead wrong to tell me nanotechnology is BS

Where: thespinoff.co.nz

Who: Michelle Dickinson

When: 28/05/18

Skeptic summary: Nano girl, aka Michelle Dickinson with a PhD in nanotechnology defends an Australian scientist who was slammed for having ‘nano' in her bio by Elon Musk (Entrepreneur, CEO of Tesla, Space-X, The Boring Company) who said ‘nano' was ‘BS'. As Michelle points out, in the twitter exchanges that followed, Elon didn't apologise, and ended up obliquely suggesting he create a news rating website called Pravda (after the Russian newspaper known for repeating the party line) which would allow the public to rate ‘good' journalists and news outlets.

Mark Lynas: how we got it wrong on GMOs

Where: www.rnz.co.nz

Who: Wallace Chapman When: 10/06/2018

Skeptic summary: Discussing his book “On seeds of Science”, Mark starts by explaining how he went from anti-GMO activist to supporter, and explains the science for GMOs as well as countering some of the illogical arguments used against it. He explains it was the conflict he felt as a science writer where at the same time as agreeing with the 97% about climate change, he didn't believe scientists about GMOs, and that dissonance helped him move to align himself with science on both issues. Mark slams the environmental movement and accuses them of causing hunger and poverty by banning safe GMOs. Mark does not pull any punches and vehemently sticks up for science. A must listen!

Bringing the big meth myth mess to light

Where: www.rnz.co.nz

Who: Colin Peacock When: 10/06/2018

Skeptic summary: A brilliant run down going back years on the media reports on meth testing. It was New Zealand alone who decided to pour thousands into tests and to evict innocent tenants on the basis of those tests. Sadly good media reporting and scientists seem to have systematically been ignored in a classic case of mass hysteria. Skeptical hero Souxsie Wiles is quoted as saying “how do we get evidence based policy making?” Conclusion, scientists must be consulted for good reporting and effective moral policy decisions.

Cambridge's Lloyd Buscomb named Chiropractor of the year

Where: www.stuff.co.nz

Who: Mike Bain When: 08/06/2018

Skeptic summary: Lloyd's clinic offers services to babies and children to treat ‘a wide range of childhood symptoms'. You have been warned.

The CUSP Interviews: John Richards

Craig Shearer

John was Interviewed by CUSP regular and Skeptic Chair Craig Shearer

Transcribed by Jessica Macfarlane

This interview was carried out on The Completely Unnecessary Skeptical Podcast in February 2018

Craig: I'm sitting here with John Richards from Atheist Alliance International who happens to be here in New Zealand on holiday having a great time enjoying the fantastic weather I hope

John: Brilliant weather isn't it, yes, too hot really but I'm visiting my son and his family.

Craig: OK

John: And it's my second visit., I came here 6 years ago too, but the children have grown a lot in the space between.

Craig: I'm Sure.

John: It's summer holidays so we're just lazing about taking it easy and just chilling out as they say these days.

Craig: And so you're going to give a talk tonight at Auckland skeptics in the pub about your role as the director, or a director presumably of Atheist Alliance International?

John: Yes that's right. Um I'm proposing to do two things I've got a presentation about how to deal with believers because of course we get involved in a lot of interaction is the polite way of putting it, with people who have who have strong beliefs, so I've got quite a lot of experience reacting to them. So I'm going to deliver my presentation first, and then I will give an update on developments in The Atheist Alliance international field, and tell the audience about the work that we do and hopefully encourage some of them to become members.

Craig: So what's the history of the organisation?

John: Well it's, it started in America about 25 years ago, and it's outward-looking. There is a sister group called Atheist Alliance of America. They were one initially, but we split it into two. AAI, the role is to deal with the rest of the world which is a pretty big remit, and so we are active in a lot of countries. I'm the affiliates director so my job is to keep the local organisations on board and make sure they're paying their dues, and keep them informed as to what's going on, offer them assistance and that sort of thing. We focus mainly on third world countries as they used to be called, we're supposed to call them developing countries nowadays to be politically correct. But many of them are ex-colonial countries. So we have been active quite a lot in Africa. We've been to countries such as Uganda, Zambia, Gambia, Nigeria, and we helped the Nigerians stage their very first humanist conference last year. We supplied the keynote speaker and gave them a grant to help them hold the event.

Craig: So What sort of reception do you get in those developing countries? My impression would be that some of those countries would be quite hostile to atheism.

John: Yes well the major population is very theistic in a lot of these countries, but we've generated little enclaves of free thinking people, and those are the people that we meet up with when we go there, helping them to develop their roots to be deeper, so we've done this in the Philippines, Guatemala, South Africa, and India too.

Craig: Of course in some of those countries there are actual laws against non-belief.

John: We haven't been to those countries yet. I think there are 13 countries in the world where if you declare that you're an atheist it's a capital offence, so we haven't gone there yet.

Craig: You'll be risking your own life.

John: Indeed. Those are the fundamentalist Muslim countries which are very intolerant of anybody who is not a Muslim. In fact I had an acquaintance back home in the UK who was not a religious man but who came from Kyrgyzstan I think, and he told me he didn't know he was a Muslim until he read what they'd put in his passport! So there is no choice, if you're born there that's what you have, and this is what we're campaigning against of course, we want a secular world where policy decisions affecting how the country runs, and the education of the children and so on are not influenced by religious considerations.

Craig: So you're a retired science teacher?

John: Yes I am.

Craig: How did your atheism figure into your teaching in the classroom?

John: Well it was never a problem, well almost never a problem, in the UK as of course we are pretty much a secular nation although, ostensibly we have an established church, but the Anglican church is pretty moribund, it's not a campaigning church. So I mean for example the family that I was born into we're not churchgoers, my peers in school we're not churchgoers my friends and relatives, cousins and so on, Church didn't figure in our activities, the only time that my parents went to church was for Funerals and weddings, I never got taken to the funerals (laugh) as a boy, so of course at that time, all of the schools were pretty much C. of E. Church of England schools, so you got a good dose of Bible in your education. Morning assemblies, prayer hymn and actual lessons in the gospels and so on, but that never really took hold on me so, I'm not a reformed Christian, I was born an atheist and I carried on that way you know and then later on in my schooling I got interested in science, and of course that pretty much knocked on the head any of the Mythologies that I may have been tempted to go towards, and since then I have taught it. In school as a teacher I can remember one occasion when I had an objection from a parent whose daughter I was teaching A level biology, the course had just begun, and I was teaching them evolution, and the parent objected and the girl was taken out of biology and taken to another subject.

Craig: And this was A level, and that's the top level?

John: Yes.

Craig: That's a shame. Do you think she would have had some introduction to evolution and biology before that level?

John: Not a lot, not lower down the school levels. It's come in more recently, but now I'm talking 40 years ago.

Craig: So you had one sort of objection to the teaching of evolution but it doesn't sound like it would be that common I suppose.

John: It wasn't no that was a single occasion.

Craig: That's interesting how it contrasts with my experience I grew up in a family that was Christian and we got taken to church weekly. My father was the most devout I guess and my mother went along with it, but we initially went to a Methodist Church and then to an Anglican Church, and I guess science never really reared its head, and there was no fundamentalism in that particular church. I personally got out of going to church as a teenager when I was invited to play piano at Sunday school so that was quite convenient really, it means I got out of going to boring services.

John: Not for me thank you very much.

Craig: Indeed.

John: Well I was invited to, because I could sing I was invited to be in the choir in our parish church. So I went along on one occasion and I was dressed up in a ruff round the neck and a ‘surplice' I think they might have called it a sort of long dangly loose black smocky thing, and we sang our songs because as it would happen the church organist was my piano teacher, my private piano teacher, so that's how I got coerced into doing this, but I only went the once. I thought, this is not for me.

Craig: We had our Skeptics conference late last year and one of the speakers is a woman, Dr. Alison Campbell, who talked to us about the teaching of evolution in New Zealand, and it actually surprised me to find out that there were quite a lot of restrictions. Not formal restrictions on the teaching of evolution, but teachers sort of shied away from it for, reasons, and my own recollection is that I never really learned about evolution until I became interested in it when I was in a job where one of my colleagues was a young earth creationist.

John: Oh right!

Craig: And that really just surprised me.

John: That is the trouble. If you don't teach evolution, people form all sorts of incorrect beliefs about it. I mean, they think that it has a purpose, they think that its intention is to go from a single celled organism to a human, and that is the route that it should follow. But it doesn't work like that at all.

Craig: Yes, I think there is a good quote from Richard Dawkins about people who understand evolution generally accept it, and those that don't understand it are generally against it.

John: Yes that's right.

Craig: You're doing a debate this weekend.

John: Saturday, yes that's right.

Craig: With one of our resident Christians. So the topic of that debate is “God vs Science, Friends or Foes?” and so, the person you're debating is Zachary who's recently done his PhD. He's, I'm not sure if you're aware of exactly what he got his PhD in, is it something to do with evolution.

John: Yes, something like that.

Craig: So he's not a young earth creationist.

John: No.

Craig: But he does seem to have some leanings towards Intelligent Design.

John: Yes. He's an interesting fellow because he's a fan of ‘Biologos' which is Francis Collin's American based organisation, a compatibilist. He's trying to show that God and science are friends and there's no reason for them to be enemies, and his view seems to be that, I asked him whether God kickstarted it and then let it carry on, and he says no, he says that God upholds and sustains, I guess the entire universe. So I asked him what would happen if he, or she were to stop doing that, and I envisaged the world stopping spinning and everybody flying off, and we didn't really go further down that route. It's an interesting one.

Craig: Yeah. From my interactions that I've had with him, he certainly seems to believe in the idea of a personal God.

John: Christian one too I think.

Craig: Yeah, but I'm not sure how compatible that is with a God who's sort of involved all the time and sort of tends to be everywhere and there is somehow this universal feel.

John: Yeah, an ether God.

Craig: Is it like God is like some sort of AI that's sort of thinking about how all these particles have to move, or does he sort of set up the laws of physics to allow things to operate as they do?

John: Who knows.

Craig: Yes, well I'll certainly be interested in how the debate goes.

John: It isn't really on that though, I mean the subject's not how the universe began or whether God exists, it's whether God and science can be friends. So that's the topic.

Craig: And I guess the majority of theists in the world actually aren't fundamentalists.

John: No, sure.

Craig: So most people I guess at least see some, they don't necessarily see a conflict between belief and science.

John: Even the Vatican has come out and said evolution is true.

Craig: Yes, but I think anybody who is enthusiastic about science is probably going to lean towards at least non-conventional beliefs in God if not atheism.

John: Yes. Incidentally, when the Vatican came out and said that evolution is true, they said “and it was invented by saint Augustine in the 5th Century” or something.

Craig: It's a shame he didn't write it all down, and then Darwin wouldn't have had to come along and write it all down himself.

So where do you see the sort of intersection between Atheism and Skepticism?

John: Well, now that's a very good question. I'm going to talk to you a bit about atheism, because it sounds with the ‘ism' ending as though it ought to be an ideology, like communism, liberalism, socialism, all those other ideologies, but it isn't. It's only got ‘ism' on the end because it inherited it from ‘theism'. So there is no such belief system as ‘atheism'. It's simply non-belief in the God that theists claim exists. We're not convinced that their claims are true. Skepticism is doubt until evidence is produced, so there is a lot of overlap, but of course scepticism is general, whereas Atheism just points a finger at that one claim.

Craig: Yeah, sure.

John: It says convince me.

Craig: Yes, but I think perhaps the problem with that is many people who claim to believe in God feel that they do have evidence for God, and most of them are going to have some personal story about how there was this fantastical, well what we might describe as coincidence, but to them there is some prayer being answered, something that could not possibly happen by chance.

John: Well that's what my talk tonight is on, because it's not true to claim that all believers are stupid because they most certainly aren't, but they have formed the view based on what ever reasoning they like to think counts that there's a good chance that their beliefs are correct. Come to the meeting and I'll explain my attitude towards that. The problem is that, there are a number of areas of disagreement. We disagree over what actually counts as evidence, we disagree over the relative importance of argument and evidence or observation, and this is what my presentation is all about. With some humour thrown in.

Craig: Very good. I think there is also a lot of wishful thinking involved, in that belief in God is comforting because they can then buy into the idea that we are going to live on after death, we're going to see all the relatives that have gone, it's a very comforting idea.

John: Yes. I'm actually enjoying my afterlife right now. If I hadn't had my heart operation, what was it, four years ago? I probably wouldn't still be around.

Craig: Ok, right, what would you rather have? You could be in heaven! Or, perhaps more likely you'd be in Hell.

John: Yeah, I think so.

Craig: In the company of all the other unbelievers.

John: Yes. That's something that annoys me a little bit, because I give credit to my surgeon and his team and the other people see me and say ‘thank God'. But he didn't actually have much to do with it.

Craig: Well I think we've um probably talked for long enough, it's been great talking with you John, and I look forward to actually hearing your presentation tonight!

John: Yes, well thanks for the chin-wag Craig.

Craig: Thank you.