NHS Tayside – cutting 500 jobs in the next year in a £30million economy drive – has advertised for a “specialty doctor in homeopathy,” who is required to hold only two sessions a week.

The board insists the £68,000-a-year homeopathic specialist, based in Dundee, will bring “real benefits” to people who are recovering from illnesses such as cancer.

[...]

A British Medical Association Scotland spokesman said: “The BMA’s recently adopted policy states the Association believes there should be no further NHS funding for homeopathy.

“The basis for this is that homeopathic remedies don’t have a scientific evidence base to support their use.

“The BMA believes limited and scarce NHS resources should only be used to support medicines and treatment shown to be effective.”

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/192956/NHS-alternative-therapy-blast

The British Humanist Association position on homeopathy is that NHS funding should not be directed to delivering homeopathic remedies where the overwhelming evidence is that they offer no clinical benefit or function only as a placebo.

The BHA has criticised Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm – or rather bodies which appear to reward it for its anti-scientific displays and advocacy of Creationism – on a couple of occasions. Today, Ann Widdecombe interprets this as being anti-free speech.

(If criticising something means you’re trying to “silence” it, then isn’t that exactly what she’s doing…?)

Thus spake Ann Widdecombe:

Has anyone noticed that what the opponents of religion really want is that Christianity should be silent? Last week it was reported that the British Humanist association has condemned an award given to Noah’s ark Zoo, a creationist centre near Bristol.

The zoo has put on such an imaginative [very imaginative!] and educational [um...] display that the Council for Learning Outside the Classroom has issued it with a mark of recognition. Those who run the zoo have established workshops which cover the national science curriculum but do not include discussion of religion and do not promote the extreme creationist view that the world was created 6,000 years ago. In other words it is a moderate, education-focused organisation that challenges children’s minds and produces evidence from fossils.

Actually the zoo’s owner, Anthony Bush, told the Church Times that “From the outside, our farm is not overtly Christian. But, from the inside, we are very strongly Christian. I am a Creationist, and we see the farm as a mission station to give people scientific permission to believe in God.” Displays within the main part of the zoo explain the “30 reasons why apes are not related to man” against all contemporary scientific evidence, and a scale model of Noah’s Ark, built to “biblical proportions”, features dinosaurs climbing aboard.

The British Humanist association says the award is inappropriate merely because the zoo concentrates on creation. In short the British Humanist association does not believe that children should be allowed even to discuss creation or to be exposed to any evidence that might support it.

Actually the BHA policy on, for example, Religious Education, is that children should indeed be informed and, most importantly, discuss the details that make up religious belief systems, that ideally this would form part of a broader subject that would be part of the national curriculum (RE currently is not) and would be inclusive of secular worldviews.

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/192408/Don-t-condemn-all-debate-as-religious-propaganda

The British Humanist Association has previously criticised the Noah’s Ark zoo for its Creationist material. The zoo was expelled from BIAZA (British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums) after it failed to cooperate on alleged links with a circus featuring tigers and was found to have buried a tiger’s carcas on its grounds, against regulations. The zoo has been cleared of related cruelty charges but the local council has imposed seven additional conditions on the zoo’s license to ensure that it complies with the Secretary of State’s Standards of Modern Zoo Practice (SSSMZP).

A kitemark devised to help teachers find suitable school trip destinations has been awarded to a Christian zoo accused of promoting creationism.

Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm in Wraxall, near Bristol, is among the latest organisations to receive the Learning Outside the Classroom “quality badge”, developed by the last Government.

The zoo already runs sessions for more than 15,000 pupils a year from key stage 1 to A-level.

But it has attracted controversy for its views on evolution and creation, arguing that science has tried to “remove any notion of God from our understanding of life”.

“This is unjustified and we look to put the case for a Creator across to those who wish to investigate,” the zoo’s website says.

It argues that while evolution has taken place, it cannot explain the origins of life. Elsewhere, the website challenges fossil evidence and quotes widely from the Bible.

The quality badge is designed to help teachers plan trips. Organisations have to demonstrate that they offer high-quality learning experiences and manage risk effectively.

James Gray, education officer at the British Humanist Association (BHA), criticised the Council for Learning Outside the Classroom (CLOtC), the educational charity that awards the badges, for its decision.

“It is entirely inappropriate that it should support an establishment that advances creationism and seeks to discredit a wide variety of established scientific facts that challenge their religious views,” said Mr Gray.

“Teachers and parents look to the council for assurance that children will experience high-quality educational visits that meet the relevant government guidelines. Awarding this zoo a quality badge risks exposing hundreds of children to anti-scientific dogma.”

Continues: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6052399

The British Humanist Association has previously criticised the Noah’s Ark zoo for its Creationist material. The zoo was expelled from BIAZA (British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums) after it failed to cooperate on alleged links with a circus featuring tigers and was found to have buried a tiger’s carcas on its grounds, against regulations. The zoo has been cleared of related cruelty charges but the local council has imposed seven additional conditions on the zoo’s license to ensure that it complies with the Secretary of State’s Standards of Modern Zoo Practice (SSSMZP).

The government has released its eagerly anticipated response to the Science and Technology Committee’s Evidence Check on Homeopathy and, incredibly, it’s even worse than I thought it would be. The verdict is “business as usual”, with the main recommendations of the committee ignored in a fog of confusion and double-think.

You get a sense of this confusion very early on, with lines like: “given the geographical, socioeconomic and cultural diversity in England, [policy on homeopathy] involves a whole range of considerations including, but not limited to, efficacy.” I actually have no idea what this means – do medicines work differently in Norfolk from the way they work in Hampshire? The report doesn’t elaborate.

Continues: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jul/27/choice-fetish-homeopathy-policy

Oh, how I loves me an alt-med smackdown: at a meeting of the British Medical Association’s junior doctors, Dr. Tom Dolphin, deputy chairman, said:

Homeopathy is witchcraft. It is a disgrace that nestling between the National Hospital for Neurology and Great Ormond Street [in London] there is a National Hospital for Homeopathy which is paid for by the NHS [National Health Service].

Ha! I couldn’t have said it better myself. Despite what homeopaths say, homeopathy has been shown beyond any reasonable doubt to have no effect above that of a placebo. That won’t stop homeopaths from still claiming it works; they’ll use anecdotes, they’ll use evidence distorted and twisted into a Möbius strip, or they’ll simply make stuff up.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/05/17/british-medical-association-homeopathy-is-witchcraft/

The regulatory body for pharmacists in NI has proposed that patients be told that homeopathic products do not work, other than having a placebo effect.

The draft guidance comes following a report on homeopathy published earlier this year by the House of Commons Science committee.

It reviewed the evidence base for homeopathy and concluded that it was “not an efficacious form of treatment.”

Pharmacists are to be consulted about their views on the guidance.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8640582.stm

It was announced yesterday that the philosopher Antony Flew died on 8th April following a long illness. Flew was long-regarded as one of Britain’s finest philosophical proponents of rational atheism, and a widely respected humanist. He epitomised a deeply British approach to academic philosophy: rationalist, empiricist, closely argued in analytic prose.

Flew often criticised afterlife beliefs, and once told the Sunday Times, “I don’t want a future life.” But on earth at least, Antony Flew’s work and reputation seem destined to remain live issues. Once controversial for this stalwart atheism, it is the final work bearing his name which has attracted most criticism and controversy in recent years. The Christian ghost writers of There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind, have been accused of foisting Intelligent Design-inspired deism on a philosopher whose memory and philosophical faculties were failing.

But There is a God was preceded by several years of muddy and conflicting reports about Flew’s  wavering views. Whatever the truth, it has become an acrimonious battle for the mind and soul of one man, perhaps a battle which – like attempts to claim for atheism or theism the personal beliefs of Einstein (or to disown those of Hitler) – will be waged for generations.

Antony flew

Throughout most of his career Flew criticised religious truth-claims for their lack of falsifiability (for a true believer, nothing seems to count against their god). He championed the “presumption of atheism” as a default position on religious matters. Flew’s essay Theology and Falsification is required reading for theologians and philosophers of religion – apparently the most quoted essay on philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century – and indeed it is written plainly enough that it features in many of the more open-minded school RE lessons. His book Atheistic Humanism pulled together various of his papers against religious beliefs, before moving on to the practice and theory of Humanism and exploring live ethical and political issues.

Flew’s work was partly influenced by his early teachers, in particular Gilbert Ryle. His longstanding humanism was reflected in his involvement with organisations such as the Rationalist Press Association. He had various hobbyhorses, and many found him obsessional. He detested the progressive, egalitarian ethos of the late 1960s and 70s, supported the cold war and lamented the state of education.

… Many former colleagues and students remembered him with great respect. One acknowledged him as having high principles and high standards, always following arguments where they led him. Another, then a novice lecturer at Keele, noted his helpfulness, in spite of political differences. A former student recalled how, in 1962, he boomed at a bemused philosophy class that “sex … is a very dangerous thing”, fearing that it would interfere with studying. But his views on abortion and homosexual law reform were liberal, and he was a trenchant critic of the Roman Catholic church’s teaching on contraception.

– from the Guardian obituary

In the new millennium Flew’s philosophical trajectory performed a slow burn about-turn. As early as 2001 rumours spread that his “negative atheism” was being chipped away by supposed evidence that there might, just might, be a creator god. In a short essay, “Sorry to Disappoint but I’m Still an Atheist!“, the mild-mannered philosopher rejected these claims of his conversion. (Rejected them “vehemently”, according to the Telegraph obituary, but this sensational description shows an unfamiliarity with Flew’s character and  doesn’t bear out in the language of the piece.) Flew wrote:

I can suggest only one possible source of the rumours. Several weeks ago I submitted to the Editor of Philo (The Journal of the Society of Humanist Philosophers) a short paper making two points which might well disturb atheists of the more positive kind. The point more relevant here was that it can be entirely rational for believers and negative atheists to respond in quite different ways to the same scientific developments.

After outlining his reasons why neither atheists nor theists would be converted by cosmological Fine Tuning arguments, he concludes:

In short, I recognize that developments in physics coming on the last twenty or thirty years can reasonably be seen as in some degree confirmatory of a previously faith-based belief in god, even though they still provide no sufficient reason for unbelievers to change their minds. They certainly have not persuaded me.

This is at best a double-edged, perhaps even slightly confused refutation of his alleged conversion, conceding as it does that some scientific findings would count as evidence for theism – if only for theists. Looking back as we do from the age of the Four Horsemen, Flew’s 2001 atheism may sound like agnosticism to many, closer to not being a theist than to active disbelief in any god:

I remain still what I have been now for over fifty years, a negative atheist. By this I mean that I construe the initial letter in the word ‘atheist’ in the way in which everyone construes the same initial letter in such words as ‘atypical’ and ‘amoral’. For I still believe that it is impossible either to verify or to falsify – to show to be false – what David Hume in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion happily described as “the religious hypothesis.” The more I contemplate the eschatological teachings of Christianity and Islam the more I wish I could demonstrate their falsity.

Many popular humanist philosophers today (think A C Grayling, Stephen Law, Nigel Warburton, Julian Baggini) seem quite happy to regard non-falsifiability as just one tool in an armament against gods, and non-falsifiability is no bar to offering plenty of active reasons to be skeptical. Today, philosophical complaints about the non-falsifiability in principle of god-beliefs is likely to sit alongside robust arguments against God, like the argument from suffering which had indeed compelled Flew himself in earlier days.

Over the following years the picture became more confused.

Flew’s belief was in deism, involving a remote creator who takes no interest in human affairs.

Flew said he was impressed by the work of Gerald Schroeder, a physicist and Jewish theologian who wrote “The Hidden Face of God,” published in 2001.

“He pointed out the improbable statistics involved and the pure chances that have to occur. It’s simply not on to think this could occur simply by chance,” the Sunday Times quoted Flew as saying.

– from the Los Angeles Times obituary

Despite the 2001 claim, “I’m Still an Atheist!”, by 2004 in an interview with Gary Habermas for the journal of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, things had changed. Habermas and Flew had been friends for some time. Flew first says, “I don’t believe in the God of any revelatory system”, but goes  on to answer a question about theistic revelation:

Yes. I am open to it, but not enthusiastic about potential revelation from God. On the positive side, for example, I am very much impressed with physicist Gerald Schroeder’s comments on Genesis 1. [Endnote references: Gerald L. Schroeder, The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom.] That this biblical account might be scientifically accurate raises the possibility that it is revelation.

The book by Schroeder, which apparently so influenced the great philosopher, interprets the six days of Biblical Creation as billions of years corresponding with a Big Bang model of the universe and was dismissed by Victor J Stenger (among many other skeptical critics) as  ”fitting the Bible to the data” and reading at times like a “parody” of itself.

By the end of the interview, Gary Habermas asks if “there is any chance that you might in the end move from theism to Christianity?” The once proud atheist apparently doesn’t bat an eyelid at being described as a theist, but he does answer that he probably won’t become a Christian theist:

I think it’s very unlikely, due to the problem of evil. But, if it did happen, I think it would be in some eccentric fit and doubtfully orthodox form: regular religious practice perhaps but without belief.

‘Deist’ seems to be the best fit by this point.

But believers waiting to welcome this most prodigal of sons back into the fold were to be disappointed. Flew’s conversion did not embrace such concepts as Heaven, good and evil or the afterlife – let alone divine intervention in human affairs. His God was strictly minimalist – very different from “the monstrous oriental despots of the religions of Christianity and Islam”, as he liked to call them. God may have called his creation into existence, then, but why did he bother? To that question, it seemed, Flew had no answer.

– from the Telegraph obituary

His view of Christianity had not changed: he still could not accept the God who revealed himself, and intervened in the world, and he still admired the moral force of the tradition. He had no such admiration for Islam, which, he said, is “best described in a Marxian way as the uniting and justifying ideology of Arab imperialism”.

– from the Times obituary

In 2006 Flew’s signature was associated with a joint, open letter to Tony Blair calling for the teaching of Intelligent Design in UK schools. And finally in 2007, with the publication of There Is a God, it appeared that the journey from ardent atheist and humanist to religious apologist was complete.

There Is a God details some already well-rehearsed Arguments from Design. According to the book’s most infamous critic, it “is perhaps the handiest primer ever written on the science (many would say pseudoscience) of religious belief.” It’s just that Flew isn’t really the author. This critic is Mark Oppenheimer, the historian who, shortly after publication, visited Antony Flew and writing in the New York Times upped the ante on Flew’s legacy forever.

Oppenheimer damned Flew’s co-author Roy Abraham Varghese as the kind of “ghost writer” who takes complete possession of the ostensible author. Oppenheimer describes finding Flew a shadow of his former self, unable to remember key names and events not just from his philosophical career but even from the new book. The impression is of a mind approaching senility, without the energy or the wherewithal to construct a new chapter, let alone a full book. Debate about the battle for Flew’s soul was already raging and Oppenheimer acknowledges this, but his description of events puts him firmly on one side.

The version you prefer will depend on how you interpret a story that began 20 years ago, when some evangelical Christians found an atheist who, they thought, might be persuaded to join their side. In the intellectual tug of war that ensued, Flew himself — a continent away, his memory failing, without an Internet connection — had no idea how fiercely he was being fought over or how many of his acquaintances were calling or writing him just to shore up their cases. … With his powers in decline, Antony Flew, a man who devoted his life to rational argument, has become a mere symbol, a trophy in a battle fought by people whose agendas he does not fully understand.

Investigating how Flew came to write such a surprising book, Oppenheimer describes Flew’s correspondence with Richard Carrier. Carrier, a skeptic who took it upon himself to investigate the earlier rumours of Flew’s theism, had exchanged numerous letters with Flew following the 2004 dabblings in theism. Flew had responded in a way which Carrier could only interpret as warped by too much theist propaganda. Carrier was exasperated.

Flew, he sees, has been taken to dinner by the theists, has been fed questionable science and swallowed it with pleasure. Carrier is fighting a rear-guard action, via snail mail, from a continent away.

Carrier urged Flew to take back responsibility and reconsider the state of the science and the direction of his philosophy.

Perhaps the single most damning piece of evidence of the extent to which Flew might have been manipulated by a theist in-crowd comes from the fact that a few simple nudges from Carrier actually worked! Flew wrote back to say he had been mistaken in trusting his Christian correspondents; that Schroeder and his modern-science-is-Genesis theory obviously wasn’t up to date, and that he would withdraw the forthcoming introduction to a new edition of one of his books. As a consequence, a passage about his deism was indeed dropped from publication. For Oppenheimer the implication is clear. Flew was in a state of severe suggestibility, whether to his multiple theist correspondents or to the skeptic Carrier. Flew was unable to assess new writing for himself.

In further correspondence with Carrier, Flew spoke of retracting other recent statements on religion, including an endorsement for a book by his 2004 interviewer, Gary Habermas. Revealingly, Flew refers to his own “decline” as an inhibiting factor, and in the context of his quickly-reversed positions on the biggest questions of his philosophical life, it’s hard to disagree.

“The statement which I most regret making during the last few months was the one about Habermas’s book on the alleged resurrection of Jesus bar Joseph. I completely forgot Hume’s to my mind decisive argument against all evidence for the miraculous. A sign of physical decline.”

Flew had been a leading authority on the philosophy of David Hume.

But by the time There Is a God was published, with Varghese as credited co-author, Flew seemed to have forgotten his re-conversion to atheism. The book happily cites Schroeder, as well as Gary Haldane and Varghese himself. Oppenheimer points out darkly that having previously forgotten even his beloved Hume, the Flew of There Is a God is ”deeply read in many philosophers — John Leslie, John Foster, Thomas Tracy, Brian Leftow — rarely if ever mentioned in his letters, articles or books. It’s as if he’s a new man.”

When Oppenheimer visited Flew he asked him, he admits, questions to test his faculties, which may seem cruel.

In “There Is a God,” Flew quotes extensively from a conversation he had with Leftow, a professor at Oxford. So I asked Flew, “Do you know Brian Leftow?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think I do.”

“Do you know the work of the philosopher John Leslie?” Leslie is discussed extensively in the book.

Flew paused, seeming unsure. “I think he’s quite good.” But he said he did not remember the specifics of Leslie’s work.

“Have you ever run across the philosopher Paul Davies?” In his book, Flew calls Paul Davies “arguably the most influential contemporary expositor of modern science.”

“I’m afraid this is a spectacle of my not remembering!”

… As he himself conceded, he had not written his book.

“This is really Roy [Varghese]’s doing,” he said, before I had even figured out a polite way to ask. “He showed it to me, and I said O.K. I’m too old for this kind of work!”

Roy Varghese had twenty years in which to foist God-friendly works of pseudo-science on Flew, Oppenheimer argues. But he is careful not to accuse the co-author of outright manipulation.

To believe that Flew has been exploited is not to conclude that his exploiters acted with malice. If Flew in his dotage was a bit gullible, Varghese had a gullibility of his own. An autodidact with no academic credentials, Varghese was clearly thrilled to be taken seriously by an Oxford-trained philosopher; it may never have occurred to him that so educated a mind could be in decline.

Modelling his philosophical martyrdom on Socrates, Flew had always said he would take the evidence where it led him. At some point around twenty years ago, the evidence Flew was exposed to started to come in weighted measures with a very particular slant. Did Roy Varghese and Gary Habermas and others at Biola University manipulate Flew over years as he succumbed to the mental erosion of time, culminating at last in a book written, in essence, by themselves, espousing their own views?

There is something ghoulish, let alone highly speculative, about trying to determine from a distance and in retrospect exactly when (if ever) a person can be said to have lost their mental autonomy. It seems already that people will point to this interview or that book or the other letter to argue that Flew was manipulated on the one hand, or that he came to his own theistic conclusions on the other. The patchy change in his language and outlook over at least a decade probably points to a mixture of the two, at least until the ghost writing of There Is a God.

If someone did write and publish a book which essentially committed identity theft against a great philosopher then that is tragic, and it is important. But as Flew himself would undoubtedly never have disagreed, the philosophy is more important than the fate of one man. Really,  the clues about Flew’s own personal beliefs should pale into insignificance against  the body of work.

We have one work of dubious authorship, to set against a lifetime of truly great, analytic British philosophy.

Bob Churchill is Head of Membership at the British Humanist Association.

The science writer Simon Singh has won his court of appeal battle for the right to rely on the defence of fair comment in a libel action.

Singh was accused of libel by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) over an opinion piece he wrote in the Guardian in April 2008.

He suggested there was a lack of evidence for the claims some chiropractors make on treating certain childhood conditions including colic and asthma.

The BCA alleged that Singh had in effect accused its leaders of knowingly supporting bogus treatments.

In May last year, high court judge Mr Justice Eady, in a preliminary ruling in the dispute, held that Singh’s comments were factual assertions rather than expressions of opinion – which meant he could not use the defence of fair comment.

Today, the lord chief justice, Lord Judge, master of the rolls Lord Neuberger and Lord Justice Sedley allowed Singh’s appeal, ruling that the high court judge had “erred in his approach”.

Singh described the ruling as “brilliant” but added: “It is extraordinary this action has cost £200,000 to establish the meaning of a few words.”

The Singh case has become a cause celebre for science journalism and prompted calls for reforms to the defamation law to keep it out of scientific disputes.

Continues: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/apr/01/simon-singh-wins-libel-court

Rambling Daily Mail article gawps – without a hint of irony, let alone critical reflection – at dancer who claims regular homeopathy and the wearing of “infrared” knickers keeps them healthy.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1256435/As-MPs-NHS-scrap-homeopathy-dance-boss-seen-GP-42-years-thanks-natural-remedies.html

If you’ve been following the campaign to stop the funding for homeopathy on the NHS, and the mass overdose outside branches of Boots, you’ll be delighted to hear that Parliament’s Science and Technology Select Committee, after hearing all the evidence, has called for the complete withdrawal of NHS funding and official licencing of homeopathy.

Peter Fisher, director of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, told the committee that the remedies’ efficacy depended on how you shook them (Note: shaken, not stirred):

Dr Fisher stated that the process of ‘shaking is important’ but was unable to say how much shaking was required. He said ‘that has not been fully investigated’ but did tell us that ‘You have to shake it vigorously [...] if you just stir it gently, it does not work.

The blog goes on to say that:

Note that the BHA referred to in the news report is the British Homeopathic Association, not the British Humanist Association. I have, however, been dismayed to learn from a reliable source that there are members of the latter organisation who use homeopathy:

… a surprising number of humanists dabble with altmed … because they haven’t really grasped the point about scientific enquiry and evidence, etc.

Oh dear. get your brains in gear people!

http://www.suffolkhands.org.uk/node/1175

The British Humanist Association has in fact welcomed the Select Committee’s findings, with the BHA’s Head of Public Affairs quoted as saying, “There has been enough testing of homeopathy to provide plenty of evidence showing that it is not efficacious. Public policy should be rational and evidence-based and the government should be ensuring that public funds are spent on treatments that have been proven to work, and on research that is backed up by scientific evidence. To do otherwise is irrational, unethical and a waste of public money.” http://www.humanism.org.uk/news/view/490

Suffolk Humanists and Secularists are affiliated to the British Humanist Association.

Simon Singh

Maria MacLachlan reports on the case of the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) versus Simon Singh.

A year ago, I was blissfully ignorant of how hazardous it can be to write about health and medicine. That changed in May 2009, when I attended the preliminary hearing of the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) v Simon Singh. The case has become a cause célèbre for science writers and may serve as the catalyst for the reform of England’s draconian libel laws, which are having a catastrophic effect on two things dear to any humanist’s heart: free speech and scientific inquiry.

Simon Singh is a science journalist and co-author of Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial. In April 2008, he wrote a piece for the Guardian entitled, Beware the Spinal Trap, which challenged a number of claims made by the British Chiropractic Association. The full story can be found on the Sense about Science website but, in a nutshell, Simon argued that the claims made by the BCA were unsupportable, the BCA were less than pleased and threatened legal action — not against the newspaper, but against Simon Singh personally. The Guardian offered the BCA a 500-word right of reply to Singh’s piece as well as an offer of a clarification in the newspaper’s ‘Corrections and Clarifications’ column. The BCA turned down both offers, demanding that Simon retract his comments and apologise. Simon, convinced that the evidence is on his side, decided to fight the action.

Trick or Treatment by Simon Singh

Last week, I attended the latest pre-trial hearing which, because of its importance, was heard by a panel of eminent judges presided over by the Lord Chief Justice. Their decision on the meaning of the words Simon used in the article will be a crucial one and is expected to be delivered in few weeks’ time. At the hearing, the Lord Chief Justice proclaimed he was “baffled” as to why the BCA had brought this action rather than take up the offer of a reply at the time. Why didn’t they just write an article arguing that Dr Singh was wrong and present the evidence that would give the lie to his comments? His Lordship added that, if the case does eventually go to full trial, it will end up costing either Dr Singh or the BCA a vast amount of money. It has been estimated that Simon will end up paying between half a million and a million pounds if he loses.

So why didn’t the BCA use their right of reply? A widely held view — and one that I have come to share — is that England’s libel laws make it easy to stifle criticism, silence challengers and close down important debates about issues concerning public health. It’s expensive to resort to legal muscle but the threat to do so is usually enough to shut someone up. Unfortunately for the BCA, their decision to sue a wealthy high-profile scientist who believes he has the weight of scientific evidence behind him, is backfiring. Simon has said he wants his day in court and that he can finance his defence himself, which is fortunate because even winning would be likely to cost more than what most of us can afford.

A couple of years ago, the Guardian itself was sued by Matthias Rath over articles written about him by Ben Goldacre, who writes the Guardian’s ‘Bad Science’ column and has authored a book of the same name. Rath is a German physician and vitamin pill salesman who went to South Africa, where 6.3 million people are HIV positive and 180,000 die of AIDs each year. Once there, Rath launched a misinformation campaign claiming the life-prolonging antiretroviral (ARV) drugs used to treat HIV patients were actually poisoning them and they should be taking his vitamin pills instead. The Guardian ended up a staggering £175,000 worse off for having successfully defended the action.

Dr Goldacre had the Guardian behind him while Dr Singh is wealthy enough to reassure supporters that he will be “damaged but not destroyed” if he loses. But one man who will lose everything if the judgement goes against him is British cardiologist, Dr Peter Wilmshurst, who is being sued by the American manufacturers of a cardiac device that Dr Wilmshurt had investigated and found wanting. He reported his negative findings to a cardiology conference in the USA and his comments were reported on an American health website. On the grounds that the website might be seen in the UK, the manufacturers are able to use England’s libel laws to sue him. Dr Wilmshurst can’t afford to defend this action and faces financial ruin if he loses but he won’t back down, he says, because he’s a doctor and has taken the Hippocratic Oath.

Unsurprisingly, the action against Dr Wilmshurst has sent ripples of fear through the hearts of editors of scientific journals, who now have to think twice about publishing negative reports of pharmaceutical products or not publishing reports they think are flawed.

Make no mistake; nobody is safe from England’s libel laws. It’s not just professional scientists, doctors or writers who are silenced by them. Everyone who writes a blog is vulnerable but it tends to be those bloggers writing about serious subjects who receive threatening letters from lawyers and who have no option but to remove articles exposing quacks and fraudsters.

In August 2008, the United Nations Human Rights Committee said England’s libel laws “served to discourage critical media reporting on matters of serious public interest, adversely affecting the ability of scholars and journalists to publish their work, including through the phenomenon known as libel tourism”.

An example of libel tourism would be Roman Polanski, who has been a fugitive from US justice since 1978, when he confessed to an American court that he’d had unlawful sex with a 13-year old girl. He fled the country before he was sentenced but, rather surprisingly, he still thought he had a reputation worth defending. In 2004, he was able to use England’s libel laws to successfully sue an American magazine, without having to set foot on English soil because our legal justice system obligingly allowed him to give evidence by video link from Paris, where he resides.

I’ve been unable to find a single judge, lawyer or politician who has spoken or written in defence of our libel laws and it remains a mystery to me why it is taking so long to do anything about them. We need libel laws designed to protect individuals from being hurt by malice and the publication of falsehoods. We don’t need libel laws that intimidate the scientific community from publicly challenging dangerous nonsense. As BHA distinguished supporter, Professor Raymond Tallis, argued recently in the Times, the place to settle disputes over scientific claims is the laboratory not the courtroom.

I urge everyone who is appalled and embarrassed by England’s repressive libel laws to support the Campaign for Libel Reform: spread the word, sign the petition and write to your MP.

Maria MacLachlan is BHA celebrant, a blogger and the creator of the Think Humanism website and forum.

The British Humanist Association has supported the Campaign for Libel Reform.

I must take a moment to report that science writer Simon Singh experienced a very encouraging day at the Court of Appeal yesterday, in a pre-trial hearing on the meaning of words in his 2008 Guardian article for which the British Chiropractic Association are suing him for libel.

Before dipping into the positives, it’s worth repeating some cautionary words from Singh himself, who last night pointed out that ”we are still at a preliminary stage of identifying the meaning of my article. It could easily take another two years before the case is resolved”. However, all the accounts from yesterday’s hearing suggest the case could finally have taken an encouraging turn. The hearing was presided over by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, the Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger and Lord Justice Sedley, which Index on Censorship calls “one of the most high-powered panels of judges ever to preside on a single case”, and according to legal blogger Jack of Kent, “the British Chiropractic Association’s case received a sustained battering by three of the most senior appeal judges in England, all of whom made favourable reference to the need for scientific debate”.

The panel reserved judgement until a later date, but accounts from those present in court suggest that they were sympathetic to Singh’s case. Encouraging words came from the Lord Chief Justice, who stated that he was “surprised” that “the opportunities to put this right have not been taken”, for instance the BCA not taking up the offer of a right to reply in the Guardian. According to Index on Censorship, he stated that “At the end of this someone will pay an enormous amount of money, whether it be from Dr Singh’s funds or the funds of BCA subscribers.”

http://blog.newhumanist.org.uk/2010/02/encouraging-day-in-court-for-simon.html

The Simon Singh / British Chiropractic Association case prompts a Radio 4 progamme to ask if Science is on Trial?

What happens when the free pursuit of answers in scientific research comes face to face with English law? Alan Urry investigates.

Simon Singh, author of Fermat’s Last Theorem and The Code Book, is one of the UK’s most successful science writers. Peter Wilmshurst is a respected cardiologist and has long fought for high ethical standards in scientific research. Francisco Lacerda works in Stockholm studying how children learn to speak. Henrik Thomsen is a Danish radiologist with an interest in kidney disease. They are a disparate group, but what they all have in common is that they have all fallen foul of English law for engaging with what they believe are scientific debates. Lawyers, journalists and scientists are now campaigning for a change to the UK libel laws to protect free speech. Those issuing or threatening the writs say they have commercial reputations to protect. Where should the balance lie?

Listen to the programme until 25th February 2010 at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00qps87/Science_on_Trial/

The Daily Mail hates vaccines. I can’t quite work out why, but any anti-vaccine nonsense they can pick up anywhere gets an instant story. Which is intriguing as the Irish Daily Mail is campaigning for the Irish government to fund the HPV vaccine.

A GP receptionist contracted Myasthenia Gravis six weeks after having the H1N1 vaccine and now is quite debilitated by it. So it must be the vaccine that’s the cause and isn’t it awful how she was advised to get it and is now really disabled. (I’m paraphrasing only very slightly).

Increasingly, I am discovering that the media cannot do nuance. Everything has to be black and white. Almost nothing in life is that straight forward and certainly nothing in medicine. The issue of a potential flu pandemic poses a problem for the media. The question the media has been wrestling with since H1N1 became pandemic is this: Is swine flu like any other flu or potentially the end of the world as we know it? The problem for the media is that the only honest answer to that is “both.”

Story continues: www.angrymob.uponnothing.co.uk/home/70-newspaper-lies/914-the-daily-mail-campaign-to-kill-children

New Humanist magazine on the 10:23 Event.

If it turns out that homoeopathic medicine works, Saturday 30 January is going to go down as a dark and deadly day in the history of British scepticism. For at 10:23am that day, more than 500 sceptics around the country will swallow an entire bottle of homeopathic pills in order to “demonstrate that these ‘remedies’, prepared according to a long-discredited 18th century ritual, are nothing but sugar pills”. But what if the sceptics are wrong? Well, it could be rationalism’s very own Kool-Aid moment…

Of course, the participants in the “10:23 Event” have no such concerns, given the fact that any “active” ingredient present in homeopatic remedies has, as this handy factsheet provided by the organisers explains, been diluted to as little 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 1% of the whole by the time it reaches the shelves of retailers.

But remember, kids, you can overdose on water, so be careful!

http://blog.newhumanist.org.uk/2010/01/sceptics-to-put-alternative-remedies-to.html

Richard Fortey in the TLS reviews Andrew Parker’s The Genesis Engima, which offers the thesis that the Bible is scientifically accurate because the opening of Genesis, with some rough and ready shoe-horning, offers a totally precise (but of course highly poetic) analogy to future scientific discoveries.Richard Fortey is not altogether convinced…

De Luc’s was a perfectly respectable intellectual position for his time (he also coined the word “geology”), but it comes as something of a shock to find Andrew Parker making comparable claims nearly a quarter of a millennium after de Luc. I suspect he has never heard of his intellectual forebear; certainly, his grasp of the history of geology is sketchy.

I should perhaps explain the programme of The Genesis Enigma, so that the basis of the argument can be examined properly. After a revelatory moment in the Sistine Chapel, Parker realized that the sequence of “events” described verse by verse in Genesis corresponded to real events in the history of the solar system and of life on earth. Such was the one-to-one correspondence between the “latest” scientific discoveries and the Authorized Version of the Bible – the relevant page of which provides the only illustration in the book – that the likelihood of the ancient sources arriving at the right sequence of events by chance alone was very small indeed, or so he claims. Therefore, the account in Genesis is, to use the subtitle of the book, “scientifically accurate”. Of course, some allowance must be made for the limitations of understanding that pertained in biblical times.

… The reviewer has a difficult choice when faced with a book like The Genesis Enigma. Should it be given the oxygen of publicity? Or should it be ignored? To treat such a book at length in the TLS is to award it a seriousness it does not really deserve, but what has propelled me to do so is the invocation of science and scientists in support of Parker’s dodgy thesis. It is important that scientific evidence be honestly treated. There is an alarming tendency today to regard science as “just an opinion”. I do think it possible that some anti-rationalists might welcome Parker’s book to show how much a matter of opinion science can be. It is not, of course; it stands or falls on evidence.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6981314.ece