So, I've finally joined the 21st century by buying my first ever 3G smartphone, a Motorola Droid 2. I've been getting a lot of use out of it and I'm happy with the network coverage and connection speed so far. There's also the Android Market, which lists thousands of user-developed applications you can download, everything from games and news readers to compasses and metal detectors (no kidding).

I do have one important complaint, though. There aren't nearly enough atheist-themed apps!

The Market is aswarm with Christian apps: Bible references, daily devotional readings, Christian chat rooms and bulletin boards, phone wallpapers, streaming apps for Christian radio and TV stations, and so on. But atheist- and skeptic-friendly apps are few and far between. Just about the only ones I've found are a pocket debater's guide from the anti-climate-change-denialist site Skeptical Science and an amusing quote database from FSTDT.

So, where are all the atheist app developers? Are they all iPhone users? Or do any readers know about ones I've somehow missed? We need some parity here!

• President Obama signs a law to fight British libel tourism by barring such judgments from being enforced in the U.S.

• My esteemed guest author, Sarah Braasch, has an article in the latest issue of The Humanist on the French burqa ban.

• After a scary brush with mortality, everyone's favorite squid-loving atheist professor is back in action. Visit his blog and leave some get-well-soon comments!

• Did a Catholic priest carry out an IRA bombing? And if so, did the church help cover it up and shield him from justice?

• Susan Jacoby contemplates the theodicy of the bedbug.

• And last but not least, An Apostate's Chapel has this outstanding example of the eloquence, wit and wisdom of Robert Ingersoll, written in response to a Salvation Army-organized vigil of several thousand Christians praying simultaneously for his conversion. (Spoiler: It didn't work!)

Last month, I concluded my post series of chapter-by-chapter responses to Lee Strobel's The Case for a Creator. I'm happy with the way this project turned out, and I'd been wanting to do it again, but I wasn't sure if I had the stomach to tackle another apologetics book in such detail so soon.

Well, fortune favors the bold! Earlier this year, I got an e-mail from a Daylight Atheism commenter who offered to write his own book-length rebuttal. After seeing some of his writing, I decided he'd be a more than worthy contributor to this site. With that in mind, I'd like to introduce B.J. Marshall, who's going to be addressing Francis Collins' The Language of God. (Having given creationists their turn, it seemed only fair to give a theistic evolutionists a chance to prove themselves.)

I'll let B.J. introduce himself in his own words:

With a BA in Economics from Oswego State University, BJ began his career in 1999 working for the Federal Government where he still works. During his career, he obtained a MS in Management from the University of Maryland University College, got Master's Certificates in both Business Analysis and Project Management, and became a Certified Project Management Professional. He currently works as a Business Analyst in IT, where he serves as a liaison between program areas that think they need IT solutions and the IT personnel who actually provide the software applications to meet those needs. Given the Federal Government's stereotypical dysfunction, he'll be busy for a very long time.

BJ grew up Roman Catholic in a small city in rural Upstate New York. He became very active in the church proclaiming the readings at mass, singing in choirs, participating in Small Church Communities, leading a Young Adult Ministry, and in general kicking butt at being Catholic.

He began having serious doubts with his faith about five years ago, when he started studying philosophy and seeing that the claims he held to be true were based on rather poorly grounded assertions. His search for God attained Ludicrous Speed when his wife announced she was pregnant with their son. He read books from both the theist and atheist perspectives, listened to debates and podcasts, and discovered the wealth of information that is the blogosphere.

He decided last summer to come out to his close friends and family. While his friends have been accepting, his parents have actively tried to reconvert him, lovingly giving him "The Case for a Creator" for his birthday (along with a new Bible and a pamphlet for those who have left the church). He found Ebonmuse's rebuttal of Strobel's book to be of great assistance. BJ's parents gave him "The Language of God" as a Christmas gift, and he'd like to return the favor to the Daylight Atheism readership.

He would like to sincerely thank his wife, who is made of 100% awesome, for supporting him throughout his deconversion. He finds it ironic that the person he stood the most to lose through his deconversion was the one he came out to at the onset and relied on for support over the past five years.

B.J.'s first post will appear later today. Stay tuned!

This weekend, I went for a walk at a nature center in the Hudson Valley. The weather was quintessential summer - warm, brilliantly sunny and clear - and the forest was alive with life: swarms of bees, butterflies and moths doing the daily work of pollination, dragonflies darting over the water, a symphony of birds in the trees, even a snapping turtle basking in the sun. This was one of my most cooperative photo subjects, who took the time to pose and display the iridescent photonic crystals that give butterfly wings such striking colors.

Eastern tiger swallowtail (Papilio glaucus), Hudson Highlands Nature Center, July 2010. Photo by the author. Camera details: Canon PowerShot SD1200 IS. Click for larger version.

• Despite the good sense shown by the British Medical Association in lambasting homeopathy at their annual conference last month, the UK National Health Service has announced that it will still pay for water and sugar pills passed off as medicine.

• A court in Utah has thrown out the rape conviction of Mormon cult leader Warren Jeffs, due to a legal technicality, and ordered that the case be retried. Texas is still seeking to have him extradited to face similar charges, so it seems likely that he'll ultimately face justice.

• I was shocked to read of some ultra-Orthodox Israeli communities that are so extreme, they demand that their women wear burqas so as not to arouse the passions of men.

• A Liberty University graduate defends the separation of church and state.

• In more welcome news, the U.K. education secretary has said he's interested in proposals for atheist schools, after Richard Dawkins made such a proposal in response to a law allowing faith-based and community groups to open their own publicly funded schools. And why not? If every church in England has its own schools - the article mentions Anglican, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh and Hindu - why shouldn't there be atheist schools that teach students rationality and critical thinking?

Earlier this month, Greta Christina published a piece on AlterNet, based on my essay "The Theist's Guide to Converting Atheists", that listed things that would convince her of God's existence. She also repeated the challenge I posed to theists - prove that your beliefs are falsifiable by posting a corresponding list of things that would convince you to become an atheist.

The AlterNet post got hundreds of comments, and netted a total of two responses. In this post, I'll briefly analyze them both.

First, there's this essay from Verbose Stoic. I left a comment on his site which is reprinted below, with minor edits:

I've reviewed this list, and I think that rather than meeting my challenge, it emphasizes the point I sought to make by raising it: for most theists, belief in God is a deliberately unfalsifiable construct that bears no relation to the real world.

Your first criterion is that you would accept it if your definition of God was shown to be self-contradictory – but you've more or less said that in that case, you would just change your definition and continue believing. Also, it's not clear to me why mere logical consistency should be your standard for believing. There's an infinite number of self-consistent, non-contradictory entities that nevertheless don't actually exist – unicorns, leprechauns, minotaurs, mermaids, and so on. Why should God be treated according to a different standard?

Meanwhile, your second criterion is so vague as to be useless. You just say "prove that there exists something that is incompatible with the existence of God", without any explanation of what that thing might be or how one would go about proving that it exists. You cite the problem of evil as one potential example, but clearly you're already aware of the problem of evil and don't consider it a persuasive disproof of God, and you don't explain why not or how it would have to be different for you to accept it as such.

Ultimately, you conclude that probably nothing would ever convince you of God's nonexistence ("The qualities of God are such that such disproofs just don’t work", and "my agnosticism makes me skeptical that they would ever work"). That, of course, is exactly the point I wanted to make by writing my essay in the first place. Belief in God is unfalsifiable, not dependent on any evidence in the world, which means, as Sam Harris has said, it's not really a belief about the world at all.

There's also this post, from "allthedeadheroes". My reply, originally sent via e-mail:

I have a couple of comments on this:

1. You said you would give up your belief if you received "Objective evidence that contradicts my theory of God." But you also said that your belief can explicitly accommodate everything science discovers about the world. Would you therefore agree that this criterion is impossible to meet? If not, what sort of evidence would qualify as contradicting your theory of God?

2. You also listed, "Proof that my subjective beliefs were in some way bad for me or the people around me." Would you consider it harmful to encourage people to come to conclusions about what exists in objective reality based on their subjective feelings and sensations? Because I certainly do. That same method of decision-making is what results in people believing that God wants holy war and theocracy, that he commands the oppression of women and gays, that he condones faith-based opposition to science - all because they "feel" strongly that this is what he wants of them. To put it another way, how would you address the issue of people using your same method - that of subjective feeling and experience - to come to entirely different, and undeniably harmful, conclusions?

What's notable about both these replies, which I think stands in sharp contrast to Greta's essay and mine, is how noticeably they avoid contact with the evidence. They're based on definitions, subjective experiences, moral beliefs, philosophies - anything but the facts of the world. They'll go to almost any length rather than make a clear evidentiary commitment to give up belief in God if some concrete, objective criterion is satisfied.

This is all the more noteworthy because, if these beliefs are rationally founded in the first place, it ought to be very easy for a theist to explain what would convince him to give them up. It ought to be a straightforward matter of applying the argument to the best explanation, as I explained in a further comment on Verbose Stoic:

...it is relatively easy for an atheist to say 'If this happens, I’d believe in God' because they can point to an event and use it as a positive proof. That doesn't happen for the negative side of the ledger."

I don't agree that theists have a harder time than atheists in outlining what would change their minds. If you agree that evidence is the link to truth, then it seems to me that this task could be accomplished fairly easily: explain what evidence convinced you to believe in God, and then explain what further evidence would overturn your initial conclusions.

As an analogy, let's say I believe in Bigfoot. Let's also say my belief is premised on several different lines of evidence: videos of hairy man-shaped creatures in the woods, plaster casts of giant footprints in mud, and the testimonies of several eyewitnesses who claim that they saw an anthropoid beast lumber out of the forest and into their backyard.

Now let's say the man who shot that video came forward to confess it was a hoax, created with the help of a friend, and produces a receipt for a costume shop dated the day the video was taken. Let's say he produces clay sculptures of feet that fit the casts that were earlier produced. And let's also say the house where the eyewitnesses live is proven to have been contaminated with ergot mold that would have produced vivid hallucinations in anyone living within.

Clearly, in this case, I no longer have reason to believe in Bigfoot. Every strand of evidence that links my belief to objective reality has been severed, and new evidence points to a better explanation that accounts for the prior evidence more convincingly than my former belief did. Now, I might continue to believe in Bigfoot regardless, asserting that the creature could still exist despite the failure of all the evidence. But, I hope we can agree, that would be irrational at that point.

I'm not suggesting that belief in God could only be overturned by the discovery of a deliberate conspiracy to deceive humanity. But I can readily conceive of the discovery of lines of evidence - in fact, I would argue that such evidence has already been discovered - which adds up to the same result. If you think the theist has the harder task here, I'd venture to say that it's merely because theists, having constructed their beliefs so as to make them immune to disproof, are naturally at a loss when asked what would in fact disprove them.

A few weeks ago, I was alerted by a Google alert to a post, "Conversation With An Atheist", on the site Everyday Christian. Since I'm always interested to find Christians who want to converse with atheists, to see what they have to say about us and to us, I checked it out. It turned out to be a fairly run-of-the-mill creationist argument by a Christian apologist named Jack Wellman.

Since my interest was piqued, I posted a comment in reply to Mr. Wellman, and then another when he responded (you can see them by following the link to the thread). Several others chimed in as well. Wellman kept responding, using the typical creationist tactic of changing the topic to a new argument every time the previous one was refuted. He also posted several remarks that showed a spectacular misunderstanding of evolution, such as inexplicably claiming that the universality of the genetic code was evidence against common descent, rather than one of the strongest pieces of evidence for it. I tried to correct these fallacies in as civil a manner as possible.

However, at some point, it seems that either Wellman or the site moderators decided he wasn't faring well enough in the debate, and simply stopped allowing new comments to be posted. I subscribed to the thread by e-mail and got one final message several days ago, from another contributor complaining that his previous comments had been censored. But when I checked the thread, this comment had been deleted. Since then, no new comments have been allowed to appear.

This was my last comment, which was submitted over a week ago and hasn't been posted. There's been no explanation from the site moderators as to why it was rejected:

"And so you, evolutionists, and biologists had expected to see something that would link a primitive ancestor to the middle Cambrian animal Pikaia. Explain the archeological evidence that Pikaia had a less-complex ancestor then."

Easily done: Haikouella isn't an ancestor of Pikaia. You've jumped to the erroneous conclusion that a species living at time X must necessarily have been the ancestor of a species at time X+Y.

If you really want to understand this, Jack, I'm happy to explain it. Evolution rarely, if ever, works in a single, smooth trajectory of change - species A changes into species B, which changes into species C, and so on. Instead, what we usually see is a path of descent like a branching bush: species A radiates into species B1, B2, B3... and so on. Most of these go extinct, but B2, say, speciates into C1, C2, and C3, and again, some of the daughter species go extinct and others diverge in their own ways. But species don't have fixed lifespans, and there's nothing to dictate how long a particular species will survive before it goes extinct. There may still be living species from the A or B generation existing side-by-side with far more advanced descendants. It's like having an uncle who's younger than you: for humans, it's unusual but certainly possible. But in evolution, it's downright common.

For obvious reasons, it's difficult to reconstruct an exact line of descent from fossils, just as you probably couldn't put together an exact family tree just by looking at photographs. It's possible that either Pikaia or Haikouella is the common ancestor of all vertebrates, or it may be another species we haven't discovered yet. But what's certain is that evolution was doing a lot of experimenting with chordates in the Cambrian, and what's equally certain is that we came from one of those lineages, because true vertebrates - primitive fish called ostracoderms - start appearing in the Late Cambrian and then in greater variety in the next period, the Ordovician. This was why I wrote "Pikaia or one very like it" - all this detail is what lies behind that little phrase.

"Irises and humans have 25% of the same DNA, so based upon your faulty logic, we should be at least 1/4th part Iris."

It would be more accurate to say that irises and humans are very similar when it comes to the most basic functions of life, which is true, and is a prediction of evolution via universal common descent. Really, why are you so surprised by this? Sure, irises and humans don't look much alike, but at the lowest levels of organization, we have a lot in common.

We're both made out of eukaryotic cells. We both store genetic information in DNA, copy it into messenger RNA, and transcribe that RNA into proteins. We both use ATP as the cellular currency of energy. We both share basic components of cellular metabolism like glycolysis and the Krebs cycle. We have these and many other traits in common because we (that is to say, animals and plants) are both descended from an ancestral eukaryote that did all these things. We've both inherited a common toolbox of genes for performing the basic functions of life - genes that perform functions so basic, it would be essentially impossible for evolution to change them in any major way - and as the human and iris lines diverged, we each added our own specializations on top of that.

"Incidentally, you failed to mention the fact that the genetic code for protein-coding genes is nearly universal in eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Millions of alternative genetic codes exist, so why do all organisms have nearly the same one?"

Again: because we're all descended from a common ancestor. This is actually one of the most powerful lines of evidence for evolution. Why do you think it should be a problem for us?

Note that an omnipotent creator could easily have created every single species with a completely different genetic code, a completely different way of turning genes into protein. That's the kind of evidence that would prove evolution impossible. Instead, what we find is near universality, with just a few very minor variations - the only signature we could reasonably expect from a process of descent with modification.

If you see anything so inflammatory in this comment that a site moderator would have cause to reject it, please tell me what it is, because I'm stumped. The only conclusion I can draw is that Jack Wellman realized he wasn't doing well and didn't want to deal with any further criticism, and prevailed on the site admins to stop letting it through. (I've also saved a copy of the thread in case they go back and delete earlier comments, which wouldn't surprise me at this point.)

Sadly, in my experience, this isn't uncommon. I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that it's pointless to debate creationists and other religious fundamentalists in any forum that they control, because they'll shut down the discussion as soon as they sense they're losing, even if the contrary comments are polite and on topic. They simply can't be trusted to allow a fair and open debate; they have too much to lose. And this isn't true just on web forums, but in wider society, where religious believers constantly try to shut down criticism with blasphemy laws, "hate speech" claims, threats, and every other method fair or foul available to them.

After some searching, I found Mr. Wellman's own site. I've sent him an e-mail to let him know about this post and to invite him to continue the debate here, or even just to explain why my comments stopped being posted. I don't expect much to come of it, but we'll have to see.

The 57th edition of the Humanist Symposium has been posted at Unequally Yoked (a great concept for a blog in its own right!). Go check it out, link to it if you see fit, and thank the host for all her fine work.

With that said, I have to say a few words about the future of the Humanist Symposium. I started this carnival back in April 2007 because I believed, and still do believe, that there ought to be a more prominent platform for writing on humanism and the positive side of atheism. I'm happy to do the bookkeeping work of scheduling and running the carnival as long as there's an equal response from the community.

But in the last few months, I've noticed a trailing off of interest - both in the volume of submissions, and especially in the number of people volunteering to host. When the carnival started up, it was routinely the case that there were hosts for many months out. But lately, there have only been hosts for one or two editions in advance, if that, and the next edition has no host at all as of yet. It's not that there's no more writing on positive atheism; I see it all the time. But it may be that the carnival itself hasn't caught fire among the nonreligious blogosphere as a way of promoting it.

There are several bloggers whom I think really get the mission of the Humanist Symposium, and who have been very diligent in hosting and sending in submissions. I do appreciate their efforts. But I'm hoping for it to be supported by a broader, organic community, not just a dedicated core of a few, and I haven't been seeing that these past months.

So, I put it to you: Is this the end of the road for the Humanist Symposium? Three-plus years is a pretty good run for any blog carnival, I think. Has this carnival run its course? Should it be discontinued?