[Travelogue] Antarctica part 7

On our second day at sea heading for the Antarctic peninsula I had a follow up meeting with Richard Dawkins to talk about the proposal I had written up for him a few days earlier.  TL;DR version: he was not interested in participating or even endorsing the idea, but he would be willing to provide some introductions, most notably to The Clergy Project, where he thought I might find a more sympathetic audience.

Since neither of us had anyplace to go I decided to try an audacious experiment.  About three years ago, while on another cruise, I wrote an imaginary dialog between myself and a prominent YouTube atheist who goes by the handle QualiaSoup.  It advances an argument for the proposition that the idea of God has many (but of course not all) of the same properties that God would have if he existed.  Thus one can plausibly claim that God exists if one defines God as an idea, an axiom that many theists would subscribe to.  It's a bit of a stretch, but I think the argument actually holds up pretty well, even after all this time.

I decided to try this argument out on Richard to see how far I got.  (NB: I told him up front what I wanted to do and asked him if he was OK with it.)  TL;DR: I got a lot further than I was expecting to.  I got a little hung up on the circularity of redefining God as the-idea-of-God and had to on-the-fly coin the terms God1 (a supernatural being, which does not exist) and God2 (the idea of God1, which does exist, and which can have real effects, some of them beneficial).  But in the end I ran out of steam and could not convince him that there was a point, that there was a useful distinction to be drawn between fiction and falsehood.  (I think his exact words were, "But what's the point if it isn't true?")  So in the end I took my best shot at reforming Richard Dawkins and I failed.  But I'm grateful that fate afforded me the opportunity.  And the some of the leads he gave me are still active and may result in something some day.  Stay tuned.

In the meantime, the ship had to divert its course to the north because there was much more sea ice coming up from the Weddell Sea than had been expected (almost certainly a consequence of global warming).  Our captain (the coolest captain ever) had an open bridge policy, so I spent some time there watching the crew dodge icebergs. There's a whole terminology associated with ice.  Little pieces of ice are called growlers (I guess because of the sound they make as they scrape against the hull).  Slightly larger chunks of ice are called bergy bits (no, I am not making this up) but I was never entirely clear on where the dividing line was.  There are also lots of different kinds of icebergs, but I won't bore you with the details.

As a result of the unexpected ice our scheduled stop at Elephant Island had to be cancelled and instead we ended up at another one of the South Shetland Islands (I can't remember which one now, but I think it was Nelson Island).  We didn't land there, but we did get a zodiac tour.  I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

(BTW, in case you haven't already realized it, you can click on these images and get larger versions.)