The first instance of the use of this phrase was in response to criticism of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; a standard criticism was that Dawkins had not studied theology and was therefore unqualified to discuss evidence for or against the existence of God. This is fallacious because, although as a non-theologian he is not technically qualified to discuss the nature of God, as a scientist he is extremely qualified to discuss the nature of evidence. Moreover, any discussion on the nature of God (as anything other than a hypothetical entity) depends entirely upon first proving the existence of God as a real and tangible object.
Dawkins himself once said, when referring to the fact that he is not a theologian:[3]
"Most of us happily disavow fairies, astrology, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster without first immersing ourselves in books of Pastafarian theology etc.Credit is given to PZ Myers for this logical fallacy. Following is a recent post by PZ discussing the controversy within the skeptical community on this subject:
John Loftus criticizes the Courtier's Reply. How dare he? I thought it was Holy Atheist Writ by now.
But the Courtier's Reply as an answer for theology needs to be discussed critically. First off, I do not expect anyone to understand any particular theology in order to reject it. We all do this easily. I doubt very much anyone understands all of the religions they reject. I don't. No one does. We reject them all for the same reasons, because they have not met their own burden of proof. So I agree very much that neither PZ Myers nor Richard Dawkins needs to fully understand the various forms of Christianity in order to reject them all. They can certainly use the Courtier's Reply, and for them it's legitimate, as it is for me when rejecting Hinduism, which I know little about. Christians do not fully understand the other Christianities they reject, so why should anyone expect this from skeptics?
But here's the problem. PZ Meyers and Richard Dawkins, and others, have the clout to recommend those of us who do understand the various Christianities that exist who know how to debunk them on their own terms. But perhaps, and I'm only suggesting perhaps, they are so committed to the Courtier's Reply when it comes to their own lack of understanding of Christian theology that they don't realize this will not do if they want to change the religious landscape. If they do, then may I humbly suggest they recommend the work of Biblical scholars like Robert Price, Hector Avalos, Bart Ehrman and others like them, as well as philosophers like John Shook, John Beversluis, Richard Carrier, Keith Parsons, Matt McCormick and others like them. But they can't do it, because they are committed to the Courtier's Reply, and that's a shame. I can embrace the Courtier's Reply when it comes to religions I reject. But given the power and influence of Christianity in particular, they need to recommend and embrace those of us who know it and argue against it. The Courtier's Reply may some day be the blanket response to religion. It isn't yet. Until then let them recommend those of us who do understand the dominant religion of our land, both philosophers and biblical scholars. It takes all of us together with all of our talents, all of our knowledge, and all of our abilities.
No, no, no. Loftus is making the same misinterpretation I've heard from creationists and theologians: that the Courtier's Reply is a call for ignorance and an excuse for not trying to understand religion. It's not. Rather, it's an amusing way to tell someone that they haven't established their premises (the existence of deities), and that all their phantasmagorical elaborations on their fantasies are irrelevant. Cut to the core issue; if you haven't shown that Jesus even existed, it's silly to be arguing about the color of his socks.
I have no disagreement with the approach of the scholars listed above; in fact, I'm a big fan, particularly of Carrier and Avalos. They're taking a different angle: even if we set aside the fundamental fallacy of the premise, we can assay the ramshackle rationalizations and irrational excuses and shoddy scholarship and show that the whole construction is bogus from root to crown.
For me, the Courtier's Reply is sufficient because I'm not wedded to any particular doctrine; it's enough for me to see that the core is rotten and hollow. But I entirely agree that for most religious people, the existence of a god isn't even an issue — it's assumed and taken for granted. What most people have locked into their brains is a pattern of ritual and dogma and pseudohistory so intricate that it obscures the central assumption, and to chip through that we need Biblical scholars who grapple with the details.
We just don't need Bible scholars who layer on more crud.
I used to be a conservative. The operating phrase here is “used to”. I admired them for their stand on limited government. I was such a fool back then.
If you want to ever understand what a true conservative is, look no further than Mark Levin. He is probably the most conservative talk radio show host out there these days and he certainly says a lot of things I do agree with.
But he’s got one huge and potentially fatal flaw when it comes to his views, one that he doesn’t ever reconsider and arrogantly defends at all costs: his support of the military and police force.
And this is the fatal flaw of any conservative you’ll come across. They will blindly and strictly defend the actions of all military and polices forces without question. If you question what they are doing, you will be called a liberal or a nutjob. If you suggest that the weapons and boots of the government could be used against you when you fight for limited government, you are no longer considered a conservative.
The fact is, I’ve had more insults and illogical arguments thrown at me from conservatives rather than liberals. I’m sure I could get a full share from both if I regularly went to the liberal forums, but I guess I had set my expectations too high.
You see, I’m more of an individual than most people would like. I don’t care for fitting my belief system into a specific box. Heck, I have disagreements with Christians over things. I mean, don’t get started on the fallacies and sheer absurdity of Calvinism.
But conservatives are not free thinkers anymore than liberals are. In fact, many libertarians lack any original thought and tend to spout out views that were given to them by smarter men than them. I guess it is just the way of the collective: to look to the smarter people to guide them.
There is a difference though in how the “low Church” members of any group handle opposing views they can’t resolve on their own. When any group has members who are more than willing to resort to insults and not to reason or to simply admit, “I don’t know”, you’ve got Brutals and yahoos and not a group you should associate with.
That is why I have little tolerance for insults in any debate. It’s not that I’m thin-skinned, if I was, I would simply hunt down your bosses and get you fired, much like what Dave Ramsey did to Matt Collins. It’s got more to do with the fact that once the insults start flying, I know that I’ve won the debate and that there is no point in moving forward.
But this is how Mark Levin operates. If you make any reasonable argument against him, he’ll insult you and shut you down. He’s probably banned more dissenters from his Facebook page than I have followers on my twitter account (it’s only less than two hundred though). But if you were to read some of the vile shit his followers throw at their opponents, the rules become clear: you can only be a bastard if you agree with me. This is how most popular pundits operate and it’s getting sickening, regardless of their ideology.
But it is for that specific reason that I abandoned conservatives, libertarians, anarchists, and just about everything else: it’s because I have yet to find a group that doesn’t treat its opponents like garbage.
And yes, I used to be an asshole myself to a lot of people on these stupid forums. So I know that you can change if you’re one yourself.
I agree with the spirit and intent of the campaign, and I understand why there is a need for it. I read a comment the other day that went something along the lines of, “Of course these old faggots like Dan Savage want young fags not to kill themselves. Who else if he going to fuck?” Sentiments like this are disturbingly common, and they stem from an overall attitude of hostility for homosexuality. This is basically why the gay rights movement exists.
I will try to tread lightly as I provide a little criticism of the “It Gets Better Project.”
And there needs to be criticism, because it’s not exactly the most well thought out campaign. For one thing, it’s based on a lie. I have talked to many gay people who are well past high school, and trust me: it gets worse.
Gay kids in high school don’t have to worry about losing their job and not making the mortgage because they got fired from their job for their sexual orientation. Gay kids aren’t generally at the age when gay marriage bans directly affect their lives. And it’s generally not gay high schoolers who are beaten and dragged behind pick-up trucks.
It just doesn’t get better by magic. The status quo is such that it does not get better just because you get past high school.
To me, the message needs to be: only you can make it better. There needs to be change enacted for it to ever get any better, not only when it comes to gay rights, but anything. Time does not improve the world naturally. Progress is not measured with a watch or a calendar, but in the decibel level of your voice. If you don’t speak out for change and publicly push for it, it ain’t gonna happen.
Which leads me to another criticism… I won’t name the kid, but this whole movement was because some gay guy jumped off a bridge when his roommate set up a webcam and broadcast some gay sexin’. This whole situation pissed me off, and not for any of the reasons given in the public debate.
For one thing, all the blame fell on the roommate with the webcam set up. Newsflash: it was the roommate’s room, too. It’s not like someone snuck into the kid’s room, invaded his personal space, installed a covert camera, and then broadcast it. It was his room, and he was kicked out by this guy who wanted to have sex with another guy.
As someone who lived in college dorms, I sympathize far more with the guy who was kicked out. I always made sure to schedule my sexual escapades around my roommate, and my roommate did the same. I always felt bad for (and gave a place to hang out and watch TV to) anyone who was in the situation of the “locked out” roommate.
So already I hate this kid for locking out his roommate. Strike one. Then, he goes and jumps off a bridge like a drama queen because people found out he was gay. Strike two. Then this kid’s family prosecuted (successfully) the roommate for doing nothing more than videotaping his own room. If it had been a security camera instead of a webcam, no one would have questioned it. Since it’s a “webcam” and the kid killed himself and was gay… that roommate is a monster.
Strike three, you’re out. Good riddance, I don’t miss you. I’m glad you did it, and I wish more people like you would jump off bridges. I hope the family dies in a firey car crash and that all vestiges of any DNA you had is wiped from the gene pool.
Why so much hostility? Well for one thing, it gives gay rights a bad name to attach itself to this incident. It’s a tacit admission that, “Hey, we idolize a guy who thought being gay was so awful that having other people know you’re gay is worthy of killing yourself over.” What the fuck kind of message is that? We shouldn’t be putting people on a pedestal for killing themselves after being outed. How does that make any sense?
Dan Savage is an icon of gay culture, not the douche who took a flying leap off the George Washington when his homosexuality was made public. If Dan Savage wasn’t in some way associated with this whole “It Gets Better” thing, I would say it was hopeless. But Dan Savage can publicly say, “I’m gay,” and not want to die, and he fights tooth and nail for gay rights.
That is how it will get better, from gay activists who actually care about the gay community and who work to make it better for all, not from self-loathing cowards who aren’t worthy of even having me write their names. We should forget those types of people, the kind who run from their problems, the kind of give up, the quitters. They aren’t even worth a memory.
That is what we should be telling people. We should remind them that if you take the lazy way out, if you are too afraid to confront difficulty, we won’t honor you with anything, and we won’t even bother to remember you. I guarantee you that if that idea crosses the mind of someone looking over the ledge, it’s a whole lot more likely that they won’t jump than if they’re thinking, “I’ll be a hero for this…”
Multisource political news, world news, and entertainment news analysis by Newsy.com
About 25% of American workers don't even get any paid vacation time, and the rest of us are lucky if we get two weeks (actually, that's only ten work days) of time off from the job. The mentality is to work us to death. That's the capitalist system of exploitation. American workers are always kept in fear because of lack of job security, as well, so even when they do have vacation time, they're often reluctant to take it, or are cautious about how much they take at one time (when my dad was working, it took him ten years to earn 4 weeks of vacation a year, and then he would take it all at once, which he said the managers didn't like, but those were the days when more private sector jobs were unionized, so he at least had a union to offer some protection from arbitrary employer actions).
We live under a system designed to keep the working class in constant fear of losing their jobs, with just enough unemployment to keep the peons in line with the knowledge they can be easily replaced with another job-hungry wage-slave waiting in the wings, but not so much unemployment to threaten the system itself with riots in the streets and the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with a just system of true worker control and ownership of the workplace.
I recently took two days off from work, and when, a couple of weeks later, I needed just a schedule change giving me a Monday off for that week only, our manager threw my recent vacation days back in my face (he considers himself a "liberal" Democrat, by the way) saying "You just took a week of vacation." A week? I took two days! With my weekend days that equaled a total of 4 days off in a row! But in his capitalist, pro-boss, anti-worker, hierarchical mindset, I was now asking for too much, because, Good God!, I'd had a couple of days off.
The Yankee money-grubbing big business "work-ethic" is another thing we have to thank Lincoln and his war of aggression for, because it imposed this system on the entire country.
But some will defend it all like the filthy shills for capitalism that they are:
“Sure, there are those who complain, and some for good reason, but it seems that this country, being dubbed the no-vacation nation, is more of a testament to employers and employees alike, rather than a black eye for capitalism and the American way of life.”
It's a testament to the injustice of wage-slavery, idiot! That's all it is!
Go to any Ron Paul event and it strikes you immediately: What's up with all the young people?
The 75-year-old Texas congressman packs halls on college campuses. His campaign volunteers often look too young to shave. And even at a recent New York City book signing, it's surprising how many teenagers and 20-somethings are lined up for an autograph, clutching Paul's new book, Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom
.Sixteen-year-old Rob Gray says the age of the crowd doesn't seem odd to him.
It's "the old canard of the young being more open-minded than the old," he says.
Paul, the world's most unlikely teen idol, is running again for president.-Ron Paul: Why The Young Flock To An Old Idealist
 Science & Religion Today | Atheist Scientists and (Their Idea of) Spirituality Science & Religion Today According to a new paper in the journal Sociology of Religion, Ecklund and fellow sociologist Elizabeth Long found that 22 percent of atheist scientists consider themselves spiritual, and they see their spirituality as more congruent with science than ... |
Choice of 'God' poll stickers in Ohio will make atheists cringe, say voting ... TruthDive Columbus, May 31 (ANI): A move made by the Ohio government that offers all voters regardless of their religious beliefs, a sticker with the word “God” has stirred the hornet's nest, as some voting rights activists believe it would make atheist groups ... |
This will at least stimulate a raising of your awareness on these subjects. Enjoy, and please click on the actual post to read the comments:
Many people seem to believe that morality depends for its existence on a metaphysical quantity called “free will.” This conviction is occasionally expressed—often with great impatience, smugness, or piety—with the words, “ought implies can.” Like much else in philosophy that is too easily remembered (e.g. “you can’t get an ought from an is.”), this phrase has become an impediment to clear thinking.
In fact, the concept of free will is a non-starter, both philosophically and scientifically. There is simply no description of mental and physical causation that allows for this freedom that we habitually claim for ourselves and ascribe to others. Understanding this would alter our view of morality in some respects, but it wouldn’t destroy the distinction between right and wrong, or good and evil.
The following post has been adapted from my discussion of this topic in The Moral Landscape (pp. 102-110):
—
We are conscious of only a tiny fraction of the information that our brains process in each moment. While we continually notice changes in our experience—in thought, mood, perception, behavior, etc.—we are utterly unaware of the neural events that produce these changes. In fact, by merely glancing at your face or listening to your tone of voice, others are often more aware of your internal states and motivations than you are. And yet most of us still feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions.
The problem is that no account of causality leaves room for free will—thoughts, moods, and desires of every sort simply spring into view—and move us, or fail to move us, for reasons that are, from a subjective point of view, perfectly inscrutable. Why did I use the term “inscrutable” in the previous sentence? I must confess that I do not know. Was I free to do otherwise? What could such a claim possibly mean? Why, after all, didn’t the word “opaque” come to mind? Well, it just didn’t—and now that it vies for a place on the page, I find that I am still partial to my original choice. Am I free with respect to this preference? Am I free to feel that “opaque” is the better word, when I just do not feel that it is the better word? Am I free to change my mind? Of course not. It can only change me.
There is a distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions, of course, but it does nothing to support the common idea of free will (nor does it depend upon it). The former are associated with felt intentions (desires, goals, expectations, etc.) while the latter are not. All of the conventional distinctions we like to make between degrees of intent—from the bizarre neurological complaint of alien hand syndrome to the premeditated actions of a sniper—can be maintained: for they simply describe what else was arising in the mind at the time an action occurred. A voluntary action is accompanied by the felt intention to carry it out, while an involuntary action isn’t. Where our intentions themselves come from, however, and what determines their character in every instant, remains perfectly mysterious in subjective terms. Our sense of free will arises from a failure to appreciate this fact: we do not know what we will intend to do until the intention itself arises. To see this is to realize that you are not the author of your thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose. This insight does not make social and political freedom any less important, however. The freedom to do what one intends, and not to do otherwise, is no less valuable than it ever was.
While all of this can sound very abstract, it is important to realize that the question of free will is no mere curio of philosophy seminars. A belief in free will underwrites both the religious notion of “sin” and our enduring commitment to retributive justice. The Supreme Court has called free will a “universal and persistent” foundation for our system of law, distinct from “a deterministic view of human conduct that is inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system” (United States v. Grayson, 1978). Any scientific developments that threatened our notion of free will would seem to put the ethics of punishing people for their bad behavior in question.
The great worry is that any honest discussion of the underlying causes of human behavior seems to erode the notion of moral responsibility. If we view people as neuronal weather patterns, how can we coherently speak about morality? And if we remain committed to seeing people as people, some who can be reasoned with and some who cannot, it seems that we must find some notion of personal responsibility that fits the facts.
Happily, we can. What does it really mean to take responsibility for an action? For instance, yesterday I went to the market; as it turns out, I was fully clothed, did not steal anything, and did not buy anchovies. To say that I was responsible for my behavior is simply to say that what I did was sufficiently in keeping with my thoughts, intentions, beliefs, and desires to be considered an extension of them. If, on the other hand, I had found myself standing in the market naked, intent upon stealing as many tins of anchovies as I could carry, this behavior would be totally out of character; I would feel that I was not in my right mind, or that I was otherwise not responsible for my actions. Judgments of responsibility, therefore, depend upon the overall complexion of one’s mind, not on the metaphysics of mental cause and effect.
Consider the following examples of human violence:
- A four-year-old boy was playing with his father’s gun and killed a young woman. The gun had been kept loaded and unsecured in a dresser drawer.
- A twelve-year-old boy, who had been the victim of continuous physical and emotional abuse, took his father’s gun and intentionally shot and killed a young woman because she was teasing him.
- A twenty-five-year-old man, who had been the victim of continuous abuse as a child, intentionally shot and killed his girlfriend because she left him for another man.
- A twenty-five-year-old man, who had been raised by wonderful parents and never abused, intentionally shot and killed a young woman he had never met “just for the fun of it.”
- A twenty-five-year-old man, who had been raised by wonderful parents and never abused, intentionally shot and killed a young woman he had never met “just for the fun of it.” An MRI of the man’s brain revealed a tumor the size of a golf ball in his medial prefrontal cortex (a region responsible for the control of emotion and behavioral impulses).
In each case a young woman has died, and in each case her death was the result of events arising in the brain of another human being. The degree of moral outrage we feel clearly depends on the background conditions described in each case. We suspect that a four-year-old child cannot truly intend to kill someone and that the intentions of a twelve-year-old do not run as deep as those of an adult. In both cases 1 and 2, we know that the brain of the killer has not fully matured and that all the responsibilities of personhood have not yet been conferred. The history of abuse and precipitating cause in example 3 seem to mitigate the man’s guilt: this was a crime of passion committed by a person who had himself suffered at the hands of others. In 4, we have no abuse, and the motive brands the perpetrator a psychopath. In 5, we appear to have the same psychopathic behavior and motive, but a brain tumor somehow changes the moral calculus entirely: given its location, it seems to divest the killer of all responsibility. How can we make sense of these gradations of moral blame when brains and their background influences are, in every case, and to exactly the same degree, the real cause of a woman’s death?
It seems to me that we need not have any illusions about a casual agent living within the human mind to condemn such a mind as unethical, negligent, or even evil, and therefore liable to occasion further harm. What we condemn in another person is the intention to do harm—and thus any condition or circumstance (e.g., accident, mental illness, youth) that makes it unlikely that a person could harbor such an intention would mitigate guilt, without any recourse to notions of free will. Likewise, degrees of guilt could be judged, as they are now, by reference to the facts of the case: the personality of the accused, his prior offenses, his patterns of association with others, his use of intoxicants, his confessed intentions with regard to the victim, etc. If a person’s actions seem to have been entirely out of character, this will influence our sense of the risk he now poses to others. If the accused appears unrepentant and anxious to kill again, we need entertain no notions of free will to consider him a danger to society.
Why is the conscious decision to do another person harm particularly blameworthy? Because consciousness is, among other things, the context in which our intentions become available to us. What we do subsequent to conscious planning tends to most fully reflect the global properties of our minds—our beliefs, desires, goals, prejudices, etc. If, after weeks of deliberation, library research, and debate with your friends, you still decide to kill the king—well, then killing the king really reflects the sort of person you are.
While viewing human beings as forces of nature does not prevent us from thinking in terms of moral responsibility, it does call the logic of retribution into question. Clearly, we need to build prisons for people who are intent upon harming others. But if we could incarcerate earthquakes and hurricanes for their crimes, we would build prisons for them as well. The men and women on death row have some combination of bad genes, bad parents, bad ideas, and bad luck—which of these quantities, exactly, were they responsible for? No human being stands as author to his own genes or his upbringing, and yet we have every reason to believe that these factors determine his character throughout life. Our system of justice should reflect our understanding that each of us could have been dealt a very different hand in life. In fact, it seems immoral not to recognize just how much luck is involved in morality itself.
Consider what would happen if we discovered a cure for human evil. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that every relevant change in the human brain can be made cheaply, painlessly, and safely. The cure for psychopathy can be put directly into the food supply like vitamin D. Evil is now nothing more than a nutritional deficiency.
If we imagine that a cure for evil exists, we can see that our retributive impulse is ethically flawed. Consider, for instance, the prospect of withholding the cure for evil from a murderer as part of his punishment. Would this make any sense at all? What could it possibly mean to say that a person deserves to have this treatment withheld? What if the treatment had been available prior to his crime? Would he still be responsible for his actions? It seems far more likely that those who had been aware of his case would be indicted for negligence. Would it make any sense at all to deny surgery to the man in example 5 as a punishment if we knew the brain tumor was the proximate cause of his violence? Of course not. The urge for retribution, therefore, seems to depend upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior.
Despite our attachment to notions of free will, most us know that disorders of the brain can trump the best intentions of the mind. This shift in understanding represents progress toward a deeper, more consistent, and more compassionate view of our common humanity—and we should note that this is progress away from religious metaphysics. Few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems. And yet one of the fears surrounding our progress in neuroscience is that this knowledge will dehumanize us.
Could thinking about the mind as the product of the physical brain diminish our compassion for one another? While it is reasonable to ask this question, it seems to me that, on balance, soul/body dualism has been the enemy of compassion. The moral stigma that still surrounds disorders of mood and cognition seems largely the result of viewing the mind as distinct from the brain. When the pancreas fails to produce insulin, there is no shame in taking synthetic insulin to compensate for its lost function. Many people do not feel the same way about regulating mood with antidepressants (for reasons that appear quite distinct from any concern about potential side effects). If this bias has diminished in recent years, it has been because of an increased appreciation of the brain as a physical organ.
However, the issue of retribution is a genuinely tricky one. In a fascinating article in The New Yorker, Jared Diamond writes of the high price we often pay for leaving vengeance to the state. He compares the experience of his friend Daniel, a New Guinea highlander, who avenged the death of a paternal uncle and felt exquisite relief, to the tragic experience of his late father-in-law, who had the opportunity to kill the man who murdered his family during the Holocaust but opted instead to turn him over to the police. After spending only a year in jail, the killer was released, and Diamond’s father-in-law spent the last sixty years of his life “tormented by regret and guilt.” While there is much to be said against the vendetta culture of the New Guinea Highlands, it is clear that the practice of taking vengeance answers to a common psychological need.
We are deeply disposed to perceive people as the authors of their actions, to hold them responsible for the wrongs they do us, and to feel that these debts must be repaid. Often, the only compensation that seems appropriate requires that the perpetrator of a crime suffer or forfeit his life. It remains to be seen how the best system of justice would steward these impulses. Clearly, a full account of the causes of human behavior should undermine our natural response to injustice, at least to some degree. It seems doubtful, for instance, that Diamond’s father-in- law would have suffered the same pangs of unrequited vengeance if his family had been trampled by an elephant or laid low by cholera. Similarly, we can expect that his regret would have been significantly eased if he had learned that his family’s killer had lived a flawlessly moral life until a virus began ravaging his medial prefrontal cortex.
It may be that a sham form of retribution could still be moral, if it led people to behave far better than they otherwise would. Whether it is useful to emphasize the punishment of certain criminals—rather than their containment or rehabilitation—is a question for social and psychological science. But it seems clear that a desire for retribution, based upon the idea that each person is the free author of his thoughts and actions, rests on a cognitive and emotional illusion—and perpetuates a moral one.
The message, in its entirety, was: "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels -- bring home for Emma."
Humans have a tendency to confuse the words "mysterious" and "deep." If we don't understand something, especially something to which we have attached an aura of religion, intrigue, or romance, we seem to conclude automatically that it has great significance. While some texts that have yet to be deciphered are likely to contain interesting information, just by the law of averages we'd expect that some of them... don't.
My sense is that the Voynich Manuscript is one of the latter. It is a bound volume, allegedly from the 15th century, with colored drawings of plants, astronomical objects, mythical animals, and a host of other fanciful items. (You can see images of it, and read more about it, here.) The writing is in a set of characters that has yet to be deciphered, and has been the source of much speculation, from the ridiculous (that it is an alchemical manual whose contents contain magical knowledge of such power that it had to be hidden) to the pragmatic (it's a hoax).
The manuscript itself was named for Wilfred Voynich, who owned it in the early 20th century. After his widow's death in 1960, it was donated to Yale University, where it currently resides.
Recently, scientists were allowed to snip tiny pieces off of four different pages in the manuscript, and it was conclusively carbon-14 dated to between 1400 and 1438. Note that this only tells us the age of the parchment, not the age of the writing. The antiquity of the parchment has reawakened interest in the manuscript, both by legitimate scholars and by woo-woos who think that they'll be the one to translate it -- and acquire its secret knowledge.
Of the many hypotheses of its origins, the one that seems to be the likeliest is that it was produced by Edward Kelley. Kelley was a self-styled alchemist during the reign of Elizabeth I, who became friends with the famous alchemist and mystic John Dee. Dee was apparently duped by Kelley's fantastic claims, which included a purported ability to transmute copper into gold using a powder he'd obtained by grave-robbing a Welsh bishop's tomb. Apparently finding this scientifically plausible, Dee invited Kelley to accompany him to Prague, and Kelley became Dee's "scryer" -- Kelley would stare into a "shewstone" (the Elizabethan ancestor of the crystal ball) and have conversations with angels. The angels spoke a language that Kelley called "Enochian," but Kelley translated what they said, and Dee dutifully wrote it all down. Many scholars suspect that Kelley, in order to make his story more convincing (and probably to make money by selling the manuscript), turned out the Voynich Manuscript in "Enochian" to make his story more plausible.
But how do we know it isn't a cipher, or an actual language? There are a few features of the Voynich Manuscript that seem to indicate that it's nonsense. The first is that the best cryptographers in the world have been unable to crack it, even using computer algorithms designed for the purpose. Writing in ciphers was a common practice in medieval and Renaissance times, especially among the alchemists, and all of these passages have quickly fallen to cipher-breaking techniques. Given the length of the Voynich Manuscript (240 pages), it's extremely unlikely that these techniques wouldn't have cracked the code -- if there was anything sensible there in the first place.
Second, there are some very "un-language-like" features of the text in the Voynich Manuscript. There are a number of places where words are repeated two or even three times in a row -- something that is not at all common in written language. The distribution of word lengths is also suspect -- most of the words are between five and eight characters long, and there are very few extremely short words. This, again, is unlike virtually every written language currently in existence. Given the success of linguists in decoding written languages for which they had no spoken referent (e.g. Linear B in Crete), I'd say they're pretty good at recognizing what a real language looks like -- and, by extension, what a non-language would look like.
Most damning is a statistical study done in 2003 by Gordon Rugg, followed up by a 2007 study by Andreas Schinner, which showed that the frequency and patterns of syllables in the Voynich Manuscript was consistent with gibberish -- i.e., they were random. Schinner used a computerized analysis of the text from the Voynich Manuscript and showed that it could have been produced by a completely stochastic method -- one in which syllables were chosen in a non-meaningful manner, to give the appearance of language.
Of course, none of this will stop the woo-woos from claiming that the Voynich Manuscript contains the Secrets of the Ancients. As Casaubon found out in Umberto Eco's amazing novel Foucault's Pendulum, the more you deny that there is any meaning in something, the more the true believers become convinced that there must be -- otherwise, why would you be so desperate to deny it? It's hard for us to accept the possibility that there is no meaning in something as fanciful, and stirring to the imagination, as the Voynich Manuscript. Given that Miller's monks tried to find meaning in "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels -- bring home to Emma," we shouldn't be surprised if the controversy over the Voynich Manuscript is not over any time soon.
