I was going to post on this, but Matthew Cobb beat me to it.  (If you’re not looking in at his online Z-letter, you’re missing some good biology.)  In today’s Nature is a nice article by a group of scientists from China, Ireland, and the UK, showing that color-bearing organelles (“melanosomes”) can be preserved in some fossils, giving us a clue to the color of ancient animals in life.  In this way they found out that the “feathered dinosaur” Sinosauropteryx had reddish-brown stripes on the tail!

They also found similar melanosomes in fossils of early birds.  Because melanosomes were previously known from living birds but not from dinosaurs or ancient birds, this gives additional evidence (as if we needed any!) that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs. See Matthew’s post (and the Nature article, if you have access) for more.

Fig. 1.  Sinosauropteryx, replete with colored feathers. Illustration by James Robins (from report on National Geographic website).

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F. Zhang, S. L. Kearns, P. J. Orr, M. J. Benton, Z. Zhou, D. Johnson,  X. Xu and X. Wang.  2010.  Fossilized melanosomes and the colour of Creteaceous dinosaurs and birds.  Nature online, 27 January.

Over at today’s New York Times, conservative author Ross Douthat is upset at Richard Dawkins’s piece on Pat Robertson, Haiti, and theodicy.

But Dawkins’ “defense” of Robertson, against the “milquetoast” Christians who rushed to disavow the televangelist’s suggestion that the Haitian earthquake victims were being singled out for divine punishment, offers an interesting illustration of militant atheism’s symbiotic relationship with religious fundamentalism.

How does Douthat (the name begs for puns!) harmonize the disaster in Haiti with the notion of a powerful and loving God? By quoting the words of Jesus:

I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you, that ye may be the children of your Father who is in Heaven. For He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. (Matthew 5:44-45) . .

There’s a heavy stress on sin and the possibility of ultimate punishment here, obviously. (Plenty for Richard Dawkins to find obnoxious, in other words.) But Jesus also lays a heavy emphasis on the idea that we shouldn’t interpret the vicissitudes of this life as God’s way of picking winners and losers, or of punishing particularly egregious sinners. Until the harvest, the wheat and tares all grow together, the rain falls on the just and unjust alike, and those who survive natural disasters are as liable to judgment as those who perish in them. . .

In other words, everything will be equalized in the afterlife.  That’s bogus, of course.  What could happen in the afterlife to discount the suffering of children who die of leukemia, before they’ve even had a chance to sin?  Or those innocent victims of Haiti?  Do you stand a better chance of going to heaven if you’re a good person who has experienced undeserved illness, evil, or disaster, than if you’re a good person who hasn’t?  Douthat’s remedy here is the same as those who take the Bible literally:  in the end, everything is judged appropriately, although we can’t understand exactly how God is going to do it.

So is it reasonable to believe that the Gospel passages quoted above “speak more clearly” than, say, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to the question of whether Christians should interpret the events in Haiti as God’s punishment for some (spurious) 18th-century sin? I think it is. So do many theologians, ancient as well as modern, Protestant as well as Catholic, And the fact that Richard Dawkins and Pat Robertson both disagree tells us something, important, I think, about the symbiosis between the new atheism and fundamentalism — how deeply the new atheists are invested in the idea that a mad literalism is the truest form of any faith, and how completely they depend on outbursts from fools and fanatics to confirm their view that religion must, of necessity, be cruel, literal-minded, and intellectually embarrassing.

I’m not sure exactly which “new atheist” has claimed that “mad literalism is the truest form of faith.”  I think people like Dawkins assert that it is a very common form of faith, and those who don’t adhere to it—who pick and choose what they want from Scripture (as Douthat does above, conveniently leaving out the Old Testament)—don’t have good reasons for their particular interpretations.

Douthat neglects the theodicy of Jews, who of course don’t accept the New Testament and so can’t invoke the conciliatory words of Jesus. But even considering Christianity alone, Doubthat still fails to address the most important question of all:  how do you harmonize an ominipotent and beneficent God with the idea of natural disasters and the horrible suffering of some innocent people?  True, some “modern” Christians don’t see the events in Haiti as God’s punishment of sinners, or of anyone else.  But these Christians still haven’t explained, at least to the satisfaction of any rational and inquisitive person, why God allows things like that to happen if He could prevent them. In that sense, Pat Robertson has a better answer than those oh-so-sophisticated modern theologians.

If Douthat was right, there would be no need for theodicy. But of course there is: it’s one of the busiest areas of modern, non-literalistic theology.

The same muscles (arectores pilorum) that enable a cat to do this:

also enable us to do this:

And in both cats and ourselves, the same stimuli cause goosebumps/hair erection: cold and fear.

But of course goosebumps aren’t of any use to us. They don’t keep us warm, nor do they make us look bigger and fearsome, like the kitteh above. They’re evolutionary leftovers, evidence of our common ancestry with other mammals.

Three days ago, The New York Times published an op-ed by Harvard professor James Wood, noting that the tragedy in Haiti makes hash of theodicy and of the notion of a powerful and beneficent God.  Well, Times readers couldn’t let that one go by, and so  several of them wrote back. Of course they can’t reconcile the notion of a good God with natural disasters, but they try anyway:

We do not know the answer to this conundrum except to say that is the nature of freedom in an imperfect world and that is the mystery of the providence of God. God will work all things for our good even if we don’t understand. That is what faith is: the moment we say we understand, there is no longer any faith.

I love that last sentence.  The guy says that we don’t understand anything about God, but he’s absolutely certain that “God will work all things for our good”!  How does he know that?

This from a professor at Harvard Divinity School:

The bishop’s theology is neither mystifying nor contradictory, and in fact represents one version of a view held by many Christians and other religious people: namely, that God is deeply present in and through the events of the world — often inscrutably, but always powerfully and lovingly — and though we cannot for the life of us see how, even catastrophes include divine presence and power.

Mr. Wood may not share this view, but he has no right to scorn it, especially from a safe harbor.

Of course he has a right to scorn it!  In fact, he has a duty to scorn it.

What Haiti tells us is exactly nothing about God but everything about ourselves: we are mortal and vulnerable, every one. For some, this is the beginning, not the end, of religious devotion. Is it not imperiously condescending to those Haitian Christians gathered to worship in the rubble to say that “no invocation of God beyond a desperate appeal for help makes much theological sense”? Such a worshiper might counter: suffering and death come to all, even to a God who in his love took on our mortal, vulnerable condition as his own.

And another:

James Wood neglects the two fundamental themes of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures: the Exodus and the Resurrection. Both suggest that catastrophe is never the final word and that human beings should never be without hope. A fair reading of history suggests that such hope is not misguided.

What these letters prove, as if we need more proof, is that being smart doesn’t mean that you’re rational.  There is no evil, no disaster, so great that the faithful can’t rationalize it as the plan of a loving God.  Could some of them please tell us what circumstance would convince them that either there is no God, or that the one who exists isn’t so benevolent after all?

My nephew Steven is sometimes a pain in the tuchus, and he’s always squeezing his old uncle for a few bucks, but he has undeniably good taste in movies and writes about them well.  He runs a website, Truth at 24 (“Cinema is truth at 24 frames per second.”—Jean-Luc Goddard), where the posts are sporadic. However, he’s just posted his choice for the best films of the decade, and it’s worth a look.  Every film on the list is worth seeing, although I think he vastly overrates Lost in Translation, and Y Tu Mama Tambien, a true classic, should be ranked higher.

The “On Faith” column at The Washington Post is on a godless roll.  First they publish Dan Dennett’s critique of theodicy, calling it a “fraudulent contract,”   and then today Richard Dawkins on the hypocrisy of reactions to the Haiti disaster. Here’s the peroration, strong even for Dawkins:

. . .To quote the President of one theological seminary [R. A. Mohler, Jr.], writing in these very pages:

“The earthquake in Haiti, like every other earthly disaster, reminds us that creation groans under the weight of sin and the judgment of God. This is true for every cell in our bodies, even as it is for the crust of the earth at every point on the globe.”

You nice, middle-of-the-road theologians and clergymen, be-frocked and bleating in your pulpits, you disclaim Pat Robertson’s suggestion that the Haitians are paying for a pact with the devil. But you worship a god-man who—as you tell your congregations even if you don’t believe it yourself—’cast out devils’. You even believe (or you don’t disabuse your flock when they believe) that Jesus cured a madman by causing the ‘devils’ in him to fly into a herd of pigs and stampede them over a cliff. Charming story, well calculated to uplift and inspire the Sunday School and the Infant Bible Class. Pat Robertson may spout evil nonsense, but he is a mere amateur at that game. Just read your own Bible. Pat Robertson is true to it. But you?

Educated apologist, how dare you weep Christian tears, when your entire theology is one long celebration of suffering: suffering as payback for ‘sin’—or suffering as ‘atonement’ for it? You may weep for Haiti where Pat Robertson does not, but at least, in his hick, sub-Palinesque ignorance, he holds up an honest mirror to the ugliness of Christian theology. You are nothing but a whited sepulchre.

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UPDATE:  As Richard notes in his comment below the fold, the Post actually published a number of responses to the question, “Does God allow Haiti to suffer,” which you can find here.

Appearing on ABC news, Greg Epstein, Harvard’s humanist “chaplain” (is that an oxymoron?),  calls for the formation of atheist congregations.

Now Epstein has a lot of good things to say in this interview, and kudos to Harvard for hiring a nonreligious minister-equivalent, but really, do we atheists want to gather together once a week to celebrate our nonbelief? Once a year at an atheist convention, fine, but is common nonbelief a good basis for forming a community? It seems to me that that’s more like what Kurt Vonnegut calls a granfalloon.

(p.s. Epstein has been ordained as a “humanist rabbi.” Nice title!)

h/t: RichardDarwkins.net