Two posts this early morning and then I’m outa here, but stay tuned.
In her latest “On Faith” column at The Washington Post, Paula Kirby answers the following question:
Q: Rick Perry, at a campaign event this week, told a boy that evolution is ‘just a theory’ with ‘gaps’ and that in Texas they teach “both creationism and evolution.” According to a 2009 Gallup study, only 38 percent of Americans say they believe in evolution. If a majority of Americans are skeptical or unsure about evolution, should schools teach it as a mere “theory”? Why is evolution so threatening to religion?
Kirby is a former Christian who once had dreams of becoming a nun, but gave all that up and is no longer inclined to pull her punches about religion:
Evolution is a simple fact. We can choose to remain ignorant of it, we can stick our fingers in our ears and refuse to think about it, we can even rail against it and shout and scream that it is not allowed to be true. But facts are facts, and will not go away just because we don’t like them. We don’t get to vote for our preferred method of having come into existence as a species, any more than we can choose to have been delivered by stork rather than conceived and born in the usual way. . .
She explains what a scientific theory is, and in the process gives a shout-out to both my book and Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth (thanks, Paula!).
Kirby also doesn’t sugar-coat the problem that evolution poses for Christianity, and, having spent the last few weeks having my brain scrambled by theological attempts to show that of course God used evolution as his Preferred Method of Creation, I appreciate Kirby’s contention:
While I welcome anyone who recognizes that the evidence for evolution is such that it cannot sensibly be denied, to attempt to co-opt evolution as part of a divine plan simply does not work, and suggests a highly superficial understanding of the subject. Not only does evolution not need to be guided in any way, but any conscious, sentient guide would have to be a monster of the most sadistic type: for evolution is not pretty, is not gentle, is not kind, is not compassionate, is not loving. Evolution is blind, and brutal, and callous. It is not an aspiration or a blueprint to live up to (we have to create those for ourselves): it is simply what happens, the blind, inexorable forces of nature at work. An omnipotent deity who chose evolution by natural selection as the means by which to bring about the array of living creatures that populate the Earth today would be many things – but loving would not be one of them. Nor perfect. Nor compassionate. Nor merciful. Evolution produces some wondrously beautiful results; but it happens at the cost of unimaginable suffering on the part of countless billions of individuals and, indeed, whole species, 99 percent of which have so far become extinct. It is irreconcilable with a god of love.
And this:
Christianity is like a big, chunky sweater. It may feel cozy, it may keep you warm, but just let one stitch be dropped and the whole thing unravels before your very eyes. Evolution is that stitch.
I have to refrain from just reproducing the whole column, but it’s really good—a shot fired across the bow of faith.
____________
UPDATE: At the same site, Richard Dawkins also has a piece attacking the ignorance of Rick Perry, and there are about twenty other pieces on the same topic by a variety of scientists, theologians, and intellectuals.
Heading. Paula
Already fixed. How embarrassing!
Already forgiven! Thank you very much for posting it.
The comments on the WashPo site are, er, interesting, as ever. But this one is the clear frontrunner for the Really Should Read A Book (No, Not That One) Before Commenting Award at present:
“They have found plenty of old monkeys, plenty of old men, but unfortunately there is not a single monkey-man unearthed. evolution has been debunked over, and over again by DNA structure, not a single non-fabricated transitional species, and not to mention it is a THEORY… that is code for wild freaking guess! in this age of scientific enlightenment and crazy stories like “a lizard one day said I want to fly and then he grew feathers” i have no idea why dinosaurs were created, why fish swim, and cats don’t, or why we elected a guy for president who was working as neighborhood watch captain before he won a Senate race by default and stayed 5 months on the job. on second thought, after that analysis old darwin may have been on to something.”
That was just Jerry messin’ with you. He took the best of woo from the WEIT site.
What the ~@$#? There are some strange people out there – an argument for restricting internet access if ever there was!
Just a fan note. I love the way you write, Paula.
You’re worth a thousand Fesers.
…re “monkey men”…
Yes, there have been. Australopithecus. Not only a transitional species, but a monkey-man at that (well chimp-man, but close enough for this nutter who wouldn’t understand the difference).
The WP poster would no doubt classify Australopithecus a monkey. I’ve seen it before. They claim there are no links or transitions, then you point one out, they say it’s a monkey. Very convenient for them.
The hilarious thing is how half of them classified a certain set of fossils as H. habilis, absolutely, most definitely, uncontrovertibly a honest-to-goodness-bona-fide full human, while the other half classified the exact same set of fossils as A. habilis, absolutely, without-a-doubt, baraminologically-indisputably, an ape.
@Claimthehighground
Nope. That level of abject ignorance is real. I see it all the time in central WA state.
Aside from larger works, such as the books you mentioned, your article was the most well-written, concise, comprehensive, and compelling argument I’ve ever read in favor of teaching evolution and omitting creationism in public schools. Good job!
Now I’m embarrassed after reading that excellent article. I had confused “On Faith” with the idiotic “Speaking of Faith” (and now “On Being”). Ugh. Sorry about that. You are as far from Krista Tippett as it gets, I’m delighted to say.
Yes, Paula’s article is excellent. Well done!
Great work. Love it. Thanks Paula.
Excellent article. Love the sweater analogy. To answer “Why is evolution so threatening to religion?” It tells people who are deluded into thinking that they are special, that they are not and never will be other than by their own efforts. These people’s self-worth is bound up in thinking some magical being cares for them and only them and will answer prayers at their bidding (no matter how hard they claim that their god isn’t “vending machine”).
Ha! I blogged on this before Jerry did. So there. 😉
Yeah, but Paula beat you both to it.
And Jerry doesn’t “blog”….I think.
Yes, I was about to reply before llwddythlw did. I don’t blog—I write!
And when, Dr. Blackford, are you going to “blog” on the number of species on Earth? 🙂
Ken Ham says it’s between 2000-4000. That’s how many fit into his Kentucky ark.
I’m sure that’s 2000-4000 *kinds*, which is the loophole for “as many as I want.”
Creotards don’t do species, they do baramins.
Excellent article.
Following the incident with Perry, there was some flak in a few of the more Conservative publications. I can reduce the general tenor of the comments to “How dare you. It’s a politico-religious question, not scientific, and why don’t you also ask for Michelle Bachmann/Sarah Palin’s opinion on dark matter?”
This last point is a red herring and I would point to the introduction to The Blind Watchmaker where Dawkins comments that many people (I include politicians in this) don’t understand relativity, quantum mechanics or evolution, but a subset of those people THINK they understand evolution. It’s all about a little mud hole and two mosquitoes getting together, and violating the second law of thermodynamics….
Christianity is like a big, chunky sweater. It may feel cozy, it may keep you warm, but just let one stitch be dropped and the whole thing unravels before your very eyes. Evolution is that stitch.
Kirby’s article is excellent, but I’m going point out this nit, in which Kirby expresses almost the same, incorrect idea as Dawkins’s “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”
There are a multitude of excellent reasons to reject Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, polytheism, and so forth, as the majority of humanity has done for each individually before evolution was ever discovered. Evolution does, however, drive in one of the final nails.
I think that your “nit” is missing Kirby’s point somewhat: there was simply no single observation before Darwin (if you call The Origin an “observation”) that so devastated religious belief. The argument from design was a deep and forbidding moat protecting belief. By draining that moat, the idea of evolution finally made the castle of faith susceptible to the assault of reason.
Good metaphors!
First you allow the possibility of God’s existence, now you allow the possibility of pot-Humean supernatural design—we’re going to suspect you of deist sympathies if you’re not careful!
Seriously, somewhere on the internet there’s a video of Hitchens teasing Dawkins for being a milder atheist because, if I recall correctly, of this issue. I’ll side with Voltaire and Hitchens.
But was Voltaire an “intellectually fulfilled” atheist in the sense Dawkins means? Did he have a satisfactory explanation of human origins to replace the mythology he (rightly) rejected? That’s what Darwin contributed, and I don’t think Dawkins is “incorrect” to point it out.
Darwin’s predecessors had almost identically the same sound reasons we do to discredit Christianity and other religions. They were as “intellectually fulfilled” as we are, who do not possess an explanation for the laws of physics. We expect either a natural explanation, or no explanation at all. Partial ignorance is no reason to embrace transparent nonsense.
Eh, that’s not exactly fair.
It’s only been recently that archaeologists have attempted to empirically verify the stories in the Bible and come up amazingly short. I’d link to Hector Alaya’s excellent lectures on the topic, but they’ve been linked to a number of times this week, already.
And it’s been only more recently still that the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has made it impossible to maintain the possibility of some historicity of the Gospels.
In the Enlightenment, the only way to distinguish the Bible from Commentarii de Bello Gallico was by the fantastic nature of the Biblical content.
You might as well castigate Newton for failing to properly calculate Mercury’s orbit.
Cheers,
b&
I will answer that, but first I have to get rid of a nit.
Science doesn’t do wholesale “explanation”, whatever that is. The closest I can get out of a dictionary is that an explanation in a science sense could be “a statement that makes something comprehensible by describing the relevant structure or operation or circumstances etc.”
In that sense science explains observations and other methods (“describing the relevant … operation or circumstances”) or systems and processes (“describing the relevant structure”). But it doesn’t explain, for example, why an individual pathway was taken. It explains only which collection of pathways are valid.
We run up against that when we look for “explanation” of laws. We do know that laws, at least in physics, simply are symmetries (say, charge conservation) or symmetry breaking (say, matter universe).
But we may not know why a specific symmetry breaking resulted in this rather than that. Why not antimatter?
But we have more than an explanation of the laws of physics! We have an explanation of the “explanation of the laws of physics”. Either the set of unbroken symmetries is constrained (TOE universe) or not (anthropic universe).
Again we may not know which alternative is the fact at the moment. (The anthropic universe predicts more of what we see, though.) But we have a dictionary meaning “explanation”.
Much of this was uncovered early in the 20th century. My science idol Emmy Noether derived the basic result explaining physical law 1915, and the TOE/anthropic consequences immediately follows.
So we are, what, shy Darwin with 7 decades or so. But that was _a century_ ago! No reason to still describe this as “do not possess an explanation for the laws of physics”.
In fact, during that century we went on to know these laws in the domain we live in.
I don’t think physics helps the religious to be “intellectually unfulfilled” any more than biology.
Gah! Italics fail. When can we expect a WordPress plugin for comment preview?
Also, that doesn’t came out right in “the final cut”. It should be “Either the set of broken or unbroken symmetries …”.
when we look for “explanation” of laws … Either the set of broken or unbroken symmetries is constrained (TOE universe) or not (anthropic universe). … Noether
[…]
I don’t understand the nit about science not providing “explanations”, which are a “reason or justification for … belief” (OED).
As for the ultimate explanation of physical law, the reasons behind Feynman’s speculation are relevant:
“It is possible—and I’ve often made the hypothesis—that physics will not ultimately require a mathematical statement, that the machinery will ultimately be revealed—it’s just a prejudice, like one of these other prejudices.
It always bothers me that, in spite of all this ‘local’ business, what goes on in no-matter-how-tiny-a region of space and no-matter-how-tiny a region of time, according to the laws as we understand them today—takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out.
Now how could all that being going on in that tiny space?! Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny, stinky bit of space-time is going to do? So I made the hypothesis often that the laws are going to turn out to be, in the end, simple like the checkerboard, and all the complexity is from size.”
Something like that would be an explanation.
Voltaire wasn’t an atheist. He was a deist. He despised organized religion, but he believed in a supreme, creator, being.
I tend to agree with Steve Smith, at least to the extent that deism for all practical matters is nothing like the intellectual handicap theism is. The Enlightenment thinkers preceded Darwin and many were already atheist based on their own appreciation for the explanatory powers of science and no doubt for the expectation that science would indeed eventually address satisfactorily what at the time still seemed unexplained.
From the very little I know of the subject, it was my impression that thinkers before Darwin comprehended/postulated a sort of evolution, from a philosophical/empirical approach…
Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing like the last 1.5 centuries of evolutionary science for putting the final nail in the coffin, but I do tend to see a lot of, IMHO, underestimation of some of the great thinkers of the past in modern dialogue. I do hope we’re getting much closer to a critical mass, of course!
I think the first and greatest blow was the discovery that the Earth is not the centre of the universe. That was the beginning of the end of god.
I am only amazed that she gets to write regularly in the Post. As far as as I can tell her writings are the only consistent atheist voice in the corporate media.
And her writing style is a true joy to read. I have followed her on twitter for months and find every comment to be clear, crisp and accurate. The current article is a gem.
Susan Jacoby also does a weekly column at the Post called the Spirited Atheist.
Hear, hear! Poor Susan Jacoby. Of all the modern atheist/freethinker authors, she seems to get the least attention.
I agree wholeheartedly with Paula that people need to understand evolution as it is, not as their faith wishes it would be. A well done piece.
But doesn’t Paula’s piece contain a contradiction? She says evolution is “not kind,” it is “brutal.” Then she says it is “simply what happens, the blind, inexorable forces of nature at work.” So which is it? Is evolution brutal, or blind?
The more disturbing truth is that evolution in itself is neither brutal nor kind. It’s like the ocean, or any natural force – vast and powerful, capable of supporting life or swallowing it up.
By calling such forces “brutal” or “kind,” we indulge in personification. I can see why a Christian would do that – Christians believe they have felt God’s love, and they see it everywhere. But why would an atheist do it?
This is the atheist argument I find most pointless, frankly. “If you Christians could only understand how brutal evolution is, you wouldn’t believe in Jeebus anymore.” But Christians endure tragedy and awful pain all the time, and most stay Christian. (Some get more Christian.)
Telling such people to drop their faith because evolution is mean is tantamount to telling them to stop feeling God’s love. Like that great song in the musical “The Book of Mormon” where one of the characters says, “Don’t feel those feelings!” How likely do you think that is?
Actually, it’s very likely. These sorts of considerations – the problem of evil in general, but also these more specific aspects of it – were very worrying for me when I was an evangelical Christian. These are exactly the sorts of considerations that can really cause believers to lose sleep and question whether their beliefs add up.
It doesn’t even take knowledge of natural selection, though that makes it worse. But look how troubled Tennyson was in his famous “nature red in tooth and claw” passage in In Memoriam, written prior to On the Origin of Species. Lyellian geology and the fossil record were devastating to the faith of European intellectuals even before Darwin and Wallace came up with natural selection as an explanation for what was being seen. The brutal process (and yes it is brutal in its effects – talk of brutality in this context needn’t imply deliberate choice by an intelligent agent) of species succeeding each other over the eons fitted badly with concepts of divine love and providence.
Tennyson, of course, held on to his faith (by the skin of his teeth, I’d say), but many didn’t.
This stuff is dynamite for people who actually face up to it. Yes, many people refuse to, but many of those who actually do are deeply troubled by it, and many have actually lost their faith. Similarly, many people actually have resisted the science, with its dangerous implications – even hanging on to discredited forms of diluvial geology against all the evidence – to protect their faith.
Before he died, Tennyson asked his son to place a later poem, Crossing the Bar, at the end of all editions of his poetry. I’ve heard it suggested that the penultimate line of the last verse expresses some doubt through the word “hope”.
“I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.”
Yes, the “nature red in tooth and claw” line also occurred to me in thinking about this.
But here’s the irony. The atheist ideal, as I see it, is for believers to realize their faith is irrational, and inadequate to the facts of nature. Yet because faith is inherently emotional, atheists often rely on appeals tinged with emotion – “nature is not kind, it’s brutal.” That may be effective, but it doesn’t seem very science-based.
Hi Jeremy
In Unweaving the Rainbow (2000, p.192) Dawkins writes:
which agrees with your stance (I think)
I also kind of agree with you, but would you frown on Dawkins for claiming that the inanimate universe is “pitiless” & “indifferent” ? By your criteria, and perhaps also Dawkins’ own, in River out of Eden (1995, p.133) RD should not have written the phrase I’ve bolded here:
I think a touch of controlled poetry is necessary in good, popular science writing & it does no harm if the context makes it obvious that it’s a fancy
I think you’ve captured the essence of my disccomfort, and Dawkins is clearly aware of the problem. “Pitiless” seems a well-modulated description, better than brutal. The idea being, if you’re looking for pity, don’t look at evolution as a process.
To me that’s different from saying only a brutal, malevolent agent could have devised evolution. I just don’t think that’s a productive path in this light, since people of faith can always say, “Oh I don’t know, look on the bright side why don’t you.”
This is probably a matter of taste more than anything. I don’t mind brutal; from the POV of a snowshoe hare, a lynx is brutal. Or rather, I suppose, that should be “from a human POV.” You can look at it as simply trying to counteract the idea of providential creator. (Of course, from the POV of the lynx, the hare providentially appears…)
The word I like out of that line is “witless”, which to me is much more accurate than “pitiless.” In one of my books I titled a chapter “An Ode to Witlessness”, exploring this very idea (and using the poem) as it applies to anthropomorphism of animals. My editor and I had a brief tussle over this because she didn’t like “witless” but I thought it was perfect, and still do.
How strange. I have only just finished reading your Sex on Six Legs Marlene! A jolly fine read & I didn’t mind the feminism one bit 🙂
I agree re “Witless” ~ Do you have a blog ?
I have no problem in describing the process of evolution as blind and the outcome as being brutal.
That’s just the way it is.
Fact is, the process of evolution depends to a large extent on brutality — which species gets to make a meal out of another species. And how that species evolves to avoid being eaten. And how the predator of that species evolves to become a more-efficient predator.
Sexual selection aside, and humans (being the apex predator of all time) excepted, there’s very little about evolution that doesn’t depend to a very large extent on the fact that the reason not every individual within a species procreates is because it becomes food for another species before it matures. Without differential survival, natural selection would have no matrix upon which to work.
Is a blade of grass brutal?
No, but its survival depends on the ability to have a strong root system that sends up lots and lots of shoots to survive the constant eating of those shoots by ungulates.
No kidding, without the eating part, grass would look very much different than it does now.
You can concede any time you want. Because each and every example you come up with will have a predator-prey interaction. Heck, even humans are preyed upon by bacteria. Resistant staph is a classic example of evolution at work.
Sure, ungulates eat grass and that affects their biology and evolution. However, this strikes me as one of the weaker reasons to doubt the existence of a creator with beneficent motives. Brutal? It’s not even annoying.
Not if you’re a blade of grass.
What about “surviving” versus “not surviving” is unqualified brutal — to the organism involved?
No, not every example is predator-prey.
Amongst several others, there’s also competition for resources. Every time I pull out a mature dandelion in my lawn, I see the circle of dead grass that has succumbed to the shading caused by the dandelion’s leaves.
Trees struggle mightily to outgrow their neighbours in a race to keep their leaves in the light. Their competitors include members of their own species as well as non-members. Failure to grow fast enough means death by shading.
One curiosity about such trees is that they must invest so much in growing for height that they become very spindly. If then deprived of the support of their neighbours, their trunks are too thin to prevent them from flopping over and their roots are too weak to keep them from being uprooted.
Sometimes we become dependent on our enemies.
This is often stated as an axiom of evolution, but I don’t buy it. Imagine a hypothetical world of infinite resources in which no creature ever dies and no species goes extinct. It would still be true that the individuals that produce the most offspring the fastest would come to dominate the ecosystem, forcing less efficient breeders into marginal status (if not literal extinction).
The facts of death and extinction are consequences of natural selection operating in a world of finite resources, not prerequisites for natural selection to function at all.
but what would that “dominance” mean if there are infinite resources? it wouldn’t “force” less prolific breeders to marginal status, since there would be no competition.
and “literal extinction” is a contradiction of your premise that “no creature ever dies and no species goes extinct”
“Dominance” means that if you take a random sample of individuals, you are overwhelmingly more likely to encounter efficient breeders than inefficient ones. It means that over time, gene frequencies change so that unsuccessful genes represent a vanishingly small fraction. (In the real world of finite resources, this fraction rounds to zero.)
“If not literal extinction” is a restatement of my premise, not a contradiction of it.
Indeed. There would still be differential survival as a necessary consequence of differential reproduction, just without the influence of any additional selective pressure. The need to reproduce alone is still obviously a substantial selective pressure with respect to the maintenance of the population. Alleles that result in infertility or embryo morbidity would be selected against, while those that augmented fertility and survival would become predominant, as you note. This pressure would also act on alleles that cause death before development to a sexual maturity (in a sexually reproducing species as an example).
Your assumptions effectively mean that every species will eventually reach infinity.
There seem to be a number of misunderstandings of the nature of the infinite running through this subthread.
pj, the only way for “every species [to] eventually reach infinity” in the scenario proposed would be if given an infinite amount of time.
Gregory, even if your experiment were permitted to run for an infinite amount of time, all species would be equally infinite in number. It’s highly counterintuitive, but all countable infinite sequences are the exact same size. For that matter, so are all sequences of rational numbers.
On the other hand, there are infinitely more irrational numbers than there are rational numbers.
Yes, that language is very confusing, which is why set theory was developed. But the short version is that all infinite sets of rational numbers can be mapped in a one-to-one relationship to any other, but there will always be more irrational numbers than can possibly be mapped onto any set of rational numbers.
Cheers,
b&
Ben, your observations about infinities are true, but I don’t see how they’re relevant. My point is that in a contest of exponential growth, the guy with the biggest exponent leaves everyone else in the dust, despite the fact that they all tend toward infinity.
Er…that’s just it.
If discussing actual infinities, the exponents don’t matter; the sets are the exact same size.
And even if discussing “practically” but not actually unlimited systems, such as bacterial growth in an ocean the size of the galaxy, it still doesn’t matter in your scenario. Sure, the proportions of the two populations will be such that the one becomes a rounding error, but the smaller one will still be growing in an unlimited fashion unhampered by the other, just not as fast.
Of course, if you let the experiment run long enough so that it actually bumps into the limits, then, yes, conventional wisdom would again apply.
Cheers,
b&
Apparently I’m not explaining myself clearly. At any given timeslice t (for finite t), the sets are not infinite, and the successful genes outnumber the unsuccessful genes. Moreover, the proportions will become ever more skewed with increasing t.
Changing gene frequencies over time is the very definition of evolution, and the reason for the change in this thought experiment is natural selection operating through differential reproduction (not differential survival).
What happens when t becomes infinite is irrelevant to this argument.
I think I see the point you’re trying to make. Thanks for sticking it out.
Cheers,
b&
Which is, in fact, differential survival!
What am I missing? Competition is a well-known selective pressure.
“This is the atheist argument I find most pointless…”
Thanks for bringing this up. Somewhere in GB Shaw’s writings, no idea where, he observes that suffering is not additive. That is, no matter how many individuals suffer no matter how horribly, the most suffering experienced is that of one single individual.
So to speak of “unimaginable suffering” is pure poetic licence.
There are plenty of individuals suffering worse than you can possibly imagine.
Yes, how careless of me. I meant that it’s a pretense to posit some kind of infinite suffering. It’s kind of like positing Jesus.
Er, not infinite, but really huge. Like, since the beginning of evolution.
Tasmanian devils are likely to go extinct due to a contagious, facial-tumor producing cancer. The process probably comes close to ‘infinite suffering’ (a term that Kirby doesn’t use, BTW) for the poor devils.
How would a “brutal” or “kind” person behave? We all have some kind of answer to that question, and using those terms can be means of evoking that knowledge we already possess.
Then there’s also the fact that language is rather fluid. While you may think that it’s only strictly true that actors can be brutal or kind, you’d be dead wrong. Language doesn’t work that way. If people think actions can be brutal or kind, independent of the actor, they can.
So there’s really no problem at all with calling the process of natural selection brutal and not kind. Honestly, how could anyone misunderstand, who isn’t determined to do so?
The point is precisely that this sort of description is almost entirely subjective. That’s fine for writing a poem. But it’s not so good if the goal is a rational argument that people of faith are misleading themselves.
Well, that was downright delightful! One of the most succinct and entertainingly symbolic (sweater imagery)responses to the “theory” argument I have seen in a while! I see how it was hard for you to not post the whole thing! Thank you for sharing!
Hate to nitpick, but it wasn’t a shot across the bow at all.
No, it was a solid hit, right at the waterline. Clean through both hulls, too.
Cheers,
b&
Sure, but their faith will keep them afloat.
Or they can do that walk on water thing. It’s always a crowd pleaser.
Huh? Not a fat chance in he —
Oh, wait. I see what you’re doing there.
Why, yes. No need to worry. Carry on, faithests! Never mind the sinking ship; you don’t need a ship. Your faith won’t let you drown.
Cheers,
b&
At least we can get some water dunk coughs, can’t we?
[Takes out the popcorn.]
I agree 100% with the problem for religion that is posed by evolution. But it isn’t the only problem. The method God devised for solar system formation involved periodic mass extinctions when asteroids crashed into the earth. Pretty brutal (sorry Jeremy @9). For some reason though, religious folks seem to pick on evolution and not astrophysics. You biologists are just lucky I guess.
Oh come now. Just how many asteroids have crashed into the earth in the 6000 years the earth has been in existence? None, or else the god guy would have told some Noah type guy how to build an asteroid deflector, and to put two (or is it eight of the clean and two of the unclean?) under the deflector, and it would be in the book. Besides that the god guy stopped the sun in it’s tracks so Joshua could finish his battle in daylight. So god has complete control over the sun, moon & stars.
Good point. At roughly 65 million years between mass extinction events, we have 65,000,000 – 6,000 years left till the next one. Certainly the Rapture will occur before then. Isn’t it supposed to be next week or so?
In October, I checked.
So I should use all my vacation days now, and not save them for Xmas?
Cash them in, sell all your belongings and give the money to the church. You’ll be all raptured up. Really, they said so, and if you can’t trust the church, then who can…oh screw it.
Give them to me, I’ll be sure the church gets them…
“None, or else the god guy would have told some Noah type guy how to build an asteroid deflector…”
Well, he did tell Lot to gather his family and get out of town before the fire and brimstone fell.
Good point. I retract my snide anti-theist remark. Lot’s family were good folk. I hear his wife was the salt of the earth.
A pillar of the community…
ROFL, you two!!
Well, there was Tunguska. But the only people who might have been affected were godless commies, so I guess that’s ok.
Not in 1908 they weren’t!
For some reason though, religious folks seem to pick on evolution and not astrophysics.
They don’t perceive astrophysics as challenging their faith in the same way evolution does. Astrophysics presents mind-boggling timescales and distances, all of it originating in a “big bang”, and religious people are cool with that.
Basically, people pick and choose what science to believe.
There is only one known mass extinction from an impactor, and yes, it was probably an asteroid: the K-Pg event 65 Ma before present. That was an unlucky hit, since it happened in calciferous and sulfurous sediments that modern life laid down.
When we go back, the extinction risk isn’t only massively decreased, we have no factual evidence of impact related extinctions.
_If_ life was early, and genome family data can be extrapolated to suggest life arose ~ 4.3 Ga bp, the impactor that created the final Earth-Moon system, now in some scenarios as late as ~ 4.36 Ga bp, probably erased an early biosphere since it demolished the crust. No “Goldilocks survival zone” ~ 1 km down the crust (where life can have endured the Late Heavy Bombardment).
So we have one “affirmative” and one “who freakin’ cares if life arose once or twice”. =D
Oh, I missed this:
We know for sure there isn’t any periodicity in extinction rates, if you use the latest fossil record data and do a proper autocorrelation analysis (instead of ad hoc filters purely designed to put the wanted periodicity in there in the first place!).
“The data also confirm that extinction and origination rates both declined through the Phanerozoic and that several extinctions in addition to the Permo-Triassic event were particularly severe. However, the trend may be driven by taxonomic biases and the rates vary in accord with a simple log normal
distribution, so there is no sharp distinction between background and mass extinctions. Furthermore, the lack of any significant autocorrelation in the data is inconsistent with macroevolutionary theories of periodicity or self-organized criticality.” [My bold.]
Thanks for referencing the Alroy paper. It was a good read. I can now refer to the K-Pg event as “a large extinction pulse”, and not, “when the asteroid hit the Yucatan.” I particularly liked his statement – thrown in the midst of statistical results – that “Ghosts do not speak, so their empty niches must somehow beckon.” In science they beckon through verifiable evidence, in religion they beckon through just-so stories, feelings and “but I just KNOW that it’s so” thinking.
Well worth reading.
Great article by Paula but the people who should be listening already have their fingers in their ears.
Something about the impossibility of dissuading a person by rational argument out of a position he has arrived at by non-rational means. Somebody said it better.
Fingers in their ears and their heads up their ass.
You know, DV, I’ve always doubted the truth of that saying. Some people clearly are reasoned out of belief. I am one of them, though I’ll admit it wasn’t anyone else’s arguments that swayed me: I just came to see it for myself.
But looking back to my religious days, I think there were times when the right thought-provoking challenge might have got under my skin enough to make me start thinking. Faith is quite an up and down affair. Believers go through phases of feeling quite confident in their faith, and others when they’re more doubtful. You just never know which kind of phase a believer is going to be in when you challenge them. I suspect instantaneous conversions are rare; but I do think it’s sometimes possible to plant a seed of doubt which, over a period of time, becomes persistent and cannot be ignored.
The other problem I have with that saying is that it makes the mistake of assuming all believers are the same, and have the same reasons for taking up or persisting in belief. No two people are ever exactly the same, so there’s no more reason why two Christians should react to something identically than for two atheists to do so. Different circumstances, different backgrounds, different personalities – they all make for different religious experiences. What works with one won’t work with another.
This is why I get so fed up with the accommodationist whingers who, the moment a Gnu dares to express him or herself, immediately leap to say, ‘That’s not the way to do it – you’ll just put everyone off that way’. That’s rubbish. Any approach will appeal to some, and alienate others. Personally I always find conspicuously softly-softly, heavily tactful approaches patronising to the point where I want to slap the person making them; others will feel much the same about those of us who prefer to just come straight out and say what we mean. No one approach will always work, but no one approach will always fail either. The important thing is that there’s a variety of styles out there because that’s how, between us, we’ll have the most impact.
Wow, another well said statement. Thanks Paula.
You are my new hero. (-ine, if we must cleave to feminine diminutives…)
there are two sentences who are very important in this article, the first is : “The primary role of the school is pretty straightforward: it is to educate.” and second “any conscious, sentient guide would have to be a monster of the most sadistic type.” These two findings are the real problems for Christians. The First gives a problem for the goal of Christianity because this goal is not education but to multiply the number of their Group. The more they are, the more powerful they are and reality is not important because their “truth” is a myth sold as reality to children (to make them better, you know). The second finding is even more important because it prove their reflection to their deity. They know very well that the so called “creation” is what Mrs. Kirby describes so exactly, but if you give that deity unlimited power there is no way out of the dungeon. So they have a very big problem. The solution is even evident as cowardly, they put sunglasses on their nose and call the deity all loving and especially merciful and that proves their hypocrisy because when their deity should be all loving there should be no need for mercy. So they know very well the tragedy of living created by their big sadist but they don’t dare to say. And so the myth is created. But there is another twisting in these vicious circle : they must do the good and then said “our god has done it” and when something terrible happen there is a continuous search for something positive so they can say who wonderful and loving their god is. It’s the mentality of the slave who can’t escape the territory of the master, or the fear of the victim who can’t escape from the torturer. The responsibility lays with the herd who compare his fellow cosmopolitan with a sheep he has to guard. The herd are the same as the butchers and the shearers. The graves of war are not filled with the gangsters who declare war but with the deluded sheep who were forced to kill the other sheep of another master.
Paula Kirby’s work is excellant, she is one of my favourite Gnu’s.
Thanks again for your work Paula, it always gives me a smile.
I wanted to comment on Paula’s piece at her paper but had to register or something. Just wanted to say I think I have not seen the argument put any better (sorry to all those who think they have put it better).
Apropos, but irredeemably wrong and confused, Jim Manzi:
Ever since Wächterhäuser’s work, possibly before, there are potentially testable pathways between probiotic and protobiotic systems.*
And, since many of these incorporate coenzymes, they are at least in principle amenable for phylogenetic trait analysis (and testing) as well!
Therefore “first causes” theology as applied to biology have been implicitly addressed many times over the last 3-4 decades at least. Global “don’t knows” have been replaced with proper testable sets of pathways. Manzi may need to be familiarized with the sciences he tries to criticize.
And as always, what the @#?! have theology to do with science? Manzi may want to address that “classic First Cause argument” first.
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* Which is validated in that his requirements for enzyme activity have been shown to rival modern enzymes. By this test his models doesn’t work.
Oops, I got overeager. The ancestral traits of having a genetic system doesn’t affect the phylogeny between human and its ancestors, natch – they all have it. =D
So Manzi fails in having a rational argument in the first place.