If I seem obsessed with the accommodationist website BioLogos, it’s for two reasons: its fervent attempts to meld science and evangelical Christianity clearly demonstrate both the follies and failures of accommodationism, and its funding by the John Templeton Foundation shows how insidious Templeton really is. (Out of their billion-plus dollar endowment, they give 70 million dollars per year to scientists and theologians, many of them trying to harmonize science and faith.)
Yesterday I highlighted the follies of pastor Dave Swaim, who’s presenting a four-part sermon on BioLogos that supposedly promulgates that science/faith harmony. In part 3, he tried to tell us not only how to distinguish the metaphorical from the literally true in the Bible, but also made completely bogus claims about the historical truth of many parts of Genesis.
It’s gotten worse. In part 4 of his sermon, Swaim engages in some unwarranted denigration of science. First he takes out after plate tectonics and radiometric dating, apparently part of his strategy to show that science doesn’t have all the answers (this is, of course, another accommodationist strategy).
A couple years ago, a researcher at Los Alamos National Labs explained why our models for plate tectonics are all wrong.1 And another presented a paper questioning the veracity of radiocarbon dating.(1) Both of these tools have been foundations for the current theories of the age of the earth.
Note that the editor (probably BioLogos president Darrell Falk) apparently added the footnote (1) here (“Editor’s Note: These are fringe reports that are far outside of the realm of mainstream science”) to distance himself from the evidence Swaim is mentioning. Reader Sigmund, who brought this sermon to my attention, suspects that the tectonics model “is by John Baumgartner and is pure flood geology.”
Swaim then goes on to cast aspersions on abiogenesis, the idea that life on Earth originated as a purely naturalistic process from nonliving precursors:
And while all scientists agree that genetic mutation happens just like the theory of evolution describes, no scientist can explain abiogenesis, which is an undirected process producing the first living organism from nonliving chemicals. That’s scientifically impossible, but atheists must believe it’s true in order to exclude the possibility of God.
This is pure stupidity: scientists—not all of whom are atheists, by the way—don’t “believe” anything just to exclude God. As I’ve said elebenty billion times, we have no a priori commitment to atheism or non-supernaturalism; we take the Laplace-ian stance, born of experience, that the invocation of gods has simply been useless and unnecessary in helping us understand nature.
In the comments section, Darrel Falk tries to defend Swaim:
I don’t think Dave was telling atheists that God is in those gaps more than any place else. He, like me, was just expressing surprise, given the naive state of our knowledge, that atheists think they can—on scientific grounds—rule out the existence of God.
Oh dear, Dr. Falk. It’s the lack of evidence, don’t you know? We can provisionally rule out God on precisely the same grounds that we can rule out fairies, dragons, and the Loch Ness monster.
But Falk emphasizes (and here he agrees with P.Z. Myers and others) that evidence has nothing to do with believing or disbelieving in God:
Jerry Coyne asked me one time, “Can you think of any bit of scientific knowledge that could conceivably arise in the future that would be inconsistent with your view about the existence of God?” My answer was “no.” Science, as I see it, is simply studying God’s activity. The natural laws are a manifestation of the ongoing regular activity of the Spirit of God which pervades the universe.
But this, of course, is a blatant admission not only that belief in God rests purely on revelation, but there is nothing that could ever shake that belief—no fact about the world, no tragedy bespeaking God’s indifference, nothing.
At any rate, Swaim’s semon shows how closely BioLogos is skirting creationism and criticizing science, all in the name of promoting science. It’s the cognitive dissonance inherent in such extreme accommodationism.
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Speaking of the dangers of accommodationism, here’s another: perhaps anti-science Christians won’t necessarily turn toward science if they see that evolution doesn’t entail atheism. Perhaps they also must be convinced that science isn’t connected with other values as well. This came to my attention when Mark Mann, from Point Loma Nazarene University, wrote an essay at BioLogos, “Let’s not surrender science to the secular world,” on the anti-evangelical-mindset essay by Giberson and Stephens.
He makes two dubious but familiar accommodationist points. First, he claims, correctly, that no form of Christianity is opposed to science in its entirety:
There is no ‘Christianity’ that stands or ever has stood as a whole against science or reason. Whatever Christianity IS it certainly is an incredibly complex movement, and throughout its history there have been multiple ways that Christians have thought about the relationship between faith and reason, science and theology. This is a point I wish to unpack at greater length in a later blog, but for now it is sufficient to say that there has never been any single way that Christians have thought about the relationship between faith and reason, much less what faith and reason even mean. So to treat Christianity (if there even can be said to be such a ‘thing’) as a univocal totality is highly problematic.
That’s irrelevant, for many forms of Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity, are opposed to things like evolution and global warming, and on scriptural grounds. The point was not that Christians oppose all science: presumably many of them take antibiotics and use cellphones. I don’t think Giberson and Stephens erred on the important issue, particularly because Giberson, who’s on board with evolution and anthropogenic causes of warming, is also an evangelical Christian.
Mann also reprises the dreary argument that the roots of science lie in religion:
The same goes for science. Is it truly or purely a secular pursuit? [JAC: Of course it is!] What are we to make, then, of the countless religious individuals who have been scientists and who have made significant contributions to our knowledge of the cosmos? Did they do so only by some kind of compromise between their faith and secular forms of knowledge? Again, the historical evidence would indicate quite the contrary. Take, for example, the Islamic Golden Age of scientific discovery (c. 750-1200).. . .
And the list of Christians who have made significant contributions to scientific discovery ever since is absolutely eye-popping: Nicholas Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, Robert Boyle, Joseph Priestly, Michael Faraday, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, Lord Kevlin, Max Planck…to name just a few . . . I can, I believe, say with a great sense of confidence that few, if any, of these great Christian scientists understood themselves to be integrating their faith with secular knowledge.
Totally irrelevant again. Everyone back then was a Christian. To say that science wasn’t a secular pursuit but a religious one is to say that brewing was also a religious pursuit, because nearly all brewers were Christians. Even an addled creationist can see through that argument.
What I found most interesting, though, was one of the comments: #6748, by a Christian named Alan:
It is op-eds like Giberson’s that makes me generally nervous about Biologos. I do find much that is helpful on the website, but when I read the op-ed, it seems that the head of the organization not only wants us to accept evolution, but also the global climate change scare and the legitimacy of homosexuality and gay marriage. I accept evolution because of the evidence. But why mix these other issues into the pot? Mr. Giberson, respectfully, I would suggest that you’re shooting yourself in the foot if you really want conservative evangelicals (like myself) to consider the case for evolution; as soon as they read your takes on global warming, but ESPECIALLY homosexuality/gay marriage, they will just disregard you as a politically left-leaning Christian.
This suggests that getting Christians to become pro-science isn’t merely a matter of showing that science doesn’t entail atheism. You have to accommodate Jebus in other ways, specifically, by not accepting the idea of global warming or gay marriage.
If you’re. say, Chris Mooney, and tell the faithful that evolution doesn’t cause atheism, that might not convert them if you also take stands in favor of gay marriage or anthropogenic global warming (things I’m sure Mooney accepts). All they have to do is “read your takes” on these issues, and their interest wanes. Since many people who advocate science (and most accommodationists, I think) are in favor of gay rights, that accordingly diminishes their effectiveness.
All this shows is that accommodationism involves more than disconnecting science from atheism. In fact, to convince the faithful, it seems as if you have to be largely on board with much of their social/political agenda. And that is why BioLogos is increasingly kissing up to evangelical and conservative Christians.
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UPDATE: Alert reader Sigmund points out that BioLogos president Darrel Falk has added a comment to Mann’s post that supports my contention about what the organization is up to. Here’s part of Falk’s comment:
Our primary goal at BioLogos not to convert conservative Christians to the BioLogos point of view. More than anything, our task is to work towards depolarizing the discussion. That, as I see it, supersedes whether people actually come to take on the BioLogos point of view. I am more concerned that we exhibit Christian integrity in how we dialog with each other.
And Sigmund’s take:
So they’ve stopped trying to change the evangelical environment and have settled on building a nature reserve—with evangelical theist evolutionists as the pandas.
BioBogus is nothing more than a theistically inclined version of the Anthroposophical Society backed by a trust fund. Rudolph Steiner would be envious.
This phrasing already poisons the well against abiogenesis. What we should be saying (and getting Creationists to say) is trying to explain what chemical process led to the first biological organisms. It makes sense, since all biology is chemistry, but not all chemistry is biology.
“Living” and “non-living” assume some sort of spiritual essence that creates a false dichotomy between chemical and biological processes. In reality, there is no such fine line between chemistry and biology; it is much more hazy. Biology basically being chemicals that reproduce in some fashion.
What? No quintessence?
Feser will be disappointed.
Was going to comment on the same thing. “Abiogenesis is scientifically impossible?!” Citation please! Swaim is an essentialist moron.
+1.
While I’m not a biologist, I tend to view evolution as the process of life, and conversely define life as the populations that partake in it. I don’t think it makes sense to define individuals as “life” – ask the last individual of a sexual species if he or she will be fit.
So life is a property of evolving hereditary populations, not individuals – and if you want to make a fine pint, throw in “biochemical populations” – so of their particular chemistry. As you imply, there were no fine line in the sand where the first such population noted “we are alive!”
Well, of course you can throw in yeast populations to make a fine pint. But it should be “a fine point”.
“Living” and “non-living” assume some sort of spiritual essence that creates a false dichotomy between chemical and biological processes.
Crick’s higher goal in his projects to discover and decode DNA was to bury forever superstitions “crackpot” ideas like vitalism and religion. Crick was explicit about this, and his debt to Schrodinger for the motivation to discredit vitalism.
Loma Linda University is to the Seventh Day Adventist Church as Notre Dame is to the Catholic Church.
The 7DAs believe in the literal interpretation of the bible. 6000 year old universe, Adam and Eve, a real worldwide biocidal flood, and all the rest. Every faculty member at LLU has to sign a statement of belief in these things. And if their beliefs change, they’re fired.
They’re also, oddly, intensely interested in medicine. LLU has a medical school, and the 7DAs run a multi-billion (that’s billion with a B) dollar health care system.
They are nuts with scalpels.
Oddly enough, the first xenotransplant on an infant, Baby Fae, was performed there in 1984. Fae was the ‘Baby with a baboon heart’ in Paul Simon’s song Boy in the Bubble, from the Graceland album.
Another SDA university, La Sierra, recently fired most of their biology department. They were EXPELLED
They had been after them for a while for being too friendly to evolution.
Their big crime though was being caught…drinking beer while watching a football game at home. As I didn’t know, the SDA’s prohibit alcohol.
…and MEAT!
They’re strict vegetarians. No smoking, no drinking, no caffeine. They’re into “family walks” after dinner. They breed like rabbits. The Quiverful movement has nothing on these characters.
They’re also millennialists. They truly believe Jesus is on his way…any second now. With a flaming sword (what, no Uzi?).
They are all over the place in my little corner of the universe. Which is quite odd, because I’m smack dab in the heart of Billy Graham country.
They worship on Saturdays, not Sundays. And do not open their places of business on the Sabbath, no matter what.
There’s a golf course near me that is closed on Saturday! And they had the nerve to complain about slow business in the local newspaper.
None of the Seventh Day Adventists I’ve ever known have been vegetarians, though maybe they just don’t consider the stuff from McDonalds to be real meat.
In the interest of accuracy Point Loma Nazarene University and Loma Linda University are not the same thing and PLNU is not a Seventh Day Adventist institution (although I believe it is open to people of that sect.)
Really? Since when? Not only does science think it is possible, there are even several competing, more or less plausible, hypotheses. This is science denialism, pure and simple. For him to accuse atheists from making up stuff because their beliefs demand it is just too rich.
Some of the scribblings of these “accommodationists” reminds me of the panic endured by a pompous ass about to give a public lecture just as he realizes that his britches are about to drop due to the elasticized waistband giving out.
In the marketplace of ideas fact and fiction are often confused; it is up to individuals to avail themselves of knowledge that can be independently verified. To do less is simply burying one’s head in the sand.
Positing a “god” when one’s knowledge is deficient is simply highlighting one’s ignorance.
Note: I have had little more than a high school education, augmented by much reading, and even so I can detect the desperation of these wishful thinkers.
+1
You and me both.
I’m a little baffled by Mann’s reasoning that science is not secular because Muslims and Christians made scientific discoveries. He seems to not realize that being a Muslim was not a requirement to understand Muslim science, nor is being Christian a requirement to understand the Christian science. The Christian scientists happily used the results from the Muslims, after all. The fact that their results could be independently verified regardless of religious beliefs makes it secular.
Also, I was unaware that global climate change is now a Christian/evengalical issue (although it is a clear right-wing issue, of course).
Oh, yes.
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lol. It’s ok everyone. In a couple of years when that dude who is funded by Templeton finally figures out how God’s mind works we’ll all know everything that there is to know about everything.
He’ll have an explicit mechanistic description of God’s mind.
So let’s just sit tight and wait for his revelation of the inner workings of God’s mind.
Yep! I can’t wait to read about the immeasurable entity’s immaterial mind and what measures the grant receiver used to determine how it works! (Heck, I’m eager to read about how he distinguished it from an imaginary god’s imaginary mind!)
lol. Yes I agree. We definitely don’t want to know the description of an imaginary God’s mind because that’s just dumb and he only really has two years for his funding/stipend. So hopefully he restricts his studies only on describing the inner workings of the real God. The King of the Universe and all possible universes that He just hasn’t created yet).
They could rename themselves Answers in Genesis, or is that name already taken?
I have commented on this before, it is sloppy thinking on the part of people who really should know better to treat creationism and global warming skepticism as essentially the same (religious) thing.
Evolution completely contradicts major statements of faith, and quite honestly DOES undermine all of significance in most religions. It is very much a religious issue.
The warming issue has none of those conditions. It contradicts no sacred texts, it does not undermine any theological belief. Arguments (well other than the conspiracy ones–which themselves are not religious either) are hammered out over nuances of how data is to be interpreted and what mathematical approaches are legitimate for analysis. The skeptics may be wrong but their arguments are far from religious. If overtly non-religious people make arguments that do not reference religion, why are they considered religious?
Interestingly I am also puzzled by the ‘man made’ requirement, i.e. people who agree that warming is going on, but doubt that it is significantly human causes are thrown category in with the the religious wingnut crowd. Why is this? It almost sounds like a sense guilt over human activity is a required component … is it necessary to feel guilty to be properly scientific? Why is that even an issue?
I speculate that this is very much a philosophical and especially political driven schism. If you look at the approach that is generally outlined by the most active supporters of anthro warming, it usually involves massive government programs, and somewhat coercive mandates about peoples’ behavior. The default approach is pro-active government actions (on a multinational level). There are plenty of people (not just religious ones) whose hackles get raised by such an approach. So, my theory is that this is a big (multi) government vs small government/individual autonomy divide fueling much of this dispute. Religion may be coming along for the ride, but has no dog in this fight.
I think the idea conflicts with their beliefs that God gave Adam dominion over the land, and that man can’t destroy it… God will destroy it when he’s ready to usher in the tribulation or whatever–
In any case, there is a strong overlap between religious fundamentalism and denial of AGW that no amount of evidence is likely to change; this makes both a position of faith. Believers in both set a very low standard of evidence for what they have come to believe or wish to be true –and an impossible standard of evidence to accept a conflicting claim or the idea that they could be as wrong as those “others” whom they are SURE are wrong.
I think religion DOES have a dog in this fight– at least in America it does… religionists are keen to imagine themselves good moral people, but they don’t want to DO anything to earn the title like use less fuel or make less waste. They feel entitled to all they have due to their “faith” and can’t be bothered with how their selfishness might affect others or future generations. Perhaps the only connection is scientific ignorance, but given the vociferousness of their opinions on both evolution and AGW denial, it appears to be more than that.
I think it’s simpler than that. The people who fund the American fundamentalist Christian movement have vested financial interests in lax environmental regulations, so they tell the pastors and authors on their payroll to attack the idea of man-made global warming. The “dominion over the earth” theology is a useful tool to advance this goal.
I speculate that this is very much a philosophical and especially political driven schism. If you look at the approach that is generally outlined by the most active supporters of anthro warming, it usually involves massive government programs, and somewhat coercive mandates about peoples’ behavior. The default approach is pro-active government actions (on a multinational level). There are plenty of people (not just religious ones) whose hackles get raised by such an approach. So, my theory is that this is a big (multi) government vs small government/individual autonomy divide fueling much of this dispute. Religion may be coming along for the ride, but has no dog in this fight.
Agree that this is largely cultural: in general, it seems like conservatives like conformist, collectivist philosophical outlooks where everyone in the community is expected to agree — which is ironic given all the conservative rhetoric about rights of the individual, etc. What they really want is freedom for individuals to think and act exactly like they do.
But “active supporters of anthro warming”? What the hell does that even mean? You think there are people out there rooting for AGW? (Well, there maybe a few anarchist/environmentalists but they’re relatively fringe even among the greenies.) I think most sensible people agree that AGW is a bad thing.
I don’t think it’s a big government thing. I think it’s a conformity/in-group, out-group thing. Believing in AGW marks you as “not-a-true-conservative” which means you’re not part of their culture — which means you’re not a real American and you ‘kin GIIIIIIIIT out!
I think the source of angst about global warming is a financial issue. Follow the money. Who has the most to lose by capping carbon emissions, retrofitting factories and plants. People like the Koch brothers. And those who profit most from the least environmental regulation. Cheaper to throw stuff in a river than clean it up first.
The religious right wingnuts are being used as pawns in this game to obscure the real intentions of industrialists. Money pulls political strings which, in turn, pull heartstrings.
Wingnuts can’t produce a coherent answer as to why they oppose efforts to reduce man-made contributions to atmospheric warming. They understand neither the science, nor the politics nor the money trail at the root. They’re just cows in a field mooing.
Lots of cows, however.
I don’t know that I’d go that far. I tend to agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but I think conservative culture had a pre-existing anti-intellectual streak heavily tied to notions of masculinity that would have made conservatives dismissive of AGW even without the propaganda. There’s also the very-America “you can’t tell me how to live my life.” Lots of people don’t like being told that running the AC all day and driving a hummer are bad things that they shouldn’t do.
Finally, so many Americans are dependent on petroleum fuels just to get to work that increasing the price of petroleum products really does amount to a really regressive tax. In this case, the interests of poor Americans really are aligned with the Koch brothers.
The reason they won’t accept the human component in global warming is that it leads to acceptance that there are already too fucking many people on the planet, which leads to acceptance of reproductive rights.
Makes sense to me.
Yeah there’s that too.
Also that they need to accept that “be fruitful and multiply” isn’t something they can do anymore.
As Dan says, nobody is rooting for this.
It is a scientific find, climate science is unequivocal on it, attribution (to AGW as well as natural factors) are at 2 sigma as of last year, and I give it even chances we will see the physics criteria of 3 sigma theory validation before IPCC 2014.*
The approach of those who takes the modeled social risks seriously, as they should, involve the usual governmental acceptance of risk mitigation. For one, it would be immoral for governments to look the other way. For another, it is much less costly to prevent GW than live with it, and one outcome of democracy is to look for better ways.
If you don’t want to partake in civilization, fine, go buy an island. Just don’t buy one without a decent mountain…
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* Since we are looking at a sick puppy, already 2 sigma is a tremendous signal-to-noise ratio compared to the ~ 80 % diagnosis accuracy you get from your medical care. We can’t complain. Unfortunately.
Could just be an Evil Scientists of Doom issue.
Abiogenesis – Don’t we do that every time we take a multi-vitamin?
Given my limited understanding of the process, I think such an event is practically inevitable given a certain environment. Yet creationists will hem and haw about how science has spent such mind boggling epochs as DECADES and still hasn’t cultivated a bunny rabbit from base chemicals. Early Earth had millions of years and a vast environment to work with and science is supposed to recreate the entire tree of life in under a century? Yet their ancient Yahweh poetry is a MUCH better explanation!
To be fair, some of the people on the list lived late enough for it to unlikely that they feigned religious belief out of necessity. Max Planck lived well into the 20th century.
…and, of course, the list leaves off a contemporary of Planck…Einstein.
Einstein was an atheist.
I thought that Einstein was more a deist/agnostic and did not support an atheistic view?
“I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”
“In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views.”
Einstein used the word “God” to describe universal rules, but he was very clear that he did not believe in the existence of any sort of supernatural being that interfered with people’s personal lives and expressed offense when people tried to claim that he did.
So pistor Swaim thinks radiocarbon dating is one of the “foundations for the current theories of the age of the earth”?
Aren’t these people even properly briefed, even if blatantly ignorant?
My favourite moment of fun with observant 7DAs (of which there is a small but militant and highly noxious minority over here in Europe as well) consists in discussing dendrochronology, with hands-on samples. When it comes to counting tree-rings, and the counter gets farther and farther back into the past, passing the 6000y mark, screeeeech!
No need to screech when one believes in magical invisible entities– just claim that a trickster god is testing his imperfect creations –or that demons are trying to garner souls for Satan– or that it’s all part of the mystery of a 3-in-1 Jesus-god who is beyond our understanding.
Invoke magic freely and “poof” all cognitive dissonance evaporates! And one can keep on believing whatever it is they imagine themselves special and saved for believing in.
You know, I find that whole Devil Burying Dinosaurs thing hilarious. Sometime, I want to walk a creationist through just what all the Devil would have to do…
Lay down each and every fossil, in exact evolutionary order. Adjust the Continents so they look like they could have fit together. Place partially decayed radioactive elements everywhere in the universe. Shape the features of the universe itself to give the impression of great age.
After a certain point, it hardly seems to be *God’s* creation at all. And if God did it, you have to ask yourself, why would it go to such trouble in manufacturing an old universe?
Actually contemporary creationist/fundie thought (an oxymoron to be sure) has god, not satan, faking the fossil record. He just spends a lot of time running around hiding fossils here and there.
The fundie god has a boring life.
Having satan hiding the fossils to fool us humans gives too much power to satan.
Satan, after all, is just another one of god’s creations along with humans, demons and hell.
Isn’t it supposed to be a test of faith? (See also James Blish’s A Case of Conscience.)
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Biologos is not interested in the truth. They are interested in maintaining their faith– even when the facts conflict with what they imagine themselves “saved” for “believing in”.
I’d say this is true of the majority of Christians as well.
Unfortunately, much of Christianity is incoherent and there is no agreement on what “true Christians” are “supposed to” “believe in” to win “happily ever after”. Moreover, as far as the evidence is concerned, the invisible beings that Christians believe in are as imaginary as the invisible beings they reject. There is no evidence for “souls” and if there was, scientists would be testing and refining that evidence for their own benefit and no faith would be necessary. No one would have to try and believe nonsense for fear that they might suffer forever if they don’t.
The whole “accommodationism” enterprise is doomed, because there is no way to show why anyone interested in the truth should take Christian supernatural claims more seriously than Christians take the supernatural claims of Scientologists or Muslims or believers in Greek myths. You can’t give credence to god belief without also given credence to demon belief and belief in Gypsy curses or fairy spells. Biologos is failing for the same reasons believers in these other myths would fail if they attempted such an enterprise. Believing in things and really wanting them to be true doesn’t make them real.
BioLogos are stuck in a catch-22 situation with evangelical Christians. They have realized that evangelicals do not trust scientists, even theistic evolutionists like Giberson and Francis Collins, so they have resorted to using evangelical preachers to spread the word.
The catch with this, as illustrated by Pastor Swaim, is that being an evangelical preacher and having an adequate knowledge of basic science are two mutually non overlapping domains. In fact the more knowledge one gains about science the less likelihood that one will be able to remain an evangelical preacher. This is not just for reasons of personal belief, acknowledgement of an acceptance of evolutionary theory is enough to get you expelled from many evangelical ministries.
It is even worse for BioLogos because the more knowledge one has in science the more a person is going to accept the scientific consensus for things other than evolution – for example global warming or human sexuality not being a personal choice.
Sigmund – as another BioLogos watcher and sometime-advice-giver, you are on target. Early on it became clear to me that the BL mission of ‘integrating science and Christian faith’ would not be a scientific endeavor but rather a theological undertaking. Venema’s science is solid, but I believe that BL has learned that the rank and file evangelical won’t relate to scientific data but rather will follow the teaching/preaching of their pastors and church leaders. And hence as you note, the Catch-22.
JAC, I have a quibble with this statement (and nothing else in your enlightening post):
“As I’ve said elebenty billion times, we have no a priori commitment to atheism or non-supernaturalism; we take the Laplace-ian stance, born of experience, that the invocation of gods has simply been useless and unnecessary in helping us understand nature.”
While I agree that we don’t have an a priori commitment to atheism, doesn’t science have (appropriately) an a priori commitment to non-supernaturalism?JAC, I thought you agreed with Boudry’s position that the notion of the supernatural (apart from and interacting with the natural world) doesn’t make sense. If something exists, it ought to be part of nature and conceivably detectable by studying nature. I know you haven’t closed your mind to the possibility that there might be evidence that some sort of “God” might exist. You’ve suggested that such evidence would be in nature and that any such evidence would point to a “God-entity” that would have to be part of nature.
Nature consists of what exists. There can be nothing that exists beyond what exists (in other words beyond nature). Thus, there the idea of the supernatural makes no sense and we must reject the notion of the supernatural.
Science has no commitments, a priori or otherwise. It is enough that science works. We observe that it works on natural systems, and we understand why it wouldn’t work on, say, magical systems.
That we don’t observe much of magic or any other dualism is mere coincidental and auspicious, it could easily been otherwise. But we have monism in the same way that we see uniformity, and it makes science more efficient.
If you will you can constitute a principle of physicalism (physics monism) in the same way as a principle of uniformity or a cosmological principle. They are all testable and they are all telling of the auspicious efficiency of science.
[Conversely they inform on nature, of course.]
I would deem that a theological claim on the properties of nature.* As such, it isn’t useful.
Observation is useful, and it says that today a hypothesis of magic would go nowhere.
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* FWIW, basic set theory says that you can’t make such claims on sets. (Proposing a set of all sets.) And objects belongs to sets.
To be more exact, you run into Russel’s paradox in naive set theory. So you must make a claim outside of it. As good a description of theology as any, making claims outside of what natural objects allow.
With faith in Hitchens’s dictum that “time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted,” I’ve attempted to engage the community at BioLogos. I’m curious to see where this bottle goes:
Steve – you have probably discerned that your bottle may not go very far with the departure of Enns and Giberson. The responses thus far have not had much substance, and I suspect that the evolution of BioLogos will continue to reflect the selection pressures of the conservative evangelical community.
Since I started to study astrobiology, I fell I should take this false claim on. Even the fact that there exist a viable scientific area shows that it is a fabrication.
First, we can predict that abiogenesis in the form of evolution of the first cellular populations happened. Standard cosmology tells of beginnings impossible for life as we know it.
Second, we have validated the prediction by observation. Again we have observed conditions impossible for life in the record of our planetary system formation, and later we have observed life. (Well, duh.) So abiogenesis is an observed fact.
Third, we have a viable area of abiogenesis theory, with a plethora of hypotheses. At least since Wächterhäuser’s surface metabolism hypotheses of 1988 they have been testable.* (In fact, 2008 there was a paper that invalidated that area of research by modeling how surface catalysts would need to be at least as productive as today’s enzymes.)
So it is scientifically impossible to claim that abiogenesis isn’t a science. We have tries (natural experiments and observations whereof), theories and testability, the big three T’s.
A relative to good old Chaplain Kevlar, a man of the cloth?
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* To do as all astrobiologists in spe and present my favorite theory, I’ll add another tentatively testable hypotheses:
DNA-protein cell machinery, RNA biosynthesis before the first membranes, the first enzymes are examples of (not fully exclusive) common evolutionary chicken-and-egg problems. Luckily such problems conveniently bottleneck possible pathways to a smaller set.
Bottom up, chemical network enzymes are a natural outcome in newer scenarios. High-temperature reactions seems to be much faster than orthodox theory predicted from scant data. This temperature dependence gives a self-selection for enthalpic pre-proteinous enzymes. [“Impact of temperature on the time required for the establishment of primordial biochemistry, and for the evolution of enzymes”, Stockbridge et al, PNAS, 2010.]
Now looking top down, we see that pathways meet. The first modern metabolic networks originated with purine metabolism, and specifically with the gene family of the P-loop-containing ATP hydrolase fold. [“The origin of modern metabolic networks inferred from phylogenomic analysis of protein architecture”, Caetano-Anollés et al. PNAS, 2007; “Rapid evolutionary innovation during an Archaean genetic expansion”, David et al, Nature, 2010.]
That is, ATP sits at the intersection between a cooling and/or hydrothermal vent active Earth prometabolism and nucleotide protometabolism. (Which compound seems to later have been exaptated by modern proteinous metabolic genes as coenzyme/energy currency.) Minimum change of traits picks ATP use before RNA evolution
Note that this is an (as of yet informal) test of a phylogenetic pathway.
I think another nice way to approach the abiogenesis problem is to ask: “Well, what was all that unbound carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorous supposed to do? What would the surface of the earth look like without abiogenesis?”
I think to ask this is almost to answer it: take a bunch of very reactive elements and put them in water on a silicate substrate, expose them to solar radiation and they’re going to keep reacting in new and interesting ways creating dazzling varieties of more and less complex compounds. To sneak a little metaphorical teleology in, the system will keep trying new compounds unless and until it finds one that replicates itself (under whatever conditions). And that would be abiogenesis. If it didn’t happen in the first billion years it would have happened eventually — it was just a matter of time.
It’s almost harder to explain why abiogenesis wouldn’t happen under conditions like those on the early earth.
So, a variant of “why should there be nothing rather than something?” I like it!
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Exactly: the potential existence of replicators makes the lifeless world unstable, like symmetry-breaking in cosmology.
Second, we have validated the prediction by observation. Again we have observed conditions impossible for life in the record of our planetary system formation, and later we have observed life. (Well, duh.) So abiogenesis is an observed fact.
How would this preclude panspermia as the alternative observed ‘fact?’
Falk: “…we exhibit Christian integrity in how we dialog…”
Um, would that be like the integrity of Marcus Ross?
In other words, they tell bald-faced lies but they do it nicely.
And they actually think this is a positive trait.
Amazing but not surprising. Who was it that said, “beliefs arrived at without science cannot be dispelled by science”? In this case pseudo-science can be very deceptive and believable to science naive people.
Yep, the end of that sermon is pretty bad. I think the BioLogos people liked the flexibility in theology that the pastor seemed to be making, but perhaps they were just hearing what they wanted to hear.
On the other hand, today:
http://biologos.org/blog/understanding-evolution-mitochondrial-eve-y-chromosome-adam
…a quite capable debunking of “Reasons to Believe”‘s arguments that mitochondrial “Eve” is evidence of a literal Adam and Eve.
If you’re going to bash the bad stuff, give credit where credit is due to the good stuff.
I’ve always highlighted the fact that BioLogos is all over the map on Adam and Eve, and in fact I think their formal statement is that they take NO POSITION with respect to the historicity of Adam and Eve, a formal position that is unscientific and wrong.
And Nick, don’t tell me what to post about. Go start your own website if you have such strong feeling–especially because you don’t go after BioLogos for ANYTHING they say.
sbscrbng
So the evangelicals see science as a threat because they believe that if they were to accept Evilution they’ll then be coerced by the Gay Agenda and the Green Agenda. It’s the usual problem of religious people wanting to select their own imaginary truths. They just can’t give up the Jesus and god myth and would rather deny reality in favor of their delusions.
Excellent article in Discover magazine about possible abiogenesis on earth:
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/feb/did-life-evolve-in-ice
Um, yes. They did.
Was it meant to imply that these religious scientists never actually did any science, but instead dreamt it all up during prayer?
Methinks it’s a bit insulting to suppose that they didn’t compromise.
Everyone back then was required, by law, to be a Christian, under penalty of property forfeiture, imprisonment, or death.
I have only one thing to say about this picture
Yuck!
“Let’s not surrender science to the secular world,”
Oh okay. Alright, nobody surrender science to the secular world!! Okay there you go. Lol. People!! Nobody surrender science to the secular world!!
http://biologos.org/blog/lets-not-surrender-science-to-the-secular-world
A far more appropriate way to criticize the anti-intellectual and anti-scientific positions of Christian fundamentalists is to demonstrate how deeply anti-Christian and anti-biblical these positions truly are.
Yeah that always works pretty good. Telling fundies that Biblical things are Anti-Biblical. Good plan!
Defining Gnosticism and demonstrating the extent to which Christian fundamentalists are guilty of this heresy will be the central thrust of my next blog.
Yeah that should work pretty good. Telling people they are heretics always works out well. Sorry, but you have to have the bonfires and torture to actually make it work. You ain’t allowed to do that anymore though. Oh wella!
(subscribing)