Category: apologetics

Is ISIS full of “true believers”?

March 8, 2015 • 3:51 pm

You’ve probably seen or heard about the discussion between Sam Harris and Graeme Wood over at Sam’s website, a discussion called “The true believers.” Wood, of course, has become famous—and notorious—for his analysis of ISIS’s theological background in a piece that appeared in The Atlantic (see my post for the link). Wood’s thesis, which he supported by interviewing ISIS supporters outside the Middle East (the man is no fool and didn’t want to be beheaded), was that ISIS represents an apocalyptic strain of Islam, justified by the Qur’an, that aims to establish an ever-expanding Caliphate and longs for a final battle with the West, during which Jesus will appear and save Islam.

Wood was taken to task for the usual things: neglecting “other motivations” for ISIS’s behavior, failure to interview members of ISIS in the Middle East, and for his “un-nuanced” interpretations of theology. By and large, he took as truth what his subjects told him, and when that largely revealed religious motivations, the “Islamophobia-decriers” had to find reasons to discredit him.

In his long discussion with Sam, they go over these motivations again, and I recommend that you read the piece. I’ll highlight just three things:

1. Motivations: religious or otherwise? There is a slight disparity between Harris and Wood here, with Harris taking the religious motivations espoused by ISIS sympathizers at face value, while Wood says that some people might not be expressing other motivations, like resentment of Western colonialism. By and large, though, both men are on the same page; but Wood is a tad more cautious:

Wood: Yes. However, the countervailing current in social science is the tradition in ethnography and anthropology of taking seriously what people say. And this can lead to the exact opposite of the materialist, “root causes” approach. When Evans-Pritchard, for example, talks about witchcraft among the Azande, he’s describing exactly what they say and showing that it’s an internally consistent view of the world. This is something that anthropology has done quite well in the past, and it gives us a model for how we can listen to jihadis and understand them without immediately assuming that they are incapable of self-knowledge.

What I’m arguing for in the piece is not to discard either type of explanation but to remember the latter one and take the words of these ISIS people seriously. Even though at various points in the past we’ve ignored political or material causes, this doesn’t mean that ideology plays no role, or that we should ignore the plain meaning of words.

Of course, we don’t know what people actually think. Maybe they’re self-deluded; maybe they don’t really believe in the literal rewards of martyrdom. We can’t know; we’re not in their heads. But this lack of knowledge cuts both ways. Why do so many people instantly resort, with great confidence, to a material explanation—even or especially when the person himself rejects it?  It’s a very peculiar impulse to have, and I consider it a matter of dogma for many people who study jihadists.

Harris: Yes, especially in cases where a person meets none of the material conditions that are alleged to be the root causes of his behavior. We see jihadis coming from free societies all over the world. There are many examples of educated, affluent young men joining organizations like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State who lack any discernible material or political grievances. They simply feel a tribal connection to Muslims everywhere, merely because they share the same religious identity. We are seeing jihadis travel halfway around the world for the privilege of dying in battle who have nothing in common with the beleaguered people of Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, or Somalia whose ranks they are joining, apart from a shared belief in the core doctrines of Islam.

. . . Again, the fact that most jihadis are generally rational, even psychologically normal, and merely in the grip of a dangerous belief system is, in my view, the most important point to get across. And it is amazing how resolutely people will ignore the evidence of this. Justin Bieber could convert to Islam tomorrow, spend a full hour on 60 Minutes confessing his hopes for martyrdom and his certainty of paradise, and then join the Islamic State—and Glenn Greenwald would still say his actions had nothing to do with the doctrine of Islam and everything to do with U.S. foreign policy.

I’m perfectly prepared to accept that some of these militants have motivations other than religion. Many may simply long for excitement, or to feel part of something larger than themselves. But what I’m not prepared to accept is that every one of them has nonreligious motivations. It’s curious to me—and this the one thing I think I’ve contributed to Sam’s thinking—that Western apologists like Greenwald and Karen Armstrong will question people’s motivations when they explicitly say their motivations are religious, but will not question them when they say their motivations are based on economics or resentment of Western imperialism. This is the double standard of Western liberals that so infuriates me.

2. So why the double standard? I think both men agree, and I agree too, that holding ISIS to standards different from those to which we hold, say, the Israelis, reflects a kind of paternalism: a tendency to give a break to people considered oppressed.

Harris: Do you have other ideas about why it’s so tempting for liberals to ignore the link between jihadism and religious belief?

Wood: There’s also a deep urge to deny agency to the Islamic State, and I think it’s fundamentally connected to a reluctance to see non-Western people as fully developed and capable of having intelligent beliefs and enough self-knowledge to express them. These people articulate well-thought-out reasons for what they do. And yet ignoring what they say somehow gets camouflaged in the minds of liberals as speaking up for them. It’s delusional.

I think this is on the mark, though liberals are notably reluctant to admit it, for it’s expressing a kind of reverse racism that they deplore. I consider myself a liberal, and am deeply distressed by the view that different groups should be held to different standards of behavior, with some groups excused or overlooked for performing barbaric acts.

3. The false notion of objective morality.  Wood’s interview with ISIS sympathizers convinces me even more that there are no universal moral truths.  Listen to what he says about some of his subjects:

Wood: Anjem Choudary is a fixture on Fox News. He talks to Sean Hannity, and many people would say that those two deserve each other. He’s known for screaming about the greatness and supremacy of shari’ah. But I had no interest in the screaming. Instead, I wanted details. We had a lucid, friendly exchange about what he believed a fully shari’ah-compliant caliphate would look like. I found him articulate, informed, and pleasant company in this regard. When I say “informed,” I mean he had answers to all my questions. They might not have been the right answers, but he was able to answer pretty much everything I could come up with about the Islamic State, about how it looks and why it’s so wonderful.

And he did this unflinchingly, even when he was endorsing what I would call rape or slavery—what even he would call slavery, in fact. This was not a tough call for him. If he has any compunction about these practices, it was completely undetectable. That was not true of some others I’ve interviewed who have literalist views of Islam. To be in the presence of someone who can say, in this modern day, that slavery is a good thing and that to deny its goodness is an act of apostasy was a very unsettling experience.

Most moral objectivists would say that slavery is objectively wrong. I say it’s “wrong” because a society that condones it is a dysfunctional society that promotes the subjugation and unnecessary suffering of individuals. But Choudary would say it’s fine, justifying it on Quranic grounds, or even on consequential grounds. How do you convince someone like him that he’s objectively wrong? Such people appeal to divine sanction, and although you can say that there is no god, and he should be appealing to something else, the fact is that many people hold religious dogma as the arbiter of morality.

I have seen attacks on the internet of my views that there are no objective moral truths, but I don’t find them convincing. Slavery is an example that most reasonable people would agree on, but there are other and harder issues, like abortion, that defy any objective “moral solution.” One must, at bottom, express some kind of preference, like for “overall well being,” that can be neither quantified not objectively justified.

 

ISIS is really, truly Islamic

February 17, 2015 • 11:30 am

I keep touting Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning book The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 as a corrective for those who claim that Al-Qaeda is motivated not by religion, but by secular issues like poverty, colonialism, and the like.  Wright’s book shows clearly that the roots of Al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamic groups that practice terrorism were, in the main, motivated by Islam, its dictate to wage jihad, and its hatred of the West, whose values stood in distinction to those of Islam.

Despite, that, though, Muslim apologists like Karen Armstrong and Reza Aslan continue to insist not only are Islamic terrorist groups “not truly Islamic,” but that the message of the Qur’an is one of peace and love. That, of course, is bunk. And now that ISIS has arisen after Wright’s book, the same apologetics are being applied to it as were applied to Al-Qaeda.

The necessary corrective has just been published in The Atlantic by Graeme Wood, in a piece called “What ISIS really wants“. Wood is an editor at the magazine as well as a lecturer in political science at Yale. He lived in the Middle East for four years beginning in 2002, so he certainly has the street cred to write about ISIS. His piece is long—21 pages as I printed it out—but it’s well worth reading, especially because ISIS threatens to kindle a huge war in the Middle East.

Many readers sent me the link to the piece (thanks, all!), probably because its main message is one I make a lot: ISIS has deep roots in Islam and, in fact, is simply carrying out the medieval Muslim plan to establish a worldwide caliphate. Wood clearly describes ISIS’s bizarre theology involving the capture of Istanbul by the Caliphate, the death of nearly all its members, and then their final rescue by the Muslim prophet Jesus (yes, the Jesus) who comes back to Earth during the Apocalypse.

Wood’s article involved a lot of travel, interviewing, and scholarly work, and you really should read it (the download is free). I’ll give just a few quotes (indented) and then my own take on the piece.

The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.”
. . . Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.
. . . According to Haykel, the ranks of the Islamic State are deeply infused with religious vigor. Koranic quotations are ubiquitous. “Even the foot soldiers spout this stuff constantly,” Haykel said. “They mug for their cameras and repeat their basic doctrines in formulaic fashion, and they do it all the time.” He regards the claim that the Islamic State has distorted the texts of Islam as preposterous, sustainable only through willful ignorance. “People want to absolve Islam,” he said. “It’s this ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ mantra. As if there is such a thing as ‘Islam’! It’s what Muslims do, and how they interpret their texts.” Those texts are shared by all Sunni Muslims, not just the Islamic State. “And these guys have just as much legitimacy as anyone else.”
There is much more, but I needn’t duplicate what’s online. But why is it important to recognize that ISIS, like Al-Qaeda, is a religiously motivated group? This is where a generally superb article loses a bit of its patina. Wood argues that we can fight the organization more effectively since its religious background gives us insight into its plans:
The ideological purity of the Islamic State has one compensating virtue: it allows us to predict some of the group’s actions. Osama bin Laden was seldom predictable. He ended his first television interview cryptically. CNN’s Peter Arnett asked him, “What are your future plans?” Bin Laden replied, “You’ll see them and hear about them in the media, God willing.” By contrast, the Islamic State boasts openly about its plans—not all of them, but enough so that by listening carefully, we can deduce how it intends to govern and expand.
And indeed, one of Wood’s claims is that ISIS must continually expand and gain land, for that is what the Caliphate is supposed to do. If we can prevent that, he says, ISIS will die a slow death. This is in contrast to Al-Qaeda, which can be viable as an organization without a territory, for it can simply go underground and emerge at appropriate times to wreak havoc.
But in the end, says Wood, an invasion and direct confrontation is unlikely to work, and so he basically recommends what we’re already doing:
Given everything we know about the Islamic State, continuing to slowly bleed it, through air strikes and proxy warfare, appears the best of bad military options. Neither the Kurds nor the Shia will ever subdue and control the whole Sunni heartland of Syria and Iraq—they are hated there, and have no appetite for such an adventure anyway. But they can keep the Islamic State from fulfilling its duty to expand. And with every month that it fails to expand, it resembles less the conquering state of the Prophet Muhammad than yet another Middle Eastern government failing to bring prosperity to its people.
. . . Properly contained, the Islamic State is likely to be its own undoing. No country is its ally, and its ideology ensures that this will remain the case. The land it controls, while expansive, is mostly uninhabited and poor. As it stagnates or slowly shrinks, its claim that it is the engine of God’s will and the agent of apocalypse will weaken, and fewer believers will arrive. And as more reports of misery within it leak out, radical Islamist movements elsewhere will be discredited: No one has tried harder to implement strict Sharia by violence. This is what it looks like.

So in the end, knowing ISIS’s background and ideology doesn’t seem that helpful.

But Wood also has another point. Every time the President or someone else claims that ISIS isn’t really a brand of Islam, it turns those who are susceptible to jihad even more militant, for they see that the U.S. “lies about religion to serve its purposes.”  Well, I don’t find that argument terribly convincing, but maybe it does have some force.

My own objection to characterizing ISIS as “not Muslim” is on grounds of truth: such statements are disingenuous and simply serve to perpetuate all religion, with the harms attendant on it, for I see even the moderate forms of faith as usually harmful. (Yes, Reza Aslan, I’m an anti-theist.)  I think it’s marginally useful to know that ISIS is a religiously motivated group, for it’s best to know your enemy as fully as possible, but Wood hasn’t made the case that such knowledge will be crucial in defeating the group.

_________
For another take on the religious nature of the war, see Roger Cohen’s column in today’s New York Times, “Islam and the West at war.” One excerpt:

I hear the words of Chokri Belaid, the brave Tunisian lawyer, shortly before he was gunned down by Islamist fanatics on Feb. 6, 2013: “We can disagree in our diversity but within a civilian, peaceful and democratic framework. Disagree in our diversity, yes!”

To speak of a nonspecific “dark ideology,” to dismiss the reality of conflict between the West and Islam, is also to undermine the anti-Islamist struggle of brave Muslims like Belaid — and these Muslims are the only people, ultimately, who can defeat the black-flagged jihadi death merchants.

Australian religionist tries to explain why God allows evil; fails miserably

February 10, 2015 • 1:15 pm

Australia, though a pretty nonreligious country compared to the U.S., still has its pockets of faith. One was recently emptied on the Australian Broadcasting System’s (ABC’s) site “The Drum,” in piece written by Simon Smart, a man described on the ABC’s site as

. . . a Director of the Centre for Public Christianity and the co-author with Jane Caro, Antony Loewenstein and Rachel Woodlock of For God’s Sake – An Atheist, a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim Debate Religion. A former history and English teacher, he studied theology at Regent College, Vancouver. He is the author of a number of books including Bright Lights Dark Nights – the Enduring Faith of 13 Remarkable Australians.

All it takes is a degree in theology to screw up one’s thinking, or so it seems in Smart’s piece “Fry vs. God: the comedian’s concerns aren’t new.” In it, Smart attack’s Stephen Fry’s short response on theodicy in his interview with Gay Byrne on Irish television (I’ve put it below in case you’ve forgotten it or haven’t seen it.) Asked what he’d say to God if he encountered Him, Fry responded that he’d ask God why there’s so much unmerited evil in the world, like kids getting cancer.

Fry’s short response has caused a lot of consternation among Christians. I’m a bit surprised at that, because the problem of evil, which spawned the discipline of theodicy, has been around as long as Christianity itself.  Fry didn’t say anything that the Old Atheists didn’t say decades ago. But the old arguments need to be raised again with each generation of believers, and Fry is, after all, an immensely smart, popular, and likable man. His comments demand an answer.

Well, Smart has responded to Fry. As with all attempts to give a religious justification of evil, though, he fails miserably. Here’s how Smart explains why an all-loving and omnipotent god tortures children (my emphasis):

Ultimately when a Christian stops to consider the struggle of human existence they will want to point to the death and resurrection of Jesus as the centre of a very long, and still unfolding, story of how God launches a plan to redeem the world from its misery – a portrait of a God who has not remained aloof from the suffering but rather has become part of it.

The resurrection of Jesus points to God condemning all the things that have destroyed life, and promising a day when the weight of history and all the centuries of human cruelty, sadness and loss will be overcome. Is it enough? Not everyone will think so.

The biblical picture offers a promise of the possibility of a new beginning when murdered children will be raised up and restored, where families torn apart by violence will find peace and harmony again. It presents a vision of a time where crushing loneliness will be a thing of the past, where bodies broken and ravaged by disease or old age will be restored to strength and vitality, where people who have experienced grinding poverty will find abundance, where children ripped from their mother’s arms in a tsunami will be ushered in to new life. In the end Christianity is a story of the denial of the powers of darkness and violence and cruelty and hatred and heartbreak. And in their place the victory of goodness and mercy; kindness and love.

Every aspect of this vision is predicated on Jesus rising from death. If that didn’t happen, then it is right and proper to join Stephen Fry and to throw the whole thing out the window.

This is completely insane. It simply says that because of Jesus all things wrong will be made right in the next world.  But that doesn’t answer the question at all, for the evil has still already occurred in our world! Even if there’s a new beginning, the end was often pretty bad.  And God could have prevented those bad endings.

Is it better to have a kid who dies horribly of cancer subsequently find peace and harmony in heaven, or for that kid to not have gotten cancer in the first place, causing horrible suffering for herself and her parents? Which way of ordering the cosmos would be better? I would have thought that a truly good God would create a world in which there was no suffering of innocents and people went to heaven as well. Or why not just have a heaven that everyone lives in, and cut out the middleman? In fact, why make people in the first place? Smart gives no answers.

This week I’ve seen more than one Christian use similar arguments to justify evil, and they all seem blinkered to the problems. If God is omnipotent, he can do anything he wants, and if he makes innocents (or animals) suffer horribly, there must be a good explanation. The only credible ones left to believers are a). That God is sometimes evil, as he was in the Old Testament, or b). We don’t understand God’s ways. Any other explanation is pilpul. The most parsimonious explanation is, of course, that there is no God and “evil” is simply expected in an evolved world, a world where mutations cause cancer, people get infectious diseases, the tectonic plates move, and animals and microbes evolved to kill other animals.

At least Smart has the honesty to admit that if there were no Resurrection, then Christanity crumbles at its core. But his argument that the Resurrection justifies natural evils doesn’t hold water.

In the end, Smart plays his trump card: even if we don’t know whether there is a God, or why, if there is a good God, he creates evil, we have to keep the myths alive because of the Little People:

We may even, as Fry claims to have done, conjure up a degree of optimism in the face of the implications of a godless universe. But if we arrive at that point it would be fitting to acknowledge that, while doing nothing to rid ourselves of suffering we will have removed a source of profound hope that for centuries has sustained millions of people in the face of life’s joys and sorrows.

h/t: Phil

Simon Conway Morris’s new book on evolutionary convergence. Does it give evidence for God?

February 8, 2015 • 11:59 am

The eminent paleobiologist Simon Conway Morris, who did seminal work on the Burgess Shale Fauna, has a new book out. Published on January 19, it’s called The Runes of Evolution: How the Universe Became Self-Aware. And it was published by Templeton Press, which should tell you something about its contents.41O9HaXoi1L

 

Now the subtitle does seem to be a bit wooish and Deepak-ish: in fact, more than a bit, for the Universe is certainly not self-aware, at least in the sense that it has a Big Mind that can produce awareness. Unless, that is, if you believe in God, which Conway Morris certainly does (he’s a devout Christian). And I suspect, and am willing to bet, that the message of this book is that the evolutionary phenomenon of convergence—its nominal topic—gives evidence for the deity. Like Conway Morris’s previous book, it is probably a work of natural theology.

In 2003 Conway Morris produced a fat book called Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. Much of the book was quite good, for it was the first concerted attempt to document the phenomenon of “evolutionary convergence.” This is the phenomenon whereby unrelated species evolve similar traits in response to similar selective pressures, so they “converge” in the way they look.

There are lots of examples of such convergence; one of the most famous is the way that marsupial and plancental mammals, though their ancestors diverged about 160 million years ago, have produced species that look very similar. Here’s a picture of several convergences from The Roaming Naturalist; I have a similar picture in Why Evolution is True and give more examples below:

converge361

The problem with Conway Morris’s Life’s Solution was not its catalogue of remarkable convergences, which I found fascinating, but in its aim: to claim that evolutionary convergence gives evidence for God. That is, he used the phenomenon of convergence to argue that there are certain favored paths for evolution (which, indeed, there almost certainly are)—but that one of those paths must lead to Homo sapiens or a similarly self-aware creature (I call them “humanoids”) that can apprehend and worship God.

Lest you doubt that this is where Conway Morris was going in that book, read my post about it from 2012. (You can read about Conway Morris’s religious beliefs and denigration of atheism here.)

As I said, I haven’t yet read the new book, and I will, but the description at the Templeton Press site suggests that it’s a popular version of Life’s Solution, and with the same message—with added “self-awareness of the universe”:

How did human beings acquire imaginations that can conjure up untrue possibilities? How did the Universe become self-aware? In The Runes of Evolution, Simon Conway Morris revitalizes the study of evolution from the perspective of convergence, providing us with compelling new evidence to support the mounting scientific view that the history of life is far more predictable than once thought.

A leading evolutionary biologist at the University of Cambridge, Conway Morris came into international prominence for his work on the Cambrian explosion (especially fossils of the Burgess Shale) and evolutionary convergence, which is the process whereby organisms not closely related (not monophyletic), independently evolve similar traits as a result of having to adapt to similar environments or ecological niches.

In The Runes of Evolution, he illustrates how the ubiquity of convergence hints at an underlying framework whereby many outcomes, not least brains and intelligence, are virtually guaranteed on any Earth-like planet. Conway Morris also emphasizes how much of the complexity of advanced biological systems is inherent in microbial forms.

In anticipation that this new book will mirror the old one, including its message of human inevitability, let me reproduce something I wrote a while back criticizing the ideas that a). the evolution of humans (or humanoids) was inevitable and b). that evolutionary convergence gives us evidence for a Divine Plan. My article in the 2009 New Republic, “Seeing and believing,” reviewed two books on evolution by Kenneth Miller and Karl Giberson. Both of them use arguments similar to Conway Morris’s for why evolutionary convergence gives evidence for God. Rather than rewrite my argument (which I’ve already done in the upcoming Faith versus Fact), I’ll just reproduce a bit of what I wrote five years ago:

To support the inevitability of humans, Giberson and Miller invoke the notion of evolutionary convergence. This idea is simple: species often adapt to similar environments by independently evolving similar features. Ichthyosaurs (ancient marine reptiles), porpoises, and fish all evolved independently in the water, and through natural selection all three acquired fins and a similar streamlined shape. Complex “camera eyes” evolved in both vertebrates and squid. Arctic animals such as polar bears, arctic hares, and snowy owls either are white or turn white in the winter, hiding them from predators or prey. Perhaps the most astonishing example of convergence is the similarity between some species of marsupial mammals in Australia and unrelated placental mammals that live elsewhere. The marsupial flying phalanger looks and acts just like the flying squirrel of the New World. Marsupial moles, with their reduced eyes and big burrowing claws, are dead ringers for our placental moles. Until its extinction in 1936, the remarkable thylacine, or Tasmanian wolf, looked and hunted like a placental wolf.

Convergence tells us something deep about evolution. There must be preexisting “niches,” or ways of life, that call up similar evolutionary changes in unrelated species that adapt to them. That is, starting with different ancestors and fuelled by different mutations, natural selection can nonetheless mold bodies in very similar ways–so long as those changes improve survival and reproduction. There were niches in the sea for fish-eating mammals and reptiles, so porpoises and ichthyosaurs became streamlined. Animals in the Arctic improve their survival if they are white in the winter. And there must obviously be a niche for a small omnivorous mammal that glides from tree to tree. Convergence is one of the most impressive features of evolution, and it is common: there are hundreds of cases.

All it takes to argue for the inevitability of humanoids, then, is to claim that there was a “humanoid niche”–a way of life that required high intelligence and sophisticated self-consciousness–and that this niche remained unfilled until inevitably invaded by human ancestors. But was its occupation really inevitable? Miller is confident that it was:

“But as life re-explored adaptive space, could we be certain that our niche would not be occupied? I would argue that we could be almost certain that it would be–that eventually evolution would produce an intelligent, self-aware, reflective creature endowed with a nervous system large enough to solve the very same questions we have, and capable of discovering the very process that produced it, the process of evolution…. Everything we know about evolution suggests that it could, sooner or later, get to that niche.”

Miller and Giberson are forced to this view for a simple reason. If we cannot prove that humanoid evolution was inevitable, then the reconciliation of evolution and Christianity collapses. For if we really were the special object of God’s creation, our evolution could not have been left to chance. (It may not be irrelevant that although the Catholic Church accepts most of Darwinism, it makes an official exception for the evolution of Homo sapiens, whose soul is said to have been created by God and inserted at some point into the human lineage.)

The difficulty is that most scientists do not share Miller’s certainty. This is because evolution is not a repeatable experiment. We cannot replay the tape of life over and over to see if higher consciousness always crops up. In fact, there are good reasons for thinking that the evolution of humanoids was not only not inevitable, but was a priori improbable. Although convergences are striking features of evolution, there are at least as many failures of convergence. These failures are less striking because they involve species that are missing. Consider Australia again. Many types of mammals that evolved elsewhere have no equivalents among marsupials. There is no marsupial counterpart to a bat (that is, a flying mammal), or to giraffes and elephants (large mammals with long necks or noses that can browse on the leaves of trees). Most tellingly, Australia evolved no counterpart to primates, or any creature with primate-like intelligence. In fact, Australia has many unfilled niches–and hence many unfulfilled convergences, including that prized “humanoid” niche. If high intelligence was such a predictable result of evolution, why did it not evolve in Australia? Why did it arise only once, in Africa?

This raises another question. We recognize convergences because unrelated species evolve similar traits. In other words, the traits appear in more than one species. But sophisticated, self-aware intelligence is a singleton: it evolved just once, in a human ancestor. (Octopi and dolphins are also smart, but they do not have the stuff to reflect on their origins.) In contrast, eyes have evolved independently forty times, and white color in Arctic animals appeared several times. It is hard to make a convincing case for the evolutionary inevitability of a feature that arose only once. The elephant’s trunk, a complex and sophisticated adaptation (it has over forty thousand muscles!), is also an evolutionary singleton. Yet you do not hear scientists arguing that evolution would inevitably fill the “elephant niche.” Giberson and Miller proclaim the inevitability of humanoids for one reason only: Christianity demands it.

Finally, it is abundantly clear that the evolution of human intelligence was a contingent event: contingent on the drying out of the African forest and the development of grasslands, which enabled apes to leave the trees and walk on two legs. Indeed, to maintain that the evolution of humans was inevitable, you must also maintain that the evolution of apes was inevitable, that the evolution of primates was inevitable, that the rise of mammals was inevitable, and so on back through dozens of ancestors, all of whose appearances must be seen as inevitable. This produces a regress of increasing unlikelihood. In the end, the question of whether human-like creatures were inevitable can be answered only by admitting that we do not know–and adding that most scientific evidence suggests that they were not. Any other answer involves either wishful thinking or theology.

One final note: I argue that the contigency of evolution means that the appearance of humans wasn’t inevitable. How do I reconcile that with my view of physical determinism—that, barring truly indeterminate quantum effects, everything that happens in the universe obeys physical laws, and thus is in principle predictable? Doesn’t that view mean that if the tape of evolution was rerun, humans would appear again, simply as a result of physical law? In Faith Versus Fact, I argue “no,” and for two reasons. First, the raw material for evolution—mutation—is likely to be a quantum phenomenon, both in the nature of replication errors in the DNA and in the cosmic rays that can also cause mutations. Both of those may be fundamentally non-deterministic phenomena, and hence unpredictable in principle. And if the raw material for evolution is unpredictable in principle, then so are its products. That means that if we reran the tape of life, one couldn’t say with any certainty that humanlike creatures would appear.

Second, or so Official Website Physicist™ Sean Carroll tells me, many of the cosmic bodies produced after the Big Bang also resulted from quantum phenomena in the early universe. That means that the Earth and its physical conditions were likely not a result determined at the moment of the Big Bang. Now that doesn’t mean that there isn’t life on other planets—in fact, I suspect there is. But it means that the inevitability of humans evolving on Earth (a tenet of Christian evolutionists like Conway Morris and Miller) isn’t a result of the inevitability of the laws of physics.

If humans really are an inevitable product of evolution, we could in principle test that by looking at life on other planets. For if there is life in those places, it must have been life that evolved. And if it’s life that evolved, then, according to Conway Morris, there will be “humanoid” creatures there, with intelligence similar to ours (or even more advanced), as well as some belief in and worship of God. You can rerun the tape of life on planets other than ours!

Giles Fraser tries to pwn Stephen Fry by telling us what god is *really* like

February 4, 2015 • 1:24 pm

Do you want some Sophisticated Theology™ today? I thought not. But I have some new theology right here, and boy, is it sophisticated!

First you’ll have to recall (or watch) the Stephen Fry video in which, asked by interviewer Gay Byrne what he’d say if he met God, Fry (an atheist) answered that he’d query God about the pervasiveness of evil in the world (see my post here, or watch the video below). Why, he’d ask, do innocent children die of leukemia? In other words, Fry, assuming that God had some control over the existence and nature of bad stuff on Earth, would ask God for the truths that theodicy has been seeking for millennia.

Well, the Guardian has published a piece in which Giles Fraser rebukes Fry and rejects the kind of God that Fry envisions. The piece is called, “I don’t believe in the God that Stephen Fry believes in, either,” and the odd thing is that the writer who rejects Fry’s God is Giles Fraser, who happens to be not only a journalist, but the priest in charge at St Mary’s Newington in south London and the former canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral. In other words, he’s an Anglican bigwig.

So what, according to Fraser, were Fry’s big mistakes? There were two:

1. God doesn’t have that kind of power. He has, instead, the Power of Love! But how can God be powerless? Because, says Fraser, Jesus was powerless. Fraser:

Too many religious people actually worship power. They imagine the source of ultimate power, give it a name (God, Allah, Yahweh) etc, and then try and cosy up to it, aligning their interests with those of the boss. . .  the temptation is always to suck up to power.

This is why the Jesus story is, for me, the most theologically revolutionary story that there can be. Because it imagines God and power separated. God as a baby. God poor. God helpless on a cross. God with a mocking and ironic crown of thorns. In these scenes it is Caesar who has the power. And so the question posed is: which one will you follow when push comes to shove? You can follow what is right and get strung up for it. Or you can cosy up to power and do as you are told. By saying that he will stare ultimate power in the face and, without fear, call it by its real name, Fry has indicated he is on the side of the angels (even though he does not believe in them). Indeed, Fry is following in a long tradition of religious polemic, from Job to Blake and beyond.

Umm. . . .the last thing I heard, Anglicans—like their Catholic-Church ancestors—accepted the Trinity. That makes Jesus part of the Godhead, i.e., one with power!  And you are saved through your faith in Jesus. Is that power or what?

More important, Fry wasn’t asked to address Jesus, but to address God, or rather the part of the Trinity called God. And nobody doubts that God has power. Or, if Fraser is claiming that God simply can’t do anything beyond emitting Endless Love from above, let him be explicit about that.

What we see in the paragraphs above is simply a word salad that evades the big question: can God do anything about evil or not? And if he can, why doesn’t he? But Fraser goes on:

2. There is no such thing as the God that Fry imagines. That’s right—Fraser says so explicitly:

The other problem with Fry’s argument is philosophical. Simply put: there is no such thing as the God he imagines. It is the flying teapot orbiting a distant planet about which nothing can be said. Such a God doesn’t exist. Nilch. Nada. It’s a nonsense. Indeed, as no less an authority than Thomas Aquinas rightly insists, existence itself is a questionable predicate to use of God. For God is the story of human dreams and fears. God is the shape we try to make of our lives. God is the name of the respect we owe the planet. God is the poetry of our lives. Of course this is real. Frighteningly real. Real enough to live and die for even. But this is not the same as saying that God is a command and control astronaut responsible for some wicked hunger game experiment on planet earth. Such a being does not exist. And for the precisely the reasons Fry expounds, thank God for that.

Well, that settles that!  It’s comforting to know that at one human on this planet—Giles Fraser—knows exactly what kind of God there is. God isn’t a disembodied spirit with humanlike qualities, as many other Anglicans wrongly believe. No, he is a God who is really just the name that we give to our hopes and dreams and fears. But—he’s also REAL!

Of course Fraser cites Aquinas, who really did believe that God existed as a spirit with humanlike traits and could punish and reward people. And, indeed, no less an authority THAN NEARLY EVERY DAMN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGIAN IN THE UNIVERSE thinks that God does indeed have the power to punish and reward people—that he is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. If that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t even have the Problem of Evil and the discipline of theodicy that it spawned. But apparently only Fraser and possibly Aquinas knows that the three-O God doesn’t exist.

I guess I’m sounding a bit grouchy, what with the capslock and all, but this kind of pronouncement angers me. How the hell does Fraser know what kind of God there is? What gives him the authority to pronounce that Fry’s God is a phantasm? How does he know what he claims to know?

Fraser, in fact, shouldn’t be addressing his remarks to Fry. He should be addressing them to all his Christian coreligionists—Protestant, Anglican and Catholic alike—letting them know that all of them are wrong about God.

h/t: Lenny

William Lane Craig goes after me about Adam and Eve

February 2, 2015 • 9:20 am

O frabjous day! Just when I thought I had nothing to say today—and these days happen—Ceiling Cat (praise be unto Him) sent me something interesting in an email from reader Brian. Brian called my attention to the latest “Reasonable Faith” podcast by theologian William Lane Craig, a broadcast called “The historical Adam and Eve.” It’s 14.5 minutes long, and has a free download and iTunes connection at the link, so it’s not too onerous timewise—though it is brain-wise. The best part is that it’s devoted to attacking me, or rather my views on the historicity of Adam and Eve. When someone like Craig or Chopra goes after me, I know I’m in for some chuckles.

I didn’t find my exact post about the Primal Couple that Craig is attacking, but I’ve posted quite a bit about the issue, and so you can just search for “Adam and Eve” on this site. I have a section about this problem in the Albatross (soon available at fine bookstores everywhere).

The problem, as you’ll know if you’re a regular here, is that genetic data show clearly that the genes of modern humans do not descend from only two people (or eight, if you believe the Noah story) in the last few thousand years. Back-calculating from the genetic diversity seen in modern humans, and making conservative assumptions, evolutionary geneticists have shown that the human population could not have been smaller than about 12,250 individuals: 10,000 in Africa and 2,250 in the group of individuals that left Africa and whose descendants colonized the rest of the world.  There was a population “bottleneck,” but it was nowhere near two or eight people.

This shows that Adam and Eve were not the historical ancestors of all humanity. And of course that gives theology a problem: if the Primal Couple didn’t give rise to everyone, then whence our affliction with Adam and Eve’s Original Sin? That sin, which the pair incurred by disobeying God, is supposed to have been passed on to the descendants of Adam and Eve, i.e., all of us. And it’s that sin that Jesus supposedly came to Earth to expiate. But if Original Sin didn’t exist, and Adam and Eve were simply fictional metaphors, then Jesus died for a metaphor. That’s not good!

That doesn’t sit well with theologians, of course, who, if they accept the science (and most of the smarter ones have), must then explain the significance of Adam and Eve, and whether they really existed. I discuss this in the Albatross as well; suffice it to say here that there are several interpretations of Adam and Eve as both historical and metaphorical, many of them funny and none of them coming close to solving the problem of Original Sin and the coming of Jesus.

William Lane Craig, though, still buys the Genesis view that Adam and Eve were not only real people, but that all humans are their actual descendants. He believes not just in a bottleneck of two people, but that Adam and Eve were the first two people, presumably created de novo by God.

Craig defends that view in his podcast, which you can hear in about a quarter of the time it takes me to write this. But let me reiterate a few of his claims:

  • He first denies that the historicity of Adam and Eve is critical for Original Sin. What? Well, says Craig, the Eastern Orthodox Church accepts the reality of Adam and Eve, but doesn’t believe in Original Sin. So, concludes Craig, the dependence of Original Sin on Adam and Eve “is not inherent to Christianity.” Case closed.

The big problem, of course, is that Craig is not a member of the Eastern Orthodox church, and doesn’t hold that view! (He’s an evangelical Christian.) So what is he on about? I’m baffled. And even if he did deny that there was such a thing as Original Sin, he’d still face the problem of Adam and Eve not being the ancestors of every living human.

  • Craig gets around the genetic data by saying that the population-size estimates by geneticists are based on mathematical models, and “It could well be the case that these mathematical models are simply incorrect.”  Well, maybe, but they use conservative assumptions, and there are two different models giving pretty much the same results. If the models are wrong, let Craig present some cogent criticisms and, perhaps, make his own model, or have a Christian geneticist do it. In the interim, on one side we have two sets of decent scientific estimates of historical population size, and on the other we have Craig’s bluster. I’ll go with the science.
  • Craig does level one criticism of the models: they assume a constant mutation rate in humans. That’s not a bad assumption, actually, for we have no reason to think that the rate of errors in DNA replication changed drastically in the last ten thousand years. But Craig says that the mutation rate could have been much higher in the past than we see now. That would then give us a misleadingly high population sizes if we use the lower present mutation rates. If they were much higher in the past, then maybe there could have been just two people in H. sapiens, and the huge mutation rates in their immediate descendants would give us the genetic diversity present today.

There are two points against this. First, human mutation rates are not estimated by direct observation, but from population-genetic estimates, with some estimates based on data from many generations. So if mutation rates were higher in the past, much of that would already have been accounted for.

Second, if mutation rates did change over time, you’d expect them to be higher not in ancient times, but recently, since now we’re exposed to all kinds of mutagens (like chemicals and X-rays) that we didn’t have in the past.

Craig’s desperate invocation of the nonuniformity of mutation rates reminds me of those theologians who, seeing a contradiction between their beliefs in a young Earth and the fact that we can see light from stars millions of light-years away, invoke either a non-uniformity of the speed of light (“it was higher in the past”) or God’s creation of light in transit from the stars along with the stars (after all, what good would stars be to humans unless we could see their light as soon as God made them?). This isn’t science, but apologetics—an attempt to save an a priori emotional commitment.

  • Craig gloats about the fact that the “Y-chromosome Adam” (the single male from which all our Y chromosomes come) and the “mitochondrial Eve” (the single female from which all our mitochondria descend) lived about the same time, in contrast to what I said in my post.  So they could have been Adam and Eve!  Indeed, a few years ago estimates based on a limited number of Y chromosomes showed that these ancestors did live at non-overlapping times. But more recent analyses show that there could have been some overlap.

This, however, hardly supports the idea that the genomes of all modern humans came from a couple who lived at the same time and mated with each other. There are huge error bars around these times. So, for example, the Y chromosome Adam could have lived any time between 120,000 and 160,000 years ago, while “mitochondrial Eve” could have lived any time between 99,000 and 148,000 years ago.  While there’s overlap, there’s also 32,000 years when they don’t overlap. This is not good support for the claim that the two individuals lived at exactly at the same time. 

But there’s a bigger problem. As I note in the Albatross, “although all the Y chromosomes of modern humans descend from this one individual, the rest of our genome descends from a multitude of different ancestors who lived at various times ranging from 100,000 to about 4 million years ago. Our genome testifies to literally hundreds of ‘Adams and Eves’ who lived at different times—a result of the fact that different parts of our DNA were inherited differently based on the vagaries of reproduction and the random division of genes at when sperm and eggs are formed.” It’s not just mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal DNA we have to consider, but the entire human genome. And that shows clearly that parts of the genome go way back before the DNA on the Y and on the mitochondrion. Indeed, parts of our genome originated even before our divergence from the ancestors of chimps! We have some variable genes, for example, with variants that are more closely related to gene forms in chimps than to other genes in humans. That shows that the variability was hanging around in our common ancestor, and that the variability has persisted over more than five million years.

But none of this so-called “contemporary” DNA data refutes the data showing that the human species was never as small as two individuals. It’s a separate issue.

  • Near the end of the podcast, Craig gives his own take, and that’s a literal view of Genesis: Adam and Eve were real people and the ancestors of all humanity. As he says,”I’m inclined to stick to the literal Adam and Eve until I’m actually forced by the evidence to abandon that view, and I’m far from that point.” Surprise! He also claims (at the beginning) that there is good evidence for the historical resurrection of Jesus, though I’m not quite sure what that “good evidence” is. Is it simply what the Bible says?—because that’s the only evidence I know of. He does raise the point that perhaps a historical Adam and Eve were part of Paul and Jesus’s “incidental beliefs,” but not part of their “teaching.” This is theobabble. If Jesus and Paul believed in a literal Adam and Eve, as the Bible says they did, what does it matter whether they just believed it or taught it? For Craig, after all, Jesus is part of God, and if God thought Adam and Eve were real, it must have been true.
  • One of the most amusing parts of the podcast is when Craig’s pal on the podcast (I don’t know who he is) tells Craig that I deliberately misspelled “Jesus” as “Jebus” in my post. (I plead guilty.) Craig is flummoxed, for he can’t believe that anybody could actually make fun of the Lord in that way. You can hear the horror when Craig realizes that “Jebus” was not a typo, but a deliberate misspelling. I’m then told not only that I’m immature, but that I should “get a life, and become a Christian while I’m at it.”

No thanks, Dr. Craig: I’m not drinking your Kool-Aid.  It’s clear (and you’ve said this about Jesus’s Resurrection) that there are no data that could possibly dispel your idea that the Bible is historically true. You are not open to any findings of science if they go against your faith.

Lawrence Krauss rebuts “Science increasingly makes the case for God”

January 25, 2015 • 1:25 pm

On Christmas Day of last year, the Wall Street Journal published a short piece by Eric Metaxas called “Science increasingly makes the case for God” (The subtitle is “The odds of life existing on another planet grow ever longer. Intelligent design, anyone?”). If the WSJ link takes you to the subscription page, just Google the author’s name and the article’s title, and you’ll find a link that’s free.

Metaxas’s piece was wildly popular. It got about 400,000 Facebook shares and likes, and as of this morning there were 7,008 comments! Metaxas, described by Wikipedia as “An American author, speaker, and TV host” appears to be a believer, for there’s also this: “On February 2, 2012, Metaxas was the keynote speaker for the 2012 National Prayer Breakfast.”

Given its message, it’s not surprising that Metaxas’s article went viral, for it purported to give scientific evidence for God’s existence. Or rather, it claimed that science could not explain the existence of life on Earth in any convincing way, and so the only option must have been God’s creation. A few quotes will give the tenor of his piece; it’s all based on the supposed improbability of life coming into being:

Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life—every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart. Without a massive planet like Jupiter nearby, whose gravity will draw away asteroids, a thousand times as many would hit Earth’s surface. The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing.

. . . Yet here we are, not only existing, but talking about existing. What can account for it? Can every one of those many parameters have been perfect by accident? At what point is it fair to admit that science suggests that we cannot be the result of random forces? Doesn’t assuming that an intelligence created these perfect conditions require far less faith than believing that a life-sustaining Earth just happened to beat the inconceivable odds to come into being?

Metaxas then raises the “fine-tuning” argument—the supposed improbability of the universe having the right physical constants in place to allow life, and finishes off like this:

The greatest miracle of all time, without any close seconds, is the universe. It is the miracle of all miracles, one that ineluctably points with the combined brightness of every star to something—or Someone—beyond itself.

Notice that “Someone” is capitalized, and of course what Metaxas means, and what accounts for the article going viral, is that “something or Someone” simply has to be God—preferably the Abrahamic God.

The article’s popularity also shows that although many believers claim that they don’t need evidence for God, when something that seems to be evidence crops up, they seize on it avidly. Religious claims are claims about reality, and thus could conceivably be supported or refuted by evidence. If anybody says otherwise, just show them how many people liked Metaxas’s piece.

Well, I can imagine what I’d feel if I were Lawrence Krauss reading it. Along with Sean Carroll, Krauss has spent a lot of time showing that we can explain the universe without invoking God, something that is a major theme of Krauss’s most recent book, A Universe from Nothing. So Krauss, who isn’t timid, sat down and wrote a rebuttal to Metaxas’s piece. It appeared in yesterday’s online New Yorker under the title, “No, astrobiology has not made the case for God“; I’m surprised, given the magazine’s penchant for coddling faith, that it appeared at all.

But good for Krauss. He takes apart every probabilistic argument given by Metaxas, and cites new work showing that the origin of life may have been nearly certain given the chemical conditions on early Earth. I still haven’t been able to get through the arcane paper describing that work, but Krauss summarizes it nicely:

Furthermore, a recent interesting, if speculative, proposal suggests that, when driven by an external source of energy,matter will rearrange itself to dissipate this energy most efficiently. Living systems allow greater dissipation, which means that the laws of physics might suggest that life is, in some sense, inevitable.

Maybe Krauss will write a sequel to his book called A Biosphere from Nothing. He adds this:

Beyond this, two exciting scientific advances in recent decades have identified new ways in which life can evolve, and new locales where it can do so. First, we have discovered a surprisingly diverse group of new solar systems. And we now understand that, even in our solar system, there are a host of possible sites where life might have evolved that were long considered unlikely. Moons of Jupiter and Saturn may have vast oceans of liquid water, underneath ice covers, which are heated by gravitational tidal friction associated with their giant hosts. On Earth, scientists have had to revise old rules about where and how life can survive. The discovery of so-called extremophiles—life forms that can live in extreme acids, or under extreme heat or pressure—has vastly increased the set of conditions under which we can imagine life existing on this planet.

And, finally, Krauss takes apart the fine-tuning argument for God, something that Sean Carroll has also been attacking. Here’s Krauss:

The constants of the universe indeed allow the existence of life as we know it. However, it is much more likely that life is tuned to the universe rather than the other way around. We survive on Earth in part because Earth’s gravity keeps us from floating off. But the strength of gravity selects a planet like Earth, among the variety of planets, to be habitable for life forms like us. Reversing the sense of cause and effect in this statement, as Metaxas does in cosmology, is like saying that it’s a miracle that everyone’s legs are exactly long enough to reach the ground.

Krauss doesn’t discuss two other explanations for fine-tuning (the one above seems to presume that the constants were simply a given that we don’t understand, perhaps just a matter of “luck”). Those two are 1.) there could be a deeper physical principle showing that the constants more or less had to be pretty close to what they are, but we don’t yet understand that principle (this may be implied in Krauss’s emphasis on the progress of cosmology), and 2.) there might be multiple universes that (according to physical theory) have different physical constants, and life happened to have arisen in one universe that had the right constants. The “multiverse” idea isn’t just something cooked up by physicists determined to kick God out of the picture, as it arises naturally from some theories of physics; and there is evidence for some of the conditions conducive to a multiverse.

But the real flaw in Metaxas’s piece is that it’s a big fat God-of-the-gaps argument, claiming that if science doesn’t understand something by now, God must have done it. That is, of course, a dreadful way to argue in view of all the “gaps” in our understanding (most notably the origin of species) that over the centuries have been caulked not with God, but with science. And so Krauss pwns Metaxas in his final paragraph:

In the meantime, both believers and non-believers are done a huge disservice when people promulgate biased and disingenuous claims that distort what current science implies and can imply about the universe. In a society in which the understanding of science is already marginal—and where, at the same time, the continued health of modern society as it meets the challenges of the twenty-first century depends, in some sense, on our ability to utilize our scientific knowledge, both to create new technologies and to help guide rational public policies—this is the last thing we need.

Another thing we don’t need is people claiming that when science encounters a hard problem that it hasn’t yet solved, God is peeking out of that lacuna.