Category: Christians behaving badly

My Quillette review of Francis Collins’s new book on healing America with science, truth, trust, and faith

March 13, 2025 • 9:15 am

As I note in my new review of Francis Collins’s new book, The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust, he’s a very good scientist and science administrator, but also a pious evangelical Christian (remember the frozen waterfalls that brought him to Jesus?).  Collins had previously written a book arguing that science and Christianity were not only compatible, but complementary ways of finding the truth, but now he’s produced another. As I say in my review of the new book in Quillette (click on screenshot below, or find my review archived here):

While much of the Road to Wisdom reprises the arguments of the earlier book, this new one takes things a bit further. Collins is deeply concerned about the divisions in American society highlighted by the last presidential election, by people’s inability to have constructive discussions with their opponents, and by our pervasive addiction to social media and its “fake news”; and he believes that accepting a harmony between religion and science will yield the wisdom that can mend America.

As the author of Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible, I wouldn’t be expected to laud Collins’s thesis, and I didn’t.  You can read the review for yourself, but I spend a lot of time criticizing Collins’s claim that science combined with religion is the best way to find the “truths”to repair the deep divisions in America’s polity. Even if those divisions—Collins largely means Republicans vs. Democrats—can be repaired, saying that the way forward is combine the “truths” of science and religion is a deeply misguided claim.

I won’t go into details, but of course religion is simply not a way to discover truth, especially since Collins’s definition of “truth” is basically “facts about the world on which everyone agrees”: in other words, empirical truth. Religion can’t find such truths, as it lacks the methodology.  Note that Collins does not espouse Gould’s “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” claim that science and religion are compatible because they deal with completely different issues, with science alone getting the ambit of empirical truth. Gould’s claim, described in his 1999 book Rocks of Ages, was also misguided, and you can read my old TLS critique of it here.) No, Collins asserts that religion can find empirical truths. Sadly, he gives no examples where religion can beat science–just a bunch of questions that religion can supposedly answer (e.g., “How should I live my life?”).

I’ll give one more quote from my review:

What are the truths that religion can produce but science can’t? Collins’s list is unconvincing. It includes the “fact” of Jesus’s resurrection and the author’s unshakable belief that “Jesus died for me and was then literally raised from the dead.” In support of this claim, Collins cites N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God as compelling evidence for the Resurrection, which Collins claims is “historically well documented.” But when I worked my way through the entirety of Wright’s 817-page behemoth, I found that the “historical documentation” consists solely of what’s in the New Testament, tricked out with some rationalisation and exegesis. Neither Collins nor Wright provide independent, extra-Biblical evidence for the crucifixion and resurrection, much less for the Biblical assertion that upon Jesus’s death the Temple split in twain and many dead saints left their tombs and walked about Jerusalem like zombies. Absent solid evidence for these claims, they are little more than wishful thinking.

Other “truths” that one finds in religion are “moral truths”: the confusing set of rules that Collins labels the “Moral Law.” To him, the fact that our species even has morality constitutes further evidence for God, for Collins sees no way that either evolution or secular rationality could yield a codified ethics. That claim is belied by the long tradition of secular ethics developed by people like Baruch Spinoza, Peter Singer, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls. While many faiths and societies aspire to common goals like “love, beauty, goodness, freedom, faith, and family,” this does not suggest the existence of a supernatural being.

Click below (or here):

Although it seems obvious to me that religion and science are incompatible insofar as both make empirical claims (granted, some of faith’s claims are hard to test), it’s not obvious to the many Americans who blithely get their vaccinations but then head to Church and recite the “truths” of the Nicene Creed. Sam Harris pointed this out in a piece he wrote opposing Collins’s appointment as NIH director:

It is widely claimed that there can be no conflict, in principle, between science and religion because many scientists are themselves “religious,” and some even believe in the God of Abraham and in the truth of ancient miracles. Even religious extremists value some of the products of science—antibiotics, computers, bombs, etc.—and these seeds of inquisitiveness, we are told, can be patiently nurtured in a way that offers no insult to religious faith.

This prayer of reconciliation goes by many names and now has many advocates. But it is based on a fallacy. The fact that some scientists do not detect any problem with religious faith merely proves that a juxtaposition of good ideas/methods and bad ones is possible. Is there a conflict between marriage and infidelity? The two regularly coincide. The fact that intellectual honesty can be confined to a ghetto—in a single brain, in an institution, in a culture—does not mean that there isn’t a perfect contradiction between reason and faith, or between the worldview of science taken as a whole and those advanced by the world’s “great,” and greatly discrepant, religions.

While I wouldn’t have opposed Collins’s appointment on the basis of his faith, I would have if he had shown any signs that his faith would affect his science. As it turned out, it didn’t: Collins left his religion at the door of the NIH.  But he continues to proselytize for both Christianity as the “true” faith and for a perfect harmony between science and religion.

In a patronizing New Yorker article (is that redundant?) about Collins and his book that I just discovered, I was sad to see another pal soften his views about Collins, science, and faith:

Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who fiercely criticized Collins’s nomination on account of his “primitive, shamanistic, superstitious” religious views, told me in an e-mail that he had changed his mind about Collins, for two reasons. “One is the sheer competence and skill with which he’s directed the Institutes, blending scientific judgment with political acumen,” Pinker wrote. “The other is a newly appreciated imperative, in an age of increasing political polarization, toward making institutions of science trustworthy to a broad swath of the public, of diverse political orientations.” In a way, I thought, Pinker was saying that representation matters: science has an audience, and the right speaker can persuade all of that audience to listen. “A spokesperson for science who is not branded as a left-wing partisan is an asset for the wider acceptance of science across the political spectrum,” Pinker said. But Collins is more than a spokesperson for science. He is also a kind of representative, within the scientific community, of American communities that his peers sometimes fail to reach.

Pinker’s first point is right, and, as I said, I wouldn’t—and didn’t—oppose Collins’s nomination as NIH director.But the author then interprets Pinker as making the “Little People” argument: science will be accepted more broadly if scientists accept religion, even if those scientists don’t practice it. In other words, we have to avoid criticizing superstition if America is to fully embrace science.

But while there’s no need for scientists to bang on about religion when we’re teaching about or promoting science, no scientist should ever approve of a belief in unevidenced superstition, or of any system of such supterstition.  Yet that’s exactly what Collins does in his book, and it’s why the book is misguided, flatly wrong about accommodationism, and unenlightening.

Ross Douthat continues to use the NY Times to tout his new book on why we we should be religious. But he uses the same tired old arguments.

February 12, 2025 • 10:15 am

I don’t know if it’s considered ethical to use one’s newspaper column to reproduce excerpts of a book that you’ve written—at least if you get paid for both the book and the column, which would be double-dipping. But let’s leave that aside to consider Ross Douthat’s new book, which he’s excerpted twice in The New York Times. In the latest article, below, Douthat gives several arguments for the existence of God, including his favorite one, which turns out to be humans’ ability to comprehend the truths of the universe. That comprehension is supposedly evidence for a divinity, for Douthat doesn’t see how natural selection could give us abilities beyond those that evolved during most of the six million years since we shared a common ancestor with chimps.  Click below to see his arguments, which are also archived here.  And of course I try to refute his arguments.

First, here Douthat’s book, apparently part of an intellectual/journalist push to argue that religion (despite its disappearance) is really, really, supported by evidence. Click below to go to the Amazon site. The book came out yesterday.

I’ll also leave aside my problem that it’s hard to believe in God if you’ve already rejected that form of supernaturalism. However, Douthat is trying to pull an anti-Hitchens and convince us that, yes, there are very good arguments for believing in God, In other words, he’s trying to reconvert us nonbelievers. The problem is that he recycles the same old tired arguments that have failed to convince most nonbelievers, and so offers at best a lame argument.  It sure doesn’t convince me, though, as I said in Faith Versus Fact, I don’t think it’s a 100% absolute certainty that no God exists. That would be an unscientific point of view. But I’m pretty damn sure that we live in a godless universe.

Here are Douthat’s arguments, most of which should be familiar to you (his quotes are indented):

1.) The three big ones.  He considers the best evidence for God to be the “convergence of multipole different lines of arguments”, though the convergence of weak arguments do not, to me, lead to a very convincing argument:

Consider three big examples: the evidence for cosmic design in the fundamental laws and structure of the universe; the unusual place of human consciousness within the larger whole; and the persistence and plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions.

Each of these realities alone offers good reasons to take religious arguments seriously. Indeed, I think each on its own should be enough to impel someone toward at least a version of Pascal’s Wager. But it’s the fact that a religious perspective makes sense out of all of them — why the universe seems calibrated for our appearance and why consciousness has a supernatural-seeming dimension and why even nonbelievers report having religious experiences — that makes the strongest case for some form of belief.

The cosmic design argument rests on the so-called “fine tuning” of the universe, which of course has alternative explanations, including the fact that we do not know how fine-tuned the universe is since we don’t know what other combinations of constants would permit life; the anthropic principle that since we’re here to observe life, the constants must have permitted life; the view that the constants may be connected in a way that we don’t understand; the idea that there are multiple universes, only some of which permit life, and we happily happen to be in one that allows it (Douthat, not a scientist, rejects the multiverse explanation); that the universe would look very different from how it does now if it really was fine-tuned, and so on. For a good summary of these arguments, see Sean Carroll’s video and my post here, as well as Carroll’s summary at The Preposterous Universe. Douthat apparently has not considered these rebuttals seriously.

As far as human consciousness is concerned, Douthat doesn’t see how it could have evolved, and therefore sees it as a product of God. But we are beginning to understand the naturalistic underpinnings of consciousness, which means that evolution—either directly for consciousness or indirectly via evolution that’s produced  consciousness as a byproduct—is a plausible alternative. For some reason Douthat ignores the evidence that other species of animals are conscious (some appear to have a “theory of mind,” which implies consciousness, as well as the ability to pass the mirror test for self recognition; see also here). Since Douthat sees human exceptionalism for this trait as evidence for God, what about the consciousness of animals. Why did God make them conscious.  Douthat:

[God’s] infinite mind and our finite minds have some important connection, that we actually matter in the scheme of things and that in fact our own godlike powers are proof of something that was claimed by the old religions at the start: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.”

Are squirrels and ravens also made in the image of God?

Finally, there Douthat’s argument based on “the plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions”.  I guess you’d have to read the book to see what “disenchanted conditions” means (presumably not when you’re in church or taking LSD), but I’m always dubious that one having an experience of God (and I have had “spiritual” experience, which I don’t consider evidence for God) proves the existence of God. After all, people have illusions and delusions and experiences all the time that do not compoart with reality. People with anorexia look in the mirror and think they are too fat even though they are skeletal. But they are not fat. I could go on, but you can think of similar delusions.

But wait! There’s more!

2.) The universe is intelligible and we can use reason to understand it.  To Douthat, this is the most convincing argument of all. 

Even then there is still a strange jackpot aspect of our position that cries out for explanation: We aren’t just in a universe that we can observe; we’re in a universe that’s deeply intelligible to us, a cosmos whose rules and systems we can penetrate, whose invisible architecture we can map and plumb, whose biological codes we can decipher and rewrite and whose fundamental physical building blocks we can isolate and, with Promethean power, break apart.

This capacity of human reason is mysterious, on one level, in the same way that consciousness itself is mysterious: As the philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it in his critique of materialism, “Mind and Cosmos,” it is “not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and discover what is objectively the case” that presents a problem for a hard materialism, since under materialist premises our thoughts are ultimately determined by physical causation, raising questions about how they could possibly achieve objectivity at all. (There is an even more intense argument that even having our thoughts align as they do with physical reality is extremely unlikely and miraculous, but I’ll just direct you down that rabbit hole rather than explore it.)

But the success of human reasoning is remarkable even if you wave away the problem of consciousness and assume that evolutionary pressure suffices to explain some modest form of successful reasoning — that the response to stimuli that enabled early Homo sapiens to recognize the patterns, say, of a predator’s behavior ended up having adaptive use beyond just panther dodging, granting our hominid ancestors some kind of basic capacity of understanding.

As we’ll see in #3 below, Douthat doubts the evolutionary hypothesis for other reasons, but in fact I cannot see our powers of understanding the universe as something that defies naturalistic evolution. We have evolved through natural selection to understand what we could over the first six million years of our lineage.  Individuals that had correct understandings (snakes might kill you, thunder means that there may be water, cat tracks are a cause of concern) are those who survived, while those who didn’t understand such stuff would not survive.  This is of course not unique to humans, for many animals show what seems to be an understanding of their world, and what various signs and signals mean. Some birds know that if another bird seems them cache an acorn, they have to go rehide the acorn. The sure looks like reasoning, but it may be the product of natural selection—or even learning.  And, of course, the ability to learn evolved by natural selection as well.

Douthat, though, says that we understand far more than we could have evolved to understand: our powers or reasoning far exceed what was “needed” by natural selection. Ergo Jesus and the last point:

3.) We understand far more about the universes than would be expected if our powers of reasoning evolved by natural selection. We can play chess, we can make music, we can send people to the Moon. How on earth did we evolve the capabilities to do those things? Douthat:

Even then, it seems likely that in many, many potential universes those capacities would have hit a ceiling in terms of what they could accomplish, that there would have been either inherent limits on our ape-minds or complicating aspects of the hidden architecture preventing superficial understanding from ever going really deep. It seems dazzlingly unlikely that an accidental observer would just keep on cracking codes at each new level of exploration, as the practical gave way to the theoretical, the simple to the complex, the intuitive to the far more mysterious, without any obvious evolutionary pressure forcing each new leap.

“Is it credible,” Nagel asks, “that selection for fitness in the prehistoric past should have fixed capacities that are effective in theoretical pursuits that were unimaginable at the time?” Evolution’s pressures on our capacities are for prehistoric survival, not discovering calculus or E=mc². So why should capacities that evolved because we needed to hunt gazelles and light fires also turn out, mirabile dictu, to be capacities that enable us to understand the deepest laws of physics and of chemistry, to achieve manned spaceflight, to condense all of human knowledge onto a tiny piece of silicon?

This to me seems a really misguided argument, for it neglects two things that have developed through culture, which, of course, though not unique in humans, are most highly developed in our species (advanced reasoning and complex culture). I could add writing, which allows us to pass on knowledge to a distant futurity. Once we have a big brain and an ability to reason, and on top of that culture and communication through writing or syntactical language, the sky is the limit. Playing chess or going to the moon is not a result of evolution, but a byproduct of an evolutionary process that eventually led to the development of culture and communication (both of which, by the way, would also be favored by natural selection, since we are social animals).  Further, it’s not just us who have abilities that could not have evolved. Lyrebirds can imitate car doors closing or chainsaws; parrots can imitate human speech and song. While some imitation may have been favored by natural selection, surely the imitation of human speech has piggybacked on other abilities.  Dogs and horses can be trained to do things that are completely unnatural to them, and would never have appeared in nature, but they get a reward for successful training. It’s not hard to see that these abilities are simply byproducts of these animals’ evolution.  Now horses and parrots have neither the culture, language, or manual abilities to build spaceships, and so they haven’t done so, but one can see in many species potential abilities that could not have been the direct product of evolution.

And if we can see in other species these “piggyback” abilities, then it’s not so hard to see them in our own species. That, after all, is the line of argument that Darwin made in his books, showing that humans could have evolved because there’s a continuum between the features and behavior of other species and of our own species.

And with that I will conclude my argument on this Darwin Day. Douthat, I fear, is simply appropriating old arguments and cobbling them together to argue for God.  But of course the best argument for God, which can’t be made because it hasn’t worked, is direct signs of God’s existence, like him spelling out “I am that I am” in the stars (that one is due to Carl Sagan). In Faith Versus Fact I list other arguments that would tentatively convince me, an atheist, of the existence of not just God, but of a Christian God.  But no such evidence has appeared, so Douthat relies on The Argument from Lived Spiritual and Religious Experience. The words of the late Victor Stenger come to mind: he said something like, “The absence of evidence is indeed  evidence of absence—if that evidence should be there.” It isn’t.

Finally, there are arguments against God, especially Douthat’s Christian variety. One was made by Stephen Fry: Why does God let innocent children die of cancer, or kill millions through earthquakes and tsunamis? Presumably an omnipotent and loving God would have the ability to prevent needless suffering. I’m sure Douthat deals with that in his book, but I’ve heard all the justifications for that (“God gave us free will,” “God gave us a planet with tectonic plates,” “We don’t understand God’s ways,” and so on), and find none convincing.

Douthat is merely buttressing a faith that he probably learned as a child (he’s not a Hindu or Muslim, after all), and I’m betting that his book will be an extended exercise in confirmation bias. We shall see.

****************

Douthat has also touted his book on a podcast with Catholic believer Andrew Sullivan. I’ve listened to about half of their 1½-hour conversation (link below), but you can listen to it by clicking on the screenshot below, and you can see Sullivan’s notes here. An excerpt:

Ross is a writer and a dear old colleague, back when we were both bloggers at The Atlantic. Since then he’s been a columnist at the New York Times — and, in my mind, he’s the best columnist in the country. The author of many books, including Grand New Party and The Decadent Society, his new one is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (which you can pre-order now). So in this podcast, I play — literally — Devil’s advocate. Forgive me for getting stuck on the meaning of the universe in the first 20 minutes or so. It picks up after that.

For two clips of our convo — on the difference between proselytizing and evangelizing, and the “hallucinations of the sane” — see our YouTube page.

Other topics: Creation; the improbable parameters of the Big Bang; the “fine-tuning” argument I cannot understand; extraterrestrial life; Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; Hitch; the atheist/materialist view; the multiverse; quantum physics; consciousness; John von Neumann; Isaac Newton; human evolution; tribal survival; the exponential unity of global knowledge; Stephen Barr’s Modern Physics and Ancient Faith; the substack Bentham’s Bulldog; why humans wonder; miracles; Sebastian Junger and near-death experiences; the scientific method; William James; religious individualists; cults; Vatican II; Pope Francis; the sex-abuse crisis in the Church; suffering and theodicy; Lyme Disease; the AIDS crisis; Jesus and the Resurrection; Peter J Williams’ Can We Trust the Gospels?; and the natural selection of religions.

There are also shorter YouTube clips of the discussion here and here.  The longer discussion is pretty much a precis of the article above, at least the bit I listened to. Sullivan says he pushes back just to be the devil’s advocate, but I haven’t yet gotten to that part.

h/t: Paulo

Another child killed by religion

January 29, 2025 • 10:00 am

Much of Chapter 5 of my book Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible (the chapter’s called “Why does it matter?”) deals with religiously-motivated child abuse, mostly in the form of religious parents denying medical care to children.  Some of the stories are horrific, especially the first one I tell involving a girl with bone cancer. While Christian Science and the Jehovah’s Witnesses are major culprits, with their faith often mandating that God rather than doctors will cure children, there are other groups like them.  And when the children die, as they often do (Jehovah’s Witnesses prohibit blood transfusion, and the kids, indoctrinated with that dogma, may die if they don’t get blood), the parents used to get off with light prison sentences or even parole. After all, it’s religion, Jake, so it’s okay to let your your kids die in its name!  For some reason, all the cases I described in my book involve Christian parents.

Well, it’s still happening The Guardian reports today about on eight-year-old diabetic (type 1) girl whose father, converted to an evangelical sect, decided to deny his daughter the insulin she needed to live. (I am SO familiar with this kind of behavior. It’s not ubiquitous, but it’s not vanishingly rare, either.) The daughter died, of course (this was in 2022), and the death was likely a painful one.

The difference between this case, described below (click on screenshot to read), and similar cases in the U.S., is that the parents—and 10 other people—were convicted of manslaughter yesterday, a much more serious charge than often levied against such parents in the U.S. I suppose manslaughter is an appropriate charge, but one shouldn’t rule out murder charges, either since sane persons know what will happen if they withhold insulin from a diabetic child. (I know of no murder charges ever filed against these odious parents.) Anyway, I get quite exercised when helpless kids die because God is supposed to save them, and often this happens with the child’s assent, because they get propagandized. Religion often comes with the need to propagandize, especially to your kids.

An excerpt from the article:

It took Jason Struhs 36 hours to call the ambulance after the death of his daughter Elizabeth.

When the police followed shortly afterwards, they heard singing. The Saints, a religious sect in Queensland, that has been likened to a cult, were praying for the eight-year-old to be resurrected.

“I’m not jumping up and down in joy, but I’m at peace …” Jason told a police officer that day. “I gave my little girl what she wanted. And I expect God to look after her.”

Justice Martin Burns on Wednesday found Jason Struhs, and religious leader Brendan Stevens, along with Elizabeth’s mother, Kerrie, brother Zachary, and 10 other members of the group, guilty of her manslaughter.

Elizabeth Struhs died at her family home in Rangeville, Toowoomba, west of Brisbane, on 6 or 7 January 2022, of diabetic ketoacidosis.

Jason told police: “There were no feelings of oh well, that didn’t work.”

“I have to be patient. I have to keep praying. I didn’t sit there and think that I had killed my daughter, I was thinking that she was in a better place now,” he said.

The delay before calling the ambulance after a child’s death is quite common, though I don’t know why. The kid is dead and it has to be reported. At any rate, there was a trial at the end of 2024.

Throughout the nine-week trial last year, the court heard hours of interviews with the Saints filmed by police, at the scene and in the days afterwards.

Recently released to the media, they give an insight into their beliefs.

Elizabeth’s mother, Kerrie Struhs, believed so strongly in the Saints’ faith she had been previously jailed for not providing her daughter the necessaries of life in 2019, when Elizabeth became sick for the first time.

Jason took her to the hospital in a coma over Kerrie’s objections. She told the police she wasn’t grateful to the medical staff for saving her life.

“What do you think might have happened if she wasn’t taken to hospital the first time?” she was asked by police, days after Elizabeth’s death.

“I believe she would have got better and didn’t need any medical assistance at all,” she replied.

When Elizabeth was returned to the family with no lasting medical problems, she took it as proof of a miracle. She never attended hospital to see her daughter’s treatment.

A month after Kerrie was released from jail, Elizabeth was taken off her insulin after two-and-a-half healthy years and became sick again – but her mother told police she never had any doubts.

She told them she was surprised God was taking the situation “to the extreme … as in, to death”, but saw it as part of his plan for the “last days”.

If Elizabeth had died and was brought back in front of paramedics, more people would see the miracle, she said.

“These are end days. I see this as simply God is needing to show people, give people a chance to see that God is still here. And we are the ones that will declare it faithfully,” she told police.

Jason was originally not religious; it was only when he “found God” that he turned into someone who could kill his daughter:

For 17 years, his wife and many of his children attended the small home-based church service multiple times a week, but Jason Struhs didn’t believe in God at all.

For years he helped her administer insulin four times a day, take her to doctors, prepare specific meals and check her sugar levels.

. . . . After a verbal fight with his son Zachary and counselling by the other Saints, Jason converted in August 2021.

“The next four months after turning to God had been the best four months of my life, because I had peace. I now had family who loved me,” he said in his police statement.

The sentence below, which I’ve put in bold, is what really angers me. These people are so absolutely sure of the fictions they embrace that they are willing to let their offspring die because “they’ll be in a better place,” There is no evidence for such a place! Jason feels no remorse for what he did.

The Saints prayed and sang as a group. Finally, on 8 January, Jason called the paramedics.

“I said to everyone that even though God will raise Elizabeth, we couldn’t leave a corpse in the house, we couldn’t leave her body sitting there forever,” Jason said.

On 8 January, Jason told police his faith was stronger than ever.

“I am fully at peace at heart. I don’t feel sorry, I feel happy because now she’s at peace and so am I … she’s not dependent on me for her life now. I’m not trapped by diabetes as well.”

Burns will sentence all 14 on 11 February.

Only prosecution and strong sentences will curb this kind of behavior, though some of it will go on in secret, for religion is powerful.

I won’t harp on this further; you can read my book to see similar cases.  The point, of course, is that this girl would still be alive if there were no religion, for only religion would make a parent stop giving medical care to their offspring. (Well, I suppose there are other forms of such lunacy as well, but these are doctrines of Christian Science, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other fringe Christian sects like the Saints.)  And the courts, in the U.S. at least, used to go much easier on parents like this than, say, parents whose kids died from malnourishment or related abuse. Religion used to give you somewhat of a pass, though that now seems to be changing, thank Ceiling Cat.

Here’s a video about the death of Elizabeth and the trial.  Do watch it, because you’ll see how these people remain deluded even though they thought God would “bring her back” after she died.

Finally, I present for your appraisal the cover of the Jehovah’s Witness magazine Awake! from 1994.  Every child on the cover of this magazine died because they refused blood transfusions. But it’s okay, because they put God first.  I used this slide in the talks I used to give about faith versus fact.  In the case of Elizabeth, faith is The Saints; fact is insulin.

h/t: Paul

Richard Dawkins vs. Jordan Peterson: rationality versus logorrhea

November 22, 2024 • 9:15 am

Reader Chris, knowing of my disdain for podcasts (and perhaps for Jordan Peterson as well), asked me to listen to at least 15 minutes of this long (1½-hour) discussion between Richard Dawkins and Peterson.  All it did was confirm my disdain for Peterson, who seems remarkably self-absorbed and domineering (he doesn’t even let the moderator, Alex O’Connor, get a word in edgewise). And it made me admire Richard even more for his patience in dealing with cranks.

I started listening at 17:23, and that’s where I started the video below. Or you can click on this time marker: (17:23) with the discussion of whether the biblical texts were divinely inspired or did they evolve over time in a secular way?

What bothers me about Peterson is not only his logorrhea, but his unwillingness to answer questions straight, producing a word salad that barely makes sense.

During the 15 minutes I listened (from 17:23 to about 33:00), Dawkins and Peterson discuss whether the Bible was divinely inspired, whether it contains any “truth” at all, and whether the concept of “sacrifice,” which Peterson says is the dominant motif of the Bible (it supposedly progresses from a primitive notion of sacrifice in the Old Testament to Jesus’s marvelous sacrifice made to redeem humanity) come from divine inspiration.

A good example of Peterson’s word salad in this clip is his assertion that truth is unified, and the world of value and world of fact must “coincide in some manner we don’t yet understand.” He gives us a Hobson’s choice: “You either believe that the world of truth is unified or it’s not; either there’s contradiction between value and fact” or there is not.  Peterson adds that he belives that “different sets of values can be brought into unity.”  This to me seems deeply misguided. Values are not the same thing as facts, nor can all different sets of values, which at bottom reflect preferences, can be harmonized.

Peterson repeatedly claims to be asking questions of Richard, but he never really finishes his questions because Peterson is so obsessed with talking nonstop. He is in love with his own thoughts and his own voice.

However, Richard manages to get in one question for Peterson: “Did Jesus die for our sins?”  That is a yes-or-no question, but Peterson waffles, saying that there are “Elements of the [Biblical] text he doesn’t understand:, but the more Peterson studies the bible, the more he understands.  Peterson analogizes the Bible to quantum mechanics, saying that the more you study this mysterious subject, the more you understand.  Richard responds by shutting Peterson down, saying that Biblical texts do not work in the same way as does quantum mechanics, in that quantum mechanics works—it generates predictions that lead to further truths about the world. The Bible, avers Richard, don’t have any credentials because it makes no predictions.

In an attempt to corral Dawkins into Christianity, Peterson says that Dawkins’s claim that he was a “cultural Christian” proves that Dawkins “found something derived from Christianity that he had an affinity with”. “What did Christianity get right,” asks Peterson, “that enabled [Dawkins] to make a statement like that?”  Dawkins responds nothing: his view that he is a “cultural Christian” simply means that he was brought up in Christian culture and knows the Biblical texts. Dawkins adds that doesn’t value Christianity at all.

They then arrive at one moment of agreement: some religions lead to better behavior of their adherents than do others. Both men seem to agree that Islam leads to a worse society than does Christianity. But then Peterson implies that morality is identical with religion, and that you adhere to better religions to get societies with better morality.  I would point out that Steve Pinker, in his big books, explains how religion is really an impediment to the improvement of society, and that you don’t in fact need religion to derive morality. We all know this is true from the morality discussed by secular philosophers like Plato, Hume, Kant, Spinoza, Rawls, and Singer. Peterson seems to be a Confused Christian.

Finally, before I gave up in disgust, I watched Richard ask Peterson whether he believed that Jesus was born of a virgin (32:10). Once again Peterson waffles, saying that he isn’t really qualified to comment on elements like this in Bible, but he sees enormous mystical and metaphorical value in the story: “Any culture that doesn’t hold the image of the woman and infant sacred dies.”  My response is “WTF”? What does he mean by “sacred”? And which societies have died for lack of this sacralization?

What we see here is Peterson arguing that Biblical/spiritual “truth” is no different from scientific truth; in other words, all “ways of knowing” come up with truths of equal status.

One other thing I learned from this video, besides the relief I need no longer pay attention to Peterson, is Richard’s enormous patience in dealing with semi-loons like his opponent.  I wondered why Richard even engaged Peterson, but reader Chris responded this way: “I like Sam Harris’s explanation of old: he and Richard know they can’t change the views of their opponent, but they can influence some of the audience watching it.”

It seems to me, though, that Richard is being a huge masochist by engaging in this effort. Fans of Peterson love his word salad and will not stop worshiping him, and those who are neutral should, if they have any neurons, realize from Peterson’s words alone he is in some way unhinged.

Here: click the video to start where I started, and then listen to about minute 34. And have some antacid at hand!

New Louisiana law requires display of Ten Commandments in all public school classrooms

June 21, 2024 • 9:30 am

There is a new law in the benighted state of Louisiana requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in all public school classrooms, including colleges. It is an arrant violation of the First Amendment—indeed, it was intended to test whether it comports with the First Amendment—and it is motivated by religion.  The fact that the law is admittedly religious in origin and nature is pathetically masked by saying that the Commandments are really an important part of American history, and that three other secular documents like the Declaration of Independence may also be displayed alongside Moses’s Laws.

Click below to read, or find it archived here:

The NYT article above has a brief summary of the law and the motivations of its promoters, which I’ve excerpted below.

Gov. Jeff Landry signed legislation on Wednesday requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in every public classroom in Louisiana, making the state the only one with such a mandate and reigniting the debate over how porous the boundary between church and state should be.

Critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, vowed a legal fight against the law they deemed “blatantly unconstitutional.” But it is a battle that proponents are prepared, and in many ways, eager, to take on.

“I can’t wait to be sued,” Mr. Landry said on Saturday at a Republican fund-raiser in Nashville, according to The Tennessean. And on Wednesday, as he signed the measure, he argued that the Ten Commandments contained valuable lessons for students.

“If you want to respect the rule of law,” he said, “you’ve got to start from the original law giver, which was Moses.”

The legislation is part of a broader campaign by conservative Christian groups to amplify public expressions of faith, and provoke lawsuits that could reach the Supreme Court, where they expect a friendlier reception than in years past. That presumption is rooted in recent rulings, particularly one in 2022 in which the court sided with a high school football coach who argued that he had a constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s games.

. . .The measure in Louisiana requires that the commandments be displayed in each classroom of every public elementary, middle and high school, as well as public college classrooms. The posters must be no smaller than 11 by 14 inches and the commandments must be “the central focus of the poster” and “in a large, easily readable font.”

It will also include a three-paragraph statement asserting that the Ten Commandments were a “prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries.”

That reflects the contention by supporters that the Ten Commandments are not purely a religious text but also a historical document, arguing that the instructions handed down by God to Moses in the Book of Exodus are a major influence on United States law.

I’ve put the bill that became law below, and there’s a lot to unpack in it. But read for yourself; I’ll simply single out the highlights.

Click to read:

The bill begins with a long rationale trying to show that the Ten Commandments are an important part of American history, and therefore should be displayed because it’s not really promoting religion, but recounting our history. After all, some of the Founders mentioned God!  But doesn’t explain why, say, the Constitution or Declaration of Independence are NOT required to be displayed. No, the Ten Commandments is the only historical document required to be displayed; other documents are optional.  Here’s some of the rationale for making that display mandatory—the “historical context” argument that Christians use to push religion into schools (and put “In God We Trust” on our money):

Recognizing the historical role of the Ten Commandments accords with our nation’s history and faithfully reflects the understanding of the founders of our 9 nation with respect to the necessity of civic morality to a functional self-government. History records that James Madison, the fourth President of the United States ofAmerica, stated that “(w)e have staked the whole future of our new nation . . . upon  the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments.”

. . .  The text of the Ten Commandments set forth in Subsection B of this 17 Section is identical to the text of the Ten Commandments monument that was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in Van Orden v. Perry, 545 U.S. 677, 688 19 (2005).  Including the Ten Commandments in the education of our children is part of our state and national history, culture, and tradition.

The Mayflower Compact of 1620 was America’s first written constitution and made a Covenant with Almighty God to “form a civil body politic”. This was the first purely American document of self-government and affirmed the link between civil society and God.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 provided a method of admitting new states to the Union from the territory as the country expanded to the Pacific. The Ordinance “extended the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty” to the territories and stated that “(r)eligion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

. . . .The Supreme Court of the United States acknowledged that the Ten Commandments may be displayed on local government property when a private donation is made for the purchase of the historical monument. Pleasant Grove City, Utah v. Summan, 555 U.S. 460 (2006).

The bill cites other religious statements by the founders, but of course the word “God,” while appearing in the Declaration of Independence, does not appear at all in the Constitution. The Founders barely believed in God, were not very religious at all, and it’s misleading to suggest that this nation was founded on the rules adumbrated in the Ten Commandments. (Or were there Eleven Commandments? See below.)

Note too that the Supreme Court ruled—and this too seems a First Amendment violation—that one could display the Ten Commandments on government property if the money for the display did not come from the public.  This, I suppose, is a lame attempt to avoid excessive entanglement of the government and religion vis-à-vis the Lemon Test, and, indeed, this bill requires that the money for the many classroom copies of the Ten Commandments must come from “donations”. That tells you right away that something fishy is going on.

Display of other documents is optional:

A public school may also display the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, and the Northwest Ordinance, as provided in R.S. 26 25:1282, along with the Ten Commandments.

The Northwest Ordinance? What about the fricking Constitution?

There is another requirement: the Ten Commandments must be displayed along with a “context” statement, to wit:

The History of the Ten Commandments in American Public Education

The Ten Commandments were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries. Around the year 1688, The New England Primer became the first published American textbook and was the equivalent of a first grade reader. The New England Primer was used in public schools throughout the United States for more than one hundred fifty years to teach Americans to read and contained more than forty questions about the Ten Commandments

The Ten Commandments were also included in public school textbooks published by educator William McGuffey, a noted university president and professor. A version of his famous McGuffey Readers was written in the early 1800s and became one of the most popular textbooks in the history of American education, selling more than one hundred million copies. Copies of the McGuffey Readers are still available today.

The Ten Commandments also appeared in textbooks published by Noah Webster in which were widely used in American public schools along with America’s first comprehensive dictionary that Webster also published. His textbook, The American Spelling Book, contained the Ten Commandments and sold more than one hundred million copies for use by public school children all across the nation and was still available for use in American public schools in the year 1975.

This is all more striving by the sweating lawmakers to show that, because the Ten Commandments were mentioned in early textbooks, they have become an integral part of American education and thus should remain so today. But since then the courts have tried erect and maintain a “wall of separation between church and state”, a metaphor used by Jefferson, who drew on earlier ideas of Roger Williams.

The enforcement of the Establishment Clause hasn’t been perfect: as I said, we have “In God We Trust” on our money; the Pledge of Allegiance includes the phrase “0ne nation, under God”; and the Supreme court has allowed various First Amendment violations to slip through, including, as the NYT mentions, affirming a “Constitutional right” of a football coach to kneel on school property and publicly say a Christian prayer after football games.  Christians, it seems, cannot seem to keep their religion out of public schools. (That is, of course, why we have to eternally battle against creationism, which comes from the fictional narrative of Genesis 1 and 2.

Will this law stand?  It’s certainly going to be challenged by the ACLU and FFRF, and I’ve no doubt that these and other groups will take the law all the way to the Supreme Court. What happens then? The answer is murky. The court has allowed public prayer after public-school games, and a display of the Ten Commandments on public property if it’s funded privately.  The latter ruling may provide a precedent to uphold this law as well.

And we all know that the court is largely religious: 7 of the 9 justices are Catholic (I’m counting Gorsuch, who is “Anglican Catholic”), Jackson is a Protestant, and Kagan is the lone Jew. It’s not hard to imagine that most of the Supremes will be sympathetic to this law. And then. . . I’m worried about the resurgence of creationism.

By the way, as Steve Orzack pointed out, somehow the bill lists not ten but eleven commandments, to wit:

I count ELEVEN, right?  The authors of the bill have some revision to do!

Richard Dawkins on the “simplicity” of God

August 31, 2023 • 11:10 am

If you’re able to read the post below on Richard Dawkins’s Substack site, you get three treats in one. First, he reproduces a scathing review he wrote for the 1996 Sunday Times of London about theologian Richard Swinburne‘s book Is There a God? (The answer was “yes,” of course, and Swinburne’s god was a “simple” one.) Second, Richard re-discusses the topic based on a debate he had with Swinburne and other religionists this June about whether God was indeed “simple.” Finally, both segments are written in Richard’s inimitable clear and humorous style, and so you get the third treat of enjoying his prose. (I’d love to be able to write like him; Richard and Steve Pinker are my models for clear and absorbing writing.)

If you haven’t looked at Richard’s site, the following might be free to access. Click on it to try. If not, either subscribe or just read the quotes I’ll give below.

The book review begins with a funny rebuke:

It is a virtue of clear writing that you can see what is wrong with a book as well as what is right.  Richard Swinburne is clear.  You can see where he is coming from.  You can also see where he is going to, and there is something almost endearing in the way he lovingly stakes out his own banana skin and rings it about with converging arrows boldly labelled ‘Step here’.

Yep, he stepped there.

Swinburne claimed that God has many powers. For example, as Richard notes, the esteemed theologian thinks that God has to keep every physical particle in line, for without God’s continual intercession, every electron would willy-nilly assume different and diverse properties.

[Swinburne’s] reasoning is very odd indeed.  Given that the number of particles of any one type, say electrons, is large, Swinburne thinks it too much of a coincidence for so many to have the same properties.  One electron, he could stomach.  But billions and billions of electrons, all with the same properties, that is what really excites his incredulity.  For him it would be simpler, more natural, less demanding of explanation, if all electrons were different from each other.  Worse, no one electron should naturally retain its properties for more than an instant at a time, but would be expected to change capriciously, haphazardly and fleetingly from moment to moment.  That is Swinburne’s view of the simple, native state of affairs.  Anything more uniform (what you or I would call more simple) requires a special explanation.

“. . . it is only because electrons and bits of copper and all other material objects have the same powers in the twentieth century as they did in the nineteenth century that things are as they are now” (p 42).

Enter God.  God comes to the rescue by deliberately and continuously sustaining the properties of all those billions of electrons and bits of copper, and neutralising their otherwise ingrained inclination to wild and erratic fluctuation.  That is why when you’ve seen one electron you’ve seen them all, that is why bits of copper all behave like bits of copper, and that is why each electron and each bit of copper stays the same as itself from microsecond to microsecond.  It is because God is constantly hanging on to each and every particle, curbing its reckless excesses and whipping it into line with its colleagues to keep them all the same.

Oh, and in case you wondered how the hypothesis that God is simultaneously keeping a billion fingers on a billion electrons can be a simple hypothesis, the reason is this.  God is only a single substance.  What brilliant economy of explanatory causes compared with all those billions of independent electrons all just happening to be the same!

Not only that, but besides looking after the gazillions of electrons in the Universe (not just on Earth), God has to monitor the behavior and thoughts of every individual, human or nonhuman, and has complete knowledge of all of them. As it says in Matthew 10:29:

Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.

The review is delightful, especially if you like mockery of Sophisticated Theology™, and Richard ends it this way:

A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe is not going to be simple.  His existence is therefore going to need a modicum of explaining in its own right (it is often considered bad taste to bring that up, but Swinburne does rather ask for it by pinning his hopes on the virtues of simplicity).  Worse (from the point of view of simplicity) other corners of God’s giant consciousness are simultaneously preoccupied with the doings and emotions and prayers of every single human being.  He even, according to Swinburne, has to decide continuously not to intervene miraculously to save us when we get cancer.  That would never do, for, “If God answered most prayers for a relative to recover from cancer, then cancer would no longer be a problem for humans to solve.”  And then where would we be?

If this is theology, perhaps Professor Swinburne’s colleagues are wise to be less lucid.

I feel like applauding when I read stuff like that.

After this, Richard quotes how theologians and believers went after him for his claim in the debate that God must be complex (his definition of “complex” is below), and that if you really understood theology, you’d know that its practitioners mean “simple” in a way different from both scientists and laypeople.

In the debate, Swineburne stood by his claim that God was simple, so the existence of God isn’t really a problem. (The “complexity” of any god would demand an explanation of how such a vastly complicated deity came about, an explanation that theologians aren’t prepared to give, as they don’t have one—except perhaps to claim “it’s gods all the way down”.)

In a loud, confident, articulate voice, Swinburne expounded exactly the same astonishing line as before, and I criticized it in the same terms. How can you possibly say God is a “simple”, “unitary” explanation for the universe and the laws of physics, given that, in order to create it, he needed to know a whole lot of physics and mathematics.  Plus, 4.6 billion years later, he now has the bandwidth to read the intimate thoughts of seven billion of people simultaneously, and, for all we know, the thoughts and prayers of even more billions of extra-terrestrial aliens.

It didn’t surprise me that Swinburne still thinks God is a supremely simple entity. He evidently uses the word “simple” in a special theological sense. What does surprise me is the number of others incapable of seeing the absurdity of his position. Several Twitter responses to the debate proudly proclaim “Divine Simplicity” as a thing in theology. But you can’t demonstrate that something is right merely by shoving the word “Divine” in front of it, not even if you attribute it to Augustine or Thomas Aquinas. What is the justification for invoking “Divine Simplicity in this context? Does it even mean anything coherent?

And then Dawkins explains what he means by simplicity and complexity, which is the same way scientists (and everyone else, if they could articulate it) understands complexity. It’s a nonmathematical version of “Shannon information.”  Here I have to give a longish quote:

Here’s what I mean by simple. I suspect it captures what most biologists mean, if not most scientists. It can be quantified using an intuitive, verbal version of Shannon’s mathematical measure of information. Simple is the opposite of complex. The complexity or simplicity of an entity is the minimum number of words (more strictly bits – binary digits in the most economical re-coding) you need to describe it. A centipede and a lobster both consist of a train of segments running from front to rear. The centipede is simpler than the lobster, in the following sense. To describe the centipede, you admittedly need a special description of the front and rear segments, but the many segments in between are the same as each other. Just describe one segment, and then say “Repeat repeat repeat . . . some large number of times” (it might literally be 100 times in some species.) But you can’t do that with the lobster because most of the segments are different from each other. If you were to write a book called The Anatomy of the Centipede and another book called the Anatomy of the Lobster, the second book would come out a lot fatter. Assuming, of course, that the two books go into a similar level of detail, which is an easy assumption to police.

From this you can see that simplicity/complexity is measured not just by number of parts but also by what Julian Huxley called “heterogeneity of parts”. And we have to add that the heterogeneous parts themselves, and the way they are connected up, are necessary to the definition of the entity concerned. Any old heap of junk has a large number of heterogenous parts but neither they, nor their particular juxtaposition, are necessary to the general definition of “a heap of junk”. You can shuffle the parts of a  heap of junk a million times, and all million will answer to the definition of a heap of junk. The heterogenous parts of a lobster, and their mutual arrangement, are necessary to the definition of a lobster. So they are to the definition of a centipede, but fewer of them are different from each other, and you can shuffle (most of them) into any order.

There’s more, but I’ll just give some funny bits in the form of social media rebukes Richard got (in italics) and his answers (in plain text):

“Richard, stop embarrassing yourself. Stick to science.

With all due respect – and I have a lot of respect for you – watching you switch lanes from science to philosophy is like watching Michael Jordan switch to baseball.”

I’ve become ever so slightly irritated by the suggestion that you need some sort of special training to think clearly. Philosophy is just thinking clearly. Does one not need to think clearly to do science? Or history? Or any subject worth studying. Perhaps not theology, where thinking clearly might even be a handicap.

and this:

For evolution’s sake stop trying to do theology.”

I am not trying to do theology, not least because I have grave doubts as to whether theology is a subject at all (I don’t in any way impugn the fascinating work done in university Departments of Theology on the Dead Sea scrolls, comparing ancient Hebrew texts, and similar honest scholarship). I’m talking about theology in the (I suspect but could be wrong) obscurantist sense epitomised by “Transubstantiation” and the “Mystery” of  the Eucharist, the “Mystery” of the Trinity, the “Mystery” of the Incarnation, and “Divine Simplicity”.

I am not trying and failing to do theology, Swinburne is trying and failing to do science. The question of why all electrons and all copper atoms behave as others of their kind do is a purely scientific question.  And the question of why we exist, which was the topic of the London debate, is fairly and squarely a scientific question. It is possible that science will never ultimately solve it, though I think it will, and the possibility of failure is no reason to give up without making the effort. But if science doesn’t solve it, no other discipline will.

And, finally, this:

“Stick to biology.”

Thank you, I intend to. Biology uses language honestly and solves real problems. In 2,000 years, what problem has ever been solved by theology?

In that short last sentence, Richard sums up what I try to say in my lecture on the incompatibility of religion and science. There I talk about all the scientific advances in just the last century, and then ask this: “How much more do we know about the nature and will of God since the writings of Augustine or Aquinas?”  The answer, of course is “nothing”, for theology is not a discipline in which one can investigate and test various propositions.  We still know nothing about God—least of all whether He/She/It even exists.

h/t: Daniel

More Sophisticated Theology: a religious scholar ponders whether Neanderthals had immortal souls

August 10, 2023 • 8:30 am

Lest you think that Sophisticated Theology™ has fallen on hard times, here we have an article pondering at great and tedious length the immensely important question, “Did Christ die for Neanderthals?” That can be rephrased, according to author Simon Francis Gaine, as “Did the Neanderthals have immortal souls?” (The “OP” after his name stands for Ordinis Praedicatorum, meaning of the Order of Preacher in the Dominican sect of Catholicism.)

And he gets paid to write stuff like this; his biography gives his bona fides, include a degree from Oggsford:

Fr Simon is currently assigned to the Angelicum, Rome, where he teaches in the Theology Faculty of the Pontifical University of St Thomas. He lectures on the Theology of Grace and Christian Anthropology, and oversees the Faculty’s Doctoral Seminar.

Fr Simon holds the Pinckaers Chair in Theological Anthropology and Ethics in the Angelicum Thomistic Institute, of which he is also the Director. He is a member of the Advisory Board of Blackfriars’s Aquinas Institute, the Pontifical Academy of St Thomas, Rome, and the Vatican’s International Theological Commission.

He studied theology at Oxford, and completed his doctorate in modern Catholic theology before joining the Dominican Order in 1995.

Click on the screenshot for a paradigmatic example of Sophisticated Theology™. The paper appeared in 2020 in New Blackfriars, a Wiley journal that’s apparently peer reviewed.

Here’s the Big Question:

 I have no expertise in any of these sciences, but have tried as best I can to understand what they have to say, in order to take account of what they have to say within a theological framework. Today I am going to look at the Neanderthals and their relationship to us from a theological perspective in the Catholic tradition, asking what a disciple of St Thomas Aquinas should make of them. Are they to be counted among the humanity God created in his image and likeness and which fell into sin, or are they to be counted instead among the other animal species of our world represented in the first chapter of Genesis? Or are they something else? While creation itself is to be renewed through Christ at the last, according to Christian faith Christ is said to die for our trespasses, for our sins. So did Christ die for Neanderthals?

This comes down to the question, says Gaine, of whether Neanderthals had immortal souls, so we have to look for evidence of that. If they did, then they could be saved by Jesus, though since the Neanderthals’ demise antedated the appearance of Jesus by about 40,000 years, their souls must have lingered in somewhere like Purgatory (along with the souls of Aztecs and other pre-Christian believers) for millennia. Gaine does not take up the question of whether other hominins, like H. erectus or H. floresiensis, much less the Denisovans, also had souls.

Since we have no idea whether Neanderthals had immortal souls (indeed, we can’t be sure that anybody else has an immortal soul, since it’s like consciousness), we have to look for proxies for souls. The question is complicated by the fact that Neanderthals interbred with “modern” Homo sapiens, so that most of us carry some a few percent of Neanderthal genes in our genome.

To answer his question of whether Neanderthals are “theologically human” (i.e., whether they had immortal souls), Gaine turns to his hero Aquinas:

So were Neanderthals theologically human or not? I think the only way we can approach this question is to ask whether or not Neanderthals had immortal souls, as we do. But, apart from Christian teaching, how do we know that we even have such souls? We cannot just have a look at our immaterial souls, and Aquinas thought that we only know the character of our souls through what we do. Aquinas argues from the fact that we make intellectual acts of knowledge of things abstracted from their material conditions, to the immateriality of the intellectual soul. Our knowledge is not just of particulars but is universal, enabling pursuits like philosophy and science, and the potential to be elevated by God to supernatural knowledge and love of him. If human knowing were more limited to a material process, Aquinas does not think our souls would be such subsistent, immaterial souls. Finding evidence of intellectual flights throughout the history of sapiens is difficult enough, however, let alone in Neanderthals.

. . .  What we need to look for in the case of Neanderthals is evidence of some behaviour that bears the mark of an intellectual soul such as we have.

And so an “intellectual soul” then becomes a proxy for the immortal soul, which is itself the proxy for whether you can be saved by Christ. Did Neanderthals have these? Gaine uses several lines of evidence to suggest that they did.

  • Neanderthals buried their dead (religion!)
  • Language. We don’t know if Neanderthals could speak, but they had a vocal apparatus similar to that of modern H. sapiens. Gaine concludes that they had language, though of course that’s pure speculation. But since when have Sophisticated Theologians™ bridled at usupported speculation?
  • Neanderthals made cave paintings and may have adorned themselves with feathers and jewelry: signs of a “material culture” similar to H. sapiens.

And so he concludes, without saying so explicitly, that Neanderthals had immortal souls and were save-able by Christ. This supposedly allows us to use science to expand theology:

How though does any of this make a difference to theology in the tradition of Aquinas? If Neanderthals were created in God’s image and saved by Christ, this must expand our understanding of Christ’s ark of salvation and raise questions about how his saving grace was made available to them. Because the Church teaches that God offers salvation through Christ to every person in some way.  theologians have often asked in recent times how this offer is made to those who have not heard the Gospel, members of other religions, and even atheists. It seems to me that, just as modern science has enlarged our sense of the physical universe, the inclusion of Neanderthals in theological humanity must somehow expand our sense of human salvation, given that it was effected in the kind of life Neanderthals lived.

. . . But even if Neanderthal inclusion does not pay immediate theological dividends, at least for apologetic reasons it seems necessary for theology to take account of their discovery. Unless theologians do, they risk the appearance of leaving faith and science in separately sealed worlds, as though our faith cannot cope with advancing human knowledge, leaving it culturally marooned and seemingly irrelevant to many. That is exactly the opposite of the attitude of Aquinas, who, confident that all truth comes from God, in his own day confirmed Christian wisdom by integrating into it what he knew of human science.’

But why stop at Neanderthals when you’re “expanding your faith through science”. There are lots of other hominins that must be considered (see below).  Can we rule most of these out because they might not have had language?

From the Encyclopedia Brittanica

And what about other mammals? In 2015 the great Sophisticated Catholic Theologians™ Edward Feser and David Bentley Hart argued about whether dogs can go to Heaven. (Hart said “yes,” while Feser said “no”, both of them furiously quoting Church Fathers like Aquinas to support their positions.)

These are tough questions, and of course to answer them theologians have to construct confected arguments based on casuistry. What amazes me is that people get paid to corrupt science with such ridiculous theological questions. It is unsupported speculation about unevidenced empirical assertions.

h/t: David