Category: debate

Abbie Smith debates creationist Steve Kern

March 17, 2012 • 12:57 pm

Update: A video of the debate is now up on YouTubue; and yes, it is a rout for Kern and a win for Abbie:

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On Thursday fellow “blogger” Abbie Smith, aka erv—a graduate student who studies endogenous retroviruses—debated evolution with conservative pastor Steve Kern at the Oklahoma City Community College. The debate was sponsored by the Oklahoma City Chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.

Red Dirt Report describes the fracas, which, if the site is to be believed, was a rout for Kern and a victory for Abbie. A few snippets from the report:

This year, Kern took up the challenge again, this time debating whether “intelligent design” should be taught in public schools, something his opponent – Abbie Smith, a doctoral candidate in microbiology and immunology at the University of Oklahoma – disagreed with.

After introductions by the Rev. Jim Shields of the Interfaith Alliance of Oklahoma, Kern kicked off the debate by giving a rather rambling opening statement that, among other things, had him proclaiming “neo-Darwinism is a dying theory” and that “education is about having other points of view.”

“Since removing God from the schools, public education has suffered,” Kern said.

As Kern looked down at his notes, seemingly nervous and unprepared, Smith sat next to him, smiling confidently. She would soon have her turn, standing behind the lectern and giving a snazzy PowerPoint presentation that clearly explained

With images of reactionary book burnings and an artist rendering of Jesus coddling a baby dinosaur accompanying her notes that appeared on two screens, Smith’s classroom approach was smart, witty and informative in comparison to Kern’s rigid, fundamentalist approach. . .

When Smith concluded her introduction, Kern sarcastically congratulated her and explained that children are not taught the difference between microevolution and macroevolution and how the former “is the ability of species to make chamges within the limits set by the parameters encoded in the DNA of specific species” while the latter is the “unobserved process of one species changing into a totally different species.”

Noting a bill that his legislator wife, State Rep. Sally Kern (R-Oklahoma City) has pushed, addressing “academic freedom,” Kern said all it would do is “allow teachers to point out discrepancies” in scientific theories, such as the theory of evolution.

At this point, Kern then got startlingly emotional, asking Smith and the audience, “Why are they upset about children learning about God?” He then added, “You can’t compartmentalize your faith, your education … they are all things, that are part of who you are.”

Because it’s against the First Amendment, you moron! Kern then went on to use a version of the “why-are-there-stlll-monkeys” argument:

Kern also said the theory of evolution was a “lie … (they) have been teaching and preaching and proselytizing for 70 years …”

This is where Kern began to argue that evolution – at least macroevolution – doesn’t make sense because “viruses are still viruses” and other organisms are still what they have always been … “You’re talking about adaptation here,” he told her.

Smith went on to talk further about viruses, while Kern sat there with a sour look on his face, coming back to tell her that “You go back and viruses are viruses … they may have adapted … they are still viruses.”

. . . “If evolution is true, why are so many people asking about its validity,” asked Kern.

The debate wound up with a Q&A:

During a question-and-answer portion, following the conclusion of the debate, one of the questions had to do with God and that if there was a God, wouldn’t the study of evolution expose His existence?

Smith thought about it and said, “Theoretically.”

Kern, of course, said that if a design is revealed, then logically there must be a “designer.”

This is one time when Abbie failed to score big.  “Theoretically,” is a confusing answer. I would have responded, “Yes, the study of evolution has given evidence against the existence of God, for no Designer God would have used the wasteful and incredibly painful process of natural selection to forge His creations, nor would He have pointlessly led 99% of all species that ever lived to a final extinction.  If a beneficent and omnipotent God wanted to bring things into being, natural selection—with all the incalculable and pointless suffering it brings to innocent animals—would have been the last process He would have used.  And, of course, there are all those design flaws, like the small birth canals of women. . . ”

Kern, apparently, failed to grasp the elementary tenet of evolution that natural selection gives the appearance of design without the need for a designer. Nous n’avons pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.

Kudos to Abbie, who, unlike other students, is using her spring break productively.

Student Abbie and Pastor Kern (Andrew W. Griffin / Red Dirt Report)

UPDATE: The Oklahoma City Biblical Examiner has a different (and poorly-written) take on the debate. LOL!:

At one point, Ms. Smith said that, if evolution were proven false, all science would be useless and she would have no reason to go to work the next day.  It is unclear whether she was referring to macro-evolution or micro-evolution.  Macro-evolution is an unobservable hypothesis which supposedly took place in the far distant past.  It has no bearing on observable science today.

The Biblical Examiner needs to learn the difference between “unobservable” and “we can see it happening in real time with our own eyes.” One can certainly observe feathered dinosaurs in the fossil record around 140 million years ago, as well as a gazillion “mammal-like reptiles” and “fishapods.” And then there are those annoying early hominins . . .

Dawkins comes for the Archbishop, and can there be evidence for God?

February 27, 2012 • 5:28 am

Last Thursday Richard Dawkins had a debate/conversation with Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the Sheldonian Theater at Oxford.  The topic: “The nature of human beings and the question of their ultimate origin.” I must confess that I haven’t yet seen the conversation, which I present in its entirety in the video here, but readers who have seen it should weigh in below.

The Independent gives the debate a lukewarm review:

Yesterday, the university hosted what seemed tantalisingly like a similar clash of great minds, between the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and Professor Richard Dawkins – like Huxley, a bulldog on behalf of Darwin’s theories. But anyone hoping for a dust-up would have been sorely disappointed, for the conversation was conducted with utmost politeness. The cleric even confessed his belief in evolution, and agreed with Dawkins that humans shared non-human ancestors. Wilberforce would be turning in his grave – assuming, as Williams does, that the soul survives death . . .

Rather than arguing, Dawkins and Williams seemed intent on finding areas of agreement. Did the Archbishop agree that there was probably no “first man”, that human evolution was gradual, and that – in Dawkins’ formulation – no pair of Homo erectus parents gazed down proudly at their Homo sapiens newborn? He did. “The Pope thinks that,” Dawkins claimed. “I’ll ask him sometime,” Williams replied. . .

They did, finally, come to verbal blows – or gentle nudges, at least – over the origins of the universe. “The writers of the Bible, inspired as I believe they were, were not inspired to do 21st-century physics; they were inspired to pass on to their readers what God wanted them to know,” Williams argued. “In the first book of the Bible is the basic information – the universe depends on God, humanity has a very distinctive role in that universe, and humanity has made rather a mess of it.”

“I am baffled,” responded Dawkins, “by the way sophisticated theologians who know Adam and Eve never existed still keep talking about it.” God, he said, “cluttered up” his scientific worldview. “I don’t see clutter coming into it,” Williams replied. “I’m not thinking of God as an extra who has to be shoehorned into it.”

Once more we hear, from a sophisticated archbishop, that the Bible isn’t a science textbook, but still contains things that God wanted people to know. (Note that Williams admits that the Bible was somehow written under God’s “inspiration.”)  What, exactly, were those things?  Are we tainted by Original Sin or not? What, exactly, is our “very distinctive role” in the universe? And how did we make a mess of it, aside from environmental despoilation? And did god want us to know that it’s our duty to kill adulterers, or that homosexuality is an abomination? By what warrant does Williams know which parts of the Bible are metaphorical, which are meant literally, which convey those timeless truths of God, and which are to be ignored?

Anyway, the debate:

Richard has written his own analysis of the debate—and of the attending publicity, including his “admission that God might exist”—in a piece at his website: “No blood on the carpet. How disappointing.”  Here are two good or intriguing bits:

It’s hard to resist a feeling of “You can’t win”. On the one hand we ‘horsemen’ and ‘new atheists’ are attacked, often aggressively and stridently, for being aggressive and strident. On the other hand, when journalists or religious apologists actually meet us and we turn out to be courteous and civilised, they accuse us of climbing down, “admitting” or “confessing” that we have changed, when actually we are behaving exactly as we always have. They seem to feel let down when they discover that the real people aren’t anything like the way they so relentlessly portray us; as if, since they’ve gone to the trouble of inventing extravagant caricatures of us, we should at least have the decency to live up to them in real life.

And this:

I am actually drawn to the Steve Zara / PZ Myers point that it is hard to think of any evidence that would in principle be capable of convincing me of a god’s existence (a trick, or a hallucination, or insanity, or even a visitation by an evolved super-human from outer space would always be more probable). But I didn’t feel like raising this in the Sheldonian, where it would have been so far off the radar of either of my two colleagues as to lead to no fruitful exchange. There was also the risk of a blast of epistemic incomprehensibility from the philosophical referee. And that would have been no way to finish off a civilised evening.

Here I disagree with Richard, not about not mentioning this in the Sheldonian (I probably would have done that, though), but about evidence for God. I’ve posted before that although I’m a diehard (i.e., 6.995) atheist, I cannot say for sure that there is no God, and there is some evidence that would convince me of one.  The hypothesis of a supernatural, omnipotent being that can do anything can in principle be supported with evidence.

Richard says that one can’t distinguish that evidence from the actions of an evolved alien or super-human, but I’m willing to provisionally accept that evidence as “god” pending more data.  Suppose that the Bible had made detailed prophecies that came true, and whose truth wasn’t brought about by the prophecies themselves? Or if we found secret divine messages coded in our DNA?  What if prayers always worked, but only prayers uttered by a Jew importuning Yahweh? What if amputees who visited Lourdes regrew their limbs? (Ebon Musings has put together a list of evidences for God that he’d find convincing.)

If a divine, miracle-working being appears who has characteristics comporting with those of some faith, then I think it’s okay to provisionally accept that being as “god.”  We can worry later about whether it’s an “evolved alien or super-human” (see the take on this at Daylight Atheism).  I know some readers will disagree, but remember that this is about evidence that I would accept as a scientist.  If other scientists disagree, then we have a controversy. It won’t be resolved, of course, because such a being almost certainly won’t appear.

If Richard really accepts the idea of God as a scientific hypothesis, as he seemed to do in The God Delusion, then presumably there’s evidence that could confirm that hypothesis. If there isn’t, then it’s still a hypothesis, but not a scientific one, and one can reject it on first principles without having to deal with “counterevidence” like the existence of evil.  Or, like P.Z., Richard might consider the hypothesis of God as incoherent, in which case it’s not worth discussing at all.

Would the world be better without religion?: the debate

November 30, 2011 • 5:44 am

National Public Radio (NPR) has finally posted the audio of a debate between Matthew Chapman, Darwin’s great-grandson, philosopher Anthony Grayling, Dinesh D’Souza, president of the King’s College of New York, and Rabbi David Wolpe on the question, “Would the world be better off without religion?”  You can hear the 50-minute debate here, or get to the debate by clicking the link on the page given in the first sentence.

I didn’t find the debate particularly edifying, nor did I see a clear winner; indeed, the atheist side failed to bring up obvious points like the total lack of evidence for God (or the tenets of Wolpe’s Judaism or d”Souza’s Christianity)—though evidence was alluded to. Nor were the specious roots of supposed “atheist atrocities,” like those of Pol Pot and Stalin, really probed.  Perhaps the debate was more useful to people who are largely unfamiliar with the arguments.  What was painfully lacking here was Christopher Hitchens.

As for the results, the atheist side appeared to have gained a tiny victory, though both sides gained votes at the expense of those undecided at the beginning. NPR reports:

Before the Oxford-style debate, moderated by ABC News’ John Donvan, the audience at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts voted 52 percent in favor of the motion and 26 percent against, with 22 percent undecided. Afterward, 59 percent of the audience agreed the world would be better off without religion, while 31 percent disagreed — making the side arguing for the motion the winners of the debate. Ten percent of the audience remained undecided.

And I’m sure the vote reflects performance and not the actual changes in mindset of the audience. That’s the big problem with these debates.

Yesterday’s debate on the value of religion, and participants’ comments

November 16, 2011 • 5:06 am

Yesterday in New York City, Slate and Intelligence Squared sponsored a debate on the question “The world would be better off without religion.” The participants were Anthony Grayling and Matthew Chapman (Darwin’s great-great grandson) versus the strange duo of Rabbi David Wolpe and Dinesh D’Souza.

It wasn’t online but I’ll put it up if a video appears.  If any reader went, please post a report below.

Slate also has a pre-debate interview with David Wolpe (you’ll remember him as one of the two rabbis who debated Chistopher Hitchens and Sam Harris) on whether religion makes people behave badly. Three of his answers are of interest:

Slate: This idea that the world would be better off without religion seems pretty modern. Is it? Or has there simply been a wave of anti-religious sentiment recently?

DW: The idea is a modern. It’s one that shows a certain charming obliviousness and dangerous naiveté about human nature, as though it’s religion that makes people do bad things when in fact it’s being people that largely makes people do bad things. Religion is one of many different attempts to get them to be a little bit better than they would be if left to their own devices.

This itself seem extraordinarily naive. If there hadn’t been the Catholic church, what on earth would have impelled some sort of secular Inquisition? And so on. But then he immediately retracts what he says above, admitting that religion can make people do bad things:

Slate: Earlier this year, you wrote a story articulating the four reasons that atheists are angry in the Huffington Post. You also noted, “No one can seriously deny that religion has been guilty of wickedness in this world and has provided cover for wickedness. … While as a believer I think there is much more to be said about this topic, it is certainly reasonable for people to be angry at religion for its abuses, particularly people who have themselves been victims.” What more should be said about the topic?  

DW: It’s true that people in the name of their religion sometimes do terrible things. And if religion is supposed to make people better, I understand why it doesn’t always have the best reputation in this world. It doesn’t always work the way it’s supposed to. The flip side of that is that the “supposed to” also comes from religion. Like, why would we expect that religion would make people better? Religion does have and promote standards. So when religious people do bad things, we’re disappointed in them because they’re religious people [and] they’re supposed to do better. In some ways, the condemnation of religion is a tribute to religion, otherwise you wouldn’t condemn it.

What?  And is the condemnation of the Holcaust a tribute to the Nazi Party?  Something is worthy of opprobrium if it inspires bad acts, irrespective of whether it’s supposed to inspire good ones.

Finally,

 Slate: What would a world without religion be like?

DW: I once kiddingly said if you want to know what a world that was run without genuine faith and only with goods [would look like], you don’t have to imagine it because there’s Hollywood. A world without religion would be Nietzsche’s world. It would be a world in which ultimately the only value is power. If there isn’t a transcendent value, then the strongest wins. The only thing that militates against power is the sense that there’s something higher. Without religion, I don’t know what the sense of that something higher could be. For me, it would be a very frightening world.

Umm. . . or you could look at Sweden.  Although a fair number of people in that secular states formally belong to a church, only 23% of them believe in God.  And do the “strongest win” in Sweden? I don’t think so. Thanks to state-sponsored services, the weakest, poorest, and sickest there have a much better chance than they do in the God-fearing United States.

Slate also has a similar interview with Dinesh D’Souza.  Not much new there, though he argues that secular Europe is moral because “Christian morality is embedded in the bones of Europe.” For the atheist side, there’s a largely autobiographical interview with Matthew Chapman, though so far nothing from Grayling that I see.

Eric MacDonald on the debate Q&A

November 6, 2011 • 8:34 am

UPDATE:  Over at Metamagician, Brother Blackford gives a brief take on the Q&A video in his post, “The Coyne/Haught question time.”

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I swear, I wish Eric MacDonald would take up debating theologians on the stage rather than on his website.  As a former Anglican priest, now an atheist, he knows all the tricks and evasions of theology. But perhaps he’s just too nice a guy to go after those fluffballs in public.

At any rate, over at Choice in Dying, Eric has just published an analysis of the Q&A session John Haught and I had after our debate. Eric’s piece is called “Q&A: Haught on God, Bitter, Impolite, and Wrong“, and he illustrates his points with snippets from the videotape. (By the way, the debate and Q&A are now on YouTube; click on the links to get them.) Eric has a very good comment on his own post, too—it’s #8.

Eric’s analysis is his usual thorough and thoughtful job. Two of the most interesting points involve Haught’s ambivalance between whether or not God intervened in the real world (though Haught appears to have flirted with deism, the dispatching of Jesus to Earth is an explicitly theistic act), and the incoherence of the “scientism” charge, which I’ll address one of these days. In the meantime, I’m going to make a cup of tea.

Blackford on l’affaire Haught et Coyne

November 5, 2011 • 5:29 am

I’m really exhausted with this debate business, but there’s one more post I want to highlight.  Brother Blackford, who’s been in the U.S., just got home and has a post on the implications of DebateGate.  The most interesting part, I think, is one of Russell’s bugaboos: the widespread notion that religion (as opposed to say, politics) is supposed to be given a pass in public debate, while atheism, of course, is not:

The comments directed at Haught were far more genteel than what we typically see from Christian debaters such as William Lane Craig. I’ve seen Craig far more openly mocking than that in the way he deals with his opponents. However, you might say that Haught did not use any mockery or even any direct criticism of Jerry’s views as expressed elsewhere (such as in articles and posts at Why Evolution Is True). That’s correct. Haught chose to concentrate on sketching his general worldview, putting it in historical perspective, and so on. Still, I’ve seen him, in his books, engage in forms of condescension, mockery, and outright abuse that go far beyond anything we can see Jerry Coyne doing in the video. Haught is not Mr Nice Guy, even if he played that role on the day. He can be as nasty as any nasty “New Atheist”. Indeed, his open letter, with its continual use of emotive, angry language, is nastier (and far more obviously unfair) than anything in the speech that it denounces.

This incident reminds me of the earlier fracas over Jerry’s New Republic review of a couple of books by, respectively, Kenneth Miller and Karl Giberson. Though the review contained some strong criticisms of the books, it was well within the proper bounds of civility for a book review.

And yet, it led to claims (notably from Chris Mooney and apparently Barbara Forrest) that such books should not be reviewed in such a manner – that doing so is uncivil. Once again, the proposal seems to be that religion, or at least “nice” non-fundamentalist religion, should be treated with a special deference that would not be given to, say, economic theories or political ideologies. Anything less than a solicitous attitude to religion counts as incivility. . .

The point is that people like Jerry Coyne are likely to encounter over-the-top reactions even when they engage in thoughtful, and appropriately civil, critiques of theological or religious views. Perhaps some of the reaction to that, in turn, then becomes hurtful or unseemly (Haught claims to have received very abusive emails over the current fracas, for example), and I don’t condone that. But let’s be blunt: Haught needs to get out more if he thinks there was anything remotely inappropriate about the way Jerry conducted himself at the University of Kentucky. It is Haught’s outraged and outrageous open letter that merits our condemnation.

I then went back and looked at what Chris Mooney said (and agreed with) when summarizing Barbara Forrest’s criticism of the New Republic piece. Here’s how we’re supposed to behave when talking to religious moderates (Mooney’s admonitions are indented, separated by my reactions):

1. Etiquette. Or as Forrest put it, “be nice.” Religion is a very private matter, and given that liberal religionists support church-state separation, we really have no business questioning their personal way of making meaning of the world. After all, they are not trying to force it on anybody else.

That’s ridiculous.  “They’re not trying to force it on anybody else”? Really? What are Catholics doing all over the world, with their opposition to abortion, birth control and condom use, divorce, and so on? For many years they basically set the law in Ireland, for instance, and still affect it in many other nations. Every time someone takes a religiously-based stand in politics, they’re trying to force their religious views on other people. Trying to force your views on others is what politics is about, of course, but we have every right to criticize politics when they’re motiviated by unevidenced superstititon.  Is religion a private matter when it motivates people to blow innocent people up in the name of Allah?

If religion really were a private matter, I doubt that many of us would spend so much time going after it.

2. Diversity. There are so many religions out there, and so much variation even within particular sects or faiths. So why would we want to criticize liberal Christians, who have not sacrificed scientific accuracy, who are pro-evolution, when there are so many fundamentalists out there attacking science and trying to translate their beliefs into public policy?

Why can’t we go after all of those who enable pernicious superstition?  That includes nearly all Catholics who deliberately keep silent about the foul crimes and policies of their church, as well as those wingnut fundamentalists.  The Pope causes far more harm in this world than do people like William Dembski or Ken Ham.  As I’ve said before, the antiscience views of religion are only one part—and not the worst part—of how religion poisons everything.

3. Humility. Science can’t prove a negative: Saying there is no God is saying more than we can ever really know empirically, or based on data and evidence. So why drive a wedge between religious and non-religious defenders of evolution when it is not even possible to definitively prove the former wrong about metaphysics?

Of course science can prove a negative.  It can prove that I don’t have four wisdom teeth, or that Barack Obama wasn’t born in Kenya. Presumably neither Mooney nor Forrest believe in Santa Claus. And note where the wedge is driven: “between religious and non-religious defenders of evolution.”  Well that wedge also separates some of those who enable harmful superstitions from those who don’t.

Q&A added to “The Video”

November 4, 2011 • 9:12 am

The debate video between John Haught and me in Kentucky has now been supplemented with the question-and-answer session. This is a stand-alone video of about 28 minutes, and I’ve embedded it below.

My favorite bit is between 24:30 and the end.

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UPDATE (and a note): Over at Sandwalk, Larry Moran highlights some of Haught’s testimony during the Dover Trial, in particular his characterization of some evolutionary biologists he considers undesirable “materialists,” and of the place of science in understanding the universe.

Larry asks his readers whether people like me should refrain from going after Haught’s theology because he was on our side at the Dover trial. My response is that my distaste for creationism in public schools doesn’t force me to bite my tongue when I hear pernicious and unsupported religious doctrine.  After all, religion—with Catholicism one of its most dangerous forms—does far more damage as a fulmnating illness than does its single symptom of creationism.  With the Catholic Church complicit in the spread of AIDS in Africa, in the sexual abuse of children, and in the torturing of adherents with thoughts of hell, we’re supposed to forget all that and give praise for Dover?

In his testimony, Ceiling Cat help us, Haught talks about the damn teapot and “explanatory pluralism” again (the man’s mind is apparently able to hold only one metaphor), and about the layers of explanations that include God.

I hadn’t read Haught’s testimony at Dover before, and I have to say that I find some of the things he says in Larry’s excerpt rather disturbing. I see Haught’s testimony as vindicating superstition. Go see for yourself.