Category: in the news

New HuffPo science section: Uncle Karl praises accommodationism, and bonus review of book by Karl

January 8, 2012 • 11:58 am

HuffPo has started a “Science” section of its website, which looks to be a good thing (they’re long had a “religion” section), but I’m wary. So is Carl Zimmer, who posted this on Google Plus:

Arianna Huffington unveiled a new science section for the Huffington Post this morning. This could be a very good thing (but only if they leave behind their nonsense of the past).

Zimmer has a longer discussion of the science section at his website, The Loom.

Well, maybe this could be a good thing, though a casual inspection reveals that it had worrying tabloid-like qualities despite the presence of some solid reporting (as on the dubious connection between vaccines and autism). I was amused, and a bit dismayed, to see a column by Uncle Karl Giberson (whom I’m going to de-avuncularize if he keeps writing stuff like this), extolling the same “science-religion peacemakers” that I discussed in an earlier post. Actually, this is a bit nepotistic since one of the “peacemakers” extolled in that article was Giberson himself.

What does Giberson write about in his column in the science section? Not science. It’s about “The top peacemaker in the science-religion wars: John Polkinghorne“. Polkinghorne was a physicist who became an Anglican priest, a big accommodationist, and eventually, an inevitably, won the Templeton Prize.  I’ve read his stuff, and it’s the same old Sophisticated Theologian® garbage.

Giberson not only seconds Polkinghorne’s peacemaker prize, but gives the man a Lifetime Achievement award:

I hope that Wallace continues his annual list but I would like to add an additional category: The Lifetime Achievement Award for making peace between science and religion. And for 2011, that award should go to John Polkinghorne, who has emerged in recent years as arguably the most significant Christian since C.S. Lewis.

That alone should put you off your feed, but Karl sums it up:

Polkinghorne, now in his 80s, admits that faith is complex and filled with paradox. But so is science he notes, as quantum mechanics has shown so clearly. His own faith acknowledges the legitimacy of doubt and he understands why some cannot believe. But for him, it all fits together in a way that he sometimes describes as “too good to be true.” His Christian belief ties everything together. “I have never thought,” he told us, that “the universe was a tale told by an idiot.”

Actually, the universe isn’t a tale told by an idiot, it’s just something that happened. There’s no genius or idiot behind it at all.  But if there is a God behind it, yes, he did do some idiotic things, like making 99.9% of species go extinct, and giving human males a prostate gland prone to swelling in middle age. Or allowing the talking snake to corrupt us all so that we have to grovel our whole lives to regain favor with God.

I will be writing on Polkinghorne in the future, but for the flavor of the man’s accommodationism, just see Anthony Grayling’s review of Polkinghorne’s latest book, or see Eric MacDonald’s analysis here.  Polkinghorne is no hero: he’s just a garden-variety accommodationist who has science cred and uses big words. Any one of us with two neurons to rub together could pull a Sokal and do the same thing.

I invite readers who peruse the PuffHo science section to keep me updated about the pieces that appear there.  And Karl, if you’re gonna be in the science section, could you deep-six the Jesus stuff and stick to the science?

*****

Uncle Karl has partly (but not completely) redeemed himself by just publishing a book (coauthored with Randall Stephens) that is reviewed in Sunday’s NYT Book Review: The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age. As reviewer Molly Worthen note, the book “condemns the current state of evangelical intellectual life,” and adds:

Why would anyone heed ersatz “experts” over trained authorities far more qualified to comment on the origins of life or the worldview of the founding fathers? Drawing on case studies of evangelical gurus, Stephens and Giberson argue that intellectual authority works differently in the “parallel culture” of evangelicalism. In this world of prophecy conferences and home-­schooling curriculums, a dash of charisma, a media empire and a firm stance on the right side of the line between “us” and “them” matter more than a fancy degree.

To the evangelical experts profiled in this book, the chief purpose of science or historical research is not to expand human understanding, but to elucidate God’s will. That doesn’t require academic scholarship — just a “common sense” reading of the Bible and a knack for finding evidence in today’s headlines rather than in the record of the past: “America’s worrisome slide into immorality, liberalism and unbelief was caused by the widespread acceptance of evolution and its pernicious influence in areas like education, law, sexual mores, politics and so on,” in the authors’ paraphrase of creationist logic. Similarly, amateur Christian historians “have pressed history into the service of politics and religion,” twisting facts to support their feelings that the country has veered from its biblical moorings.

And C. S. Lewis, Uncle Karl’s hero, makes a brief appearance in the review:

For all evangelicals’ supposed disdain for secular academia, it is telling that their favorite guru is not an undereducated quack, but a thinker that “The Anointed” mentions only in passing: C. S. Lewis. American evangelicals adore Lewis because he was an Oxford don who defended the faith in a plummy English accent, thus proving that one could be a respected intellectual and a Christian too.

I don’t understand the admiration that Christian scholars bear for Lewis.  He was a second-rate apologist. One example: in Mere Christianity, he gives evidence for God in the form of the “moral law”: humans’ intuitive grasp of right and wrong. Even at the time, before we had primate studies showing what look like rudiments of morality in our relatives, we still knew of the secular tradition of morality beginning with the Greeks.  And Lewis’s famous “liar, lunatic, or Lord” argument for the divinity of Jesus hardly exhausts all the possibilities.

Lewis a “sophisticated theologian”?  Naaw.  Oxford does not equal sophisticated when it comes to theology.

h/t: Jon, Tom

Hitchens dispels the bromide that suffering makes you stronger

December 10, 2011 • 1:17 pm

Thank Ceiling Cat that Christopher Hitchens is still among us, and still writing.  His latest piece at Vanity Fair, “Trial of the will,” an obvious play on Leni Riefenstahl’s movie.  His purpose is to dispel the myth that suffering is empowering and ennobling:

Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

Hitchens, whose health has declined but not his prose, graphically describes the sufferings he’s endured in hopes of a cure.   It’s ineffably sad; he has so much more to say!

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

Hitch won’t be with us much longer, I fear—though I hope otherwise—and although he may not consider his sufferings empowering to him, I think they are to us.  If nothing else, it shows us how we should meet our end: fighting, but with grace.

From Vanity Fair: "The author in Houston, where he is receiving treatment at the MD Anderson Cancer Center."

h/t: Michael

New York Times recalcitrant on OkapiGate

November 10, 2011 • 4:48 am

Yes, I pick nits too, and the other day I criticized a New York Times science piece by Douglas Quenqua on okapis because it claimed that “Okapis are the only known relative of the giraffe, but with the silhouette of an antelope.”  What he meant was that okapis are the closest living relative of the giraffe, but of course okapis have many “known relatives,” including, say, every other species on Earth.

As a total pedant, I asked one of my friends who works at the NYT to convey this to Quenqua. I assumed he’d admit the sloppiness and correct his piece. No dice: while he responded to me by email, he’s digging in his heels.  From his email:

I see from your blog post that you already know that okapi and giraffes are the only two species in the mammal family Giraffidae. It was in that respect that we classified the okapi as the only living relative of the giraffe.

“In that respect”?  Thers’s no respect in which it’s okay to make an inaccurate statement about evolutionary relatedness.

I’ll be watching Quenqua for recidivism.

Woo may have killed Steve Jobs

October 21, 2011 • 7:28 am

Many of us know that Steve Jobs delayed an operation for his pancreatic cancer—an unusually treatable form of that cancer that might have been cured by surgery—in favor of trying “alternative” therapy.  Today’s New York Times reports the details, gotten from a new and authorized biography of Jobs written by Walter Isaacson. The Times reports:

His early decision to put off surgery and rely instead on fruit juices, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments — some of which he found on the Internet — infuriated and distressed his family, friends and physicians, the book says. From the time of his first diagnosis in October 2003, until he received surgery in July 2004, he kept his condition largely private — secret from Appleemployees, executives and shareholders, who were misled.

. . . Mr. Jobs put off surgery for nine months, a fact first reported in 2008 in Fortune magazine.

Friends and family, including his sister, Mona Simpson, urged Mr. Jobs to have surgery and chemotherapy, Mr. Isaacson writes. But Mr. Jobs delayed the medical treatment. His friend and mentor, Andrew Grove, the former head of Intel, who had overcome prostate cancer, told Mr. Jobs that diets and acupuncture were not a cure for his cancer. “I told him he was crazy,” he said.

Art Levinson, a member of Apple’s board and chairman of Genentech, recalled that he pleaded with Mr. Jobs and was frustrated that he could not persuade him to have surgery.

His wife, Laurene Powell, recalled those days, after the cancer diagnosis. “The big thing was that he really was not ready to open his body,” she said. “It’s hard to push someone to do that.” She did try, however, Mr. Isaacson writes. “The body exists to serve the spirit,” she argued.

It’s hard to see how someone so science-oriented, so tech-y, could do something so manifestly dumb.  And he may well have paid for it with his life.  It’s a great pity.

The Times piece gives other details of Jobs’s life from Isaacson’s biography, which hasn’t yet been published.

Caturday felid: gangster Whitey Bulger brought down by Miss Iceland and a stray cat

October 15, 2011 • 6:07 am

James Joseeph “Whitey” Bulger (“g” pronounced as “j”) was a notorious Boston mobster who engaged in racketeering, promotion of illegal gambling, and murder.  He also served for a while as an FBI informant, but went on the lam in 1994 when his indictment for racketeering was imminent.

The Martin Scorsese movie “The Departed” was based largely on Bulger’s life, with Jack Nicholson playing the Bulger-ish character.  (Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Sheen, and Matt Damon were also in the movie, which I and others highly recommend.)

Bulger remained on the run for 17 years, but was finally captured last June in Santa Monica, California, where he had been living as a recluse. How was he caught? Cats tipped off the authorities, helped by Anna Bjornsdottir, a former Miss Iceland, who was Bulger’s neighbor. According to CBS News:

A Boston Globe investigation reveals it was Miss Iceland 1974 who was the tipster who collected the $2 million reward for information to the arrest four months ago of notorious alleged Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger.

Bulger, formerly No. 1 on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives list, was discovered when he went outside to help feed a stray cat. Bulger, who almost never went outside, was seen there and remembered by the former Miss Universe contestant and actress, Anna Bjornsdottir, Bulger’s sometime neighbor.

. . . Boston Globe reporter Shelley Murphy, who spent months tracking down details of Bulger’s life as a fugitive, said on “The Early Show,” that Bulger’s apartment building wouldn’t permit pets, so he had to go outside to feed the cat.

Murphy said, “Apparently, Whitey liked the cat. … He would be out there this morning while his girlfriend fed this cat.”

The CBS video report is here (it’s preceded by a brief ad).


			


	



			
				
		


	

		
Kentucky newspaper gives biased account of our upcoming debate on religion

	October 2, 2011 • 5:06 am

			


	

		
Question:  you’re a local newspaper in Lexington, Kentucky, and you want to describe an upcoming debate on “Religion in the 21st Century”—a debate that will feature at least three speakers who are anti-religious—but you don’t want to offend your religious readers. (Kentucky is one of the more religious states in America.)


Answer: You pick out one theologian and one critic of religion, and show that they both agree on one thing: the Bible can’t be taken literally.


That, at least, is what the “culture critic” of the Lexington, Kentucky newspaper, the Herald-Leader, did when describing our upcoming debates on Oct 10-12 at the University of Kentucky. (schedule below).  Bart Ehrman, agnostic and critic of the Bible and the story of Jesus, will square off against David Hunter (“Are Faith and History Compatible?”) and on the last night I’ll be up against Catholic theologian John Haught in a debate on “Science and Religion: Are they Compatible?” (guess which side I’ll be taking?).


What does writer  Rich Copley say about this?  He interviewed Ehrman and Haught, who apparently agree on a few things, one being that the Bible is “misused”.


Ehrman and Haught acknowledge that religion is a huge topic in contemporary culture, though it is not a terribly edifying conversation, particularly when it comes to history or religion.


“It’s a mixture of poor science education and poor religious education,” says Haught, a senior fellow in science and religion at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.


Ehrman observes, “There are real culture wars going on in America. You have the conservative movement and the emergence of a new atheism and humanism.”


A lot of that, both argue, goes back to a misuse of the Bible as an authoritative text on history and science.


Putting aside the fact that Copley devotes 50% more words to Haught’s views than to Ehrman’s, it would have been nice of him to quote the “opponents” of Haught and Erhman rather than just try to point out the two guys’ common ground.  Those opponents, of course, are David Hunter and I.


I don’t really mind being ignored here, but what I can’t stand is Haught’s views going unopposed, especially his oh-so-sophisticated but insupportable view that the Bible is not “a textbook of science”.  This kind of stuff is really starting to tick me off:


“The point of Scripture is transformation to an authentic existence,” says Haught, an author of several books including last year’s Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life (Westminster John Knox Press, $20). “But there is this assumption that sacred texts inspired allegedly by God should give you reliable scientific information.”


That, he said, is not the Bible’s purpose. But that assumption leads to heated conflicts and ultimately distrust between the scientific and religious communities. The results can be seen in things like the Creation Museum in Petersburg, which Haught has visited and says gives the biblical Creation story “a degree of scientific reliability.”


Maybe that’s the point of scripture to Haught, but it’s not the point of scripture to the vast majority of believers in America, who take much of the bible literally. Remember that 78% of American believe in angels, 81% in heaven, and 70% in hell and in Satan.  For millennia the Bible has been taught as containing literal truths about what happened among our ancestors. That has changed—but mostly among more “sophisticated” believers—and largely because science has showed that many Bible stories are bunk.  Now theologians regroup with their talk of “metaphor”. But who the deuce does Haught think he is to tell everyone what the “point” of scripture is? Does he have a pipeline to God?


He goes on:


Haught says scientists have also misused the Bible, saying that “because it doesn’t deliver scientific information, they reject it all.”


He says that understanding that science is science and that the Bible is a religious text has been essential to his own faith journey.


“Truth cannot contradict truth,” he says. “Science and faith respond to different questions.”


When Haught and his fellow accommodationists assert that “the Bible doesn’t deliver scientific information” or “the Bible is not a textbook of science,” what they really mean, but dare not say, is this: “The Bible is not true.” Or, more precisely, they mean, “Most of the Bible isn’t true, but some of it is, and I’m the one who gets to decide which bits are true.”


Give me an honest fundamentalist, who takes everything literally, rather than a weaselly accommodationist who picks and chooses what’s true without any rational criteria.  After all, most of these Bible-is-not-science types do see Jesus as a divine being, born of a virgin, crucified, and revived roughly three days later. That story is not up for grabs, nor is the existence of a divine Father in heaven.  (If you’ve any doubts, read the Nicene Creed, which is loaded with statements about empirical truth and which, presumably, Haught recites when he goes to church.)  After all, if you’re really sophisticated, you can see God as a metaphor, too: as a mere word that encapsulates the awe we feel when we contemplate the universe and how science has helped us understand it.


And “truth cannot contradict truth”?  Give me a break. As interpreted by Haught, that statement is a pure tautology, because “truth” in the Bible is defined as “that metaphorical interpretation which cannot contradict science.” Up until a few years ago, the literal existence of Adam and Eve was accepted by many as “truth.”  Now that “truth” is known to contradict the scientific truth that the human population size never bottlenecked at anywhere near two individuals.  So the theological sausage grinder extrudes new “truth”, including the idea that Adam and Eve were the two out of many people whom God designated to form the “federal headship” of humanity.  Such is the instantly malleable nature of religious “truth.”


_______


Here’s the schedule if you’re anywhere around Lexington on Oct. 10-12


“Are Faith and History Compatible?” Bart Ehrman, department of religious studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and David G. Hunter, department of modern and classical languages, literatures and cultures, University of Kentucky. 6 p.m. Oct. 10. Singletary Center for the Arts recital hall, 405 Rose St.


“The Compassionate Community: How Universal Ecumenical Values Can Strengthen Politics and Policy,” Jonathan Miller, lawyer and author of The Compassionate Community and TheRecoveringPolitician.com. “Islam and the Relation of Religion to State,” Ihsan Bagby, department of modern and classical languages, literatures and cultures, UK. 6 p.m. Oct. 11. Singletary Center for the Arts recital hall.


“Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?” Jerry Coyne, department of ecology and evolution, University of Chicago; and John Haught, Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown University. 6 p.m. Oct. 12. UK Student Center Worsham Theater.

			


	



			
				
		


	

		
University of North Carolina chorus expels gay singer

	September 3, 2011 • 9:06 am

			


	

		
This seems clearly illegal, but also shows how religion is like an abusive partner.  The World on Campus reports that a Christian a capella chorus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—”Psalm 100″—expelled Will Thomason, an openly gay student, just for being gay.   Weirdly enough, University policy seems to support the group’s right to discriminate in this way:


Psalm 100, whose mission is “to spread the joy of the Lord through song,” operates under a constitution based on Biblical standards, and the group concluded that Thomason’s views on the group’s constitution did not match up with its standards.


The university’s official policy seems to support the group’s ability to expel a member based on religious belief. It says: “Student organizations that select their members on the basis of commitment to a set of beliefs (e.g., religious or political beliefs) may limit membership and participation in the organization to students who…support the organization’s goals and agree with its beliefs.” However, the same policy says a student cannot be excluded from membership based on “sexual orientation.”


Templeton [Blake Templeton, the group’s director] said the university approved Psalm 100’s original constitution, which allows its decisions to be made based on the Bible. And he stressed that it was Thomason’s disagreement with the group’s constitution, not his sexual orientation, that got him kicked out.


As if “disagreement with the group’s constitution” were not the same thing as being gay! That’s a distinction without a difference.


But this is the most disgusting part:


Blake Templeton, general director of the group, said the decision was tough, especially because so many people thought it was done out of hatred.


“That’s so far from the truth,” he said. “I want the power of God’s love to be so, so clear.”


Templeton stressed that the group made its decision out of love for Thomason, not hate.


Right. Just like an abusive spouse:  “I’m going to hurt you, but only because I love you.”


If you want to voice your objections, Winston Crisp, UNC’s Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, is conducting an investigation, and you can email him at  wbcrisp@email.unc.edu   Here’s a sample email if you are too lazy or busy to write your own, but of course it’s better if you be original.  But sending something is better than sending nothing, and all of it will send a message to the UNC administration:


_______


Dear Chancellor Crisp,


I am writing to protest the expulsion of UNC student Will Thomason from the “Psalm 100” chorus simply because he was gay.  While UNC’s policy appears to support the chorus’s right to expel members based on religious belief (a policy that I disagree with as well), it does NOT support the right to expel members based on sexual orientation.  As I’m sure you’ll agree, that policy is not only illegal, but highly immoral.  What could someone’s sexual orientation possibly have to do with his ability to sing?


Some Christian sects may still hold on to their archaic notions of sexuality, but society has moved on, increasingly recognizing that gays are neither immoral, mentally ill, nor aberrant.  I am sure that UNC agrees with that view as well, and hope that your investigation of the issue will lead to Thomason’s reinstatement in the chorus.


Thanks very much.