Category: Intelligent Design Creationism Watch

A creationist writes in espousing the Argument from Incredulity

December 20, 2019 • 12:30 pm

Here we have, from San Diego (of course), an email from a man who is an ardent exponent of the Argument for God from Incredulity. I’ve omitted his name so as not to embarrass him.  I appear to have been the sole recipient of the email, but given its salutation, it was probably sent to other scientists considered as deluded as I. The theme of this screed is the claim that some animal behaviors are so complex that they could not have evolved by a Darwinian step-by-step process.  Ergo, God did it. (You will recognize this argument as the basis for Intelligent Design.) On top of this is laid the idea that an animal, when performing an adaptive act, has to “know” what it’s doing, and animals just don’t have brains like that.

This is a longish email so I’ll briefly discuss only two examples, parasitic larvae keeping their hosts alive by eating only non-essential organs, and the archerfish, which spits water at prey above the water (mostly insects) and is amazingly accurate. In both cases I’ll propose an adaptive pathway that eliminates the necessity for invoking divine intervention.

The email (the bold bits are mine):

To Those of Evolutionary Bent:

This is the story of a wasp (Pompilidae) and a spider (Ctenizidae), or the trap-door spider. The two have a peculiar relationship: the wasp uses the spider as a larder for its young, laying its eggs (or one egg) on or inside the living spider, placing the paralyzed creature back inside its burrow until the wasp larva can hatch out and consume its still-living host.

But this is no easy task. First, the wasp must find the well-camouflaged spider residence. A very good sense of smell, and observation of possible spider burrows from the air or on the ground, depending on the habits of the particular wasp specie, are certainly necessary to the work. Still, considering the area that must be reconnoitered by the wasp to find a spider ensconced in a camouflaged hole in the ground, it is a task that would put many military intelligence workers to shame.

Then the wasp attacks: sometimes is merely pulls on alarm-webbing that surrounds the burrow. This will bring the spider out into the open, expecting a ready-made meal. If the wasp is quick enough, it can sting the spider, perhaps in the midsection, before the creature can react. The spiders, for their part, boast long, deadly (to insects) fangs, dripping with paralyzing poison. The spider may recognize the danger and duck back into its fortress. If it successfully closes the trapdoor, the wasp will be shut out; the spider can hold the door shut with two or four legs, and hold on to its home’s wall with the other four. No problem: the wasp merely chews off the door’s hinges, and comes face-to-face with an angry spider! Then, we have a problem: how the wasp will deal with the spider head-on. Some wasps have a talent for hypnosis; they appear to stroke the spider with their antennae, putting it into a restive state. In other cases, the wasp merely turns her back on the monster Arachnid, and stabs it in the head with her formidable stinger: end of combat. But the beginning of a paralyzed end for the spider.

Then, the wasp can lay its egg; sometimes on and, for other species, inside the spider. Then we have another question: how does the larval wasp, when hatched, know to eat only non-essential parts of the paralyzed spider, in order to keep it alive until it can pupate and become a living, flying wasp? For it certainly eats everything except the vital organs, leaving the best ’til last, when it can gnaw its way to freedom and spread its wings to find a mate and then go spider-hunting.

So all this, the wasp, the unfortunate spider, and their dueling interactions, were brought about by Biological Evolution, a la Charles Darwin or some other foolish inquisitor. Really? You’ll excuse me in my dubiousness. We must add this paradigm to many others: the construction of the mammalian eye and function of the rods and cones; the need for the brain to turn the upside-down image transmitted to it, right-side up. Then there’s the Archerfish (Toxotes), which can “shoot”, via spitting jets of water at its insect prey from an underwater perch, compensating easily for the water’s refraction, even at odd angles. And the Cleaner Wrasse fish (Lambroides dimidiatus) that pops into the mouths of large and dangerous predator-fish to clean them of parasites and dead tissue, even excess mucus; and can “service” up to 2000 “customers” in a four-hour feeding period. Yet, they remain uneaten by sometimes hungry patrons visiting the “cleaning station ” on the reef.

Indeed, there are hundreds, if not thousands of such stories, each more mysterious than the last: all pointing to a Creator, certainly not One Who would use a “dog-eat-dog” process like evolution. But certainly One Who left His fingerprints on all of His work in the creation as we have come to know it.

And what of the variations that occur in the known species, as Darwin himself pointed out in the birds of the Galapagos Islands? Is this, too, “evolution”? Different colors, different beaks, different diets, different sizes and breeding habits– these are all adaptations afforded them for their continued survival in a world where “climate change,” earthquakes, volcanoes, and man’s activities can cause conditions to change. No one so far has noted Darwin’s birds changing into other species or non-avian creatures. Not very likely, I think.

The fact is, that Biological Evolution, of whatever description or fancy, is a Scientific dodge to avoid calling for the creation– and the Creator– in their theories and hypotheses. It is a gigantic academic hoax, that in fact has played a major role in political axioms like Nazism, Communism, and Fascism which have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions human beings. And I challenge these scientists who insist that it “must be true” to answer the facts presented here or by numerous other critics to give evidence in support of their positions. We seek the truth of the matter, not mere theories, hypotheses, or suppositions. So far the Scientific World has been unable or unwilling to come up with it.’

Name redacted

Let’s take the larval wasp first.  The way to address the incredulity argument is to postulate a plausible step-by-step process in which each step is adaptive. And then couple that with variation in the trait under consideration—variation due to mutation. If the nonadaptive variants leave no offspring, but the adaptive variants do, then you get evolution by natural selection. There’s not necessarily any “knowing” here on the part of the animal, at least in the cognitive sense—just different behaviors that can be performed automatically. A microbe doesn’t “know” to move towards a food source: to paraphrase Jessica Rabbit, it’s just evolved that way.

In the case of the wasp, all that is required is that different larvae have different propensities to eat the organs of the spider. How could this happen? Well, presumably the different organs of a spider can be perceived differently by the larval wasp, either by their location or, more plausibly, by the fact that they “taste” different. If different wasps prefer different “tastes” (or internal locations), and some of that variation is based on variation in genes, then the problem is solved. That’s because those wasps with a taste for the vital organs, or for indiscriminate eating, will kill their hosts early and stand less of a chance of surviving (if you kill your spider host too early, it decays and will not constitute good, fresh food, so that you may die or be malnourished).  On the other hand, those larvae having less of a taste for the vital bits of the spider host, and thus which eat those bits last, will be the ones most likely to survive and leave offspring.  Over time, this results in the evolution of a behavior in which all wasps eat the nonessential organs first, only finishing up with the vital ones when they’re about to pupate. Note that there is no conscious “knowing” here: all that’s required is variation in how you eat your host, and you need no cognition for that—only an attraction to eating some organs more than others. And this is not implausible.

That takes care of the wasp. How about the archerfish? Well, all you need is a starting behavior that can be improved and refined so that fish can not only spit water at prey above the water, but do it accurately. Of course that seems implausible because it requires that one envision fish that have some tendency to spit water in the first place, and of what use is that?

First, let’s look at how these amazing animals operate:

 

How could that evolve? While it’s not difficult to see that once you can acquire food by squirting insects and knocking them into the water, natural selection will then improve your aim, enabling you to judge distance, compensate for refraction, and so on. In fact, not just evolution (which involves no “knowing”), but there is also real learning here, as, if you do a bit of Googling, you find that young archerfish are pretty lousy at knocking down their prey, and have to improve their skills with practice. That may be real knowing.

But how did the whole scenario get started? A little more Googling shows that at least some archerfish use a similar technique to displace silt beneath the water, uncovering hidden prey.  That’s pretty easy to explain, as you’re not really aiming but foraging, and you already have the equipment to do that: producing jets of water outside of your mouth, which is apparently common in fish. The New Scientist article that I found in about a minute of Googline says this (I’ve put a possible “solution” in bold):

To their surprise, the researchers found that the archerfish were able to alter the length and type of water blast to suit the type of sediment. Their shots were shortest if the sediment was coarse-grained and increased in length as the sand became finer.

“The big question is: how did they know beforehand which type of silt was which, and so how long they should blast it for?” asks [Stefan] Schuster. The answer might be that they are adept underwater shooters in the wild, too.

Which came first – aerial or underwater shooting – also remains to be established.

“Perhaps some tendency to produce underwater jets might have been there first, because this is widespread among fish,” says Schuster. Triggerfish use jets to turn round sea urchins to get access to their soft parts, for example, and lionfish use jets to orient small prey fish for easier swallowing.

“Many other fish and invertebrates forage by disturbing the ground, and this is probably the ancestral condition,” says Alex Kacelnik of the University of Oxford. “Archerfish probably thus started with this ordinary skill then transitioned to targets probably at, or narrowly above, the surface and this created new selective pressures to focus and aim water jets at ever higher targets.”

“It’s a lovely example of the incremental and interactive process of evolution of complex traits through natural selection,” he says.

Schuster says the two techniques might have evolved in parallel, with the fish building on and adapting their skills according to their habitat.

So here we have an initial condition whose evolution isn’t hard to understand. Once you squirt at the silt below you to uncover prey, selection would improve that ability, as would learning, and maybe you’d start homing in on things that you see in the sediment.  You then have the ability to be a living squirt gun. If a mutant fish then simply squirted at an object it could see, but one at the surface or above the water, a successful squirt would bring you food, and, importantly, reproduction. You might in fact get more food than other individuals in the population who aren’t aiming at insects directly but just foraging willy-nilly, with most of their squirts being fruitless. And if that were the case, both selection and learning (apparently fish can learn!) would work together to improve the ability of archerfish to squirt at prey above the water. The compensation for refraction, intensity of squirt, and so on, would then be honed by both selection and learning.

Now I don’t know if this scenario really happened, or if both types of squirting evolved together (which is also plausible given that there’s a general advantage to squirting), but we can envision the first steps in the evolution of archerfish behavior—adaptive steps. And the rest, as they say, is commentary (i.e., improvement by selection). No need to default to God.

The rest of the email, including the claims that we see microevolution but not macroevolution, and that Darwinism begat Nazism, Communism, and so on, doesn’t deserve rebuttal here; I’ve done that many times before.  And I’m not going to write a personal answer to this fellow (yes, he’s male), as that would mire me in a back-and-forth exchange that would be totally unproductive. I just wanted to give some examples of how the Argument from Incredulity, which of course is the basis for Intelligent Design Creationism, can be addressed by thinking of plausible and adaptive intermediate steps in the evolution of a trait.  If you can do that, then there’s no need to posit a God, since ID and the kind of creationism espoused above require that one cannot conceive of an adaptive pathway for the evolution of a trait. If you can, then the whole ID/creationist enterprise, which of course requires the additional postulate of a complex Designer for which there’s no evidence, becomes unparsimonious and superfluous.

Ohio House passes bill apparently allowing students to give wrong answers if those answers are based on religious conviction

November 15, 2019 • 10:45 am

Here we go again. It’s fairly normal procedure for evolutionary biologists to tell their creationist students that they don’t have to accept the evolution they’re taught in class, but they must at least regurgitate the correct answers on exams. But the House part of the Ohio state legislature has apparently gone further—they’ve passed a bill mandating that students cannot be penalized (or rewarded) for giving answers on tests or assignments that comport with their religion.

Read this report at Cleveland.com (click on screenshot):

From the site:

The Ohio House sent to the Senate on Wednesday a measure that would prohibit public schools from penalizing students for some work that contains religious beliefs.

Critics have called the bill unnecessary or valuing religion over secularism. One critic said under the bill, if a student turned in homework saying the earth is 10,000 years old – a belief held by some creationists — they couldn’t get docked in their grade. However, the bill’s sponsor said it was more nuanced than that.

House Bill 164 passed the House 61 to 31.

Now I can’t access the bill since the ship won’t let me, but I’m trying to get a copy from someone. In the meantime, you can read it for yourself, and I’ll rely on a summary given by the site. (UPDATE: I’ve now been able to see the bill and have added a few more of its stipulations.)

HB 164, known as the Ohio Student Religious Liberties Act of 2019:

  • Requires public schools to give students the same access to facilities if they want to meet for religious expression as they’d give secular groups.
  • Removes a provision that allows school districts to limit religious expression to lunch periods or other non-instructional times.
  • Allows students to engage in religious expression before, during and after school hours to the same extent as a student in secular activities or expression.
  • Prohibits schools from restricting a student from engaging in religious expression in completion of homework, artwork and other assignments.

It also specifies a daily “moment of silence for all students”: “for prayer, reflection, or meditation upon a moral, philosophical, or patriotic theme”, but adds that no student will be required to participate. But a student who doesn’t remain silent will surely be demonized, so this is bizarre. Its purpose, though, is clear: it’s a Christian ploy to get students to start the school day with a prayer. 

The bill is worrisome because of course the second and fourth parts are clear violations of the First Amendment. None of us have problems with schools giving religious groups the same rights as secular groups, which in fact is required by the First Amendment. Religious expression during instructional times impedes student education, and where there’s a conflict like this between religious wishes and governmental requirements, it’s almost always resolved in favor of the government (religious exemptions for vaccinations, allowed in many states, is an exception). Rendering unto Caesar is standard practice.

The fourth bit—the subject of this post and the Ohio bill—is especially worrisome, because it allows students to give wrong answers if those wrong answers comport with their faith. That, too, is inimical to the public welfare, and to the duty of public education, in the service of religion. While the bill is said to be more “nuanced” than that, I don’t know how, and even the bill’s supporters aren’t sure.

Here’s what that bit says in the bill:

Sec. 3320.03. No school district board of education, governing authority of a community school established under Chapter 3314. of the Revised Code, governing body of a STEM school established under Chapter 3326. of the Revised Code, or board of trustees of a college-preparatory boarding school established under Chapter 3328. of the Revised Code shall prohibit a student from engaging in religious expression in the completion of homework, artwork, or other written or oral assignments. Assignment grades and scores shall be calculated using ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance, including any legitimate pedagogical concerns, and shall not penalize or reward a student based on the religious content of a student’s work.

You can see the ambiguity here. On the one hand the code permits students to use religious expression to do homework or answer test questions, and to do so without penalty (or reward); on the other hand it says that assignments will be graded “using ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance.” That gives no guidelines about what to do when a student says that the Bible says that the Earth is 10,000 years old, or that all animals and plants were created within a day or two because that’s what Genesis says. This is a bill that’s simply begging for a lawsuit.

How do the sponsors justify such a ridiculous incursion in public education—an incursion that, if legal, would presumably apply not just in secondary schools, but in state colleges and universities? Here’s the justification:

Children these days face pressures over drug use, student violence and increasing rates of depression and suicide, said bill sposnor Rep. Timothy Ginter, Youngstown-area Republican.

“We live in a day when our young people are experiencing stress and danger and challenges we never experienced growing up,” he said.

Ginter said he’s convinced that allowing religious self-expression would be positive.

Well, there’s plenty of chance for religious self-expression after school or in church. And there’s no excuse for impeding students’ education by giving them credit for religious answers that are wrong—or failing to tell them that they’re wrong, even if you don’t penalize them. If you want religious answers to be acceptable, have your kids home-schooled—or send them to religious schools.

But would the bill allow students to get credit for wrong answers that buttress their faith? It’s not clear; that might depend on the results of later First-Amendment lawsuits. The Cleveland.com website says this:

ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] of Ohio Chief Lobbyist Gary Daniels called HB 164 a mixed bag. On the one hand it removes some restrictions on students’ religious rights.

I think Daniels is a bit off the mark here. Those “restrictions on students’ religious rights” are already prohibited by the First Amendment (first and third points above). So what’s new?

Here’s the ambiguous bit:

On the other hand, Daniels said that if a student submitted biology homework saying the earth is 10,000 years old, as some creationists believe, the teacher cannot dock points.

“Under HB 164, the answer is ‘no,’ as this legislation clearly states the instructor ‘shall not penalize or reward a student based on the religious content of a student’s work,” he said.

Well, that’s confusing! If you can neither penalize nor reward students for arguing that, for example, the Earth is 10,000 years old, what can you do? If you give them credit, you’re rewarding them. If you give them no credit, you’re penalizing them.

Amber Epling, a spokeswoman for Ohio House Democrats, said that in an analysis of the bill by the legislature’s nonpartisan staff, “they cannot be rewarded or penalized for the religious content in their assignments.”

She believes the bill could result in teachers accepting assignments that fly in the face of science.

But I think it’s more likely that teachers would avoid this whole issue by not asking questions that could lead to religiously-inspired answers. But that means no evolutionary biology at all, and not many biology teachers want to avoid teaching evolution, even in the American South. To deprive students of this wondrous (and true!) theory by catering to students’ faiths would be to do them a profound disservice. After all, is religion so different from other unsubstantiated faiths like Holocaust denialism? Does Scientology and its crazy claims about Xenu and thetans get “respected” too? That way lies madness.

And here’s some more madness. Sponsor Gintis says that the bill’s “nuances” prohibit students from getting credit for wrong but religiously-inspired answers, but then undermines what he said by asserting that Moses was a historical figure and you could get credit for writing about Moses as if he existed.

But Ginter, the bill’s sponsor, said that the student would get a lesser grade in a biology class for an evolution assignment. Even if the student doesn’t believe in evolutionary theory, the student must turn in work that accurately reflects what is taught.

“It will be graded using ordinary academic standards of using substance and relevance,” he said.

However, if students were assigned a report based on historic figures, they could turn in a paper on a historical figure, such as Moses or Mohammed, Ginter said.

What, exactly, is the extra-Biblical evidence for the historical existence of Moses? It’s exactly as thin as extra-Biblical evidence for the historical evidence for a Jesus figure—i.e., NO evidence.

If you’re an Ohio resident, please read the bill and then, if you object (and I’m guessing you will), write to your state senator and your governor. Though the bill has already passed the state House by a 2/3 majority, it must still pass the state Senate and then be signed into law by Governor Mike DeWine.

h/t: Woody, Fred, Kit

Why theological challenges to science resemble conspiracy theories

October 2, 2019 • 10:00 am

My friend the philosopher Maarten Boudry called my attention to a fairly new paper by Taner Edis, a professor of physics at Truman State University and frequent critic of religion and creationism. I’ll let Maarten tell you about it in this post. His take is indented, and we’ll both give you links and ways to read the paper.

COSMIC CONSPIRACIES

Maarten Boudry

My long-time collaborator, the physicist Taner Edis, has a cool new paper in which he draws analogies between religions and conspiracy theories. In dealing with challenges from modern science, theologians have often resorted to conspiracies, involving both the “scientific establishment” and God himself (or Satan). As Edis writes in the abstract:

“Theological responses to scientific challenges can usefully be compared to conspiracy theories in order to highlight their evasive properties. When religious thinkers emphasize hidden powers and purposes underlying a seemingly material reality, and claim that these hidden purposes are revealed only through special knowledge granted to initiates, they adopt conspiratorial attitudes. And when they charge mainstream science with corruption or comprehensive mistakes, so that science becomes a plot to conceal the truth, the resemblance to a conspiracy theory deepens. Theologically conservative denial of evolution often exhibits such features, but some liberal theologies also border on conspiracy theories. Intelligent design creationism, however, is sometimes less conspiratorial.”

In some respects, according to Edis, the responses to evolutionary theory developed by liberal theologians are MORE (not less) conspiratorial than those of their conservative, fundamentalist counterparts. Since liberal theologians want to evade conflicts with science as much as possible, their conception of God tends to be that of a “Deus absconditus”, a God who choses to remain hidden and does not interfere with the natural order. For example, liberal theologians like John Haught believe that God is secretly meddling with quantum processes to bring about the right DNA mutations needed to fulfill his creative plan. All biological evidence points toward processes of pure chance and necessity, but in reality, according to Haught and others, God is tweaking atoms and molecules in statistically undetectable ways. It’s like a casino operator who cheats, but only very rarely, as Edis writes. This is nothing less than a giant, cosmic conspiracy in which God, for whatever inscrutable reason, is pulling the strings behind the scenes, though always making sure to cover his tracks.

More conservative theists, by contrast, want to attack certain parts of modern science head-on. As a result, they tend to believe in a God who massively interferes with the natural world. Young-earth creationists, for example, believe that the evidence for Biblical miracles such as the Flood and the Resurrection of Jesus is all around us. Or take the infamous example of ID creationist Michael Behe, who claims that he has found empirical evidence of design in the ‘irreducible complexity’ of the bacterial flagellum and the blood-clotting process. This is not a God who covers up his tracks, but one who leaves his fingerprints everywhere in plain sight.

Initially, ID creationists were also less likely to invoke conspiracies involving the scientific establishment (the other type of conspiracy discussed by Edis). They believed that scientists were just wrong or misguided, but not that they were actively hiding some truth. As a result, ID advocates were also pretty optimistic about the prospects of Intelligent Design in the scientific world. After all, they found irrefutable evidence for design! It was only a matter of time before Darwinism would be toppled. As the scientific community turned against them, however, and no cracks appeared in the Darwinian paradigm, ID creationists resorted to conspiracy theories to explain their defeat. It was all part of a secret plot by “dogmatic materialists” to keep God out of science.

This is what often happens when a belief system is threatened with counterevidence. Even though many pseudosciences did not start out as conspiracy theories, sooner or later many believers resort to conspiratorial thinking as an immunizing tactic, to explain away defeat or to evade confrontation with reality.

The paper’s link is in the screenshot below, and if you aren’t a member of ResearchGate, judicious inquiry will yield you a copy.

And I’m told the paper is in this book that was published last December (click to go to Amazon link). The book has no reviews on Amazon yet, perhaps because it costs £120!

Another breathtaking example of creationist Egnorance

September 27, 2019 • 10:45 am

If you’ve followed the Intelligent Design (ID) mishigass, you’ll have heard of Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon, a Christian who was once an atheist, and a big supporter of ID and senior fellow of the Discovery Institute. Egnor writes for the Evolution News website. Like several people there, he’s obsessed with me, but instead of taking apart my views on evolution, he goes after me personally, criticizing my attacks on theology and, worse, calling me names. This tells you two things. First, that religion is intimately entangled with ID. Although IDers disingenuously claim that they’re driven to the idea of a Designer in the Sky by the science alone, it’s curious that virtually all of them (biker David Berlinski may be an exception) are religious. Why are all the Discovery Institute flaks religious?

Also, it shows the intellectual failure of ID to replace evolution, which according to the Wedge Document timetable, it should have done by now. So they result in apologetics, theodicy, and philosophy. They’ve already lost on the science.

This week Egnor goes after me because of what I wrote about David Attenborough the other day. You can read his rant, which includes name-calling, by clicking on the screenshot below from the comment-free Evolution News site (I’ve archived the link below so their site doesn’t get clicks.)

Here goes Egnor’s argument, which is indented.

A shimmering example of atheist idiocy (there is no other word for it) is Jerry Coyne’s recent argument, at Why Evolution Is True, against God’s existence in his post on David Attenborough’s agnosticism. Attenborough, who is a Darwinist producer of nature films (quite good films I must say, despite the Darwinist taint), was interviewed about his views on God.

To Coyne’s chagrin, Attenborough declares that he is agnostic about God’s existence. Attenborough raises common objections to theism (e.g., the problem of evil), but he invokes a rather nice metaphor about a termite mound. He points out that termites, blind and busily working away in a mound, are unaware of human observers. Their unawareness is not evidence that an observer doesn’t exist — they lack the sense organs to perceive the observer. Attenborough says that is why he is agnostic — he doesn’t sense that God exists, but perhaps that is because he lacks the capacity to know God.

Attenborough:

I do sometimes feel that maybe I’m lacking in some sense organ, and I don’t know whether there’s anybody else involved in all this sort of thing. And it’s a very confident thing, saying that you’re absolutely sure that there’s nothing in this world that I don’t have the sense organs to appreciate. That would be my position.

Coyne hops on this:

[O]f course, if a god wanted to make himself known to humans, he would have given them the sense organs to detect divinity.

A Breathtaking Ignorance

My goodness. In this one assertion, Coyne (culpably) and Attenborough (more innocently) betray a breathtaking ignorance.

God is not a physical thing. It is only physical things that can be sensed by sense organs. If God could be sensed via an organ, He would not be God. What would be sensed would be a part of creation, not the Creator. God is not in nature. He is prior to nature. He is the Source of nature.

And, contra Coyne and Attenborough, God did endow us with an organ by which we may know Him. He endowed us with reason. Alone among animals, human beings have the power of abstract thought — to contemplate ideas separated from concrete particular (sensible) objects. We have intellect, by which we can understand immaterial knowledge and will by which we act on our abstract knowledge.

Reason and Will

Our capacity for reason is the “organ” God gave us to know Him, and our will is the “organ” God gave us to love Him.

Reason is our divine “sense organ.” It is perfectly adapted to its task — it allows us to know and love our Creator. In this sense we are created in His image: we have the capacity to know immaterial reality and to act on our knowledge.

Atheists ask where is our “divine sense organ?”, when the very capacity by which they ask the question — their capacity for reason — is the “sense organ” they seek.  This utter atheist idiocy helped lead me to God. What I found, when I looked at the arguments for and against His existence, is that the arguments against His existence were vapid nonsense. 

There are many problems here. First of all, even if God is not a physical thing, nearly all Christians—the theistic ones—think that God interacts with the world in a physical way. After all, God sent his son/alter ego down to Earth as a scapegoat to be killed for our sins, thereby expiating us. IDers believe that God The Intelligent Designer either brought new species into being or made the requisite mutations to promote their appearance. Indeed, the very concept of Intelligent Design presupposes that empirical evidence—science and observation itself—inevitably brings us to the concept of an Intelligent Designer. And that evidence is “sensed by sense organs.” 

In other words, ID itself refutes Egnor’s claim that God The Intelligent Designer cannot be sensed via an organ. The stupidity here (and I’m not pulling punches given that Egnor engages in name-calling) is to assume that a deity who is nonphysical cannot be apprehended through sense organs. If you’re a theist, that’s palpably ridiculous.

As for God giving us our “capacity for reason” specifically so we can know Him (do chimps know Him, too, since they have a capacity to reason?), that’s also ridiculous. If our capacity for reason gives us the “capacity to know immaterial reality and act on our knowledge”, then how come every religion has a different conception of immaterial reality? Egnor is a Christian; does he reject the Muslim belief that Jesus wasn’t the son of God but merely a prophet, and that Muhammad was given the true religion by Allah through Gabriel? Does he reject Hindu pantheism, or the animism of some tribes? Does he reject the thetans and Xenu-beliefs of Scientology?

Yes, if God gave us reason to know the truth about Him, how come the “truths” that “reason” tells believers are so disparate? Our divine sense organs must be defective in some way.

And why, over time, has “reason” turned more and more of the West into atheists? After all, God gave this reason to each of us, and gave it to us specifically so we’d know Him (or Her or Whatever). Are some people lacking in this reason? And that includes people who seem to have plenty of reason on other fronts: atheist intellectuals like Bertrand Russell, Stephen Hawking, Dan Dennett, Stephen Fry, Richard Dawkins, and so on. And David Attenborough lacks it, too? Why did God give these people lots of ability to reason, but prevented that reason from apprehending His existence? Why are more and more people not using their organs of reason properly as time progresses?

And why is this blather on a site called Evolution News & Science Today? Because that’s also a site where Egnorant fools who are slaves to ancient superstitions parade their inability to reason. And that’s why they promote ID. Every time an IDer like Egnor writes about theology on that site, it affirms Judge Jones’s decision, back in Dover, that ID is not science but a form of religion.

Trump nominates a creationist as a Ninth Circuit appellate judge

September 26, 2019 • 9:00 am

The Ninth Circuit comprises the following “judicial districts” in the western U.S., including Alaska and Hawaii; it is only one step below the Supreme Court in its power, and the Circuit’s inclusion of California makes its decisions especially important.

Brian Leiter, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, reported that Trump appointed nominated former Solicitor General Lawrence VanDyke as a justice to this court, a nomination pronounced by the Las Vegas Review-Journal as a “stellar choice.”

Well it isn’t. Regardless of his legal views, Leiter reports that VanDyke is a creationist, and, as noted on Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports, an unrepentant and obdurate creationist:

As a student at Harvard Law School fifteen years ago, Lawrence VanDyke (Trump’s nominee) published an incompetent apologia for Intelligent Design creationism, under the guise of a “review” of a book shilling for creationism, in the Harvard Law Review.  I excoriated it on my philosophy blog, while further efforts by Mr. VanDyke to defend himself only resulted in his digging his hole deeper.

Of course, an intellectually disgraceful book review fifteen years ago shouldn’t be disqualifying, but surely Senators will want to find out if Mr. VanDyke is still a shill for creationism and how that might effect his rulings.

You can follow the links (some of them don’t work) to see VanDyke’s approbation of Intelligent-Design creationism , but it appears that VanDyke, who wrote a note favoring ID for the Harvard Law Review (???), has dug in, hardening his criticisms of evolutionary theory after Leiter went after him.  Granted, VanDyke’s initial publication was in 2004, but it’s still worrisome that nominated Federal judges can be creationists.

Indeed, unlike Leiter, I think that adherence to creationism or its gussied-up twin Intelligent Design creationism, should be disqualifying for a judge. After all, what if a judge said he didn’t believe in gravity, or bacteria? Wouldn’t that count as strong evidence about his ability to adjudicate evidence? And it’s not a certainty that more court cases about the teaching of creationism could arise. (Sometimes I quail when I think of the U.S. Supreme Court revisiting them, just as it may revisit Roe v. Wade.)

Yes, I hope the Senators responsible for VanDyke’s confirmation ask him about his creationism. In fact, this question should be asked of Trump as well (I have no idea what he’d say, but it’s guaranteed to be gibberish), as well of all the Democratic Presidential candidates (I suspect they all adhere to established science).

Acceptance of evolution is a touchstone of rationality in modern society, as is accepting the safety and efficacy of vaccinations, and since these are both matters that have been of legal interest, they’re fair game.

VanDyke (center). Photo: Lido Vizzutti, AP

h/t: Greg Mayer

More on my Quillette critique of David Gelernter

September 10, 2019 • 9:00 am

A while back I wrote a critique on this site of computer scientist David Gelernter’s attack on evolutionary theory, itself published in the conservative venue The Claremont Review of Books. Here’s a link to his original piece (click on screenshot):

My critique, as is usual with pieces on WEIT, was written quickly, so I didn’t bother to insert references to the many criticisms of Gelernter’s ideas, ideas that are taken without alteration from Intelligent-Design books by Stephen Meyer, William Dembski, and the usual suspects.

When Quillette asked me if I wanted to respond to Gelernter’s piece, I was a bit puzzled. First, I’d already written a response here, and second, Gelernter’s piece came out in May. It turns out that Quillette didn’t know I’d already addressed the piece, and the more recent interest in Gelernter’s piece was apparently because it got a fair amount of publicity from religious, conservative, and Intelligent Design websites, and was touted in a bizarre video featuring Gelernter discussing the fatal flaws of Darwinism with Meyer, David Berlinski, and Hoover Institute flack Peter Robinson.

You won’t learn anything new from the video; the most striking bit is Berlinski’s attire. Somewhat of a fop and always dressed impeccably, here Berlinski dresses like a biker, complete with jeans, a teeshirt, a cut-off jean jacket, boots, and a gold-headed cane (screenshot below). What gives?

Where’s my Harley?

Back to the narrative. I decided to accept Quillette‘s invite so I could rewrite the piece from scratch, linking to the many papers that rebut Gelernter’s claims about the sudden Cambrian “explosion”, the improbability of “early-development” genes evolving, the lack of evidence for “speciation” (a process that Gelernter apparently misunderstands), and so on.  And so my piece appeared yesterday (click on screenshot):

I don’t have anything to add to that piece, except that I left out a lot of references that could have been used as supplemental ammunition (one, for instance, is paleontologist Don Prothero’s scathing critique on Skepticblog of Stephen Meyer’s “Cambrian Explosion Proves ID” book, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design).

Here I want to address a few ancillary issues. The first is why Gelernter, who apparently has a high reputation in computer science, would drink the ID Kool-Aid. Seriously, his reputation, regardless of his previous achievements, will forever be tarred by his embracing of ID creationism. Perhaps he’ll join the Discovery Institute.  At any rate, it doesn’t add much to a rebuttal such as mine to speculate in detail about the motivations of someone like Gelernter. But his piece’s references to God and religion, and his own Judaism (apparently not he secular brand) made me think that he’s susceptible to ID because it supports a view of life that, if not explicitly creationist, is at least teleological.

Steve Pinker, in a tweet about my post, had another theory, which is his:

And Steve wrote me privately (quoted with permission):

In terms of why Gelernter took this path, I wouldn’t underestimate enemy-of-my-enemy-ism. People fed up with campus PC orthodoxy often lurch to whatever they think is the opposite — sometimes ideological libertarianism, sometimes Trumpism, sometimes ID. After all, they reason, campus leftists hate the Christian right; therefore the Christian right can’t be all bad. I’ve had non-leftist friends ask me hopefully if there is some major flaw in Darwinism, figuring that they have a non-PC ally, and they’re crushed when I say there isn’t.

Indeed, Gelernter has leaned strongly right and has also been a vocal critic of “PC orthodoxy”. Wikipedia says this about him:

Gelernter has critiqued what he perceives as cultural illiteracy among students. In 2015, he commented, “They [students] know nothing about art. They know nothing about history. They know nothing about philosophy. And because they have been raised as not even atheists, they don’t rise to the level of atheists, insofar as they’ve never thought about the existence or nonexistence of God. It has never occurred to them. They know nothing about the Bible.”  Time Magazine profiled Gelernter in 2016, describing him as a “stubbornly independent thinker. A conservative among mostly liberal Ivy League professors, a religious believer among the often disbelieving ranks of computer scientists.” In October 2016, he wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal endorsing Donald Trump for President, calling Hillary Clinton “as phony as a three-dollar bill,” and saying that Barack Obama “has governed like a third-rate tyrant.”  The Washington Post, profiling him in early 2017 as a potential science advisor to Donald Trump, called him “a vehement critic of modern academia” who has “condemned ‘belligerent leftists’ and blamed intellectualism for the disintegration of patriotism and traditional family values.” David Gelernter does not believe in anthropogenic climate change.[14] In July 2019, Gelernter challenged Darwin’s theories. According to Gelernter, “The origin of species is exactly what Darwin cannot explain”.

Regardless of Gelernter’s motives, his critique of evolution is absolutely dreadful, full of holes and misleading claims. He should be ashamed of himself.

At the outset of my piece, I asserted that I wasn’t criticizing Gelernter’s views because he hadn’t been trained in evolutionary biology or even biology (neither were Darwin and Mendel). In a post on his own website, Shtetl-Optimized, computer scientist Scott Aaronson does note the falling-away of Gelernter from even computer science “conservative punditry”:

Speaking of empiricism, if you check Gelernter’s publication list on DBLP and his Google Scholar page, you’ll find that he did influential work in programming languages, parallel computing, and other areas from 1981 through 1997, and then in the past 22 years published a grand total of … two papers in computer science. One with four coauthors, the other a review/perspective piece about his earlier work. So it seems fair to say that, some time after receiving tenure in a CS department, Gelernter pivoted (to put it mildly) away from CS and toward conservative punditry. His recent offerings, in case you’re curious, include the book America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered In the Obamacrats).

Some will claim that this case underscores what’s wrong with the tenure system itself, while others will reply that it’s precisely what tenure was designed for, even if in this instance you happen to disagree with what Gelernter uses his tenured freedom to say. The point I wanted to make is different, though. It’s that the question “what kind of a field is computer science, anyway, that a guy can do high-level CS research on Monday, and then on Tuesday reject Darwinism and unironically use the word ‘Obamacrat’?”—well, even if I accepted the immense weight this question places on one atypical example (which I don’t), and even if I dismissed the power of compartmentalization (which I again don’t), the question still wouldn’t arise in Gelernter’s case, since getting from “Monday” to “Tuesday” seems to have taken him 15+ years.

Finally, although the readers’ comments on my Quillette piece are only starting to accumulate, it’s already devolved into a free-for-all, with several readers making ridiculous claims about evolution’s flaws and a few others defending real science. This one—the very first comment—makes me (as the young folk say) “facepalm”:

This is complete nonsense. “jdfree49” not only gives no reason why microevolution has to “back up” before making the big leap to macroevolution, like a person jumping a gap, but also apparently knows nothing about the evolution of legs, which appear to have evolved from strong bony fins of lobe-finned fish. Has this person ever heard of Tiktaalik? It is this kind of blather, spouted without any apparent knowledge of the data we have, that infuriates me.

And there’s this one:

Note that “breathnumber” ignores the fact that my critique of Gelernter is about 90% discussion of the evidence, with a small bit of speculation of how someone as smart as Gelernter could jump the shark. This, I suspect, is how the Discovery Institute will dismiss my article: as a critique of religious motivations rather than of an argument. (They’ll also reiterate Meyer’s flawed arguments.) ID isn’t religious, they’ll say! But of course it is. Every creationist I’ve ever met (and I include IDers in that mix) has been motivated by religion, or at least is religious, with the possible exception of biker David Berlinski.

Like my previous pieces on Quillette, I find that the comments are often quite obtuse—something that surprised me given that Quillette is a more intellectual site than, say, Slate or Salon. Why are the readers so peeved about, and so ignorant of, evolution? Since Quillette often published anti-“PC” pieces, Perhaps Pinker is on to something.

My Quillette piece criticizing the anti-evolution arguments of David Gelernter

September 9, 2019 • 2:02 pm

I’m off to have my post-operation inspection at the hospital, so I don’t have time now to write about my new piece in Quillette. The article pretty much stands on its own as a critique of a recent (and widely cited) article by well known computer scientist David Gelernter—a piece that recycled many familiar Intelligent Design arguments. And it wasn’t even wrong, as virtually every claim he makes in the service of dissing Darwinism is flawed.  Click on the screenshot to read it, and I’ll write a bit more about it tomorrow.