The Pope believes in angels!

October 3, 2014 • 9:56 am

. . . and not metaphorical ones, either! How can a smart guy be this dumb? Oh, right. . . religion.

Those who say that Catholics are okay with science should recall that the Catholic Church accepts the existence of a historical Adam and Eve as the literal ancestors of all of us, decreed that God tweaked evolution by giving us a soul, and asserted the existence of demons (Francis himself believes in demons and angels, and of course the Church maintains a stable of exorcists, including one in the Vatican). Now we hear that the Boss Catholic, Pope Francis, believe in guardian angels as well.

Pope Francis said on Thursday that guardian angels exist and people who listen to their advice are less likely to make the wrong decisions.

“The doctrine on angels is not fantasist. No, it’s reality,” the pope said during his daily mass in the small chapel in his residence at the Vatican.

“According to church tradition we all have an angel with us, who protects us and helps us understand things,” he said in a message to mark the Feast of the Guardian Angels, celebrated by Catholics on 2 October.

The message that humans are helped along in life by an otherworldly guardian was in contrast to former pope Benedict’s insistence in 2012 that angels did not sing at the birth of Christ – news that devastated many a carol singer and earned him the epithet “killjoy pope”.

Francis asked: “How often have we heard ‘I should do this, I should not do this, that’s not right, be careful …’. So often! It is the voice of our travelling companion.” The pope advised sceptics to ask themselves: “How is my relationship with my guardian angel? Do I listen to him? Do I say good morning to him? Do I ask him to watch over me when I sleep?

“No one journeys alone and no one should think that they are alone,” he said.

I would really, really like to hear what Catholic Andrew Sullivan says about this pronouncement. After all, he took me to task for saying that anybody in history ever thought the Genesis story was meant literally. Now we have Sullivan’s Boss, his Pope, telling him that angels are real.  Come on Andrew, do you have the guts to say that the Pope is full of it?

At any rate, do remember things like this the next time some Catholic, or the National Center for Science Education, tells you that religions like Catholicism are perfectly compatible with science.

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Clarence, the guardian angel who finally got his wings.

 

Once again: Was there a historical Jesus?

October 3, 2014 • 5:47 am

This question is of perennial interest, and of course won’t be settled, at least by those theists who proclaim, wrongly, that “you can’t prove a negative.” (Really? You can’t prove that I don’t have two hearts, or a brother?) Even if, after decades, we fail to come up with good evidence for a historical Jesus, Christians will still maintain, based on Scripture, that he existed.

Again, the question is not whether Jesus was the son of God/part of God as Christianity alleges, but whether there was even a historical person around whom the Jesus myth accreted. While people like Bart Ehrman give an adamant “yes,” others, like Richard Carrier (and our own Ben Goren) are “mythicists,” claiming that there’s no convincing of any real person who could have been the model of the Jesus figure.

I have to say that I’m coming down on the “mythicist” side, simply because I don’t see any convincing historical records for a Jesus person. Everything written about him was decades after his death, and, as far as I can see, there is no contemporaneous record of a Jesus-person’s existence (what “records” exist have been debunked as forgeries). Yet there should have been some evidence, especially if Jesus had done what the Bible said. But even if he was simply an apocalyptic preacher, as Ehrman insists, there should have been at least a few contemporaneous records. Based on their complete absence, I am for the time being simply a Jesus agnostic. But I don’t pretend to be a scholar in this area, or even to have read a lot of the relevant literature. I haven’t even read Richard Carrier’s new book promoting the mythicist interpretation, though I will.

Because of the paucity of evidence, we can expect this question to keep coming up. And so it’s surfaced once again, in a PuffHo piece by Nigel Barber.

Barber, who has a Ph.D. in biopsychology and a website at Psychology Today (“The Human Beast”), has also written six books.  And in the Sept. 25 edition (is that the right word?) of PuffHo, he takes up the question of the historicity of Jesus. His piece, “If Jesus never existed, religion may be fiction,” briefly lays out the mythicist case. Of course religion itself is not a fiction, but what Barber means is that Christianity’s empirical support, like that of Scientology or Mormonism, may well rest on a person or events that simply didn’t exist.

Here’s the crux of Barber’s argument. (I have not yet seen the piece in Free Inquiry to which he refers, as it’s behind a paywall, but if a reader wants to send it to me, I’d be much obliged.). I’ve put the critical part in bold:

In History, Jesus Was a No Show
Various historical scholars attempted to authenticate Jesus in the historical record, particularly in the work of Jesus-era writers. Michael Paulkovich revived this project as summarized in the current issue of Free Inquiry.

Paulkovich found an astonishing absence of evidence for the existence of Jesus in history. “Historian Flavius Josephus published his Jewish Wars circa 95 CE. He had lived in Japhia, one mile from Nazareth – yet Josephus seems unaware of both Nazareth and Jesus.” He is at pains to discredit interpolations in this work that “made him appear to write of Jesus when he did not.” Most religious historians take a more nuanced view agreeing that Christian scholars added their own pieces much later but maintaining that the historical reference to Jesus was present in the original. Yet, a fudged text is not compelling evidence for anything.

Paulkovich consulted no fewer than 126 historians (including Josephus) who lived in the period and ought to have been aware of Jesus if he had existed and performed the miracles that supposedly drew a great deal of popular attention. Of the 126 writers who should have written about Jesus, not a single one did so (if one accepts Paulkovich’s view that the Jesus references in Josephus are interpolated).

Paulkovich concludes:

“When I consider those 126 writers, all of whom should have heard of Jesus but did not – and Paul and Marcion and Athenagoras and Matthew with a tetralogy of opposing Christs, the silence from Qumram and Nazareth and Bethlehem, conflicting Bible stories, and so many other mysteries and omissions – I must conclude that Christ is a mythical character.”

He also considers striking similarities of Jesus to other God-sons such as Mithra, Sandan, Attis, and Horus. Christianity has its own imitator. Mormonism was heavily influenced by the Bible from which founder Joseph Smith borrowed liberally.

Barber goes on to talk about how the origin of Mormonism was a sham promulgated by a con man (an interpretation I accept). Yet even in that case there’s better evidence than we have for Jesus, for the Book of Mormon opens with two statements from eleven witnesses—people who were contemporaries of Joseph Smith—who swore that they saw the golden plates that became the Book of Mormon. Those people are historical figures who can be tracked down, and so the evidence for the existence of the plates is stronger than for the existence of a historical Jesus.

Barber finishes by describing how credulous people have started sects based on phony gurus and leaders, and, indeed, how an Indian film director decided to create his own religion by pretending he was a guru.  And of course we all know how L. Ron Hubbard started Scientology based on a bunch of science-fiction writings and a phony theology involving Xenu, volcanoes, and thetans. How people can buy that stuff—and there’s a lot of them—is beyond me. But of course you don’t get to learn the theology of Scientology until you’ve spent thousands of dollars, and so are inclined to accept it (bogus as it is) because of the “sunk-costs fallacy.”

At any rate, if there is no contemporaneous record of Jesus, there should have been, how seriously should we take his historical existence? I am not inclined to accept the Bible as convincing evidence for a historical Jesus

Is there anyone in history with so littlec ontemporaneous attestation who is nevertheless seen by millions as having really existed? There is of course Socrates, but of course we have a historical figure, Plato, who attests to his existence. Yet even that is overlain with a patina of mythicism, and I don’t think most scholars would say that Socrates existed with the certainty that Christians (or even atheists like Bart Erhman) would say that Jesus existed. And there’s no religion based on the historical existence of Socrates. As for Shakespeare, well, we have his signature and a fair amount of contemporaneous evidence that he really did exist; we just don’t know for sure that he wrote those plays (absence of evidence).

p.s. If you want to comment saying, “I am not concerned with this tedious question,” please don’t bother. If that’s your attitude, there’s no need to inform us all about your lack of interest.

 

 

Readers’ wildlife photographs

October 3, 2014 • 4:55 am

Dorsa Amir is a second-year Ph.D. student in Biological Anthropology at Yale University, and has a website. She sent us some photos of primates, along with captions. I didn’t know that there were macaques in Morocco, but Wikipedia tells the tale:

The Barbary macaque (Macaca sylvanus), Barbary ape, or magot is a species of macaque unique for its distribution outside Asia and for its vestigial tail. Found in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria and Morocco and El-Kouf National Park in Libya along with a small population of unknown origin in Gibraltar, the Barbary macaque is one of the best-known Old World monkey species.

If you’ve been to Gibraltar, you’ll know that there’s a population of about 300 or so on The Rock, probably introduced by the Moors.

And here are Dorsa’s notes and captions:

Thought I’d send along some photos from my fieldwork in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, studying barbary macaques. Not the highest quality (couldn’t take along too fancy of a camera for the field), but still interesting.

Here’s Kit-Kat, an alpha male in contention, who may possibly be the saddest looking monkey in the world. Even when he’s being groomed by his harem. Like, seriously, Kit Kat, crack a smile now and again, you know?
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This guy’s Galack, the most handsome monkey in Morocco. I mean seriously, look at that coat. Chicks dig Galack.

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Here’s one of the many little beebins. These little guys just love to jump on our equipment and generally get us in trouble with their protective parents.

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Here they are, cuddling for warmth. [I

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BONUS FELID:

And here’s a photo of my cat, Emerson, for good measure:

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Dorsa added that she works at the field site of the Barbary Macaque Project, whose website is here.

 

Friday: Hili dialogue

October 3, 2014 • 2:51 am

It’s Friday! Hili has a biology question, and the answer is that domestic cats evolved from one subspecies of the small European wildcat, Felis silvestris lybica, about the size of Hili herself.  Proud of her ancestry, Hili is The Cat That Walks by Herself:

Hili: I have a common ancestor with a tiger.
A: Undoubtedly.
Hili: Did we evolve from a cat bigger than tiger or a cat smaller than me?

Hili the tiger

In Polish:
Hili: Mam wspólnego przodka z tygrysem.
Ja: Niewątpliwie.
Hili: Czy myśmy wyewoluowali z kota jeszcze większego od tygrysa, czy z jeszcze mniejszego ode mnie?

Why are dog breeds so variable compared to cat breeds?

October 2, 2014 • 12:53 pm

This is a question for readers to answer. I have my own theories, but I want to hear yours.

Dog breeds (I’ll spell out “dog” this one time) are of course tremendously more variable than breeds of cats. It doesn’t matter what trait you pick: behavior, color, skeletal configuration, size, and so on—dogs are more variable across breeds than are cats. To take one example, using just weight: cat breeds vary only about threefold, from the 6-pound Singapura to the 20-pound Maine Coon. But among dogs, the range is 90-fold, from the 2-pound Chi*ua*ua to the 180-pound Mastiff.

(In nature, however, the situation is reversed. There are roughly equal numbers of wild felid and canid species—38 of the former and 36 of the latter—and each has been diversifying for roughly the same amount of time. Yet the size range among wild felid species is 173-fold—from the 3.5-pound rusty spotted cat to the 605-pound tiger—while the size range of wild canids is only 34-fold, from the 2.5-pound fennec to the 85-pound gray wolf.)

There’s a reason I gave you those facts, which may bear on the answer to your question.  Again, WHY ARE DOG BREEDS SO MUCH MORE DIFFERENT FROM EACH OTHER THAN ARE CAT BREEDS?

Be complete in your answer, and be aware of questions that may be raised to counter facile assertions.

I will pick the best answer, and the award will be a Jerry Coyne the Cat Keychain, a very rare item (I have only three):

Screen Shot 2014-10-02 at 2.46.36 PM

 

This is a high-quality thick plastic-laminated image, with my namesake cat (as an adorable kitten) shown on both sides, getting a belly rub from his foster mother Gayle Ferguson. The prize guarantees a frisson of pleasure every time you use your keys.

Leave your answer below; contest closes at 6 p.m. Chicago time this coming Sunday (October 5).

NYT readers agree that doubt is an essential part of faith

October 2, 2014 • 10:17 am

In yesterday’s paper edition of the New York Times, the “letters” section highlights four responses to Julia Baird’s Sept. 25 op-ed,“Doubt as a sign of faith” (my post on here essay is here). Baird’s thesis, taking off from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent admission that sometimes he doubted God’s existence (but not Jesus’s), was that doubt is not a weakness of religious faith, but a strength. Remember Barid’s words?:

Just as courage is persisting in the face of fear, so faith is persisting in the presence of doubt. Faith becomes then a commitment, a practice and a pact that is usually sustained by belief. But doubt is not just a roiling, or a vulnerability; it can also be a strength. Doubt acknowledges our own limitations and confirms — or challenges — fundamental beliefs, and is not a detractor of belief but a crucial part of it.

As I noted, the problem is that there is no good way to resolve religous doubt except to either embrace it and become an atheist or, more usually, to convince yourself based on wish-thinking that you were right all along. It eludes me how going through a “darkness of the soul” somehow can strengthen you in your faith. That’s just not rational—not unless you find a gleam of evidence somewhere in the darkness. And if you return to faith after having your doubts, you are discarding intellectual honesty for emotional security.

So one would think that among the four letters to the NYT editor there might be at least one dissenter, one person who says that doubt is a strength of the intellect, but not a virtue of faith. But one would think wrong. All four letters agree with Baird, extolling the virtue of doubt.

Just three samples of the madness:

Julia Baird is wise to remind us that Christ himself experienced doubt and darkness on the cross when he cried out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” This cry has long confounded Christendom, but it should not because if Christ was to experience all that is human, he also had to experience spiritual doubt and darkness, a perplexing irony for he who said, “I am the light of the world.”

As for the archbishop of Canterbury: how poignantly real and human to admit and embrace his own doubt. Only a man who identifies with the whole of our humanity, its light and its shadow, could muster the humility and courage to reveal his own spiritual landscape.

How many of us would be so willing to lay bare our inner selves?

ROBERT WALDRON
Boston, Sept. 26, 2014

The writer is the author of books about Christianity.

Courage? Is the Archbishop now hedging his public sermons or prayers: “Dear God (if you exist). . .” And if Christ had to experience “all that is human,” then he’d have to have sex, too, which I don’t think is mentioned in Scripture.

*****

Even the most faithful have doubts about their faith. If one does not, he or she is either a fool or a liar.

In my case it came as a crushing blow, even though I was a priest chaplain with the 101st Airborne in Vietnam. I was always afraid that some bullet had my name on it. Once when we were in a firefight and the Marine point man was wounded, the medic shamed me into crawling up with him to help the man. In spite of fear, I followed him. When we were halfway there, a bullet blew the medic’s head off.

Covered with his blood, I lost my faith. How could a loving God do this to such a good man? I crawled to the Marine, lifted him onto my shoulders, stood up and carried him down. I had hoped that the enemy would kill me because I had nothing more to live for.

A priest without faith is like wine without grapes. I made it, and all thought I was courageous. Not so. I wanted to die. Later I came to belief again, but that is another story.

A situation can be shocking and so traumatic that we can go beyond doubt to atheism. But doubt there was, even for a priest.

PETER J. RIGA
Houston, Sept. 27, 2014

After that, he should have become an atheist for good. Finally:

****

Julia Baird’s article reminds me of something that Dr. Leonard Kravitz, one of my rabbinical school professors at Hebrew Union College in New York, used to say to his students: “Certainty doesn’t make you correct. Certainty makes you certain.”

(Rabbi) STEVEN FOLBERG
Austin, Tex., Sept. 26, 2014

Dr. Kravitz was right. But belief in something for which there is no evidence makes you not admirable, but credulous.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the Times didn’t publish any letters saying that perhaps having doubts means that you’re believing in something that might not be true. After all, it’s not kosher to publicly criticize religion, even in the “letters” column of a liberal newspaper.

Colbert on Jindal: A black mark on Brown University

October 2, 2014 • 7:31 am

by Greg Mayer

On Monday night’s episode of his show, Stephen Colbert sarcastically endorsed Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal in the 2016 presidential race, lauding him as a “down-home guy who’s learned to stop learning.” Jindal is best known for his disastrous 2009 response to Obama’s address to Congress, and his pushing of creationism in Louisiana schools (covered at WEIT here, here, here, here, and here). At a Christian Science Monitor Breakfast in September, a reporter asked Jindal his views on evolution. Jindal obstinately refused to answer, repeatedly stating his support for local control of education, despite that not being any part of the question he was asked. Colbert elaborated on Jindal’s mantra of local control, proposing that on one Galapagos island, finches have longer beaks because they evolved to eat fruit, while on another island, “the beaks were shorter because Jesus”.

Screen shot from the Colbert Report, 30 September 2014.
Screen shot from the Colbert Report, 30 September 2014. Note the short beaks.

(I could not get the video to embed, so click here to see it; evolution part begins about 3:20.)

Jindal began his evasions with what is now becoming a standard line– the “I’m not a scientist” gambit, which paradoxically seems to enable the claimant to be bold and unconstrained in their beliefs, rather than humble. But when Jindal says he’s not a biologist, Colbert points out that Jindal holds an honors degree in biology from Brown University! My friends and colleagues at Brown—which include the indefatigable proponent of science and foe of creationism Ken Miller—have some explaining to do! Ironically, earlier this year Jindal suggested Obama sue Harvard for having failed to educate him properly. But it seems that if anyone has cause to complain of what their education did for them, it’s Jindal. (In fairness to Brown, I must note Michael Shermer’s thesis that smart people (which Jindal believes he is one of) are better at rationalizing away the evidence in order to maintain their preexisting prejudices; so, it might not be Brown’s fault that Jindal either doesn’t really know much, or suppresses his knowledge for the sake of his political career.)

Colbert, however, is quite taken with Jindal’s “impressive retreat from knowledge”, and his efforts to make sure others aren’t “handicapped by knowledge”. And, he points out, “there’s a lot more science he [Jindal] can run away from.”

If Jindal’s public floundering on the question wasn’t enough, Jindal replied to Colbert with a series of inept tweets, filled with non sequiturs, what one supposes are flat attempts at humor, and the claim to be ripping pages out of books, which I think he wants us to think is satirical, but seems perilously close to what we might actually expect him to do. Like a dog returning to its vomit, he plunges, Maru-like, back into the box, becoming yet further entangled. Not to mention all the traffic he’s driving to Colbert’s site.