More readers of Andrew Sullivan go after Michael Robbins’s Sophisticated Theology

August 17, 2014 • 12:23 pm

In a post on July 26 I kvetched about the continuing Sophisticated Theology™ of poet Michael Robbins, who, as I wrote about a whle earlier, had an annoying penchant to use book reviews as a club to bash New Atheists. Robbins’s faux review on Slatebrought out a number of angry responses, and he took a shellacking not just at my site (390 comments, very few of them favorable), but also at reader Maggie Clark’s site, and even at Andrew Sullivan’s site, The Dish, where a number of readers went after him. 

Much as I differ with Sullivan on matters like God and Israel, and despite his failure to allow comments on his posts, he has the admirable habit of allowing some pushback from readers, usually picking the best comments and presenting them anonymously in a separate post, much as I do with the religious and creationist trolls who annoy me. Sullivan, however, treats his comments with respect, for he chooses the good ones.

I had missed the fact that Sullivan allowed a secondset of comments criticizing Robbins’s views, particularly his annoying but persistent argument that New Atheists, by attacking literalists or garden-variety believers, are attaking “strawmen” and missing The Best Arguments for God. Further, Robbins likes to argue that the New Atheists aren’t dolorous enough. Failing to realize the huge hit that the absence of God gives to morality, or on our personal finitude, we are not nearly as sad and miserable as we should be. Most atheists are fairly cheerful and well-fed people, and Robbins can’t stand it that we don’t mope around or put guns to our heads (or, like Camus, crash our cars into trees). These are simply trite and refuted claims, but they’re especially annoying coming from a wannabee hipster poet like Robbins.

And so the venerable Sullivan put up another dollop of Robbins criticism in a post called “Nostalgic for Nietzsche, Ctd.” I love ‘em! I’ll reprise three; the last (though anonymous) comes from one of our readers.

Reader 1:

Michael Robbins’ latest defense of his essay review of Spencer’s book, which you posted, conveniently skips past a colossal point that one of your readers quite cogently articulated in dissent:

The religious intelligentsia want to embrace the vast majority of Christians (who believe nothing like they do), as part of their faith, and at the same time decry atheists who focus on that vast majority as failing to engage “true” Christianity and the deep, meaningful arguments for the faith.

Robbins goes on to prove your reader right when he, like John Haught and David Bentley Hart and other “Sophisticated Theologians”, makes the boring mistake of saying that “religious fundamentalism is a soft target.” Is it really that soft when almost half of America believes that God created the world in its current form according to Genesis? Is it really?

I’m going to take credit right now for the term “Sophisticated Theologians,” which of course I trademarked from the outset. It seems to be becoming a term of art. Oh well, I suppose the coining of a widely used neologism, even uncredited, is a mitzvah. And of course Reader 1 makes a good point. Hart, for example, would have to repudiate the many Orthodox Christians whose notion of God is not a nebulous Ground of Being.

Here’s a comment sent to Sullivan by another reader:

Dammit. I never said anything, positive or negative, about the Hart quote other than Robbins wanted us to focus on it. More to the point: When Michael Robbins writes “Christians have recognized the allegorical nature of these accounts since the very beginnings of Christianity”, or “it’s not God, at least not God as conceived by a single one of the major theistic traditions on the planet”, he’s ignoring the belief of most Christians in the US and elsewhere. To be clear, most living Christians do not recognize the allegorical nature of these accounts (a statement easily proven).

When Robbins says, “I had assumed it was obvious that Origen and Augustine would hardly have taken the trouble to deny literalist readings of the Bible if such readings did not exist” he’s faking left and going right. Reading the Bible literally came after the Reformation (a fact Robbins flags in his article “He Is Who Is“). And while I am insufficiently educated to speak to Origen, I’m happy to go head-to-head on Augustine: $50 for every place Augustine denies literalist readings of the Bible vs. every place Augustine did not. For example, did Augustine believe in a literal Adam and Eve and original sin? (Yes.) Does evolutionary theory destroy both? (Yes.) Will I make good money if Robbins takes me up on my offer? (Yes.)

You go, reader! He/she continues, and makes some good points.

“Young-earth creationism” is “of course” not based on the Bible. He seriously said that. Robbins’ use of the phrase “of course” illustrates a startling ignorance of the mass of Christianity and their scriptural exegesis. Apparently Ken Ham and Bill Nye’s debate on a 6,000 year-old earth missed the point – nobody watched it.

OK, enough whining, to the heart: Michael Robbins continues to miss the point.

“But the New Atheists did not write books that simply attacked creationism. They wrote books that purport to challenge theistic belief as such. They therefore have a responsibility to address the best cases for God, not the dullest.

They wrote books to challenge the theistic belief … of the vast majority of Christians. The audience that believes Noah stuffed 9 million unique species on a boat, and the kangaroos hopped from Mount Ararat to Australia without leaving a single skeleton. That doesn’t require challenging the best cases for God, that requires pointing out that 18 million animals would require a lot of food, produce a lot of waste, and the wolves would probably eat the rabbits. If the target audience doesn’t care (or understand), the best cases, why should atheists focus on them?

Yes “religious fundamentalism” is a soft target – but it is the important target, and the target on which atheists should focus. If Robbins disagrees, he needs to make the argument that attacking the best cases for God is worth doing, not that it’s the “right” thing to do.

I suppose, in response to the last paragraph, Robbins would respond that if you really want to kill the notion of God stone cold dead, you have to refute people like David Bentley Hart or Karen Armstrong.  But they’re deliberately designed their concepts of God to be irrefutable, so that’s not on. Further, even if you kill that Sophisticated God, the mass of believers will keep on believing their Unsophisticated One. They don’t care if you refute the Ground of Being, since that’s not their God.

Finally, here’s a comment Sullivan calls “Another piles on.” In fact, this was written by reader Thomas. who posts here under the name “Another Tom”. He emailed me proudly that this came from him:

I’ve found Michael Robbins essay and response both unconvincing. The “New Atheists should be more like Old Atheists,” trope aside, there are other tropes I saw in Robbins’ response. Let’s play spot the trope!

“But the New Atheists did not write books that simply attacked creationism. They wrote books that purport to challenge theistic belief as such. They therefore have a responsibility to address the best cases for God, not the dullest. When Dennett asks if super-God created God, and if super-duper-God created super-God, he is simply revealing a lack of acquaintance with the intellectual traditions of the major religions. If you want to argue against something, you have to understand what you’re arguing against. That’s axiomatic.”

I would say there are two standard tropes in here. First is the atheists don’t address “the best cases for God.” As far as I can tell atheists always deal with the argument for God being made. Whenever I see that phrase I’m reminded of the practice of goal-post shifting. Often when an atheist addresses a “case for God” they’re told that they haven’t addressed the “best case for God.” Which makes me wonder, why don’t proponents of theism use the “best case for God?” Maybe Robbins should check out Jerry Coyne’s website (not blog)Why Evolution is True; he has addressed various “best cases for God.” Most recently he covered David Bentley Harts’ latest book and found that that “best case for God” was a series of non-sequiturs. X exists therefore God is hardly a convincing argument.

The second I noticed has already been addressed through the Courtier’s Reply. I don’t need to spend several years studying fashion to point out someone’s naked just as I don’t have to spend several years studying theology to point out arguments for theism are not rational.

Another thing, this sentence: “Some atheists believe that their faith in scientific naturalism suffices to disprove the existence of God, for instance.” Speaking of caricatures … I will admit that there may be atheists like this but I know of no atheists who make arguments like that. Science simply eliminates various things from various gods portfolios and finds natural explanations. Germ theory of disease is one example. Do bacteria and viruses disprove God? Of course not, it simply means that God is not needed for people to get sick.

The atheists I know are atheist because they found the argument for theism unconvincing. Personally I’ve always found evidence for theism lacking and the philosophical arguments for theism either irrational or creating an irrelevant deity whose existence is identical to it’s nonexistence. Robbins should check out QualiaSoup’s three–part series on morality without God if he wants to some idea of what he’s arguing against.

[snark] Oh wait, stuff like that can’t exist because of the intellectual shallowness of atheists. [/snark]

I love my family and friends. I help others because it is right. I share what pleasure I have with the people I care about. I celebrate life as best I can and share what joy in life as best I can, because this is all we get. There’s no way I’m going to celebrate life any less just because someone told me I should be sad about the death of God.

Spot the nightjars!

August 17, 2014 • 10:08 am

JAC:  Matthew has gone off to the Lake District for a week’s “hols,” but he left me with a post so I wouldn’t go dry. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that it’s a “Spot the nightjar” post.  Srsly!  I’ll give the answer either tomorrow or this evening.

 

by Matthew Cobb

OK, we’re going to give you a chance here. First you’ll get your eye in with some easy ones, then there’s the test.

This photo of a Large-tailed nightjar, by David Behrens and taken from here, gives you an idea of quite how amazing their camouflage is:

This photo of a Bonaparte’s nightjar, by Folkert Hindriks, taken from a great set of photos of Brunei you can find here (superb close-ups), is quite amazing – if the bird had its eye shut, it would be very difficult to spot:

Nightjareye

And now, the test, a fantastic photo of a Fiery-necked nightjar by Jolyon Toscianko. And no cheating or image searching!

ced7c171fa-images-Nightjars-Nightjar in Leaves

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 50 Smartest “People of faith”?

August 17, 2014 • 7:44 am

The Best Schools website, which I think is fairly well known for telling people where to study in a given area, has produced a list and description of “The 50 smartest people of faith.” And it’s dire. I’m not sure whether they simply haven’t looked hard enough to find smart religious people (they choose folks who have gone public with their beliefs), or whether those people are simply rare.  We do know that the degree of unbelief rises with education, but education isn’t completely correlated with “intelligence” (which the writers don’t define), and, in the main, most people—even at the upper end of the IQ scale—are probably religious.

The article was written as an explicit refutation of atheism, as we heathens supposedly claim that we’re the only smart ones. The rational for the piece and criteria for selection are these:

A few years back, “New Atheist” authors Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett helped to publicize a movement to rechristen atheists as “Brights” (see our feature article on influential atheists here).

This was no doubt mainly because the word “atheist” still has a harsh and aggressive ring in the ears of most ordinary people.

But the corollary—that people of faith are “Dims”—was surely an added benefit, in the minds of the New Atheist publicity men.

Is it really true that most intelligent and well-informed people are atheists, while people of faith tend to be unschooled and credulous?

Far from it.

Unfortunately, in the rancorous debates in this country over the role of religion in our public life, all too often it is simply assumed—by both sides—that religious faith is in conflict with reason (and intelligence). The unspoken assumption is that religion relies exclusively on faith, while science alone is supported by reason.

This idea is utterly mistaken, but because it mostly goes unchallenged, it reinforces the stereotype that atheists are somehow smarter than believers.

One way to combat the erroneous assumption that faith conflicts with reason is by giving greater visibility to living, breathing believers who are also highly intelligent. That is what we are endeavoring to do with this list of “The 50 Smartest People of Faith.”

The qualifications for inclusion on our list are twofold:

(1) Intellectual brilliance, evidenced by a very high level of achievement, whether in the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, literature, the fine arts, or public service; and

(2) Religious faith, evidenced either through explicit personal witness or through publicly professed respect for religion.

By “religious faith,” we mean religion in the monotheistic, or Abrahamic, tradition—which we happen to know best. We do not doubt that a similar list of brilliant and devout Hindus, Buddhists, Daoists, Confucianists, Shintoists, and others could easily be drawn up, and we hope it will be, by those qualified to do so.

Most of the individuals on our list have given explicit public witness to their religious faith. However, in a few cases we infer a faith that appears to be implicit in a person’s writings. Needless to say, we do not pretend to see into people’s hearts. Unbeknownst to us, some individuals may have private reservations. But all have declared their deeply held respect for religious faith through their works and/or their public pronouncements.

This list, then, includes living men and women who are both people of faith and people of exceptional intellectual brilliance and professional accomplishment. It is presented in alphabetical order.

You can look for yourself, but I want to say a few words before I highlight some of the choices. First of all, give me a few hours and I’d produce a list of the “50 smartest nonbelievers” that is far, far more impressive than this. After all, many of the people in the site’s list are theologians, for crying out loud! Among scientists alone I could beat their own list hands down.

Second, is someone who is religious really “smart”? My answer is “yes, of course: they can be intelligent and do really good things, but they do have a flaw in their intelligence: a tendency to believe in superstition and religion nonsense.” But many of us, even smart heathens, have some flaw, mental or otherwise. So most of the scientists, writers, and others in their list do strike me as smart. Nevertheless, I could produce a much more impressive list of smart atheists, and people would have recognized the names as opposed to the many obscure on on the Best Schools list.  Who, for example recognizes Ben Carson (more about him later), as opposed to atheists Stephen Hawking or J. D. Watson?

Moreover, their list of “smart” people includes quite a few theologians—at least ten of the fifty names, not to mention Pope Benedict! Given my biases, I have trouble seeing someone as “smart” who makes their living parsing and explaining the nonexistent.  Yes, these theologians would do well on IQ tests, and would strike you as intelligent if you talked to them without knowing that they did theology, but, really—Alvin Plantinga? Perhaps for such people “savvy” is a better word than “smart”.

At any rate, I’ve singled out a few of these smart believers, and give comments on them below. I’ve divided them into three classes: theologians, scientists and doctors, and “others” (lawyers, writers, etc.). I’ve only mentioned people I’ve heard of.

Scientists and doctors

1. Ben Carson.  A retired neurosurgeon known for pioneering forms of neurosurgery in children, Carson is controversial because he’s a creationist—and a diehard one.  I wouldn’t call him super intelligent in the conventional sense, but rather super competent as a doctor. I simply can’t laud the intelligence of someone who purports to be a scientist but is a vocal creationist.  By the way, the website gets one thing wrong: although the faculty of Emory protested Carson’s invitation as a speaker because of his creationism, they neither urged disinviting him, nor was he disinvited. (The site says he was uninvited and then reinvited. That’s not true.)

2. Simon Conway Morris. A paleontologist at Cambridge, Conway Morris is a smart guy who’s done pioneering work on the Burgess Shale fauna. An Anglican, Conway Morris science has, I think, been compromised by his repeated insistence (and several publications) that the evolution of humanlike beings was inevitable. As far as I can see, that view comes solely from his faith, for if God made humans in the image of Himself, the evolution of creatures capable of apprehending and worshipping God must have been inevitable. Conway Morris’s argument is based on evolutionary convergence (different lineages evolve similar features, meaning that evolution is sometimes constrained in particular directions), but humanlike intelligence is an evolutionary one-off (no other creatures have it, or religion), so his argument simply doesn’t work.

3. David Gelerntner, a computer scientist who is Jewish. I don’t know much about him but he’s respected and, sadly, was injured by one of the Unibomber’s explosives.

4. Martin Nowak, at Harvard, is a Catholic evolutionary biologist who pulled in a huge ($10 million) Templeton grant. He’s undoubtedly done good work in theoretical evolutionary biology, although I must say that I can’t pinpoint a solid contribution he’s made to understanding nature (and, asking several of my friends who are evolutionists, I find that they can’t, either). Nowak was largely responsible for the current and misguided criticisms of kin selection that have so muddled our field; I’ve posted about this many times.

That’s pretty much it for the scientists. Now I could produce a list of much more impressive living scientists who are atheists. Some I can’t name here since they wouldn’t want their unbelief publicized, but among those I could put on MY list of smart atheist scientists are Dick Lewontin (my advisor at Harvard), J. D. Watson (and Francis Crick when he was alive), E. O. Wilson, Steven Weinberg (and just about any physicist), Lisa Randall, Stephen Hawking, Sean Carroll (the physicist), Richard Dawkins, Harry Kroto (Nobel Laureate), Peter Atkins, Patrick Bateson, Jared Diamond, Lee Smolin, Martin Rees (a nonbeliever but friendly to faith), Paul Nurse (Nobel Laureate), David Deutsch, Steve Pinker, and Steve Jones.  Give me a few days and I could produce a longer list, but the one I just gave is about five times as long as the list given above.

Theologians

I wonder why they even put theologians on this list! Sure, they can be smart, but certainly there are equally smart people who actually accomplish something. Theologians spend their lives refining their understanding of a nonexistent being and explicating the work of other theologians who do the same thing. As Dan Barker told me, “Theology is a subject without an object.” If smart people don’t expand our understanding of the universe, or create something that moves us, as a great artist would, or help relieve human suffering, do they belong on this list?

The list does not, as far as I see, include religious scholars, who have much more claim to the potential title of being smart, for many of them don’t believe in the tenets of the religions that they study.

1. William Lane Craig. We all know Craig, who is a Baptist and a skillful debater.  Yes, he’s savvy, but can someone who accepts the Divine Command Theory of Morality, so that God’s Old-Testament genocides are perfectly okay, really be smart? Does someone who spends years explicating the cosmological argument—an argument that most philosophers and all physicists find uncompelling—really belong on this list?

2. David Bentley Hart.  An Orthodox Christian, Hart is a quintessential Sophisticated Theologian™, one who makes the argument that God is a Ground of Being, not an anthropomorphic spirit. He uses a lot of words to say things that, to me, are meaningless, but that give succor to perplexed smart believers. There is no substance to what he says, for there’s no way of checking its veracity. He sees that as an advantage.

3. Alistair McGrath. Educated in molecular biology at Oxford, McGrath now holds a professorship of theology and education at King’s College, London, and engages in apologetics, historical studies of Christianity, and criticism of New Atheism.

4. R. Albert Mohler. President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the U.S., and a creationist, Mohler isn’t even as intellectually sophisticated as William Lane Craig, and I don’t know why he’s on this list. They must have been desperate.

5. Alvin C. Plantinga. Plantinga, a philosopher who is a member of the Christian Reformed Church, may have done some good work in philosophy once, but now spends his days engaged in verbose Christian apologetics. His latest hobby-horse is the claim that Christianity must be true because only the Christian God could have given is the means (a sensus divinitatis) to detect truth. Evolution, he claims, gives us no reliable way to form beliefs about what is true. He’s wrong. And he also has sympathies for intelligent design. He’s smart in the way that a good t.v. huckster is smart: he’s able to take advantage of people’s psychological weaknesses to sell his product.

6. John C. Polkinghorne. Once a physicist, now an Anglican priest and theologian, Polkinghorne works on showing that faith and science are in harmony. If you’ve read his stuff, you’ll find it unremarkable: the standard accommodationist pap.

7. Jonathan Sacks. Sacks was Chief Rabbi of the Commonwealth, and is still a rabbi as well as a visiting professor of theology in London. I don’t know much about him except, like all Sophisticated Rabbis, he’s very slippery in debate about saying what he actually believes.

8. Richard Swinburne is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Oxford, has a reputation as perhaps the greatest living philosopher of religion, and has written many works of apologetics as well as adducing philosophical evidence for God. He’s surely smart, but what can you say about a guy who misuses his gifts to prove the nonexistent?

9. Charles M. Taylor, a Catholic, is more a philosopher than a theologian, I think, though he’s spent much of his life attacking scientism and naturalism, and has nabbed the Templeton Prize (a mark of shame). I can’t speak about his other philosophical achievements, but I haven’t been impressed by his criticism of naturalism.

10. Peter van Inwagen is an Episcopalian philosopher of religion at the University of Notre Dame. Much of his work, which I’ve read (and it’s couched in tedious prose!) deals with the Problem of Evil, and how that comports with an omnipotent and loving god. I’ve discussed his theological arguments on this website (see here and here),  His arguments for why God finds it necessary to make animals feel pain, and why God is hidden, are unintentionally hilarious.  Clever, yes; intellectually sound, no.

11. Joseph A. Ratzinger. (Pope Benedict XV). WTF?

Others

1. Phillip E. Johnson, a Presbyterian, has no claim, to my mind, to being on this list. He is, as most of you know, the Father of Intelligent Design (his book Darwin on Trial was instrumental in the ID movement), and the force behind the notorious Wedge Document, a strategy for replacing naturalism as taught in science classes with Christianity and Jesus. Although he was a professor of law at Berkeley, I am aware of no contributions he’s made to jurisprudence. And really, does someone deserve kudos for spreading lies? Here’s how the website characterizes his contributions:

“A well-recognized legal scholar in the field of criminal law, Johnson is best known for his critique of Darwinian naturalism. Johnson’s book Darwin on Trial sparked what has come to be known as the Intelligent Design movement. His debates with prominent atheists who appeal to evolutionary theory to undermine religious faith (e.g., Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Weinberg, and Will Provine) are legendary. A figure of controversy, Johnson deserves much of the credit for the informed critique of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory that is rapidly growing among American intellectuals (even if many of the contemporary critics of Darwinism, such as Thomas Nagel, reject Johnson’s views on intelligent design).”

2. “Condolleezza” Rice. The site misspells her name, giving her two “l”s instead of one. An evangelical Protestant, Rice has a long record of accomplishment in government and politics, and was provost at Stanford. She’s surely smart, though I’d prefer that she’d used her intelligence in the service of enlightenment and liberalism rather than American conservatism and imperialism.

3. Marilynne Robinson, a Congregationalist, is a superb writer who has crafted at least two great novels (Housekeeping and Gilead, which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction). I’ve read them both and enjoyed them immensely. But she went off the rails with her religiosity, going after Darwinism and “scientism.” Her book Absence of Mind, a critique of atheism and scientism, was, to my mind, simply a rant.

A Polish kitten does monologues

August 17, 2014 • 4:59 am
My friend Malgorzata in Poland was visited by her friend, a local teacher who brought along a young kitten whom she had rescued and decided to give a forever home. The kitten, who had been abandoned, was skinny and ill, but the vet is now fixing him right up, and he’ll be fine.
 
The teacher has named the kitten Leon, and, in an imitation of  the Hili dialogues, posts a Leon Monologue every few days on her Facebook page. I won’t put them up regularly, as of course the Princess gets pride of place, but I thought the first three deserved to be shown. So here’s Leon with his questions and plaints (also in Polish), beginning with Malgorzata’s explanation:
His human’s name is Elzbieta Wierzbicka and she teaches Polish language in the school in Dobrzyn. She had another cat, also rescued but as an adult, Bruno, who went for a walk a few months ago and never returned. After looking for him everywhere possible she acknowledged the sad fact that Bruno will not return. Then she saw an ad that animal shelter has a 7-week-old abandoned kitten who needs special care and she took him.
1.

When I just sit, do I still grow?

10570318_808101502543786_6407756076001119125_n

 
Gdy tak sobie siedzę, to rosnę?
*******
2.
Do not call me “my little one”. I’m 9 weeks old!
10576906_808522219168381_2574972083320241104_n
 
Nie mów do mnie “Mój Malutki”. Mam już 9 tygodni!
 *******
3.
What? You didn’t buy the liver?
10351377_809469505740319_785313753923672836_n
Jak to, nie kupiłaś wątróbki?
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Love
M.

 

Readers’ wildlife photographs

August 17, 2014 • 4:10 am

I’m feeding birds as well as squirrels, and most of those birds turn out to be house sparrows (Passer domesticus). They’re skittish—far more so than the squirrels—so I have to hide a bit to watch them on the windowsill. And I think they’re gorgeous birds.  The males are clad in different shades of brown, and the females are small and cute.

Reader Diana MacPherson obviously agrees, and she sent me some photos and commentary on a pair of juvenile sparrows pestering their dad for food. Her captions are indented:

Some more baby birds have emerged & I photographed some of the baby House Sparrows  (or what I call English Sparrows – Passer domesticus) hanging around & also being fed by their dad. The last pictures are funny as only one baby gets fed & the one who doesn’t receive the seed is not impressed at all!

Two baby house sparrows huddling together on a chilly, rainy day.

270A6503

A baby English Sparrow with her dad.

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Baby English sparrow with dad [begging for noms]:

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Baby English Sparrow being fed by dad while sibling is annoyed.

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Baby that didn’t get the seed seems to say, “Hey, where’s MY seed?!”

270A6517

Dad has had enough of these demanding babies!

270A6518

The wonders of genetics: a seedless melon

August 16, 2014 • 12:27 pm

I haz a big melon:

Melon
It’s a selfie!

And it’s seedless!!

There’s nothing better on a hot summer day than digging into the sweet, scarlet, crunchy meat of a chilled watermelon. And it’s even better when the watermelon is seedless: no spitting and less mess. We didn’t have seedless watermelons when I was a kid, so it’s still a great treat for me to eat one. And it’s even better when they’re like the one above, which I got at the produce store this morning. It must weigh at least 12 pounds, and cost only $3.59. I’ll get at least seven evening treats out of that puppy.

Seedless watermelons are in fact a triumph of genetics, for you can really design them de novo. You just double the chromosome number of a regular watermelon, so that instead of two sets of chromosomes it has four. The methods, outlined in this article, are simple: they involve treating watermelon seedlings with colchicine, a chemical derived from crocuses that inhibits cell division. By so doing, you can produce watermelon plants that have cells with 44 instead of the normal 22 chromosomes. These plants are called “tetraploids,” for they have four instead of the normal two sets of chromosomes (“diploids”).

When those cells produce flowers, the pollen (or eggs) in those flowers will have ½  X  44, or 22 chromosomes, while the pollen or eggs of a normal diploid watermelon will have ½ X 22 = 11 chromosomes. If you cross pollen of the latter to eggs from an engineered tetraploid melon, the zygote, or fertilized seed, will have 11 + 22 = 33 chromosomes. That seed can grow into a normal plant: a watermelon with three sets of chromosomes, called a triploid.

But when that triploid melon itself tries to make seeds, it has to do so through the process of meiosis, the same way we make sperm and eggs. That process begins with the members of chromosome sets pairing together in the cell before they split up for the reduction division. And if you have three representatives of each chromosome instead of the normal two, they don’t pair properly. When that happens, a normal female egg cell can’t form, and you get tiny, aborted seeds. In other words, triploid melons are sterile. They are the mules of fruit. (This is exactly how modern bananas are produced as well: they are also triploids, engineered to get rid of the seeds of their wild ancestors. When you cut across a banana and see those black specks in the middle, those are the aborted banana seeds.)

Ergo, we have a tasty triploid melon that lacks seeds: just what we want. The only problem is this: how do we grow more of them if they are sterile? Farmers get the triploid seeds from horticultural companies that produce them by the colchicine + crossing process. (Farmers can’t be bothered with all that technical stuff.)

The process is also described in a “Fun facts” FAQ from the National Watermelon Promotion Board. Their description starts out okay:

Where do seedless watermelons come from?

Seedless watermelons were invented over 50 years ago, and they have few or no seeds. When we say seeds, we are talking about mature seeds, the black ones. Oftentimes, the white seed coats where a seed did not mature are assumed to be seeds. But this isn’t the case! They are perfectly safe to swallow while eating, and don’t worry – no seeds will grow in your stomach.

So, how are seedless watermelons grown? Chromosomes are the building blocks that give characteristics, or traits, to living things including plants and watermelons. Watermelon breeders discovered that crossing a diploid plant (bearing the standard two sets of chromosomes) with a tetraploid plant (having four sets of chromosomes) results in a fruit that produces a triploid seed. (Yes, it has three sets of chromosomes). This triploid seed is the seed that produces seedless watermelons!

But then they screw it up. Can you spot the error, or at least the confusion, in the following paragraph?

In other words, a seedless watermelon is a sterile hybrid which is created by crossing male pollen for a watermelon, containing 22 chromosomes per cell, with a female watermelon flower with 44 chromosomes per cell. When this seeded fruit matures, the small, white seed coats inside contain 33 chromosomes, rendering it sterile and incapable of producing seeds. This is similar to the mule, produced by crossing a horse with a donkey. This process does not involve genetic modification.

Note too the somewhat duplicitous statement that seedless watermelon is not a genetically modified food. It sure is! Colchicine treatment, crossing, and so on, are all modifications of the genetic complement of a melon, and what you finally eat has three sets of chromosomes instead of two. How is that  not genetic modification? The fear of GMOs, always greatly exaggerated, has gone too far, scaring even the National Watermelon Promotion Board.

At any rate, eating watermelon is much better for you than eating the other summer treat I love: ice cream (Breyer’s strawberry, please). Watermelon is nutritious and rich in lycopene. Here’s the nutritional information for a “standard serving”: two cups. (I probably eat twice that much.):

Screen Shot 2014-08-16 at 12.58.20 PM

Note: only 80 calories. By comparison, a small pot of Greek yogurt (125 g) has about 144 calories.

Oy vey! I intended to just show the picture of my bargain watermelon, and look what happened. I went too far. But that reminds me of a joke, one I’ve told before:

An elderly rabbi, having just retired from his duties in the congregation, finally decides to fulfill his lifelong fantasy–to taste pork. He goes to a hotel in the Catskills in the off-season (not his usual one, mind you), enters the empty dining hall and sits down at a table far in the corner.  The waiter arrives, and the rabbi orders roast suckling pig.

As the rabbi is waiting, struggling with his conscience, a family from his congregation walks in!  They immediately see the rabbi and, since no one should eat alone, they join him.

Shocked, the rabbi begins to sweat.  At last, the waiter arrives with a huge domed platter. He lifts the lid to reveal-what else?–roast suckling pig, complete with an apple in its mouth.

The family gasp in shock and disgust, and quickly turn to the rabbi for an explanation.

“This place is amazing!” cries the rabbi. “You order a baked apple, and look what you get!”

I’ll be here all year, folks.

The bottom of the creationist barrel: the Argument from Photoshopped Cow

August 16, 2014 • 10:47 am

This does not appear to be a joke, but a picture of a Photoshopped cow that, according to the website Creation Moments, is good evidence for the Great Designer:

While doing some research on the Internet recently, we came across this photo of a cow bearing a detailed map of the world on its hide. Was the cow born with these markings or are the spots the handiwork of a skilled Photoshop artist?

Cow_world_map1

Given the presence of Madagascar, New Zealand, Cuba, Japan, and every other feature of the globe, the parsimonious explanation would be Photoshop. Only a creationist would leave even a tiny bit of doubt about that hanging in the air. But even if it’s just a put-up job, it’s still evidence for God!

Obviously, this cow’s spots were put there by a designer. But our question for evolutionists is this: If you agree that the cow’s spots are designed, why won’t you agree that the actual cow – which is so much more complex than the arrangement of its spots – was designed as well?

Evolutionists and atheists will agree that the pattern of the cow’s spots was designed, but they will not agree that the cow itself was designed. That’s because they are committed to their faith – yes, faith! – built on the premise that there is no Designer. Though they can see the complexities of nature all around them, they say that everything was the result of mindless, natural processes.

And that’s why Darwinists have a cow whenever they hear a Bible-believing Christian say that things which appear to be designed actually are designed! If they weren’t so biased against God, they’d know that the cow’s spots reveals the incredibly huge blind spot in their own minds.

The response is short: we have a good theory for how something complex like a cow could arise via purely naturalistic processes. And we have evidence for that theory. We have no good naturalistic theory for how a cow could develop a perfect replica of a world map on its flanks.

JEBUS!

h/t: Steve