Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
It has been a long day, and Professor Ceiling Cat is dispirited. This calls for both a penguin and a cat. The penguin’s first.
Matthew Cobb sent me this tw**t from “General bollocks” which included a funny flash video of a penguin (I think it’s an Adelie) attacking a man. The penguin is so aggressive that the man stumbles backwards and falls. I couldn’t find a way to include the flash (you can see the original here), but of course I found the very short video of the penguin attack is on YouTube (below).
I’d love to be attacked by a penguin, for my second Big Dream (beyond petting a baby tiger or lion) is to visit the Antarctic. I have swum with penguins in the Galápagos, but have never encountered them on land. And besides, swimming with penguins entails this: watching a dark shape, followed by a stram of bubbles, zip by so fast you can’t see what it is.
I knew that in 1978 the Mormon leadership, which had previously barred blacks from being priests (Mormons have a lay priesthood, and blacks were allowed to be members but not priests), did a 180° theological turn. Blacks were suddenly allowed to be priests because of a convenient “revelation” that was experienced by the elders. It happened when the exclusion of blacks was no longer tenable in a democratic egalitarian society, when the Civil Rights Act was already 14 years old, and when the Church was planning to expand into Brazil, ripe territory for converts but one with a distressing number of un-priestable blacks. (There were few black Mormons in the U.S. before 1978.) So God apparently changed his mind.
At any rate, I didn’t know until this morning that Mormons still prohibit women from becoming priests. That, too, is untenable, and it’s causing trouble in the Church. The details are given in an op-ed by Mormon writer Cadence Woodland in yesterday’s New York Times, “The end of the ‘Mormon moment.'”
Woodland details some of the embarrassing moments that caught the church with its pants down, exposing its Magic Underwear. One was its support of Prop 8 in California, banning gay marriage. Another was the excommunication of Kate Kelly, a Mormon lawyer who had called for the church to allow women to be priests. She was excommunicated for—get this—apostasy! Has Utah turned into Saudi Arabia now?
How nice that they have a pipeline to God’s will! Of course this is going to have to change, just as the prohibition of priesthood for blacks changed, and then how will they rationalize that given the statement above? Did God change his mind? All the Sophisticated Theologians™ tell me that god doesn’t do that. He has no emotions (despite the wrathful and jealous God of the Old Testament) and he is steadfast and unchangeable (despite process theology).
Mormon women are demanding more equality and more participation in the church. One of them was Woodland, who signed up with Kelly’s “Ordain Women” movement. According to Woodland:
Like Ms. Kelly, I believe that the fundamental structural, cultural and spiritual inequalities Mormon women face can be rectified only if they are ordained as priests.
Well, that’s a non-negotiable demand, but it’s not going to rectify the inequalities—not as long as Mormon women are treated as breeding stock, as so many of them are. When I was in high school I went out with a Mormon girl, who immediately tried to convert me (on our second date, she took me to her home and her family showed me movies on how great it was to be a Mormon). About a year ago I looked her up on the internet just for fun (the Mormons, you know, are great believers in genealogy), and found that she had nine children!
Woodland wasn’t excommunicated, but she was shunned:
Though I have not been disciplined, I have lost friends, and my views have strained more than one close relationship. I have been lucky to enjoy the unfailing support of my husband, but friends and some family members have cautioned me against my outspoken unorthodoxy. My faith, not just in the good will of church leadership but in the central message of Mormonism, has crumbled. In December, I stopped attending services. I have no plans to return.
But Woodland realizes something that the Church leadership apparently doesn’t: if they buck the tide of modernity, especially of the established view that women and minorities are not inferior to white men, they will lose members. This is what will kill the Catholic Church eventually, though they’re buying time with incursions into South America and Africa.
The lesson is that, in Western society, morality comes from Englightenment values based on secular reason, and the Church simply trails on behind, like a cat dragged on a leash, tugging against social pressures. If the Church really were a force for good, they wouldn’t have waited until 1978 to allow blacks to be priests (the prohibition, of course, was based on Scripture), and they’d give women full religious equality—NOW. Woodland sees what will happen, though she doesn’t draw the lesson about where morality and gender equality really come from:
The church will continue to lose members like me until it realizes that messages about diversity and inclusion are hollow when excommunication and censorship are the responses to dissent. While the church invests in missionary work, especially overseas, an unwelcoming posture is likely to hinder its growth.
The true legacy of the Mormon Moment might just be that the church was given the chance that many religious institutions desperately need to stay relevant in the 21st century: the opportunity to open itself to criticism and inquiry. The church has chosen not to. And it has killed its own moment by doing so.
I await the next Convenient Revelation from the elders about women.
Today we’ll leave the asterisk out of “dog,” for I just saw a pictorial post on BuzzFeed that made me weep. It’s called “I died today,” by Duke Roberts. Duke Roberts was a dog with terminal cancer, and the sequence of pictures shows his last day on earth, including his final injection.But he had a great day, and didn’t seem to be in much pain. They even gave him a last meal: a whole plate of cheeseburgers:
Now DO NOT READ THE ARTICLE if you don’t want to burst into tears, for if you have a sentient bone in your body, you will. It’s not the sadness alone, but the love that the people showed to their dog. Like cats, they’re family, too, and though I wouldn’t own one, I understand perfectly how Duke’s owners felt.
In August of 2012 I wrote about the Templeton Foundation’s funding of an “Immortality Project,” in which a philosopher at the University of California at Riverside was given 5.1 million dollars to head a consortium of academics studying the afterlife, its ramifications, its possible existence, and its influence on people’s behavior. The studies also included Near Death Experiences (NDEs), and the possibility that they might say something about our life after death. There were also some real science projects. Well, maybe the research on “immoral” invertebrates can help us live forever (I doubt it), but funding theologians for this endeavor is just a waste of money.
At any rate, part of the dosh was just handed out to a philosopher at Christopher Newport University in Hampton Roads, Virginia. It was reported in the local paper, and a reader sent me a scan of the Daily Press‘s front page story, with the reader’s addendum:
A philosopher at Christopher Newport U. got some money from the Templetons to study “philosophies of the afterlife.” OK. No problem. The comparative study of views of the afterlife is a legitimate cultural pursuit. My issue is with the treatment of the story. You can see from the attached jpeg of today’s front page. The headlines make it seem like this guy and his collaborator (from Regent University) are taking direct observations of Valhalla, the Pearly Gates, the place where dead terrorists get all those virgins, the LDS Celestial Kingdom, etc. Of course, they’re not “seeking answers,” they’re just using 57 grand to ponder the same old pointless questions. And it’s part of the Immortality Project, which seems to toss poor defenseless hydras into a mix with human near-death experiences.
I thought to myself that this front page is a good example of the media’s role in the process by which philosophical matters become transmogrified into woo.
Note the subheadline, which explicitly presumes the afterlife is real (“What is the hereafter like”?) and that questions about it will be answered by the Templeton-funded professor. I wonder if Professor Silverman has clarified this misconception in a letter to the paper.
Anyway, I was told the story was behind a paywall, but I found it here. The sub-project sounds pretty dire:
The Christopher Newport University professor [Eric Silverman] received a $57,000 grant from The Immortality Project, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation and University of California at Riverside, to study philosophies of the afterlife. Silverman is working with Regent University professor Ryan Byerly on the project, which they hope will lead to a published anthology with several contributing writers.
“Anything that we come up with, there’s some speculation here, there’s no getting around that,” Silverman said.
Silverman said many Western concepts of the afterlife are rather disappointing.
“It’s not a very attractive view. You have these images of an afterlife that is kind of less real than the real life — clouds floating around semi-isolated, not really doing very much,” he said. “I understand the reasons for the metaphors, but they’re kind of crass metaphors if you really think about it.”
Silverman hopes by using philosophical concepts, some new ideas can be found on what paradise would be like.
“Can you become a better person morally? What would the afterlife be like constitutionally? Is it a material physical life, is it immaterial, are there institutional structures?” Silverman said. [JAC: I have no words to respond to this]
“There’s a whole series of questions that are worth pursuing and really have not been dug into, at least not in a philosophical way in the past century,” he said.
“Some speculation here”? Now that is the understatement of the year! And it’s a great pity that some people’s concepts of the afterlife, FOR WHICH THERE IS NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER, are disappointing. I myself could envision a wonderful afterlife, engaged in great conversations with people like Spinoza (of course we’d all speak the same language, whatever that is), and having Szechuan food delivered to our clouds. Well, maybe it would get boring after a while—after all, it’s eternity, Jake!
The curious thing is that Silverman thinks that by using philosophy he is going to find out what the afterlife is like. This is what gives philosophy a bad name, and I’d be delighted if people like Michael Ruse (or, more likely, Elliott Sober) would criticize this. Philosophy isn’t going to answer such questions, but perhaps a fertile imagination combined with wish-thinking will.
This $57,000 is an indefensible waste of money. But i have no doubt that some commenters will justify this kind of investigation, and perhaps Eric MacDonald will as well. After all, such studies could tell us about human truths, and give us a kind of knowledge that is simply inaccessible to “naturalism.”
But wait! There’s more:
Silverman, who is a Christian, said religion inevitably plays a role in any discussion of afterlife, but he and Byerly’s work is not focused on trying to do a comparative study of views from faiths such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism.
“Anything we come up with that’s likely to be true should be compatible with mainstream religion in general,” he said. “That’s what would we hope.”
Now how are they going to know what is “likely to be true” among the things they “come up with”? That, in a nutshell, is the problem of theology. And their attempts to force whatever they make up into the Procrustean bed of “mainstream religion” shows that their project is doomed from the start, for they already have determined that their results must be compatible with already-existing fiction. That isn’t objective investigation, but apologetics. What an embarrassment for the University!
I’m sure, however, that Templeton doesn’t mind the misleading reporting about their project in papers like The Daily Press. After all, the public desperately wants to believe there’s a heaven, which accounts for the over-the-top sales of books like Proof of Heaven and Heaven is For Real. I think Templeton would be delighted that people think their project somehow vindicates the reality of the afterlife—all the while declaiming, as does the guy in the video below, that of course the Foundation is not presuming an afterlife.
Here’s a video of the project’s principal investigator, philosophy professor John Martin Fischer:
Note that some money goes to theologians, and note also how he hedges about the possibility of an afterlife. Nevertheless, there’s that tiny bit of plumping for The Big Questions that Science Can’t Answer. As Fischer says:
“They [near-death experiences, or NDEs] point to the possibility that our own physical world—our own natural world—is more wonderful and complex, and perhaps mysterious and beautiful than we might have imagined: that they don’t necessarily and obviously point to the existence of an afterlife.”
Well, the phenomenon of NDEs itself, which has been known for a long time, already tells us that the workings of the mind at the point of death are fascinating (but not necessarily “wonderful”), yet we already know some explanations for those experiences.. So we already know about the “wonder and complexity” of the human brain evinced by NDEs. I doubt, though, that Fischer and his team are going to find out what physiological changes cause NDEs. No, they’re clearly aiming at the numinous.
In the article, Fischer avers that because he’s getting flak from both atheists and religionists he’s on the right track. As he says, “We get criticized from all sides, which probably means we’re doing just the right thing,” Fischer said. “As a philosopher, for me disagreement is a good thing.”
Not if you’re wasting money investigating fiction! This “we must be right” trope is simply crazy, and especially crazy for a philosopher. While doubt is a good tool for getting at the truth, you can’t always take universal criticism as a sign that you’re right. They might have laughed at Edison, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
When I was working as a pastor I would often gloss over the clash between the scientific world view and the perspective of religion. I would say that the insights of science were no threat to faith because science and religion are “different ways of knowing” and are not in conflict because they are trying to answer different questions. Science focuses on “how” the world came to be, and religion addresses the question of “why” we are here. I was dead wrong. There are not different ways of knowing. There is knowing and not knowing, and those are the only two options in this world. Religion, even “enlightened” liberal religion, is generally not interested in the facts on the ground. Religion is really not about “knowing” anything; it is about speculation not based on reality.
Here’s a video of Mike Aus “coming out” as a nonbeliever for the very first time—on MSNBC, a national television station. He shows the slow attrition of faith described by other former pastors like Dan Barker and Jerry DeWitt. Note also that he gives credit to Pinker and Dawkins for his “deconversion.” So much for the claim that vociferous atheists are ineffective in bringing believers to science (and nonbelief).
I can always count on Stephen Barnard of Idaho to come through with nice pictures, and this set next in the queue. (Thanks to readers who sent me photos. Some will be published soon, but remember that not every picture sent it will be published.)
Here we have a bird and a mammal (click all photos to enlarge):
The mountain cottontail is solitary perhaps because food is a limiting factor and shelter in their environment can be sparse. It is active and on the move all year long, looking for areas with an ample food supply. The animal is crepuscular and feeds in or near sheltering brush. Severe weather limits their ability to gather food. Because food and sometimes moisture is sparse, energy is very important. The animal uses less than ten percent of its energy during the reproductive season to mate. After the mating season, males often become more secretive and stealthy. Females, however, are equally active throughout the year.
When the animal is frightened it runs several meters to an area where it can hide and freezes with its ears erect to assess the situation of danger. If the cottontail is further disturbed, it rapidly hops away and tries to trick the predator by running in a semicircular path.
. . . The gestation period is 28-30 days and the female can have four or five litters per year. The litter size is usually 4-8 but in California it is not unusual for a litter to consist of just two babies.
I suspect we’ll have a bit more of this stuff as the excitement of the World Cup tapers off. Elite Daily put up two more items related to The Chomper:
A Pac-Man game with his likeness was, somehow, created. Even well-respected companies couldn’t resists getting in on the fun, going out of their way to taunt the Liverpool star on social media.
And another one (why do people do this to themselves? Don’t they realize that in 20 years this will be not only stupid, but meaningless).
Over the weekend, one English fan posted a photo of his new, and dumb, ink; a tattoo that immortalizes the Suarez bitemark.
