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’s nearly the end of a long day, but I was productive (on another task!). We shall end Sunday with a sign of England’s solicitude for the cat. This is from a tw**t by Glenn Swann:
Yes, of course it’s made privately (if it’s a public sign, then I’m even more impressed!), but who cares?
And don’t forget: U.S. plays Portugal in 40 minutes.
Remember the creationist outside the Evolution meetings who handed out bananas with Bible verses on them yesterday? My ex-student Mohamed Noor (president of the Society), decided to respond by making evolution bananas, which were placed in the fruit bowl at the meetings. The Society issued an official tw**t:
Those of you who have studied evolution will recognize the gospels. I hope there was a Coyne and Orr 1989 (or 2004) and that somebody snatched it up. If those aren’t part of the canonical Gospels of Noor, I disown him.
Don’t worry; I’ll soon tire of this, but I was energized by Brian Cox’s exchange with Deepakity.
How can a man on safari in Africa still want to tw**t, much less broadcast nonsense like this?
If consciousness consists, as Chopra says, of subjective sensation, or “qualia,” then who gets your qualia after you die?
I’m never sure what the “Fr.” in front of a religionist’s name means, but I guess it means “Father,” denoting a priest. (I used to think it mean “Friar,” denoting a monk.) At any rate, one Fr. Aidan (Alvin) Kimel, an Eastern Orthodox Priest who no longer practices, has a website called Eclectic Orthodoxy, and has decided that my recent post on anthropomorphic gods needs to be refuted. Recall that the point of my post was that most ordinary believers seem to have an anthropomorpic notion of God: a God that has humanlike emotions, feelings and motivations.
But, says Fr. Kimel, that’s not all that the average believer thinks, and so he’s taken me to task in a post called “Jerry Coyne and his anthropomorphic God.”
His post is short, and I haven’t a lot to say about it, but I do want to emit a few words. First, let it be known that Kimel admits unashamedly that his God, and most people’s God, is indeed humanlike:
“But my point,” Coyne explains, “is that this is, in fact, how many Christians (and add to that Jews and Muslims) think of their god: as a person without a body. And that person has humanlike thoughts, feelings, and emotions.”
And of course he is absolutely right. This is how ordinary Christians think about the God whom they worship and serve. Our God is indeed personal, which is why we dare to pray to him, petition him, intercede with him, and seek to obey his commandments. Though this may leave us open to the ridicule of atheists like Mencken and Coyne, we sure aren’t going to apologize for our conviction nor are we going to philosophically qualify the divine personhood out of existence. We do not believe, will never believe, in an impersonal Deity.
But. . . . (of course there’s a “but”), there’s more! Kimel believes in a Ginsu God, one that’s humanlike but comes with a lot more!
But … and there is a crucial but here … we are also very much aware that God infinitely transcends all of our notions of personality and consciousness. God is God. If and when we do express ourselves incautiously about the divine nature and find ourselves speaking of God in purely anthropomorphic terms, the theologians of our respective traditions step in to correct us, typically through the catechetical teaching of our pastors.
Well, of course. Even the average Joe believes that God, while like a human, is also omnipotent, omniscient, and is perfectly good. Beyond that, I suspect, the average believer doesn’t think much. But Kimel argues that the concept of a humanlike God is purely a modern one:
There is a problem here, though. Sometimes pastors are not well-trained in the theology and are thus not well acquainted with the theological and spiritual tradition they are ordained to represent and teach. And to make matters worse, many only possess a modern understanding of God, popularly identified as theistic personalism. Theistic personalists often seem to relish in anthropomorphism.
I doubt this. After all, the God in the Bible is clearly anthropomorphic, and and I don’t know of any famous theologians, beginning with Augustine up to the 19th century, who thought that God was only a Ground of Being, lacking any aspects of a human being. After all, the Bible tells us that we’re made in the image of God. Does that only mean that we’re little Grounds of Being, too? I don’t think so. Now I may have missed some 15th-century apophatic theologians, but I’m pretty sure that a humanlike God is not a creature of modernity.
To correct the notion of an anthorpomorphic God, Kimel offers a quote from a single theologian, St. Anthony the Great:
The problem of the anthropomorphic rendering in Deity in the Scriptures has long been recognized in the theological tradition. How do we interpret the stories in which God gets angry or changes his mind and so on? The first thing we do, of course, is interpret them. Thus St Anthony the Great (fourth century), as quoted in the Philokalia:
“God is good, and passionless and immutable. If a man accepts it as right and true that God does not change, yet is puzzled how (being such) He rejoices at the good, turns away from the wicked, is angered with sinners and shows them mercy when they repent, the answer to this is that God does not rejoice and is not angered, for joy and anger are passions. It is absurd to think that the Deity could be helped or harmed by human deeds. God is good and does only good; He harms no one and remains always the same. As to ourselves, when we are good we enter into communion with God through our likeness to Him, and when we become evil, we cut ourselves off from God, through our unlikeness to Him. When we live virtuously we are God’s own, and when we become wicked, we fall away from Him. This does not mean that He is angry with us, but that our sins do not let God shine in us, and that they link us with the tormentors-the demons. If later, through prayers and good deeds, we obtain absolution of our sins, it does not mean that we have propitiated God and changed Him, but that through such actions and our turning to God we have cured the evil in ourselves and have again become able to partake of God’s goodness. Thus, to say that God turns away from the wicked is the same as to say that the sun hides itself from those who lose their sight”. (Texts on Saintly Life 150)
To Kimel, this quote has pwned me, or so he claims:
There’s nothing odd or unusual about Anthony’s correction of biblical anthropomorphism. One will find such corrections throughout the theological, homiletical, and ascetical tradition. This doesn’t mean that Christians do not believe in a personal Creator; but it certainly does mean that we understand the difference between God and a god—and we apparently understand this difference a lot better than does Dr Jerry Coyne.
In other words, God completely lacks emotion, nor is He altered by the world.
Well, Fr. Kimel, that’s a new one to me. You’ve managed to find one theologian who says that. How about others, starting with the Bible itself, which characterizes God as jealous, pleased, or angry? Is that a metaphor? What about the 18th-century pastor Jonathan Edwards, whose famous sermon “Sinners in the hands of an angry god” , delivered in 1741 in Enfield, Connecticut, terrified his parishoners, and continued to terrify many long after he was dead? Here’s a bit of that sermon; I’ve put in bold all the humanlike emotions—real, strong emotions—that, said Edwards, God experiences:
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.
What do you think of that, Fr. Kimel? Was Edwards wrong and St. Anthony right? How do you know? After all, the Old Testament is fully on Edwards’s side, isn’t it? In those books God gets jealous and angry all the time.
And as for God “remaining always the same,” I presume that Fr. Kimel has heard of process theology, no? That’s a form of theology, promoted by the mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, in which God is affected by his creatures and does change. Process theology has in fact experienced a kind of resurgence lately. Is that wrong, too, Fr. Kimel?
That’s all I have to say, for all these assertions about God aren’t based on anything other than wish-thinking and mental masturbation. If you want to go by scripture, then I win, for there God is a very emotional (as well as a brutal and narcissistic) character. If you want to go by what theologians say, all bets are off, for different theologians say different things about God. David Bentley Hart, for instance, would call Kimel’s notion of God completely naive.
I’ll say one more thing. If I can indulge in some Yiddish argot, I’ll add that I don’t know from God, Kimel doesn’t know from God, and nobody knows from God.
Today’s Doonesbury is a wicked slam at climate-change denialists:
This reminds me of an old and hilarious Doonesbury strip in which a TB-inflicted patient, a creationist, is asked if he wants the cure based on evolution.
h/t: Linda Grilli
I love the smell of atheist-bashing in the morning. Well, not really, but it’s an odor that is all too familiar when I open the morning email.
For a long time Salon has been the main online venue for atheist bashing, and one of their more avid bashers is Andrew O’Hehir, a staff writer. We’ve met him before when I reviewed an earlier Salon piece of his bewailing the “unnecessary” conflict, as he saw it, between science and religion. All you need to know about that earlier piece are two things: 1) he praises Terry Eagleton, and 2) he wrote this:
Creationists and other Biblical fundamentalists, needless to say, are having none of it: For them, the empirical realm is always and everywhere subservient to the revealed word of God. Meanwhile “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, along with their pop-culture sock puppet Bill Maher, espouse a similar view from the other direction. Their ahistorical or anti-historical depiction of religion is every bit as stupid as Ken Ham’s. Since there is nothing outside the empirical realm and no questions that can resist rational inquiry, the so-called domain of religion does not even exist. These debased modern-day atheists conflate all religion with its most stereotypical, superstitious and oppressive dogmas – a mistake that Nietzsche, the archangel of atheism, would never have made – and refuse to acknowledge that human life possesses a sensuous, symbolic and communal aspect that religion has channeled and accessed in a way no other social practice ever has. Strangely, their jeremiads urging the sheeple to wake from their God-haunted torpor haven’t won many converts.
Somebody should compile a “Manual for Bashing Atheists” (an analog of Peter Boghossian’s book), containing all these tired old bromides, which often include not only the claim that New Atheists see all religion as fundamentalism, but also fulsome praise for the “old,” “rational” atheists, like Camus, Sartre, and Nietzsche. But you get the tenor of O’Hehir’s thoughtless prose from the above. “Sheeple,” indeed! And “the domain of religion” does not even exist? Really? What, then, did Dawkins write about in The God Delusion? And what about the New Atheist depiction of religion as being “every bit as stupid as Ken Ham’s”? You have to be a few cards shy of a deck to say something like that.
Oh, and in his earlier piece O’Hehir also criticized an early episode of the new “Cosmos” for its treatment of Giordano Bruno:
Things can’t possibly be as bad on the scientific and rationalist side of the ledger, but they’re still confused and confusing. [Neil deGrasse] Tyson has made diplomatic comments about science and religion not necessarily being enemies, a halfway true statement that was never likely to satisfy anybody. (Meanwhile, “Cosmos” thoroughly botched the fascinating and ambiguous story of Giordano Bruno, a cosmological pioneer and heretical theologian burned by the Inquisition.)
As I said at the time, the depiction of Bruno was not (as O’Hehir interpeted it) a blanket takedown of religion, but of the inimical effects of dogma and superstition on science.
But that makes it all the more curious that OHehir’s just published in Salon a pretty worshipful telephone interview with Ann Druyan, the creator, writer, and producer of the popular new “Cosmos” series, which starred Neil DeGrasse Tyson. It’s a pretty good interview—on Druyan’s part, not O’Hehir’s, for he insists on turning the conversation to religion, what Druyan thinks about it, and whether she used the show to criticize it. But it’s worth hearing her take because she’s awesome.
First, though, O’Hehir has to get in his licks against New Atheism again—personified, as always, by the Satanic Richard Dawkins. Note that he slaps Dawkins around while pretending to praise Druyan (my emphasis):
One mistake Druyan never makes, either in “Cosmos” or anywhere else, is the arrogant historicism sometimes displayed by Richard Dawkins and other prominent scientific atheists. By that I mean the quasi-religious assumption that we stand at a uniquely privileged position of near-perfect scientific knowledge, with just a few blanks to fill in before we understand everything about the universe. “I’m sure most of what we all hold dearest and cherish most, believing at this very moment,” Druyan has said, “will be revealed at some future time to be merely a product of our age and our history and our understanding of reality.” Science as a process, as “the never-ending search for truth,” is sacred. But what we now know, or think we know, is always a matter for humility and doubt.
That paragraph is completely unnecessary in this interview; it’s there for one reason only: because O’Hehir is for some reason obsessed with New Atheism, which he despises. But notice that he simply misrepresents it by claiming that “prominent scientific atheists” have the “quasi-religious” belief that “we stand at a uniquely privileged position of near-perfect scientific knowledge, with just a few blanks to fill in before we understand everything about the universe.”
That, pardon my French, is complete bullshit. Think of some prominent scientific atheists: Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Steve Pinker, Sean Carroll, Steve Weinberg probably come to mind. Do any of them conform to O’Hehir’s stereotype, thinking that science is almost done understanding the Universe? Hell, no! O’Hehir is either clueless, and hasn’t read these people, or, more likely, is deliberately smearing them by pretending that they believe something they don’t. One characteristic of people like Dawkins and Carroll is that they’re constantly emphasizing the puzzles that still beset science: how little we know, and how far we have to go. I can’t tell you how nauseous I become when I read stuff like this.
Note also that O’Hehir characterizes science as “sacred,” which I see as a deliberate choice of words meant to analogize it with religion. Here are the first three definitions of “sacred” from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
Full Definition of SACRED
1a : dedicated or set apart for the service or worship of a deity <a tree sacred to the gods>b : devoted exclusively to one service or use (as of a person or purpose) <a fund sacred to charity>
2a : worthy of religious veneration : holyb : entitled to reverence and respect
3: of or relating to religion : not secular or profane <sacredmusic>
[O’Hehir]: Ann, I know I’m not the first person to bring this up, but you’ve done two versions of this show where, you know, a prominent male scientist was on-screen and you were behind the scenes. The first time around, of course, it was your husband, and this time it’s Neil Tyson. Because he’s standing in front of the cameras, everybody thinks of him as the creator of the show. What’s going on with that?
[Druyan]: That is a funny thing, isn’t that? I am a little bit surprised when critics, who I think are more likely to read the credits with some degree of attention, talk about the show as if Neil has had something to do with its inception or its writing. In the case of Carl it was different. Obviously Carl was the senior partner in conceiving the show with me and [astronomer] Steven Soter. And so, I mean, I am kind of taken aback. But then I look at the brilliance of Neil’s performance, and how unexpectedly he has taken what I wrote and given it its best possible expression on the show. So I love the guy. I guess that’s the plight of the writer. It is coming out of someone else’s mouth; people think it must be theirs. It’s a natural reaction.
This is what one says when one is a decent person but feels she’s been overlooked. And Druyan deserves more credit: she was the driving figure behind the “Cosmos” remake, and the main writer. When she worked with Sagan, they were full partners.
Her religion-dissing is also refreshing:
You’ve been pretty outspoken over the years about your views of religious myth and its relationship to science. You’ve talked at times about the desire to reclaim some of the sense of mystery or daring or even spirituality that could hypothetically be associated with science. Is this show to be considered as part of that struggle, as an attempt to recapture the mystery and power of science in the public imagination?
That’s beautifully said. And you know, I could speak to that. Yes, I mean, what always has surprised me personally is that the revelations about nature and the universe that science has presented to us are not just, you know, more likely to be better approximations of natural reality than we’ve gotten from any other source, but they’re also way more spiritually satisfying than anything we’ve ever been able to make up. You know, our interpretations of nature that are not rooted in nature at all and that are anthropocentric are kind of the infantile idealized visions of us as the center of the universe. As the children of a very disappointed father. [Laughter.]
O’Hehir bores in, determined to make some space for faith:
Well, I think people still look to religion as a zone for certain questions that science has no way to approach. You know, does the universe have some pattern or meaning behind it, even if we cannot discern it? Why is there something instead of nothing at all?
Oh, yes. Yes, that is Leibniz. That’s his favorite question. In “The Varieties of Scientific Experience” [a memoir co-authored by Druyan and Sagan], in the introduction, I wrote about that in the context of a note that I found in Carl’s handwriting. He had taken that paragraph [from Leibniz], summarized it and then written something in the margins. You know, Leibniz goes on to say, and I’m paraphrasing, “What would happen if we did not, you know, stop asking that question? Where would we go? We’d have to say God, because that’s the only place we could stop asking that question.”
So Carl wrote, in his beautiful Brooklyn public school handwriting, “So don’t stop.” I found that after his death, and it was like hearing his voice. And it was like, exactly, I couldn’t agree more. Why is God telling me to stop asking questions? When we defied God by tasting of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, that’s how we became ourselves. You know, God may not like that part of us, but I do.
The whole interview is worth reading. Druyan comes off as a thoughtful and talented woman, O’Hehir as a tendentious journalist with a double agenda of dissing New Atheism and sending up some flak at science.
h/t: Marella
Reader Diana MacPherson sent two pictures, a juvenile common grackle (Quiscalus quiscula) and a perching ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris; click both to enlarge):
This is a cute baby grackle (the babies are all out in full force). This guy has a seed his dad gave him after he squawked for food. I love the pretty shade of green of his eyes & I never noticed the green eye colour before.
This male ruby-throated hummingbird perched constantly on the thing that holds the hummingbird feeder. I think he’s a new guy because he took a bit to get comfortable with my camera. Look at his cute, tiny claws! I took a picture of the same male perched in a nearby tree in silhouette as well.
Here are its cute tiny feet, enlarged. This seems patently maladaptive: a hummingbird with bigger feet could find more perches!
At last, a game I want to see after work (US vs. Portugal)!
Yesterday was a shocker, and that’s becoming the norm. Iran held Argentina to a draw, until, in about the 92nd minute, Messi came through with a beautiful goal to win for Argentina. And Ghana held mighty Deutschland to a draw, 2-2. I watched half of the Argentina/Iran game (the last half, thank Ceiling Cat), and about the last 20 minutes of the Ghana/Germany game. I was much impressed with Ghana; they fought like tigers and were skillful passers. It was an exciting and fast-paced game—at least the part I saw.
Here’s today’s schedule:
Thanks to goddam FIFA, I can’t find any video of the four goals in the Germany/Ghana game, though I had one up last night. It was pulled. You can see the highlights here.
This is the best video I can find (damn FIFA!) of Messi’s last-minute goal, but it’s a good one: one side-step around a defender and then a powerful kick from a distance into the corner of the net. The goal occurs in the first 10 seconds, and you needn’t watch the rest.
Here’s today’s animated Google Doodle; click on the screenshot to see if the keeper makes a save:
