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.
Now it really is Monday, or at least I’m pretty sure. And NO RAIN: mostly sunny with a high of about 66°F (19°C). On May 16, 1943, the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto came to an end as the Nazis dynamited the Great Synagogue and then the buildings. 13,000 Jews were killed and the remaining 50,000 sent to the camps. Onl 300 Nazis died. Only two buildings remain in Warsaw; the outline of the former ghetto is inlaid in the street in bricks. On this day in 1975, Junko Tabei, a 35-year-old Japanese, became the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
Notable births on this day include the Russian Élie Metchnikoff (1845), who won the Nobel Prize, along with Paul Ehrlich, for their work in immunology. Those who died on this day include the great jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt (1953), Sammy Davis Jr. (1990), and puppeteer Jim Henson (1990; same day as Sammy).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is tattling on Cyrus:
A; What are you looking at?
Hili: Cyrus’s run off somewhere again without permission.
In Polish:
Ja: Czemu się tak przyglądasz?
Hili: Bo Cyrus znowu gdzieś pobiegł bez pozwolenia.
The PuffHo Religion and Science page is a real hoot—if you can stand its endless and annoying attempts to reconcile the two areas. It’s relentlessly accommodationist and invariably silly. Although the posts aren’t frequent, I saw a newer one today, which is both funny and sleazy, as it misrepresents Sagan’s views on religion.
The piece is “Listen to Carl Sagan open up about religion and the possibility of alien life,” by Carolyn Gregoire, a senior PuffHo writer. It points you to the Blank on Blank site (a production of the Public Broadcasting Service) and then to 6.5-minute audio, given below) of Sagan being interviewed by the late Studs Terkel. Here’s how PuffHo characterizes the video:
Sagan also touches on the age-old conflict between science and religion, rejecting a literal interpretation of the Bible as scientifically wrong, but noting that the two ways of thinking are ultimately about finding answers to life’s biggest questions — answers that may ultimately be less important than the questions themselves.
Well, that’s not exactly true. The fun begins at 3:29, when, after discussing the possibility of extraterrestrial life, Sagan notes that both religion and science are “after the same thing” (understanding the cosmos and our origins), but that religions all contradict each other about the facts. How, then, can you know which religion makes correct claims? There’s no way, says Sagan—unless science can adjudicate their claims. This, in fact, is one of the points of Faith Versus Fact.
After a brief ad, Sagan talks about Einstein’s “religion,” maintaining, as I think is the case, that the physicist saw God as “little more than the sum total of the laws of the universe.”
If you can find anything in this video substantiating Gregoire’s implication that the questions are more important than the answers, let me know. (I see that trope all the time, and still don’t know what it means. I think it’s a Deepity). And of course the summary doesn’t note at all that Sagan claims a priority of science over faith in finding those answers. Nope, PuffHo isn’t allowed to say stuff like that!
To see how little Sagan really thought of religion, read The Varieties of Scientific Experience (edited by Ann Druyan), which I consider one of Sagan’s best books—and one that’s sadly neglected. There he makes no bones about the uselessness of faith.
Reader Merilee called my attention to this video on Facebook, showing what appears to be a jaguar catching a crocodile. The cat simply leaps into the water and snags the beast, dragging it away for lunch. What an amazing feat, and what a brave cat!
Click on the screenshot to see the 44-second clip:
One of the main mistakes creationists make is arguing that if a vestigial trait is actually used for something, then it is neither vestigial nor gives us evidence for evolution. (Such features testify to common ancestry.) Both creationist claims are wrong. They rest on the false argument that if the appendix, for instance, actually has some useful function, then it can no longer be claimed as evidence for evolution—as a now-useless remnant of a much larger part of the intestine that was useful in our ancestors.
Why is that argument false? Because if a feature is an evolutionary modification of an obviously ancestral feature, like the flippers of penguins (which clearly evolved from wings), then it can be both useful and vestigial, and therefore testimony of evolution. It’s important that readers remember this, because creationists conveniently forget it.
One feature that can be both vestigial and useful is the human appendix. Once thought to be not only useless, but positively detrimental (our ancestors died from its inflammation), we’re now finding that it has some use, as it contains immune-system cells that may serve as a refuge for useful bacteria, bacteria that can repopulate our gut if it’s wiped clean by diseases like cholera. A February article on the science site Cosmos—unfortunately called “The Appendix—Darwin’s Mistake“—points out increasing evidence that the appendix has a function.
Author and physician Norman Swan writes this in Cosmos:
. . . over the last few years the thinking has changed. The appendix turns out not to be an evolutionary curiosity but a handy little organ with the potential to resuscitate the bowel. Back in 2007, researchers at Duke University in North Carolina proposed that the appendix was actually a “safe house” for normal gut bacteria that could be put to use when the bowel had been devastated by, say, an infection such as cholera and needed to be repopulated by healthy bacteria.
The Duke group had found colonies of protective microbes known as biofilms were disproportionately produced by the appendix. Ironically, the immune cells found in the gooey mucous lining of the appendix and bowel actually help these biofilms to form.
If this theory were true then people without an appendix might be more vulnerable to dangerous gut infections. A study a few years later found evidence for this. People who’d had their appendix removed were significantly more likely to suffer recurrently from the serious and potentially life-threatening recurrent Clostridium difficile infection.
. . . the lining of the appendix contains a newly discovered class of immune cells known as innate lymphoid cells. Other lymphoid cells must be specifically tuned to attack the latest strains of bacteria or viruses, but these cells come ready wired to respond to the wide range of biological insults that flow down the intestines from our daily diet.
Experimenting in mice, the researchers found that these innate lymphoid cells were critical to maintaining the tissue around the caecum. If the cells were removed, the caecum shrank, suggesting they played a vital role for the integrity of the tissue. They also found that mice without these innate lymphoid cells were more vulnerable to a pathological
gut infection. This supports the study I mentioned earlier where patients without their appendix were more likely to suffer from recurrent C. difficile infections.
Darwin mentioned in The Descent of Man that the appendix is “useless” and “a rudiment”, as well as being variable, so that humans have really different sizes of their appendixes, and some have none at all.
Was he wrong about the appendix being evidence for evolution? No. Yes, he was wrong about its being “useless”, but not about its variability or its status as a rudiment of the larger appendixes in our herbivorous relatives.
Granted, the data above might be true, but that doesn’t detract from the appendix’s use as evidence for evolution. Yet creationists love finding that rudimentary organs may still be useful for something, as they think (not very clearly, as usual) that if something has a use, it can’t possibly be vestigial.
In fact one creationist website takes this quote from Why Evolution is True to show that the evidence for evolution is weak:
We humans have many vestigial features proving that we evolved. The most popular is the appendix… our appendix is simply the remnant of an organ that was critically important to our leaf-eating ancestors, but is of no real value to us.
But the whole section, appearing on pages 60 and 61, notes that the appendix may have a function:
We humans have many vestigial features showing that we evolved. The most famous is the appendix. Let’s look at it closely. Known medically as the vermiform (“worm shaped”) appendix, it’s a thin, pencil-sized cylinder of tissue that forms the end of the pouch, or caecum, that sits at the junction of our large and small intestines. Like many vestigial features, its size and degree of development are highly variable: in humans, its length varies from about an inch to over a foot. A few people are even born without one.
In herbivorous animals like koalas, rabbits, and kangaroos, the caecum and its appendix tip are much larger than ours. This is also true of leaf-eating primates like lemurs, lorises, and spider monkeys. The enlarged pouch serves as a fermenting vessel (like the “extra stomachs” of cows), containing bacteria that help the animal break down cellulose into usable sugars. In primates whose diet includes fewer leaves, like orangutans and macaques, the caecum and appendix are reduced. In humans, who don’t eat leaves and can’t digest cellulose, the appendix is nearly gone. Obviously the less herbivorous the animal, the smaller the caecum and appendix. In other words, our appendix is simply the remnant of an organ that was critically important to our leaf-eating ancestors, but of no real value to us.
Does an appendix do us any good at all? If so, it’s certainly not obvious. Removing it doesn’t produce any bad side effects or increase mortality (in fact, removal seems to reduce the incidence of colitis). Discussing the appendix in his famous textbook The Vertebrate Body, the paleontologist Alfred Romer remarked dryly, “Its major importance would appear to be financial support of the surgical profession.” But to be fair, it may be of some small use. The appendix contains patches of tissue that may function as part of the immune system. It has also been suggested that it provides a refuge for useful gut bacteria when an infection removes them from the rest of our digestive system.
But these minor benefits are surely outweighed by the severe problems that come with the human appendix. Its narrowness makes it easily clogged, which can lead to its infection and inflammation, otherwise known as appendicitis. If not treated, a ruptured appendix can kill you. You have about one chance in 15 of getting appendicitis in your lifetime. Fortunately, thanks to the evolutionarily recent practice of surgery, the chance of dying when you get appendicitis is only 1%. But before doctors began to remove inflamed appendixes in the late 18th century, mortality probably exceeded 20%. In other words, before the days of surgical removal, more than one person in a hundred died of appendicitis. That’s pretty strong natural selection.
So yes, the appendix may have a function, but it’s still a vestigial organ, and evidence for evolution. The only remaining question is this: is it a detrimental feature? Well, because of doctors it isn’t now, but it may well have been over the bulk of human evolution, as I note above. And that may be the reason it’s not only small but variable among people. Features that are crucial for our survival and reproduction don’t vary nearly that much. Perhaps its marginal use as a refuge for bacteria wasn’t useful enough to overcome the disadvantage of its being prone to infection.
Saying that there is a “function” to the appendix isn’t enough. To show that its presence is (or was) adaptive compared to its non-presence, you have to show that the benefits of having a bacterial refuge (in terms of future reproduction) outweighed the problems of having an infection-prone organ. And nobody has showed that. So, it’s still possible that the appendix, while vestigial and rudimentary (and highly variable: the sign of a feature, like wisdom teeth, that’s disappearing over time), may have been detrimental in our ancestors and is detrimental now.
Nevertheless, creationists continue to harp on a functionality of the appendix as disproving evolution. If there is a lesson from this post, just remember: THAT IS NOT TRUE.
But let us for the moment grant the creationists their argument: that the appendix is not a remnant of a useful feature, but a feature that evolved, or is maintained, by a net reproductive benefit to its carrier. Does that disprove evolution? Hardly, given the massive evidence for evolution from a gazillion other areas.
And there are features that don’t seem, even under scrutiny, to have any positive effect on your reproduction. If you want a feature that is almost certainly does not enhance fitness, try our vestigial ear muscles (also variable among people), or, better yet, the hundreds of “dead genes” that we harbor in our genome: genes that had a function in our ancestors but have been silenced. (Olfactory-receptor genes and yolk-protein genes in humans are two examples.) Let the creationists explain why the creator put nonfunctional “dead” genes in our DNA, and just those genes that are active and adaptive in our ancestors.
And seriously, Dr. Swan: “Darwin’s mistake?” What are you implying by that? As I said, it may well be true that, over the bulk of human evolution, having an appendix was, on net, detrimental. “Detrimental” is “worse than useless,” so Darwin might not have been so wrong after all.
UPDATE: Because people have suggested that I wrote this entire piece without having read any of Taunton’s book, let me add that I read the six pages about Hitchens given on the Times site, and, after writing it, have read substantial sections of the book that someone sent me. I am now well versed in what Taunton said, and I stand 100% by what I wrote below. The man was clearly intending to suggest that Hitchens, toward the end of his life, was softening on Christianity, and was keeping “two sets of books”. (There is in fact a chapter called “Two Books”). An excerpt from that chapter:
These divisions—or some might say “contradictions”—necessitated a keeping of “two books”—a phrase Hitchens would use quite often to describe various aspects of himself, his beliefs, and his relationships with other people. The original meaning of the phrase “keeping two sets of books” refers to a fraudulent bookkeeping method in accounting, where one set of books is public and one is private; the public book is made to appear in accordance with the law, while the private book records all the shady financial dealings behind the scenes.
The implication, in using this phrase in regard to himself [“keeping two books], is that the discovery of his private set of books would reveal that his public set of books were somehow fraudulent. The public and private Christophers did not match. To know what was really going on, one must see the private books—or so the phrase would imply (and Christopher was notably meticulous in regard to precision in words).
The reader already knows where I am going. As I’ve already noted, my private dealings with Christopher revealed a much different man than the public Christopher, the confident, bombastic, circuit-riding atheist-pugilist. While I do not quite want to say that the public Christopher was a sham—perhaps an occasional actor might be a better description—he said and did things in my company that would lead one to conclude that this public manifestation of Christopher Hitchens was not the real one.
And that chapter opens with this quote:
“God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.”
—SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET, ACT III, SCENE 1”
There’s no doubt, then, that Taunton claims that the Hitchens we saw and knew was not the real one—that only he knew the real Hitchens.
That’s malarkey, as of course it leaves out Hitchens’s editors, friends, colleagues, and wife, all of whom saw his private side, and none of whom agree with Taunton’s fairy tale.
_______________
Stories of deathbed conversions are always dubious, especially when they are recounted by the faithful, lack corroborating evidence, and involve a famous nonbeliever. Such was the case of Charles Darwin, an agnostic subject to widespread (and false) conversion stories. Creationists still propagate the lie that Darwin embraced God on his deathbed.
And such is now the case with the late Christopher Hitchens.
A “friend” of Hitchens, one Larry Alex Taunton, is profiting from rumors—rumors he revived—that Hitchens might have been turning to God after learning he had terminal cancer. Taunton is the founder of the Fixed Point Foundation, whose website states this:
The mission of Fixed Point Foundation is to defend and proclaim the Gospel in the secular marketplace and equip others to do the same. To that end, Larry Alex Taunton and the Fixed Point team have sponsored debates and symposia on topics ranging from atheism and Islam to gay marriage and the relationship between science and religion – bridging the sacred and the secular.
Hitchens was a man of many contradictions: a Marxist in youth who longed for acceptance among the social elites; a peacenik who revered the military; a champion of the Left who was nonetheless pro-life, pro-war-on-terror, and after 9/11 something of a neocon; and while he railed against God on stage, he maintained meaningful—though largely hidden from public view—friendships with evangelical Christians like Francis Collins, Douglas Wilson, and the author Larry Alex Taunton.
In The Faith of Christopher Hitchens, Taunton offers a very personal perspective of one of our most interesting and most misunderstood public figures. Writing with genuine compassion and without compromise, Taunton traces Hitchens’s spiritual and intellectual development from his decision as a teenager to reject belief in God to his rise to prominence as one of the so-called “Four Horsemen” of the New Atheism. While Hitchens was, in the minds of many Christians, Public Enemy Number One, away from the lights and the cameras a warm friendship flourished between Hitchens and the author; a friendship that culminated in not one, but two lengthy road trips where, after Hitchens’s diagnosis of esophageal cancer, they studied the Bible together. The Faith of Christopher Hitchens gives us a candid glimpse into the inner life of this intriguing, sometimes maddening, and unexpectedly vulnerable man.
I haven’t read it (except for the six pages given by the Times [see update above: I’ve now read a lot more]), but I’ve corresponded with several people who have, and have read the reviews (both on Amazon and in the press), and my impression was verified. Taunton is apparently cagey about his intent, but reviewers and others have clearly read his book as showing that Hitchens was, at the end of his life, coming around to religion. The book’s title, too, clearly implies that the man had a “faith.” Well maybe he did, but it was in rationality, not religious malarkey.
One of the pieces about Taunton’s book was written by Mark Oppenheimer in Friday’s New York Times. Note the title, and click on the screenshot to go to the piece:
(Note too that Oppenheimer has previously gone after New Atheism.) That article describes how Taunton drove around with Hitchens in the fall of 2010 (Hitchens died on December 15, 2011), all the while discussing the Bible. You can read an excerpt here, and it doesn’t at all suggest that Hitchens was becoming religious.
The Times describes the book further:
Based principally on these conversations, Mr. Taunton concluded that Mr. Hitchens was seeking — and that he was, at least, open to — the possibility that Christianity was true. Perhaps, Mr. Taunton writes, Mr. Hitchens “used his position as a journalist as a kind of professional cover for a very personal inquiry” into the faith.
Several Christian magazines have trumpeted Mr. Taunton’s work. In the Christian journal Books & Culture, Douglas Wilson wrote that “fewer things are sadder than the death of a defiant atheist,” yet Mr. Taunton’s “simply outstanding” book offers just enough hope for Hitchens’s salvation to make it useful for the church. “Ministers will be strengthened and evangelists encouraged,” he wrote.
Secular publications have been kind, too, with Publishers Weekly noting Mr. Taunton’s “smooth and accessible prose.”
But in an article by the Religion News Service last month, friends of Mr. Hitchens took exception with the book’s conclusions.
Steve Wasserman, a literary agent and editor, and an executor of Mr. Hitchens’s estate, described the book as “a shabby business” in which “unverifiable conversations” are made to “contradict everything Christopher Hitchens ever said or stood for.”
Here’s a quote from the Books & Culture review, which also takes Taunton’s book as showing Hitchens’s increasing sympathy for religion:
No one is saved because we think it would be grand if they were. Good wishes and pious guesses cannot cleanse what only the blood of Christ can cleanse—and the blood of Christ does nothing for the unrepentant. But from my interactions with Christopher, I did know that it was quite possible I had an attentive audience. From Larry Taunton’s book I have received the additional encouragement of knowing that the audience was clearly more attentive than I knew.
And from a piece by Kimberly Winston in Religion News Service (click on the headline to go to the piece):
Excerpt:
Before his death at 62, Christopher Hitchens, the uber-atheist and best-selling author of “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” considered becoming a Christian.
That is the provocative claim of “The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist,” a controversial new book winning both applause and scorn while underscoring, again, the divide between believers and atheists that Hitchens’ own life and work often displayed.
. . . Taunton writes that during the same time period, “Christopher had doubts … and those doubts led him to seek out Christians and contemplate, among other things, religious conversion.”
“At the end of his life, Christopher’s searches had brought him willingly, if secretly, to the altar,” Taunton writes at the end of the book. “Precisely what he did there, no one knows.”
After noting that some of Hitchens’s friends and colleagues poo-pooed this notion, Taunton defended himself:
Reached by phone at his home in Birmingham, Ala., Taunton stood firm in the face of such criticism. Asked about the fairness of publishing such claims about Hitchens after his death, he said: “The things that I relate, I think by and large I substantiate. What I am saying is this: If Christopher Hitchens is a lock, the tumblers don’t line up with the atheist key and that upsets a lot of atheists. They want Christopher Hitchens to be defined by his atheism, and he wasn’t.”
Well, pardon my French, but that’s pure bullshit. Who is claiming that Hitchens was defined by his atheism? And what does that even mean? Certainly Hitchens was a famous atheist, and was admired by many of us for his passionate defense of nonbelief, but that didn’t define him. He was a complex man, and other things that “defined” him were his liberal politics, his love of the Kurds, his hatred of dictatorship, his penchant for books, wine, and Mr. Walker’s amber restorative, as well as his many friendships and his belief in rationality. As for Taunton “substantiating” his claims, read the Times excerpt. Even if it’s genuine (and, of course, Taunton’s conversations with Hitch weren’t taped), it doesn’t show Hitchens drawing closer to Christianity. It shows him discussing the precepts of the faith. And, without a tape, how did Taunton remember so accurately what Hitchens said?
I was also surprised that one of the people who endorsed the book was Michael Shermer, whose words are on the Amazon page:
“If you really want to get to know someone intimately, go on a multi-day cross-country road trip, share fine food and expensive spirits, and have open and honest conversations about the most important issues in life. And then engage them in public debate before thousands of people on those very topics. In this engrossing narrative about his friendship with the atheist activist Christopher Hitchens, the evangelical Christian Larry Taunton shows us a side of the man very few of us knew. Apparent contradictions dissolve before Taunton’s penetrating insight into the psychology of man fiercely loyal to his friends and passionately devoted to leading a life of integrity. This book should be read by every atheist and theist passionate about the truth, and by anyone who really wants to understand Hitch, one of the greatest minds and literary geniuses of our time.” – Michael Shermer, Publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of The Moral Arc.
More about Shermer in a minute. First, though, Taunton’s revelations will surprise those who closely followed Hitchens’s bout with cancer up to the end, watching interviews like those below and reading his book Mortality, which has no mention of impending conversion. Here, for instance, are two interviews he gave during his cancer treatment. (Hitchens never said explicitly that he had a terminal illness, but he surely knew it, for stage 4 esophageal cancer—which has metastasized—has about a 0% survival rate.)
First, Hitchens’s interview with Anderson Cooper. The part transcribed below, when he talks about circling vultures like Taunton, begins at 7:58:
Cooper: Even when you’re alone, and no one else is watching, there might be a moment when you want to hedge your bets.
Hitchens: If that comes it’ll be when I’m very ill; when I’m half demented by drugs or by pain. I won’t have control over what I say — I mention this in case you ever hear a rumour later on — because these things happen, and the faithful love to spread these rumours. They want this deathbed conversion [mumbles]. I can’t say the entity that by then wouldn’t be me wouldn’t do such a pathetic thing, but I can tell you that, not while I’m lucid. No, I can be quite sure of that.
Cooper: So if there is some story that on your deathbed. . .?
Hitchens: Don’t believe it; don’t credit it.
Note that he predicted vultures like Taunton.
Here’s Hitchens’s interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. where the discussion of vultures begins at 2:45:
Why did Shermer endorse the book? As he says in a post on The Moral Arc: “The real Christopher Hitchens,” at the time Shermer thought his endorsement was a fair appraisal, but changed his mind in light of a) the reaction of the public to the book, which clearly showed that it was intended to be, and taken as, a “deathbed Christianity tome”; and b) Taunton’s subsequent statements defending his position that Hitchens was contemplating becoming religious.
Shermer, who knew Hitchens, was especially incensed by Taunton’s claim that Hitchens “kept two sets of books”, a reference to a duplicitous accounting practice, and one that implies similar duplicity on Hitchens’s part. As Taunton said, “[Hitchens] had two real aspects of his personality and of his real beliefs that existed in real tension: one that he would reveal to the public and another that he revealed only to certain people.”
I don’t believe that for a minute, as it goes against all existing data, and by “data” I mean the public record of his talks, what Hitchens wrote, and the testimony of Hitchens’s close friends. Yes, you can claim that in all of these cases Hitchens was lying, but I’ll credit the public record any day over the hearsay reportage of Taunton, a man dedicated to spreading Christianity.
In his article, Shermer explains Hitchens’s engagement with religion, and then formally withdraws his endorsement of the book:
On his road trips with Taunton Hitch was merely doing what he often did with people who differed with him—spend personal time with them in order to penetrate the public façade and see what is inside the private thoughts.
. . . You can learn so much more about a person’s real motives and motivated reasoning by talking to them off stage and off print than you can by limiting yourself to debating them in public and reading their published works. Particularly effective is to dine and drink with them because after a time they open up and reveal what they’re really thinking and feeling. This is not at all “keeping two sets of books” in the two-faced manner that phrase may imply to some people. It is just being friendly and respectful to better understand someone’s inner self.
I believe that is what Hitch did in general, and in particular with Taunton. Naturally, because he’s an evangelical, Taunton hopes that perhaps, possibly, maybe—just maybe—Hitch inculcated the gospel message from their discussions about the book of John (among other related topics) so that Hitch is spared eternal damnation.
Shermer’s last bit:
P.S. I gave Larry Taunton a chance to clarify what, exactly, he means by the “two sets of books” phrase: public/private distinction we all make or intentional deception concealing his true beliefs from the public and his closest friends and revealing his true beliefs to Taunton. Taunton responded: “I stand by what I’ve written, Michael. A few—very few—of the hateful atheist crowd have read it, but almost none of the trolls. That is a quotation that I allowed to be used in an article.” I personally find that interpretation unbelievable. I hereby withdraw my endorsement of the book and request that my blurb be discontinued from use.
In the Times piece, Taunton backs off a bit, claiming, as do all authors in such cases, that he was misunderstood:
In an interview, Mr. Taunton said that his rather modest claims were being misunderstood.
“I wasn’t at his deathbed,” Mr. Taunton, 48, said. “I think on that first road trip Christopher was contemplating conversion. Do I think he had a conversion? No.” By the second road trip, he said, the moment seemed to have passed.
While The Christian Post declared that, according to the book, Mr. Hitchens “was contemplating conversion to evangelical Christianity,” Mr. Taunton said that was wrong: Even if Mr. Hitchens had come to some sort of belief, it is not clear what he would have believed in. Jesus Christ? An indescribable higher power? The Jews’ God (late in life, Mr. Hitchens learned his mother, and thus he, was Jewish)?
“Contemplating conversion and being close to Christ are two very different things,” Mr. Taunton said.
Well, there’s no evidence save Taunton’s wishful thinking that Hitchens was even contemplating conversion. And a book about Hitchens’s curiosity about religion certainly wouldn’t have sold at all. Further, if Hitchens didn’t accept God, why did Taunton call his book “The Faith of Christopher Hitchens“? I think he knew exactly what he was doing, and realized full well that his narrative would be taken by Christians as a sign that Hitchens was Seeing the Light. Christians just love stories about deathbed conversions of atheists, and Taunton played into that, all the while saying that he didn’t really intend that. I call duplicity.
Shermer agrees, and sent me this in an email, which I quote with permission:
Taunton is very slippery. If you suggest that he said anything strong in the way of Hitch converting, or leaning toward converting, he denies, dissembles and says “read the book.” But when you suggest that the “two books” metaphor means nothing more than public/private split we all have, Taunton replies that, no, Hitch was seriously considering Christianity. That’s why I pressed him for clarification and the most I could get back was “I stand by what I wrote.” Then he launches into the metaphor about the lock tumblers not lining up for Hitch as defining himself solely by his atheism. Different topic. Of course Hitch didn’t define himself by his atheism. He was political more than anything, but that’s a diversion from what I was asking! I think Taunton is the one with two books.
Now you may say that I’m writing so much about this because I’m an offended atheist trying to defend my “hero” against the possibility that he might have contemplated religion. Nope; not for a second. I’m writing this post because I’m 100% convinced that, after attaining maturity, Hitchens never thought about accepting God. Let Taunton or others who make such claims give us real evidence, not just undocumented statements about Hitchens’s interest in religious doctrine.
I’m also writing this to defend a man who cannot defend himself. Were he still here, and read Taunton’s screed and his post-book waffling, Hitchens would tell us in no uncertain terms that he does not credit superstition and entertained no thoughts of accepting God. And I’m writing to decry someone who knows that this ghoulish book will be read by believers as a triumph for Christianity. Taunton is simply a vulture, feeding and profiting on the death of a man who can’t respond.
I suppose I should close now because I’ve said all I wanted to say for myself… In the meantime we have the same job we always had, to say, as thinking people and as humans, that there are no final solutions, there is no absolute truth, there is no supreme leader, there is no totalitarian solution that says that if you will just give up your freedom of inquiry, if you would just give up, if you will simply abandon your critical faculties, a world of idiotic bliss can be yours. We have to begin by repudiating all such claims – grand rabbis, chief ayatollahs, infallible popes, the peddlers of mutant quasi-political worship, the dear leader, great leader, we have no need of any of this. And looking at them and their record I realise it is they who are the grand imposters, and my own imposture this evening was mild by comparison.
Are those the words of a man keeping two sets of books?
Taunton, in fact, is the one who has given up his freedom of inquiry, embraced the Supreme Leader, and found his world of idiotic bliss. And Christians are enriching him for draping his own faith as a shroud over Hitchens.
Reader Robert Lang sent some photos of primates from a trip he took to Costa Rica earlier this year. His notes:
We saw a lot of monkeys, but mostly as disconnected parts glimpsed through heavy leaf cover. The mantled howler monkeys (Alouatta palliata), though, eventually came right into the cabin area where we were staying. They certainly lived up to their name, serenading our Caribbean accommodations at the crack of sunrise. It’s hard to describe the cacophony, but imagine dumping a truckload of tennis balls and squirrels into a d*g kennel, and the resulting sound would be a fair approximation. They have wonderfully expressive faces.
It’s not hard to tell which howlers are males:
Less easily seen were Geoffroy’s spider monkey (Ateles geoffroyi), who kept more of a distance from us, but were entertainingly acrobatic, leaping between trees and using their tail as a fifth limb.
The third species we saw was the white-faced capuchin monkey (Cebus capucinus), of which I got only one half-decent photo (but plenty of blurry black smears in dense foliage).
Oy! It’s Monday Sunday again, but at least it’s not raining in Chicago. It’s also May 15, the Ides of May, and on this day in history there were big doings, for in 1940 McDonald’s opened its very first branch in San Bernardino, California. Now there are over 35,000 branches in 118 countries. How many of you American readers have never eaten there? Can we find even one?
Here’s that first branch:
Note the limited menu. I can remember when burgers, fries, and a soft drink were 15¢ each.
Those born on this day include Pierre Curie (1859) and Mary Lyon (1925), the English biologist who proposed that, in mammals, one X chromosome in females was inactivated randomly in cells, simultaneously explaining the phenomena of tortoiseshell cats and Barr bodies. And, on this day in 1886, Emily Dickinson died at age 56.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili makes a funny:
Hili: What do you associate renewable energy with?
A: Wind, sun, waves…
Hili: You see, and for me it is birds.
She’s very cute by the Vistula:
In Polish:
Hili: Z czym ci się kojarzy energia odnawialna?
Ja: Z wiatrem, ze słońcem, z falami morskimi…
Hili: No widzisz, a mnie z ptakami.
And out in Winnipeg, Gus has reduced his box to a floor, but still enjoys sitting on it. (Tell staff Taskin that he needs a new box to chew!)
Required to be leashed when outside, Gus sometimes makes a big mess in his wanderings, like the example of “cat’s cradle” below:
Finally, reader Diana MacPherson sent this, which may be real:
