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.
I spoke yesterday of a possible debate between Robert Price and Bart Ehrman about the historicity of Jesus. One or two readers gave the details in comments, but I thought I’d put it above the fold if you’re anywhere near Milwaukee. The details of the “Mythinformation Conference” (subtitle: “Is Faith Rooted in Fiction”) are here, and I’ve put the schedule for the one-day meeting below. It’s on OCTOBER 21 of this year and will held at Turner Hall in Milwaukee. Tickets will run you $60 (only $30 if you buy them now; add an unconscionable $100 or $75, respectively if you want to go to the “afterparty”,), but it’ll be worth it to see Price and Ehrman go head to head on whether there was a real Jesus Man. There are other good speakers, too!
If you want something to discuss, you can address reader Lou Jost’s claim that the Biblical evidence for Jesus as a historical person is sufficiently strong that the burden of proof is actually on the mythicists to show that he didn’t exist. But how are you going to do that? It all comes down to a subjective judgment on how much you believe the Bible as a source of historical information—at least on Jesus.
I’ve been spending a bit of time listening to Amy Winehouse on YouTube and iTunes (thanks to a friend for sending me files). She’s an interesting and tragic figure, but a lot of her music is splendid.
One thing I’ve noticed is the nature of the comments on her YouTube videos. In contrast to comments for other women singers who died early (Patsy Cline, and especially Janis Joplin, who died at the same age as Winehouse, also of drug and alcohol abuse), the comments for Amy express strong emotion: she was an “angel”, the word “love” and heart emoticons are often used, and there’s a general atmosphere that something went badly wrong with the world when she died.
Why the difference? My theory, which is mine (but not very novel), involves two factors. First, she was fragile: unable to withstand the pressures of fame (and, of course, having an addictive personality); that likely evokes feelings of tenderness and affection. Second, one gets the feeling that some commenters have a “rescue fantasy”: if only they, or somebody, could have done something, Amy might not have died. That, of course, is insupportable because the laws of physics dictated her end from her beginning.
But I do mourn her loss, and her music is often a revelation; she was a natural singer, putting every note in the right place. Example: this Latin-esque jazz version of the Paul McCartney song, “All My Loving,” performed with just a guitar accompaniment. The video isn’t great, but the sound is okay. This was obviously recorded in the days before her tattoos and big hair. You can hear the Beatles’ recording here.
Don’t expect much but persiflage for this week: I’m crazy busy and can’t brain. But we do have a nice panoply of beetle photos from reader Jacques Hausser in Switzerland:
Here some pictures of Cetonidae. I inserted a photo from Wikipedia commons #4.
#1 The European rose chafer, Cetonia aurata (family Cetonidae, sub-family Cetonini), is a rather big (about 20 mm) and somptuously colored beetle. The coloration is physical, the structure of the cuticle of the beetle reflecting mostly left-handed circular polarized light.
#2: The adult rose-chafer lives on flowers, eating mostly pollen and stamens – and if necessary ripping apart the flowers themselves to reach their food: rose chafers are not unanimeously appreciated by rose gardeners. Here on Philadelphus (mock-orange), its long squared “nose” (clypeus) covered by pollen (what gives it a rather bovine look),
#3: Coloration is variable, here a vividly red-and-green specimen (on a wild carrot). Note the “beard” used to brush and gather pollen and, interestingly, the softly rounded slot on the margin of the elytra. Most of the beetles fly with the elytra (hardened forewings) passively open, what induces drag and slows them, but not the Cetonini. Their elytra are welded together and stay closed. They can only be slightly lifted up to unfold the large rear wings, which then work through this margin slot.
#4: This beautiful composite photo by Bernie Kohl (public domain, Wikipedia commons) shows the takeoff of a rose chafer, elytra closed. Their flight is very efficient, powerful, straight and fast.
#5: The babies are less attractive. They eat mostly rotting wood and twigs, and can be found in compost heaps, where unfortunately they are frequently mistaken for cockchafer grubs and destroyed. The trick: rose chafer grubs have a small head and a big bum, for the cockchafer it is the contrary.
#6: Is this splendid bronze specimen another color variant? It could easily be so, but no. It is another, very similar species, and even another genus:Protaetia cuprea (subspecies bourgini). The main difference between the two genera, the shape of the mesosternal process, is hidden on this picture, but the whitish spot on the “knees” (look at the middle leg) provides a clue. The flower is Angelica sylvestris.
#7: Some smaller species don’t show such a gleaming glory. Here is Tropinota hirta on a hawkweed (Hieracium sp.)…
#8: … and Oxythyrea funebris, busily destroying an iris bud to reach the stamina. It is easily recognizable from the previous one by the six white spots on the pronotum.
To the best of my information, it’s April 18. I leave for Portland on Wednesday (back Sunday evening), and it will be a busy week. On this day in 1775, Paul Revere made his famous Ride, warning of the British advance. The Great San Francisco Earthquake occurred in 1906. In 1954, Nasser took over in Egypt, and in 1983 terrorists bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63.
Those born on this day in include Clarence Darrow (1857, a nonbeliever), and Hayley Mills (1946, so she’s 70 today; raise your hand if you saw “Parent Trap”). Those who died on this day include Erasmus Darwin (1802), Albert Einstein (1955), and Thor Heyerdahl (2002; raise your hand if you’ve read Kon-Tiki). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej instructs Hili on the propers of skepticism:
Hili: Where do axiomatic certainties come from?
A: Some come from mathematics, others from the lack of skepticism.
In Polish:
Hili: Skąd się biorą pewniki?
Ja: Jedne z matematyki inne z braku sceptycyzmu.
Two items for lagniappe: Diane G. called my attention to this cartoon from Over the Hedge, by Michael Fry and T. Lewis. It’s a sure sign that Snowflakedom is on the wane when cartoonists mock it:
And reader jsp sends us Electro Kitteh. Fat chance that you could get your cat to do this:
Thanks to several readers for sending me this clip from yesterday’s Saturday Night Live. It’s very clearly a parody of the risible movie “God’s Not Dead 2,” starring Melissa Joan Hart—famed in her previous life as Sabrina the Teenage Witch. To see the model, the trailer of GND2, click here. Even the lettering is the same.
I don’t watch SNL any more, since I cut my teeth on it in the days when it was truly great, with John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, Dan Akroyd, and Chevy Chase; and I’m always disappointed when I look at its latest incarnation. But there are still some good bits, and this is one.
The disparity of views between critics and the public is clear from the divergent ratings on Rotten Tomatoes (click on the screenshot to see the critics’ take):
In this absorbing video, the Atheist Debate project, represented by creator Matt Dillahunty, interviews Robert Price, a former Baptist minister and now an atheist theologian and philosopher at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary. (Price’s latest book isBlaming Jesus for Jehovah: Rethinking the Righteousness of Christianity.) The topic is the historicity of Jesus, which I’ve written about several times, facing considerable dissent from some readers who argue that there’s good evidence for a real Jesus-Man.
I’m pretty much of the opinion that there’s no strong evidence for the claim that Jesus was a historical person around whom the Jesus myths (obviously false) accreted. In other words, I’m a mythicist. I don’t claim that we know that a Jesus-man didn’t exist, only that we don’t have good evidence that he did. In the same way, I think the same lack of evidence prevails for the existence of Bigfoot, Nessie, and UFO abductions.
This puts me outside the bailiwick of modern scholarship, but I still claim that those scholars, like Bart Ehrman, who claim that mythicists are dead wrong, are themselves operating from psychological motives rather than from empirical evidence. They are, as Price mentions in this video, adherents to the “Stuck in the Middle with You” brand of scholarship, believing only those in the center with critical but conservative views, while placing both fundamentists like William Lane Craig and mythicists on the outside. In other words, these scholars, even though there’s no evidence for a historical Jesus, adhere to that view because it makes them look reasonable.
Price, as you’ll see from this video, is pretty much a mythicist: he sees no strong evidence, and no extra-Biblical evidence, for a historical Jesus. As he says, “The evidence supports the Christ-Myth theory.” He asks why there’s no secular biographical information about Jesus, and no “extra-Biblical historical mentions.” And you can’t dismiss him: Price really knows his stuff. He was once a strong believer, and has considerable theology under his belt.
Price’s claim? That the Jesus story in the gospels makes sense if it’s simply a rewritten update of the Old Testament story and perhaps also a melange of earlier myths, perhaps including those of Homer—stories that have similar elements. He argues that the whole distortion starts with the epistles of Paul, which he claims is “a story that effaces, ignores, or denies the historical existence of Jesus.” The Jesus-person, says Price, is “a savior god who gets historicized.” Towards the end, Price argues that religious scholars are in a kind of conspiracy to dismiss all Jesus-person-agnostics as misguided mythicists.
They’re not. The evidence for a historical Jesus simply isn’t there. Watch the video:
Price avers that Bart Ehrman, for instance, spends more time appealing to authority than dealing with the lack of evidence that he (Ehrman) admits in his earlier work. At the very end of the video, Price mentions that he might have a debate with Ehrman on mythicism. Now that would be something to see, and I hope it takes place. Get the popcorn!
