Two cat cartoons

March 14, 2014 • 5:01 am

Basically, I got nothing today, which is good because I have cat stuff to do, i.e., writing a recalcitrant book.  I do have a recipe (next post) and maybe some other stuff will crop up. In the meantime, here are two cat cartoons sent to me by readers. This first post apparently relates to the mysterious 16th-century “rocket cats” that appeared in a German manuscript; I posted about these last Caturday, and I suppose they were an internet meme.

Ruben Bolling takes the rocket cat and runs with it in this cartoon, from The Daily Kos, called “Percival Dunwoody: Idiot Time-Traveler from 1909”.  The middle frame is supposedly the origin of the “rocket cats” in the manuscript (below). Note the somewhat muddled reference to evolution:

Daily Kos Steve Percival DunwoodyThe original rocket cat from about 1530:

Rocket cats 2

This strip, from Wednesday’s The Far Left Side by Mike Stanfill (a strip I’ve never heard of), memorializes his beloved cat Poozy, who had died two days before. There’s a touching story about Poozie below the cartoon and several pictures and a video of him. It’s the saddest cat cartoon I’ve seen:

3-12-14-my-poozyh/t: Steve

The last days of Jerry Coyne

March 13, 2014 • 2:28 pm

It’s only a bit more than a week before Jerry Coyne, my feline namesake, flies to his new home in Christchurch, New Zealand. Here are some pictures that Gayle Ferguson, who saved him and his four sisters from certain death, sent me last night. She’s communing with Jerry, and will be sad to see him go.

Photo on 12-03-14 at 10. 10

Photo on 12-03-14 at 10.2 9

Photo on 12-03-14 at 10.3 5

Gayle made a spiffy flier showing and describing all five kittens, which she sent around to friends and colleagues. Jerry was the first to be snapped up; here’s his page in the five-page brochure:

Picture 2

And the second kitten, Poppy, was adopted yesterday, to a nearby home in Auckland. I wonder why the two red kittens went first. Picture 3

Saudi cleric issues fatwa against all-you-can-eat buffets

March 13, 2014 • 2:06 pm

All I can say today is, “Thank Ceiling Cat I’m not a Muslim.” For there’s nothing I like to see more when I’m hungry than a sign that says “all you can eat” (or, in England, the characteristically more polite “all you care to eat”).  It is a Rule of Eating if you like good food, you like lots of good food. A true gourmet will also be a gourmand. If I’m in Louisiana, give me a table, a pitcher of beer, and someone who will pour endless buckets of boiled crawfish onto the butcher paper covering my table. The same goes for crabs in Baltimore and oysters in Charleston. That is why, when I’m in a strange town and hungry, I will ask restaurant advice from strangers who are, well, a bit portly. 

Sadly, the Saudis may no longer have this option, for, according to Al-Arabiya, a Saudi-owned media outlet located in Dubai, a Saudi cleric has issued a fatwa against all-you-can eat buffets:

The cleric, Saleh al-Fawzan, recently issued a fatwa through a kingdom-based Quranic TV station prohibiting open buffets, saying that the value and quantity of what is sold should be pre-determined before it is purchased.

“Whoever enters the buffet and eats for 10 or 50 riyals without deciding the quantity they will eat is violating Sharia (Islamic) law,” said Fawzan on al-Atheer channel.

I’d like to know the part of Sharia law that dictates this, but I’m sure there’s something in there that can be interpreted this way.  I guess “enough to fill me up” doesn’t qualify as a “quantity” according to that law. Or perhaps al-Fawzan just got a case of heartburn.

Affronted (and hungry) Muslims, however, are striking back:

Using the Twitter hashtag “prohibiting-open-buffet” (in Arabic), some of the site’s users criticized Fawzan’s fatwa.

“Restaurants will be ruined if they didn’t quantify the food they sold. This negates the sheikh’s premise that the quantity is unknown,” said on Twitter user. [JAC: I don’t understand what this means.]

“This is not Quran just a mere fatwa, if you want to follow it, you are a free man but you can not impose it on others,” wrote another.

One user sarcastically wrote: “Congratulations! Open buffets have made it in the list for what is forbidden for us.”

But there are also supporters of this fatwa. Fortunately, fatwas are not binding on all Muslims, for interpretations of sharia law vary from place to place. Were I a Muslim, I’d just laugh and take another helping.

h/t: Grania

Is God a bodiless person?

March 13, 2014 • 11:01 am

I found in my mailbox yesterday a letter from an staff member at “Awake,” the official publication of the Jehovah’s Witnesses (JWs), and a magazine that many of us have probably been proffered in door to door proselytizing events.  I thumbed through it briefly, and found an article called “The Untold Story of Creation.” Surprisingly, that article seemed to accept evolution as the means God used to create life. While it says “Jehovah God created all the basic kinds of plant and animal life, as well as a perfect man and woman who were capable of self-awareness, love, wisdom, and justice,” it adds that “The kinds of animals and plants created by God have obviously undergone changes and have produced variations within the kinds. In many cases, the resulting life-forms are remarkably different from one another.”

That’s theistic  (“God guided”) evolution, of course, combined with a ex nihilo creation event at the outset, but it’s still a form of evolution. But the discussion of  the evolution of “kinds” is muddled, since most creationist Christians think of members of a “kind” as being fairly similar to one another (i.e., the “dog kind,” which includes wolves and jackals), and not “remarkably different from one another.” JW evolutionism is a bastard hybrid between Biblical creationism and theistic evolution.

But I digress. What struck me about the article was a section at the beginning describing the nature God. Here are some of his characteristics, taken verbatim from the piece:

  • “God is a person, an individual. He is not a vague force devoid of personality, floating aimlessly in the universe. He has thoughts, feelings, and goals.”
  • “God has infinite power and wisdom. This explains the complex design found everywhere in creation, especially in living things.” [JAC: I guess that the “changes” occurring within kinds come from God’s design, not natural selection.]
  • “God has a personal name, which is used thousands of times in the Bible. That name is Jehovah.”

There are other traits listed, like God’s love for humans, but I wanted to point out that this religion, at least, sees god as a person—granted, not a physical person, but a disembodied mind that has the thoughts, feelings, and plans of a human person.

This view of God as a divine being that resembles a bodiless person (but with omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence) is not unique to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Eric MacDonald, as well as liberal religionists, tell us that the view of God adumbrated above is naive, and that Sophisticated Theologians™ don’t really believe that such a God exists, or, if He does, he’s an ineffable being whose qualities cannot be pinpointed.

But that claim about theologians is not true. Here’s a panoply of statements by various theologians and religionists, some of them Sophisticated™, that say otherwise, specifying the precise nature of God, often attributing to Him personlike qualities:

Attributes of God. Though God is one and simple, we form a better idea by applying characteristics to Him, such as: almighty, eternal,holy, immortal, immense, immutable, incomprehensible, ineffable, infinite, intelligent, invisible, just, loving, merciful, most high, most wise, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, patient, perfect, provident, self-dependent, supreme, true. (The National Catholic Almanac by the Frnciscan Clerics of Holy Name College).

If any theologian is regarded as Sophisticated™, it’s Richard Swinburne. Here’s how he sees God:

I take the proposition ‘God exists’ (and the equivalent proposition ‘There is a God’) to be logically equivalent to “there exists necessarily a person without a body (i.e. a spirit) who necessarily is eternal, perfectly free, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and the creator of all things.’ I use ‘God’ as the name of the person picked out by this description.” (Existence of God p. 7)

“That God is a person, yet one without a body, seems the most elementary claim of theism. It is by being told this or something that entails this (e.g. that God always listens to and sometimes grants us our prayers, he has plans for us, he forgives our sins, but he does not have a body) that young children are introduced to the concept of God.” (The Coherence of Theism, p. 101)

I believe Eric mentioned Alvin Plantinga as a Sophisticated Theologian™. What does he say about God?

“What he [Daniel Dennett] calls an “anthropomorphic” God, furthermore, is precisely what traditional Christians believe in—a god who is a person, the sort of being who is capable of knowledge, who has aims and ends, and who can and in fact does act on what he knows in such a way as to try to accomplish those aims.” (Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, p. 11)

“So believing in God is more than accepting the proposition that God exists. Still, it is at least that much. One can’t sensibly believe in God and thank Him for the mountains without believing that there is such a person to be thanked, and the He is in some way responsible for the mountains. Nor can one trust in God and commit oneself to Him without believing that He exists: ‘He who would come to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of those who seek him’ (Heb. 11:6)'” (God, Freedom, and Evil, p. 2).

Those aren’t statements by people who don’t think that God actually exists, or, if he does, exists in some way beyond our understanding.

Finally, from a book for kids, a characterization of God that doesn’t materially differ from Plantinga’s.

“It’s really important to understand that God is not an impersonal force. Even though He is invisible, God is personal and He has all the characteristics of a person. He knows, he hears, he feels and he speaks.” (B. Bickel and S. Jantz, 1996, Bruce and Stan’s Pocket Guide to Talking With God, p. 40).

So here we have both Sophisticated and Unsophisticated Theologians claiming that God has person-like characteristics. I could multiply these examples almost indefinitely, or provide the statistics about the percentage of people who believe in a personal God who interacts with humans (67.5% in the US, 18.7% in France, 26.9% in Great Britain, 54% in Italy).

My questions to those like Eric MacDonald, who chastise us for not reading more of Sophisticated Theology™, are these:

1. If you think there is a God, like most Sophisticated Theologians™, why are you so sure that that God is not like a person, or ineffable, rather than like the humanoid god of Plantinga, Swinburne, et al? After all, there is no more evidence for an ineffable, ground-of-being God than there is for a personal, talking-to-you God. Where is the knowledge that makes someone like Karen Armstrong or Terry Eagleton more authoritative on the nature of God than, say, people like Plantinga, Swinburne, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Bruce and Stan?

2. If you think there is no God (Eric avers that David Bentley Hart thinks that, though I must read his book to see), then you are an atheist, and get no more benefits from believing in a nonexistent deity than from being a secular humanist. If you think there is no God, then you have no warrant to speak of a god.

What I am starting to realize is that what distinguishes Sophisticated Theology™ from regular theology (or regular belief) is its attempt to remove God from the realm of empiricism.  Its adherents do this in two ways: either by asserting that God does not exist (which means that it isn’t theology but philosophy with numinous overtones), or by claiming that God isn’t what we thought he was all along, but rather some nebulous Ground of Being or Force of Nature or Sustainer of Existence whose nature can’t be specified.

But that doesn’t work, either, and for two reasons.  First, it’s not the kind of God everyone believes in, and would not be recognizable as God even by people like  Swinburne or Plantinga. Second, the Ineffable God Claim still demands evidence, for it’s an assertion about what exists in the universe. And if you don’t provide that evidence, as well as evidence that your conception of God is more accurate than, say, Bruce and Stan’s, then we needn’t pay attention to your arguments.

It all boils down to evidence. If you want us to listen to your Sophisticated Theology™, first convince us that there is a God, however you define it. If you can’t do that, the game is over. Or, if you think there is no God but religion still has value, tell us why we should value something that makes false claims, and why it’s better than enlightened humanism.

I finish with a relevant cartoon from the website of reader Pliny the in Between:

Toon Background.021

 

Indiana legislators embarrass their state

March 13, 2014 • 5:47 am

UPDATE: Over at the Discovery Institute’s “Evolution News and Views” website, where no commenting is allowed, David Klinghoffer thumps his chest and pretends that the threat of the Fatuous Four legislators carries real weight. Klinghoffer implies darkly that if Ball State doesn’t play ball and allow ID to be taught, the university will lose state funding:

Our inaugural Censor of the Year, Jerry Coyne, is all bluff and bluster. He says that although four state legislators have written to the president of Ball State University gravely requesting clarification of BSU’s ban on intelligent design, nothing will come of it:

“The DI is going to lose on this one, and if the legislators try to pass some ‘equal time’ law for ID in Indiana Universities, they’ll just look ridiculous. The Discovery Institute is simply unable to accept that they can’t push creationism in a public university, and are trying to make trouble.”

That paragraph just by itself is ridiculous. No one wants some enforced policy of “equal time” for ID, merely freedom for scientists and scholars to teach and research about the evidence for design in nature if they wish to do so. That’s a very different thing from “creationism,” and even more different from “pushing creationism.”

The pretense that ID is not creationism, and that teaching ID is not pushing creationism are, of course, lies for Jesus.  And the “freedom to teach ID” is freedom to proselytize Christianity, which is not a freedom at all: not under our Constitution and not in public schools. It’s not academic freedom, either, not when it comes to science classes.  Klinghoffer continues:

Coyne, who played a key role in walking Ball State down this particular plank, is uneducable. Even so I think he may be in for a surprise.

The surprise, of course, is the DI’s insane idea that Ball State will bend on this one because they’re afraid of losing funding. Here’s Klinghoffer’s threat:

So Coyne doesn’t think that Senator Dennis Kruse, Senator Travis Holdman, Senator Greg Walker and Representative Jeffrey Thompson pull any weight with President Gora? I think they do. Senator Kruse is only the chairman of the Senate Education Committee. In 2012 Ball State received $143.5 million of its $352 million budget from the state of Indiana. That is 41 percent. That suggests some influence these lawmakers can bring to bear.

What’s more — more anxiety-making if you are an administrator at Ball State — is that the percentage of state funding has been falling precipitously already for decades, as is true across the country in higher ed. According to the Muncie Star Press, at BSU it’s down from 65 percent in 1987. Still, as of 2012, Ball State was considerably more dependent on public money than some other state universities in Indiana. Purdue University gets only 24 percent, while Indiana University gets 22 percent.

The combination of dependence and shrinking support is an uncomfortable one.

. . . So Coyne wants us to think that, under these circumstances, when four legislators tell President Gora they have “serious questions” about her management of a public university, that’s a light thing, easily brushed off?

Yes, that’s exactly what I think, and I’m willing to bet that that’s exactly what will happen. Four Republican legislatures cannot cut funding to BSU because, in the end, the State won’t mandate that intelligent design can be taught in a science class. That would require cooperation of the rest of the legislature and of Indiana’s governor. And if the state doesn’t want to make itself look ridiculous and anti-science, that won’t happen. BSU, of course, won’t bend to the legislators’ ludicrous demands anyway.

What Klinghoffer doesn’t realize is that Indiana, despite the religiosity and benighted attitudes of many of its citizens, doesn’t want to make itself look as ignorant as the people at the Discovery Institute.
____________

Yesterday I wrote about how four Indiana state legislators wrote to Ball State University (BSU), asking questions about how Eric Hedin’s class came to be removed from the BSU science curriculum after it was found to be ridden with religious proselytizing.  I now have a copy of their letter, which I’ll post below.  This letter was written in collaboration with the creationist Discovery Institute (DI), which is deeply upset that intelligent design was banned from BSU science classes. That banning was a whack on the nose of the camel of Christianity as it tried to stick its nose into the tent of higher education.

Picture 2 Picture 3As I predicted, all four signers are Republicans. Dennis Kruse, to Indiana’s shame, is chair of the state Senate Committee on Education and Career Development. Travis Holdman is on the Senate Commission on Improving the Status of Children. Greg Walker is the chair of the Senate Ethics Committee (!) and on the Committee for Commerce, Economic Development, and Technology.  Jeffrey Thompson, a state Representative, is not only on the House Education Committee, but is in fact described as a “Chemistry, Physics and Math Teacher, Danville Community High School.”

It’s no surprise, of course, that these are Republicans, for that is the Party of Ignorance, but it’s somewhat surprising that all of these are dedicated in some way to improving education and Technology in Indiana. Hoosiers, be ashamed of your state!

As several readers noted, the legislators and the Discovery Institute have gone badly wrong on this one. As reader Erp noted, the course at issue is the Honors Course “Dangerous Ideas,” taught by Paul Ranieri (pdf of the course here). Reader Ant dug up Paul Raniei’s c.v., which you can find here, and Ranieri is hardly the agent of Satan that the DI and legislators make out. In fact, Ranieri, an associate professor of English, is apparently a Catholic. He got his bachelor’s degree at a Catholic college, Xavier University of Ohio, and under his activities as Faculty Advisor you’ll see this:

Screen shot 2014-03-13 at 7.29.40 AM

Ranieri was Chairman of the English Department from 1998-2001 and acting Chair in 2007. He appears from his c.v. to be deeply dedicated to undergraduate education, and his Honors Course seems to be one that simply challenges students’ ideas using the book What is Your Dangerous Idea?, which, as I noted, contains as many defenses of religion as attacks on religion. It isn’t a science course, nor does it seem to proselytize religion. It appears in fact to be what a college Honors course should be: one in which a diversity of competing viewpoints are discussed.  But that doesn’t mean that in a college science course a diversity of competing viewpoints should be discussed, especially when one of those viewpoints—Intelligent Design—has been rejected as science by both the scientific community and the courts.

If the Indiana legislators want all viewpoints to be taught in science courses, by all means let them agitate for alchemy to be taught in Chemistry classes, faith healing and homeopathy in health classes and the medical school, and astrology in the psychology class. For Intelligent Design has no more credibility than these pseudoscientific “alternatives.” The reason that ID rather than homeopathy is being pushed is obvious: ID is a religiously-inspired theory, and teaching it is part of the “Wedge Strategy” to get materialism expelled from public education and replaced with Christianity.

Those legislators and the Discovery Institute are going to lose on this one. They chose the wrong course to use an example, and they’re making fools of themselves. It’s particularly embarrassing for representative Jeffrey Thompson, who teaches science in high school! Let’s see an Indiana newspaper for once come out and decry in plain terms the ignorance of these legislators, as well as their apparent ignorance of the U.S. Constitution.

We can look forward to a lot more angry posts by David Klinghoffer and his colleagues at the Discovery Institute after the dust settles on this one.

Submitted with respect,
Jerry Coyne
Discovery Institute “Censor of the Year” for 2013

Thursday: Hili dialogue

March 13, 2014 • 3:09 am

Hili is apparently a very lax editor, not caring about what is posted on her site (unless she’s the subject!)

A: Hili, are we going to post this article about UN Human Rights Council?
Hili: Human person, don’t bother me with that.

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In Polish:
Ja: Hili, dajemy, ten artykuł na temat Rady Praw Człowieka ONZ?
Hili: Człowieku, nie irytuj mnie.