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.
We have two more songs in Buffalo Springfield Week, which will finish up nicely tomorrow. This song, clearly by Stephen Stills, appeared on the “Buffalo Springfield Again” album in 1967.
Back then Stills had a great, gravelly blues voice, as you can see on this cut. The guitar work is superb, and the change of pace and styles clearly presages Stills’ later work with Crosby, Stills, & Nash—especially “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” one of the great rock songs of our time.
There’s a woman that you ought to know,
And she’s coming, singing soft and low,
Singing rock and roll, she’s a joy to know.
‘Neath the shadow of a soothing hand
I am free there, just to make my plans,
Dream of far away lands, anything close at hand.
And she will follow me wide, do you know,
Familiar places she’s been by, that I know,
Could it be, she don’t have to try.
And tomorrow, she’s a friend of mine
And the sorrow, I see her face is lined
She’s no longer blind, she’s just hard to find.
Here’s a live version—clearly lip-synched, but it’s nice to see the group when they were all very Young, bedecked in psychedelic clothes and beads.
It’s Thursday, with a high of 69°F predicted, and the storms will start tomorrow. But Monday, my Big Trip Day, is predicted to be fair. I have a big podcast radio interview today, but more on that later (you can listen live). In this day in 1787, the United States Constitution was signed in Philadelphia: a BIG DAY for all Americans. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is just messing with Andrzej:
A: What are you worried about?
Hili: I’ve lost the Higgs boson somewhere.
In Polish:
Ja: Czym się tak martwisz?
Hili: Gdzieś mi się zgubił bozon Higgsa.
And here’s a bonus Hili-and-Cyrus “buddies” picture from Andrzej’s Facebook page:
Well, creationist Ben Carson appears to be nipping at The Donald’s heels as the most popular Republican candidate, but it’s hardly an improvement. I still predict that they’ll both plummet in popularity as the Republicans finally realize whom they’re supporting. Meanwhile, Carson goes around, as he did in Iowa in June, pushing his extreme conservative message, recently time suggesting that the U.S. government monitor colleges for “extreme political bias”—that is, of course, liberal political bias. Carson said this in Corning, Iowa:
“The other function I would give to the Department of Education is monitoring our institutions of higher learning — colleges and universities — for extreme political bias. If it exists, they get no federal funding,” Carson said.
Asked about that in Des Moines, Obama responded first, according to Vox, with a general remark:
“I have no idea what that means, and I suspect he doesn’t either,” he said, then continued: “The idea that you’d have somebody in government making a decision about what you should think ahead of time or what you should be taught, and if it’s not the right thought, or idea, or perspective or philosophy, that person would be — they wouldn’t get funding, runs contrary to everything we believe about education,” he said. “That might work in the Soviet Union, but that doesn’t work here. That’s not who we are.”
I couldn’t improve on that. And then Obama added a pretty strong critique of the “identity politics” tsunami washing over American college campuses (and British ones, too). Emphasis is mine:
“The purpose of college is not just … to transmit skills,” he said. “It’s also to widen your horizons, to make you a better citizen, to help you to evaluate information, to help you make your way through the world, to help you be more creative.”
. . . “It’s not just sometimes folks who are mad that colleges are too liberal that have a problem. Sometimes there are folks on college campuses who are liberal, and maybe even agree with me on a bunch of issues, who sometimes aren’t listening to the other side, and that’s a problem too. I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. I gotta tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, ‘You can’t come because I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say.’ That’s not the way we learn either.”
Note the word “coddled.” So here Obama is setting himself up against the entire edifice of modern liberal education, with its trigger warnings, speaker bans, “no-platforming” of political opponents, “safe spaces” with puppy videos, criticism of “offensive” speech, and so on. And God bless him (if there was a God)! These are the words of a serious man who deals with serious issues, a man who knows how democracy works and how progress is made. They are the words of a good President, and I’m confident that that’s how history will judge him.
Ignoring legal counsel and concerns about a possible lawsuit, a majority of the Coolidge City Council voted Monday to amend a resolution that would allow prayers before council meetings, including a stipulation that they be Christian.
Council members Steve Hudson, Rob Hudelson, Gary Lewis and Tatiana Murrieta all voted in favor of the Christian-only stipulation to the resolution, which was originally written to include ministers from any faith represented within the city limits. Mayor Jon Thompson and Councilman Gilbert Lopez voted against the amended resolution, with Vice Mayor Jacque Henry absent.
There’s a 30-day review period, and then this becomes the town law. These people better think twice about passing the amendment, though, lest they saddle their small town with enormous legal bills brought by an FFRF or ACLU lawsuit:
Should the resolution become final with the Christian-only stipulation, there is a very real possibility of the city being taken to court. Fitzgibbons referenced the 2014 Supreme Court case Town of Greece v. Galloway, which allowed for prayers at council meetings as long as the prayer did not disparage some faiths, and as long as the opportunity to pray is offered to all faiths.
The little town’s newspaper article is long, so go over and read the whole thing if you hear to read about The Town That Never Learns. You’ll hear about a councilman who said he’d leave the room if somebody said a non-Christian prayer, and about the city’s district attorney advising him that he was within his rights to do that! Another approving city councilman said this: “We just proclaimed Constitution Week. You know what was said at the end of the (Revolutionary) war? A treaty in Paris that said ‘In the name of the most Holy and undivided Trinity.’ You don’t get that from the Quran. You get it from the Bible. You get it from Christianity. That’s our heritage.” [Indeed, the Treaty of Paris does say that, but then the Constitution has the First Amendment.]
I had no idea that Rupert Murdoch’s organization 21st Century Fox had taken over National Geographic, and even the magazine’s contributors are worried about how that will change the content. Well, the best disinfectant is satire; and here, courtesy of reader Jim, is a cartoon about what the new magazine might look like with its right-wing ownership. The cartoon is by an old favorite here, Ruben Bolling, creator of Tom the Dancing Bug:
In the 5½-minute video below, Keathley is interviewed by Jamie Dew—professor of history and philosophy and Dean of the College at SBT—about the relationship between science and Christianity. The title of the brief interview, given on the site Between the Times, is “Are science and theology enemies?” Keathley clearly thinks not—in fact, he thinks that Christianity was essential for the rise of science.
He rejects the “warfare” hypothesis of the relationship between science and religion, originally promulgated by John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White (see the first chapter of FvF), saying that those authors had an “agenda”. Well, White (the founder of Cornell Unversity) surely didn’t: he was a believer and discovered through extensive reading that some (but not all) elements of Christianity had opposed scientific advances. His aim was actually to make religion stronger by purging it of its anti-science “dogmatism.” While some of his White’s facts were wrong, many weren’t, but accommodationist scholars like Ronald Numbers continue to use these errors to debunk the entire “conflict” hypothesis. But these scholars have their own agenda: they are determined to show that science and religion can live in harmony. That’s why they try so hard to pretend that the Galileo affair didn’t really have much to do with religion—an argument that is palpable nonsense.
What these scholars seemingly don’t understand is that while some church authorities promoted science, many others opposed the progress of science (e.g., anesthesia, vaccination, and even lightning rods!). More important, the method of ascertaining truth through science is completely inimical to the method of ascertaining religious “truths” (i.e., stuff that is made up). In that sense, then, the “warfare” hypothesis remains, for when scientific truth opposes religious dogma, more often than not believers side with dogma rather than science. Keathley, after all, is an old-earth creationist who rejects evolution. Isn’t that a prime EXAMPLE of the warfare between his Baptist superstitions and the findings of science?
Keathley imputes the rise of science in Europe to the following influences of Christianity (as opposed what he calls those other “pagan polytheistic religions”): the ideas that nature is real and has a value and an order that can be discerned through laws. Further, the search for laws, according to Keathley, came though the Christian notion of a Great Lawgiver, and from the belief that humans were able to think God’s thoughts after Him, and so could find those laws.
This, of course, is simply post hoc rationalization: a way to discern harmony between irreconcilable ways of finding “truth” by claiming that the only real way to find truth was in fact the offspring of Christian superstition. Of course it’s possible, even likely, that some people were motivated by their religious beliefs to study and understand nature. But it’s just as likely that elements of the church inhibited that search for truth.
And one has to consider this, too: the Church held sway over Europe during the Middle Ages—for ten centuries beginning about 500 A.D. Western science as we know it is a fifteenth-century production. Why the big delay if Christianity was so important in promoting science? And didn’t the ancient Greeks (and early Muslims) also begin doing science, but science not promoted by religion? Thales, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Archimedes—did they do their work because they wanted to emulate the Mind of Zeus, the Great Lawgiver? I think not: it was simple human curiosity.
And that curiosity would certainly have resided in the early European scientists as well. Yes, they were virtually all Christians, but everyone was a Christian then. If you give credit to Christianity for science, then you must do so for nearly everything that arose in post-medieval Europe, including the printing press.
In the end, we simply can’t make a convincing argument that without Christianity, science would have started later, or would have been slowed in its progress. We have no control group—no ability to rerun the course of history to see whether, in a heathen Europe, science would have started up later. We just don’t know.
But what we do know is that, at present, religion is not a force for scientific progress. It is only an impediment. I can’t think of a single bit of progress in understanding the world over the last 200 years, for instance, that was promoted by religion. (I’m sure readers can name one or two bits, but ALL scientific progress has come from rejecting the supernatural.) We have left our childish superstitions behind, and, as Laplace said, “we don’t need that hypothesis.”
And if Keathley is so sure that science and theology aren’t enemies, is he willing to give up his antiscientific old-earth creationism? He is a living example of why his own thesis is wrong. Remember, 40% of Americans are young-earth creationists, at least as far as humans are concerned, and virtually all of those are motivated by religion. Many of these try to impose their creationist nonsense on public-school biology classes. If that’s not a war between science and superstition, I don’t know what is.
