Yet another liberal thinker tells us how God really is

July 6, 2013 • 7:41 pm

At the PuffHo “Science” section (!), we get an essay by Beth Green, described as a “spiritual teacher, intuitive counselor and consultant.” Inspired by a TED talk by Louise Leakey on human evolution, Green churned out a piece called “Evolution, Humanity, & God“, in which she tries to convince us that we’ve been wrong about God all along. It’s not that a deity doesn’t exist—it’s just not the kind of perfect, anthropomorphic being we thought he was. Instead he’s “an ever-evolving field of consciousness that is moving toward greater self-awareness and integration.” Now that’s the kind of a God worth wanting!

Here’s one bit from her essay that floats the idea of an evolving God. I present it without commentary, save for a bit of bolding (mine) and one reader comment that I’ve pasted at the bottom.

Suppose God was not sitting in heaven planning out the universe with omnipotence and omniscience? Then God could be seen not as perfect and static, but as dynamic and evolving. And then we could see ourselves in the same way: as evolving, not shameful, as manifestations of a God that isn’t perfect either. And having released ourselves from shame, we could face ourselves more honestly, acknowledging our flaws, addictions, cruelty, fear and destructiveness. And we would no longer compare ourselves to the perfect Creator, but have compassion for ourselves as also imperfect and evolving. And now with self-compassion and no longer paralyzed by shame, we could accept ourselves yet simultaneously call ourselves to accountability for our impact on ourselves and others. And we could lend our efforts to changing ourselves in directions that we foresee as more beneficial to ourselves, one another and our planet.

God and we are evolving; it’s that simple. But how do we feel about this idea? It would eliminate shame and blame, but the price would be letting go of the idea of the perfect God. Why is that scary?

Most of us still, consciously or unconsciously, cling to the belief in a perfect God. Why? Because life is frightening, and we need security, and therefore we haven’t gotten over our need for a father, all-loving, all-knowing, focused on us and taking care of us. Because if we create a God to which we can attribute certain characteristics, we just might be able to figure out the rules and learn to manipulate the universe. Because we need somebody to help us, and we don’t trust ourselves or one another.

We don’t need a perfect God to experience the peace, receive the guidance and connect to the bliss of what we associate with God. As a spiritual teacher in the 21st century, I’m ready to share the good news — that it’s possible to have an intimate and profound relationship with a God that doesn’t exist in the old sense. And we can do that by dropping the anthropomorphic view of a God created in our image and embrace the mystery of consciousness in the process of evolution, so that we can truly experience Oneness not only with One another but with the Divine.

I am a mystic, not a scientist, but I have no problem with science. It brings fascinating facts and theories that I can accept, question and/or integrate into my meager understanding. And the idea that we had not one, but multiple simultaneous ancestors* supports my mystical experience of God as an ever-evolving field of consciousness that is moving toward greater self-awareness and integration, with which I can have an intimate relationship. In fact, I can feel closer to this evolving God than I ever felt to the old man with the beard, because this field is not perfect, and I don’t have to feel ashamed of my human imperfection. And it fits with my experience of reality, where nothing is static, where everything is changing, even the rocks being impacted by the forces of nature itself. And it allows me to keep my common sense intact, because I don’t have to pretend that I live in a perfect world.

God must love the theory of evolution, because God is evolving, too.

After working my way through Green’s essay at great cost to my equanimity, I have to agree with this commenter:

Screen shot 2013-07-06 at 9.31.57 PM

*One comment: I’m not sure that Green understands that if several species of hominin existed simultaneously, as appears to have been the case, then only one of them could be the ancestor of modern humans. (If there was some cross-breeding, then of course we could be carrying genes that occurred in more than one earlier species.)

Now I’m a “radical evolutionary atheist”

July 6, 2013 • 8:38 am

The religious and conservative media are parroting the Discovery Institute in the case of Eric Hedin, the Ball State University professor who taught intelligent design and proselytized for Christianity in a science class.  Even the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) simply reproduced a press release from the Discovery Institute about the 7,000 signatures they collected supporting Hedin’s “academic freedom.”

One reader thought the WSJ article was a news piece, but didn’t notice this small disclaimer at the bottom:

Picture 1What the hell?

Anyway, the Christian News Network, which has now shown itself to be The Anti-Evolution Christian News Network, continues to report on and defend Hedin and intelligent design.  In their own post on the Hedin petition, they simply recycle reporting from the Muncie Star-Times, the Discovery Institute, and the Ball State student news paper. (Don’t journalists do their own investigation any more?)

There’s not much new there, but I do love the new way that they characterize me:

Discovery Institute’s David Klinghoffer agrees with West, saying that the committee formation was directly influenced by Jerry Coyne, a radical evolutionary atheist who called Hedin “the nutty professor,” and first alerted the Freedom from Religion Foundation about his questionable teaching.

As far as I know, Klinghoffer never called me a “radical evolutionary atheist,” so I suspect this is the Christian paper’s own characterization. I’m not quite sure what a “radical evolutionary atheist is” (is it an atheist who evolves?), but it definitely an attempt to dismiss me (and Hedin’s other opponents) with a slur.

I will thus characterize Klinghoffer, the Christian News Network, and the Discovery Institute as “radical creationist superstitionists.”

h/t: Diane

Another freak of nature: the Emei moustache toad

July 6, 2013 • 5:15 am

Lots of animal species have males with weapons to fight each other—invariably over females or territory, which is a proxy for mating success, But I wasn’t aware until now of a species whose males grew their weapons only during the breeding season, and then shed them. (I may be wrong here, and I’m sure a savvy reader will correct me if I am. Deer, of course shed their antlers and regrow them each year before the breeding season, so this may be a similar phenomenon.)

But the spiny facial protrusions of the Emei moustache toad, Leptobrachium boringii, studied and described in a new paper in PLoS ONE by Cameron Hudson and Jinzhong Fu, clearly represent a case of evolution promoting the development of weapons only when they’re needed, and then discarding them when they’re no longer needed. This is a great case of developmental plasticity over the mating season. (The paper is free online; reference and link below.)

Meet this bizarre amphibian:

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Two males from a Facebook photo:

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Those spikes on the snout are produced only in males, and last only 2-3 weeks during the breeding season. According to the paper, the males use them when fighting, head-butting each other in battles over nest sites and females.  In a “news and views” on the article at New Scientist, first author Cameron Hudson notes that, “During the breeding season, each male grows 10 to 16 spines. “They are as sharp as a pencil lead,” says Hudson, adding that the frogs “do try to stab you a bit when you pick them up”.

The New Scientist piece also has a short video clip (I can’t embed it) showing how the males fight; do watch it.  The fights often result in injuries when the males stab each other in the head and flanks, though the authors never saw or found a toad killed this way.

The toad lives in Szechuan, China, and males have a mean size of about 75 mm (3 inches), while females are about 12% shorter and 46% lighter.  The males build nests in fast-flowing streams, and thereby attract females. Females are apparently fertilized while visiting the nests, and then hie off back to the forest while males remain in the nests, guarding the clutches of eggs until they hatch.

The results of the paper aren’t earth-shaking; I’m putting up this post mainly because the beast is so weird.  The authors found that males can take over other males’ nests, though nest possession isn’t correlated with body size (that may reflect only small sample size).

The most interesting result is from DNA analysis, showing that the eggs guarded by a single male can actually be fathered by several different males. That almost certainly reflects males taking over the nests of other males after head-butting contests. There were also cases of single clutches of females having eggs from more than one father, implying multiple insemination of individual females.

Why do the males guard the eggs of other males? That would seem to be maladaptive, because you’re protecting the genes of rivals.  Well, there’s no cost to doing that, so you’re not expending more energy. Still, you’re protecting genes that will compete with your own. Clearly the optimum adaptive strategy for a male would be to immediately destroy the eggs of another male when taking over his nest. (This is analogous to male lions who, when taking over a new pride of females, kill all the cubs and then inseminate the females to produce their own progeny.) But perhaps these toads don’t have the ability to do that, or perhaps there’s no way for them to distinguish between their own clutches and those of other males. This study was a short one, but is ongoing, and maybe we’ll have some answers later.

In the meantime, here are two pictures from the PLoS ONE paper, showing the spines in their full glory as well as when a male has shed most of his spines after the breeding season:

Picture 1

_________

Hudson, C. M., and J. Fu. 2013. Male-biased sexual size dimorphism, resource defense polygyny, and multiple paternity in the Emei Moustache Toad Leptobrachium boringii.  PLoS ONE 8:e67502 EP.

Caturday felid: Spiderman cats and long jump fail

July 6, 2013 • 4:46 am

I had a really cool ad for the Oxygen network on tap this week, showing a cat trying to act like a dog, but it seems to have disappeared. (It was here but now is not available. If any reader can find it, please post the URL.)

UPDATE: Alert reader Michael Fuhr (first comment below) has found the Oxygen video, so I’ll put it up here. (Note that at the beginning, before it transmogrifies into a dog, the cat is dolorous, like Henri. They even play the melancholy “Gymnopédie” behind his words!) Let me add that I see this video as deeply misguided. . .

As a last-minute substitute, I’m posting two videos of athletic cats. The first is supposed to be a “Top 10 Spiderman Cats” but there are only 9 and the last clip appears to be the same as the first. (I’ve posted one or two of these cats before.) Regardless, it shows that human technical free climbers have nothing on the moggies. For what are crampons but artificial claws?

Note: some of my ailurophile friends tell me that it’s not good to use laser pointers with cats because the cats don’t ever get the satisfaction of catching the dot.

And, as a special treat, here’s a link to a video (I can’t embed it) of a spectacular cat long jump fail. Poor kitteh’s ambitious and well-contemplated leap isn’t noticed until he messes up. A screenshot:

Picture 1

h/t: Jeffrey

Joey Chestnut wins again, downs 69 hot dogs in ten minutes

July 5, 2013 • 12:41 pm

It’s time for the annual all-American rite of gluttony: Nathan’s Fourth of July hot-dog eating contest, the Super Bowl of the bizarre sport of competitive eating. The goal of this competition, held on Long Island, New York, is to down as many hot dogs as possible within the ten-minute time limit. Experienced contestants separate the dog from the bun, gobble the former, and then squash the bun into a lump to eliminate bulk, ingesting it with a gulp of water.

And this year Joey “Jaws” Chestnut set a world record: 69 hot dogs in ten minutes. That’s one hot dog every 8.7 seconds. And it beat his previous record (set in 2012) by exactly one dog.  He might have done even better had his long-time rival, Takeru Kobayashi, the small Japanese guy with the big stomach, been present. But Kobayashi didn’t attend.

God bless America!

Poland’s first test-tube baby becomes a voluntary apostate

July 5, 2013 • 9:01 am

Speaking of Catholics, I received some heartening news from my friend Małgorzata Koraszewska, who, along with her husband Andrzej, runs the Polish rationalist wesite Racjonalista. The news is that Poland’s first test-tube baby has left the Church in protest. She writes:

Today in Poland the first Polish test-tube baby, Ms Agnieszka Ziolkowska, has performed an official act of apostasy (to be stricken from the list of Catholics in Poland you have to do it very formally). The Church demands a witness to this act, and her witness was Professor Tomasz Polak, a theologian, former priest who left the priesthood in March 2007 (you have no idea what a scandal this was!) and even changed his name (his former name was Weclawski). Ms. Ziolkowska decided to go for formal apostasy after Polish bishops condemned in vitro fertilization.

It really gladdens my heart and I wanted to share it with you. The link to an article about it (unfortunately, in Polish): is here.

This is an act of considerable bravery given that Poland is Europe’s most Catholic country, with up to 90% of its inhabitants identifying as members of the Church.

I was told that it’s not this easy to leave the church: even when excommunicated you’re supposedly still a Catholic, just one who is going to hell. And I’m not sure exactly why Catholics object to test-tube babies: wouldn’t that allow for more Catholics? My guess is that it has something to do with having babies “naturally,” which doesn’t involve test tubes and artificial insemination.

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Agnieszka Ziolkowska

Muncie newspaper’s readers turn against ID

July 5, 2013 • 6:38 am

I’ve already posted on the Muncie Star-Times’s article on how the Discovery Institute has reacted to the Ball State University panel appointed to investigate Professor Eric Hedin’s science class. In that class Hedin is accused of having proselytized for Christianity and taught intelligent design while neglecting alternative (i.e., genuinely scientific) views.

The comments after that piece, however, are interesting, since most of them are now on the side of rationality and against intelligent design. Here are all of them from Wednesday. I was particularly interested in the comment by Richard Geisler, one of the students who took Hedin’s course.

I had Dr. Hedin for an Astronomy course. He demonstrates utmost professionalism. He began the semester asking everyone to write down what they thought their purpose in this life was. On the last day prior to finals, he finished his lecture on the origins of the universe and concluded that there are multiple opinions to what caused it all to happen. His opinion is that a Being was responsible for it and it was his opinion that we were here to serve that Being. That was it! There wasn’t anything controversial about it.

Nothing controversial about that—if you’re a Christian! And what kind of professor begins a science class by asking his students to write down their purpose in life? Do you suppose that had something to do with the purpose of the class?

I’m very curious how this whole Hedin affair will turn out. If Ball State University wants to keep any kind of credibility as a science-friendly institution, it has no choice but to can the class. The down side is that that will make Hedin into an ID martyr like Guillermo Gonzalez (just hired at Ball State!), and possibly land Hedin a job as a Discovery Institute Fellow.

The comments:

  • 157099_100000862815930_1374280475_q
  • The Discovery Institute is against a panel consisting of scientists. No surprises here.http://www.discovery.org/about.php

  • Amy Edmonds ·  Top Commenter · Works at Ball State University

    “Academic Freedom” outrage is the latest tactic of the Discovery Institute to wedge religion into science courses. You don’t see them demanding that universities or high schools teach alchemy, astrology or phrenology, just their pseudo-scientific theories that coincidentally support a God that resembles the Christian god.

  • Gary Hurd ·  Top Commenter

    On his Ball State biographic web page, Prof. Hedin lists “teleology” as one of his research interests. (Examined today). This is the notion that the universe exhibits “design and purpose.” It is not a secret that he is a creationist. And that is not the issue. What is questioned is whether Ball State University wants to teach creationism and award credit for honors physics? Maybe they could establish a certificate in astrology, too?The departmental review of his course obviously failed. This is not honors physics. I could see a course about creationism offered in sociology, or anthropology. But, reviewing Prof. Hedin’s reading list shows that there are nothing but creationist texts. This is not a course “about” creationism, it is teaching creationism as if it were science. There are none of the books written by scientists …See More

  • Gary Hurd ·  Top Commenter

    John West whines that scientists are biased against magical, and pseudo-scientific thinking. He thinks that a highly respected scientist like Dr. Pilachowski should be disqualified to review Prof. Hedin’s creationist course. West’s problem? Dr. Pilachowski was elected President of the American Astronomical Society. And like all professional scientific societies, the AAS opposed fraud passed off as science. The nation’s largest professional science association American Association for the Advancement of Science has pointed out for years about ID creationism “That the lack of scientific warrant for so-called “intelligent design theory” makes it improper to include as a part of science education” (2002). According to professional creationism apologist J. West, this disqualifies hundreds of thousands of scientists. And then we learn that Professor Eflin is suspect as a “feminist.”Clearly, West has a problem with highly qualified scientists and women. I suggest he close the lid back on his “think tank” and flush it. No doubt room will be found at the “discovery institute” for poor doctor Hedin. They can always use another shill with a Ph.D.

  • Amy Edmonds ·  Top Commenter · Works at Ball State University

    The goals of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture:Started in 1996, the Center for Science and Culture is a Discovery Institute program which:
    supports research by scientists and other scholars challenging various aspects of neo-Darwinian theory;
    supports research by scientists and other scholars developing the scientific theory known as intelligent design;
    supports research by scientists and scholars in the social sciences and humanities exploring the impact of scientific materialism on culture.
    encourages schools to improve science education by teaching students more fully about the theory of evolution, including the theory’s scientific weaknesses as well is its strengths.

  • Almitra Formisano Massey ·  Top Commenter · Selma, Indiana

    A call to action for those of us who believe science and religion can co-exist, for those of us who believe in intelligent design, and who support this professor and his desire to encourage students to think outside the box. If you stand by Professor Eric Hedin, join me in writing and calling the provost to let him know:
    Dr. Terry King
    (765) 285-1333
    TSKing@bsu.edu

    • Kevin Brown ·  Top Commenter

      With respect no-one is saying that science and religion cannot co-exist. They can and already do for most Christians. People are saying that the the theory of ID and creationism are NOT science. There is NO basis, proof or evidence for ANY of these theories.They laregly spend most of there time just attacking Evolution without providing ANY positive proof of there own theory. Frankly there supporters begin to sound like bullies and bigots after a while. Hence why many people who understand this controversy have so little respect for these so called theories.In Fact ID is the invention of a politicaly lobby and Marketing firm. The discovery institute. (they spend most of there funding on marketing and politics and a increadly small portion on what could even remotly be considered science).
      Reply · 4 · Like · Yesterday at 1:05pm

    • Richard Geisler · Muncie, Indiana

      If my opinion means anything, I had Dr. Hedin for an Astronomy course. He demonstrates utmost professionalism. He began the semester asking everyone to write down what they thought their purpose in this life was. On the last day prior to finals, he finished his lecture on the origins of the universe and concluded that there are multiple opinions to what caused it all to happen. His opinion is that a Being was responsible for it and it was his opinion that we were here to serve that Being. That was it! There wasn’t anything controversial about it. I would assume the course under review is similar, and even if it isn’t, it certainly wouldn’t be any more radical than the music theory prof I had that goes on rants and raves against Republicans, Christians, and claims that faith in a God is a form of mental retardation.
      Reply · 4 · Like · Yesterday at 1:08pm

    • Gary Hurd ·  Top Commenter

      This is nothing short of an invitation to harass Provost King. Typical of the religious fanatics who promote creationism.
      Reply · 3 · Unlike · Yesterday at 1:48pm
  • Eric Goberman ·  Top Commenter · BS Applied Mathematics Univ of Florida

    It should be noted that the Discovery Institute was taken to court and lost: ID is biblical creation and lying about it won’t change it.Biblical creation is NOT science, there is no “science” in ID.The purpose of the discovery institute:
    a federal court ruled that the Discovery Institute pursues “demonstrably religious, cultural, and legal missions”,[7][9][11] and the institute’s manifesto, the Wedge strategy,[12] describes a religious goal: to “reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions”.[13][14] It was the Federal Court’s opinion that intelligent design was merely a redressing of creationism and that, as such, it was not a scientific proposition
    Reply · 2 · Unlike · Follow Post · 5 hours ago