Amateur theologians: You can’t be a determinist if you feel like you have free will

June 10, 2013 • 11:49 am

This came to my attention through a linking attempt, and doesn’t merit a long response, but it’s an argument new to me.  At a website called Theo-Sophical Ruminations, whose author describes him/herself  someone whose “professional training is in theology, but I am an avid student of Christian apologetics,” there’s a post that seems quite critical of my views on free will. Called “Coyne on free-will: ‘we don’t have free will’ but ‘we have no choice but to pretend that we do choose“, the piece chastises me for saying that I behave as if I have real libertarian free will, even though intellectually I believe my choices are a determined product of my genes and my environment. That’s is supposed to be a real problem.

Here’s what the blogger says,

Scientists say the darndest things.  Last January I blogged on an article Jerry Coyne wrote in USA Today regarding free will.  At one point he said, “So if we don’t have free will, what can we do? One possibility is to give in to a despairing nihilism and just stop doing anything. But that’s impossible, for our feeling of personal agency is so overwhelming that we have no choice but to pretend that we do choose and get on with our lives.” Coyne is still spinning the same gobbledygook.  Recently, on Coyne’s own blog, a commentator took Coyne to task for acting as though humans have freedom, while being adamant that they do not.

Coyne responded:

“Yes, I think that all human actions are predetermined and not under some kind of dualistic control. Nevertheless we all, including incompatibilists like myself, act as if we have choices, for our feeling of agency is strong. So please don’t say that I shouldn’t make “should” statements because of that. I will act as though I have free choices even though I don’t. And of course you have to admit that what I say, determined or not, can influence the future actions of others. . . .” [it goes on]

I’m not sure exactly why that’s gobbledygook, nor does the writer give a reason. We have a strong feeling of agency, and that may be a product of natural selection—I’m not sure. But regardless, that feeling of agency is there, and pervasive, even though it may be a confabulation. We know such confabulations exist, for we’re all aware of cases in which people pretend to themselves that they’re making a choice when they’re really not, either because we “know” them so well that we’re aware of their self-deception. More obvious cases come from neuroscience, whose practitioners can stimulate brains and cause automatic responses (like waving one’s hand) that the subject interprets as a free choice (“I was waving at a nurse”). Likewise, psychology experiments with Ouija-board type setups clearly show that subjects think they are moving a cursor or an object when they’re not influencing its movement at all.  These things are indisputable. So what’s the problem?

In response, the unknown blogger simply levels a criticism of my remark made by David Heddle, a Calvinist physicist in Virginia who has something of an obsession with watching and criticizing my words.

Heddle:

. . . if all actions are predetermined then you cannot act as if you have choices. Acting is a volitional process of the very type you are denying. In your model there is no acting, there is only a differential equation of the universe cranking out its next time step. He is so close! He admits that in his world-view everything is predetermined, but in the next breath he obfuscates that unsavory factoid by claiming that he can “act” as though he has free choices. He can freely choose, he believes, to pretend that he can freely choose. And Jerry can’t, as he suggests, affect the behavior of others when he has already admitted that all human actions are predetermined.

To which the Theo-Sophical blogger responds:

Spot on!  Determinists who deny free will always end up affirming it through the back door.  They really do need to make philosophy courses part of the core curriculum in science programs!

What a mishmash of garbled thinking! Acting is not a volitional process of the type I’m denying; where is the evidence that it is “volitional,” presumably in the dualistic sense implied by Heddle and the Theo-Sophist. As for “freely choosing” to act as if I have free choices; that’s simply wrong. I don’t choose that feeling, freely or otherwise. My feeling of volition—that there is some “I” apart from my genes and environment that can make choices—is not freely chosen. It’s instilled in me—and almost certainly by my genes, since nearly all humans have it regardless of their experience.

Finally, of course I can affect the behavior of others if my actions are predetermined, for I am part of other people’s environments. Those effects are predetermined as well; they’re part of the whole physical regress (except for any pure indeterminacy produced by quantum effects).

Maybe I’m misunderstanding something, but this seems to be a misguided defense of libertarian free will. I’m used to compatibilists criticizing me for not happily embracing “the only kind of free will worth wanting,” but the idea that my feeling of volition somehow vindicates libertarian free will is simply dumb.  Maybe they should start making critical thinking part of the theoogy curriculum.

Ten to one Heddle will get his knickers in a twist over this. I won’t be paying attention.

Train illusion

June 10, 2013 • 8:17 am

If you watch this for a bit, the train will appear to start going backwards. I’m sure there’s some fancy psychological name for this particular illusion, but I don’t know it. Thanks to several readers who sent this.

Oh, and today is the deadline for the cat beard contest. Get your cat beard photos in (if you’re brave enough to take one) by 5 p.m. Chicago time.

train

Legal scholar: teaching intelligent design in public universities is both a scientific and First Amendment no-no

June 10, 2013 • 5:50 am

Today I want to mention an article in the 2008 William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal (my undergrad alma mater!) about the constitutionality and legality of teaching intelligent design in university science classes (reference and free download below).

The author is Frank S. Ravitch, Professor of Law & Walter H. Stowers Chair of Law and Religion at Michigan State University, so he certainly has the professional credentials to weigh in on this debate.  Of course that doesn’t mean that you will agree with him; apparently there are those who think that the First Amendment strictures against government sponsorship of religion do not apply—or at least don’t trump “academic freedom”—in public universities.

This is the only article I know of that deals with this issue, and so is relevant to the case of Eric Hedin, who proselytizes Christianity in an undergraduate science class at Ball State University.

Ravitch reaches three conclusions.

1.  Intelligent design (ID) is not science and therefore “universities may. . . preclude professors from teaching it in university science departments”.

Ravitch goes through the Lemon test and the Kitzmiller case in Dover to conclude, as did Judge Jones in the latter case, that intelligent design is not science, but a religiously motivated theory with no credible evidence behind it.  Ravitch then concludes, after reviewing relevant case law, that:

There is a significant amount of case law holding that public university officials may insist that professors teach within the stated curriculum. It is equally clear that within the curriculum, professors are accorded a great deal of academic freedom; although there are some limitations.”° Some of these cases involve professors inserting their religious views into courses unrelated to religion. In the end, courts have held that courses at public universities are so connected with the educational function of these institutions that university officials have a right to enforce “legitimate pedagogical interests” as to the general substance of courses. These interests either outweigh any claims of academic freedom asserted by professors °9 or are said to be invalid when it comes to teaching (at least in the core curriculum).

As for those who assert that this violates “academic freedom,” Ravitch responds:

At one level this is a bit disturbing to academics like myself. I had thought that academic freedom was quite broad in the classroom both as a matter of law and policy, but reading the cases, it seemed more and more like this is true as a matter of policy, but not necessarily as a matter of law. Yet, the ascendance of ID theory suggests there are reasons why the courts have ruled as they have. Most of the cases do not involve garden variety teaching disputes.” They more frequently involve either overt sexualized or profane statements in courses that do not touch on sex or profanity in any way, or they involve the insertion of material that may run contrary to the focus of the courses involved.’

Ravitch discusses the Bishop v. Aronov case decided by a federal court: the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Bishop was a professor at the University of Alabama who taught exercise physiology, and constantly proselytized about Jesus in his classes. He also organized an after-class event, “Evidences of God in Human Physiology,” which was optional.

Bishop was told to knock it off, but sued the university. He lost. As Ravitch notes,

The court held that a university classroom is not a public forum for speech. Thus, the university has the right to determine what substance is appropriate in the curricular context, so long as it has legitimate pedagogical interests for doing so. This must be done through case-by-case analysis.  In Bishop, the university had valid concerns regarding the relevance of the professor’s religious statements to a course in exercise physiology. Bishop had the freedom to hold events on his views of G-d’s role [JAC: the truncated spelling suggests that Ravitch is an orthodox or conservative Jew] in human physiology on campus so long as those events were not connected to his courses.  Thus, Bishop was not denied the freedom to discuss his religious convictions, he was only denied the ability to outwardly do so in the manner that he had in his exercise physiology course. The key issue was the department, college, and university’s right to control curriculum based on legitimate pedagogical interests.’ In this case, those interests included concerns about the pedagogical effects of students feeling religiously coerced in a basic physiology course.’ The notion of legitimate pedagogical interests was taken from a line of cases involving secondary schools.’

Ravitch also discusses legal cases supporting the idea that a university “may control a private individual’s speech where it is done in a manner which makes it, in reality, university speech. . .” As one judge ruled in a university case:

“While a student’s expression can be more readily identified as a thing independent of the school, a teacher’s speech can be taken as directly and deliberately representative of the school. Hence, where the in-class speech of a teacher is concerned, the school has an interest not only in preventing interference with the day-to-day operation of its classrooms as in Tinker, but also in scrutinizing expressions that ‘the public might reasonably perceive to bear [its] imprimatur'”.

2. Teaching ID in public universities and colleges is a likely violation of the Establishment Clause. That is, it can be prohibited an an unwarranted incursion of religion into public schools. This is directly relevant to the Hedin case:

The primary Establishment Clause concern regarding ID in science departments at public universities involves teaching ID. Support for research may also be an issue, but as will be seen, the teaching of ID poses a far more significant problem under the Establishment Clause. The Bishop court relied, in part, on the university’s justified fear of religious endorsement and coercion when it upheld the university’s right to preclude Professor Bishop from teaching a religious approach in his exercise physiology class. An important implication was that this was a general science class and not an upper level seminar and that it was a science class, as opposed to a class in religion or philosophy.

. . . When one registers for a course in the science curriculum, one does not expect to have religious positions on creation thrust upon oneself. Once one is registered for the course, it may be hard to withdraw for any number of reasons. If the professor imposes his or her religious views on the scientific subject matter of the course or, for religious reasons, skews his or her teaching so as to create a false impression that a generally scientific approach is invalid, there are clear problems of endorsement and coercion.

So much for the fact that Hedin’s course wasn’t required, and is therefore exempt from religious speech prohibitions. (It came close to being required, though, since there are very few Honors classes that meet the science requirement, and the Jesus proselytizing apparently didn’t begin until well after the class started).

When one registers for a course in the science curriculum, one does not expect to have religious positions on creation thrust upon oneself. Once one is registered for the course, it may be hard to withdraw for any number of reasons. If the professor imposes his or her religious views on the scientific subject matter of the course or, for religious reasons, skews his or her teaching so as to create a false impression that a generally scientific approach is invalid, there are clear problems of endorsement and coercion.

What about university professors not being subject to the Constitution because they’re not “agents of the state”? I disagree with that, and so does Ravitch. They are state employees performing state-specified duties, and if they promote Christianity, like Hedin did, they’re violating several prongs of the Lemon Test.

As the Edwards, Bishop, and Kitzmiller courts all note, the effect of teaching religious theories of creation in a secular science classroom is to promote or endorse religion. Using the podium of a state university science department to promote a religious theory of origins that has been rejected by the broader scientific community is an endorsement of religion. As the Bishop court explained, it could make students feel that they must “take it” or have their grades affected, and as the Kitzmiller court explained, it can create a false sense of scientific views on central issues in students who do not have a strong grounding in biology, chemistry, etc.

Ravitch concludes that “the Establishment Clause makes the public university’s role in limiting the teaching of ID in science courses mandatory. . there are no free speech or free exercise rights involved because there is no unlimited right to teach whatever one wants regardless of curricular needs or merit.”

3. Denying tenure to someone who engages in ID research is justified, since ID is not valid science.  On the other hand, revoking someone’s tenure if he/she decides to engage in post-tenure ID research is more problematic. 

I agree with this: the utmost caution must be exercised when considering revoking tenure since, after all, many professors engage in either no research or off-the-wall research after getting tenure, and they don’t get fired.  So long as one doesn’t teach ID in class, there would be little justification for removing tenure from somebody who starts dabbling in creationism. And, indeed, Lehigh University has not revoked the tenure of Michael Behe, one of ID’s prime exponents.

The onus, then, is on those who claim that Hedin can teach what he wants, including proselytizing for Christianity, to show that Ravitch’s legal analysis is dead wrong. Banging on about “academic freedom” is not sufficient.

I have reviewed the guidelines of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) on “academic freedom”, and it says precious little about whether a professor has freedom in a university classroom to either teach creationism or engage in religious proselytizing. The issue apparently hasn’t been adjudicated. The original AAUP guidelines (the famous “1940 statement”) say this:

  1. Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties; but research for pecuniary return should be based upon an understanding with the authorities of the institution.
  2. Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject. Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institution should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment.
  3. College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but their special position in the community imposes special obligations. As scholars and educational officers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.

Note the difference in “full freedom” for research and publication and “freedom” for discussing things in classroom, which is circumscribed by “teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject” (read, “Jesus”).

Finally, a more recent analysis of academic freedom prepared in 2002 by Donna R. Euben, the AAUP’s legal counsel, notes this:

D. Some Future Challenges

More clearly defining the relationship and tensions between individual and institutional academic freedom under the First Amendment will be a challenge for AAUP, colleges and universities, and courts. Future cases may provide opportunities to refine that relationship through exploration of:

The difference in protections under the First Amendment right of academic freedom between K-12 and postsecondary schools [colleges and universities]; and

The scope of institutional academic freedom as between private and public sector institutions

Both of these challenges involve the Hedin case, which makes it ripe for adjudication. I hope it doesn’t come to that, but it is time for the courts to clarify whether state employees who teach at U.S. universities must still abide by the Constitution. I still can’t see a good argument to the contrary.

_____

Frank S. Ravitch, 2008 Intelligent Design in Public University Science Departments: Academic Freedom or Establishment of Religion, 16 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 1061 (2008), http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmborj/vol16/iss4/6

Thought you might want to see it

Today’s Google Doodle honors Maurice Sendak

June 10, 2013 • 3:36 am

Today’s Google doodle is the best I’ve seen yet. It’s an animated tour through the world of Maurice Sendak,  the beloved author and illustrator who would have been 85 today had he lived (he died last year). I’m not familiar with all of Sendak’s work, as my childhood antedated his book, but i09 says this:

The animation takes us through Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and Sendak’s 2011 book Bumble-Ardy. Happy Birthday, Mr. Sendak.

Here’s a screenshot, but it doesn’t do it justice at all. It’s quite a long animation, and you must see it.

Google DoodleHe was gay, of Jewish extraction, and an atheist.  Wikipedia notes this:

Sendak was an atheist, and stated in a September 2011 interview with Terry Gross on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air that he didn’t believe in God. He went on to elaborate, and said among other things, “It [religion, and belief in God] must have made life much easier [for some religious friends of his]. It’s harder for us non-believers.”

I posted this wonderful video (an illustrated recording, actually) when Sendak died, but it’s worth hearing again. This is part of Terry Gross’s interview with Sendak, and he expresses his love of life and loss of his friends. It’s terribly moving.

As he said, “there are so many beautiful things in this world.” He was one of them.

h/t: SGM

Bill Maher takes apart Reagan

June 9, 2013 • 4:45 pm

Since Ronald Reagan died nine years ago, I’ve watched him transmogrified into something of a saint. Even Democrats like Obama don’t dare say a bad word about this bigoted right-wing, demagogue. All he had going for him was a faux affability, which was a thin veneer on deeply dangerous ideas.

Two weeks ago Bob Dole, in a critique of the Republican Party on Fox News Sunday, argued that the GOP had moved so far right that Reagan couldn’t even make it as a Republican candidate were he to run today.

While it’s good that Dole points out how crazily conservative the GOP has become, I didn’t buy for a second his view that Reagan wouldn’t be a comfortable fit with today’s Republicans. Reagan was a right wing-nut, and his beatification is mystifying.

I see that Bill Maher agrees with me. Here’s a clip from a recent show in which he disassembles the Reagan myth, and does so in an extraordinarily serious way for Maher.

Necrophilia in a tropical frog

June 9, 2013 • 12:17 pm

Did that title get your attention? Well, yes, it’s a bit sensationalistic—wait till The Daily Mail gets hold of this!—but there are also evolutionary lessons here. I’ve previously posted about necrophilia in penguins, but those sex acts were largely unproductive with respect to offspring. In this case, though, males of a tropical frog have what is an apparently evolved behavior to get dead females to eject their eggs, fertilizing them as they’re squeezed out. Offspring are produced.

The behavior is reported in a recent paper by Thiago Izzo and colleagues in the Journal of Natural History (reference below; free download here). The species at issue, Rhinella proboscidea, is an Amazonian frog that engages in what is called “explosive breeding.”  Over two or three days, several hundred males gather in streams or ponds, competing with each other to fertilize the females who drop by.  But the frenzy to mount the females and copulate with them (eggs are expelled by the females, with males covering them with sperm as they emerge) is so heated that females are often drowned.

One would think that that would be the end of the story, but it isn’t.  The males have an adaptation to copulate with recently-drowned females, squeezing their bellies with the male’s hindlimbs to make the corpse expel the eggs.  The researchers observed at least four males doing this near the city of Manaus in Brazil,  collecting the eggs and confirming that they were fertilized.  Here are  photos from the paper. Photo (c), with the dead female, is especially saddening (caption below the photos).

Picture 3
Figure from paper with caption: Figure 1. Necrophilia in Rhinella proboscidea in a central Amazonian headwater stream. Thousands of eggs (arrow) from a single reproductive event, in a small patch of a headwater stream (A). Two males in a battle for a drowned female. The larger (arrowed) is in amplexus and compressing the female’s abdomen with his legs, which resulted in expulsion of the oocytes (B). Male compressing the abdomen of a dead female, which resulted in expulsion of her oocytes (C).

Now I’m not sure whether the behavior involved in squeezing dead females differs from normal male copulatory behavior, but I suspect it does, since I’d guess that females voluntary expel eggs during copulation. I’m sure some herpetologist will weigh in here. But if the behavior does differ, then the necrophiliac squeezing is probably an evolved adaptation, since males squeezing dead females who still contain viable eggs will leave more offspring than non-squeezing males. The authors suggest that some morphological features of males, such as spines on their thumbs and large size, might also have evolved as adaptations for necrophilia.  I find that more problematic, since these features probably exist in males of species that don’t commit such immoral acts.

The interesting question to ponder is whether dead females have also evolved to expel their eggs more easily.  Let us not forget that natural selection can act post mortem, though I can hardly think of another case (a related case involved male spiders who catapault themselves into the jaws of their female mates after copulation, presumably giving the females a meal that increases their reproductive output).  Any morphological feature of females that facilitates their expulsion of eggs after death will be selected for, as those features give the bearers a higher reproductive output than non-expellers.  It’s not clear, though, whether that adaptation has evolved in females of this species.

The authors note that necrophilia has been seen in several vertebrates, including mammals, birds, reptiles, and other amphibians, but they add that this “is the first case where the necrophilia brings a direct fitness gain, generating descendants.”

Here’s a short video of a calling male from biotabrazil.com:

__________________

Izzo, T. J., D. J. Rodrigues, M. Menin, A. P Lima and W.E. Magnusson 2012. Functional necrophilia: a profitable anuran reproductive strategy? J. Nat. Hist. 46:2961-2967

Updates on the Hedin case

June 9, 2013 • 7:55 am

Ball State University’s investigation of professor Eric Hedin continues. Hedin, you’ll recall, was accused of teaching creationism as well as proselytizing for Jesus in an undergraduate science course, and newspapers and websites continue to report and discuss the issue.

To me, the case is important because the issue of whether public universities —as opposed to public grade schools and high schools—can teach creationism or push a particular religious view has never been properly adjudicated by U.S. courts. Such proselytizing, and the teaching of intelligent design creationism (ID), has been ruled out of court in “lower level” schools as a violation of our Constitution’s First Amendment. Nevertheless, many of my fellow academics claim that the First Amendment doesn’t apply in this way to public universities. That’s because, they say, issues of academic freedom (“a professor can teach what he wants”), and the elective nature of many college courses, make the First Amendment inapplicable at the university level.

I find that opinion baffling.  Many high-school courses, such as advanced placement courses, are optional too, and one can always get home schooled, yet the First Amendment still applies. It also applies at public high school sporting events, where public or student-led prayers are unconstitutional even though attendance at the games is optional.

As for academic freedom, that is not enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, nor does it mean what people like P. Z. Myers and Larry Moran think it means. It’s not a license to teach anything you want in the classroom, including astrology, spiritual healing, and creationism. Rather, it’s a license to do what research you want—a license to inquire freely in your academic career.  And even that “freedom” is circumscribed, for you’re not going to get tenure at a good university doing research “proving” creationism or the efficacy of telekinesis. (Once you have tenure, of course, you can pretty much do what you want without fear of being fired.) Academic freedom is about inquiry, not about teaching. Finally, professors at public universities are, like those in all public schools, employees and agents of the state, and their speech in the classroom can be construed as government speech.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss a reviewed and published article by a legal scholar that makes exactly these points with respect to public universities.  It may be an eye-opener for those who claim (without legal training or knowledge) that First Amendment principles are trumped by academic freedom in public universities.

But let me once again give my take on what I think Ball State should do.  The university should 1. Remove Hedin’s honors symposium as a science class, 2. Move it, if he still wants to teach it, to a philosophy or religion curriculum, 3. Tell Hedin he has to offer more balance in his course, giving viewpoints of nonreligious scholars like Sean Carroll, Victor Stenger, or Lawrence Krauss, and 4. absolutely prohibit Hedin from pushing his personal religious views (Christianity) on his students.  For the record, I do not think Hedin should be fired, but his classes should certainly be monitored. If I pushed atheism on my students the way Hedin pushes Christianity, I would deserve similar treatment.

In the meantime, writers continue to give their opinions. One is by the former Official Website Uncle™, Dr. Karl Giberson, who lost that title through dogged and unreasoning adherence to evangelical Christianity. In his new HuffPo piece on the Hedin case, “Teaching students about God and science,” he demonstrates once again why he lost his title to Eric MacDonald.

Giberson, a critic of ID, teaches classes similar to Hedin’s at his own school, Stonehill College in Massachusetts, feels that Hedin’s course is unbalanced and not a good cause célèbre for academic freedom. Giberson’s take on this is, then, reasonable:

I can hardly agree with the intelligent design folk at the Discovery Institute that this is an academic freedom case. Academic freedom is a noble, if ambiguous, concept that can be invoked in support of many things but one of those is not the freedom to tell students things that are not true. If, as the syllabus suggests, Hedin’s students are learning that the ideas of the intelligent design movement are the cutting edge of science and heralding a major revolution, there are grounds for concern. If the students leave Hedin’s class believing that the scientific community is wrestling with the proposals that have come out of the intelligent design movement, then they have been misled and poorly served. Most practicing scientists understand that their disciplines have unanswered questions and “boundaries” of some sort. But virtually none of them are looking to an external “designer” to answer these questions.

Hedin’s assigned readings and bibliography are somewhat unbalanced, although one of the two required texts is a solid popularization of conventional big bang cosmology, unadorned by theological speculation. However, were students to infer that the extensive bibliography list covers the bases for the discussion of the “Boundaries of Science” they would be mistaken. Of the roughly 20 books listed, half advocate basic intelligent design with the remainder divided evenly between books by Christians sympathetic to raising constructive questions about God in the context of science — like Keith Ward and myself — or non-theists with minority viewpoints that resonate in some way with traditional theism — like Roger Penrose and Paul Davies. Noticeably absent are genuinely critical books of the sort written by Vic Stenger, Steven Weinberg and even Jerry Coyne that address the same issues but offer informed atheistic responses.

Good for ex-uncle Karl.  But he goes off the rails in two ways. First, he says that there’s no evidence that Hedin engaged in Christian proselytizing in class:

No evidence whatsoever supports Jerry Coyne’s claim that Hedin is “proseletyzing for Jesus” in his Boundaries of Science class. Coyne is notorious for pretending not to understand the difference between a philosophically motivated theism and Christian fundamentalism and has waded into this controversy with his usual blinkered culture war mentality.

That’s simply not true. There are at least three published “complaints” on RateMyProfessors.com (out of 15 total) noting Hedin’s pushing of Christianity. Note that the 15 are from of all of Hedin’s classes—and he teaches several—not just from the honors course at issue. I’ll reproduce them again for Karl’s delectation (he mentions just one of these):

Picture 3
Further, there are at least two other students who have written detailed complaints about Hedin’s proselytizing in the Honors class (his statements are worse than you can imagine), but haven’t yet decided whether to go public with their complaints. (You can imagine the ostracism they’d face!) I’m not at liberty to publish their statements yet, but hope that I can soon. I’ve mentioned at least one of these other complaints on my site, and I’m not lying about it, so Karl is just wrong.

As for Karl’s statement that I’m “notorious for pretending not to understand the difference between a philosophically motivated theism and Christian fundamentalism and has waded into this controversy with his usual blinkered culture war mentality,” well, that’s just mean-spirited, un-Christian for a Christian, and, worse, wrong. I certainly understand the difference between fundamentalism and “philosophically motivated theism” and have never pretended otherwise.  The problem is that the latter isn’t any more respectable than the former. Indeed, in some ways it’s worse, since “philosophically motivated theism” is usually espoused by smart people who should know better and by those who, like Giberson, have science training and should know how to distinguish evidenced from nonevidenced beliefs. Really, Karl, if we’re getting personal here, let me respond that you’re a smart guy, so how can you believe all that crap?

As for “blinkered culture war” mentality (and yes, it is a culture war, involving superstition versus reason), Giberson ends with this:

Eric Hedin is an assistant science professor, popular with most of his students. He needs to get promoted to associate and then full professor. If he works hard, he will get tenured along the way. And my guess is that his interdisciplinary explorations, like those of many thinkers inclined to consider the larger context of their fields, will become more sophisticated as time passes. If not, his colleagues won’t vote him tenure. In the meantime, Ball State doesn’t need external culture warriors telling them how to run their university.

Hedin’s been an untenured professor for over a decade, and was at a religious college before that. There’s no sign of him becoming more sophisticated. His Christian-soaked syllabus in 2013 is pretty much what it was in the past.

As for BSU not needing culture warriors to oppose them, of course they do—that is, if that school wants to retain any credibility of being an academically sound institution.  Were we supposed to sit back and let Hedin shove Jesus down his students’ throats, as well as presenting creationism in his science class? Well excuse me for informing Hedin’s chair (and then, when the chair did nothing, the Freedom from Religion Foundation) about his course. None of us, including the FFRF told anyone what to do—we simply informed the university of the dangers of its present course.  And if they let Hedin continue his religious proselytizing in science class, they’re fools.

And if Hedin gets away with this, so can anybody else, and then it’s Christianity in science classes everywhere. As Clarence Darrow said on the second day of the Scopes trial:

Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

*****

Here’s a lovely editorial by the benighted Ron Coody in the the Fort Wayne (Indiana) News Sentinel : “Intolerant critics of BSU prof lose scientific objectivity to an ideology.” Coody favors the “science is a religion” trope:

On the other hand, Coyne and many others in the secular academy have made science into a religion. They brazenly assert that science proves atheism. Their religion is atheism and they use their classrooms to spread their religion.

When a physicist like Dr. Hedin dares to suggest that science does not prove atheism and furthermore surmises that there are questions about truth it might never answer, the atheists assemble their inquisition.

Like the outspoken atheist biology professor at my son’s university who mocked a student one day in class for saying, “Bless you” to a friend who sneezed, they will resort to shaming, bullying, intimidation and sometimes outright deceit to promote atheism. They want to engineer an Orwellian world where no one can question the myth that modern physics and biology have proven there is no God.

These kinds of people are not only intolerant. They have lost scientific objectivity to an ideology.

I dare Coody to show where I have ever said that science proves atheism.  And I dare him to show that I’ve tried to spread atheism in my classroom. Frankly, Coody is an outright liar. What I have said—and on this site and in my writings, not in my class—is that science (and rationality) has given no evidence for the existence of gods, and so I choose not to believe in them.

And what “deceit” have I, or any other BSU critic, practiced? Coody again is lying here. I always wonder if Coody and others who denigrate science for being “like religion”, or a “nonobjective ideology” have ever pondered the implications of that view for religion itself. By trying to drag science down to the level of religion, they’re implicitly criticizing religion.

****

Finally, a neutral piece from The Christian Post on the Hedin affair, “Ball State University Professor Awaiting Decision for Teaching Creationism.” It does include a new quote from the Discovery Institute (ID Central):

Dr. John G. West, vice president of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, told The Christian Post that the investigation of Hedin was a matter of academic freedom.

“Prof. Hedin is an outstanding professor who has published many peer-reviewed technical articles in his field,” said West.  “Contrary to published reports, there is absolutely no evidence that he teaches or even believes in ‘creationism,’ the idea that the earth was created just a few thousand years ago in 6 literal 24-hour days.”

West also told CP that he hoped Ball State would decide to “be fair and courageous and stand up for Professor Hedin’s rights.”

“State University [sic] needs to allow Prof. Hedin the same freedom it gives every other faculty member on its campus. Unfortunately, we’ve seen universities and other institutions intimidated in the past on this issue,” said West.

Three things wrong here. First, intelligent design is creationism, just not young-earth, literalist creationism.  Second, and again, “academic freedom” refers to freedom of inquiry, not freedom to tell your students anything you want. And it’s also a matter of First Amendment rights.  Third, I don’t know if any other BSU professor gets away with touting Jesus in the class, so West’s statement that other professors have the same “freedom” is misguided.

cat-jesus

h/t: SGM, Amy

Sunday morning bird facts

June 9, 2013 • 5:01 am

First, did you know that goshawks (Accipiter gentilis; the Northern Goshawk) can fly through extremely small spaces? This bird wasn’t trained to do it; they fly through dense woods and have to negotiate quickly on the wing.

(For an earlier post on goshawks hunting, go here.)

And this fascinating fact, which will make you a hit at cocktail parties, came from the University of London’s John R. Hutchinson, a big name in vertebrate anatomy and biomechanics:

Picture 3

You’ll want to see the proof, of course (that semicircular, whitish-blue bulge in the hole is the back of the eye):

Owl eye through ear

[EDIT FROM MATTHEW COBB: I sent John’s tweet to Jerry and I was so amazed I chatted about it with various colleagues this morning. Amazement all round. Then someone asked: ‘how do they hear?’ This led to a lot of googling and thinking – ‘hey, what about the ear drum?’ And the answer is (it appears) – this is a picture of a dead owl  that has had its ear drum removed/sectioned so you can see into its eye socket. Which is still pretty cool, just not as cool as we all thought. My excuse? I know about maggots and that’s about it. John didn’t realise that we would all misinterpret the picture (which he didn’t take). IF ANYONE KNOWS ANY BETTER PLEASE WRITE IN THE COMMENTS BELOW!]

Hutchinson has pinned a gazillion great animal/anatomy picks at his Pinterest site, Mucho Morphology.  Here are two as lagniappe, but go over and see for yourself:

A leucistic (not albino) echidna, from All Albino Animals (some of them aren’t true albinos, but show leucism):

787370-albino-animals
Repinned from Animals by Remi Kalisz
Originally pinned by Judy Shelton onto Albino Anomilies

The eye of a giant Humboldt squid:

220dad93ae80d5fd59654a118f9fc7f1
Originally pinned by Volker Heupel onto nature

EDIT from Matthew Cobb:

Given that the d*g has no bone to the back of its eyesocket (as you can see in this skull), I asked John Hutchinson on Twitter whether you could do the same trick with a d*g as he did with an owl. He replied as follows:

Hutchinson

h/t: SGM, Matthew Cobb