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.
According to CNN, the cardinals have chosen the new CEO of the Catholic Church.
One guess per reader: whoever first guesses the Pope correctly wins a free book with a Cat-Lick drawn in it.
Offer expires when the Pope is publicly named.
Go!
I have some good news and some bad news.
(That reminds me of a something my father used to say:
Dad: Jerry, I have some good news and some bad news. Which would you like to hear first?
Jerry: The bad news. [I’m Jewish.]
Dad: The bad news is that there isn’t any good news.
Jerry: Well, then, what’s the good news?
Dad: The good news is that that’s the only bad news there is.
Depending on what the other person requests, you can also do the reverse, saying that the good news is that there isn’t any bad news, but the bad news is that that’s the only good news there is. I’ll be here all week, folks.)
At any rate, the good news today is that, according to an article in the latest Atlantic by David Wheeler, evangelical Christians who homeschool their kids are getting fed up with the blatantly creationist biology textbooks that, until recently, were all they could find for their kids.
It’s no secret that the majority of homeschooled children in America belong to evangelical Christian families. What’s less known is that a growing number of their parents are dismayed by these textbooks.
Take Erinn Cameron Warton, an evangelical Christian who homeschools her children. Warton, a scientist, says she was horrified when she opened a homeschool science textbook and found a picture of Adam and Eve putting a saddle on a dinosaur. “I nearly choked,” says the mother of three. “When researching homeschooling curricula, I found that the majority of Christian homeschool textbooks are written from this ridiculous perspective. Once I saw this, I vowed never to use them.” Instead, Warton has pulled together a curriculum inspired partly by homeschool pioneer Susan Wise Bauer and partly by the Waldorf holistic educational movement.
. . .This staunch rejection of modern science tends to characterize today’s leading homeschool textbooks. For example, Science 4 Christian Schools, a homeschool textbook published by Bob Jones University Press, doesn’t mince words when it comes to evolution and Christian faith. “People who accept the Bible believe that God made everything,” the book states. “They call God’s description of how things began the Creation Model. Those who disregard the Bible believe instead that everything got here by itself. They call this description of how things began the Evolution Model.”
The assertion that anyone who believes in evolution “disregards” the Bible offends many evangelicals who want their children to be well-versed in modern science. Jen Baird Seurkamp, an evangelical who homeschools her children, avoids textbooks that discredit evolution. “Our science curriculum is one currently used in public schools,” she says. “We want our children to be educated, not sheltered from things we are afraid of them learning.”
For those homeschooling parents who are science-friendly and read this website, the piece lists several publishers who present evolution from a largely scientific—as opposed to a completely creationst—viewpoint.
That’s the good news. It’s time that homeschooling parents had biology textbooks that didn’t show humans riding dinosaurs. (Seriously, the article mentions one book that does this.)
The bad news is that the books that are available always try to comport evolution with God.
The rising number of homeschool families striving to reconcile belief in God with today’s scientific consensus has attracted the attention of at least one publisher — Christian Schools International in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “Most science textbooks that attempt to present the content from a Christian perspective also attempt to discredit the theory of evolution,” says Ken Bergwerff, a science curriculum specialist at Christian Schools International. “Some do it discreetly; others are quite blatant. The CSI science curriculum clearly presents science from a Christian perspective, but does not attempt to discredit the theory of evolution. The content presents God as the author of all of creation, no matter how he did it or when he did it.”
Dorothy Boorse, a biology professor at Gordon College, a Christian college in Massachusetts, applauds these underdog homeschool textbooks. “I believe that the best evidence is that the earth is very old and that God used and continues to use the biological process of evolution,” she says. “Many Christians in the sciences believe such a position is consistent with several possible interpretations of Scripture, including some that go way back in Christian history, and several from the Jewish tradition.”
So they’ll learn evolution, butit comes with the obligatory dose of apologetics, showing how evolution doesn’t conflict with their faith. This will almost always involve theistic evolution: either God set up the process to create his creatures (especially humans), or he sticks his finger into the process from time to time to make desired mutations, plants, and animals (especially humans). Both interpretations are unscientific. After all, do homeschool chemistry textbooks say that God guides every molecule? Why not say in the history textbooks that God created human history as well, knowing that it would produce a Hitler?
Do apologetics really belong in any science textbooks? If homeschooled kids are disturbed by scientific truths, let them go to their parents for the obligatory theological brainwashing.
And guess who’s getting their sticky fingers into the accommodationist-textbook business?
Other Christian organizations that believe in evolution are beginning to put money and resources into their efforts to reframe the conversation. In 2012, the BioLogos organization received a multimillion-dollar grant from the John Templeton Foundation to fund its Evolution and Christian Faith project, which disburses money to Christians who reconcile theology with evolutionary biology.
For example, grant recipients Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, and Scot McKnight, a New Testament scholar at Northern Seminary, will “write a book on the evidence for evolution and population genetics, with informed theological reflection on how these issues interact with orthodox Christianity,” the BioLogos website states. [JAC: see the book proposal here.]
Go here if you want to see how dreadful the Templeton/BioLogos “Evolution and Christian Faith” program is. One of them is the development of an accomodationist college textbook, which, after teaching evolution, will do this:
Tensions perceived by readers between scientific and biblical accounts of origins are defused when the purviews of science and theology are properly defined and their historical engagement is reviewed, a robust doctrine of creation is explored, and the cultural-historical contexts of scriptural accounts are understood.
The key word here is “properly defined”, and it’s a weasel term that is the basis of Steve Gould’s NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria) approach. That was an approach that didn’t work because religion obstinately refuses to remain “proper”. (Gould, for example, didn’t see fundamentalism as a “proper” faith simply because it encroached on science. His argument thus devolved into circularity.)
Scientists as divergent as Francis Collins (in The Language of God) and E. O. Wilson (in Atoms and Eden) also argue that Gould’s accommodationism is a non-starter because both agree that the epistemic claims of faith intrude into science, and (on Wilson’s part), religion is a human-created phenomenon that doesn’t have the corner on morality and meaning.
The Templeton/BioLogos project pushes a specific theology: that there is a “proper understanding” of scripture—a metaphorical one, of course (with the exception of the Virgin Birth and Resurrection, both of which Collins accepts as truths)—that makes evolution okay. Where this approach always fails is in convincing anti-evolution theists that the new theology is “proper.” You can lead a creationist Christian to evolution, but you can’t make him think.
The inevitable failure of accomodationism will be the subject of a second post later today, when we’ll see why an ex-fundamentalist preacher sees even moderate Christian dogma and evolution as thoroughly incompatible.
Another accommodationist attack in the Guardian on Grayling and his new book. The subtitle says it all:
It’s by Jonathan Rée, and is completely predictable:
Militant atheism makes the strangest bedfellows. Grayling sees himself as a champion of the Enlightenment, but in the old battle over the interpretation of religious texts he is on the side of conservative literalist fundamentalists rather than progressive critical liberals. He believes that the scriptures must be taken at their word, rather than being allowed to flourish as many-layered parables, teeming with quarrels, follies, jokes, reversals and paradoxes. Resistance is, of course, futile. If you suggest that his vaunted “clarifications” annihilate the poetry of religious experience or the nuance of theological reflection*, he will mark you down for obstructive irrationalism. He is, after all, a professional philosopher, and his training tells him that what cannot be translated into plain words is nothing but sophistry and illusion**.
Yadda yadda yadda. . .
There’s nothing new I can say about this stuff. It’s tedious, it’s repetitive, it’s unoriginal, and it’s wrong. But it never stops.
Oh, I’ll say one thing: once you take the Bible as metaphor, any interpretation is possible. In that sense, fundamentalists are more intellectually honest than the “moderate” faithful.
UPDATE: For a palliative, read Grayling’s lovely Guardian essay from 2006, “Can an atheist be a fundamentalist?” A snippet:
It is time to put to rest the mistakes and assumptions that lie behind a phrase used by some religious people when talking of those who are plain-spoken about their disbelief in any religious claims: the phrase “fundamentalist atheist”. What would a non-fundamentalist atheist be? Would he be someone who believed only somewhat that there are no supernatural entities in the universe – perhaps that there is only part of a god (a divine foot, say, or buttock)? Or that gods exist only some of the time – say, Wednesdays and Saturdays? (That would not be so strange: for many unthinking quasi-theists, a god exists only on Sundays.) Or might it be that a non-fundamentalist atheist is one who does not mind that other people hold profoundly false and primitive beliefs about the universe, on the basis of which they have spent centuries mass-murdering other people who do not hold exactly the same false and primitive beliefs as themselves – and still do?
________
My footnotes:
*”The nuance of theological reflection” = obscurantism
**What Rée means here is this: obscurantism = profundity
Another awesome cat video from Japan.
In less than a second, this tabby leaps into the air and catches a toy bear. In slow motion, the grace is revealed: the cat catches the bear with its front paws, transfers the toy to its mouth, twists around using its tail as counterbalance, and then retracts its rear feet to land on its forelegs.
Can any d-g (or Nureyev, for that matter) produce such a lovely leap? (That’s a rhetorical question.)
h/t:Gattina
I’m reading an interesting book: a series of interviews by Steve Paulson of various bigwigs who talk about the relationship between science and religion. It’s called Atoms & Eden: Conversations on Religion & Science (Oxford University Press, 2010). The interviewees are diverse and interesting: they include Francis Collins, Karen Armstrong, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Simon Conway Morris, Jane Goodall, Robert Wright, Elaine Pagels, John Haught, Daniel Dennett—23 in all, a broad mélange of believers, “strident” atheists, and accommodationists. It’s well worth reading, for there are some surprises (E. O. Wilson, for instance, calls himself a “provisional deist”).
I’ll post any interesting tidbits I find, but here is one, a statement by Francis Collins, NIH director, giving his take on the origins of intelligent design (ID). It’s on pp. 34-35, in response to Paulson’s followup to an earlier statement by Collins: “I think many of the current battles between atheists and fundamentalists have really been started by the scientific community.” Collins says this is a tragedy, and Paulson asks why he says this. Collins’s response is this:
“If you look at the history of the intelligent design movement, you will see that it is a direct response to the claims coming from people like Dawkins. They could not leave this claim unchallenged—that evolution alone can explain all of life’s complexity. It sounded like a Godless outcome.”
Yep, blame it on the militant atheists!
The problem is that Collins is completely wrong, and he should know better. ID was a direct and deliberate strategy of creationists to circumvent court rulings that deemed creationism a religious theory that, according to the U.S. First Amendment, couldn’t be taught in science classes. In response, the faithful cooked up a theory in which God now appeared in a lab coat instead of robes—as an “intelligent designer” of unspecified provenance. He might be a space alien!
The IDers didn’t fool anyone. And, if you look at The Wedge Document” (pdf here), a manifesto drafted in 1998 as the master plan for the “godless” ruse of ID, you’ll see that it’s blatantly motivated by faith.
It also contains no mention of Dawkins, and was written seven years before The God Delusion came out.
ID was not a direct response to Dawkins or any other atheists. It was a direct response to courtroom defeats and the fear that creeping materialism would displace religion in America. Anybody who’s studied this issue even cursorily knows that.
But Collins, like many accommodationists, wants to argue that loudmouthed atheists are responsible for the truculence of creationists. If we’d only shut up, creationism would go away.
The evidence, which Collins ignores, says otherwise.
Combining HuffPo with the new, wooish reincarnation of TED is likely to prove a toxic combination. Sure enough, HuffPo has begun featuring essays based on TED talks. The latest one, “Why do evil and suffering exist?” by Jeffrey Small (based on a nonreligious talk by Phil Zimbardo), is dire. It’s garden-variety theodicy dressed up for HuffPo readers. As Small puts it:
But theologians continue to struggle with a fundamental question: How can a purported loving, yet all-powerful, God permit evil and suffering, especially when they strike saint and sinner alike? Witnessing the reality of the human condition leads many to ask whether God is truly omnipotent, omniscient, or loving, or to conclude that maybe God simply does not exist at all. Why wouldn’t God prevent a young child from being struck by cancer, killed by a deranged shooter, or drowned in a tsunami? The common retorts that God’s ways are “mysterious” or that God has an overarching plan that we cannot know are unsatisfying both emotionally and logically.
To any thinking person not brainwashed by upbringing or desire, the answer is clear: there isn’t any God. (The less parsimonious theory is either that God is malicious or that, as John Haught posits, He’s relaxing on his celestial throne with popcorn and a Big Gulp, enjoying the show.)
The “evils” of the world, both manmade and natural, are simply a result of evolved animals living in a dynamic and unstable world. There is predation, parasitism, and disease. Humans hurt others to advance themselves. The tectonic plates move, and multitudes die in earthquakes and floods. This is precisely what you’d expect if there is no God.
But of course that conclusion is unacceptable to the faithful. Small, who is religious, offers a version of the “free will” explanation—presumably involving dualistic free will, or a ghost in the machine:
Evolution only works because of freedom in the natural world: a freedom of genetic mutation, a freedom of natural selection, and a freedom of randomness. This freedom led to the existence of conscious humans, but by necessity the same freedom also causes cancer, disease, natural catastrophes, and even extinctions. The paradox of existence is that death and destruction bring forth new life. Spring follows winter.
As unpleasant as the physical and emotional sensations of pain and suffering may be, they are neurological adaptive responses necessary to protect us from harm. Similarly, human freewill, in conjunction with a biological self-interest for preservation, are programmed into our natures to ensure our survival. But these same qualities when unchecked can also lead people to commit atrocities. [JAC: Couldn’t God check them?]
“Freedom” of genetic mutation? Is that the unpredictability of mutations that might rest on quantum phenomena? Well, God could have stopped that had He wanted. In contrast, there’s no “freedom” in natural selection and other sorts of randomness, which is determined at bottom. And even if we have “choices”, God could made our choices ones that didn’t produce evil.
If you accept compatibilist free will, things become worse, for that’s not the kind of free will posited by the faithful. To them, at each point we must be able to choose between good or evil. In the end, Small must conclude that his God could have tinkered with the world—and with evolution—to prevent suffering, but chose not to do so.
But Small wants something more—meaning. He’s already provided it from a naturalistic perspective, but needs to explain why God permits preventable suffering.
While science can explain the cold-hearted mechanics of the human condition, it leaves us wanting something more: meaning. Can we combine the insights from religion and science in making sense of death and suffering?
What a rhetorical question! Does one expect the faithful to answer this in anything but the affirmative? (My answer is “Yes, you can make sense of anything—including Auschwitz—using the theological sausage grinder.”) Small gets in deeper:
What if instead of viewing God as a cosmic judge punishing us for our misdeeds or as a capricious chess master toying with our lives according to some mysterious plan, we think of God as the power of being itself — a power that supports all existence as its creative ground but does not make a choice as to which unfortunate events to change? Thus, the problem of evil is ultimately one of perspective: from a micro view we lament the sufferings of humanity, but from a macro view we can understand that this suffering is part of the very fabric of existence itself — an existence that on balance is good.
The nature of existence is such that humankind must be free. To be free, we have the ability to do evil, to turn away from God, the true ground of who we are. Thus, the reality of evil and suffering is built into the very fabric of life as a requirement for life to be.
“Power of being.” “Ground of being.” Those are the weasel words of theologians who don’t know what they’re saying, and so emit fancy phrases to cover their ignorance like a blanket of snow. What, exactly, is a “power of being”? Is it benevolent and omnipotent? If so, the question remains.
And what about all that evil and suffering not caused by human choice: children getting leukemia, thousands wiped out by natural disasters like tsunamis, and all those animals whose suffering is as painful as ours? Why is that a “requirement for life to be?” Why couldn’t an omnipotent god prevent tsunamis and kill those cancer cells? How do these things play into the “greater good”? Small doesn’t tell us.
If the fabric of existence is good “on balance,” well, it could be even better on balance if the Power of Being could turn our choices to the good, or could tinker with geology. If the P.O.B really is omnipotent, he could do stuff like that.
It’s never been clear to me why God supposedly gives us free will, knowing that we’ll “choose” bad actions, and then punishes us for making the wrong choices. He even knows what wrong choices we’ll make! What is gained in all this?
In the end, Small finds meaning in a kind of powerless, watered-down deity who would not be recognizable to most religious folks as God:
Our individual lives are short, inconsequential in a universe that is 13.7 billion years old. We are finite. We suffer. Yet the faiths of the world also teach us that we can transcend suffering and death because we are part of something bigger than us. Behind our everyday realities lies an Ultimate Reality, what we might call God, Allah, Elohim, Nirvana, Brahman. By transcending our individual egos, our wants and desires, and connecting on a deeper and broader level with this Ultimate Reality, we can find true peace.
Yes, some religions, like Buddhism, can give us tips for dealing with suffering, but their lessons are secular, for Buddhism is more akin to philosophy than religion. But dealing with pain still gives us no evidence for an “Ultimate Reality.” The Ultimate Reality is pain, and some joy along with it. For most animals, it’s a joyless search for noms and an eternal avoidance of predators.
If after reading Small’s piece you want more pain, peruse the readers’ comments, many of them pure religious nonsense. But one smart commenter reprises the argument of Epicurus:
Of course he’s not God—he’s the Power of Being? Get the difference?
Small’s HuffPo biography gives these details:
Jeffrey graduated summa cum laude from Yale University and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. He earned a Masters in the Study of Religions from Oxford University in England where he was a member of Oriel College.
So how can such a smart guy spout such nonsense? The next line in the biography tells the tale:
Jeffrey is active in the Episcopal church, but he has also studied Yoga in India and practiced Buddhist meditation in Bhutan.
To paraphrase Steve Weinberg: “With or without religion, there are some people who say smart things and some people who say dumb things. But for a smart person to say dumb things—that takes religion.”
Finally, my advice to atheists: your best chance to change the minds of religious people is to make them justify evils—both manmade and natural.
Well, I’ve seen cats and rabbits on baseball fields, but never a pine marten on a football pitch. The Torygraph reports on an incident last Sunday:
A Swiss League match between FC Thun and Zurich was disrupted after a pine marten escaped onto the pitch on Sunday and evaded capture for over five minutes.
The marten, which is similar to a weasel, appeared at one point to have be caught Zurich defender Loris Benito.
But Benito was bitten for his troubles and it managed to escape again.
Martens are known for their sharp teeth which are usually used to eat birds, berries and the occasional garden hose.
So it was up to Zurich goalkeeper Davide Da Costa, armed with his gloves, to pick up the marten.
Here’s the video:
Some biology: the European pine marten (Martes martes) is a mustelid widespread throughout Europe, but declining (and protected) in Britain. Those readers who dissed the gray squirrel should know that the pine marten is thought to be responsible for decimating the gray squirrel and leaving the red squirrels pretty much alone, possibly because the gray spends more time on the ground,
The lovely beast:
Here’s a BBC report on breeding them; as you can see, they’re extremely rare outside Scotland. Have any readers ever seen one? (There’s a North American species, too: Martes americana, and I wonder if it’s really a different species from the European one.)
You can see more of them here.
Tomorrow’s the last lecture I give this quarter in my Ecology & Evolution course (I teach the evolution part), and it may be the last lecture I ever give to undergraduates. Even though the weather’s dire (cold and drizzly), I decided to wear a decent pair of boots.
Guess the hide (click to enlarge):
