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 many venues, including our own Chicago Tribune, a meter exploded over Russia this morning, scattering hot debris and injuring many people:
CHELYABINSK, Russia — A meteor streaked across the sky and exploded over central Russia on Friday, sending fireballs crashing to earth that shattered windows and damaged buildings, injuring more than 500 people.
People heading to work in Chelyabinsk heard what sounded like an explosion, saw a bright light and then felt a shockwave, according to a Reuters correspondent in the industrial city 950 miles east of Moscow.
The fireball, travelling at a speed of 19 miles per second according to Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, had blazed across the horizon, leaving a long white trail in its wake which could be seen as far as 125 miles away.
Car alarms went off, windows broke and mobile phone networks were interrupted. The Interior Ministry said the meteor explosion had caused a sonic boom.
“I was driving to work, it was quite dark, but it suddenly became as bright as if it was day,” said Viktor Prokofiev, 36, a resident of Yekaterinburg in the Urals Mountains.
“I felt like I was blinded by headlights,” he said.
No fatalities were reported, but President Vladimir Putin, who was due to host Finance Ministry officials from the Group of 20 nations in Moscow, told Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov to help those affected.
And, of course, capitalism comes to Russia:
Despite warnings not to approach any unidentified objects, some enterprising locals were hoping to cash in.
“Selling meteorite that fell on Chelyabinsk!,” one prospective seller, Vladimir, said on a popular Russian auction website. He attached a picture of a black piece of stone that on Friday afternoon was priced at $49.46.
Here’s a new video if the meteor that has already gotten 105,000 views.
Draft guidance for the website NHS [National Health Service] Choices warning that there is no evidence that homeopathy works was suppressed by officials following lobbying by a charity set up by the Prince of Wales.
Homeopathy, which involves the use of remedies so heavily diluted with water that they no longer contain any active substance, is “rubbish”, said chief medical officer Sally Davies in January to the House of Commons science and technology committee. She added that she was “perpetually surprised” that homeopathy was available in some places on the NHS.
But the government’s NHS Choices website, which is intended to offer evidence-based information and advice to the public on treatments, does not reflect her view. A draft page that spelled out the scientific implausibility of homeopathic remedies was neutered by Department of Health officials. It is now uncritical, with just links to reports on the lack of evidence.
Lobbying by opponents, and the response from DH officials who did not want to take on Prince Charles’s now defunct Foundation for Integrated Medicine and other supporters of homeopathy, is revealed in correspondence from the department discussing the new guidance. It was released under the Freedom of Information Act to Prof David Colquhoun of University College London, a Fellow of the Royal Society and prominent science blogger.
There is no evidence that Prince Charles was involved personally in the lobbying. . .
NHS Choices has offered information on homeopathy since at least 2007, but it has been heavily criticised for its failure to state that there is no proof that homeopathy has anything other than a placebo effect on patients.
The page was taken down early in 2011, pending what a statement on the site said would be “a review by the Department of Health policy team responsible for complementary and alternative medicines”. But critics were disappointed by the page that went up in October 2012, which still does not raise any issues about effectiveness.
David Mattin’s original draft (he’s now left the National Health Service) stated strongly that there was no evidence that homeopathic remedies were better than placebos, and that “if the principles of homeopathry were true it would violate all the existing theories of science that we make use of today; not just our theory of medicine, but also chemistry, biology, and physics.” Immediately, Prince Charles’s lobby, the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health (which disbanded in 2010 after financial malfeasance on the part of officials), as well as the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (Woo Central), raised objections, and Mattin’s draft was altered by officials of Britain’s Depatment of Health (DH).
The Guardian report gives the sordid details, and the DH did not respond to a request for comment.
This is worse than creationists watering down the teaching of endorsement, for homeopathy causes deaths. One of my European friends had cancer of the salivary glands, which was treated homeopathically (unsuccessfully, of course), resulting in the progression of cancer to a more serious stage. It is the obligation of NHS choices to point out that homeopathy has no scientific basis and is no better than placebos. Anything other than a full statement of these facts is irresponsible and, in fact, is complicit in murder.
Nancey Murphy is a well-known theologian and philosopher of religion who is a Professor of Christian Philosophy at the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. She’s also an ordained minister in the Church of the Brethren, was on the board of advisers of the Templeton Foundation, and has written and edited numerous books, one of which (Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, edited with W.S. Brown and H.N. Malony), won the Templeton Award for best book in theology and science.
I had read some Murphy before, as one of her specialties is the relationship between science and faith, but decided to read more on the advice of John Loftus, who sent me a list of books that, he said, were influential in Christian thought about the science-religion conflict. I’ve just finished her 1990 book, Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (Cornell University Press, Ithaca). As with all of the books by Sophisticated Theologians™ that I’ve read, it’s deeply flawed.
Murphy’s thesis, buried in prolix discussions of the philosophy of science and the works of philosophers like Imre Lakatos and theologians like George Tyrrell, is that theology is in fact a science that has scientific methods for finding out the truth about God.
What are those methods? This is the book’s huge flaw: they are what Murphy calls ” communal discernment”: if a religious community (not individual religious people) discerns something about God as a whole, and incorporates that into their faith, then they have the right to claim that that group belief is true. A few quotes:
p. 152: “So far we have found agreement that Christians are able, because of the indwelling of the Holy spirit, to recognize what is or is not a genuine work of the Holy Spirit, whether it be a matter of teaching or of practice.”
p. 157: “So long as reasonable precautions have been taken to distinguish between gifts and their counterfeits, a positive judgment entitles members to say of the events that they are acts or words of God.” [JAC: the “gifts” include healing, speaking in tongues, and making prophecies]. . . In the preceding sections we have seen that on the basis of the practice of communal discernment, participants in a wide assortment of Christian communities select certain observable events in ordinary church life and designate them as acts (or words) of God. Furthermore, they believe they are entitled to say they know that they are acts of God. . . ”
p. 194: “For the theologian the existence of God is presupposed (as is the existence of matter for the physicist, or of persons for the psychologist).”
p. 198: “The present work contributes to the third, “interactionist,” position in that it sets out to show plainly that (potentially at least) theology is methodologically indistinguishable from the sciences.”
What kind of religious “truths” does the scientific method of communal discernment uncover? Here’s one that, says Murphy, was uncovered by Catholic modernists in the early 1900s:
“Genuine Catholicism is the true faith and reconcilable with modern thought.” (p. 92)
You might find it amusing (on the other hand, probably not) to work your way through Murphy’s prose to see how this “fact” is supported. The “reconcilable with modern thought” part is a no-brainer: we all know that any religion or religious dogma, can be reconciled with modern thought through judicious word-chopping and logic-parsing. That’s what theologians are paid to do. It’s harder, though, to prove that Catholicism is the “true faith”! I’ll leave it to you to read Murphy’s mental gyrations that lead to that “truth.”
And that brings us to Murphy’s big problem. Communal discernment may provide a superficial parallel to the scientific practice of replication, but it’s superficial indeed. Rational scientists of all ethnicities and nationalities converge on the same set of truths: water is H2O, the universe is expanding, evolution occurred. But different religious communities, even within Christianity, do not converge on the same set of truths. Lutherans, for example, accept both evolution and women as priests if they’re from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, but reject evolution and women priests if they’re from the Missouri Synod of Lutherans. Many Christians believe that salvation comes only from accepting Jesus as savior, while Muslims think that such a belief damns you to hell. And so on and so on. . . There is no way that different ‘faith communities’ will converge at any truth about God (even whether there’s only one god or many) through “communal discernment.” And that makes religious “truth” community-specific, unlike science.
And of course religious “truth” established by discernment varies over time as well. Once Mormons decided, communally and on scriptural grounds, that blacks could not be members of the priesthood. Now the “truth”, prompted by a “revelation,” has reversed itself.
In the end, “communal discernment” is only a combination of individual revelation and the validation of that revelation by other church members because it sounds good. And that’s no way to find out what’s true about the universe.
Just to show one ludicrous example of Murphy’s “communal discernment” at work, here is her discussion about how this method might allow Christians to decide the “truth” that God is in fact female (pp. 167-168):
To see how a novel yet replicable fact might be found to support a theological research program, we turn to the writings of Jesuit theologian Donald Gelpi. In his Divine Mother: A Trinitarian Theology of the Holy Spirit Gelpi shows that there is precedent for employing feminine images to represent the Spirit and recommends using feminine pronouns to refer to “her.” He also provides a complex theological rationale for the appropriateness of this new linguistic practice. If Gelpi’s historical and constructive work is sound, then his theory predicts that prayer addressed to the Holy Spirit as “she” will become an accepted practice. An important concern, of course, is the force of ‘accepted practice.’ If it were simply imposed on worshipers for the sake of a theological theory, it would be useless as evidence for that theory. It would be a significant fact for theology only if it passed the test of discernment of a number of worshiping communities. If it were widely accepted as evidently in accord with the promptings of the Holy Spirit (herself), then that judgment would provide important information about the very nature of God and it would indeed be a new fact, established by means of a replicable procedure . . .
The discernment process that establishes the appropriateness of such worship is a replicable process. Just as scientists can repeat experiments to check low-level generalizations, so too can Christian communities repeat the judgment process that leads to the conclusion that such worship of the Spirit is in accord with the will of God. Not every attempt at discernment produces clear results, of course, but neither does every attempt to replicate an experiment, especially in the human sciences. Therefore I conclude that theological facts of this sort are often or ordinarily replicable and thus do not differ from scientific facts in this regard.
I have to say that, as a scientist, I laughed out loud when I read this. How presumptuous to think that such a process can lead to learning any truths about the universe! If that were the case, then any community of faith subject to mass delusions, like Scientologists, Mormons, or the doomed group at Jonestown, could claim truth. Ergo, Xenu put souls in volcanoes and Moroni gave golden plates to Joseph Smith. According to Murphy, those must be indisputable facts.
It astounds me that this stuff is taken seriously by anyone. But such is the desire of the faithful to not only claim that their faith is true—and true in a way that goes beyond individual revelation or as a “basic belief” of someone like Alvin Plantinga—but also to claim that it is true in a scientifically demonstrable way. Theologians, for all their palaver that science and religion are separate magisteria, are all too eager to assume the authority of science if they can.
You don’t really have a choice, you know: you must take your amber restorative (preferably Mr. Walker’s noir) at the Hitch Bar at Queen and Leslie Streets. And, of course, it’s named after the late great atheist, as the website blog TO reports in a positive review:
The bartender informed me that the bar is actually named after Christopher Hitchens (commonly known as Hitch). Using Hitch as an inspirational figure for a bar makes sense as Hitch was known to be a heavy drinker, a much more intuitive choice than the Mr. Rogers themed club in Parkdale.
Hitch’s drinking habits are reflected in the exceedingly strong cocktails. I ordered a Bourbon Sour ($11), recommended by the bartender. I’m usually not a big fan of hard liquor from the whiskey family – it reminds me of the time when I was 17 and put Baby Orajel on my tongue so I could drink rye without tasting it. However, this drink was delicious – the spices juxtaposed with the sour were the perfect drink on such a cold night. Garnishing the two-shot drink with sour cranberries instead of the traditional maraschino cherries was a welcome touch.
Photos by Jesse Milns
Food and drink aside, one of the best things about Hitch is the atmosphere. The bar, decorated with animal busts and mason jar lights, is a Pinterester’s wet dream. The cozy space has one long table as well as several smaller tables and rather than the usual mounted TV, Hitch has installed a projector opposite the largest wall. The bartender mentioned they plan to show documentaries and TED Talks at the bar.
For an establishment where every cocktail contains a double shot, it’s well-lit and the music is low, making it a good venue for a casual meeting or breaking up with someone.
Overall, Hitch is a great place to go for a stiff drink, delicious snacks, and good conversation. This bar truly embodies the idea of a salon.
Every drink with a double shot—that’s awesome! There’s but one problem, which you can spot below:
The first atheist who sends me a picture of him/herself drinking Hitch’s REAL favorite drink (not “The Hitch”) at the bar, along with a paragraph reporting on it, gets a free autographed paperback of WEIT. Note: you have to show the bottle, too!
These definitive answers to the mystery birds shown in today’s post come from my colleague Steve Pruett-Jones, who knows his birds. His answers (I’ve added the species names):
The yellowish bird [bird #1] is a Pine Warbler,Setophaga pinus. (I had originally thought it was a yellow warbler because in certain plumages these two species are similar).
The other bird [bird #2] is a Pine Siskin (Spinus pinus: what a great name!)
Austin Hughes, an molecular evolutionary biologist at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, has penned a critique of my recent evolution talk in The State, apparently a local paper. (You may remember Hughes as the author of a piece in The New Atlantis, “The folly of scientism,” which I critiqued on this site.)
In Columbia last week, I gave a talk on the evidence for evolution, finishing up with 15 minutes of discussion of why Americans won’t accept evolution. My take was that religion is the proximate cause of antievolutionism, for evolution is inimical to many religious people’s view of themselves, and all opposition to evolution is palpably motivated by faith. But the ultimate cause for antievolutonism must also be the cause of religion, which I provisionally take to be, in modern life, dysfunctional societies that require people to find succor in faith. Without such dysfunctionality, I argued, faith would ultimately disappear.
I’ll comment briefly on some of his criticisms. Hughes:
Unfortunately [Coyne] veered off course when he ventured into sociology. When Coyne lamented the fact that the American public seems more reluctant to accept evolutionary theory than other well-established scientific theories such as atomic theory or germ theory, he based his analysis on the assumption that no one who accepts evolution but also believes in God can be said to accept evolution.
Hughes is simply dead wrong here. It is a palpable fact that rejection of evolution comes from religion. Further, I claimed that “theistic evolution”—the form of God-guided evolution that is what most Americans “accept” when they accept evolution (although about 40% of Americans accept evolution, only 16% see it as an unguided materialistic process, which is how evolutionists also see i)t. Theistic evolution is not deistic evolution (i.e., God created the universe and evolution was an inevitable consequence), and deistic evolution does not conflict nearly as much with scientific evolution as does theistic evolution.
For Coyne — like too many in our society today — the term “evolution” stands for a package consisting of the scientific theory of evolution plus a metaphysical commitment to atheism. If you don’t accept both aspects of that package, you are anti-evolution.
I have never claimed that science, much less evolutionary biology, requires a metaphysical commitment to atheism. Hughes is simply lying when he states this. I have always argued that most scientists, including myself, take the absence of God as a provisional working hypothesis based on the history of science, for, like Laplace, we have never needed the assumption of God. I am, and have always been, willing to entertain evidence for the presence of a divine being. I just haven’t seen any. And there’s no evidence that God has guided evolution, either, since that process appears to be without direction. It’s purely unguided and materialistic nature comes from both empirical observation and a knowledge of how evolution works. Hughes continues with a familiar argument:
This view is particularly ridiculous given that the modern theory of evolution owes so much to biologists who were also religious believers, including such seminal figures in evolutionary biology as R.A. Fisher, Theodosius Dobzhansky and David Lack. By this logic, modern evolutionists are defending a theory developed by people who did not accept their own theory. The same logic would seem to imply that Isaac Newton did not really believe in his own theory of gravitation, since he also believed in God.
This is ridiculous. Of course biologists who believe in God have made contributions to science, and some of them, early on, were actually motivated to do science as a way of understanding God’s plan. That tactic stopped about 150 years ago. Religious scientists still contribute to evolution, but there is not the slightest iota of evidence that religion has contributed to those contributions. I would claim, for instance, that evolutionary biologists who are theistic evolutionists—who think that God guided the process—are in cognitive dissonance, just as much as are physicists who do physics while thinking that God guides every electron.
. . . In reality, evolution is a scientific theory, whereas arguments for or against the existence of God belong to the realm of metaphysics. Evolutionary biology no more requires a metaphysical commitment to atheism than does any other scientific theory.
One way to illustrate the difference between science and metaphysics is to consider two hypothetical theories. The first includes all the statements of modern evolutionary theory, plus the statement that God exists. The second includes all the statements of modern evolutionary theory, plus the statement that God does not exist.
In science, we decide between alternative theories by comparing their predictions to what we observe in nature. But in the case of these two alternative theories, there is no way to decide. Both theories make exactly the same predictions. The metaphysical add-on (whether or not God exists) has no effect on the predictions of the theory.
Again, ludicrous. Metaphysical naturalism is not an a priori commitment, but a provisional conclusion from observing the consistent absence of divine intervention in natural phenomena. I would gladly accept the existence of God if I saw convincing evidence for it. I haven’t seen any. Has Hughes? “God exists” is not the same thing as “God exists and intervenes in the evolutionary process.” Got that, Dr. Hughes?
Coyne ended his talk with a political diatribe, revealing his distaste for religious freedom and apparently for America in general, as well as a fondness for big-government-style socialism. Whatever one thinks of his politics, it was hard to see what connection they had to the subject of his talk.
Since Hughes touts himself as a respected scientist (see below), I’m puzzled that he didn’t see the connection. What causes Americans to be the most anti-evolutionist people among First World countries? It’s because we’re the most religious of First World countries! Why are we the most religious First World country? Because we’re the most socially dysfunctional First World country. Or so my argument went. You might not accept the last bit, but the ultimate explanation for creationism in the U.S. has to tell us why America is so damned religious.
As for my distaste for religious freedom, Hughes is again lying. I said nothing in favor of abrogating that freedom. In fact, I was exercising that freedom by criticizing religion. My distaste for America in general? Give me a break—that argument smacks of the “love it or leave it” arguments of the sixties, and Hughes does himself no credit by making it. I happen to love living in the U.S., even though much of it is imbued with reflexive sympathy for superstition.
Finally, “big-government-style socialism”? Really? Well, if that means public health care for all, I’m all for it. I also argued we need to reduce incarceration rates, child mortality, and other things that make America dysfunctional, and that doesn’t involve “big-government-style socialism.”
What is Hughes going to complain about next: that I’m trying to take away his guns? Perhaps he doesn’t like Medicare or Social Security, either, since they’re both “big-government-style” socialistic programs.
Finally, Hughes make the inevitable argument that if an evolutionist happens to be a vociferous atheist, he or she turns people away from Darwinism:
As a scientist with more than 300 peer-reviewed publications in the field of evolutionary biology, I cringe at such arguments, which do real harm to the cause of public understanding of evolution and of science in general.
When evolution is presented as part of a metaphysical package that many Americans find repugnant, is it surprising that so many are unwilling to examine dispassionately the scientific evidence in favor of evolution?
Yes, Dr. Hughes, I admire your parade of publications, but give me a break! BioLogos has been trying to connect evolution with evangelical Christianity for a long time, and it hasn’t worked. Creationists are not going to accept evolution simply because they’re told it can be compatible with their faith. If that were true, then the rise of New Atheism in the last decade should be coincident with a sharp downturn in public acceptance of evolution. In fact, that hasn’t happened.
As the following graph based on a Gallup poll up to 2008 shows, acceptance of creationism and theistic evolution have been pretty much static over the past 25 years, but acceptance of “scientific evolution,” not guided by God, has increased. Granted, it’s only a 5% increase since 2000, but that’s about 50%. At any rate, Hughes’s Theory would predict that since New Atheism arose, acceptance of evolution would plummet. This graph doesn’t show it.
Actually, P. Z. Myers recently wrote about this same specious argument on Pharyngula, in a piece called “Atheists are responsible for creationism.” There he took apart the Hughes-style argument that we atheist evolutionists should shut up about God, for that hurts our cause. Myers’s language is, as usual, pungent, but his point is similar to mine. P. Z.’s conclusion:
The recent rise of public atheism can be traced to a number of influential books. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, by Susan Jacoby, published in 2004. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason in 2004 and Letter to a Christian Nation in 2006, by Sam Harris. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins in 2006.
It’s been less than ten goddamned years.
And we’ve still got idiots claiming they see a correlation between creationism/public religiosity and outspoken atheists.
Listen, whenever you see someone making that claim, you know you’ve found an idiot talking out of their ass. Give them a look of contempt and walk away.
Well, I won’t argue that Dr. Hughes is speaking from his nether parts, but I am contemptuous of his careless arguments, his accusation that I hate America and religious freedom, and his insupportable claim that atheism turns people away from evolution.
So, Dr. Hughes, as I walk away from your ill-conceived editorial, I leave you with the opposite thought: it’s religion, not atheism, that turns people away from evolution, and we’re not going to boost American acceptance of evolution until we get rid of theistic religion.
A last thought: when people like Hughes go after me, I know I’m doing something right.
, by Susan Jacoby, published in 2004. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
in 2004 and Letter to a Christian Nation
in 2006, by Sam Harris. The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins in 2006.
