Templeton pays 12 people to discuss whether the universe has a purpose

December 1, 2012 • 10:03 am

The other day I discussed Neil deGrasse Tyson’s answer to the question, “Does the universe have a purpose?”, a question that the Templeton Foundation posed to 12 scientists, theologians, and other luminaries. I’ve since found that those who answer are remunerated handsomely. (Oh, and for those who said that they’d gladly take Templeton’s money despite its nefarious aims—if only to deplete its ample coffers—let me ask you this: would you also take money to answer that question if it was asked by the white-supremacist Council of Concerned Citizens?)

At any rate, you can read all twelve answers here, and download the pdf here.  A screenshot of the co-opted luminaries and their answers:

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Templeton’s aims, as stated in the pdf (my footnotes):

The John Templeton Foundation serves as a philanthropic catalyst for research on what scientists and philosophers call the Big Questions. We support work at the world’s top universities in such fields as theoretical physics, cosmology, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and social science relating to love, forgiveness, creativity, purpose, and the nature and origin of religious belief. We encourage informed, open-minded dialogue between scientists and theologians as they apply themselves to the most profound issues in their particular disciplines*. And, in a more practical vein,we seek to stimulate new thinking about wealth creation in the developing world**, character education in schools and universities, and programs for cultivating the talents of gifted children.

*There is no point of a dialogue between theologians and scientists, at least from the point of view of science. Theologians, of course, can always learn that some of their tenets are wrong.

**This is a generally right-wing organization that supports and tries to justify free-market capitalism (see here and here, for instance). As The Nation notes:

“Templeton has long maintained relationships with a network of right-wing organizations that share its interest in open markets, entrepreneurship and philanthropy. The Heritage Foundation, for instance, received more than $1 million between 2005 and 2008, and the Cato Institute, more than $200,000 in the same period. Templeton’s charter stipulates that the chief executives of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation and the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty are entitled to be members of the foundation, and both have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in Templeton grants in recent years. Those organizations also receive contributions from Big Oil and take part in the campaign to distort the scientific consensus on global warming.”

Anyway, here’s my summary of and reaction to their answers:

Lawrence Krauss (physicist; answer: “Unlikely”):  Good solid answer: we can’t prove there’s a “purpose” (read “God”), but it’s exceedingly unlikely. He does note, agreeing with me but not with the Squidly One or many of my readers, that there could be empirical proof of God:

Of course, nothing would stop science from uncovering positive evidence of divine guidance and purpose if it were attainable. For example, tomorrow night if we look up at the stars and they have been rearranged into a pattern that reads, “I am here,” I think even the most hard-nosed scientific skeptic would suspect something was up.

But no such unambiguous signs have been uncovered among the millions and millions of pieces of data we have gleaned about the natural world over centuries of exploration. And this is precisely why a scientist can conclude that it is very unlikely that there is any divine purpose. If a creator had such a purpose, she could choose to demonstrate it a little more clearly to the inhabitants of her creation.

David Gelertner (computer scientist; answer: “Yes”):  This answer is an unholy mess, and has some disturbing comments about sexuality.  His answer seems to be based on the supposition that the human desire to seek good proves God. He says that such a desire “defies nature,” but of course that’s not true: cooperation and altruism could easily be products of either natural selection or secular reason. It’s amazing how muddled his answer is.

Paul Davies (physicist, answer, “Perhaps”): Davies’s evidence for God is that science works—a common answer among “sophisticated” believers:

Where, then, is the evidence of “cosmic purpose”? Well, it is right under our noses in the very existence of science itself as a successful explanatory paradigm. Doing science means figuring out what is going on in the world—what the universe is “up to”, what it is “about”. If it isn’t “about” anything, there would be no good reason to embark on the scientific quest in the first place, because we would have no justification for believing that we would thereby uncover additional coherent and meaningful facts about the world. Experience shows that as we dig deeper and deeper using scientific methods, we continue to find rational and meaningful order. The universe makes sense. We can comprehend it.

Science is a voyage of discovery, and as with all such voyages, you have to believe there is something meaningful out there to discover before you embark on it. And with every new scientific discovery made, that belief is confirmed. If the universe is pointless and reasonless, reality is ultimately absurd.

But of course the universe has to exhibit regularities if life is to exist at all! But I’m not sure that the order we find can be described as “rational and meaningful”. It is discoverable by reason, but what is its “meaning”?

Peter Atkins (chemist; answer: “No”).  Good old Peter, who never pulls his punches.  Here’s a nice slap at theology from his answer:

Theologians typically focus on questions that they have invented for their own puzzlement. Some theologians are perplexed by the nature of life after death, a notion they have invented without a scrap of evidence.

Some are mystified by the existence of evil in a world created by an infinitely loving God, another notion that theologians have invented but which dissolves into nothing once it is realized that there is no God. The question of cosmic purpose is likewise an invented notion, wholly without evidential foundation, and equally dismissible as patently absurd. We should not regard as great the questions that have been invented solely for the sake of eliciting puzzlement.

The last sentence is wonderful.

Nancey Murphy (Christian philosopher; answer: “Indeed).  The usual apologetics, with a “Fermat’s-last-theorem” approach to her evidence and a misguided critique of science (my emphases):

If one cannot infer the purposes of a benevolent creator from evidence in the natural world, then how can I (and my co-religionists) claim to know the world’s purpose? The answer is too complicated to spell out here, but I take it to involve detailed comparisons of competing traditions on the basis of the support they draw from their own peculiar kinds of evidence (for Christians, historical events as in the life of Jesus and the early church, and carefully evaluated religious experiences). In addition, each tradition must be evaluated on the basis of the intellectual crises it faces. Two crises facing what I call the scientific naturalist tradition (originating in Hume’s and others’ writings) are the questions of whether it is possible adequately to explain the phenomenon of religion naturalistically, and whether the tradition can provide grounds for morality. Scientific research on the practices and beliefs of religious adherents is relevant to the first.

Her margins are too small to contain her proof! And the two “crises” that face science are bogus. Yes, we don’t understand how religion arose, but we do know something about the evolutionary basis of morality. These are hardly “crises,” but unsolved questions.

Owen Gingerich (astronomer; answer: “Yes”). He adduces what believers now see to be the most powerful argument for God: the “fine tuning” of physical constants. This, in fact, is raised by three of the “yessers”:

Had some of the basic constants of nature been only slightly different, there would be no major abundance of carbon. And it is extremely difficult to imagine intelligent life without something like carbon.

One swallow does not a summer make. But in the fine-tuning of the universe, the abundance of carbon is only one of many such remarkable aspects. There are enough such “coincidences” to give thoughtful observers some pause. Scientists who are loath to accept a fine-tuned universe feel obliged to take notice. Of course, if the universe were any other way, we wouldn’t be here to observe it, but that is hardly a satisfying answer.

Gingerich doesn’t like one possible scientific explanation: multiverses.

Suppose, however, that there are myriad universes, each with different properties. In that case we would naturally be found in the universe that, like the little bear’s porridge, is just right. Those other barren universes, many with no stars or planets, would exist in their own forever unobservable space. Somehow this is an unpersuasive counter-argument. Even one congenial universe out of many would be miracle enough.

It’s only unpersuasive to those who have a prior commitment to God.  In an infinity of universes, one is sure to have the right constants, and that’s the one where people will be thinking themselves special.

Bruno Guideroni (astrophysicist; answer: “Very likely”).  He again relies on fine-tuning:

Modern science has produced something quite unexpected. Even to a scientist such as myself. It turns out that the observed features of the natural world appear to be fine-tuned for biological complexity. In other words, everything from the mass ratios of atomic particles, the number of space dimensions, to the cosmological parameters that rule the expansion of the universe, and the formation of galaxies are all exactly what they need to be to create stars, planets, atoms, and molecules.

But where does this apparent fine-tuning come from?

Is it the manifestation of a plan for the universe? An arrangement by a superior will to prepare the way for complex creatures? Is it God’s signature? People of faith believe it is so. They read purpose in the universe as a painter sees beauty in a view on the ocean.

Like Gingerich, Guideroni doesn’t like the multiverse answer:

The fundamental scientific theories that support the multiverse require complex mathematics. The fact that these fundamental theories are even accessible to our brains, which, in a purposeless universe would be nothing but a by-product of our ability to find prey (and avoid being prey), in the millennia of Homo sapiens’ evolution is something I find quite . . . puzzling.

“Puzzling,” ergo God.  Here he reverts to another familiar argument: humans’ ability to reason beyond what would have helped us on the savanna must mean that God made our brains.

Christian de Duve (biochemist; answer: “No). His essay is a bit of a mess, as he argues that despite there being nothing special about our universe (he invokes multiverses), he still intimates that there is an “Ultimate Reality” behind our universe.  But he does ask the question that theologians scoff at, because they’re afraid of the answer:

It will be noted that there is no logical need for a creator in this view. By definition, a creator must himself be uncreated, unless he is part of an endless, Russian-doll succession of creators within creators. But then, why start the succession at all? Why not have the universe itself uncreated, an actual manifestation of Ultimate Reality, rather than the work of an uncreated creator? The question is worth asking.

Indeed! It’s not kosher to just define God as “that cause that is itself uncaused”.  You have to demonstrate that, not assert it.

John Haught (theologian; answer: “Yes). This essay is so bad as to be hilarious. Starting from the first sentence (“The fact that we can ask such a question at all suggests an affirmative answer.”), it proceeds through an argument that is incoherent, for there are lots of questions we can ask, which are not answered by a “yes” simply by virtue of our ability to ask them. But if you want a good, bracing dose of theological nonsense, have a look at his answer.

Neil deGrasse Tyson (astrophysicist; answer “Not sure.”).  Actually, he is pretty sure: his answer is “almost certainly not,” as we saw two days ago.  But, as some readers have noted, if he’s that certain that there’s no God and therefore no “purpose” behind the universe, why not just say “no.” After all, to a scientist all such answers are provisional. This pulling back is, to me, a bit of a waffle. It’s as if one asked, “Is there a Loch Ness monster,” and Tyson replied “”Not sure.”

Jane Goodall (primatologist; answer: “Certainly”). OMG! If you’re an admirer of Goodall and her work, as I have been, this answer will shake your admiration. It conflates emotional response with God, and with “purpose.” I can hardly bear to read it, but here’s an extract:

When I was a child, born into a Christian family, I accepted the reality of an unseen God without question. And now that I have lived almost three quarters of a century I still believe in a great spiritual power. I have described elsewhere the experience I had when I first visited Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. When, as I gazed at the great rose window, glowing in the morning sun, the air was suddenly filled with the glorious sound of an organ playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. It filled me with joy, brought tears to my eyes. How could I believe that blind chance had led to that moment in time—the cathedral, the collective faith of those who had prayed and worshiped within, the genius of Bach, the emergence of a conscious mind that could, as mine did then, question the purpose of life on Earth. Was all the wonder and beauty simply the result of purposeless gyrations of bits of cosmic dust at the beginning of time? If not, then there must be some extra-cosmic power, the creator of the big bang. A purpose in the universe. Perhaps, one day, that purpose will be revealed.

I, for one, do believe that blind chance (plus natural selection, which is not blind chance) led to her epiphany. And yes, it all comes from the gyrations of cosmic dust.  How can someone whose work is so implicitly tied to evolution utter such nonsense?

Elie Wiesel (writer, Nobel Laureate, and professor of humanities; answer: “I Hope So).  To me, this is the biggest disappointment, for it’s hard for me to believe that someone who survived the Holocaust (Wiesel was in Auschwitz), and wrote so movingly about it, can still believe in God. Yet his essay takes God for granted from the outset.  And that despite these words in his piece:

So many wars, massacres, and hatreds sweep over Creation that one wonders if God will lose patience.

Did he lose it before, when evil and misfortune seemed to reign over a Europe occupied by Hitler’s army? Each time that a child died of hunger, fear, sorrow; each time a child expired in flames lit by men, it was right to wonder: Where was God in all of this? What could his goal possibly have been when, over there, the Kingdom of Night had replaced his own?

I admit that all these questions remain open for me. If an answer exists, I challenge it. The brutal and cruel death of one and a half million children neither could nor should have an answer.

An answer does exist: there is no God. But Wiesel won’t buy it. He concludes with this sentence:

Man’s task is thus to liberate God, while freeing the forces of generosity in a world teetering more and more between curse and promise.

I weep for those who cling to their childish beliefs despite all evidence to the contrary.  The most powerful evidence against God is the Holocaust.

We have a winner!

December 1, 2012 • 4:45 am

Now that I’ve returned, I can award a free autographed and cat-illustrated copy of WEIT to a randomly-selected reader who reported joining the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF).

And. . . the winner is LAUREN, who left a terse message:

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So Lauren, please email me with your contact information so I can get your book out.

By the way, the competition induced many readers to join this worthy organization, and I not only received emails of thanks from FFRF co-presidents Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker, but Dan also sent me an autographed copy of his wonderful book Godless, illustrated with a hand-drawn dog (a “barker”)!

Thanks to all who joined, furthering secularism in the U.S.

Caturday felid: On the Origin of LOLcats, or the Preservation of Favoured Felids in the Struggle for Noms

December 1, 2012 • 4:34 am

Yesterday’s hilarious strip at Tom the Dancing Bug deals with two topics dear to my heart: evolution and LOLcats (be sure to click on the link to give the artist “click credit” and to see it in full size).  Note the nod to Dawkins running down the right side of the strip.

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Now I’m not a big fan of memes, as I don’t think they’ve helped us explain anything about cultural evolution (see my review in Nature). Unlike adaptations caused by genes, there’s no mechanistic explanation for how a meme spreads. Presumably it has some neurological/psychological/sociological feature that explains its appeal to humans, but that’s completely outside the theory, which is basically the statement that “a cultural unit replicates because it has features that make it replicate in the brain.” Because of that, the cartoonist’s puzzlement about how the memetic mutation that caused Breadcats “has any adaptive advantage whatsoever” is misguided. In memetics, no such explanation is required beyond “it sticks in the brain and thus ensures its own spread”.

Nevertheless, I love the name of the new species of LOLcat:  Felis virtualis.

h/t: Abandonwoo

Amazing illusions

November 30, 2012 • 11:59 am

From Quirky Mind Stuff, by Richard Wiseman (via Matthew Cobb), we have a bunch of illusions, most of them amazing.

There are two that you can try yourself, but you’ll need a friend. I tried them, and they both work for me, but for the “tightening thread” phenomenon, be sure that your fingers are relaxed and you’re not trying to keep them apart.  The “numb finger” trick also worked for me, but didn’t for two of my co-workers.

Anyway, have a look, and report what you see for the final illusion.

Good news: British government withholds funding from religious schools that don’t teach evolution as a fact

November 30, 2012 • 9:46 am

Some really good news on the evolution-education front: according to the BBC News, the British government will, starting next year, withhold funds from “free schools” (schools run by charities, parents, or religious groups) that don’t teach evolution as a “comprehensive and coherent scientific theory,” which I take to mean “as a fact.” The BBC report:

Any attempt to present as fact the view that God made the world could lead to new free schools losing their funding under government changes.

The new rules state that from 2013, all free schools in England must teach evolution as a “comprehensive and coherent scientific theory”.

The move follows scientists’ concerns that free schools run by creationists might avoid teaching evolution.

Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, said it was “delighted”.

Sir Paul told BBC News the previous rules on free schools and the teaching of evolution versus creationism had been “not tight enough”.

He said that although the previous rules had confined creationism to religious education lessons, “the Royal Society identified a potential issue that schools could have avoided teaching evolution by natural selection in science lessons or dealt with it in a such a perfunctory way, that the main experience for students was the creationist myth”.

So far 79 free schools have opened in England with 118 more due to open in 2013 and beyond. They are funded directly by central government but unlike other state-funded schools are run by groups of parents, teachers, charities and religious groups and do not have to abide by the national curriculum.

The new rules mean if a free school is found to be acting in breach of its funding agreement – for example, teaching creationism as a scientific fact or not teaching evolution – the Department for Education will take “swift action which could result in the termination of that funding agreement”.

In a letter to the Royal Society, the Schools Minister, Lord Hill, said: “While we have always been clear that we expect to see evolution included in schools’ science curricula, this new clause will provide more explicit reassurance that free schools will have to meet that expectation.”

My one worry here is that teaching evolution as specified leaves room for other theories, like creationism, to be also taught as “comprehensive and coherent scientific theories.”  As I’ve pointed out before, Islamic faith schools tend to teach evolution in one class and undercut it in another.  I’m not sure how the new rules will deal with that.

At any rate, the faithful weigh in as well, and although some favor this change, they can’t help putting in a plug for God. As the BBC reports:

Dr Berry Billingsley who leads a Reading University project on how secondary schools handle questions that bridge science and religion cautioned against an oversimplified debate.

“Evolution is a fantastic theory and explains so much about how humans come to be here. It is backed up by evidence and supported by the vast majority of scientists in the biological sciences. Many of those scientists also believe that the Universe is here because of God.

“The importance of studying evolution is indeed the first thing to be said but children also need opportunities somewhere in the timetable to explore the ‘Big Questions’, which our research shows they want to consider and it is often the science lesson that stirs up those questions.”

“Big Questions,” is, of course, the euphemism that Templeton and other accommodationists use for “what religion does.”  If the students want those questions answered, let them go to their parents or their pastors, but not to their teachers.  Why do they need “opportunities in the timetable” to ask about God, meaning, purpose, and values?  Finally, this:

Paul Bate, of the European Educators Christian Association, agreed schools should teach a broad and balanced curriculum: “Science and religion need each other in this debate. Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientists of all time said, ‘Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.'”

That statement from Einstein, which as far as I know is genuine, has always puzzled me. Einstein had no truck with a personal God, and didn’t say many nice things about religion.  I’m not sure what he meant by “Science without religion is lame,” but it doesn’t sound good.  Perhaps he meant “religion” as “that sense of wonder that motivates scientists,” for remember that Einstein also said this:

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man.”

h/t: Graham

Giberson tries to clarify the causes of creationism, but just gets deeper into the muck

November 30, 2012 • 7:10 am

Last week, (formerly Uncle) Karl Giberson wrote a piece for PuffHo that, in essence, blamed the persistence of American creationism on the stridency of New Atheism,—a stridency that, he argues, forces religious people to choose between God and evolution. He also made two statements, both wrong. In the first, he argued that my book was like other New Atheist books in calling for such a choice:

But suppose that [Marco] Rubio decided to pursue these questions in more detail and, not knowing any actual geologists, went to a well-stocked bookstore and purchased a cross section of popular science books explaining evolution, the Big Bang, and the age of the earth. In all likelihood the authors of these books would be some of America’s most vocal and anti-religious atheists — Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Daniel Dennett, Vic Stenger. And the books would argue with a suspicious passion that belief in God must be rejected if one is to take science seriously. Some of the books would have titles like “God: The Failed Hypothesis. “

Of course my book says nothing about having to reject God if you want to accept science. That was annoying. But Giberson then told a bigger whopper:

Even a diligent search would turn up but a few books explaining how contemporary scientific ideas can be understood within the framework of traditional Christianity.

I would almost classify this as a bald-faced lie, for there are elebenty gazillion books trying to reconcile science and traditional Christianity, and Giberson has to know this. (This is what Dan Dennett calls “faith-fibbing,” something to which Giberson has admitted before.) I’ve read many such books, and the University of Chicago library has huge shelves full of accommodationist tomes.  Among them I find only a few books claiming that science and Christianity are incompatible.  I called Karl out for his willful ignorance, for misleading people about my book and, above all, for blaming the persistence of creationism on strident atheists.

Perhaps stung by my criticisms here, Giberson has tried to clarify his ideas in yet another PuffHo piece, “Young earth creationism is a threat to American survival.” (He notes that he may not have been clear in his first post, but it is of course a writer’s duty to be clear.)  Yet his “clarification” only makes things worse.

But first let me acknowledge that Giberson did retract what he said about my book—though he doesn’t retract his misstatement about the paucity of accommodationist books. In an addendum, he says this:

I also note, as a clarification of my previous piece, ‘Marco Rubio’s Fiscal Cliff,’ that I did not intend to imply that Jerry Coyne’s excellent book, ‘Why Evolution is True,’ is itself hostile to general belief in God. My point was that Coyne is a highly visible crusader for atheism.

Fine, but if that was his point, why didn’t he say it?

But that’s trivial. What’s more important is Giberson going off the cliff about creationism again. This time, though, he argues that (as implied by the title of his piece, it’s a threat to American survival. How is that?  Will our country really go down the tubes if only 16% of Americans continue to accept naturalistic evolution?  Karl explains:

I worry a lot about people who believe the earth is a few thousand years old, for example. I don’t see how they can possibly think clearly about the issue of energy. If the earth is 10,000 years old, then there is no such thing as fossil fuels. The oil in the ground could not have originated from fossils laid down 4,000 years ago in Noah’s great flood, which is what young earth creationists believe. Fossil fuels, in this view, are not the result of hundreds of millions of years of organic change. Their origin is a mystery.

Knowing how our planetary fuels originated should inform deliberations about the best price for gas, the optimal EPA targets for fuel economy, and the level of subsidy for alternative fuels. And geologists are a critically important part of this conversation.

This, of course, is completely wrong. Much as I decry creationism, I can’t bring myself to say that it prevents people from thinking clearly about the issue of energy. How much oil and fossil fuel we have is a fact regardless of how those “fossil” fuels were formed.  They’re finite, even if God made them, and nobody is saying that God is going to give us more. And learning to deal with those limits doesn’t depend on your belief on how fuels were formed.

Now other religious perspectives may be problematic here, including the idea that humans have a right to plunder out planet because God made us his stewards. Similar irrationalist thinking may lead people to deny global warming.  But those are problems not of creationism, but of its root cause: religion.

Much as I’d like to see Americans accept the truth of evolution, I’d like even more to see them reject religion. For creationism is only one symptom of religion, and there are many other symptoms far more pernicious. I needn’t list them here, since we all know them: many are instantiated in the doctrines of Islam or Catholicism. Compared to throwing acid in the faces of Afghan schoolgirls, teaching creationism to high-school students is trivial.  Creationism kills nobody.

I want Americans to learn good science, but trying to eliminate creationism without eliminating religion is like trying to cure smallpox by applying wet rags to the forehead: it alleviates symptoms but the disease remains. If Karl were to write an honest piece, he’d admit that.

What he does instead is to continue blaming the persistence of creationism on those who attack creationists (read: strident atheists like Dawkins and me). In other words, Giberson echoes Nicholas Wade’s misguided piece in this week’s science section of the New York Times.  Giberson:

I have spent decades deep inside American evangelicalism. When I first engaged the origins controversy I thought the solution to the problem of anti-evolution was simple: provide evidence and people will change their minds. False things should be easily trumped by true things. And today I find many of my younger colleagues wading into this controversy with the same naïve optimism.

But after decades of huffing and puffing and blowing on the straw house of creationism, it still stands. If anything, creationism has only become more popular, even while the evidence refuting it has grown steadily stronger.

Why might that be?  (Actually, I don’t think creationism has become more popular; statistics show it remaining steady over the past few decades). According to Giberson, because we attack people like Marco Rubio who espouse creationism!

We will never resolve the issue of widespread scientific illiteracy if we simply attack public figures that reject evolution or an ancient earth. That does nothing but steel the reserve of those propagandists who make their living undermining science. The young earth creationist worldview is couched in a larger theological framework that takes “spiritual warfare” seriously. . .

Last year I published “The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age” (with Harvard University Press) examining the structures of authority within evangelicalism and how they empower what looks like a confident rejection of mainstream science. These and other books from people like Chris Mooney and Michael Ruse (both atheists) are our attempts to raise the right sort of alarm about broad cultural currents in American society. Assaulting public figures who express these cultural currents turns them into heroes.

ORLY, Karl?  Have attacks on creationism turned exponents like Ronald Reagan, Marco Rubio, or the many Republicans who deny evolution, into heroes? (I won’t say anything about Mooney and Ruse raising “the right sort of alarm”; these men are accommodationists who only enable creationism.) Remember this moment from the Republican presidential debates before the 2008 elections?

Tancredo, Huckabee, and Brownback heroes? I think not. They may be heroes to Republicans because of their moronic and antidemocratic views, or their fervent professions of belief in Jebus, but not because they deny evolution.

Giberson ends like this:

We should be worrying about the more than 100 million Americans who think the earth is 10,000 years old and trying to figure out how that happened. Rubio is simply an expression of that large problem and attacking him is nothing more than the proverbial assault on the messenger.

I worry more about the 92% of Americans who profess belief in God. If you’re looking for the answer of why so many Americans think that the Earth is 10,000 years old, the answer lies in that 92%.  I’m not exactly sure why Americans are so religious, though I suspect it’s because the U.S. is more dysfunctional than the egalitarian and caring societies of Europe.

But it doesn’t matter.  There is only one way to get rid of creationism, and that’s to get rid of religion—at least those brands of religion that are inimical to science. (And remember that even adherents to “mainstream” faiths are wary of evolution. Despite the Catholic Church’s official acceptance of evolution, for instance, 27% of Catholics believe that species were created by God and have remained unchanged ever since.) Sadly, nearly all brands of religion are inimical to science, even if their adherents won’t admit it.

I would be delighted if Giberson would admit that the root cause of creationism is religion, and not just fundamentalist or evangelical religion. And while he’s admitting that, perhaps he should examine his own beliefs.  Since Giberson is so wedded to scientific evidence, why on earth does he remain an evangelical Christian? Why does he have “faith” about Jesus when there’s not a whit of evidence for Jesus’s divinity, or even the existence of a Christian God? This cognitive dissonance is unseemly for someone who thinks that America is doomed unless its citizens start becoming more rational about our world.

 

Autographed books on the way

November 30, 2012 • 4:22 am

Several readers have reminded me that the autographed/cat-illustrated books I promised to those who donated to Doctors Without Borders haven’t arrived. That’s because I haven’t sent many of them out yet, for I’ve just returned from the UK and have been catching up.

The good news is that I have a new load of paperbacks and will begin sending them out today. I have a record of everyone who joined, so don’t worry. They’ll go out over the next two weeks. (It takes time to draw a cat!)

And this week I’m going to randomly choose one person who joined the Freedom from Religion Foundation to receive an autographed book (also avec chat).

Finally, very soon I’ll auction off the copy of WEIT autographed by the naturalists/atheists from the Stockbridge meeting, including signatures and slogans by Sean Carroll, Janna Levin, Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg, Rebecca Goldstein, Dan Dennett, et al.  It also includes a message from reader Ben Goren and a genuine inked pawprint from his famous cat Baihu.

Here’s a photo again. All proceeds will, of course, go to Doctors without Borders.  To refresh your memory, here it is. And I want big bids! (Click to enlarge.)

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