Guest post: Templeton gives $1.7 million to harmonize God with nature’s “randomness”

September 7, 2012 • 4:10 am

Theologians have long engaged in apologetics to explain the order of nature: the regularity of physical laws, fine-tuning of physical constants, and the like. The explanation, of course, is God.  Now just to show that there is no observation that The God Hypothesis cannot answer, the Templeton Foundation is throwing big bucks at a project aiming to show how God explains the converse hypothesis: the randomness of nature.  Reader Sigmund is on the case and has provided a guest post.

It all goes to show what I’ve long maintained: there is no observation about nature—including the Holocaust—that cannot be explained away by sufficiently diligent theologians.  And that, of course, shows that, to a true believer, there is no observation about the universe that could ever disconfirm the presence of God. (To a nonbeliever like me, however, there is evidence that could suggest the presence of a God, like the 900-foot Jesus I’ve discussed before.) A hypothesis that can explain any possible observation explains nothing. The last sentence of this piece proves that religion falls into that trap.

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Another slice of Templeton Randomness

by Sigmund

Last week BioLogos featured a guest post by James Bradley, a mathematician based at Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in which he proudly announced a new initiative with the rather embarrassing title, “The Randomness Project”.  The project purports to address why science fails to reveal evidence for a guiding force in nature. Those of us familiar with the business of modern Christian apologetics need only hear three more words to piece together the objectives, methods and outcome of the entire process. Those words are, of course, “The Templeton Foundation”.

According to Bradley, the project supervisor:

“It is not uncommon to hear voices proclaiming that biology and physics have shown us that—at fundamental levels—nature is random, hence meaningless, purposeless, and without a creator. In fact, chance (or randomness) has often been seen as inconsistent with Christian faith by Christians, too, not just by those opposed to faith. But how might God work providentially through indeterminate processes? The John Templeton Foundation has provided a generous grant of $1.69 million to support a new research initiative on the theme of Randomness and Divine providence.”

Thinking about why there’s no direct evidence for God doesn’t come cheap. The project will involve grants of up to $200,000 each, to be awarded to eight to ten scholars or teams of scholars who will spend up to two years examining various questions associated with randomness in nature.

According to the Request for Proposals section on the randomness website,

“Grant recipients are expected to produce one or more original manuscripts publishable in a suitable journal and to participate in an opening workshop in June of 2013 and a closing conference in June of 2015. Furthermore, grant recipients who successfully publish a popular article on their results will be eligible to receive a popular dissemination bonus award of $3,000. “

Nice work if you can get it, I suppose.

But what are the specific questions that Templeton wants answered?

The project’s website lists thirteen topics that form the basis for project proposals. Some of these seem determined to mix science and theology,

  • “How might God work providentially through indeterminate processes? Can recent advances in understanding the nature of randomness offered by algorithmic information theory, physics, biology, and other sciences provide insight into this question?
  • What are some possible implications of randomness for hiding or unfolding divine creativity and purpose in the world? Could God use randomness to (1) generate creativity, (2) hide divine actions, or (3) unfold information? Why might God do so?
  • How might we mathematically and physically model random processes in ways that help us understand how divine providence could be exercised in a “chance-governed” world?
  • How do “laws and orders” in nature interplay with “chance and randomness” in bringing about results that can be interpreted as aspects of divine providence?

Others seem to mix theology and, well, more theology:

  • What are some theodical implications of randomness, particularly for the issue of natural evil?
  • How have the theological traditions of Augustine, Maimonides, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin addressed chance and fortune? In what ways might they incorporate ontological randomness?

There’s even a question mixing theology and quantum mechanics that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Deepak Chopra book:

  • How might an understanding of providence based on an extended Molinism and/or open theology incorporate randomness? For example, could an extended Molinism provide a plausible account of the relationship between quantum mechanics and divine providence?

Surprisingly, there’s even one nod towards atheistic interpretations of randomness.

  • “How is the concept of randomness understood by advocates of secularism, naturalism, and new atheism? What are the strengths and weaknesses of these usages?”

“Strengths and weaknesses?”

I’m sure I’ve heard that phrase somewhere before.

One hardly needs $200,000 dollars and two years to answer that question.

New atheists regard the evidence for random processes in nature to be consistent with a universe without an intervening deity.

The strength of this model is that it is fits all evidence found to date, allows for predictions that can be tested, and doesn’t require any additional non-evidenced forces (such as the continuing action of a God).

Unfortunately , considering that applications are judged on “how well the specific proposal comports with the spirit of the list of bulleted items above” I’m afraid that the ‘weakness ‘ of the atheistic perspective is likely to be its failure to elaborate a potential hiding space for for Jesus.

And finally, just in case you might be wondering.  No, there’s no danger the study will provide answers the Templeton Foundation doesn’t want to hear. They already know the “truth”, and their plea to scholars (meaning theologians who can do math) is quite explicit:

“join us in exploring the truth that all creation glorifies God—even randomness!”

Curiosity update

September 7, 2012 • 2:44 am

Here’s the latest weekly video report on what the Mars rover “Curoisity”  is up to. It’s moving slowly—apparently 30 meters per day—is analyzing the Martian atmosphere, and will soon take soil samples:

h/t: Michael

Astaire Week: A coda—Fred’s favorite

September 6, 2012 • 11:47 am

The Nicholas Brothers (Fayard and Harold) were a pair of fantastically talented tap dancers who were underappreciated because, being black, they appeared only in minor films of the 1930s and 1940s starring other black actors.  But they were stupendous, highly acrobatic, and, as you’ll see in this performance from the film “Stormy Weather” (1943), could do something that even Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly couldn’t (from Wikipedia):

One of their signature moves was a “no-hands” splits, where they went into the splits and returned to their feet without using their hands. Gregory Hines declared that if their biography was ever filmed, their dance numbers would have to be computer generated because no one could duplicate them. Ballet legend Mikhail Baryshnikov once called them the most amazing dancers he had ever seen in his life.

Fred Astaire once called this performance, a dance to the song Jumpin’ Jive, “the greatest dance number ever filmed.”

If you know the music of this era, you’ll recognize bandleader Cab Calloway talking jive at the beginning.

h/t: Amy

Time to pony up for Doctors Without Borders

September 6, 2012 • 9:57 am

It’s almost time for the annual 24-hour marathon run by D. P. R. Jones to raise money for Doctors without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) from the atheist/agnostic/skeptical/humanist community.  100% of the donations will go to Doctors Without Borders, one of the finest volunteer organizations I know of, and one completely untainted by faith. And there’s already an auction where you can bid for cool items, again with the proceeds going to DWB.

There are several ways to donate.  First, visit the event site here, where the 24-hour marathon will be hosted by Jones and others beginning at 4 pm UK time (11 a.m. EST U.S. time) on September 8 and running for 24 hours straight. You can see the tentative schedule here, which includes people like Eugenie Scott, James Randi, Cristina Rad, and Mr. Deity.

Second, you can donate directly at two sites (here and here) if you’d like to give early.

Finally, there’s an awesome eBay auction of nonbeliever-related-items that have been donated by various people, and you can see all the items here. They include books on science and atheism, handbags, prints, a talking Jesus doll (signed by The Thinking Atheist!), teeshirts, autographed and otherwise, and a whole bunch of other stuff.  There are even two copies of Why Evolution is True (here and here) that I’ve autographed for the auction.  You have a bit over two days to bid on these items, and again, every penny of the take goes to Doctors Without Borders.

So bid ’em up, folks! I don’t want to see my book going for peanuts.

A review (not mine) of Hitchens’s Mortality, and a brief word on wine

September 6, 2012 • 8:05 am

I haven’t seen a bad review of Hitchens’s last book, Mortality, about his struggle with cancer. It collects his Vanity Fair pieces on Tumorville and has a foreword by his editor Graydon Carter and an afterword by his wife Carol Blue.  There’s another positive review by Lorenzo Milam at reason.com that includes this statement, which makes you think differently about the cliché that someone died after “battling with cancer”:

Did those 18 months turn Hitchens into some kind of a hero? “I love the imagery of struggle,” he tells us. But “when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring in a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into you system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you.” In less than 100 words, he not only is able to defuse the fake heroic image (“battling cancer”) but manages to leave us with a delicate and elegant irony: “kindly people” delivering “a huge transparent bag of poison…a venom sack.”

I’ve been dipping into Hitchens’s last essay collection, Arguably, and it’s just what I expected: a wonderful group of provocative and beautifully written pieces. The man was a journalistic genius: he had an entire library in his head and could summon up just the right literary allusion at the right time—without seeming pompous.  I simply have no idea how he retained all that stuff, and could still spew it out at a breakneck pace, even while drunk or hung over. There’s nobody alive that can do what he did.

I’ve not seen Mortality, but you should read Arguably. One of my favorite pieces is available free on Slate: “Wine drinkers of the world, unite.” It’s his criticism of the barbaric custom of wine stewards pouring out the wine for you at table instead of letting you do it yourself. I agree with him 100%: the host should pour the wine, and tailor it to the tablemates’ consumption.  Ad lib wine pouring by sommeliers or waiters is designed to do only one thing: help the reastaurant sell more wine.  I regularly ask, when one of these tries to pour for me, to allow me to do the deed.

But of course Hitchens’s take on the subject is far, far funnier and engaging than mine; go have a look, and never allow anyone to pour for you in a restaurant.

Federal investigation concludes that Marc Hauser fabricated data

September 6, 2012 • 3:03 am

A while back Marc Hauser, a psychology professsor at Harvard,  was accused of research misconduct, which included selective use of or even fabrication of data.  I suspended judgment until an official University investigation found Hauser guilty of eight instances of scientific misconduct.  Harvard suspended Hauser for a year, not allowing him to teach, and he subsequently resigned from the university. Since then he’s been working with at-risk teenagers.

Hauser’s work aimed at discerning the roots of human behavior, cognition, morality, and communication in monkeys. He was widely known for this work and wrote several popular  and technical books. We chose him to be one of the three plenary speakers at the University of Chicago’s Darwin Day conference in 2009.

Since Hauser did the fabricated and/or flawed research using federal grant money, there was more to come, for government agencies are by law required to investigate. As boston,com reports, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) of the U.S. Public Health Service (which runs the National Institutes of Health) has given a final report on the accusations that Hauser engaged in research misconduct.

You can download the ORI’s report here; it’s a short 8 pages long, but shows that the investigators went through his research records thoroughly, looking at every graph and data point and comparing them with the original data from tapes of monkey behavior and their transcriptions. Four grants were involved in the dubious research.

Among the finding were that Hauser:

  • Fabricated data and also misrepresented data in graphs
  • Falsified the coding of monkey behavior observed in trials
  • Misrepresented how data were coded in a paper
  • Misrepresented (apparently through fabrication) sample sizes of some behavioral responses in two papers
  • Gave false statements about the number of monkeys identifiable by their markings
  • Produced statistically significant results (when they actually weren’t) by fabricating new coding for data previously coded by a research assistant

This resulted in one paper being retracted and two corrected.  Errors were also found in work that Hauser’s lab hadn’t published.  Hauser will not admit deliberate misconduct, but made this statement,

“Although I have fundamental differences with some of the findings,” Hauser wrote, “I acknowledge that I made mistakes. … I let important details get away from my control, and as head of the lab, I take responsibility for all errors made within the lab, whether or not I was directly involved.”

To give you an idea of the depth of the investigation, here’s a brief extract from the report:

Respondent published fabricated data in Figure 2 of the paper Hauser, M.D., Weiss, D., & Marcus, G. “Rule learning by cotton-top tamarins.” Cognition 86:B15-B22, 2002, which reported data on experiments designed to determine whether tamarin monkeys habituated to a sound pattern consisting of three sequential syllables (for example AAB) would then distinguish a different sound pattern (i.e., ABB). Figure 2 is a bar graph showing results obtained with 14 monkeys exposed either to the same or different sound patterns than they were habituated to. Because the tamarins were never exposed to the same sound pattern after habituation, half of the data in the graph was fabricated. Figure 2 is also false because the actual height of the bars for the monkeys purportedly receiving the same test pattern that they had been habituated to totaled 16 animals (7.14 subjects as responding and 8.87 subjects as non-responding).

What amazes me is the leniency of the “punishment.” Making data up is the primary sin that a scientist can commit. I expected that, at the least, Hauser would be banned from ever receiving federal grant money. He also ran the chance of going to jail. But what did the ORI do? Virtually nothing: a slap on the wrist. Hauser can still apply for federal grant money, but he must do so by submitting ancillary statements from himself and the university that his research will be supervised for accuracy and, when completed, be given an imprimatur of validity by his university.  He also won’t be allowed to serve as a consultant or member of federal grant panels, which is not really a punishment at all:

Respondent neither admits nor denies committing research misconduct but accepts ORI has found evidence of research misconduct as set forth above and has entered into a Voluntary Settlement Agreement to resolve this matter. The settlement is not an admission of liability on the part of the Respondent. Dr. Hauser has voluntarily agreed for a period of three years, beginning on August 9, 2012:

(1) to have any U.S. Public Health Service (PHS)-supported research supervised; Respondent agreed that prior to the submission of an application for PHS support for a research project on which the Respondent’s participation is proposed and prior to Respondent’s participation in any capacity on PHS-supported research, Respondent shall ensure that a plan for supervision of Respondent’s duties is submitted to ORI for approval; the supervision plan must be designed to ensure the scientific integrity of Respondent’s research contribution; Respondent agreed that he shall not participate in any PHS-supported research until such a supervision plan is submitted to and approved by ORI; Respondent agreed to maintain responsibility for compliance with the agreed upon supervision plan;

(2) that any institution employing him shall submit, in conjunction with each 8 application for PHS funds, or report, manuscript, or abstract involving PHS- supported research in which Respondent is involved, a certification to ORI that the data provided by Respondent are based on actual experiments or are otherwise legitimately derived, that the data, procedures, and methodology are accurately reported in the application, report, manuscript, or abstract, and that the text in such submissions is his own or properly cites the source of copied language and ideas; and

(3) to exclude himself voluntarily from serving in any advisory capacity to PHS including, but not limited to, service on any PHS advisory committee, board, and/or peer review committee, or as a consultant.

Frankly, I am both puzzled and appalled that such a light punishment was levied for such severe misconduct.  This won’t serve as much of a deterrent to research fraud. However, Hauser did lose an academic plum in the process: his job at Harvard. And his research—if he continues it—will be forever under a pall of doubt.

h/t: Charles

Huge hermit crab migration

September 5, 2012 • 1:07 pm

This video by Steve Simonsen shows an amazing migration of hermit crabs on St. John in the Virgin Islands:

This morning I received an urgent telephone call from my good friend Pam Gaffin. She was terribly excited about an event that was happening before her eyes. Pam told me it was a migration of soldier crabs also called hermit crabs and there were millions and millions of them she likened it to the migrations of Serengeti. I didn’t need to hear anymore, I loaded my car with cameras and was out the door. Pam told me that this began this morning at sunrise at Nanny point near Concordia. I have heard about this migration for years and knew that it occurred in August, I can’t tell you how happy I am that Pam called. Pam you’re my hero.

Apparently this migration is for reproductive purposes. On St. John it’s an annual event:

The Hermit crab is predominantly a land creature, but it still has close ties to water and the sea. In fact it can never be entirely away from water, and solves this problem by always carrying a supply of water in its shell. Moreover, the hermit crab returns to the sea in order to reproduce. At certain times of the year hundreds of these creatures scramble and tumble down the mountainsides and make their way to the seashore where the females crawl to the water’s edge. They then cast their fertilized eggs in the sea where the newly born hermit crabs spend their next few months before returning to land.

A prominent psychiatrist (and creationist) responds to Bill Nye

September 5, 2012 • 10:22 am

Reader William pointed out this video in another thread; it’s a creationist going after Bill Nye’s pro-evolution video that has caused so much ruckus.  The scary thing is that the guy in the video, Dr. Timothy R. Jennings, is president-elect of the Tennesee Pyschiatric Association—and a preacher. He’s clearly a young-earth creationist. Good Lord, people (and shrinks) of Tennessee: how did this guy get into that position?

Note his assertion that there is no evidence to support evolution: he needs my book!

I love this part:

Geneticists known that with every generation hundreds to thousands of new damaging mutations enter the human genome. This means the human genome is slowly deteriorating. This is consistent with the second law of thermodynamics which state that without energy put into a system, it will decay. This is exactly what the bible documents as the declining human lifespan and recorded in scripture, perfectly matches the biological decay curve. There has never been one genetic mutation, which actually advanced a species. Every genetic mutation ever documented causes the species to deteriorate. All documentable mutations loose genetic information and slowly degrade life. As scripture says, “dying you will die.”

Yes, but damaging mutations can be weeded out by natural selection. And as for  no “genetic mutations that advance a species,” he’s apparently forgotten about lactose-tolerance mutations in pastoral human populations, antibiotic resistance mutations in bacteria, insecticide-resistant mutations in insects, mutations for black wing color in the peppered moth, mutations for tolerance of heavy metals in many plants, the Pitx and Eda mutations in stickleback fish, and so on and so on. . . .  Here he’s either ignorant or lying.

And listen to the way that he describes natural selection as “experience altering gene expression through epigenetic modification.” He’s really describing natural selection, but uses such different words that it’s hard to recognize.

I can’t believe that anybody trusts their mental health to a guy who spouts this stuff!