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.
This is another awesome Russian cat video, depicting a dog that has apparently been trained to carry a cat home. The indignant moggie, however, appears quite affronted to be taken where she doesn’t want to go.
h/t: Nancie
I want to give two thumbs up to John Loftus’s book, Why I Became an Atheist. Despite its title, it’s far more than the story of Loftus’s journey from Christian minister to outspoken atheist. It’s really a thoughtful and well-documented dissection of religious arguments and theological claims. There are, for example, chapters on “The question of miracles,” “The problem of unanswered prayer,” “Did Jesus rise bodily from the dead?”, and so on.
And there are two nice chapters on the “problem of suffering,” in which Loftus takes on and destroys the pathetic arguments offered by the faithful for why a good and powerful God allows gratuitous suffering.
So read the book. While so doing, I came across this quotation that Loftus uses to demonstrate how believers rationalize evil. The quote is so totally insane that I had to reproduce it. It’s on p. 222 of Loftus’s book, but the original source is pp. 177-181 of Brian Davies’s 2006 book The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil. (Davies is a well-known philospher of religion, now at Fordham University.)
The evil in evil suffered is not an existent entity. It is not identifiable substance or positive quality. Evil suffered occurs as existing things fail to be as good as they could be. In that case, however, I immediately conclude that the evil in evil suffered cannot be caused by God. For God, as I’ve argued, is the cause of the being of all that is real apart from himself, and the evil in evil suffered is not something with being, not something actual, and therefore, not something created by him. . . There are blind people. But blindness has no independent existence. There are blind people only because there are people who cannot see. In a similar way, evil suffered has no independent existence. . . it is still parasitic on goodness. . . the evil in evil suffered, I am saying, does not actually exist. . . The badness in a diseased cat is nothing real in the cat.
This is Sophisticated Theology™ at its finest: it simply waves away the problem of evil by denying that it—and suffering—exist. And if suffering isn’t real, God wasn’t responsible. Sophisticated Theology™ is characterized by two qualities: completely unsupported assertions and blatant obfuscation, often using fancy academic words. Both qualities are on view here.
Loftus takes the quote apart, but it’s almost self-refuting. Ask an Afghan woman blinded by acid whether she is suffering in a real way, and whether her blindness is “real”. And if blindness has no independent existence, does the HIV/AIDS virus? And since that virus causes AIDS, does that disease lack an “independent existence”? Disease and suffering (the “evils” of Davies) are real phenomena—phenomena with physical causes that a benevolent and powerful god could have prevented, just as god could have prevented a fanatical Muslim from trying to blind women for going to school. Claiming that these things have “no independent existence” is just a cheap and oily way to get around the problem.
Re Davies, I’m going to repeat the George Orwell quote that comes in so handy when dealing with Sophisticated Theology™ (it was made in another context):
One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
Keep your eye on BearCam today: in just the few minutes I’ve watched, I’ve seen a bunch of salmon jump, and a brown bear caught one. This truly is an amazing spectacle, and very soothing somehow. It’s the theater of evolution: salmon have evolved to fight their way upstream from the sea, leaping waterfalls to get to the spawning grounds, and in so doing must run a gamut of predatory bears who have learned to take advantage of fish reproduction. I wonder if there’s any aspect of salmon behavior that the bears are selecting for. . .
A screenshot with a leaping salmon:
UPDATE: Over at The Daily Beast, disgraced journalist Jayson Blair offers a take on Lehrer’s sins and offers him some “advice”.
____________
At 31, Jonah Lehrer was a Wunderkind of popular science writing, with a regular gig at The New Yorker and three best-selling books on brain science under his belt (he was also a Rhodes Scholar). His latest book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, sold 200,000 copies and made the NYT bestseller list. But I always found his writing a bit too slick, and sometimes erroneous, as I noted in two separate posts (here and here). He interviewed me by phone about the E. O. Wilson piece in the second link, and although I thought he understood the problems with Wilson’s work, what he published in The New Yorker was a lame and noncommital assessment of the “group selection” controversy.
I can’t claim that I’m prescient, but Lehrer was clearly an ambitious young man in a hurry, whose work I always saw as superficial. And now he’s been caught out.
According to yesterday’s Washington Post, Lehrer fabricated some quotes from Bob Dylan for his newest book, and the repercussions are serious:
A staff writer for The New Yorker has resigned and his best-selling book has been halted after he acknowledged inventing quotes by Bob Dylan. [JAC: See this separate NYT piece on Lehrer’s resignation.]
Jonah Lehrer released a statement Monday through his publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, saying that some Dylan quotes appearing in “Imagine: How Creativity Works” did “not exist.” Others were “unintentional misquotations, or represented improper combinations of previously existing quotes.”
Lehrer said he acknowledged his actions after being contacted by Michael Moynihan of the online publication Tablet Magazine, which earlier Monday released an in-depth story on the Dylan passages in “Imagine”
“I told Mr. Moynihan that they (the quotes in question) were from archival interview footage provided to me by Dylan’s representatives. This was a lie spoken in a moment of panic. When Mr. Moynihan followed up, I continued to lie, and say things I should not have said,” Lehrer wrote in his statement.
“The lies are over now. I understand the gravity of my position. I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and readers.”
Houghton Mifflin said in a statement that Lehrer had committed a “serious misuse.” Listings for the e-book edition of “Imagine” will be removed and shipments of the physical book have been stopped.
Both the hardcover and audiobooks of Imagine are still listed on Amazon, but they seem to have pulled the main offerings, since there are almost no reader comments on the hardcover.
Michael C. Moynihan’s story in the Jewish magazine Tablet—the story that led to Lehrer’s downfall—is free online: “Jonah Lehrer’s deceptions.” It turns out that this is not the first time that Lehrer played fast and loose with his journalism:
Last month, Lehrer was accused of a curious journalistic offense: the act of “self-plagiarism.” Lehrer, a staff writer at The New Yorker and celebrated author of three books, cannibalized his own work, posting often word-for-word excerpts from Imagine on The New Yorker’s blog without noting that it had been published elsewhere. To some, it was a tenuous charge—as one journalist commented to me, this was like “being accused of stealing food from your own refrigerator.” Others highlighted the pressures brought to bear on young writers to produce more and more content.
It wasn’t the first time Lehrer’s fellow writers had raised questions about his work. Reviewing his first book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, philosopher Jonathon Keats upbraided Lehrer for a narrative larded with examples that “arbitrarily and often inaccurately” supported his thesis. The writer Edward Champion, who catalogued Lehrer’s recent recyclings on his blog, stated baldly that Lehrer was guilty of “plagiarizing” a paragraph from fellow New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell. A New York Times reviewer catalogued the “many elementary errors” in Imagine. And the New Republic’s Isaac Chotiner, in a devastating review of Imagine, chided Lehrer for “borrowing (heavily)” from economist Edward Glaeser and claimed that “almost everything” in his exegesis of Bob Dylan’s song “Like a Rolling Stone” was “inaccurate, misleading, or simplistic.”
Lehrer’s Wikipedia bio gives a bit more information (I’ve removed the footnote numbers):
In 2012, it was reported that Lehrer had self-plagiarized several blog posts he had submitted to The New Yorker. All five of these blog posts now appear on The New Yorker website with editor’s notes listing where Lehrer had previously published related sentences, including The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Wired, and The Guardian. Additionally, Edward Champion reported that portions of Imagine: How Creativity Works had been published previously in various forms by Lehrer. In response, a spokesperson for Lehrer’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, stated: “He owns the rights to the relevant articles, so no permission was needed. He will add language to the acknowledgments noting his prior work.” Lehrer apologized for the unattributed reuse of his own work.
A correction appended to a different Lehrer article on The New Yorker website from January 2012 noted that unattributed quotations published in the original version of that article had been taken from the work of another writer.
Moynihan, the author of the Tablet piece, turns out to be something of a Dylan maven, and when he saw the dubious quotes in Imagine, he wrote Lehrer and asked for the source. After weeks of evasion and lying, Lehrer finally came clean.
Over the next three weeks, Lehrer stonewalled, misled, and, eventually, outright lied to me. Yesterday, Lehrer finally confessed that he has never met or corresponded with Jeff Rosen, Dylan’s manager; he has never seen an unexpurgated version of Dylan’s interview for No Direction Home, something he offered up to stymie my search; that a missing quote he claimed could be found in an episode of Dylan’s “Theme Time Radio Hour” cannot, in fact, be found there; and that a 1995 radio interview, supposedly available in a printed collection of Dylan interviews called The Fiddler Now Upspoke, also didn’t exist. When, three weeks after our first contact, I asked Lehrer to explain his deceptions, he responded, for the first time in our communication, forthrightly: “I couldn’t find the original sources,” he said. “I panicked. And I’m deeply sorry for lying.”
Read Moynihan’s piece for a lot more gory detail.
Now you may think that making up a few Bob Dylan quotes, and then lying about them, is not an offense serious enough to warrant recall of Lehrer’s book or his firing at The New Yorker. But you must remember that publishers don’t vet the accuracy of books: they depend on the author to do so. Once an author has transgressed, how can they ever trust him again? And The New Yorker does vet quotes: it’s famous for its fact-checking. The sin of that magazine is not in buying Lehrer’s fabrications (though I pointed out two errors in the New Yorker piece on Wilson), but in hiring a young man whose slick prose hid both his errors and his superficial conclusions. The New Yorker is all too ready to favor style over substance, and it needs to do some serious soul-searching about this tendency.
Lehrer is, for the nonce, journalistic toast. It will take a long time, if ever, before publishers trust him again. And he’ll never again write for The New Yorker. I’d feel sorry for him except that making stuff up and lying about it is nearly as big a sin in journalism as it is in science, and Lehrer scuppered a brilliant career by being in too much of a hurry. Did he really think he could get away with this?
Moynihan gives the eulogy:
A month ago, when Lehrer’s self-plagiarism scandal emerged, some supporters argued that it was simply the misstep of a young journalist. But making up sources, deceiving a fellow journalist, and offering accounts of films you have never seen and emails never exchanged, is, to crib Bob Dylan, on a whole other level.
Reader Sigmund keeps a weather eye on HuffPo and BioLogos, and found an interesting piece by Jacques Berlinerblau (remember him?) on the difference between secularism and atheism. Sadly, Berlinerblau, who apparently can’t help himself, goes beyond his thesis to bash New Atheism.
_______________
Jacques Berlinerblau and the problem of secularism
by Sigmund
Over on the Huffington Post, the accommodationist historian Jacques Berlinerblau has a new piece on the problems of secularism: ‘Secularism is not Atheism’. Berlinerblau, who seems to have abandoned his call for others to shut up about the subject of atheism if they haven’t read Lucien Febvre’s ‘The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais’, approaches the subject using the classic HuffPo accomodationist template: a couple of good but obvious points, a shot at some easy GOP target , a plea to buy his new book and, finally, a gratuitous swipe at the new atheists.
Secularism, as Berlinerblau notes, is concerned primarily with the relations between Church and State. “At its core, secularism is deeply suspicious of any entanglement between government and religion.”
As such it provides a target by those groups, most notably the religious right, who seek a strong role for their religion in government. Berlinerblau begins by pointing out the misrepresentation of secularism by the religious right in the US:
“Secularism must be the most misunderstood and mangled ism in the American political lexicon. Commentators on the right and the left routinely equate it with Stalinism, Nazism and Socialism, among other dreaded isms. In the United States, of late, another false equation has emerged. That would be the groundless association of secularism with atheism.“
This policy of linking secularism with both atheism and totalitarianism has resulted in nonsensical claims such as Newt Gingrich’s much-derided claim that the US was on the path to become “a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”
As Berlinerblau points out,
“Claiming that secularism and atheism are the same thing makes for good culture warrioring. The number of nonbelievers in this country is quite small. Many Americans, unfortunately, harbor irrational prejudices toward them. By intentionally blurring the distinction between atheism and secularism, the religious right succeeds in drowning both.”
Berlinerblau next turns to a problem he sees in the use of the term ‘secular’ by the non-religious.
“Nowadays most major atheist groups describe themselves as “secular.” Many are in fact good secularists. But others, as we shall see, are beholden to assumptions that are strikingly at odds with the secular worldview.”
Berlinerblau rightly draws a distinction between a non-religious or naturalistic worldview and a secular world view.
“Secularism, on the other hand, has nothing to do with metaphysics. It does not ask whether there is a divine realm. It is agnostic, if you will, on the question of God’s existence — a question that is way above its pay grade.”
In other words, secularism is a political position rather than a metaphysical one, concerned with the freedom to believe in whatever religion one wants and the freedom from religious strictures imposed by the state on its citizens.
What this means, in effect, is that one does not need to be a nonbeliever to be a secularist. Indeed many of the founding fathers of US secularism, such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. were religious; and it is important to remember that prominent contemporary religious secularists exist, such the Reverend Barry Lynn, the Executive Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
The major secular organizations in the US, however, namely the Secular Coalition for America and the Secular Student Alliance are explicitly non-religious in their organization and membership.
Berlinerblau sees this non-religious exclusivity as a problem, a dangerous blurring of the line between secularism and atheism that can and will be exploited by the religious right.
While he may have a point here it is questionable to what extent the membership policies of the SCA and SSA influence the view of secularism amongst the population at large. Some of the most outspoken attacks against secularism have come from leading Catholic figures from Europe, a region where secularism is not synonymous with atheism.
For example the UK based National Secular Society seeks to:
“promote secularism as the best means to create a society in which people of all religions or none can live together fairly and cohesively. The NSS sees secularism – the position that the state should be separate from religion – as an essential element in promoting equality between all citizens.”
This has not, however, prevented virulent attacks against secularism from both the Pope and one of the UK’s most senior Catholics, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, who recently claimed:
“The rise of atheism is very, very dangerous”, going on to state: “no one should be forced to live according to the new secular religion as if it alone were definitive and obligatory for all mankind”
Berlinerblau finally and predictably takes aim at the new atheists:
“some atheists, of late, have taken a regrettable anti-secular turn.”
He then goes on to equate secularism with a kind of religious neutrality – one that is violated by advcoating an anti-theistic worldview. Using the examples of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris as Violators In Chief, Berlinerblau makes a final dire and prediction:
“as long as some celebrities of nonbelief continue to espouse radical anti-theism (in the name of “secularism,” no less) the future of secularism is imperiled.”
The implication of Berlinerblau’s argument seems to be that one cannot advocate that the theistic worldview is unsupported by evidence and at the same time assume the mantle of secularism.
But why not?
Wouldn’t his caution apply equally to a theist who advocates others to accept their faith? Don’t Christians and Muslims want others to ‘see the light’ and become Christians or Muslims respectively? Wouldn’t that mean that they must be anti-secularist too?
If secularism really entails freedom of religion, then so long as the atheist or believer doesn’t try to compel others into accepting their beliefs (and Berlinerblau provides no evidence that prominent New Atheists seek this option), then where is the incompatibility between outspoken atheism and secularism?
In the end, Berlinerblau is partly correct. There is indeed a problem in the US with secularism and religion. Perhaps, however, he should ask himself not why there are so many ‘secular’ New Atheists, but why there are so few Barry Lynns.
At Brooks Falls, Alaska, it’s still light out, and seven brown bears are combing the falls for salmon. The fish appear thin on the ground, though, and I haven’t seen any nomming.
Here’s a screenshot:
You thought I’d given up, didn’t you? If so, you don’t know me. Yes, I’m still reading the King James Bible, and am at the end of The Book of Ezra (p. 471). That means I still have 637 pages to go. When I think about that, my heart sinks to my feet.
My pace has slowed not only because I have other tasks, but also because the parts of the Bible I’ve read so far are so leaden, so dull and deadly, that I’d rather do anything, including ironing, than read another chapter. This part of the Old Testament, at least, is an endless and tedious recounting of the history of the kings of Israel. It’s always the same: one of them takes the throne, worships Yahweh properly, and dies (“sleeps with his fathers”) covered with glory. The next king abjures the proper God, breaks out the golden statues of Baal, and worships the Rong God. Yahweh is, as ever, furious, and wreaks havoc on either the king (sometimes turning him into a leper) or his people, smiting them with plagues or war. You’d think that after twenty or so of these incidents, the Israelites would learn which god to worship. I guess they aren’t as smart as I thought.
At any rate, I will persist to the end of Revelation, but my main conclusion is this: in at least in the first half of the Bible, there is virtually no poetry or literary beauty on tap. If people realized that this book were pure fiction (as it indeed is), nobody would read it. There is no lovely language so far, no striking images, nothing but tedium, boring (and largely false) history and the tales of a megalomaniac deity.
Perhaps things will pick up when I get to Psalms, Proverbs, or the New Testament, but I can say with conviction that the first half of the King James Bible is not great literature. Those who say it is either haven’t read it or are smoking something.
