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.
Happy Thursday! As you see, Hili is making tentative forays into the murky hinterlands of feline religious philosophy. Now I’m not sure what the Ontological Argument for Fleas is, unless it’s the claim that a cat with fleas is the greatest cat that one can conceive of—greater than a cat without fleas—and therefore cats with fleas exist. But I may be wrong. Still, as with the Ontological Argument for God, it fails because of its lack of empirical content.
Hili: I’m thinking about ontological proof for the existence of fleas.
A: We have real proofs, we do not need bad philosophy.
Hili: Yes, but I’m entertaining my mind.
In Polish:
Hili: Zastanawiam się nad dowodem ontologicznym na istnienie pcheł.
Ja: Mamy prawdziwe dowody, nie potrzebujemy złej filozofii.
Hili: Tak, ale zabawiam mój umysł.
Today was the first day of class for Biological Sciences 314 Evolutionary Biology, and already last night Peyton, the Philosophickal Cat, was well into her reading of Doug Futuyma‘s Evolution.
Here, she’s boning up on the evolutionary developmental biology of wing and bristle morphology in insects. To her right is a list of historically prominent evolutionary biologists, along with some notes on the lecture sequence.
According to the Montreal Gazette, a figure known to many of us, Dennis Markuze, (aka “David Mabus”) is to be sentenced Thursday for violating his probation, which involved a conviction for making violent threats against many atheist writers and bloggers. I wasn’t Markuze’s biggest target, but I got the threats often enough to be a tad discomfited. Apparently, after being sentenced to probation and a stricture to stay off social media, Markuze not only ignored the order, but even threatened the cop who arrested him:
Last spring, Markuze pleaded guilty to all three of the charges and replied in the affirmative to all of Judge Jean-Pierre Boyer’s questions concerning the plea. A summary of facts was read into the court record during the hearing, including a quote of what Markuze said to the female investigator who arrested him: “You bitch. The same thing will happen to you like what happened to the (World Trade Center) twin towers in 9/11.” Markuze expressed no objections to the summary.
Markuze’s convictions stem largely from the work of Tim Farley, who besides being an atheist is a computer security expert, and managed to track Markuze down and keep the heat on the RCMP to arrest him. Markuze almost certainly suffers from mental illness and may also be an abuser of cocaine and alcohol, so it’s nor clear what the best treatment is. As the paper reports:
You know I don’t want him in jail if he’s mentally ill,” Farley said. “I just want him to leave me alone and stop posting things with my name and my picture on it.”
(Caption from the Gazette): Dennis Markuze at the provincial courthouse in Montreal, Friday November 21, 2014. He has pleaded guilty to posting threats on social networks against people who question the existence of God. Photo: Phil Carpenter / Montreal Gazette
Well, I’m with Dilbert (the guy in the red shirt). But one reader added this:
I must say Wally [the bald guy] expresses a conclusion that I also reach… that if humans have no free will there is no argument against manipulating or reengineering their behaviours in any way one might please… “A Clockwork Orange” world indeed…..
My response: of course there’s an argument against manipulating or re-engineering behaviors to control people. Just because it’s possible in theory to do that—and if think you can’t do it, at least in principle, you’re a dualist—doesn’t mean that “everything is permitted.” The argument against it is that manipulating behavior erodes people’s sense of agency, a feeling that isreal, and could in that and other ways be harmful to society and well being. So not only is that an argument against it, but such arguments can be effective, for they can dissuade people from doing bad stuff. (Some people also think that if there is no free will, it’s useless to try to convince others.)
Statements like the one from the reader above—a reader who was kind enough to send me the cartoon—sometimes makes me think that many people who argue in favor of free will don’t really grasp the issues it raises.
Do you want some Sophisticated Theology™ today? I thought not. But I have some new theology right here, and boy, is it sophisticated!
First you’ll have to recall (or watch) the Stephen Fry video in which, asked by interviewer Gay Byrne what he’d say if he met God, Fry (an atheist) answered that he’d query God about the pervasiveness of evil in the world (see my post here, or watch the video below). Why, he’d ask, do innocent children die of leukemia? In other words, Fry, assuming that God had some control over the existence and nature of bad stuff on Earth, would ask God for the truths that theodicy has been seeking for millennia.
Well, the Guardian has published a piece in which Giles Fraser rebukes Fry and rejects the kind of God that Fry envisions. The piece is called, “I don’t believe in the God that Stephen Fry believes in, either,” and the odd thing is that the writer who rejects Fry’s God is Giles Fraser, who happens to be not only a journalist, but the priest in charge at St Mary’s Newington in south London and the former canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral. In other words, he’s an Anglican bigwig.
So what, according to Fraser, were Fry’s big mistakes? There were two:
1. God doesn’t have that kind of power. He has, instead, the Power of Love! But how can God be powerless? Because, says Fraser, Jesus was powerless. Fraser:
Too many religious people actually worship power. They imagine the source of ultimate power, give it a name (God, Allah, Yahweh) etc, and then try and cosy up to it, aligning their interests with those of the boss. . . the temptation is always to suck up to power.
This is why the Jesus story is, for me, the most theologically revolutionary story that there can be. Because it imagines God and power separated. God as a baby. God poor. God helpless on a cross. God with a mocking and ironic crown of thorns. In these scenes it is Caesar who has the power. And so the question posed is: which one will you follow when push comes to shove? You can follow what is right and get strung up for it. Or you can cosy up to power and do as you are told. By saying that he will stare ultimate power in the face and, without fear, call it by its real name, Fry has indicated he is on the side of the angels (even though he does not believe in them). Indeed, Fry is following in a long tradition of religious polemic, from Job to Blake and beyond.
Umm. . . .the last thing I heard, Anglicans—like their Catholic-Church ancestors—accepted the Trinity. That makes Jesus part of the Godhead, i.e., one with power! And you are saved through your faith in Jesus. Is that power or what?
More important, Fry wasn’t asked to address Jesus, but to address God, or rather the part of the Trinity called God. And nobody doubts that God has power. Or, if Fraser is claiming that God simply can’t do anything beyond emitting Endless Love from above, let him be explicit about that.
What we see in the paragraphs above is simply a word salad that evades the big question: can God do anything about evil or not? And if he can, why doesn’t he? But Fraser goes on:
2. There is no such thing as the God that Fry imagines. That’s right—Fraser says so explicitly:
The other problem with Fry’s argument is philosophical. Simply put: there is no such thing as the God he imagines. It is the flying teapot orbiting a distant planet about which nothing can be said. Such a God doesn’t exist. Nilch. Nada. It’s a nonsense. Indeed, as no less an authority than Thomas Aquinas rightly insists, existence itself is a questionable predicate to use of God. For God is the story of human dreams and fears. God is the shape we try to make of our lives. God is the name of the respect we owe the planet. God is the poetry of our lives. Of course this is real. Frighteningly real. Real enough to live and die for even. But this is not the same as saying that God is a command and control astronaut responsible for some wicked hunger game experiment on planet earth. Such a being does not exist. And for the precisely the reasons Fry expounds, thank God for that.
Well, that settles that! It’s comforting to know that at one human on this planet—Giles Fraser—knows exactly what kind of God there is. God isn’t a disembodied spirit with humanlike qualities, as many other Anglicans wrongly believe. No, he is a God who is really just the name that we give to our hopes and dreams and fears. But—he’s also REAL!
Of course Fraser cites Aquinas, who really did believe that God existed as a spirit with humanlike traits and could punish and reward people. And, indeed, no less an authority THAN NEARLY EVERY DAMN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGIAN IN THE UNIVERSE thinks that God does indeed have the power to punish and reward people—that he is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. If that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t even have the Problem of Evil and the discipline of theodicy that it spawned. But apparently only Fraser and possibly Aquinas knows that the three-O God doesn’t exist.
I guess I’m sounding a bit grouchy, what with the capslock and all, but this kind of pronouncement angers me. How the hell does Fraser know what kind of God there is? What gives him the authority to pronounce that Fry’s God is a phantasm? How does he know what he claims to know?
Fraser, in fact, shouldn’t be addressing his remarks to Fry. He should be addressing them to all his Christian coreligionists—Protestant, Anglican and Catholic alike—letting them know that all of them are wrong about God.
Darwin Day, Feb. 12, is fast approaching, so start making your plans now. The Dinosaur Discovery Museum in Kenosha, Wisconsin will be holding its event this coming Saturday, February 7, from noon to 5 PM.
There will be educational displays (including live herps), activities for children, videos about evolution from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Chris Noto and I will each be giving public lectures during the afternoon. Chris’s talk will be on “What the Fossil Record Tells Us About Evolution”, while I’ll be speaking on “How Evolution Works”. My talk is at 1 PM, Chris’s at 3 PM; each should be about 30 min.
If you’re in southeastern Wisconsin or northeastern Illinois, come by to join the festivities!
*****
Professor Ceiling Cat will be lecturing on Darwin Day in the Deep South, my favorite place to spread the gospel. I’ll be talking about the evidence for evolution and the religious pushback against it, at the University of Southern Mississippi on February 13 (announcement here). There will be books on sale, and the good Professor will sign them; if you say “Felis silvestris lybica” (the wild ancestor of the house cat), you’ll get a cat drawn in your book.
I was going to combine this with an eating trip to nearby New Orleans, but discovered to my horror that that’s during Mardi Gras, an awful time to be nomming in The Big Easy. However, I’m told that Hattiesburg, Mississippi has two world-class barbecue joints. Stay tuned.
Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “pick,” deals with a problem that I’ve written many words about: the selective use of scripture to either buttress your moral feelings or to distinguish the “real” from the “metaphorical.” But the artist’s advantage is the ability to convey exactly the same idea in four panels and a few words. Kudos to him/her:
