BioLogos seeks a new president

July 15, 2012 • 8:20 am

BioLogos has announced that Darrel Falk, the current president (he’s served for 2.5 years after the exit of Francis Collins, who started the Foundation to bring Jesus-lovers to Darwin), is stepping down, and the organization is looking for a new president.  This completes the trifecta of resignations, which includes to date co-president “Uncle” Karl Giberson as well as Biblical scholar Pete Enns.

I’m not sure whether this means anything at for the future of this accommodationist organization: in his statement of resignation, “The vision lives on. . . and on,” Falk makes the usual excuse:

At the end of this year, I will be stepping aside as leader of BioLogos. What I love to do most of all is to study, to write, and to teach. This has been my primary calling in life. Occasionally, I have been led down a different path that included some administrative responsibilities for short periods of time, but I know my primary calling and look forward to getting back to it.

Do have a look at Falk’s account of BioLogos‘s “accomplishments,” none of which actually include converting science-averse evangelical Christians to evolution.  They’ve had workshops, meetings, and a big website for three years, as well as tons of funding from the Templeton Foundation and, I suspect, wealthy evangelicals.  But they have no record of actually doing what they set out to do: reconciling science with evangelical Christianity.

The reason is palpably clear of course: those “ways of knowing” are incompatible. But Falk seems cluelessly puzzled by BioLogos‘s failure:

But as thankful as I am for that support, no straddling ought to be required. Science studies God’s creation, which places it on sacred ground, not foreign territory. And if it is sacred ground, then Christians ought to be right there providing tours of the landscape, not out on the fringes looking in. True, there are sections of the science landscape that need to be redeemed from the scientism Richard Dawkins and others use to surface-mine and subtly rearrange the terrain for their own philosophical purposes, but the fact that they have been able to do this may be partly due to our near-absence from the territory. We have been far too hesitant to enter this world, and sometimes it seems we have simply preferred to cast stones from the outside.

Elaine Eklund has shown that Evangelicals are fourteen-fold under-represented among the scientists at the nation’s leading universities. Is this a result of what Mark Noll (almost twenty years ago) described as a scandal—“the scandal of the evangelical mind?” Could it be that the territory seems foreign because we have stayed away and failed to adequately understand how science works and why it is such a dependable way of revealing truth about the physical and biological world that God has created?

Oh for crying out loud! Evangelicals and other hyper-religious people are underrepresented in science because it threatens their faith. It’s not an inadequate understanding of how science works, but a realization that the findings of science, if taken seriously, make the idea of a god superfluous.   And, in the end, this is why all efforts like those of BioLogos will fail.

I can’t resist one dig at Falk’s boast about viewers of their site:

. . . our website has, according to Alexa, grown to become the most viewed web-site in the world for sites that focus on compatibility between mainstream science and the Christian faith. Over 750,000 people have visited the site and viewed an average of seven BioLogos pages.

Well, this site has been up only about six months longer than BioLogos‘s, and as of two minutes ago we had 14,115,529 views (I think that’s equivalent to their stats, though I don’t know how many pages my visitors have viewed.)

Bye bye, Darrel

Nor can I resist reprising BioLogos‘s statement about the new president’s mission and qualifications:

The Position

The President is the public face of BioLogos, embodying the organization’s vision and implementing it by working with the staff, leading evangelicals and scientists and the general public. This person will have deep-seated appreciation of the current gulf between modern science, especially evolution, and conservative evangelical Christianity and be able to successfully convey the need to rectify this situation.

A spirit of graciousness and genuine interest in the views of others who see things differently is important. Since the position requires a component of spiritual leadership, a commitment to a growing and meaningful personal relationship with Jesus Christ is essential. . .

Personal qualifications sought in the next leader of BioLogos

  • Exhibits a strong personal faith relationship with Jesus Christ.
  • Identifies with a local community of Christians.
  • Embraces a high view of Scripture.
  • Shows a love and respect for the church and its people.
  • Demonstrates high integrity and personal character.
  • Seeks and affirms truth.
  • Demonstrates self-knowledge of personal and professional strengths and weaknesses.
  • Synthesizes complex information.
  • Shows strong verbal and written communication skills.
  • Understands the importance of a collegial and professional leadership presence.
  • Has ability to travel by commercial airlines and by automobile.
  • Models being a seasoned and mature leader.
  • Holds the PhD or its equivalent.

I love the “has ability to travel by commercial airlines and by automobile.”  But where, oh where, is the vitally important “love of and respect for the achievements of science”?

Religious wackaloonery in Chicago

July 15, 2012 • 4:25 am

On my way to the Cubs/Diamondback baseball game yesterday (Cubs win!), I came across several loud religious groups proselytizing in Grant Park east of downtown Chicago.  This collection of misfits was particularly humorous—well, not exactly “humorous” given that if they had any power, they’d begin a Taliban-esque refurbishment of morals in America.  I took a  30-second video.  It’s unbelievable that this mentality still exists in the U.S., but, O, foreign readers, watch and weep:

The whole sick crew (click to enlarge):

Quote of the week

July 14, 2012 • 11:32 am

I’m reading E. O. Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth.  I will have more to say later about his views on the evolution of cooperation in humans and social insects, but I did like this quote from p 295 on religion and science as “different ways of knowing”:

It will be useful in taking a second look at science and religion to understand the true nature of the search for objective truth. Science is not just another enterprise like medicine or enginerering or theology. It is the wellspring of all the knowledge we have of the real world that can be tested and fitted to preexisting knowledge. It is the arsenal of technologies and inferential mathematics needed to distinguish the true from the false. It formulates the principles and formulas that tie all this knowledge together. Science belongs to everybody. Its constituent parts can be challenged by anybody in the world who has sufficient information to do so. It is not just ‘another way of knowing’ as often claimed, making it coequal with religious faith. The conflict between scientific knowledge and the teachings of organized religions is irreconcilable. The chasm will continue to widen and cause no end of trouble as long as religious leaders go on making unsupportable claims about supernatural causes of reality.

Many people view Ed Wilson as a sort of latter-day Einstein: someone who doesn’t embrace a personal God but nevertheless is soft on the idea of a deity. I think this is because Ed hasn’t gone out of his way to bash religion, and because he also wrote a book  (The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth) urging religious people that it is in all our interests to conserve Nature’s diversity.  That book was written in the form of a letter to a Baptist pastor, and Wilson was raised as a Southern Baptist in Alabama.

Because of this perceived accommodationism, people have neglected the fact that Wilson really has no truck with religious belief itself.  The quote above is typical of his views, and should dispel the notion that he’s soft on faith.  He recognizes some benefits of religion and argues that both atheist and believer alike must work to save the planet, but he clearly sees the tenets of faith as an outmoded form of tribalism.

Google honors Klimt

July 14, 2012 • 8:54 am

The Google page has another special doodle today, one in honor of artist Gustav Klimt, a particular favorite of mine. Today is the 150th anniversary of his birth. The doodle:

If you click on the doodle on the Google site, you’ll go to a page of information about Klimt.  I’ve seen only a few of his paintings in person, but look forward to a Klimt orgy when I visit Vienna in October.

Let’s forget about “The Kiss” today and look at another Meisterwerk (click to enlarge):

Farmhouse with birth trees (1903)

The great man himself (1862-1918; photo taken in 1914):

New York Times reviews Sam Harris’s “Free Will”

July 14, 2012 • 4:58 am

In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, author and editor Daniel Menaker evaluates Sam Harris’s new book in a review called, “Have it your way.”  I hoped Menaker would engage Harris’s arguments, for book reviews are boring if they merely regurgitate the book’s contents. And though I agree with Sam’s thesis and think his book excellent, the best book reviews are those that take issue with a book’s contents: in such cases we can often experience and learn from from a real clash of intellects. As a famous scientist once told me, “The only good book review is a bad book review.”

Sadly, most of Menaker’s review simply regurgitates Sam’s ideas. While the review is generally positive, Menaker calls parts of it “prosaic.”  And there is this weird paragraph:

Even though Harris assures us that civilized society can survive and might even improve with the abandonment of the concept of conscious agency, it would ultimately affect everything — all of our doings and sayings and thoughts, especially in ordinary sociomoral circumstances. This slender volume is perhaps less important in itself than in its representation of the arguments for accepting that we are not “the authors of our actions.”

What, exactly, does that last sentence mean?  After all, the purpose of the book is to convince readers that we are not the authors of our actions.  That is the book in itself!  And Menaker’s ending is lame, sounding as if it were phoned in:

Of course, questions persist. What, after the dismantling of free will, is consciousness? Just some kind of afflatus given off by three pounds of wetware? If so — if our conscious lives are nothing but the meniscus covering what our brains and bodies are up to, well then, isn’t that some glorious meniscus? It may not tell us what to do, but it does tell us what what we do means — oh, and what beauty is.

Couldn’t it be that we need the experience of what Wegner and others call “perceived control,” at least as a model of voluntary behavior, to get on with our lives and to have our achievements recognized and to be instructed by our failures? (Doesn’t Harris enjoy his success? I bet he does.) Finally, what happens to traditional qualities of character like courage, villainy, leadership? Poof! However correct Harris’s position may be — and I believe that his basic thesis must indeed be correct — it seems to me a sadder truth than he wants to realize.

Well, Sam’s book is not about consciousness but free will, yet anyone who has read Harris knows his position on that matter. It is that consciousness is indeed “some kind of afflatus given off by three pounds of wetware.” What else could it be unless you’re some kind of dualist?

As for our need for the experience of “perceived control,” well, had Menaker read the literature he purports to know, he would see that this hypothesis—the idea that the notion of personal “agency” is a neurological result of natural selection—is something that has been suggested several times before.  In the end, Menaker assumes the position of many compatibilists: he agrees with Sam that we couldn’t have made different choices in the past, but he just doesn’t like that. 

And of course Harris enjoys his successes and mourns his failures, as all of us do.  What part of determinism says that this isn’t a part our mental armory? Indeed, natural selection will have instilled in our ancestors feelings of gratification when we garner things correlated with reproductive success, including public esteem. Obviously, genes for pleasure and for enjoying success will spread insofar as they are positively associated with reproductive output. After all, that’s what orgasms are for.

h/t: Tom

Caturday felid bonus: Higgs the cat explains Higgs the boson

July 14, 2012 • 4:29 am

Faye Flam, the science writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, happens to own a cat named Higgs (the name was bestowed well before the boson was found).  Higgs often takes over the column to explain stuff to readers, and in yesterday’s Inquirer, Higgs explains his eponymous boson, how it was found, and what it means. It’s a good read for those of you who want the basics.  The only problem is that, at the end, Higgs doesn’t ask for his nomz, which he usually does at the end of his columns.

Higgs the Cat

Caturday felid: how Dayo the cat (aka “deo88xxx”) got his name

July 14, 2012 • 4:11 am

My friend Grania, also a cat-lover, pointed me to a website written by her friend:  Souped-up Garden. It’s about gardening and cooking with the garden’s produce, and it has lovely photographs. But the best part is the writer’s cat Dayo, who periodically appears  basking in the garden, licking potatoes in the kitchen, and so on.  The website’s description says:

I garden passionately and not entirely in a sane manner.  I live with my British husband, a  Paléoinformaticien–referred in this blog as the Calm One–and Dayo, our young, white and brown tabby cat in Angouleme, a lively, charming, small city in southwest France.  A native New Yorker, living abroad for about twenty years in various places, I came to settle down to a city that once inspired an earlier name for New York City, that is, Nouvelle Angouleme.  In a way, as  my sister-in-law graciously said,  I finally have come home.

All the Dayo-related posts can be found here, but here are two favorite photos of le moggie, first ensconced in a jam crock and then peering through a slot:

Of course I had to inquire in a comment on her website (below) how the cat got such an unusual name—a name that conjured up the famous Harry Belafonte song. It turns out that his real name is not Dayo, but “deo88xxx” (“the Calm One” is the writer’s husband):

And for the few of you don’t know of this traditional Jamaican mento song, made famous by Harry Belafonte, here is the famous 1956 recording. (“Mento” was the precursor to reggae.)  It’s a catchy song about the travails of Caribbean workmen who must load bananas onto fruit boats all night. It also contains one of the worst rhyming attempts in music history: “banana” is made to rhyme with “tarantula.”

This song was everywhere when I was a kid, for Belafonte was immensely popular. There’s also a hilarious version in which Belafonte sings Day-O with the animals on The Muppet Show.

I guarantee that this song is a meme, and at some point during this weekend you will burst out singing the words “Dayyyyyyyy-O!”