Stenger on science vs. religion

March 13, 2012 • 11:55 am

I swear, physicist and atheist Victor Stenger gets more “militant” with each new post in his HuffPo column, and I love it. The man speaks the unvarnished truth.

His latest is a strong and alliteratively titled discussion of the incompatibility of science and religion called “The fall of foolish faith.”  Besides urging scientists to help rid the world of religion, Stenger adds a new twist: that non-scientists should go after scientists who coddle faith.

I want to urge those of you who are not scientists to try to convince those who are to stop pussyfooting around with religion and confront the reality of what it is and always has been — a blight on humanity that has hindered our progress for millennia and now threatens our very existence.

Scientists have to help the rest of the secular community to work toward reducing the influence of religion to the point where it has negligible effect on society. I don’t believe this is impossible. Astrology and the reading of sheep entrails are no longer used to decide on courses of events, such as going to war. Why can’t we expect the same for the imagined dialogues with an ancient tribal sky god that at least one recent president has used to justify his actions?

Much of his message concerns the influence of religion on preventing the development of an energy-efficient America, one that, he says, should be using liquid thorium nuclear reactors (I have to confess I know nothing about these). Instead, the rich people, armed with the club of faith, continue to fight solar power and other new technologies, deny global warming, and foster the continued use of fossil fuels:

So why don’t we move in these directions already clearly marked out by science? Because since the late nineteenth century we have lived in a plutocracy in which petroleum and other fossil energies dominate almost every sector of our economy by virtue of the enormous wealth they bring to their producers and distributers.

Now, what does this have to do with religion? Since prehistoric times religion has served as the handmaiden to those in power, helping them to maintain that power. Tribal chiefs, kings, and emperors always had shamans and priests at their sides to assure their subjects that they led by divine right.

In America today, petro-dollars fuel a giant Christian propaganda machine that works to undermine the efforts of scientists to find solutions to the problems that face us with overpopulation, pollution, and climate change. They use techniques that were pioneered 30 years ago by the tobacco industry to suppress the evidence that smoking causes cancer and heart disease. And these techniques exploit the antiscience that is inherent in religious belief.

A new technique that in recent years has been added to the arsenal of global warming denialism is to frame climate change as a theological issue. Global warming deniers say that God would never allow life on Earth to be destroyed. After all, he gave humans dominion over the planet. Besides, the world is coming to an end soon anyway, so it doesn’t matter.

Energy matters are above my pay grade, though it’s clear that religion is behind (or at least used to justify) much of climate-change denialism.  There’s also a connection, says Stenger, though the kind of magical, nonscientific thinking fostered by faith:

While the petrocrats use science in every aspect of their businesses, they hypocritically exploit the antiscience that is inherent in religion in order to undermine any scientific findings that threaten their power and fortunes.

But my favorite part of Stenger’s longish piece is his no-nonsense pronouncements about the incompatibility of science and religion:

Most scientists do not realize that science and religion are fundamentally incompatible. This is not because they have thought about it. It is because they prefer not to think about it.

Fundamentalists know science and religion are incompatible, since science disputes so much of what is in the Bible, which they take as the literal word of God. To them, science is simply wrong and must be Christianized. A well-funded effort exists to do just that, while most scientists sit on the sidelines because they prefer not to get involved.

But science and religion have always been at war, and always will be. One of yesterday’s speakers said that he did not like to use the word “religion” but rather called it a “belief system.” Well, there are different kinds of belief systems. Science is a belief system based on reason and evidence. Religion is a belief system based on bullshit.

I love the last sentence, which I wouldn’t have the guts to publish in a forum like HuffPo.  He’s right of course, though I’d say “revelation and other forms of superstition” rather than “bullshit.”

And he’s absolutely on the mark with this:

Moderate Christians claim they support science, but they still hold to beliefs that have no empirical basis. Moderates will tell you that they accept evolution, but then they insist it is still guided by God. This is not Darwinian evolution. This is intelligent design. There is no guidance, divine or otherwise, in Darwinian evolution.

Yes, a hundred times yes!  The National Center for Science Education should take this to heart, as should the Ken Millers, Francis Collinses, and the 38% of the American public who accept evolution, but only a form guided by God (only 16% of Americans accept naturalistic evolution, while 40% are straight-out creationists).  Let us install this in our neurons: theistic evolution is not science, but creationism.

Among his other peeves is another I agree with: that science can indeed test the “supernatural,” or, if you don’t like that word, can test for the presence of a theistic god.

No doubt, science has its limits. However, the fact that science is limited doesn’t mean that religion or any alternative system of thought can or does provide insight into what lies beyond those limits. For example, science cannot yet show precisely how the universe originated naturally, although many plausible scenarios exist. But the fact that science does not–at present–have a definitive answer to this question does not mean that ancient creation myths such as those in Genesis have any substance, any chance of eventually being verified.

The scientific community in general goes along with the notion that science has nothing to say about the supernatural because the methods of science, as they are currently practiced, exclude supernatural causes. I strongly disagree with this position. If we truly possess an inner sense telling us about an unobservable reality that matters to us and influences our lives, then we should be able to observe the effects of that reality by scientific means.

If someone’s inner sense were to warn of an impending earthquake unpredicted by science, which then occurred on schedule, we would have evidence for an extrasensory source of knowledge.So far we see no evidence that the feelings people experience when they perceive themselves to be in touch with the supernatural correspond to anything outside their heads, and we have no reason to rely on those feelings when they occur. However, if such evidence or reason should show up, then scientists will have to consider it whether they like it or not.

So here’s one more thing to encode in our neurons:  a theistic god is indeed a god that can be examined with the tools of science and reason. Every good theologian knows that—the people who don’t are the scientific organizations who have made the “god-is not-testable” statements: the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Center for Science Education.

If I go on, I’ll wind up reproducing Stenger’s whole article.  So go read it: it’s all good.

Apropos of religion vs. the environment, reader Tom sent me a church sign from Syracuse, New York (Baptist, of course):

Kitteh contest: Sosa

March 13, 2012 • 8:32 am

Reader Ken, a fellow biologist, sends a story and photo about Sosa, a name you’ll recognize if you follow baseball or live in Chicago:

I’m a fellow evolutionary ecologist.  I recently discovered and greatly enjoy your blog. [JAC: Ceci n’est pas un blog.] And we share a love of cats as well.  So after reading that you welcome cat photos I have attached a few here.  As a Chicago native, (for my B-day my mother sent us a Portillo’s beef package (Al’s Beef doesn’t deliver to my town as far as I can tell).  Sosa seemed to find the most appropriate place to lie down.

We picked Sosa up from a shelter in Oct 2003 and named her after one of the heroes of a ill-fated playoff run by the Chicago Cubs.  Sammy’s reputation went downhill afterward, while Sosa has only filled our house with immense joy.  She is the most expressive cat we’ve ever been around with a wonderful and trusting demeanor, as well as curious, outgoing and a magnet for the camera.  This explains how she found the perfect pose (in her own mind, I’m sure) next to the delivery box from Portillo’s beef.  In retrospect I think she adopted us rather than the other way around.  On the day we first visited the shelter and approached the pen where she was being kept she sat on the other side of the fence with a look on her face like “Where have you been?  I’ve been waiting for you”.  We’ve given her the best home we can ever since then.

I’m told that Sosa did not get any of that beef.

Unholy connection between BioLogos and the AAAS, NIH, and the Smithsonian: Science gives evidence for God

March 13, 2012 • 5:31 am

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world’s largest scientific organization and publisher of Science, one of the two premier science journals in the world (the other is Nature). Unfortunately, this important organization has gone the accommodationist route big time, sponsoring a “Dialogue on Science, Religion, and Ethics” (DoSER) program that is largely concerned with showing people that religion and science are completely compatible.  As I’ve posted before, DoSER is sponsored by not only the AAAS, but by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Smithsonian Institution. These are government organizations, so some of your tax dollars may be going to support a brand of theology. And, of course, the whole shebang is funded by the Templeton Foundation to the tune of 5.3 million dollars.

DoSER is headed by Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, Senior Project Scientist in charge of the NASA Hubble Space Telescope, and, notably, the former head and now Executive Board member of the American Scientific Affiliation,  an association of evangelical Christian scientists.   The organization is pretty hard-line, for it takes some bizarre stands for an organization of scientists, especially one that includes Wiseman with her AAAS program meant to reconcile the truths of modern science with the beliefs of the faithful.  The problem is that the ASA doesn’t seem to accept those truths:

  • According to their website, “The ASA has no official position on evolution; its members hold a diversity of views with varying degrees of intensity. “
  • The ASA publishes the Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation (download pdf at the link), which has some pretty weird articles.  Alert reader Sigmund, who called it to my attention, describes the latest issue thusly: “As you might expect from a Christian evangelical organization that refuses to take a stance on the scientific consensus for things like evolution, it’s all over the place. It has articles on the RNA world hypothesis (science), information from an Intelligent Design viewpoint (pseudoscientific creationism), and the use of chaos theory to explain demonology (complete lunacy —written by a physician called Janet Warren who describes herself as ‘a family physician in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, with a special interest in counseling and deliverance.’  A special interest in deliverance?”

As an organization, the ASA does not take a position when there is honest disagreement between Christians on an issue. We are committed to providing an open forum where controversies can be discussed without fear of unjust condemnation. Legitimate differences of opinion among Christians who have studied both the Bible and science are freely expressed within the Affiliation in a context of Christian love and concern for truth.

Our platform of faith has four important planks:
We accept the divine inspiration, trustworthiness and authority of the Bible in matters of faith and conduct.
We confess the Triune God affirmed in the Nicene and Apostles’ creeds, which we accept as brief, faithful statements of Christian doctrine based upon Scripture.
We believe that in creating and preserving the universe God has endowed it with contingent order and intelligibility, the basis of scientific investigation.
We recognize our responsibility, as stewards of God’s creation, to use science and technology for the good of humanity and the whole world.
These four statements of faith spell out the distinctive character of the ASA, and we uphold them in every activity and publication of the Affiliation.
It is a disgrace that Wiseman is an officer of this organization and at the same time heads an important program for the AAAS, one also connected with the Smithsonian and the NIH.  She is an officer (and former president) of an organization that refuses to accept evolution, publishes articles on the “curing” of gays, and is involved in all sorts of other questionable religious activities.  Wiseman should either resign from the ASA, or the AAAS should find someone less embarrassing to head their accommodationist program. Actually, they should deep-six this execrable Templet0n-funded program, for its science “outreach” explicitly endorses a form of theology. Were I a member of the AAAS, I’d resign.
But it’s worse than that, for Wiseman has started publishing dire stuff on the BioLogos website (also funded by Templeton): articles that implicitly claim that science gives evidence for God. Her latest piece (the second) is called “Science as an instrument of worship, part 2.”  The piece is notable because its goal is to demonstrate how “studying the Creation can show us the nature of God.”:
And yet I believe it is important to rejuvenate our congregations with a sense of joy and unity in contemplating the magnificence of Creation, with forefront scientific knowledge. . .
While science itself cannot address or prove the existence or non-existence of God, there are other compelling reasons, looking at nature and experience as a whole, for many people to believe in God. And from that perspective of faith, the Creation itself will reflect the nature of God. So what could we learn about the character of the Creator God by what we have discovered in the universe? This is subjective, but I believe there are several characteristics of the Creator that one could glean (not scientifically) by considering the universe in which we live, so let me elaborate on these points.
I strongly suspect that the caveat “not scientifically,” was added to get Wiseman off the hook, for what she goes on to describe is, in fact, how one can use scientific observation to reach conclusions about the nature of God.  And here’s what she discerns about God from science:

Power is hard to describe, but when we consider that there are over 100 billion galaxies in the universe, most with hundreds of billions of stars, all the eventual result of an enormously energetic initial flash of energy over 13 billion years ago, great power is evident.

Of course, that power was entirely the result of the Big Bang, and says nothing about God.

Creativity is seen in the very processes themselves. Stars, for example, are not only shining balls of gas; they are also factories where heavier elements that we rely on for life are produced. What a brilliant mechanism!

Yes, but there are many more stars than needed to produce all the elements necessary for life on Earth.  And, of course, stars are also the result of the ineluctable physical processes initiated by the Big Bang.

Beauty can be seen in everything from spiral galaxies to snail shells to mathematical equations of motion. The fact that beauty exists and that we are able to recognize and appreciate it has interesting implications for the purposes of Creation.

“Interesting implications”? What, exactly, are they? Did God produce all those spiral galaxies simply so we could admire them from our small blue dot?

Patience is implied as we now can see, through careful astronomical study, the slow (to us) formation and maturation of galaxies and stars over billions of years, leading to our life-bearing planet, where fossils and formations tell a tale of a slowly changing Earth. Yet faith reminds us that God has been in charge this whole unimaginable time, knowing that each of us, and our Savior, would eventually appear.

This is making a virtue of necessity.  Why did God wait ten billion years after He created the universe to bring life into existence? Note as well the unscientific assertion that humans were programmed into the Universe from the very beginning, and the claim that the “Savior” appeared on only one planet in the billions in our universe. Why the excess? Was there no Intergalactic Jesus?

Faithfulness is implied by the very stability of the universe, and the fact that we can study it knowing that fundamental forces and principles like cause and effect are stable and reliable, making our lives possible and meaningful. In fact we live in what appears to be a very finely tuned universe.

The problem here is that our own planet isn’t faithful: it’s going to be incinerated in about five billion years, so Earth is hardly “stable and reliable.” And I don’t know any physicist who would describe “cause and effect” as a fundamental “force” or principle of the field.

Wiseman also endorses two other wonky religious conclusions that are supposed to come from science:

Within that framework of faithfulness, however, we see basic principles allowing freedom and its resulting good and bad consequences; quantum mechanics and chaos theory have revealed a world of uncertain or unpredictable outcomes at fundamental levels of the physical world.

The “freedom” of quantum mechanics has nothing to do with human “freedom” as conceived by Christianity, nor with the “free will” that is supposed to account for “bad consequences,” aka “evil.” She’s blaming the evils of the world on quantum indeterminacy?  And chaos theory, of course, is deterministic: it shows that certain processes, while unpredictable, are nevertheless ineluctably deterministic, and therefore can’t instantiate freedom.

And, like Francis Collins, head of the NIH, Wiseman sees fine-tuning as evidence for God:

The physical constants that describe how the forces of nature work with high quantitative accuracy are exactly right to allow life to exist and evolve and thrive for a meaningful length of time. Even tiny deviations from their measured values would have precluded life. One could (and many do) try to explain this away by imagining that there could be a very large number of other universes, each with different fundamental constants and forces, so that this one that enables life as we know it is a statistical accident. If that were true, it would still be incredible that this “multi-verse” would be of such special character that even one universe within it would be a birthplace for life.

Her conclusion from scientific observation of the universe?

This all points to a God who loves, who desires living beings to exist, to recognize beauty and wonder in the universe, and to eventually respond in personal relationship to their Creator.

It’s funny that other astronomers who have the same data aren’t on board with Wiseman’s conclusion.  The reason, of course, is that Wiseman, like all liberal theologians or believers, is simply using science as a post facto rationalization of what they already believe.  They aren’t drawing conclusions about God from the universe, but forcing the characteristics of the universe into the Procrustean bed of their faith.  There is in fact no observation about the universe that someone like Wiseman couldn’t comport with their faith. And that’s the difference between science and religion.

Despite Wiseman’s caveat, these kind of pronouncements do nothing less than use her authority of a scientist to endorse the existence of a creator, and imply that scientific observations give us a clue about the nature of a creator.

As a citizen, Wiseman of course has the right to believe what she wants, and to publish this unscientific tripe in the guise of science. But as a representative of NASA and the AAAS (her affiliations are noted in the BioLogos piece), she’s an embarrassment, for her activities show an unseemly infusion of religion into science. Science doesn’t need this kind of magical thinking! And, in fact, that’s what Wiseman’s DoSER program is all about.  If you’re a member of the AAAS and object to this program, you can write to Alan Leshner, CEO of the AAAS, at aleshner@aaas.org. Since Leshner seems to be an enthusiastic sponsor of DoSER, this may be useless. Or you could resign, but of course then you wouldn’t get your issue of Science.

h/t: Sigmund

Doonesbury 2

March 13, 2012 • 2:55 am

Today’s Doonesbury continues the saga of the woman seeking her reproductive rights in what is presumably Texas or Georgia.

(Please click on the Slate site as well to ensure that artist Garry Trudeau gets some “click credit’).

According to HuffPo, this week’s strip has simply been rejected by some newspapers:

Trudeau defended the strip and blasted Republicans over recent developments on contraception and abortion in email exchanges with Reuters and the Guardian. “To see these healthcare rights systematically undermined in state after state by the party of ‘limited government’ is appalling,” he wrote.

Romenesko compiled comments from editors who pulled the cartoon. Numerous papers, including The Press of Atlantic City, The Oregonian and The Vacaville Reporter in California, said that it crossed a line for their comics pages. The Ogden Standard-Examiner in Utah cited the cartoon’s language and the Rock Hill Herald in South Carolina referred to “graphic content” as reasons for not printing.

Athens Banner-Herald editor Jim Thompson said that he made “a unilateral decision not to publish” the strip because he thought “readers might confuse the topic of this week’s ‘Doonesbury’ with Georgia’s proposed abortion legislation.”

Cat shoes!

March 12, 2012 • 2:00 pm

From designer Kobi Levi, and ensconced in his Virtual Shoe Museum, comes this spiffy little number, the Miao:

Isn’t that soigné?  Just the ticket for your next lab Christmas party!

Go have a look to see lots of amazing, two-of-a-kind shoes, some so salacious that I can’t post them here.  One that I can is “banana“:

And here’s the “toucan”:


For the caninophiles there are dog shoes, but I ain’t showing them.

Sean Faircloth talks about Catholicism at Notre Dame

March 12, 2012 • 11:21 am

Sean Faircloth is former director of the Secular Coalition for America (SCA) and now Director of Strategy and Policy at the Richard Dawkins Foundation. He was brought up in a Catholic family and attended Catholic schools, but is an atheist, and author of a good new book, Attack of the Theocrats: How the Religious Right Harms America—and What We Can Do About It.  I recommend it, at least to American readers, though folks from other countries might like to read how bat-guano crazy the U.S. is about religion.

I have only two reservations about the book: the chapter on sex seems a tad excessive, almost obsessive, and his prescription for how to create a secular America seems appears to consist almost entirely of helping the SCA or donating money to it.  Oh, and the cover, a cartoonish drawing, detracts from the gravitas of the book’s message:

The book paints a scary picture of how, despite America’s official policy of church/state separation, our laws and our legislators are still deeply imbued with irrational religiosity. (Read his summaries of the 50 most religiously insane American senators and representatives.) It’s also very eloquent and convincing about how the “Founding Fathers” of America—people like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin—were by no means religious, but were at best agnostics, and certainly did not form the U.S. government on Christian principles. That’s a must-read section if you want to go after the common religious claim that “America was founded as a Christian nation.”

Here’s an empassioned 32-minute talk on “Catholicism, contraception, and secular morality” that Faircloth recently gave at Notre Dame, a Catholic university in Indiana.

The main points are these:

  • Addressing the largely (and preumably liberal) Catholic audience at Notre Dame, Faircloth reminds them that their ilk doesn’t follow the doctrines and rules as dictated by the Vatican.  Futher, official Catholic doctrines about reproduction are, in fact, largely immoral.
  • American Catholics from a few decades ago were almost completely behind the Constitutional separation of church and state; this has changed for the worse.
  • Current lobbyists and politicians who claim to speak for Catholic America are more in line with hard-line Protestant thinking of the last few decades than with the thinking of practicing Catholics.
  • Current “new”  (i.e., hard-line) Catholicism espouses controversial principles that don’t belong in public policy. Religious exemption clauses are meant to protect freedom of thought and expression, not to promote the transformation of personal religious beliefs into national law.

Doonesbury tackles abortion

March 12, 2012 • 6:11 am

This week’s Doonesbury is going to be about abortion and the right-wing craziness around it in America.  There is no weapon as sharp as sarcasm, and Garry Trudeau wields it with great finesse.  Here’s today’s strip, and I’ll be putting them up all this week.

(Note: as some readers have noted, although the strip is reproduced widely by others [including here], this deprives Trudeau of syndication money, or so I’m told.  So even if you look at the strip below, also click on the link above to make sure the artist gets the “click credit”.)

As MSNBC reports, some papers will probably pull this strip because it’s controversial:

Around a dozen U.S. newspapers have raised questions about an abortion-related “Doonesbury” comic strip set for publication next week, and some will likely not run it, the syndicate behind the cartoon said on Friday.

The cartoon’s story line for Monday through Saturday focuses on a Texas law that requires abortion providers to perform an ultrasound on pregnant women before the procedure, said Sue Roush, managing editor for Universal Uclick, the syndicate behind “Doonesbury.”

The law, which went into effect earlier this year, is intended to give pause to pregnant women before having an abortion and possibly reconsider their decision.

A similar bill was signed into law earlier this week by Virginia’s Republican Governor Bob McDonnell that also requires women to have an ultrasound before an abortion. . .

The Texas law “Doonesbury” is highlighting has proved controversial since lawmakers approved it last year.

It requires abortion providers to perform an ultrasound on pregnant women, show and describe the image to them, and play sounds of the fetal heartbeat. Women can decline to view images or hear the heartbeat, but they must listen to a description of the exam.

The Los Angeles Times has moved the strip, just for this week, from the comics page to the op-ed page.