A cartoon history of evolutionary biology

January 27, 2012 • 3:06 pm

This drawing, produced by Harvard student Esther Hamburger as a class assignment, is one of the most fantastic evolution-related cartoons I’ve seen. In fact, it’s not really a cartoon at all: it’s a graphical history of evolutionary biology, showing all the principals.  Throughout it winds the Great Chain of Being—in this case a genuine chain of intellectual advance.

Here’s Esther’s description, which I reproduce (along with the drawing) with her permission:

Generating an illustrated history of evolutionary biology was an idea partially inspired by the caricatures of James Gillray. The British artist’s work served to illustrate the political and social scenes of the late 18th century, and was interspersed throughout the Harvard summer school course, taught by Andrew Berry, for which this image was created. Starting from the Greek philosophers who first observed and consequently attempted to explain the world around them, the tree winds it way down to Darwin, the “father of evolution”, and Wallace, his widely unknown counterpart who seems to have lost out  in evolution’s custody battle (Google this man). It would,however, be false to say that the image was not in any way spawned by the thought: “Hmmm. I’d really rather not write a history paper.”

Click to enlarge.  It repays long study, for every detail in this drawing is meaningful.  If you pull the picture onto your desktop, you’ll see that you can zoom in on it considerably without loss of detail, as you’ll get a 10.6 megabyte image.
Thanks to Esther and Andrew for alerting me to this, and allowing me to reproduce it.

A snoring dormouse

January 27, 2012 • 9:01 am

Via the Surrey Dormouse Project (you have to love the Brits!), we have this adorable video of a dormouse in torpor, snoring away:

There are several species of dormouse, found mostly in Europe, but the famous one is the hazel dormouse  (Muscardinus avellanarius), a nocturnal rodent named after its favorite food, hazelnuts. They hibernate underground through the winter (the specimen above is undoubtedly one of these), and are protected throughout Europe: their numbers are declining because of habitat loss.

A dormouse website shows the characteristic sign of their presence:

Dormice like to eat hazelnuts and if you examine a hazelnut shell it is possible to tell for certain whether it has been eaten by a dormouse.  Look at the picture of the hazelnuts [below]. Both have been eaten by Dormice. The characteristics are a neat smooth circular cut to the inside of the opening and tiny radiating teeth marks on the outside. Woodmice also like hazelnuts and eat them in a similar way but the inside of the cut shell is not smooth as woodmice gnaw across the cut. Squirrels just crack the nuts open with their powerful jaws.

So remember, a smooth circular cut with tiny radiating teeth marks is the sign of the Dormouse!

And, of course, we have the world’s most famous dormouse, the always-sleeping rodent from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  Here the dormouse is sleeping at tea next to the Mad Hatter. Eventually the Hatter and the March Hare wake him up by putting his head into the teapot.

You can adopt a dormouse for only twenty pounds, and receive a personalized adoption certificate as well as a soft toy dormouse.

h/t: Matthew Cobb via Christina Purcell

New creationist shenanigans in Indiana

January 27, 2012 • 5:24 am

It never ends, does it? Even in the face of palpable unconstitutionality, state legislatures keep trying to sneak creationism into American public schools.  Of course it’s illegal, but so long as religion holds sway in the U.S. we’re going to have initiatives like this.

As the National Center for Science Education reports, such a bill has just passed an Indiana state senate committee:

Indiana’s Senate Bill 89, which if enacted would allow local school districts to “require the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life, including creation science,” was passed by the Senate Committee on Education and Career Development on January 25, 2012. . .

. . . Testimony against the bill stressed the unconstitutionality of teaching creation science, established by the Supreme Court in 1987. Among those testifying against the bill were John Staver, professor of chemistry and science education at Purdue University; Chuck Little, executive director of the Indiana Urban Schools Association; David Sklar, the Director of Government Relations for the Jewish Community Relations Council; the Reverend Charles Allen, a chaplain for Grace Unlimited, a campus ministry in the Indianapolis area; and Reba Boyd Wooden, executive director of the Indiana Center for Inquiry.

Note who voted for and against the bill (in America “D” stands for Democrat and “R” for Republican):

The vote was 8-2, with the bill’s sponsor and committee chair Dennis Kruse (R-District 14), Carlin Yoder (R-District 12), Jim Banks (R-District 17), Jim Buck (R-District 17), Luke Kenley (R-District 20), Jean Leising (R-District 42), Scott Schneider (R-District 30), and Frank Mrvan Jr. (D-District 1) voting for and Earline S. Rogers (D-District 3) and Tim Skinner (D-District 38) voting against the bill.

As usual, it’s the damn Republicans behind this stuff.

 Here’s what State Senate Bill 89,says:

    A BILL FOR AN ACT to amend the Indiana Code concerning education.

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Indiana:

SOURCE: IC 20-30-6-18; (12)IN0089.1.1. –>     SECTION 1. IC 20-30-6-18 IS ADDED TO THE INDIANA CODE AS A NEW SECTION TO READ AS FOLLOWS [EFFECTIVE JULY 1, 2012]:

Sec. 18. The governing body of a school corporation may require the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life, including creation science, within the school corporation.

Of course to become law, the bill has to pass the State Senate, then the state House of Representatives, and then be signed into law by the governor.  As the Indiana ACLU notes, the bill is unconstitutional on its face: teaching of creationism in public schools was rejected on freedom-of-religion grounds by the U. S. Supreme Court in the 1987 case of Edwards v. Aguillard.

Given all this, the bill is likely to be stopped at some point short of becoming law. But I want to say for the gazillionth time that we wouldn’t be facing these brushfires if there were no religion.  If we didn’t have goddy creation myths, why would anyone oppose the teaching of evolution?

A temple to atheism, for crying out loud

January 27, 2012 • 4:06 am

UPDATE: As alert reader Stan Pak notes in the comments, the Guardian has a poll on the temple in which you can vote in favor or against. As of a few minutes ago, sentiment was 84% against. You have two days to weigh in.

_____________

Alain de Botton, whom we’ve encountered before, is rapidly becoming an embarrassment to atheism.  First he wants us to adopt many of the ritualistic trappings of religion, and now he wants to erect a £ 1,000,000 pound tower to atheism in London.  Apparently he’s already raised half the money for this project. The Guardian reports:

The philosopher and writer Alain de Botton is proposing to build a 46-metre (151ft) tower to celebrate a “new atheism” as an antidote to what he describes as Professor Richard Dawkins’s “aggressive” and “destructive” approach to non-belief.

Rather than attack religion, De Botton said he wants to borrow the idea of awe-inspiring buildings that give people a better sense of perspective on life.

“Normally a temple is to Jesus, Mary or Buddha, but you can build a temple to anything that’s positive and good,” he said. “That could mean a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective. Because of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens atheism has become known as a destructive force. But there are lots of people who don’t believe but aren’t aggressive towards religions.”

What a stupid waste of money!  Richard has responded:

Dawkins criticised the project on Thursday, indicating the money was being misspent and that a temple of atheism was a contradiction in terms.

“Atheists don’t need temples,” the author of The God Delusion said. “I think there are better things to spend this kind of money on. If you are going to spend money on atheism you could improve secular education and build non-religious schools which teach rational, sceptical critical thinking.”

In the article, various people weigh in on the boondoggle, with some humanists predictably objecting to a memorial to what is, after all, an absence of belief. Curiously, at least one wooly-brained priest is in favor of the tower:

Another Anglican, the Rev George Pitcher, a priest at St Bride’s, Fleet Street, and a former adviser to the archbishop of Canterbury, “rejoiced” in the idea. “He is referring to a sense of human transcendence, that there is something more than our visceral existence,” Pitcher said.

“Building a monument acknowledges that we are more than dust. Whether we come at that through secular means or a religious narrative, it is the same game.

“This is a more constructive atheism than Dawkins, who is about the destruction of ideas rather than contributing new ones.”

It’s just like a priest to try to claim an atheist monument for God!  And really, more constructive than Dawkins?  Dawkins has converted dozens of believers to rationality and naturalism, and I see that as quite constructive.  After all, as Steve Gould always said, the destruction of bad ideas (he was referring to science) is a contribution just as real as the vetting of new ideas.  And Dawkins has certainly made far more of a contribution to understanding nature than any priest—much less the Anglican faith as a whole—has done.  One would have to be a moron to think that an atheist temple could convert anyone to disbelief.

The design of the temple is trite beyond belief:

Each centimetre of the tapering tower’s interior has been designed to represent a million years and a narrow band of gold will illustrate the relatively tiny amount of time humans have walked the planet. The exterior would be inscribed with a binary code denoting the human genome sequence.

Given that humans aren’t the apex of evolution, I favor the Natural-History-Museum solution of Steve Rose, who shows, in another Guardian piece, how silly the atheist tower is

What De Botton seems to be preaching is his own rather narrow definition of atheism, with its own unified philosophy, set of rules and even architectural brand identity. It feels rather like, er, a religion.

To answer De Botton’s original question, atheists do have their own versions of great churches and cathedrals. If the antithesis of religion is scientific rationalism, then surely its temples are the British Library, the Millau Viaduct and the Large Hadron Collider? If it’s about glorifying creation, then why not the Natural History Museum or the Eden Project? What about the Tate Modern? Or Wembley Stadium? Or the O2? Or the Westfield shopping centre? Perhaps non-believers should decide for themselves what a temple of atheism should be.

Morons of the month

January 26, 2012 • 1:47 pm

There’s a tie, folks.  Two politicians have made unbelievably stupid assertions, and I can’t decide which is dumber. I’ll leave that to you.

Running neck and neck are:

Rick Santorum, Republican candidate for President, said this about education in a speech in Florida:

“It’s no wonder President Obama wants every kid to go to college,” said the former Pennsylvania senator. “The indoctrination that occurs in American universities is one of the keys to the left holding and maintaining power in America. And it is indoctrination. If it was the other way around, the ACLU would be out there making sure that there wasn’t one penny of government dollars going to colleges and universities, right? . . . If they taught Judeo-Christian principles in those colleges and universities, they would be stripped of every dollar. If they teach radical secular ideology, they get all the government support that they can possibly give them. Because you know 62 percent of children who enter college with a faith conviction leave without it.”

Yeah, the ACLU has such awesome power over government spending on schools.

Santorum’s solution?  Stop supporting higher education:

“I’ll bet you there are people in this room who give money to colleges and universities who are undermining the very principles of our country every single day by indoctrinating kids with left-wing ideology. And you continue to give to these colleges and universities. Let me have a suggestion: Stop it.”

Can Republicans get any more stupid?

But giving the ex-Senator a run for his money is

Ralph Shortey, a state senator from Oklahoma, who thinks that food companies are putting aborted fetuses in food, and has introduced a bill in the state legislature to prohibit the use of fetuses or fetal cells in food. Of course nobody is doing this or intends to. Over at ERV, Abbie describes the insanity.

Shortey is a Republican, of course.

If God did bless America, he blessed it with a surfeit of idiots, many of whom march under the flag of the GOP.

h/t: Don B

Dolphins and whales: interspecies play?

January 26, 2012 • 11:08 am

Via Treehugger and the Science Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History comes an unusual report of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) sliding down the noses of humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae), an observation originally reported two years ago in a paper by Deakos et al. The behavior was seen twice (nice to get a paper out of about ten seconds of observation!). Here’s a video version of the report:

Here’s one observation described in the paper:

At 1427 h, two adult-sized dolphins (approximately 3 m in length) reversed direction and approached the humpback whales. The dolphins positioned themselves directly in front of one humpback still at the surface and appeared to surf the pressure wave created by the whale’s head as it swam. The two dolphins could be differentiated since one of them had a distinctive cookie cutter shark (Isistius brasiliensis) bite on the right side of the body and a notched dorsal fin. During the next two breaths by the same whale, each dolphin independently was seen lying across the whale’s rostrum as it surfaced, oriented perpendicular to the whale’s body. At 1430 h, the whale stopped and slowly raised its rostrum upward while lifting the well-marked dolphin out of the water (Figure 1a). Once completely clear of the water, the dolphin remained arched, on its side, balanced over the end of the whale’s rostrum (Figure 1b). The dolphin appeared to cooperate, with no discernible effort to free itself or escape. When the whale was nearly vertical, with its eye nearly breaking the water surface, the dolphin slid down the dorsal side of the rostrum (Figure 1c) while swinging its flukes upward (Figure 1d). This entire lift sequence lasted about 3 s, ending when the dolphin entered the water tail first.

A bottlenose dolphin slowly lifted out of the water by a humpback whale 1.8 km off the northwest coast of Kauai, Hawaii, on 25 January 2004 (photos by L. Mazzuca)
A bottlenose dolphin lifted repeatedly out of the water by a humpback whale about 800 m off the northwest coast of Maui, Hawaii, on 25 January 2006 (photos by M. Deakos)

What in the world is going on here?  The authors suggest a number of hypotheses:

  • The whale is pwning the dolphin.  Dolphins are known to surf the “pressure wave” in front of swimming humpback whales, and this could piss off the whale. The lifting of the dolphin could result from a head lunge by the whale, and head lunges are known to be part of the whale species’ aggressive behavior. The authors discount this because the head lunge was so slow, and the dolphin didn’t appear to flee it.
  • The whale is helping a distressed dolphin.  This is called succorant behavior, and has been seen in other marine mammals, though it’s very rare in baleen whales. The authors discount this because the dolphin didn’t appear injured or distressed. Also, if the action was merely a maternal response by a misguided female humpback whale (sex was not determined), that wouldn’t explain the dolphin’s “cooperative” behavior.
  • They’re playing!  Both bottlenose dolphins and humpback whales have been reported to engage in play-like behavior.  The authors suspect that this is the most likely explanation—that “social play” was initiated by the dolphin, perhaps stimulating a maternal effect on the part of the whale.
At the risk of anthropomorphizing, I see no reason why species like these, which have complex brains, couldn’t simply want to have a bit of fun.  Of course such play might not just be pure fun, but also form of socialization, bonding, or learning when it’s performed within a species.  But I do think dolphins wanna have fun.

__________

Deakos, M. H., B. K. Branstetter, L. Mazzuca, D. Fertl, and J. R. Mobley, Jr.. 2010. Two unusual interactions between a bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) and a humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) in Hawaiian waters. Aquatic Mammals 36:121-128.

The pale blue dot

January 26, 2012 • 7:19 am

Here’s a wonderful image of Earth from NASA’s Suomi satellite, an image you can make considerably larger by clicking on it.  But if you want the full Monty, and a fantastic screensaver, see the huge hi-resolution image here.

And be sure to take a look at Suomi’s Flickr gallery, which includes other pictures of Earth, and of the satellite’s construction and launch. Here it is in the lab:

Ah, what we hoomans are capable of!

Pete Enns, BioLogos, and Adam and Eve: why accommodationism won’t work

January 26, 2012 • 6:36 am

Peter Enns was the Senior Fellow in Biblical Studies at BioLogos, the Templeton-funded and Francis-Collins-founded organization devoted to reconciling evangelical Christianity and evolution.  Enns has good academic credentials, including a Ph.D. from Harvard in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.  And he left BioLogos about the same time as Karl Giberson (the Vice President), and I suspect it was because both of these guys couldn’t abide BioLogos‘s weaselly stand on Adam and Eve: a refusal to take a stand on whether they existed or not despite the clear results of populations genetics that they could not have existed.

Since leaving BioLogos, Uncle Karl became more critical of evangelical Christianity’s refusal to deal squarely with the facts of science.  Now Enns joins this critical stance in a pair of essays he’s just published, one on PuffHo and the other on his website, Peter Enns.  The articles are telling, for while being far more accepting of science and dismissive of Adam and Eve than were Enns’s former compadres at BioLogos, and far more critical of science-resisting Christians, Enns’s pieces unwittingly show why accommodationism won’t work.  It’s the same reason as ever: to comport science with evangelical Christianity requires those Christians to seriously revise their beliefs—something they won’t do. Further, the accommodationist “synthesis” of science and faith requires a selective reading of the Bible, in which some stories are seen as literally true while others aren’t.  These two reasons are connected, of course, because Evangelicals are perfectly aware of the slippery slope: if Adam and Eve were just metaphors, then Jesus could be too.

In his PuffHo piece, “Once more with feeling: Adam, evolution, and evangelicals,” Enns begins with a stark claim, and one that BioLogos would die rather than admit: science and the Biblical literalism of evangelicals are incompatible:

If evolution is right about how humans came to be, then the biblical story of Adam and Eve isn’t. If you believe, as evangelicals do, that God himself is responsible for what’s in the Bible, you have a problem on your hands. Once you open the door to the possibility that God’s version of human origins isn’t what actually happened — well, the dominoes start unraveling down the slippery slope. The next step is uncertainty, chaos and despair about one’s personal faith. . .

Evolution is a threat, and many evangelicals are fighting to keep Adam in the family photo album. But in their rush to save Christianity, some evangelicals have been guilty of all sorts of strained, idiosyncratic or obscurantist tactics: massaging or distorting the data, manipulating the legal system, scaring their constituencies and strong-arming those of their own camp who raise questions.

I have a strong suspicion that the last sentence refers to BioLogos and its dumping of Enns and Giberson over the Adam-and-Eve business.  Regardless, Enns proposes a solution, but it’s flawed: the Adam-and-Eve story wasn’t meant to be taken literally.

Evangelicals look to the Bible to settle important questions of faith. So, faced with a potentially faith-crushing idea like evolution, evangelicals naturally ask right off the bat, “What does the Bible say about that?” And then informed by “what the Bible says,” they are ready to make a “biblical” judgment.

This is fine in principle, but in the evolution debate this mindset is a problem: It assumes that the Adam and Eve story is about “human origins.” It isn’t. And as long as evangelicals continue to assume that it does, the conflict between the Bible and evolution is guaranteed.

Since the 19th century, through scads of archaeological discoveries from the ancient world of the Bible, biblical scholars have gotten a pretty good handle on what ancient creation stories were designed to do.

Ancient peoples assumed that somewhere in the distant past, near the beginning of time, the gods made the first humans from scratch — an understandable conclusion to draw. They wrote stories about “the beginning,” however, not to lecture their people on the abstract question “Where do humans come from?” They were storytellers, drawing on cultural traditions, writing about the religious — and often political — beliefs of the people of their own time.

Their creation stories were more like a warm-up to get to the main event: them. Their stories were all about who they were, where they came from, what their gods thought of them and, therefore, what made them better than other peoples.  . . .To think that the Israelites, alone among all other ancient peoples, were interested in (or capable of) giving some definitive, quasi-scientific, account of human origins is an absurd logic. And to read the story of Adam and Eve as if it were set up to so such a thing is simply wrongheaded.

Although Enns is an Old Testament scholar, this is bizarre.  It implies that the stories were “designed” as kind-of-metaphorical tales to explain human origins, and that the Adam and Eve story wasn’t really about human origins. It was a “warm-up” to explain human nature, and therefore shouldn’t be taken seriously.

But that’s bogus.  Two millennia of Christians thought these stories were real, and saw them as literal.  Of course those folks weren’t capable of giving a scientific account of humanity’s origins, but they didn’t know that! The Adam and Eve story, an amalgam of two earlier myths, was an honest attempt to describe human origins, and is still seen as such by millions of Christians who believe the Bible is either the direct word of God or is divinely inspired.

But it’s more important than that: the Adam and Eve saga plays a pivotal role in the message of Christianity: their sins brought God’s opprobrium on humanity, an opprobrium that could be expiated only with the death of Jesus.  If you discard Adam and Eve, the whole rationale for Jesus’s appearance and crucifixion, and the Christian view of humans as innately sinful, dissolves completely.  That’s why BioLogos is in such a frenzy about Adam and Eve. Science says they’re fictional; Evangelical Christians require that they existed.  There’s no resolution except to concoct dubious stories that the Primal Pair sort-of-existed, that is, there were two real people among many that God designated as “honorary” ancestors of modern humans.

Enns’s solution, the only one possible that saves both Christianity and science, is to discard the idea of a literal Adam and Eve:

Reading the biblical story against its ancient backdrop is hardly a news flash, and most evangelical biblical scholars easily concede the point. But for some reason this piece of information has not filtered down to where it is needed most: into the mainstream evangelical consciousness. Once it does, evangelicals will see for themselves that dragging the Adam and Eve story into the evolution discussion is as misguided as using the stories of Israel’s monarchy to rank the Republican presidential nominees.

Evangelicals tend to focus on how to protect the Bible against the attacks of evolution. The real challenge before them is to reorient their expectation of what the story of Adam and Eve is actually prepared to deliver.

Translation of the last sentence:  “Evangelical Christians must discard their belief in a literal Adam and Eve.”  But he doesn’t add the obvious point that this affects the whole Christian mythology, nor describe how to deal with the idea of discarding original sin.  Further, he doesn’t tell us why we shouldn’t also see the stories of the New Testament as “quasi-scientific” attempts to explain human nature—not the word of God but human constructions.  If Adam and Eve didn’t exist, why do we assume Jesus did? After all, the Bible is equally clear on the existence of all three.

While I admire Enns’s frank admission that Evangelical Christians must deal with science, he weasels out of the most important questions: the effects on Christian faith of trashing the Old Testament as a literal document, and the reasons why we’re supposed to accept the Old Testament as metaphor but the New Testament as literal. I challenge Enns, who knows these things perfectly well, to come clean about these issues.  His failure to deal head on with the important questions shows, more than anything, why the mission of BioLogos is doomed.  And it has been an abject failure: no Christians have converted to evolution, and BioLogos now is engaged simply in pandering to Biblical literalists.

***

Enns’s own blog post, “Evangelicalism and evolution ARE in serious conflict (and that’s not the end of the world)“, is taken from his new book, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Does Not Say About Human Origins.  And I’m surprised and pleased that he admits again that Evangelical Christianity is wrong in opposing science. He also admits that facile acccommodation is doomed.

There are two kinds of thinking that get in the way of the conversation evangelicals need to have over evolution.

One is exemplified by those who see red, cry “liberal,” and retreat to their safe doctrinal bunker with their fingers in their ears humming “la la la la la I do not hear you.”

The other type is exemplified by those on the other side of the spectrum, but whose thinking is just as harmful. They claim that there is no real conflict between evolution and Christianity. The two can get along quite well, with perhaps a minor adjustment or two—nothing to lose sleep over.

The former approach is obscurantist and stubborn; latter is theologically superficial. Both cause spiritual damage.

The last two sentences are a serious indictment of Enns’s former employer BioLogos, whom he sees as promulgating “superficial theology” and pushing views that are “spiritually damaging.” That’s a strong charge.

And you don’t often see an admission this frank from someone of Enns’s stripe:

So, I repeat my point: evolution cannot simply be grafted onto evangelical Christian faith as an add-on, where we can congratulate ourselves on a job well done. This is going to take some work—and a willingness to take theological risk.

Evolution demands true synthesis: a willingness to rethink one’s own convictions in light of new data, and that is typically a very hard thing to do.

Well, one solution when rethinking one’s convictions is to realize the whole apparatus of Christianity is a human-constructed fiction, and that there’s no evidence for either God or a divine Jesus. Enns, however, isn’t willing to do that.  Why? First, because religion is here to stay:

Likewise, abandoning all faith in view of our current state of knowledge is hardly an attractive—or compelling—option. Despite the New Atheist protestations of the bankruptcy of any faith in God in the face of science, most world citizens are not ready to toss away what has been the central element of the human drama since the beginning of recorded civilization.

That’s a terrible reason to retain a false story. What’s false is false, regardless of how many people believe it.

The real reason, of course, is that revelation has told Enns that God and Baby Jesus are real:

Neither am I, not because I refuse to see the light, but because the light of science does not shine with equal brightness in every corner. There is mystery. There is transcendence. By faith I believe that the Christian story has deep access to a reality that materialism cannot provide and cannot be expected to know.

That is a confession of faith, I readily admit, but when it comes to accessing ultimate reality, we are all in the same boat, materialistic atheists included: at some point we must all say, “I can see no further than here, comprehend no more than this.”

This reminds me of John Haught and his cup-of-tea metaphor that supposedly proves a “deeper reality”.  Yes, there is mystery, and if two millennia of religious lucubration has shown us anything, it’s that mysteries about the state of the universe can be solved only by science. Theology has provided no solutions; or rather, different theologies provide different solutions. Those are not “answers”, but alternative, irreconcilable, and insoluble guesses.  And how exactly does Enns know that there’s “transcendence”?

I have mixed feelings about Enns. He’s smart enough to see that evolution poses a serious problem for Christianity, but not savvy enough to see that this problem is insoluble—maybe not for him, but for many.  He’s not savvy enough to see that he won’t persuade Evangelical Christians to give up major tenets of their faith.  And, worst of all, he’s not courageous enough to do what Dawkins has asked: for Christians to go “one god further” in abandoning their historical beliefs in deities.  When Enns says “By faith I believe that the Christian story has deep access to a reality that materialism cannot provide and cannot be expected to know,” he’s abnegating the very canons of reason that he espouses.  Because, after all, the words “By faith I believe” really mean, “There’s no evidence for what I believe, but I believe it anyway because I like it.”

Let me remind Enns what he’s up against when arguing that Biblical scholarship shows that the stories of Genesis are fictional:

When asked what they would do if scientists were to disprove a particular religious belief, nearly two-thirds (64%) of people say they would continue to hold to what their religion teaches rather than accept the contrary scientific finding, according to the results of an October 2006 Time magazine poll.

Perhaps people can eventually be convinced that global warming is real, since that doesn’t really contradict their faith in a serious way, but as for Adam and Eve and evolution, well, it’s not so simple.

______

Update: I see that over at EvolutionBlog Jason Rosenhouse has written a good analysis of Enns’s PuffHo piece. I especially like Jason’s conclusion:

There are good reasons why mainstream evangelicals are mostly not buying what the scholars are selling. Once you accept that science flatly contradicts the foundational stories of scripture, you seem to have two options.

You could go Enns’s route, and summon forth a tortured model of Biblical inspiration in which God chose to communicate fundamental truths of the human condition in a manner so confusing that normal people cannot read them on their own. Instead they need assistance from the local departments of archaeology and ancient civilizations, and to have it explained to them that what certainly appear to be factual accounts of human origins are actually something else entirely. We are left to sympathize with all those generations of honest seekers laboring prior to the advances of modern scholarship, who simply had no hope of coming to a correct understanding of God’s word.

Against this you have the possibility that the Genesis stories are purely human constructions, and that they seem naive from a modern perspective because they were not written by people with any special insight into much of anything.

Which possibility do you really think is more plausible?