New HuffPo science section: Uncle Karl praises accommodationism, and bonus review of book by Karl

January 8, 2012 • 11:58 am

HuffPo has started a “Science” section of its website, which looks to be a good thing (they’re long had a “religion” section), but I’m wary. So is Carl Zimmer, who posted this on Google Plus:

Arianna Huffington unveiled a new science section for the Huffington Post this morning. This could be a very good thing (but only if they leave behind their nonsense of the past).

Zimmer has a longer discussion of the science section at his website, The Loom.

Well, maybe this could be a good thing, though a casual inspection reveals that it had worrying tabloid-like qualities despite the presence of some solid reporting (as on the dubious connection between vaccines and autism). I was amused, and a bit dismayed, to see a column by Uncle Karl Giberson (whom I’m going to de-avuncularize if he keeps writing stuff like this), extolling the same “science-religion peacemakers” that I discussed in an earlier post. Actually, this is a bit nepotistic since one of the “peacemakers” extolled in that article was Giberson himself.

What does Giberson write about in his column in the science section? Not science. It’s about “The top peacemaker in the science-religion wars: John Polkinghorne“. Polkinghorne was a physicist who became an Anglican priest, a big accommodationist, and eventually, an inevitably, won the Templeton Prize.  I’ve read his stuff, and it’s the same old Sophisticated Theologian® garbage.

Giberson not only seconds Polkinghorne’s peacemaker prize, but gives the man a Lifetime Achievement award:

I hope that Wallace continues his annual list but I would like to add an additional category: The Lifetime Achievement Award for making peace between science and religion. And for 2011, that award should go to John Polkinghorne, who has emerged in recent years as arguably the most significant Christian since C.S. Lewis.

That alone should put you off your feed, but Karl sums it up:

Polkinghorne, now in his 80s, admits that faith is complex and filled with paradox. But so is science he notes, as quantum mechanics has shown so clearly. His own faith acknowledges the legitimacy of doubt and he understands why some cannot believe. But for him, it all fits together in a way that he sometimes describes as “too good to be true.” His Christian belief ties everything together. “I have never thought,” he told us, that “the universe was a tale told by an idiot.”

Actually, the universe isn’t a tale told by an idiot, it’s just something that happened. There’s no genius or idiot behind it at all.  But if there is a God behind it, yes, he did do some idiotic things, like making 99.9% of species go extinct, and giving human males a prostate gland prone to swelling in middle age. Or allowing the talking snake to corrupt us all so that we have to grovel our whole lives to regain favor with God.

I will be writing on Polkinghorne in the future, but for the flavor of the man’s accommodationism, just see Anthony Grayling’s review of Polkinghorne’s latest book, or see Eric MacDonald’s analysis here.  Polkinghorne is no hero: he’s just a garden-variety accommodationist who has science cred and uses big words. Any one of us with two neurons to rub together could pull a Sokal and do the same thing.

I invite readers who peruse the PuffHo science section to keep me updated about the pieces that appear there.  And Karl, if you’re gonna be in the science section, could you deep-six the Jesus stuff and stick to the science?

*****

Uncle Karl has partly (but not completely) redeemed himself by just publishing a book (coauthored with Randall Stephens) that is reviewed in Sunday’s NYT Book Review: The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age. As reviewer Molly Worthen note, the book “condemns the current state of evangelical intellectual life,” and adds:

Why would anyone heed ersatz “experts” over trained authorities far more qualified to comment on the origins of life or the worldview of the founding fathers? Drawing on case studies of evangelical gurus, Stephens and Giberson argue that intellectual authority works differently in the “parallel culture” of evangelicalism. In this world of prophecy conferences and home-­schooling curriculums, a dash of charisma, a media empire and a firm stance on the right side of the line between “us” and “them” matter more than a fancy degree.

To the evangelical experts profiled in this book, the chief purpose of science or historical research is not to expand human understanding, but to elucidate God’s will. That doesn’t require academic scholarship — just a “common sense” reading of the Bible and a knack for finding evidence in today’s headlines rather than in the record of the past: “America’s worrisome slide into immorality, liberalism and unbelief was caused by the widespread acceptance of evolution and its pernicious influence in areas like education, law, sexual mores, politics and so on,” in the authors’ paraphrase of creationist logic. Similarly, amateur Christian historians “have pressed history into the service of politics and religion,” twisting facts to support their feelings that the country has veered from its biblical moorings.

And C. S. Lewis, Uncle Karl’s hero, makes a brief appearance in the review:

For all evangelicals’ supposed disdain for secular academia, it is telling that their favorite guru is not an undereducated quack, but a thinker that “The Anointed” mentions only in passing: C. S. Lewis. American evangelicals adore Lewis because he was an Oxford don who defended the faith in a plummy English accent, thus proving that one could be a respected intellectual and a Christian too.

I don’t understand the admiration that Christian scholars bear for Lewis.  He was a second-rate apologist. One example: in Mere Christianity, he gives evidence for God in the form of the “moral law”: humans’ intuitive grasp of right and wrong. Even at the time, before we had primate studies showing what look like rudiments of morality in our relatives, we still knew of the secular tradition of morality beginning with the Greeks.  And Lewis’s famous “liar, lunatic, or Lord” argument for the divinity of Jesus hardly exhausts all the possibilities.

Lewis a “sophisticated theologian”?  Naaw.  Oxford does not equal sophisticated when it comes to theology.

h/t: Jon, Tom

Another scholar claims that everyone misinterprets the Bible

January 8, 2012 • 7:01 am

This time it’s Joel S. Baden, an Assistant Professor of Old Testament (what a title!) at the Yale Divinity School.  Over at PuffHo (the religion section this time), he discusses “The problem of rationalizing the Bible.”

The good part of his piece is his criticism of people who take the Bible literally, especially the “miracles” like Noah’s flood, the parting of the Red Sea, and so on, but then go on to explain these things as natural occurrences. The Red Sea parting, for instance, has been imputed to strong winds, and we’ve seen how BioLogos rationalizes Adam and Eve as not the literal progenitors of humanity, but a God-designated “federal headship” of two chosen among many.

This is the “rationalization” Baden decries:

The problem, however, is that none of these theories about what happened are, in fact, what the Bible says happened. The Bible doesn’t say that a comet struck the ocean, or that there was global warming, or that it was low tide or that the Israelites ate lichen (or worse). It says that there were miracles, originating entirely with God, to punish or protect, to destroy or to save. Miracles cannot, by definition, be natural occurrences, no matter how rare or remarkable.

Okay, but the faithful could still maintain that there are miracles.  Baden’s taking the scientific high road here, and simply dismissing the possibility of miracles, as a good Biblical scholar should.

The parsimonious interpretation, given Baden’s respect for science and his status as a Biblical scholar, is that these stories are simply made-up parables that reflect the infancy of our species.  But he can’t do that.  He has to save God somehow, and he does:

It is not that the Bible reflects the state of knowledge in an earlier, pre-scientific culture, and that we who are more enlightened have the capacity to understand the events in the Bible more accurately. The Bible is not a record of ancient observations; it is a grand theological statement about God’s interaction with humanity and the world. Rationalizing its stories does not “explain” the Bible. Rationalizing, in fact, obscures it.

We cannot have it both ways. The Bible cannot both be a foundation of faith and conform to modern notions of scientific rationality. Nor should it. For true believers, naturalistic rationalizations undercut a central message of the Scriptures, that God intervenes in human affairs. Skeptics must wonder why any attempt is being made in the first place to prove that biblical events really happened. The Bible may be couched as historical narrative, but the claims it makes are claims of faith, which no amount of positive or negative data can alter. . .

Miracles are articles of faith, for true believers today and for the Bible as well. Whether they actually happened or not is debatable. But to chalk them up to freak occurrences of nature is fundamentally to misunderstand the nature both of the Bible and of belief in it.

I find this whole essay confusing. First Baden says that science says miracles don’t happen, and then at the end says that miracles might have happened: they are “debatable.”  He doesn’t explain why God couldn’t have used strong winds to part the Red Sea. In that sense, miracles could be natural occurrences, just ones that are extremely improbable, like all the air molecules moving to one side of a room. And those improbabilities could have been the work of God.

Baden draws a distinction between “true believers” and “skeptics” (presumably atheists), appearing to take no position on whether the Bible says anything about God, but then he also claims that the Bible is a record about God’s interaction with humanity and the world.

So I’d like to ask Baden three questions:

1.  Do you believe in God? And if so, what evidence do you have for such a being? When I first read the essay I thought he was being an atheistic Biblical scholar (I’ve met some), but his Yale bio says that he’s Jewish.

2. What about the little matter of the NEW Testament?  Was Jesus born of a virgin and resurrected? If not, then of course all of Christianity collapses. Or, being a Jew, do you take no position on that issue?

3.  You say that the occurrence of miracles is “debatable.” What is your position on this questions, and if you think there’s a case for miracles occurring, what is it?

I dislike scholars and theologians who, rather than saying what they think, tread a fine line to avoid offending anyone. Even the beliefs of theologians like John Haught remain murky—and that, of course, is deliberate.

Four films on Feynman

January 8, 2012 • 2:54 am

From Open Culture we have the “Feynman Trilogy”: three films (and a bonus television show) made by Christopher Sykes about the charismatic physicist. Altogether, they’re about 3.5 hours of Feynman, and you’ll want to watch them all (well, I did, and I loved them).  I’ll put the first one up, but go to the link to see the other three.  “The Last Journey of a Genius” is both hilarious and heartbreaking.

Who couldn’t love a Nobel Laureate with a mind like Einstein and a voice like a Brooklyn cabdriver?

Many of you may have seen this video; if so, go check out the others:

Yellow cat pwns creationist rabbi Moshe Averick

January 8, 2012 • 2:53 am

Rabbi Moshe Averick has been a royal pain in the tuchus, spreading his creationist views all over the internet, most shamefully at the Algemeiner Journal, a Jewish weekly newspaper whose chairman of the board is, of all people, the renowed Elie Wiesel. Wiesel is, of course a Nobel Laureate, a Holocaust survivor, and author of the acclaimed book Night about his life in Buchenwald. He doesn’t deserve the Averick albatross around his neck, and I wonder if he knows he harboring a creationist.

Averick’s schtick is to pretend to accept much of modern evolutionary biology, but then to claim that because scientists don’t fully understand how life began, Yahweh must have done it.  Averick has even distorted the work by scientists like Jack Szostak (another Nobelist) to further Averick’s creationist views.  I’ve written about the Duplicitous Rabbi several times (e.g., here), and if you need to see more, just enter “Averick” in the website search engine.

Averick is a lightweight with a big mouth and a strong desire to see his name in print.  But he’s so easily pwned that even a cat can do it. To that end Faye Flam, science writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, pressed her yellow cat Higgs into service again to take down the good Rabbi. (As I noted in a recent post, Higgs has had experience rebutting creationists).

At Flam’s Inquirer site Planet of the Apes, you can read how Higgs makes lunch of Averick in the post “Yellow cat offers rebuttal to creationist rabbi.”  Higgs sets Avericks straight on several issues, including what it means to offer a god-of-the-gaps argument, why Averick lied when trying to argue that Jack Szostak agreed that the origin of life from non-life (“abiogenesis”) was deeply problematic, and crushes Averick’s argument that science is a form of faith.  And, as usual, Higgs asks for a reward at the end:

I’d also like to call attention to your misleading use of the word “faith” to describe the thinking of Dr. Szostak as well as Dr. Jerry Coyne. Neither of them ever said they believed science would answer everything. We don’t know which questions will be answered by science in our lifetimes, which will be answered in the future, and which will never be answered. The physicist Richard Feynman has remarked that we don’t know if science will ever get to the bottom of things or just keep peeling back layers of an endless onion. That didn’t stop him from peeling back a quite substantial layer.

Furthermore, science works because scientists don’t apply a religious-type faith to their theories. They get in big trouble when they do. Scientists either change their minds when the evidence turns against them or they risk going down in history as defenders of a wrong or outdated idea.  Think of cold fusion.

Some people argue that scientists have faith in the process of science, but this type of faith is not a religious leap but a logical extension of our experience. The scientific method has worked in the past many times. Therefore it’s quite rational to think it will continue to work in the future.

Thank you for letting me express my opinion – Higgs. Can I have a treat?

Even a cat can look at a king, and even a yellow cat can demolish Rabbi Averick.  Go back to the Torah, my good rabbi, for that’s where your talents lie.

Origami phoenix: 10 hours, 1361 folds

January 7, 2012 • 2:56 pm

Since we had a post on origami yesterday, alert reader Myxoldian called our attention in a comment to origami master Satoshi Kamiya, who fashions paper animals, real and imaginary.  In this video Kamiya takes ten hours to fold a phoenix out of a single large, uncut piece of paper, a task requiring 1361 folds.

You can see Kamiya’s other origami work here. Click on the black-and-white images to see the work large and in color.  Here’s one of his works, a lion:

What is it like to be a whale?

January 7, 2012 • 9:53 am

ScienceNow has a short but intriguing piece by Elizabeth Pennisi called “A whale’s virtual reality.” It summarizes results presented by Jeremy Goldbagen and his colleagues on some baleen whales that feed on “bait balls”: groups of fish or krill (shrimplike marine crustaceans).  The whales lunge toward the balls, opening their mouths and ingesting huge amounts of water along with the prey. Then they expel the water through their baleen plates (extensions of the mouth’s mucus membranes).

Whales were tagged with radio transmitters affixed to the beasts with suction cups.  Pennisi reports the pretty amazing findings:

The work showed that in one giant gulp, a blue whale—the biggest creature on Earth—takes in 125% of its body weight in water and krill. During their dives, the cetaceans ram into patches of krill, opening their mouths wide and wrapping their jaws around prey-laden water, a move that stops them short. Next, they close their mouths and push water through their baleen, a system of plates that filter out the food, then speed up for another feeding bout.

But details about this feeding strategy had been lacking. This past summer, Goldbogen monitored several blue and fin whales with new tag technology that detects the changes in the whales’ orientation in space, much like smart phones “know” whether they’re held in a horizontal or vertical position and adapt screens accordingly. For the 6 to 24 hours they are attached to the whale, the tags also record depth and sound; from the loudness of the water rushing past a diving whale, researchers can calculate its speed. “We use these sensors to reconstruct what the whales are doing,” Goldbogen said.

The new tags show that as they gulp, the whales often twirl around like a corkscrew with surprising agility, Goldbogen reported at the meeting. They also will lunge from all different angles, not just horizontally, as previously thought. “We see these amazing maneuvers,” Goldbogen said.

125% of its weight in water and prey!!

Here’s a computer animation based on the tracking data from a single blue whale:

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.1009927&w=425&h=350&fv=]

In the video [above], a tagged blue whale dives twice over the course of 19 minutes. The movie shows the whale moving at about 50 times its cruising speed. The first dive, to about 15 meters, takes about 2.5 minutes in real life; the second one, which includes feeding bouts, lasts more than 12 minutes and reaches down to 180 meters, where the whale lunges five times in quick succession, as if it were on a roller coaster.

This is not a great video, but it’s the best I’ve found on YouTube to show the feeding behavior. In the first ten seconds, you see the whale twist its body and open that huge mouth to ingest a group of krill. It’s pretty amazing that the largest animal on earth sustains itself with tiny invertebrates.

h/t Aidan

Templeton funds dubious “Center for Christian Thought” at Biola

January 7, 2012 • 5:33 am

UPDATE: As a commenter noted below, Biola is committed to Biblical inerrancy, which you can see on the university website’s mission statement. See also their doctrinal statement, which besides accepting the usual divinity of Jesus, affirms the reality of Adam and Eve as humanity’s progenitors, proclaims the coming of The Rapture, and contains the following chilling statement:

All those who persistently reject Jesus Christ in the present life shall be raised from the dead and throughout eternity exist in the state of conscious, unutterable, endless torment of anguish. . .

There is a personal devil, a being of great cunning and power: “The prince of the power of the air,” “The prince of this world,” “The god of this age.” He can exert vast power only so far as God suffers him to do so. He shall ultimately be cast into the lake of fire and brimstone and shall be tormented day and night forever.

And check out the undergrad admissions form, which, besides requiring a letter from the applicant’s church (I guess you can forget going to Bioloa if you haven’t gone to church), has an essay question:

Essay Question. On a separate sheet of paper, please answer the following question in your own words.  A 1-2 page, typed response is expected.

At Biola University our common foundation is our faith in Christ and becoming transformed into His likeness. In light of this fact, please describe: a) the circumstances surrounding your decision to become a follower of Jesus Christ, using various Bible passages as the framework for your salvation and eternal life in Christ, and b) using specific examples, describe your process of spiritual growth over the past three years.

So let us be clear: Templeton just gave over three million dollars to a college that, by requiring acceptance of Biblical inerrancy, absolutely denies the findings of modern science, including the history of humanity and the fact of evolution, and won’t take a stand on the age of the Earth.  So much for Templeton’s pretense of accepting modern science. They’re looking for answers to the Big Questions while funding people who have the wrong answers to the Little Questions.

_________________________

I thought that the Templeton Foundation was making a big push to attain respectability in the scientific community, and concurrently to distance itself from purely religious projects—until an alert reader spotted this.

Biola University, a conservative evangelical college in La Mirada, a town in southern California (the college’s motto is “Biblically Centered Education”), has received the largest grant in the school’s history—from the Templeton Foundation. 

The $3,030,000 Templeton Grant, given for three years and starting in February, is to set up a “Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which will, according to the University’s blurb, be “an ambitious new initiative that will bring world-renowned Christian scholars together to research, collaborate and write about important questions facing Christianity in the 21st Century.”

Most of the money will go to 6-month and 1-year research fellowships.  And the money will also fund a pastor in residence. Way to go, Templeton! Those people working on the Big Questions of Science and Faith will surely require spiritual counseling when they sense some incompatibility between the brain and the soul.

At the heart of the Center is a residential fellowship program that will bring together eight research fellows — four Biola faculty members and four external scholars — for a semester at a time to do work on a selected theme. The Center will also bring well-known “visiting scholars” to Biola’s campus for several days or weeks at a time to help facilitate the dialogue.

Over the course of each year, researchers will produce books, articles, blog posts, videos, lectures, podcasts and other resources to help address some of the questions that matter to the Church and the academy. Each year will conclude with a public conference where participants will present their research related to the year’s theme.

The Center will also include pastors’ roundtable discussions and a pastor-in-residence who will collaborate with the researchers each semester and produce a publicly available sermon series related to the research.

Who are the first big fish they’ve landed in this program?  Why, none other than Nicholas Wolterstorff, a theologian/philosopher from Yale and—get this—Alvin Plantinga from Notre Dame. They’ve published together, and, as you may recall, Plantinga is a Sophisticated Theologian® who believes that there’s a conflict between science and naturalism (because our senses aren’t evolved to be trustworthy) and who favors the intelligent-design creationism of Michael Behe.  I thought that Templeton had long ago distanced itself from intelligent design.

As usual, Templeton (and Biola) try to sell this as a way to harmonize science and religion (btw, have a look at the comments at the bottom of this page):

The $3.03 million grant is part of the Templeton Foundation’s wider efforts to promote research and informed dialogue among scientists, philosophers, theologians and the public on subjects it deems to be of public importance. The foundation describes itself as a “philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality.”

“Big Questions,” as we’ve come to learn, represent those Questions that Science Can’t Answer, questions like “Why are we here?” or “What is our purpose?” or “Where did the laws of physics come from?”  And as we’ve also come to learn, theology (or religion) can’t answer those questions, either.

So what are the Big Questions about Science and Religion that this $3 million grant will address?  Only one has been highlighted so far.  Wait for it: it’s on “Neuroscience and the Soul.” But the details of this program don’t make it look very science-y:

Fellowship Description

This RFP is aimed at work on the implications of contemporary neuroscience for the existence and nature of the soul. Questions to be addressed include:
• Does the difficulty of solving the so-called “binding problem,” where this is a matter of explaining the phenomenon of the unity of consciousness, suggest an argument for the existence of the soul?
• Does recent evidence that various “mindfulness” techniques can affect neuroarchitecture suggest anything about (a) which views of soul are most plausible, and (b) how the soul might causally interact with the brain?
• What further can be said about claims by Libet and others that there is tension between recent findings in neuroscience and the existence of freedom of the will?
• What philosophical theories of soul best accommodate the deliverances of recent neuroscience?
• What are the most promising strategies for integrating the findings of contemporary neuroscience with Christian theological anthropology?

Much of this presumes the existence of a soul, of course, but that’s no problem for a university like Biola. And the program involves a lot of money:

Proposal requests from non-Biola-affiliated scholars will be for $70,000 to $90,000 (plus a $6,000 per semester housing stipend and relocation expenses) for projects lasting the full 2012-13 academic year and $35,000 to $45,000 (plus a $6,000 per semester housing stipend and relocation expenses) for projects lasting one semester that academic year. Proposal requests from Biola faculty will be for half-time course releases. We anticipate hosting a total of 8 fellows per semester. . .

The other Big Question has nothing to do with science: “Christian scholarship in the 21st century.” This is the program that will include Plantinga and Wolterstorff, and its purview is this:

Questions to be addressed include: What is Christian Scholarship? Why is it important? What are its proper aims and methods? What challenges does it face? Whom does it serve and how? How does Christian scholarship contribute to a life of obedience to the love commands of Jesus? Need it so contribute? Should Christian scholarship aim to influence culture? If so, how?

Remember, this is how the Templeton Foundation is spending its money (the Biola program is about 4.28% of Templeton’s total grants for the year).  And the money is going not for pure science, but for completely useless lucubrations that presume the existence of a soul and the divinity of Jesus.

Once again, the Big Questions are being addressed, but there’s no hope in hell of answering them, because they rest on false premises.

You might have asked yourself, “Is Biola University down with evolution?”  Not really: it seems to accept some form of ID that allows microevolution, but also requires the hand of God for both macroevolution and the origin of the universe.  See here and here, for instance. (And note that their “evolution” conference included ID advocates like Jon Wells, Casey Luskin, David Klinghoffer, and Denyse O’Leary.)  Biola appears to have a course in intelligent design, but I can’t find one on evolution.

J’accuse. To my colleagues Robert Plomin, Günter Wagner, Martin Nowak, and Brian Greene, among many other scientists on the Foundation’s payroll: have you no shame at all at about taking money from Templeton—an organization that’s just given three million dollars to fund studies about Jesus and ways to reconcile neuroscience with a nonexistent soul? And to hire a pastor in residence to counsel those who get into trouble when trying to reconcile brains and souls? Is there no organization so soaked in religious woo that you scientists won’t take money from it?

I must say that although these scientists turn their back on Templeton’s pro-woo activities so they can fund their own pro-science initiatives (e.g., The World Science Festival), I find that kind of cognitive dissonance contemptible. In the end, such scientists, by lending their Big Names to Templeton’s website, only put their imprimatur on the Foundation’s pro-religion and pro-right-wing agenda. I call that selling out.

And I call on journalists to question these scientists about how they can take Templeton money with one hand while covering their eyes with the other.

h/t: Michael

Caturday felids: The most important cats of 2011

January 7, 2012 • 4:53 am

From BuzzFeed comes a roundup of the 30 most important cats of 2011. If you’re an ailurophile you’ll want to see every one, but here are five of my favorites:

Guilty Russian cat (he appears 25 seconds in). Have you ever seen a guiltier-looking cat?

Fat cat on a diet! Is there anything sadder than a cat who wants his noms but isn’t allowed to have them?

The saddest kitten of all time (as the BuzzFeed caption says, “Lighten up—you’re a kitten!”):

Wrestling kittens!

And of course one of my favorites (right after Maru): Kagonekoshiro, or “white basket cat,” the chillest cat in the world.  See his website here.