Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
This comes from the new book Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? (Oxford University Press, 2011), a 77-page series of exchanges between philosopher Dan Dennett and philosopher/theologian Alvin Plantinga. It’s a short read, but there are some good bits, especially when Dennett asks Plantinga to justify why the supernatural being who created and drove the process of evolution couldn’t have been Superman instead of God. You can also see how Plantinga claims that the conflict is not between science and religion, but between science and naturalism (don’t get me started on that).
At any rate, here’s Dan’s take on accommodationism from page 50. Needless to say, I agree with him:
When [Steve] Gould, or more recently Michael Ruse, and Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education, insist that there really is no necessary conflict between evolutionary biology and religion (properly understood), they persuade few devout Christians and Muslims. Plantinga speaks for the unpersuaded who know full well there is a conflict. In fact, my disapproval of the NOMA gambit [Gould’s idea of “nonoverlapping magisteria”] grows out of the worry that these attempts by well-meaning scientific diplomats do more harm than good, unwittingly convincing many laypeople that scientists will lie through their teeth to get evolution taught in the schools. Much better, in my opinion, is to say yes, there is a conflict, and once again, science wins (contra Plantinga).
Ponder how many accommodationists say that there is no conflict when they believe otherwise in their hearts. After all, many of them (including the three named by Dan) are atheists. The NOMA/compatibility position is not something that many accommodationists believe fervently, but simply a political tactic. And religious people, though often deluded, are not stupid.
Some time ago I predicted that the Templeton Foundation wouldn’t renew the big grant it gave to BioLogos, an organization founded to move evangelical Christians toward accepting evolution. I didn’t see that BioLogos was having much success with this endeavor, and they kicked out two of their more science-friendly bigwigs, apparently because their hard line against Adam and Eve (and other religious fables) was too much for the fundamentalists whom the organization wished to convert. I predicted that the Adam and Eve controversy—for BioLogos takes no official position on their historical reality—would be its death vis-a-vis Templeton, which, after all, claims to support pure science.
I was wrong. As reader Sigmund notes in the guest essay below, Templeton not only renewed BioLogos‘s grant, but BioLogos admits that it has changed its mission.
It looks like BioLogos is here to stay
by Sigmund
What happens when you completely fail in your initial aims, lose your best team members and finally abruptly change strategy? Well, if your organization is BioLogos and your funder is the Templeton Foundation, the answer is – you still get your grant renewed!
The Templeton Foundation has been financially propping up BioLogos to the tune of $2 million since the inception of the Francis Collins’ founded organization. The initial supporting grants were, however, due to end in February 2008, and it was unclear whether the Templeton Foundation would judge they had gotten their money’s worth. BioLogos, having lost two of their best known founding members, Collins and Karl Giberson, are not a happy ship.
The initial aim of BioLogos, that of promoting the acceptance of the scientific consensus on evolution amongst the Christian evangelical community, or, as they put it themselves: “to seek a theology more accepting of science, specifically evolutionary biology”, has met with fierce resistance amongst the leadership of mainstream evangelicism. In particular, the question of how to integrate the clear implications of modern population genetics with the biblical account of Adam and Eve has brought matters to a head. With the evangelical leadership refusing to budge on whether Adam and Eve existed as the first historical human couple, it was BioLogos that was the first to blink. Echoing the Discovery Institute’s refusal to take a stand on the age of the Earth, BioLogos likewise refused to take an official position that endorsed the scientific consensus on the genetic ancestry of humanity.
This refusal to stand up for good science is, unfortunately, not an isolated incident. A gradual shift from promotion of evolution towards more ‘worship’ based writings has characterized the output of BioLogos over the past year, a rightward shift that has coincided with the loss of Giberson and the decision by BioLogos not to renew the contract of biblical scholar Peter Enns, who had argued against the conservative literalist position.
In a new post, entitled BioLoguration II, Darrel Falk, the current head of BioLogos announced that they are “blessed to receive a renewal of our Templeton funds” – although perhaps at a lower level than previously as he spends most of the post pleading for additional cash donations from BioLogos supporters.
More interesting is the explicit acknowledgement by Falk that they have abandoned their original objective. Instead of persuading evangelicals as a whole to accept science, Falk admits the much less ambitious aim of promoting toleration of the minority of evangelicals that do accept evolution.
We believe, with near certainty, that God created through the evolutionary process, but our task is not to get everyone to see it our way. Our task is, however, to help everyone embrace the many Christians who already do think this way.
So, as we suggested previously, the objective is no longer to change the evangelical scientific environment, it is now merely to set up a theological nature reserve, with their fellow evangelical evolutionists playing the role of the pandas.
One of the most important lessons of comparative anatomy is that evolution usually proceeds by the modification of pre-existing structures (or, stated more precisely, the modification of the pre-existing developmental programs that produce those structures). Certain changes are easier to evolve because the developmental system can be modified to produce them—evolution follows the developmental path of least resistance. In terms of the skeleton of vertebrates, this means that most evolutionary changes are reduction, fusion, loss, lengthening, shortening, thickening, and narrowing of bones. Evolution uses what’s already there, and rarely do wholly new structures arise.
Right front foot of elephant. The dark blue bone is the metacarpal of the first digit (the thumb in primates); the dark green bone is the sixth 'digit' or prepollex, a sesamoid bone (a bone developed within a tendon). (J.R. Hutchinson, via BBC)
A paper by John R. Hutchinson and colleagues of the Royal Veterinary College (see also his neat elephant lab website) reports the presence of a sixth ‘digit’ in the fatty pad of the feet of elephants (oddly, they don’t say which species of elephant, at least not in the published paper). Primitively, mammals are flat footed, but as they become more cursorial (i.e., adapted for running), they move to running on their toes, and finally, as in horses, on the tips of their toes.
Elephants are midway between walking on their toes and toe tips (a condition known as subunguligrade), and have a large fatty pad at the bottom of their feet to support their great weight. One of the neatest aspect of this paper is that the relatively good fossil record of elephants allows Hutchinson and colleagues to trace when (about 40 mya) and in what groups this evolutionary change toward subunguligrade locomotion and in the foot skeleton occurred. The sixth ‘digit’ is an enlarged sesamoid bone medial to the first true digit. (A sesamoid is a bone that develops within a tendon.) It is not a true toe, which would have a meta carpal/tarsal and one or more phalanges. Rather, a different bone altogether has been pressed into service to approximate a digit.
Such jury rigged adaptations were made famous by Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote about another modification of a sesamoid bone, the panda’s thumb. The panda uses its enlarged sesamoid on the front limb to aid in stripping leaves off of bamboo. A true thumb, as in primates and certain marsupials, is the first digit. The panda, being a bear, has all five of its flat footed digits, and the sesamoid is pressed into service as a thumb substitute.
Darwin and Gould used such jury-rigged adaptations as powerful evidence for descent with modification, because their imperfection and evident relation to structures of different use in other organisms (what we would now recognize as pre-existing structures) show them to be traces of history, not paragons of design. The ‘one bone-two bones-many bones’ structure of the tetrapod limb, and its manifold modifications for walking, running, digging, grasping, swimming, flying, etc., are the most familiar example of this. This tetrapod unity of type embraces similarities beyond what might be called for for functional reasons, and instead is a marker of ancestry. The limbs undergo a sequence of adaptations to various modes of life, but all are modifications of the immediately ancestral limb.
One of my favorite examples of the sequential adaptation of limbs is Richard Swann Lull’s account of the hind limb in marsupials. Primitive marsupials are arboreal (i.e., living in trees), while more derived forms are quite varied, including the speedy kangaroos. Primitive marsupials have a grasping great toe (digit I), while kangaroos have the elongated limbs and feet and reduced side toes typical of cursorial or saltatorial runners; they have lost the great toe altogether. Lull calls these primary and secondary adaptations. Tree kangaroos have become arboreal again. While it might be nice to have a grasping toe, ancestral kangaroos lacked this toe, and so they made do with what they had: the hind foot becomes broadened and shortened for use on tree limbs, and the claws are used for digging in.
As the Zen poet Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, “You become arboreal with the feet you have, not the feet you want.”
Sequential adaptation in marsupials. Hind feet of a climbing opossum (A), a saltatorial kangaroo (B) and a climbing tree kangaroo (C). Toe I is the 'opossum's thumb' (actually it's big toe), which is lacking in the kangaroos. (From Lull, 1917)
Gould, S.J. 1978. The panda’s peculiar thumb. Natural History 87 (November): 20, 24-30.
Hutchinson J.R., C. Delmer, C.E. Miller, T. Hildebrandt, A.A. Pitsillides, and A. Boyde. 2011. From flat foot to fat foot: structure, ontogeny, function, and evolution of elephant “sixth toes”. Science 334:1699-1703.
Lull, R.S. 1917. Organic Evolution. Macmillan, New York.
UPDATE: Eric MacDonald, with his much greater theological erudition, has analyzed Alexander’s argument at greater length over at Choice In Dying. A snippet:
If there was no first Adam, in the sense required, then Jesus Christ cannot be the second, and all the sentimentality and hollow joy of Christmas will not make up for this deficiency at the heart of the Christian theory of redemption — which, for good reasons, has never been solidified into dogma. The simple truth seems to be that there is no satisfactory way of doing it. Had this been attempted, the very implausibility of Christianity and the redemption it promises would have been obvious long ago.
________________________
Denis Alexander is a molecular biologist who is director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at Cambridge University, an institute founded with a grant from Templeton and sustained by further infusions of Templeton cash. Its purpose is the same as Templeton’s: to conflate science and faith.
In the latest Guardian, and just in time for the Christmas season, comes “Evolution, Christmas, and the Atonement”, Alexander’s own exegesis of the Bible—the right one of course. Part of it is metaphorical, part not.
Science tells us, of course, that the Adam and Eve story is bogus, though Alexander still tries to squeeze some meaning out of it (they can’t not do that, can they?). After admitting that modern evolutionary biology has decisively refuted the idea that the human species ever bottlenecked at just two people, Alexander begins his frenetic apologetics:
So do we then just shrug our shoulders and say “well so much the worse for theology – science wins in the end”? Surprisingly, perhaps, the Bible suggests otherwise. The tradition of interpreting the early chapters of Genesis figuratively – as a theological essay, not as science – goes back to two great thinkers from Alexandria: the first-century Jewish philosopher Philo, and the third-century church father Origen. In 248 Origen wrote that Genesis references to Adam are “not so much of one particular individual as of the whole human race”. Figurative understandings of the Genesis text have been part of mainstream theology ever since.
The first mention of Adam in the Bible is clearly referring to humankind (Genesis 1:26-27) and the definite article in front of Adam in chapters 2 and 3 – “the man” – suggests a representative man, because in Hebrew the definite article is not used for personal names, with Eve being the representative woman.
The Genesis narrative tells the story of humankind going their way rather than God’s way.
He doesn’t mention the longer tradition of interpreting the Bible literally, one that continues to this day with fundamentalists like Al Mohler and his Baptist minions.
I’ve already banged on enough on this site about how people like Alexander are always making theological virtues of scientific necessities, as well as telling people the right way to be a Christian. (Really, is that “humble”?)
The curious part of Alexander’s article, though, is the subtitle—an admission that parts of the Bible are NOT to be taken metaphorically:
Evolution, Christmas, and the Atonement
We are not descended from Adam and Eve – but still, Jesus was born to save us
Over at EvolutionBlog, Jason takes a break from math, chess, and atheism to describe a somewhat harrowing trip to the vet’s in “Emily’s big day.” Emily is, of course, his cat.
At the vet:
At home afterwards:
It is my contention, which I’ll assert without proof, that most of the well known atheist bloggers have cats rather than dogs. Hell, even P. Z. has a cat, even though he puts up anti-cat posts every week just to tick me off. And if they don’t have cats, they prefer cats. There are, of course, exceptions.
I came across this great map when researching a paper on the relationship between evolution and religion. It is from a Wikimedia Commons page, and maps the levels of atheism and agnosticism (combined) in all the countries of the world. The map was made by “Phrood” from data in Phil Zuckerman’s article, Atheism: contemporary rates and patterns. 2007, in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, Cambridge University Press. You can download the paper free at the link; it’s a great compendium of the world’s religiosity.
The Wikimedia artist notes: “The values for China, Cuba, and North Korea must be viewed with skepticism as comparatively little data is available in these countries.
Shame on America: a recent Gallup poll shows that 92% of Americans answer “yes” when asked “Do you believe in God?” Look how we stand out when compared to other First World countries. And a big yay! for Sweden, Japan, and Denmark. God obviously cares more about the southern hemisphere.
The percentages are atheists and agnostics combined; bluer countries are the good ones. Click to enlarge.
I am pretty neutral about Christmas. I don’t celebrate it overtly, but it’s nice to get together with friends or family—and get that much-needed sweater. When I was raised in a (mostly secular) Jewish family, we even had a Christmas tree, which my dad called a “Chanukah bush.” But I’m not excited, either, about atheist attempts to celebrate the season: who cares about a “Happy solstice”?
But for those heathens who like carols during this season, here’s a great one:
There’s a pretty dreadful piece by Tim Padgett in the latest online Time Magazine (I’m not sure about the print version) called “Having faith: what both Hitchens and fundamentalists don’t get about religion.” It’s an attack on both fundamentalist Christianity and Christopher Hitchens, who stands for all New Atheists, and they’re guilty of the same faults. Guess what they are? Narrow-mindedness and intolerance, of course—the usual trope about “fundamentalist atheists”. But along the way, Padgett (and I can’t find much information online about who he is) manages to proffer a lot of distorted, shopworn clichés and misstatements about both religion and atheism. Here are a few:
Islam respects Christianity. Padgett, who is correct in decrying the blanket vilification of American Muslims by American Christians (and by the Florida Family Association), nevertheless throws this in:
Every imam I know here in Miami rejects the idea [of putting the U.S. under shari’a law]. “Muslims are only 6 million out of 300 million in this country,” one reminds me. “We rely on U.S. law to protect our rights as a minority.” They’re also a minority who wish Christians well at Christmas: the Koran reverently mentions Jesus and the Virgin Mary almost 60 times.
Yes, American Muslims have a right to worship, and of course many aren’t into jihad. But just remember what happens in many places when Islam is no longer a minority but gets the upper hand. More important, it’s simply stupid to pretend that the Qur’an preaches friendship to Christians (or Jews). As everyone knows who has even glanced at the sacred document of Islam, it’s loaded to the gunwales with verses inciting followers to kill unbelievers, those who diss Allah, and Christians and Jews. Here’s a very small sample:
(5:72) They surely disbelieve who say: Lo! Allah is the Messiah, son of Mary. … Lo! whoso ascribeth partners unto Allah, for him Allah hath forbidden paradise. His abode is the Fire. For evil-doers there will be no helpers.
(9:29) – Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.
(9:30) The Jews say, “Ezra is the son of Allah “; and the Christians say, “The Messiah is the son of Allah .” That is their statement from their mouths; they imitate the saying of those who disbelieved [before them]. May Allah destroy them; how are they deluded?
“People of the book,” of course, are Christians and Jews. If you want to see a lot more along these lines, go here: there are dozens of such statements in the Qur’an. Padgett, of course, would respond that only extremist Muslims take the Qur’an literally, but if he’s citing that document as evidence of Islamic/Christian amity, he should be fair.
New Atheists like Richard Dawkins are “angry atheists” and “fundamentalists”. Padgett uses these terms several times, as here:
That’s also one of the best ways to answer Hitchens as well as other angry atheists like Richard Dawkins and quite a few members of my own hypersecular profession. It’s a fairly widely accepted maxim that atheist fundamentalists, as I call them, can be just as intolerant as religious fundamentalists.
Sometimes atheists do get angry when talking about religion, but most of the time they’re pretty calm. I haven’t ever seen Sam Harris lose his temper, and Dan Dennett is a kindly and usually placid man. When people mean “angry” in this context, they simply mean that atheists are criticizing religion. The assumption, which is flat wrong, is that one can’t do that without losing one’s temper. It is the criticism of religion itself that is regarded as “anger.” And as for “fundamentalist” atheists, well, see Grayling’s eloquent refutation of that term here.
Christians either don’t literally believe in critical parts of the Bible (e.g., the virgin birth and resurrection of Jesus) or wouldn’t care if they were shown to be wrong. In other words, people don’t take the bedrock assertions of Christianity literally. It’s not about the real truth of those claims, it’s about how good the claims make them feel. It’s all about the redemptive power of the story. And we’re not talking about fundamentalists here, but just regular believers. Padgett says:
And the problem they share is that both [atheists and fundamentalists] take religion way too literally. Just as Christian fundamentalists insist on a literal reading of the Bible, angry atheists tend to insist that belief in God qualifies you as a raving creationist. . .
Here’s what they [the “angry atheists”] refuse to get: Yes, Christians believe that Jesus’ nativity was a virgin birth and that he rose from the dead on Easter. But if you were to show most Christians incontrovertible scientific proof that those miracles didn’t occur, they would shrug — because their faith means more to them than that. Because in the end, what they have faith in is the redemptive power of the story. In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, an agnostic says to his Catholic friend, “You can’t seriously believe it all … I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.”
“Oh yes, I believe that. It’s a lovely idea.”
“But you can’t believe things simply because they’re a lovely idea.”
“But I do. That’s how I believe.”
I’m willing to bet it’s how most believers believe. Before Hitchens died at 62 from esophageal cancer, he made a point of declaring he was certain no heaven awaited him. But that swipe at the faithful always misses the point. Most of us don’t believe in God because we think it’s a ticket to heaven. Rather, our belief in God — our belief in the living ideal of ourselves, which is something even atheists ponder — instills in us a faith that in the end, light always defeats darkness (which is how people get through the wars and natural disasters I cover).
With all due respect to Padgett (I don’t really mean that, of course), that is hogwash. Has Padgett even examined what most Christians really believe? And I’m sick of quoting these statistics, but here they are again, from a 2007 Gallup Poll, and note that those polled are from the American public as a whole, not just Christians:
81% of Americans believe in Heaven
75% of Americans believe in angels
70% of Americans believe in Satan
69% of American believe in Hell (presumably 1% think that Hell has no overseer)
So much for non-literalism. Padgett should get out more. I always wonder how many Christians would remain Christians if they knew, absolutely, that the New Testament was a fabrication and that there was no afterlife? We don’t know for sure. How many Muslims would remain Muslim if they knew that the Qur’an were also a fabrication? Based on the statistics above, I suspect that if these unlikely disproofs occurred, religion would wane rapidly.
We need religion to have a good world. Padgett’s own religious beliefs are unknown to me, but he’s certainly a believer in belief:
Rather, our belief in God — our belief in the living ideal of ourselves, which is something even atheists ponder — instills in us a faith that in the end, light always defeats darkness (which is how people get through the wars and natural disasters I cover). That does make us open to the possibility of the hereafter — but more important, it gives us purposeful inspiration to make the here and now better.
With all due respect to the memory of Christopher Hitchens, making the here and now better would be difficult without religion. But it’s also hard enough without the un-Christian antics of people like David Caton. As Christmas ought to remind us.
Excuse me, but I think making the here and now better would be much easier without religion. Or so recent studies have told us. Religious societies are dysfunctional societies.
Here’s a graph I made from Greg Paul’s (2009) survey of 15 countries correlating the religiosity of a society (i.e., the proportion of inhabitants who absolutely believe in God) with how successful that society is. Success was quantified using Paul’s “successful society scale”, or SSS, which ranks societies on a scale from 1 (least successful) to 10 (most successful), incorporating a number of sociological indices of functionality including incidence of crime, venereal disease, corruption, infant mortality, alcohol consumption, poverty, and so on). You can download Paul’s paper at the link below.
Among the First World countries surveyed, the US, at 2.9, has the least successful society, and, more important, Paul found a strong negative correlation between societal “success” and religiosity. (The Darwin figure at the upper left is just meant to show that those successful countries are also the ones whose inhabitants more frequently embrace the idea of evolution). Here’s the correlation (which is still significant with the US omitted), and the least-squares regression line:
A more recent study by Solt et al (2011) showed that both among countries and across years in the U.S., religiosity is negatively correlated with income inequality: the more inequality, the more religious the country or, in the U.S., the more religiosity in that year. Solt et al. also showed that income inequality appears to be causal here: a time-series analysis of data in the U.S. showed that changes in income inequality in one year affected religiosity in subsequent years, but not vice versa.
And of course there’s Steve Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of our Nature, which shows a dramatic decrease in violence not only in the last several thousand years, but even in the last two centuries. And all the while religion has been on the wane, especially in Europe. Not strong evidence that religion sustains a good world!
All the data show that societies that are less religious are better places to live. You can argue that this might reflect either the discarding of sky-fathers in countries that take care of their residents, or the pernicious effect of religion on societal health—I think both operate—but it doesn’t matter. What it does show is that, contra Padgett, you don’t need God to be good. In fact, the best societies are those that reject God.
What world a world without God look like? Sweden and Denmark, I think. Imagine no religion. . . . .
