Oy gewalt! A creationist rabbi attacks me.

December 15, 2011 • 9:08 am

The notorious and obstreperous Rabbi Moshe Averick, whose schtick is that life couldn’t have arisen by natural means, ergo God, has gone after me in a big way on the Jewish Algemeiner website, in a post with the lovely title, “Severe weather alert: Dr. Jerry Coyne—militant atheistic biologist—is blowing very hot air in Chicago.”

I have to laugh because his post is largely a defense of David Berlinski, that pompous purveyor of evolution denialism.  Here’s a few lovely passages:

Anyone who has read Berlinski’s books or articles – whether you agree with him or not – knows that his writing is anything but awkward. Excuse me Jerry, but if Berlinski’s prose is awkward, then yours could only be described as quadriplegic. On the other hand, if Berlinski’s writing is the most exquisite bottle of French Bordeaux wine, yours is a watered-down quart bottle of Ripple. I’m sure an august institution like the University of Chicago has some wonderful creative writing courses…Just do it, Jerry.

And this, which makes me LOL:

Most revealing of all is Coyne’s confession that he has “trouble believing” that Berlinski is really an agnostic. I find this intriguing. Why is it difficult for Coyne to believe such a thing? As far as I’m concerned, the answer is obvious. Dr. Jerry Coyne is a fanatic. A fanatic is someone who is so emotionally and psychologically bound up with their beliefs, that they are incapable of considering another point of view. The sense of reality and emotional stability of the fanatic depend entirely on protecting their beliefs from any type of serious questioning or intellectual attack. Coyne is a fanatical atheist and a fanatical Darwinist. From Coyne’s psychological perspective, it is impossible for there to be flaws in evolutionary theory. It is impossible for any rational person to have doubts about evolutionary theory.

Obviously the good rabbi is completely ignorant of my critiques of modern evolutionary “dogma,” including my attacks on the shifting balance theory of evolution, on the idea that evolution must always proceed by the accumulation of many mutations of very small effect, and on the notion that morphological change nearly always involves changes in the regulatory regions of genes.  I may be wrong in these criticisms, but nobody can accuse me of being a blinkered defender of all things evolutionary.

I don’t need defending here, because Averick is being completely eviscerated in the comments. And the funniest thing is this:  Averick, who thinks he’s struck the Achilles heel of evolution by arguing that we know nothing about the origin of life (ergo Moses), went after Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak’s work on the origin of life by taking Szostak’s words out of context:

The argument that I put forth in my book, which Rabbi Jacobs also presented in his Huffington Post column, was that the simple reason why Origin of Life researchers are baffled in their attempts to find a naturalistic origin of life – as Noble Laureate Dr. Jack Szostak put it, “It is virtually impossible to imagine how a cell’s machines…could have formed spontaneously from non-living matter,” is because it is impossible for a cell’s machines to have formed spontaneously from non-living matter.

If you look in the comments, you’ll see one by Terri-Lynn McCormick, who happens to be Szostak’s wife.  She gives Szostak’s full quote in context, which of course says something very different from what Averick implies, and winds up concluding:

I do not know if you are lying or are incapable of understanding the article, but I suspect the former. Make no mistake, this kind of misrepresentation is a lie. When you say someone has said something that supports your argument when you know that the whole of his words undermine it, you are lying about what the person said. Civil discourse begins with honest engagement.

Averick just babbles in reply.  Like many creationists, he likes to take quotes out of contexts to make it seem as if scientists have deep doubts about evolution—doubts that we suppress to present a false front.  Averick is a liar, and makes me ashamed to be a (cultural) Jew.  He needs to remember the Ninth Commandment: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

Remarkably stupid remarks by a sophisticated theologian

December 15, 2011 • 7:06 am

UPDATE:  Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Ruse has also gone after Plantinga.  Ruse has apparently read the book and notes that Plantinga spends a whole chapter defending Michael Behe’s ideas about intelligent design, noting that Plantinga “spend[s] pages engaged in intellectual fawning all over Behe.”  Ruse also criticizes Plantinga for dismissing anti-ID arguments by Dawkins and me, and praises our scientific acumen while managing to get in a few licks at the same time: ” I think Dawkins is crude beyond belief when it comes to philosophy and theology. And frankly, Coyne’s obsessions are nigh psychoanalytic.”  What—Ruse doesn’t like cats or cowboy boots?

_________________________

Alvin Plantinga, like John Haught, is regarded as a sophisticated and serious theologian.  (Although he’s formally a Christian philosopher at the University of Notre Dame, he’s published lots of books defending God, engaging in apologetics, and so on, so there’s little doubt he qualifies as a theologian.)  Plantinga was also president of the American Philosophical Association, which is a serious achievement, and this week’s New York Times profile (see below) says this about his achievements:

From Calvin [College], and later from the University of Notre Dame, Mr. Plantinga has led a movement of unapologetically Christian philosophers who, if they haven’t succeeded in persuading their still overwhelmingly unbelieving colleagues, have at least made theism philosophically respectable.

I wasn’t aware that theism had become respectable among philosophers. In fact, I thought that most philosophers were atheists. Perhaps readers can enlighten me here.

At any rate, I’ve read some of Plantinga’s books and articles and haven’t been terribly impressed; they’ve merely confirmed what I said earlier:

I’m starting to realize that there is no sophisticated theology; there are merely evasions and fancy language to get around the problematic lack of evidence for God and the palpably immoral statements in scripture.

But my already-low impression of Plantinga has been further degraded by remarks he made in a piece in Tuesday’s New York Times by reporter Jennifer Schuessler, “Philosopher sticks up for God,”   It was inspired by Plantinga’s new book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism.  I haven’t yet read it, but in the Times Plantinga says some amazingly stupid things.

First he proffers the obligatory (and uncivil!) slurs against the New Atheists:

In “Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism,” published last week by Oxford University Press, he unleashes a blitz of densely reasoned argument against “the touchdown twins of current academic atheism,” the zoologist Richard Dawkins and the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, spiced up with some trash talk of his own.

Mr. Dawkins? “Dancing on the lunatic fringe,” Mr. Plantinga declares. Mr. Dennett? A reverse fundamentalist who proceeds by “inane ridicule and burlesque” rather than by careful philosophical argument.

For those accommodationists who claim that the incivility is all on our side, or emanates on the religious side only from fundamentalists, note the invective.  But Plantinga’s main point is that the view of a theistic God is actually more supportive of science than is materialism or naturalism:

Theism, with its vision of an orderly universe superintended by a God who created rational-minded creatures in his own image, “is vastly more hospitable to science than naturalism,” with its random process of natural selection, he writes. “Indeed, it is theism, not naturalism, that deserves to be called ‘the scientific worldview.’ ”

Mr. Plantinga readily admits that he has no proof that God exists. But he also thinks that doesn’t matter. Belief in God, he argues, is what philosophers call a basic belief: It is no more in need of proof than the belief that the past exists, or that other people have minds, or that one plus one equals two.

“You really can’t sensibly claim theistic belief is irrational without showing it isn’t true,” Mr. Plantinga said. And that, he argues, is simply beyond what science can do.

A brief correction first: natural selection is not a “random process.” It’s a process that combines the random production of mutations with the deterministic process of natural selection itself. I hope he understands that.

And how can a “scientific worldview” be one that doesn’t demand proof—or, rather, strong empirical evidence?  Science is all about evidence, and is not equivalent to mathematics, which is a very refined form of logic in which results follow ineluctably from premises. And as for the past existing, well, it might all be an illusion produced by aliens, but empirical evidence tells us that the past did indeed seem to exist (we have documents, fossils, radiometric dating, and our own personal histories), so that’s something that’s empirically proven to our satisfaction.

Science simply doesn’t operate on what Plantinga calls “basic beliefs,” by which he apparently means “beliefs for which one needs no empirical support.” If Plantinga wants to call theism more hospitable to science than materialism, than by all means let us include as “science” homeopathy, astrology, and spiritual healing.  After all, for many those too are “basic beliefs.”

By all scientific lights, theism is irrational because it isn’t true.  That is, there is no evidence in its favor—not a jot. Perhaps Plantinga is using such a refined definition of “truth” here that it bears no relation to our common notion. In the same way, Plantinga could assert that “You can’t sensibly claim that belief in fairies and leprechauns is irrational without showing it isn’t true.”  The absence of evidence, where there should be evidence, is indeed evidence of absence.

Plantinga adheres, like the Catholic church, to the notion of “theistic evolution”: that God didn’t just set up the process and let it roll, but actively intervened from time to time (humans are the most obvious example for theists). That’s why Plantinga is such a fan of Michael Behe’s form of intelligent design, which does allow for some non-theistic evolution as well.

Mr. Plantinga says he accepts the scientific theory of evolution, as all Christians should. Mr. Dennett and his fellow atheists, he argues, are the ones who are misreading Darwin. Their belief that evolution rules out the existence of God — including a God who purposely created human beings through a process of guided evolution — is not a scientific claim, he writes, but “a metaphysical or theological addition.”

No, it’s a scientific claim.  The scientific understanding of evolution is that genetic variation is created by a process of random mutation (there are a few other sources as well), which is then subject to natural selection or genetic drift.  We have seen no evidence to the contrary: no evidence for non-random mutation, as would occur if God guided evolution, or of any strict directionality in the evolution of humans (remember all those extinct hominin lineages that diverged in body shape, brain size, and other traits?). And there are all those design flaws in modern humans, which must reflect the actions of a Trickster God.

But wait—there’s more!

These are fighting words to scientific atheists, but Mr. Plantinga’s game of turnabout doesn’t stop there. He argues that atheism and even agnosticism themselves are irrational.

“I think there is such a thing as a sensus divinitatis, and in some people it doesn’t work properly,” he said, referring to the innate sense of the divine that Calvin believed all human beings possess. “So if you think of rationality as normal cognitive function, yes, there is something irrational about that kind of stance.”

“Sensus divinatis” is a fancy term for “lots of people believed and still believe in God.”  But in that case the sensus divinatis is not working properly in more and more people all the time. In fact, it’s almost disappeared in Scandinavia and much of Western Europe, and is waning in the US.  Did God remove it?  The fact that many people evince a belief or a behavior is no more evidence for God than is the fact that our ancestors used to kill each other at alarmingly high rates, and so had a sensus homicidus.

There’s some back and forth between Plantinga and Dennett (the two had a somewhat acrimonious public debate that’s been turned into a book), but Plantinga’s most damaging admission comes toward the end:

Mr. Plantinga and Mr. Dennett do agree about one thing: Religion and science can’t just call a truce and retreat back into what the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould called “non-overlapping magisteria,” with science laying claim to the empirical world, while leaving questions of ultimate meaning to religion. Religion, like science, makes claims about the truth, Mr. Plantinga insists, and theists need to stick up for the reasonableness of those claims, especially if they are philosophers.

Why is this damaging? First, because many religious claims about the “truth” have already been disproven by science.  The creation story, the fable of Adam and Eve, and the myth of Noah are just three.  (Note that many still adhere to these “truths”.) But there’s not one instance of a scientific claim that’s ever been disproven by religion.  Second, if religion lays claim to the “truth,” then why can’t religious people agree on what that truth is? If “truth” has any meaning at all, it has to be the same for everyone—at least if it is, as Plantinga implies, analogous to scientific truth. Yet we know that the fundamental “truth” claims of different faiths are not only divergent, but conflicting.  They’re not truths at all, but simply claims.  Science answers questions; religion can only “address” questions but never answer them.

But at least Plantinga, a theist, argues that God intervenes in the world and that we can discover “truths” about that intervention.  This lays him open to a whole slew of criticisms that don’t apply to deists.

If claims like Plantinga’s are taken seriously by secular philosophers, then philosophy is in more trouble than I thought.

Spiral with a pearl earring

December 15, 2011 • 4:02 am

Well, it’s more than just a spiral, and it’s done totally freehand, with no mapping anything out in advance.

The artist is Chan Hwee Chong from Singapore, who specializes in this strange form of art (his portfolio is here, which includes the world’s smallest sushi). Here’s a video:

You can see more of this work here.  I’ve put another example below.

This just in: creationists deny the existence of dinosaurs!

December 14, 2011 • 10:55 am

We’re used to the familiar creationist trope of dinosaurs coexisting with humans, and we all remember the photo of P.Z. riding on a Triceratops at the Creation Museum in Kentucky.  At least those creationists have the decency to admit that dinosaurs were real, and that the fossils are real remnants of animals that once existed.

Well, you may not know that there’s an even loonier subset of creationists who flatly deny the existence of dinosaurs: one might call them Dino Denialists.  You can read all about them in a nice piece by Don Prothero at skepticblog. Prothero links to a website from this bizarre sect, “Dinosaurs: Science or science fiction?”

Besides the usual attacks on radiometric dating and refutations of other creationist arguments that Biblical references to behemoths actually refer to dinosaurs, this site makes the bizarre claim that all the dinosaur fossils were fabricated by scientists.  Now even if that were possible (where is this factory that’s so busy turning out thousands of dino fossils?), why would scientists do it?. Prothero gives an explanation from the Dino Denial site:

What would be the motivation for such a deceptive endeavor? Obvious motivations include trying to prove evolution, trying to disprove or cast doubt on the Christian Bible and the existence of the Christian God, and trying to disprove the “young-earth theory”. Yes, there are major political and religious ramifications.

The dinosaur concept could imply that if God exists, he may have tinkered with his idea of dinosaurs for awhile, then perhaps discarded or became tired of this creation and then went on to create man. The presented dinosaur historical timeline could suggest an imperfect God who came up with the idea of man as an afterthought, thus demoting the biblical idea that God created man in His own image. Dinosaurs are not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible.

Highly rewarding financial and economic benefits to museums, educational and research organizations, university departments of paleontology, discoverers and owners of dinosaur bones, and the book, television, movie and media industries may cause sufficient motivation for ridiculing of open questioning and for suppression of honest investigation. [DP: That’s a real laugher! Most paleontologists are poorly paid and cannot even get a job in paleontology!]

Prothero, a crack paleontologist and author of both popular and technical books on the paleobiology, then proceeds to take the argument apart. I’ll let you enjoy his critique, but here’s one snippet:

There is a long section, using quotes out of context from the Berkeley evolution website, that claims that scientists dreamed up the whole thing as a big scam to undermine religion. Never mind the fact that all the early dinosaur discoveries were made by religious people such as Gideon Mantell, Rev. William Buckland, Mary Anning, and Richard Owen, and many later paleontologists (like Edward D. Cope) were also quite religious. This writer knows how to clip little bits of simplistic web histories out of context, but doesn’t know enough history to know the difference.

This is Lying for Jesus, just as Holocaust denial is Lying for Hitler.  I really can’t fathom the mindset of people who can entertain theories like this, fabricating completely ridiculous theories to circumvent the most convincing empirical evidence.  I suppose it differs only in degree, but not in kind, from the mindset of people like Ken Ham or William Dembski.

h/t: Grania Spingies

A Christmas letter from Dawkins to the Prime Minister

December 14, 2011 • 9:25 am

Just up at The New Statesman: Richard has written an open Christmas missive to David Cameron, “Do you get it now, Prime Minister?” It’s about the unholy alliance between the British government and religion, and especially about the divisive nature of faith schools.  A snippet:

Token objections to cribs and carols are not just silly, they distract vital attention from the real domination of our culture and politics that religion still gets away with, in (tax-free) spades. There’s an important difference between traditions freely embraced by individuals and traditions enforced by government edict. Imagine the outcry if your government were to require every family to celebrate Christmas in a religious way. You wouldn’t dream of abusing your power like that. And yet your government, like its predecessors, does force religion on our society, in ways whose very familiarity disarms us. Setting aside the 26 bishops in the House of Lords, passing lightly over the smooth inside track on which the Charity Commission accelerates faith-based charities to tax-free status while others (quite rightly) have to jump through hoops, the most obvious and most dangerous way in which governments impose religion on our society is through faith schools – as Rabbi Jonathan Romain reminds us on page 27. . .

. . . A diverse and largely secular country such as Britain should not privilege the religious over the non-religious, or impose or underwrite religion in any aspect of public life. A government that does so is out of step with modern demographics and values. You seemed to understand that in your excellent, and unfairly criticised, speech on the dangers of “multicul­turalism” in February this year. Modern society requires and deserves a truly secular state, by which I mean not state atheism, but state neutrality in all matters pertaining to religion: the recognition that faith is personal and no business of the state. Individuals must always be free to “do God” if they wish; but a government for the people certainly should not.

With my best wishes to you and your family for a happy Christmas,

Richard Dawkins

That’s telling him (so long as he reads it).

Cat Tebows!

December 14, 2011 • 8:35 am

I’ll try not to overwork the new meme of Tebowing (unless readers want to send in pictures of themselves engaged in this gesture of obeisance), but how could I resist a public display of kitteh religiosity? It’s from the Tebowing website, where the photographer adds, ““Woke up on florida/GA game day to my cat tebowing.”

I think he’s praying for noms rather than victory.

Guest post: Accommodationists are halfway to crazy town

December 14, 2011 • 5:57 am

Today we have yet another guest post by reader Sigmund, who has bravely volunteered to keep a watch on matters accomodationist at both BioLogos and PuffHo.  Here he considers an accommodationist plea to judge scientific and religious “facts” by different standards.

Two scholars take on scientific “extremism”

by Sigmund

The Huffington Post continues its war on gnu atheism with a new piece, this time penned by Philip Clayton, a theologian, and Steven Knapp, professor of English and president of George Washington University. The article follows the theme of a previous Clayton HuffPo article that vainly attempted to claim new gaps in which to hide Jesus.

In the current piece, Clayton and Knapp praise the work of Christian apologists such as the Johns Polkinghorne and Haught:

Their numerous books and conferences have explored a wide range of approaches: sometimes isolating areas of science, such as quantum mechanics, that seemed to cry out for supernatural forms of causation (or at least leave an opening for them), and sometimes seeking methods for testing religious claims in ways that are analogous to the ways that scientific claims are tested by experimentation and critical feedback. Despite their often heroic efforts, this project has not given rise to a broadly compelling research program. In fact, it has come under attack by scientists as well as religious persons. Why is that? Why would both sides not welcome these attempts to establish harmony?

Why indeed?

As usual for HuffPo religion articles, the standard tactic is applied: dividing the science/religion world into a battle between two extremist armies—the religious fundamentalists and the New Atheists—and arguing that the ideal solution is to be found by adopting the middle ground.

Clayton’s personal bio, linked to the article, gives a clearer picture of the strategy:

Rejecting the scientism of Dawkins and friends, he argues, does not open the door to fundamentalism. Instead, a variety of complex and interesting positions are being obscured by the warring factions whose fight to the death is attracting such intense attention today.

As to which complex and interesting positions Clayton means, it’s helpful to note where, exactly, he finds compatibility between science and religion.

As a philosopher he works to show the compatibility of science with religious belief across the fields where the two may be integrated (e.g., emergence theory, evolution and religion, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience and consciousness).

The continued assault on the ‘scientism’ of the New Atheists forms the central argument of the current article.

Critics such as Richard Dawkins misunderstand how religious beliefs are formed and defended when they claim that religious reasoning is purely circular, or that all religious claims are equally true — and therefore equally false!

But most religions are partly historical systems, containing claims about both factual and supernatural events. Claiming an individual named Jesus entered Jerusalem while riding a donkey is at least physically plausible in terms of what we know of the common names of that time, the animals living in the region, and the evidence that Jerusalem has existed for thousands of years.

The claim that he died, rose from the dead after three days and later ascended into the heavens, defies all we know about the sciences of cell biology and cosmology (to name but two fields). Broadly speaking, it is only this second claim that is regarded by the gnus to be as ‘equally false’ (or more accurately as ‘equally improbable’) as every other supernatural religious claim about any deity from Allah to Zeus.

Yet for Clayton and Knapp it’s all about the failure of gnu atheists to understand things from a believer’s point of view:

That misunderstanding is no doubt part of what has been driving the indignant attacks on religion in recent years from certain scientists, philosophers, and journalists. It also helps to fuel the fires of the New Atheist attacks. But the fact that a traditional claim is hard to evaluate from outside that tradition does not show that the claim is false. It merely shows that the claim is hard for outsiders to evaluate.

But wouldn’t this mean that religious claims are incompatible with science, at least in terms of how science deals with every other type of hypothesis about the natural world?

The entire article appears to be an advertisement for Clayton and Knapp’s new book The Predicament of Belief, described as follows:

In eight probing chapters, the authors of The Predicament of Belief consider the most urgent reasons for doubting that religious claims – in particular, those embedded in the Christian tradition – are likely to be true. They develop a version of Christian faith that preserves the tradition’s core insights but also gauges the varying degrees of certainty with which those insights can still be affirmed. Along the way, they address such questions as the ultimate origin of the universe, the existence of innocent suffering, the challenge of religious plurality, and how to understand the extraordinary claim that an ancient teacher rose from the dead. They end with a discussion of what their conclusions imply about the present state and future structure of churches and other communities in which Christian affirmations are made.

“How to understand the extraordinary claim that an ancient teacher rose from the dead”?

Or how to understand the story of the red-coated elf with the white beard who visits every child’s house on Christmas Eve to deliver toys?

Strangely enough, ‘extremist’ interpretations of the Santa story, based on the scientific consensus about aerodynamics and reindeer biology, are acceptable. Using science to consider the factual claims of the zombie hypothesis are, however, deemed beyond the pale—at least amongst ‘the moderate majority’.

Not surprisingly, Clayton and Knapp end with a call for moderation, or as they put it, “minimalism”, hinting that their approved religious beliefs are of the ineffable variety.

We suggest that the humility of religious minimalism is the right stance for everyone, believers and non-believers alike, to adopt.

“The humility of religious minimalism” sounds curiously like a call for religious beliefs to be kept in the private realm and not imposed on others.

Isn’t that rather extreme?