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.
UPDATE: Over at Metamagician, Brother Blackford gives a brief take on the Q&A video in his post, “The Coyne/Haught question time.”
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I swear, I wish Eric MacDonald would take up debating theologians on the stage rather than on his website. As a former Anglican priest, now an atheist, he knows all the tricks and evasions of theology. But perhaps he’s just too nice a guy to go after those fluffballs in public.
At any rate, over at Choice in Dying, Eric has just published an analysis of the Q&A session John Haught and I had after our debate. Eric’s piece is called “Q&A: Haught on God, Bitter, Impolite, and Wrong“, and he illustrates his points with snippets from the videotape. (By the way, the debate and Q&A are now on YouTube; click on the links to get them.) Eric has a very good comment on his own post, too—it’s #8.
Eric’s analysis is his usual thorough and thoughtful job. Two of the most interesting points involve Haught’s ambivalance between whether or not God intervened in the real world (though Haught appears to have flirted with deism, the dispatching of Jesus to Earth is an explicitly theistic act), and the incoherence of the “scientism” charge, which I’ll address one of these days. In the meantime, I’m going to make a cup of tea.
Here are mini-reviews of two movies I’ve seen this week. One is unknown, and very good; the other is quite well known and abysmal. Both won prizes at Cannes, but only one deserves it. SPOILER ALERT: Elements of the plot will be described in each review.
First, the good one.
Certified Copy (Copie Conforme), released in 2010, is a product of the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami; although he’s well known to aficionados of international (i.e., non-American!) movies, this is the first film he’s shot outside of Iran. (It’s also his first film that I’ve seen, so perhaps readers who have seen the others can comment.) It’s a tour de force that wasn’t on my radar screen. The plot is simple but tortuous. A British author, James Miller (played wonderfully by the handsome William Shimell, an opera singer in his first movie role), is touring in Tuscany to promote his book, Certified Copy, about the difference between original works of art and copies. There he meets an unnamed French woman played by Juliette Binoche (a fantastic actress and a gorgeous woman; she garnered an Oscar for The English Patient). Binoche (I’ll use her real name), seems to be divorced, has a tense relationship with her young son, and runs a shop that sells artworks. For an unknown reason she takes James on a one-day tour of Tuscany, and things get complicated.
While having coffee in a small town, Miller steps outside to take a call on his cellphone, and Binoche falls into conversation with the cafe’s female proprietor, who assumes that Binoche and Miller are married. Binoche plays along, and the two have a conversation about Miller’s qualities as a husband and the nature of marriage in general. Binoche tells the woman about the difficulties of the marriage; the proprietor tries to reassure her that Miller seems like a good man. When he comes back inside, Binoche tells him of the ruse, and he responds that they “obviously make a good couple,” since the proprietor assumed they were married. The ruse then elides into reality: they gradually slip into the roles of man and wife, have disagreements, moments of tenderness, and act out a possibly fictitious past in which they didn’t get along because of his absence. The dialogue is wonderful, and Binoche really shines in a difficult role (the performance got her a Best Actress award at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival).
As the couple walk around the village, things become more ambiguous. Their pretense is so minutely described, so full of authentic memories, that you begin to wonder if the two really were married and produced a son. Or are they only acting? And if they’re acting, are they beginning to fall for each other, or do they dislike each other? The day passes, full of difficulties and disagreements: a dialogue conducted in French, Italian, and English. The movie ends with the situation ambiguous and unresolved: is it a real marriage or a certified copy? The beauty of this movie is in the intriguing plot and the fantastic acting, especially by Binoche; the movie is a wonderful meditation on the nature of marriage and relationships. I give it two enthusiastic thumbs up. See it!
Here’s the UK trailer:
And Binoche talks about the movie and the director:
The whole movie appears to be on YouTube in 16 parts; part 1 is here, but I recommend seeing it in the theater. Rotten Tomatoes (my favorite movie review site) gives it a very good rating of 88%.
Next is a dreadful and overrated movie, which I don’t recommend:
Tree of Life. This is only Terrence Malick’s fifth movie in 38 years of directing. I absolutely loved his 1978 movie Days of Heaven, starring Richard Gere, Sam Shepherd, and Brooke Adams, which I regard as the most beautifully photographed movie ever made. (It gets a 93 on Rotten Tomatoes.) I haven’t seen his later films (if you have, weigh in), but Tree of Life, starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain, and Hunter McCracken, is far from outstanding. In fact, I regret the 139 minutes I spent seeing it.
The movie is about a family in 1950s Waco Texas, with Pitt playing a stern—even abusive—father of three sons, and Chastain as his ethereal and long-suffering wife. Much of the movie is seen through the eyes of young Jack (McCracken); tellingly, the parents’ first names are never given. One of Jack’s brothers dies at 19 of unknown causes, and Jack grows up into Sean Penn, who is seen only briefly in the role of an architect who appears deeply wounded by his upbringing and his brother’s death.
If the movie were only about the plot above, it would be pretty good: the cinematography is wonderful, and the narrative given only in impressionistic snippets which nevertheless add up to a moving portrayal of a young life. But Malick wasn’t content with that: he had to give the whole thing an overblown cosmic significance by making it not just the tragic tale of a family, but the story of the whole creation. Accordingly, about ten minutes into the movie, there is a 45-minute interlude of “creation,” including shots of the cosmos and of galaxies, volcanoes and lava flows, and then EVOLUTION: bacteria, animated dinosaurs in a river (truly a colossal but lolzy mistake on the director’s part), the asteroid hitting Earth 65 million years ago, and then a developing human baby (obviously Jack about to arrive).
There are also ponderous voice-overs by the actors and pictures of a pulsating flame, meant, I think, to represent the divine. The whole movie is suffused with God and religion, and not in a good way, for Malick seems to think that the reality of the divine is what gives his movie significance. The last bit of the movie is truly dreadful: all the characters, including both old and young Jack and his parents and brothers, are walking around barefoot on a beautiful beach, touching each other and reuniting. It’s obviously meant to represent Heaven. In the last scene, Chastain raises her hands to the sun (God is always indicated by the sun or a shot of the sky) and whispers, “I give my son to you,” denoting acceptance at last of his death.
For the life of me I can’t understand either what was in Malick’s head when he made this, or why the critics have tied themselves into knots of rapture about this movie. It received the coveted Palme d’Or (best feature film) at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and critical reception has been almost uniformly good. Even Anthony Lane, one of my favorite movie critics, gave it an enthusiastic review in The New Yorker. It also got a respectable 84% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, though only 63% of the audience liked it.
This could have been a very good movie had Malick dialed back on the religion and creation stuff, and done a bit more with the family and plot. As it is, his attempt to place an unhappy childhood into a frame of creation and evolution of life as a whole has produced a bloated, unsatisfying, and pretentious film. I agree with what one of the stars himself, Sean Penn, said about Tree of Life in a Figaro interview (reported in the Guardian):
“The screenplay is the most magnificent one that I’ve ever read but I couldn’t find that same emotion on screen. . . A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What’s more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly.”
Two opposable thumbs down for this enormous but failed effort.
The official trailer, which downplays the cosmic stuff that is literally half of the movie):
I’m really exhausted with this debate business, but there’s one more post I want to highlight. Brother Blackford, who’s been in the U.S., just got home and has a post on the implications of DebateGate. The most interesting part, I think, is one of Russell’s bugaboos: the widespread notion that religion (as opposed to say, politics) is supposed to be given a pass in public debate, while atheism, of course, is not:
The comments directed at Haught were far more genteel than what we typically see from Christian debaters such as William Lane Craig. I’ve seen Craig far more openly mocking than that in the way he deals with his opponents. However, you might say that Haught did not use any mockery or even any direct criticism of Jerry’s views as expressed elsewhere (such as in articles and posts at Why Evolution Is True). That’s correct. Haught chose to concentrate on sketching his general worldview, putting it in historical perspective, and so on. Still, I’ve seen him, in his books, engage in forms of condescension, mockery, and outright abuse that go far beyond anything we can see Jerry Coyne doing in the video. Haught is not Mr Nice Guy, even if he played that role on the day. He can be as nasty as any nasty “New Atheist”. Indeed, his open letter, with its continual use of emotive, angry language, is nastier (and far more obviously unfair) than anything in the speech that it denounces.
This incident reminds me of the earlier fracas over Jerry’s New Republic review of a couple of books by, respectively, Kenneth Miller and Karl Giberson. Though the review contained some strong criticisms of the books, it was well within the proper bounds of civility for a book review.
And yet, it led to claims (notably from Chris Mooney and apparently Barbara Forrest) that such books should not be reviewed in such a manner – that doing so is uncivil. Once again, the proposal seems to be that religion, or at least “nice” non-fundamentalist religion, should be treated with a special deference that would not be given to, say, economic theories or political ideologies. Anything less than a solicitous attitude to religion counts as incivility. . .
The point is that people like Jerry Coyne are likely to encounter over-the-top reactions even when they engage in thoughtful, and appropriately civil, critiques of theological or religious views. Perhaps some of the reaction to that, in turn, then becomes hurtful or unseemly (Haught claims to have received very abusive emails over the current fracas, for example), and I don’t condone that. But let’s be blunt: Haught needs to get out more if he thinks there was anything remotely inappropriate about the way Jerry conducted himself at the University of Kentucky. It is Haught’s outraged and outrageous open letter that merits our condemnation.
I then went back and looked at what Chris Mooney said (and agreed with) when summarizing Barbara Forrest’s criticism of the New Republic piece. Here’s how we’re supposed to behave when talking to religious moderates (Mooney’s admonitions are indented, separated by my reactions):
1. Etiquette. Or as Forrest put it, “be nice.” Religion is a very private matter, and given that liberal religionists support church-state separation, we really have no business questioning their personal way of making meaning of the world. After all, they are not trying to force it on anybody else.
That’s ridiculous. “They’re not trying to force it on anybody else”? Really? What are Catholics doing all over the world, with their opposition to abortion, birth control and condom use, divorce, and so on? For many years they basically set the law in Ireland, for instance, and still affect it in many other nations. Every time someone takes a religiously-based stand in politics, they’re trying to force their religious views on other people. Trying to force your views on others is what politics is about, of course, but we have every right to criticize politics when they’re motiviated by unevidenced superstititon. Is religion a private matter when it motivates people to blow innocent people up in the name of Allah?
If religion really were a private matter, I doubt that many of us would spend so much time going after it.
2. Diversity. There are so many religions out there, and so much variation even within particular sects or faiths. So why would we want to criticize liberal Christians, who have not sacrificed scientific accuracy, who are pro-evolution, when there are so many fundamentalists out there attacking science and trying to translate their beliefs into public policy?
Why can’t we go after all of those who enable pernicious superstition? That includes nearly all Catholics who deliberately keep silent about the foul crimes and policies of their church, as well as those wingnut fundamentalists. The Pope causes far more harm in this world than do people like William Dembski or Ken Ham. As I’ve said before, the antiscience views of religion are only one part—and not the worst part—of how religion poisons everything.
3. Humility. Science can’t prove a negative: Saying there is no God is saying more than we can ever really know empirically, or based on data and evidence. So why drive a wedge between religious and non-religious defenders of evolution when it is not even possible to definitively prove the former wrong about metaphysics?
Of course science can prove a negative. It can prove that I don’t have four wisdom teeth, or that Barack Obama wasn’t born in Kenya. Presumably neither Mooney nor Forrest believe in Santa Claus. And note where the wedge is driven: “between religious and non-religious defenders of evolution.” Well that wedge also separates some of those who enable harmful superstitions from those who don’t.
I had a bad feeling when he didn’t show up on the television show 60 Minutes for several weeks in a row, and then went on to announce that he was retiring—after 60 years at CBS.
He was America’s Curmudgeon, and, after the three segments of 60 Minutes, I always left it on to see what Andy would say. A lot of the time I wasn’t interested in his rants, but he was often on the mark. I’ll miss him.
Some of his best pieces have been collected here. I love “Mixed nuts” from 1997. Haven’t you ever wondered whether you were being cheated by the presence of so many peanuts? (I’m one of those cheaters who always picks out the cashews.) Andy got paid to answer questions like that (he did more serious pieces, too, of course), and that’s a job I’d love!
This fine Caturday we have two items involving cats as artwork:
If you’ve followed HaughtGate, you’ll find this garment appposite. From artist Richard Smith, it’s a new tee-shirt called “Skeptical kitteh doesn’t like your fish.” It’s available at Redbubble for only $22.44. Get the joke on the cat food bag?
And from last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine “What they were thinking” feature, we have “Now give me fierce: Los Angeles,” a snapshot of a cat photographer with the lolzy name of Richard Katris (photo by Alyson Aliano):
My mom raised cats when I was a child, so I’m very attuned to them. I’ve taken at least 800,000 cat pictures over 35 years. That’s basically what I do for a living.
Right now I am working this cat into position with a toy to take a photo before the Santa Monica Cat Club Cat Show. I’m trying to make the cat realize that nothing bad is going to happen to him. I’ve got a stick and a toy in one hand, and I’ve got a camera in the other, and I’m trying to get him interested in playing with cat toys. I’m trying to get him happy enough — and then get him in the play mode so he forgets where he is and becomes a feral hunter.When that instinct takes over, the fear goes away.
The first reaction of any cat when you take them somewhere they don’t know is, Oh, is this the vet? You’ve got to basically read that cat’s mind before the cat even knows what it’s going to do; you’ve got to convince the cat that photographing it is their idea and that it looks like a good time. You have to make them feel at home.
If things work as you wish them to work, the cat begins to pay total attention to the toy, and the people don’t exist. By positioning that toy, you can make the cat walk in circles and stand up on its hind legs so you get the photograph you want. This one was cooperative.
