Rosenhouse on Andrew Sullivan—again

October 8, 2011 • 9:07 am

As L’affaire Sullivan winds its way to its squalid end, with Andrew looking (to many at least) as a superstitious bully who knows nothing of the history of Christianity, you should have a look at Jason Rosenhouse’s latest post at EvolutionBlog, “Who gets to define Christianity?”

Jason is responding this statement by Sullivan about those many Americans who take the Genesis story and the Adam and Eve myth as literal truth:

Christianity is not and never has been defined by a majority of American believers in 2011. It has existed for two millennia in countless forms and incarnations, if you pardon the expression. My own dismay at what passes for Christianity today is not exactly a secret on this blog. I can agree with Coyne on this and still find him crude and uninformed about the faith he has such contempt for.

Jason responds by making a point that I’ve emphasized before—one that’s obvious to those, including two atheist Jews, who know anything about religion:

But Sullivan is not just placing himself in opposition to a majority of American believers in 2011. He is also placing himself in direct opposition to the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church. It is not as though atheists, motivated by a desire to make Christians look foolish, came up with the idea that Adam and Eve were real people who actually sinned. We’re not the ones who wrongly discerned historical content in what certainly seems to be an ancient myth. As we saw in yesterday’s post, the reality of Adam and Eve and the transmission of their sin through “ordinary generation” was, for most of Christian history, central to how most people saw themselves, and it was an idea promoted by virtually all of the great Christian theologians. Yet Sullivan denounces them all as brainless. Hence my description of his views as arrogant.

This brand of arrogance is typical of “sophisticated” believers and theologians, who implicitly decry the majority of fellow Catholics (or other Christians) as fundamentally ignorant of religion and of the real nature of God. The religion of such people, the sophisticates imply, is simply wrong. Yet what’s more ironic is that many theologians, or people like Sullivan, characterize themselves as “humble,” despite their arrogant view that they, alone among Christians, have the handle on truth.

Jason then makes a point that’s obvious, but cannot be made too often:

That’s not the interesting part, though. Sullivan’s statement got me wondering about the question of how Christianity is defined. I would argue that Christianity, or any other religion for that matter, is defined solely by what communities of believers say it means. There is no objective standard or Platonic essence to which you can refer. There is no basis for saying, with regard to how a particular community practices Christianity, “You’re doing it wrong!” unless that statement is just short hand for, “I don’t like the way you’re doing it.”

Fundamentalists are often criticized for acting as though they are the only ones practicing authentic Christianity. That criticism is well-deserved. But it is no better when more moderate Christians assume the same pose, acting as though they are the ones who really understand what Christianity is all about. When skeptics address themselves to culturally dominant versions of Christianity, exposing its beliefs as unwarranted and perhaps even dangerous, it is not a serious reply to say, “But you haven’t criticized real Christianity, as practiced by myself and a handful of other sophisticates.”

Politically I’m all in favor of religious moderation. If we’re stuck with religion as a serious social force, far better it be the sort of faith that is flexible with regard to doctrine. Intellectually, though, I don’t find it to be much of an improvement over what the fundamentalists offer. Sullivan’s understanding of original sin is, so far as I can tell, something he simply made up. I can find in it not the slightest connection either to the Biblical text, or to traditional Christian teaching.

John Haught, the Catholic theologian whom I’ll be debating in a week, is of this stripe as well.  All his books on accommodating science and faith rest on the same idea: those Christians who deny evolution on Biblical grounds are not only wrong, but misunderstand how God worked—by using evolution as his pen to write the great play of life.  They (and we scientists) don’t realize, as Haught does, that beneath the apparent naturalism of cosmic and biological evolution is an unfolding drama, in which God is moving things forward toward a Teilhardian “omega point” in which the essence of every being that ever lived will be enfolded into the bosom of Jesus.

Some humility!

_______________________

UPDATE:  I’ve just noticed that, over at Choice in Dying, Eric MacDonald has also gone after Ross Douthat and Andrew Sullivan for their equivocation about the Fall; e.g.,

Douthat and Sullivan can’t play both sides of the street here. They can’t scream “Parable!” when they’re making fun of Jerry Coyne, and then take it literally when they go to Mass of a Sunday morning (or Saturday night, just for the sake of convenience!). And if it screams “Parable!” then they’re going to have to answer the question how it came about that someone had to be sacrificed on a cross for the sake of a story, and how they distinguish between myths and stories and history.

East Coast tour: 1. Connecticut comestibles and the apotheosis of pizzas

October 8, 2011 • 7:04 am

I’ve just finished the first day of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) convention, which is way fun.  We toured Mark Twain’s house, and in the evening Dan Barker played piano and sang songs (including a love song he wrote for the two evening speakers, who are married to each other), Dan and Annie Laurie Gaylor gave a report on the year’s activities of the FFRF, and then Steve Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein talked about their new books.

I have photos and more to say on this, but first things first: comestibles. On Thursday I gave a science talk at Wesleyan University, and, when I accepted their invitation, I requested that I be taken to eat at one of the famous pizza joints that dot Connecticut.  My host, Fred Cohan, fortuitously chose what is perhaps the best: Pepe’s Pizza on Wooster Street in New Haven.

This place, opened by Frank Pepe in the 1920’s, is a legend.  Here’s the founder (later pictures show an increasing corpulence, no doubt due to consumption of his own product):

According to Michael Stern, the doyen of indigenous American cuisine:

Crust is what makes a Pepe’s pizza outstanding. It is Neapolitan style — thin but not brittle, with a real bready flavor. Cooked at high temperature on the brick floor of the ancient oven, it is dark around its burnished gold edge, and there is a good chew to every bite. The pizza men aren’t too fussy about scraping the oven floor, so it is likely the pizza’s underside will be speckled with burnt grains of semolina and maybe even blotched by an oil spill where another pizza leaked, all of which give the mottled oval a kind of reckless sex appeal that no tidy pie could ever match.

Here’s the oven, which consists of an open brick chamber with an adjacent chamber which contains a pile of fiercely glowing coals:

And the fuel:

Stern continues:

Frank Pepe, New Haven pizza’s Zeus, started very simply, selling pies that were nothing more than tomato with a few pinches of anchovy. To this day, Pepe’s premier pizza is made without mozzarella. It is called a white clam pie, and it is nothing but crust strewn with freshly-shucked littleneck clams, olive oil, garlic, oregano, and a dash of grated cheese. Without a mozzarella mantle, the dough develops wicked resilience, its mottled surface frosted gold. Mozzarella with onion (but no tomatoes, and perhaps a bit of garlic added) is another long-time favorite, as are the more traditional configurations with tomato sauce, cheese, pepperoni, and sausage. Broccoli and spinach are more recent additions to the kitchen’s repertoire; they are well suited to a white pie with mozzarella and garlic. But if you are coming to Pepe’s for the first time, try the white clam pie. It’s roadfood heaven.

Ever since I read about Pepe’s a few decades ago, I wanted to go there and try their white clam pie.  I was anxious before our visit, because sometimes they run out of fresh clams, and they won’t use canned ones. But we were in luck: fresh clams were on tap, and we got our pie.  And what a gorgeous thing it was, too:

This may well have been the best pizza I’ve ever had. The crust was as Stern describes it: chewy, substantial, and with some crispy bits.  And, oh, the topping was lovely. You might think that a pizza with cheese, clams, oregano, olive oil, and garlic sounds weird, but it was fantastic.

Here’s my host, Fred Cohan, downing a slice (Fred works on the evolution of bacterial diversity). We made short work of what was a very large pie:

De rigueur for washing down the pie is a local favorite, birch beer: a soft drink made from birch bark.  Birch beer is to clam pizza as Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray tonic is to a pastrami sandwich:

The other person at our meal was Barry Chernoff, a prolific freshwater ecologist who specializes in fish ecology and runs a large environmental program at Wesleyan.  He also plays guitar in a rock band and rides his pride and joy, a 2002 Honda Goldwing GL 1800 motorcycle.  This is an 1800 cc motorcycle; there are cars with engines smaller than that!  Here’s Barry on his monster bike:

Now before some health-food miscreant tells me that I’m eating all rong, let me say that I regard seminar trips as “free food zones,” in which I can indulge in a little not-really-healthy food. I don’t eat like this all the time!

That said, here was breakfast next day at O’Rourke’s, a famous diner in Middletown, where Wesleyan is located:

Desayuno:  A guacamole/jalapeno omelet with chili, black beans, hashed browns, and toasted Irish soda bread. The breakfast menu is about ten pages long, with a whole page devoted solely to versions of Eggs Benedict:

Finally, dinner the night before last was at a local Oaxacan place in Middletown, Iguanas Ranas Taqueria. I had a monstrous burrito filled with tender chicken and caramelized onions.  It was delightful, especially when washed down with Dogfish 60-minute Ale:

I’ll have more to say about godlessness (with photos) in a subsequent post. Right now I’m letting the toxins work their way out of my system.

Bill O’Reilly tries to show that Dawkins’s children’s book is atheistic propaganda

October 7, 2011 • 12:35 pm

On Wednesday, Catholic demagogue and broadcaster Bill O’Reilly “interviewed”—I use the term loosely—Richard Dawkins about his new children’s book, The Magic of Reality.  Watch the four-minute interview here.

O’Reilly tries his best to make Dawkins admit that he “mocks God” in his book (watch O’Reilly’s triumphant “AHA!!” when Richard says that he talks about “myths from around the world” at exactly one minute in); and argues that the book is pure atheistic propaganda for kids.

O’Reilly then plays the Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao atheists-are-genocidal-maniacs card, which Dawkins defuses handily.

O’Reilly then completely loses it, trying to conflate intelligent design, the origin of life, and the goodness of Jesus and the Buddha.  Richard manages to keep his composure; I doubt that Hitchens would have remained so cool in the face of O’Reilly’s religion-fuelled vitriol.

Tellingly, Fox news titles the video, “O’Reilly crushes atheist Richard Dawkins.”  Watch the video and see if you think that description bears any resemblance to the truth.

Over at her website, Miranda Hale has a more complete analysis, complete with lolzy illustrations.

But for the classic Bill O’Reilly meltdown, now an internet meme, go here (warning: language in that the the following videos is NSFW). Here’s the dance remix, and the Family Guy parody.

Andrew Sullivan is plenty peeved; responds

October 7, 2011 • 5:21 am

Oh dear, I have got Andrew Sullivan’s knickers in a twist. His original attack of me for conceiving of all religion as “fundamentalism” was uncharacteristically intemperate, and forced me to respond with equal vigor.

(For a very strong critique of both Sullivan’s piece and Ross Douthat’s similar views in the New York Times, see Jason Rosenhouse’s superb response at EvolutionBlog. Jason shows that there’s no support for Douthat’s view that the Adam-and-Eve story was part metaphor and part truth, and he completely demolishes Sullivan’s claim that hardly anyone ever took that story as gospel over the whole history of Christianity).

Anyway, Sullivan is clearly ticked off and just as intemperate as before.  He’s come back at me at the Daily Dish in a piece called “Must the story of the fall be true? Ctd.” He repeats his views that he “can agree with Coyne on this [the sad state of modern Christian apologetics] and still find him crude and uninformed about the faith he has such contempt for.”

His response is notable for two things. First, he doesn’t really respond, but merely reproduces, without much response, several comments made by readers on this site. So he’s been reading the posts and comments here, but is too cowardly to respond—and of course he doesn’t allow any comments at his own site.

Second, he tries to defend Original Sin in a bizarre and incoherent way. I reproduce below his full defense, a lovely piece of obfuscatory apologetics:

I would argue that original sin is a mystery that makes sense of our species’ predicament – not a literal account of a temporal moment when we were all angels and a single act that made us all beasts. We are beasts with the moral imagination of angels. But if we are beasts, then where did that moral imagination come from? If it is coterminous with intelligence and self-awareness, as understood by evolution, then it presents human life as a paradox, and makes sense of the parable. For are we not tempted to believe we can master the universe with our minds – only to find that we cannot, and that the attempt can be counter-productive or even fatal? Isn’t that delusion what Genesis warns against?

The answer to his last question is “no.”  Saying that we are creatures with evolved and culturally-derived morality (yes, Andrew, that’s where our moral imagination came from, not from God), and can be both good and bad, is hardly a “paradox”.  And how is it “fatal” to try to master the universe with our minds? We’ve done a pretty good job of it so far.  We sure haven’t mastered it with our nonexistent “souls”—or with a belief in baby Jesus.

He goes on:

The Fall and the Resurrection are the bookends of that paradox. It could well be, as my lapsed Catholic reader believes, that we have become morally better over 200,000 years, that gain is possible, that our better angels can progressively master our raging beasts within. But part of that was fueled by religious evolution, as Bob Wright has brilliantly laid out. So it’s possible that the Fall does indeed lead to the Resurrection, but that it is only finally fulfilled by humankind’s ultimate, universal embrace of a loving God through the aeons of time. Doesn’t Christian eschatology strongly hint at exactly such an ultimate resolution? You just have to let go of certain neuroses when you read and ponder texts about profound mysteries rendered into stories. That’s why doubt fuels faith. It prevents you from fixating on a particular pattern of thought that blinds you to the richness of other interpretations of the same, basic truth.

First of all, Wright certainly does not show that humans have become morally better over the last 200,000 years.  He gives no data on that point, asserting only that scripture has become more moral since the early days of polytheism. But even if Wright is correct (and I don’t think he is), that says nothing about whether such putative moral improvement has anything to do with validating the Christian myth.  In fact, if we’ve become progressively better over time, then why do we think there was a “Fall”? And even if there was a Fall, why does that give evidence for Sullivan’s belief in God, Jesus, and the Resurrection?

All Sullivan is doing here is confecting a post facto story to justify his Catholic beliefs. But the story is unconvincing.  He has not come close to answering my main question: how does he know that certain parts of the Bible—like Adam and Eve and the Fall—are to be taken metaphorically, while others—like the existence of God, Jesus, the Resurrection, and the expiation of sin “through the universal embrace of a loving God”—are true.  Once again, he’s cherry-picking, and he’s plenty mad that I called him out on it.  And like many “sophisticated” believers, he absolutely refuses to divulge what he believes.

I have little more to say to this superstitious bully.  I would gladly have commented on his site had he allowed comments, and he’s too lame to comment on my site.  He defends himself at a place—his blog—where he’s impervious to criticism.

We see in Sullivan what we see so often these days: a smart person who completely loses it when it comes to defending his faith.  Rather than give up his untenable Catholicism—after all, he’s a vocal gay man who belongs to a Church whose official policy condemns gays—he simply makes stuff up to explain why the Catholic myth is okay.  He’s one of those people who wants to appear progressive and down with science, but can’t bear to abandon the superstititions that give him so much comfort. This is a fundamental reason for the rise of accommodationism.

In a way I feel sorry for Sullivan.  But I’m more angry than sorry, for he obstinately fails to deal with the elephant in his room: that the Church he so ardently defends says that he’ll go to hell for his brand of sexuality.  He should not be a Catholic.

We have a winner!

October 6, 2011 • 2:06 pm

Unlike last year, this year’s name-the-literature–laureate contest actually has a winner: “uygar,” who correctly guessed that the winner of today’s Nobel Prize in Literature was Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer.

I’ve never heard of Transtromer, which shows how parochial I am when it comes to literature not written in English. But damn, isn’t it time that Salman Rushdie got it, too?

If you’re “uygar,” email me for your autographed copy of WEIT.