Andrew Sullivan is a mush-brained metaphorizer

October 6, 2011 • 5:34 am

I’m sorry for the insult in the title, but I’m just reciprocating Sullivan’s latest invective.

For a Catholic, Andrew Sullivan often has rational opinions.  But his latest attack on me in The Daily Dish, “Must the story of the fall be true?”, isn’t one of them. And since he calls me “dumb”, and uses other strong language, I think I’m entitled to respond by saying this:  Sullivan is a deluded Catholic who not only adheres to fairy tales, but seems to know very little about the history of his own faith.

Taking his cue from Ross Douthat’s similarly-themed piece in the New York Times, Sullivan goes after my attack on Mark Shea’s piece in the Catholic Register.  I criticized Shea for “metaphorizing” the story of Adam and Eve, that is, admitting that it can’t be literally true but giving other explanations of how it could be figuratively “true.”  In Shea’s case, he conceived of the Original Sin as some dude thinking an evil thought while sitting around drinking coffee.  That, he claimed, doomed the rest of humanity to eternal sin and the need for expiation, requiring Jesus to come down to Earth and be crucified.

That’s a dumb scenario, of course.  Better to give up the whole myth of original sin and expiation than engage in such ridiculous intellectual contortions.  And, as I said in my earlier post on Douthat, the mental gymnastics of apologists determined to save their myths deserves no more respect than does the tenacious stupidity of fundamentalists.

At any rate, Sullivan makes this accusation:  I am one of many deluded fools who thinks that the account of Genesis was meant to be taken seriously.  From the outset it was an obvious metaphor, and intended to be seen as such!

There’s no evidence that the Garden of Eden was always regarded as figurative? Really? Has Coyne read the fucking thing? I defy anyone with a brain (or who hasn’t had his brain turned off by fundamentalism) to think it’s meant literally. It’s obviously meant metaphorically. It screams parable. Ross sees the exchange as saying something significant about the atheist mindset – and I largely agree with everything he says, except his definition of “fundamentalist” doesn’t seem to extend much past Pat Robertson. It certainly makes me want to take Jerry Coyne’s arguments less seriously. Someone this opposed to religion ought to have a modicum of education about it. The Dish, if you recall, had a long thread on this subject in August. No one was as dumb as Coyne.

What was Sullivan smoking when he wrote this?  Among the people who have taken the Genesis story seriously are not only the fundamentalists he decries, but the theologians Thomas Aquinas and Augustine (who believed in Adam and Eve), many Popes, and nearly every Christian in the history of Christendom—at least until 1859.  Many of my friends were taught that the Genesis story was true when they were churchgoing kids.Were these people brainless, as Sullivan implies? Were they simply impervious to the obvious metaphor?

Yes, I have read the “fucking thing” (it doesn’t take long), and yes, to many modern ears, aware of what Darwin found, it sounds metaphorical. But not to all of them. Nor did the story “scream parable” to two millennia of Christians, some of them living among us right now.

Finally, if Sullivan has an ear so finely attuned that it’s able to detect which parts of the Bible scream metaphor and which scream “literal truth,” then perhaps he’d grace us with his wisdom. Does he, for example, think that the virgin birth of Jesus, Jesus’s status as God’s son, and his crucifixion, Resurrection, and imminent return “scream metaphor” as well?

Is heaven also a metaphor?  What about God himself?  To my ear, those things scream “fiction”, which is the secular equivalent of “metaphor.”  The thing about “sophisticated” apologists like Sullivan is that they always avoid telling us what Catholic doctrine they see as literally true. They know they’d look pretty bad if they said, for example, that crackers and wine are literally transformed into the body and blood of Jesus.

Like Ross Douthat, Sullivan misses the point.  Of course the Bible sounds like fiction, because it is in its entirety. Good Catholics like Sullivan try to save their religion by reading those fictions as metaphors. You could do the same thing with any scripture, or any myth. But if he really considers himself a Catholic, then surely there’s something in Scripture that Sullivan sees as really, truly true.  Could he please tell us what that is?

Unfortunately, Sullivan doesn’t allow comments on his website, so I can’t post this there. Perhaps, because he reads this site, he’ll come over here and grace us with his opinion.  And perhaps he’d explain why, even if Eden didn’t exist, he’s so sure that there’s God and baby Jesus?

h/t: Tulse

RIP Steve Jobs

October 6, 2011 • 3:54 am

He died way too young (1955-2011).  Without him, who knows what I’d be writing this on?

The tribute at Wired.

The tribute at Apple.

His commencement address at Stanford in 2005:  “How to live before you die.” He’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer two years before (his eight-year post-diagnosis survival is astounding), and surely had intimations of mortality.

“Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. You’ve got to keep going.”

Stoats, weasels and worms

October 6, 2011 • 2:27 am

by Matthew Cobb

Here’s a nice video of my colleague Andrew Gray from the Manchester Museum, describing the similarities and differences between two British mustelids – weasels and stoats – and the perils of eating shrews. Many shrews are infected with parasitic nematodes, which can bore into the skull of the hapless predator. Great close-up of holey skull at the end.

And to show you quite how cuddly stoats can be (as long as you aren’t a shrew), here’s some footage of a stoat kit that Andrew hand-reared before letting him go:

More about Andrew’s work, focusing on frogs, at his blog (NOT website) here.

Ross Douthat doesn’t understand atheism

October 5, 2011 • 6:04 am

I am so honored that conservative Catholic columnist Ross Douthat has seen fit to go after me in a piece in yesterday’s New York Times: “Why atheists need fundamentalists“.   He’s received a lot of criticism for his views and his column (see here, for instance), but hey, publicity is publicity.  And it’s especially good because Douthat’s argument is really lame.

What he claims—and this is an argument I see all the time these days—is that both Biblical fundamentalists and atheists make the mistake of thinking that the correct way to read the Bible is literally, as do Ken Ham or Al Mohler.

Granted—as some commenters here have noted—nobody takes every word of the Bible as literal truth. But many take the stories pretty literally, including the tales of Noah and the flood, the Genesis stories, the tale of Adam and Eve and their Original Sin, and, of course, the whole Jesus mythology.

After all, if lots of people didn’t practice that kind of literalism, we’d have no creationism in America, and the story of Jesus would be a convenient fairy tale, like that of Santa Claus, rather than an object of universal veneration.

But Douthat criticizes New Atheism, and me, for thinking that we go after only the fundamentalist version of religion, ignoring the sophisticated versions propounded by sophisticated theologians like John Haught and sophisticated intellectuals like himself.

Douthat’s example is a piece I wrote on this website about Mark Shea and other Catholic theologians who try to rescue the Adam and Eve story—a linchpin of Christian theology that has been completely destroyed by modern genetics.  I faulted these apologists for simply making up stories to rescue Adam and Eve: asserting, for example, that the pair were simply two humans out of many that were somehow been singled out by God to not only be the sole ancestors of humanity, but the bearers of Original Sin.

Doubthat thinks, then, that all New Atheists conceive of religion as fundamentalism, of Christianity as Biblical fundamentalism, and so we ignore those many Christians who see much of the Bible as metaphor:

It was a peculiar spectacle, to put it mildly: An atheist [Coyne] attacking a traditionalist believer [Shea] for not reading Genesis literally. On the merits, Coyne is of course quite correct that some of the details of the Genesis story seem to contradict what science and archaeology suggest about human origins. (For instance, the claim that Adam and Eve were formed from the dust of the ground and a human rib, respectively, not from millennia upon millennia of evolution, the suggestion that they lived in a garden near the Tigris and the Euphrates, not a hunter-gatherer community in Africa, and … well, you get the idea.) But then again some of the details of the Genesis story seem to contradict one anotheras well, in ways that should inspire even a reader who knows nothing about the controversies surrounding evolution to suspect that what he’s reading isn’t intended as a literal and complete natural history of the human race.

Douthat goes on about the two conflicting narratives in Genesis 1 and 2, the missing wives of Cain and Abel, and all the other Biblical inconsistencies we know about.  But then he shows his ignorance by setting up a false dichotomy:

Now one can draw two possible conclusions from these difficulties. One possibility is that the authors and compilers of Genesis weren’t just liars; they were really stupid liars, who didn’t bother doing the basic work required to make their fabrication remotely plausible or coherent. The other possibility is that Genesis was never intended to be read as a literal blow-by-blow history of the human race’s first few months, and that its account of how sin entered the world partakes of allegorical and symbolic elements — like many other stories in the Bible, from the Book of Job to the Book of Revelation — to make a  theological and moral point.

In effect, he’s making an argument from ignorance, because though Douthat can see only two possibilities, there is in fact another—one that’s the crux of the New Atheist argument. His argument here reminds me of C. S. Lewis’s famous and equally specious trichotomous argument for Jesus as either “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord.”  The problem with both of these arguments is that we’re not constrained to choose among only the choices on offer.  The Bible needn’t be either a complete fabrication by mendacious scribes, or a completely metaphorical account of the origin and fate of humanity. It could be something elese.

How about this alternative?  It’s one that Douthat doesn’t raise, but I believe one that’s more accurate than either of his alternatives:

The Bible is a jerry-rigged, sloppily-edited, largely fabricated, and palpably incomplete collection of oral traditions and myths, once intended to be the best explanation for the origins of our species, but now to be regarded merely as a quaint and occasionally enjoyable origin fable related by ignorant and relatively isolated primitive ancestors. It’s a palimpsest that is largely fictional, a story reworked many times, but based on our ancestors’ best understanding of how we came about.  It’s simply a myth, no truer than the many myths, religious or otherwise, that preceded it. Embedded in it are some good moral lessons, but also many bad moral lessons.  And the “good” morality doesn’t come from God, but was simply worked into the fairy tale by those who adhered to that morality for secular reasons.

That’s pretty much how, I think, most New Atheists regard the Bible.  And what is our problem with people who try to see the Bible as partly metaphorical? It’s just that: they see it as only partly metaphorical.  Yes, Adam and Eve is a fairy tale, and so is Noah, Jonah and the whale, and the creation tale of Genesis.  But, claim people like Douthat, not the whole Bible!  Some of it is true!  And those truths, of course, include the divinity of Jesus, his virgin birth, and his resurrection, as well as all that Original Sin and the Resurrection imply: we’ll be saved through belief in Jesus alone and, if we’re good, we’ll find ourselves in Heaven.

So the problem we have with “sophisticated” theologians and smart religious people like Douthat is not that we think that fundamentalism is the best interpretation of religion, but this:  there is no rational basis for seeing part of the Bible as literally true and part of it as metaphor.  As our increased understanding of the world gives the lie to bit after bit of the Bible, the rational conclusion is that it’s all doubtful, especially in the absence of historical evidence for parts still widely seen as true, like the divinity and Resurrection(or even the existence!) of Jesus.

Nobody, including Douthat, has yet given us criteria for determining which parts of the Bible are true and which are false.  (False parts of the Bible, of course, are not discarded, as they would be in science, but simply transformed into metaphor. This is what’s happening to the Adam and Eve tale as I write).

Until they give us these criteria, we need pay no more attention to the “metaphorizers” like Douthat than we do to Biblical fundamentalists.  The pathetic attempts of metaphorizers to transform Genesis into allegory deserve no more attention or respect than do the literal interpretations of Ken Ham and his ilk.  That’s what I mean when I say, “Give me a good fundamentalist rather than a waffler like Douthat or John Haught.”

In many ways, the torturous attempts of sophisticated theologians to save their Bible in light of its growing status as fiction are far more pathetic than the literalist ravings of Ken Ham or Al Mohler. For at least people like Douthat and Haught show signs of being intelligent, making it even more infuriating when they use their big brains to rationalize the truth of a fairy tale.  Think of all the things these apologists might have accomplished had they used that intelligence for the good of humanity instead of taking good salaries to find “truths” in the Bible.

So our problem is not that we see “true” religion as fundamentalism. Our problem is that we see no way to deconstruct scripture to determine which parts are literally true and which parts are fiction. That whole enterprise is fruitless—and contemptible.

In the end, Douthat even plays the Nazi card!  Referring to his preference for seeing much of the Bible as symbolic and allegorical, Douthat says this:

One can take the latter view and still argue that evolution by natural selection creates challenges for the way Christian theology (though less so Jewish theology, I think) traditionally interprets the Genesis story. (I’ve aired versions of this argument myself: Here, here and here, for instance.) But that’s very different from arguing that either the Genesis story or evolutionary biology has to be a “palpable lie,” and implying anyone who accepts Darwinian evolution has to dismiss the first book of the Old Testament as the ancient equivalent of the Hitler Diaries. This is the view of many fundamentalists, of course. But it’s extremely telling that an atheist like Coyne insists on it as well.

The Genesis story needn’t be either a deliberate lie or an intentional allegory. It was almost certainly the best attempt of our ignorant ancestors to understand their origins.  But, as science and reason have shown, it was wrong.  We’ve put away our childish things.  And we should put away the whole Bible as a childish thing, save for the stirring literary bits and whatever good moral lessons it teaches that happen to coincide with our secular ideas of what is good.

Douthat won’t do that.  While he sees much of the Bible as allegory, I’m sure that when he goes to Mass each week he recites the Nicene Creed, affirming his belief in these “truths”:

  • Jesus is the son of God
  • God is the creator of heaven and earth
  • Jesus was the product of a virgin birth
  • The crucified Jesus was resurrected
  • Jesus will come again to judge us all
  • Our sins will be remitted through baptism
  • There’s an afterlife for the good folks

Tell me, Mr. Douthat: are those allegories, too? When you mouth them in Church each week, are you saying what you really believe?  If not, why do you call yourself a Catholic?

I don’t insist on a view of “true” religion as a literal reading of scripture, whether it be the Bible, the Qur’an, or any other holy book. What I insist on is that those people who see some parts of scripture as metaphor, and others as true, kindly inform us how they know the difference.

Sam Harris interviews Steve Pinker

October 5, 2011 • 5:47 am

Unless you’ve been living in Mongolia, you’ll know that Steve Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, has just come out.  It’s an eloquent and statistics-laden argument for the fact that violence against other people has declined precipitously in the last ten thousand years.  It’s a big book: about 700 pages of prose and with copious endnotes, and I haven’t yet read it. (I believe it took Steve five years of intensive labor.)  But I just got a copy and will dig into it forthwith.

In the meantime, over at his website Sam Harris has an interview with Steve about the book: “Twilight of violence.”

It’s a good interview, touching, among other things, on the question of how one can maintain that violence has decreased in an era when we had the genocides of Stalin and Hitler. (This was a criticism raised in a review of the book that just appeared in The New Yorker).  Steve’s book has met with other criticism—I’ve recounted how the Guardian broached the idea that he might be seen as a “scientific racist,” an assessment that is surely wrong. But there have been great reviews, too (e.g. here), and a little bird told me that more encomiums are in the offing.

I suggest you read the interview and then, if you like how it went, buy the book. It’s a good, meaty volume, and promises to edify even those who disagree with it.

Peregrinations

October 4, 2011 • 3:16 pm

I’m off tomorrow on a seminar trip, speaking on Thursday noon about my research at the Department of Biology of Wesleyan University, then at the Freedom From Religion Foundation convention in Hartford on Saturday, and finally at the University of Kentucky’s Bale Boone Symposium in Lexington, where I’ll debate Catholic theologian John Haught on the compatibility of science and religion.

There will be book signings at the latter two venues, so show up if you want an autographed volume, or simply want to say hi.

I’ll be gone until October 14th, but will try to post as often as time permits.  I hope to cover some of the talks at the FFRF, including Steve Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein’s discussions of their new books.

As always, Matthew Cobb and Greg Mayer will pinch-post in my absence (I hope!).

Cheers!

IQ2 Debate online: “Atheists are wrong”

October 4, 2011 • 12:15 pm

On September 6, Brother Blackford and five other people (three for, three against) participated in a debate in Sydney, Australia on the question given in the tile.  The whole debate—an hour and a half—is now online.  You can see it at Richard Dawkins’s website or at the ABC site from Australia.

I haven’t yet watched it (though I’ve read Brother Blackford’s takes on it), so for the nonce I’m presenting this as a public service. But I will be watching it as soon as possible.

I did watch Russell’s bit, which extends from 54:21 to 1:02:51.  He speaks forcefully and eloquently, emphasizing, as he often does, the fact that religion is most pernicious when it has power through the state.  He also impugns the idea of a good and loving god. And his ending is powerful—a classic argument of New Atheism.

The audience questions begin right after Russell finishes.

If you’ve seen it, or watch it as a result of this post, weigh in below.

Ken Miller, confused, finds free will in quantum mechanics

October 4, 2011 • 10:28 am

This YouTube video, made on March 23 of this year at the New York Academy of Sciences, features biologist Kenneth Miller and theologians John Haught and Nancey Murphy discussing atheism and religion.  Lisa Miller of Newsweek moderates.

It’s one of a series, but I find this video particularly telling because Ken Miller, who professes himself a materialist when it comes to science, waffles when Lisa Miller asks how pure materialism of the mind can lead to freedom of choice.  I find Miller’s answer confusing because he first spews out a lot of scientific facts, and then drags in the issue of “emergent properties,” which, he says, leads to our ability to make moral decisions.

True, but that doesn’t mean that we have free will or make any kind of  real “decisions” (that is, we may have the appearance of having decided something, but that doesn’t mean that those decisions don’t rest entirely on the material components of our brain).  I think what he’s trying to do here is, as a devout Catholic, to somehow suggest that maybe one emergent property comes from God.

But maybe I’m wrong.  Nevertheless, the interesting part starts at 2:23, when Miller says, “I have always been a very strong proponent of the idea of free will.”  He then says that if anyone is a are true materialist, and thinks that materialism militates against free will, then that person “wasn’t paying attention to physics.” (Note Murphey’s enthusiastic nod of agreement at 2:45.)

What? Quantum mechanics to the rescue! Miller continues:

“At its finest level, matter has an inherent unpredictability, which certainly doesn’t explain free will, but certainly gives the lie to the notion that any inherent mechanical system is ultimately predictable.  And I don’t think we are predictable: I think that capacity to make choices is ultimately wired into the circuity of our brain, and that’s how we become autonomous beings; that’s how we make judgments; that’s how we decide to seek the truth and how we make moral decisions.”

The obvious problem is that Miller equates unpredictability with free will. I’m willing to grant that perhaps events on the quantum level would lead to two universes, started off at the exact same physical configuration, winding up at different states in the future. What neither I nor any other competent thinker is willing to concede is that quantum unpredictability has anything to do with “free will”.  A “decision” does not become free if it’s merely the result of the unpredictable movement of an electron somewhere in our brain.  How can anyone believe that stuff?

If you can tolerate that, try another segment of the discussion, “What the new atheists get wrong.”

What I want to know is this: why was this discussion presented at the New York Academy of Sciences?  What does it have to do with science?