Caturday felid: lost cat surfaces after five years, and bonus commercials

September 17, 2011 • 4:20 am

I’ve received this heartwarming tale from many readers who know of my ailuorphilia.  This version is from the New York Times, describing how a cat lost in Colorado turned up in Manhattan five years later:

UPDATE: Willow’s mystery solved: she was found by somebody who took her to New York on a plane. She later  was taken to a shelter, where the microchip was found.

A calico cat named Willow, who disappeared from a home near the Rocky Mountains five years ago, was found on Wednesday on a Manhattan street and will soon be returned to her family, where two of the three children and one of the two dogs may remember her.

A man discovered Willow on East 20th Street on Wednesday and took her to a shelter

How she got to New York, more than 1,800 miles away, and the kind of life she lived in the city are mysteries.

But thanks to a microchip that was implanted when she was a kitten, Willow will be reunited in Boulder, Colo., with her owners, the Squireses, who had long ago given up hope.

According to the article, the cat had apparently recently been a pet, since it was in good condition and not starving.

Willow (photo by Bebeto Matthews, AP)

And here are two nice commercials for Fresh and Light cat litter.

After seeing the video above, one friend commented, “All the cats I have known and loved would wait until you were really comfortable and then decide to apply the CLAWS.”

and other, featuring cat CPR

h/t: Michael

Catholics claim that lies are truer than truth

September 16, 2011 • 8:00 am

There’s a remarkable piece by Mark Shea in the National Catholic Register, “Does evolutionary science disprove the faith?”  It’s remarkable mainly for its claim that you can extract historical and scientific truth from the palpable lies of the Bible.

But let us begin at the beginning. Shea goes after me for my claim—which I stand by 100%—that modern genetics makes nonsense out of the Adam and Eve story, and thus invalidates the entire Christian theology of sin and redemption through Jesus.  We know now from genetics that humanity did not descend from only two ancestors, but from a population of ancestral apes that evolved into hominins, who themselves went through a population bottleneck of roughly a few thousand individuals. (For a full account of the scientific, historical, and theological issues, read Jason Rosenhouse’s posts here, here, and here).  To debunk my criticism, Shea simply cites an article by Mike Flynn at the TOF Spot.  Flynn’s main claim is that there could have been thousands of humans at the time of Adam and Eve, and some of these mated with the First Couple’s spawn, explaining the genetic data.

Dr. Coyne’s primary error seems to be a quantifier shift.  He and his fundamentalist bedfellows appear to hold that the statement:

A: “There is one man from whom all humans are descended”

is equivalent to the statement:

B: “All humans are descended from [only] one man.”
In other words, Flynn sees the solution in (A):
Traditional doctrine requires only A, not B: That all humans share a common ancestor, not that they have no other ancestors. . . . Dr. Coyne believes the mathematical requirement of a population numbering 10,000 somehow refutes the possibility that there were two.  But clearly, where there are 10,000 there are two, many times over.  Genesis tells us that the children of Adam and Eve found mates among the children of men, which would indicate that there were a number of others creatures out there with whom they could mate.
And, in his piece, Shea says this:
But this logical fallacy hinges on an equivocation of “one,” failing to distinguish “one [out of many]” from “[only] one.” Traditional doctrine requires only A, not B: That all humans share a common ancestor, not that they have no other ancestors.
Let’s dispose of this nonsense immediately.  As Jason shows, and a reading of Genesis immediately confirms, there’s no evidence that Adam and Eve were anything but the ancestors of all humanity. Now who their sons married (presumably their sisters) is a matter of theological dispute, but there’s simply no evidence that Adam was contemporaneous with thousands of other people who were created at the same time.  There’s nothing in Genesis to support Flynn’s claim that the children of Adam and Eve found mates among the “sons of men,” if those “sons” were anything other than Adam and Eve’s own spawn.  Both men are relying here not on the Bible, but on some “traditional doctrine” that that there were originally more than two created humans.
Well, there are lots of differing “traditional doctrines” (many of which affirm the literal truth of Genesis), and this version is an attempt to evade the blatant fictionality of the Genesis story by claiming that the book doesn’t say what it seems to say i.e., that it’s all a metaphor.  And to save the story, the theologians show another characteristic feature: they simply make stuff up.  In this case, both Shea and Flynn fabricate a huge population of humans, not directly related to Adam and Eve but living at the same time. There’s not a shred of evidence for that anywhere in the Bible.  It’s theology again, confecting stories to preserve its central message from the ravages of scientific fact.
But enough of that.  Beyond this kind of religious logic-chopping lies an attitude deeply disturbing to anyone who cares about reason. Here’s what Shea says about the Catholic Cathechism (its words are in italics):

As the Catechism itself says:390 The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.

How can Genesis use figurative language, but still affirm a primeval event? It can do it because mythic language is precisely the best way to affirm such an event, an upheaval that inflicted incalculable spiritual damage to the whole of the human race.

Translation: lies are the best way to affirm a truth. Flynn goes on in the same vein, but makes another statement that reminds me of John Haught’s assertion that a video camera recording the Resurrection wouldn’t have shown anything:

Genesis’ account of the fall does the same sort of thing. It uses figurative language to describe a real event which took place here in the real world, not in cloud cuckoo land: Our First Parents abused their free will, sinned against God and fell. The mythic language is truer language than newspaper language, because it brings us to the heart of what happened, which is far more important than a photographic record of what happened. A video of the first man committing the first sin would show us nothing, for the same reason that video of, say, a young Adolf Hitler sitting in a Vienna cafe and looking at an old Jew sipping his coffee would not reveal the momentous moment he turned from thinking, “Is this a Jew?” to thinking “Is this a German?” Traces of when sin, hate and evil are conceived in the heart cannot be detected in fossilized skulls.

Note carefully what Shea is claiming here: that an idle thought by one man (who, unlike Hitler, didn’t do anything!) doomed all humanity to a condition of sinfulness, only to be redeemed by the bloody death of an apocalyptic preacher. How can any rational person buy a story like that?

And if the language is figurative (and there’s no indication that it is: Shea simply realizes that the story wrong in light of modern science), how does he know the event is real?  Making miracles not only one-offs, but one-offs that can’t even be seen when they happen, puts the whole theological enterprise beyond the pale.  That means that there’s no way of knowing that miracles happened even if you were there.   This insulates all miracles from empirical demonstration, which of course means that we can no longer make people saints, and endeavor that depends on two verified miracles. 
Here’s another assertion by Shea in which he simply makes stuff up to save the central doctrine of Christianity:
Adam’s first sin was likewise probably invisible to the naked eye—the mere thought “No” directed at God or his own conscience would be sufficient. For all we know, it might literally have consisted of something as seemingly trivial as stealing a bit of fruit. But it was enough. It sent out shock waves in the heavens and down through human history. But the sciences can have nothing, yay or nay, to say about it.
The appropriate response is that of Delos McKown:  “The invisible and the nonexistent look very much alike.”

Finally, Shea touts the endless resourcefulness of Catholic theology:

Bottom line: There really are resources in the Catholic tradition for digesting this fascinating (but not, I think, anywhere near insuperable) challenge to the popular understanding of human origins and human sinfulness. The Church is in the very early stages of mulling over this matter and I am no prophet, but I suspect that, in a century or two, once the Church has finished puzzling out this matter, she will come down somewhere in the neighborhood of the territory Flynn (and others) are pioneering (though, of course, the science may be very different by then and scientists may, ahem, have come to incorporate or grasp insights to which it is presently blind due to its ignorance of St. Thomas and Catholic theology). Dr. Coyne’s approach is, alas, an example of that problem, but I will draw a discreet veil over that and simply point out that the rumors of the death of Catholic theology are greatly exaggerated.

Yes, we scientists (and rationalists) are severely disadvantaged in comparison to “Catholic tradition” and its theologians. We aren’t allowed to make up untestable stories to buttress our preconceptions, especially when they’re proven wrong.  There is nothing—no evidence in the world—that would make these folks finally admit that the Adam and Eve story and its tale of Original Sin, is a simple human fabrication.  They can always dig deeper into their goody bag of post hoc rationalizations.

BBC goes after atheism tonight

September 16, 2011 • 4:20 am

Today at 8:50 pm London time (rebroadcast Sunday at 8:50 am), BBC Radio 4 (FM) will broadcast what looks to be an accommodationist show taking the line Brother Blackford decries in the post below: who cares whether God exists—religion is a good thing.

The show, “Believing in belief,” by John Gray, can be heard here (but probably only for those in the UK), and it sounds dire. If there’s a podcast available thereafter, especially for those outside Old Blighty, I’ll let you know—if you really want to listen to stuff like this:

John Gray argues that the scientific and rationalist attack on religion is misguided. Extreme atheists do not realise that for most people across the globe, religion is not generally about personal belief. Instead, “Practice – ritual, meditation, a way of life – is what counts.” Central to religion is the power of myth, which still speaks to the contemporary mind. “The idea that science can enable us to live without myths is one of these silly modern stories.” In fact, he argues, science has created its own myth, “chief among them the myth of salvation through science….The idea that humans will rise from the dead may be incredible” he says, “but no more so than the notion that humanity can use science to remake the world”

Whoever said that science will enable us to live without “myths” (he probably means “issues of purpose, value, and meaning”) is absurd.  Humans need those things, but they don’t need religion to get them.  Note also the implicit slur on the truth claims of religion (“the idea that humans will rise from the dead may be incredible”), but the concomitant claim that religions based on falsehoods are essential for humanity’s well-being.

And as for the stupidity of the notion that science can remake the world, compare the world of 1700 with the world of today.  Note the differences.  How many of those are due to science, and how many to religion?  Let’s see: on the one side we have antibiotics and all other medicine, airplanes, computers, Moon landings, our understanding of evolution, lasers, and all the knowledge garnered by biology, chemistry, and physics.  On the other side we have . . . a few new cathedrals.

UK readers: report how it went.

UPDATE: Commenter Sigmund says this: You should be able to hear it live in other countries by clicking on the “listen” link on the top right of this page.

Brother Blackford & Co. defeat the goddies

September 16, 2011 • 4:06 am

Over at the Australian ABC site, Brother Blackford has a nice piece on the “Intelligence squared” debate, in which Russell and two others debated three theologians on the question of “Atheists are wrong.”  (i.e., “does God exist?”). It looks like the anti-godders were more effective, because while those who were goddies stayed about the same before and after the debate (about 28%), the godless figures were bumped during the debate from 56% to 66%, all of these coming from the “undecided” column. That shows that people on the fence are those most likely to be convinced.

Russell’s piece, reprising the debate, is called “Intelligence squared debate: on the crucial points, atheists have got it right.”  Russell points out what I am seeing more and more of: traditional arguments for God’s existence just don’t carry much weight these days. Instead, faithful and faitheists alike rely on arguments why the institution of religion itself is good:

Indeed, no argument of any kind for the existence of a god was developed by them in any concerted way.

Instead, their argument seemed largely an attempt to persuade you that you don’t properly realise what you owe to religion, particularly Christianity. In fact, I acknowledge that the world does not yet realise what it owes religion. But unfortunately for my opponents, it’s beginning to suspect the truth. . .

. . .Much of the argument from the affirmative speakers relies on what is supposed to be a moral malaise in the contemporary world, as if this can be attributed to atheists. Much of what they said was just empty moralising. Nothing follows from it about the existence of a god.

He touches on many things in his piece, including morality and the inconsistency of the fact of evolution and natural selection with a loving God:

So why would an all-powerful, all-knowing God of Love choose a process that foreseeably produces so many atrocious outcomes for the creatures involved?

Why would an all-powerful, all-knowing God of Love choose the cruel, brutal operation of evolution, in which species supersede each other? You can’t reconcile the process of evolution with the existence of such a god.

Theologians have answers, of course, but they’re no more convincing than any other form of theodicy, which truly is the Achilles’ Heel of Abrahamic religion. In the end, because there aren’t good arguments for God’s existence, the atheist side was the winner.

I don’t claim to have proved, once and for all, that no gods exist. No high-profile atheist makes that claim – not Richard Dawkins, not Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris – and neither, generally, do philosophical atheists in universities. Atheists don’t usually make such an overweening claim.

But we do claim that no satisfactory argument has ever been put for believing in any kind of god. Furthermore, there are good reasons to see religion as man-made and at least to rule out the popular idea of an omnicompetent God of Love.

Atheists are not wrong when they decline to accept the God story. On the crucial points, atheists have got it right.

A video of the debate should be available soon at the Intelligence Squared site.

Reflections on 9/11: Sam Harris and others

September 15, 2011 • 11:20 am

The Washington Post’s “On Faith” section from September 8 contains a number of people addressing the issue of “What we have learned about religion post-9/11.”  Contributors range from the Dalai Lama, Karen Armstrong, and Deepak Chopra through Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. Many of the pieces are trite, more or less what you can expect from such a thing, but others are well worth reading.  I was impressed by Sam Harris’s call for reason in “9/11 demands intellectual honesty”, a piece worth reading in its entirety (it’s not long).  An excerpt (I love the first sentence of the second paragraph below):

Whatever else may be wrong with our world, it remains a fact that some of the most terrifying instances of human conflict and stupidity would be unthinkable without religion. And the other ideologies that inspire people to behave like monsters—Stalinism, fascism, etc.—are dangerous precisely because they so resemble religions. Sacrifice for the Dear Leader, however secular, is an act of cultic conformity and worship. Whenever human obsession is channeled in these ways, we can see the ancient framework upon which every religion was built. In our ignorance, fear, and craving for order, we created the gods. And ignorance, fear, and craving keep them with us.

What defenders of religion cannot say is that anyone has ever gone berserk, or that a society ever failed, because people became too reasonable, intellectually honest, or unwilling to be duped by the dogmatism of their neighbors. This skeptical attitude, born of equal parts care and curiosity, is all that “atheists” recommend—and it is typical of nearly every intellectual pursuit apart from theology. Only on the subject of God can smart people still imagine that they reap the fruits of human intelligence even as they plow them under.

Ten years have passed since a group of mostly educated and middle-class men decided to obliterate themselves, along with three thousand innocents, to gain entrance to an imaginary paradise. This problem was always deeper than the threat of terrorism—and our waging an interminable “war on terror” is no answer to it. Yes, we must destroy al Qaeda. But humanity has a larger project—to become sane. If September 11, 2001, should have taught us anything, it is that we must find honest consolation in our capacity for love, creativity, and understanding. This remains possible. It is also necessary. And the alternatives are bleak.

Guest post: why are Catholic priests celibate?

September 15, 2011 • 8:13 am

Our second guest post is by Grania Spingies, a former Catholic, now from Atheist Ireland:

The Curious Case of Catholic Clerical Celibacy

by Grania Spingies

Northern Ireland’s Bishop Edward Daly is trying to get the Catholic Church to accept married priests, mostly because it would boost dwindling numbers of new priests.

His suggestion has little chance of being considered seriously by the Vatican, but thousands of Catholics no doubt agree with him.

I somewhat agree with him myself, mostly because I have always thought that the insistence on celibacy was bizarre and unhealthy.

However he goes on to say “There will always be a place in the church for a celibate priesthood”.

But he doesn’t say why.

It still baffles me that this tradition arose in the first place, especially as Christianity grew out of Judaism which has no such restriction placed on its rabbis. Amongst the justifications I came across during my approximately twenty years as an earnest Catholic is that celibacy focuses the priest’s energy on his work. This strikes me as a particularly weak argument. For one thing, there is no evidence at all that obligatory celibacy results in a higher output of work, and the argument ignores the contradictory evidence from other sects that do have married priests, like the Church of England, in which there is no evidence that the parishes are neglected owing to their priest being married. It also ignores the fact that sexual frustration is hardly conducive to focusing on anything.

A different explanation given for this is that the Church didn’t want to bear the financial burden of the upkeep of a priest’s family. Another is that this was the unintentional result of an early restriction in the Church that people attending Communion were to fast and abstain from sex from midnight before. In early days of the Christian sects, meetings like this were held monthly, but once the ritual became a daily event marriage became a non-viable option for priests.

Whatever reason the faithful now believe to be the correct one, history makes it evident that it was not always a tradition of the Church, it only became (a very unpopular) law in 1139. Technically, it is not even a doctrine of the Church. Even today there are exceptions made – for example, in the case of married Anglican priests who convert to Catholicism. In modern Catholicism the primitive notion of chastity and purity still remains, as if virginity conferred a level of sanctity or holiness that even the monogamous heterosexual marriage bed somehow defiles. The Vatican goes on at great length about the virtue of virginity and abstinence (e.g., here and here ) and of the eschewing of sexual intercourse (warning: it makes no sense if you “believe” in reality rather than mythological eschatology).

If anything, the Church’s insistence on celibacy has probably resulted in attracting a percentage of dysfunctional men who found that they couldn’t relate to women in their normal daily lives on any level. The Church gives them a niche where their discomfort with the female gender is regarded as a positive attribute.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the Church is rife with misogyny and paternalism, and is defined by an unhealthy preoccupation with finding ways to convince its members that sex is something that debases humans and should be controlled rigidly.

Guest post: the conflicted relationship between Intelligent Design and BioLogos

September 15, 2011 • 4:50 am

Two of our readers have contributed guest posts today, which is serendipitous as I’m jammed up for the nonce.

As we know, Stephen Meyer is a Discovery Institute flak who’s garnered more than his share of attention with his pro-intelligent design book, Signature in the Cell. Today, reader Sigmund, who keeps a weather eye on the accommodationist organization BioLogos, discusses its conflicted relationship with Meyer’s book.

BioLogos versus Stephen Meyer

by Sigmund

The slow descent into irrelevancy of BioLogos continues apace. From its inception by Francis Collins in 2007, the BioLogos Foundation’s original emphasis on increasing the acceptance of science amongst evangelical Christians has been gradually replaced by a more traditional focus on ‘worship’ and an increasing defense of Christianity from the challenges of secular reason.

This shift in strategy necessitates an “us-and-them” approach whereby BioLogos demonstrates its Christian credentials by doing its utmost to view fellow believers in a good light. Unfortunately for BioLogos, some of their fellow Christians have rather different objectives when it comes to the public acceptance of the scientific consensus.

A prime example of the problem is illustrated in a recent post by Darrel Falk, the current president of the BioLogos foundation. Falk’s post deals with the work of Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute, in particular his 2009 book ‘Signature in the Cell’. Meyer had recently taken issue with a review of his book in the September 2011 issue of Perspectives on Science and the Christian Faith, a review written by Dennis Venema, a molecular biologist and member of BioLogos.

Meyer’s book is based on the premise that “intelligent design can explain, and does provide the best explanation for (among many contenders, not just chance) the origin of the information necessary to produce the first living cell.” Meyers argues that many of the features of living cells, for example the complexity of proteins or genomic DNA sequences, demonstrate evidence that chance is insufficient to explain their origin.

Venema’s approach to this claim had been to emphasize the use, by evolution, of biological processes such as genomic duplication and mutation in the generation of novel information within the cell. Venema pointed out that Meyers book was, essentially, an argument from ignorance, and that evolution provides an elegant solution to the generation of complexity from less complex precursors.

Meyer’s answer to the destruction of his argument was to promptly shift the goalposts.

Venema was wrong, Meyer claimed, because he had talked about the generation of novel information after biological evolution had begun. Meyer’s argument in ‘Signature in the Cell’ was about the information needed to kick-start biological evolution in the first place. In other words Meyer’s central point was about abiogenesis (the origin of life), not biological evolution. (As a short aside I think it is worth noting that this argument in of itself destroys his thesis. The first self-replicating entity was unlikely to be similar to anything currently living – particularly anything present within existing cells. As such, there is nothing in the ‘signature in the cell’ that could provide evidence for the first replicator requiring an external designer.)

It was at this point that the real problems with the new BioLogos strategy become apparent. Falk, needing to see the best in every Christian, comes across as the theological equivalent of Woody Allen in the aftermath of the nymphomaniac scene in ‘Play it again Sam’. Falk spends almost the entire article wondering “How did I misread those signs?” and getting sidetracked into talking about “complex specified information” an imprecise term regarding complexity, only used by ‘Intelligent Design’ supporters.

While it is clearly a case of the usual dishonest creationist tactics of trying to be vague and then shifting the goalposts when caught out, Falk doesn’t seem to be able to state the obvious.

Needing to maintain a facade of Christian fellowship with Meyer, Falk cannot say Meyer is disingenuous.  Indeed he almost apologizes for missing Meyer’s new line of argument in the original book!

“I don’t know how misunderstandings like this happen. I believe that Stephen Meyer, who I consider to be a friend and colleague, thinks the stipulation exists in his book and that he worded it clearly. I assume he thinks it was implied in some overarching statement that I have not been able to find. I also think he believes he was clear. Unfortunately, clear he was not. I’ve looked thoroughly and I have not been able to find his stipulation.”

He even ends the piece with a prayer!:

“But the most important thing of all has been settled and on this we both agree. This Mind we speak of is God’s Mind–God’s Holy Spirit. That Spirit not only fills all of creation, but more specifically that Spirit fills us with his Presence and envelopes us in his love. This is cause for celebration and, with “sandals off,” we each bow our heads in humble worship. Truly, we–all of us–are standing on holy ground.”

In refusing to forcefully engage the sort of tactics that creationists habitually employ, BioLogos comes across as looking confused and unclear, particularly when faced with the likes of Stephen Meyer, Michael Behe and Jonathan Wells, who, unlike their ‘evolutionary creationist’ adversaries, show no hesitancy whatsoever in spreading their message.

Dawkins talks to the BBC about his new book

September 14, 2011 • 9:24 am

In this 8.5-minute clip from last night’s BBC2 Newsnight, interviewer Jeremy Paxman describes Dawkins’s new book, The Magic of Reality, and discusses it with Richard.  The author is in fine form here, waxing lyrical about evolution and the virtues of reason. Note that Paxman himself doesn’t give a lot of credit to religion: near the end (8:06), when they’re discussing the 40% of Americans who are Biblical literalists on evolution, Paxman asks, “Do you really care that there are a lot of stupid people around?”  (Can you imagine an American interviewer asking that question?)  Dawkins gives a great answer.