Da roolz

August 5, 2011 • 4:26 am

From time to time I feel compelled to reiterate my policies about posting, especially since we’ve just received an influx of new posters of religious persuasion.  Here are a few guidelines:

1. If you’re a first-time poster, I have to approve your comment before it appears.  That might not be instantaneous since I’m not always within striking distance of a computer.

2.  Most of our readers are atheists.  If you come over here professing belief in God in a loud or obnoxious way, I reserve the right to request that you describe the evidence that led to your belief.  If you fail to provide it, you may not be allowed to post again.

3.  I do not mind substantive posts, for I think they foster discussion. But please be reasonable. Within the last few days I’ve received VERY LONG comments, all from religious people about my article in USA Today. Some of their contributions have been nearly 1200 words long!  Be aware that I can’t publish such essays on this website. If you have your own site, please put them there, or condense them to a reasonable size.

4.  No name-calling, please.  You can refer to ideas as moronic or stupid, but I’d appreciate it you didn’t insult other posters.  If you do, I usually hold back the post and contact the poster privately, asking him/her to deep-six the invective.

5.   I especially don’t like nasty comments about the contents of this site. If you don’t like cats or posts about food, please just go elsewhere.

6.  Ceci n’est pas un blog. It’s a website.  Don’t try to convince me otherwise, for it won’t work. Just regard it as one of my endearing quirks.

7.  By all means correct me if I’m wrong.  I doubt that I’ve ever written a post, even about science, that hasn’t contained an error.  But it adds nothing to start your criticism with “I hate to be picky, but . . . “.

8.  If the spirit moves you, feel free to send me items that you think I or the readers would find interesting. I can’t of course use them all, but a surprisingly large number of posts are inspired by reader suggestions.  If you have a special cat (and what cat isn’t special?), consider sending me a short paragraph and a photo or two for the weekly “readers’ cats” feature.  You can find my email simply by Googling “Jerry Coyne University of Chicago.”

kthxbye

Who’s more hateful: atheists or goddies?

August 4, 2011 • 1:07 pm

UPDATE: In his comment below, DiSalvo gives contact information: “My email link on that site evidently isn’t working, but you can send email via my personal site, here.

Over at his Forbes blog Neuropsyched, science writer David DiSalvo takes up the question “Religion vs. Atheism”: Which side can rightly claim to be reasonable and tolerant?” His motivation was my post on the death threats issued by the faithful against Blair Scott, an official of American Atheists, especially my statement, “Perhaps some atheists have issued death threats against religious people, but I don’t know of any, and, at any rate, they must be much rarer than those aimed in the opposite direction.”

DiSalvo’s question:

Coyne’s first statement intrigues me, and my inner-researcher wants to know if he’s right.  Which side is responsible for most of the hate mail and death threats, the religious or the atheists?  Who has the greater right to call themselves reasonable and tolerant?

It would be difficult, I think, to answer those questions quantitatively. But I’m betting there’s enough evidence out there that a fair qualitative estimate is reachable.

So let’s make this a community project.  Please send me, or leave in the comments section, any information you think helps flesh-out an answer.  I’ll take a look at everything you send, in addition to what I find, and report back with results in a future post.

Well, if you have any information, go on over to his site and post it (he says his email is on the sidebar, but I can’t find it).  I suspect DiSalvo might want to begin with Richard Dawkins reading his hate mail.

More emails about morality

August 4, 2011 • 10:34 am

I continue to get peevish emails from both believers and pastors who have taken exception to my argument in USA Today that morality cannot come from divine will.   But there are some thoughtful emails too, and I’ve put one of them below, removing the name of the sender.

Hi Professor Coyne,

I did not see an email address on your website and hope that one of the address attempts above is correct.  I have wanted to send a note along since reading your article entitled, “You can be good without God” in USA Today on Monday.  In looking at your site it appears that the article has already generated the predictable range of divergent opinion.  I write more privately here to try and suggest some reconsideration of the character of the debate you established by that article.  I trust that writing in that particular paper suggests an effort to reach a wider audience, and that creating controversy was, at least in part, your intent.  I truly hope that you are aware that the arguments you posed were directed at more fundamentalist religious beliefs but do an immense injustice to the full range of Judeo-Christian religious tradition (since you pose your arguments within that context).  Much of the more progressive theology within that broad tradition is fully respectful of scientific evolutionary thought as well as full literary criticism of biblical texts.  We may disagree about how compatible they remain, but I suspect you are aware that many educated religious believers would find your arguments disconcerting and even silly, evidencing as they do so little appreciation or understanding of the deeper philosophical and scientific tenets truly worth debating in their implications for continued evolution of thought and moral practice.

In my opinion, the more rabid fundamentalist theology apparently deepening in America is largely the product of the growing social and economic anxiety that is infecting our populace.  As a mental health clinician, I have watched such anxiety increase across generations, especially in recent decades.  But arguments posed by authors like Dawkins, Pinker, and yourself will do little to help those very emotionally insecure people.  They also, I hope you know, have been historically debated in far more rigorous scientific and philosophical dialogues than any of you provide in your attempts within the popular media.  I for one, like Darwin, remain open to theism, and as one who has spent almost sixty years observing human behavior, let me lend you one piece of anecdotal, but highly critical, summary that contrasts your own: genuine and open religious belief tends to be highly encouraging of personal and social morality, and I observe far more open-ended logic in genuinely debating issues of choice from religious ideological frameworks than from reasoned opinions like those in your article.  To give only one example before closing, you ask the question, “Do actions become moral simply because they are dictated by God, or are they dictated by God because they are moral?”  Those who truly study religious understanding as a developmental (evolutionary) awareness see in the unfolding perspectives of universal order the realization of a moral hierarchy of goodness, and the revealed presence of an originating Cause (as Darwin did).  They no longer frame the debate by way of proof texts from the Bible, but see the biblical texts as the living embodiment of that process of discovery and history of success and failure in human response.  That many fundamentalist Christians minimize or ignore the historicity of biblical passages is no more reason to debate and defame them than is ridiculing a child for lacking full moral comprehension of their actions.  I respect that your quest for scientism is your own personal religious cause (in the sense of promoting meaning for human awareness/living), but please at least evidence the courage to debate those with arguments of genuine intellectual rigor.  If you keep an open mind empirically, you might yet discover something in traditional religious ideologies worth respecting, and realize that there are far more important causes to champion as a scientist in our age than the one you’ve embraced in the media.  Many progressive religious theologians and teachers are ready to join with you to face our monumental climatic danger.

With sincere best wishes, [Name redacted]

While this piece is well-written and thoughtful, I really don’t get it at all.   The author implies that none of the New Atheists, including myself, have grappled with the more sophisticated theological arguments for deriving morality from faith, yet (as usual) none of these arguments are mentioned!  What the author does say is this:

Much of the more progressive theology within that broad tradition is fully respectful of scientific evolutionary thought as well as full literary criticism of biblical texts. . . I suspect you are aware that many educated religious believers would find your arguments disconcerting and even silly, evidencing as they do so little appreciation or understanding of the deeper philosophical and scientific tenets truly worth debating in their implications for continued evolution of thought and moral practice.

But that’s the point: ethics moves forward from debating both philosophy and science (an example of the latter is Sam Harris’s notion that well being is the true currency of ethical judgment), not thinking about what God wants.  And that was the argument of my piece.

As for the claim that “genuine and open religious belief tends to be highly encouraging of personal and social morality,” it’s either tautological (that is, only those religions that encourage morality are deemed “genuine and open”) or untested.  Where is the evidence that the faithful are more moral than the faithless? I know of none.  What we do know is that entire religious institutions, like Catholicism, continue to promulgate immoral behavior, and adherents of faiths like Islam continue to oppress women— and murder apostates and non-Muslims—on religious grounds.

This seem to be the crux of correspondent X’s argument:

Those who truly study religious understanding as a developmental (evolutionary) awareness see in the unfolding perspectives of universal order the realization of a moral hierarchy of goodness, and the revealed presence of an originating Cause (as Darwin did).  They no longer frame the debate by way of proof texts from the Bible, but see the biblical texts as the living embodiment of that process of discovery and history of success and failure in human response.

I’ve read these sentences several times, and can’t discern in them any meaning at all, much less any notion of how God provides morality.  What on earth are the “unfolding perspectives of universal order”? And how come the “originating Cause” hasn’t reveled itself to me? (The idea that Darwin was a theist in this way is palpable nonsense, of course.)  Such is the obscurantism of theology.

And seeing biblical texts as the embodiment of “discovery and success in human response” is a failure on two counts: the morality of the Bible is in many ways not consonant with that of our own day, and even if it were, its embodiment of human moral thought at some time in history has no bearing whatsoever on whether that thought was based on religion.  If the Bible is man made, as most of us think it is, then its morality would also be man made, and simply voiced through a fictitious sky daddy.

Last night I read a book by John Polkinghorne, who argues that God’s fiats must be good because God, as the Greatest Possible Being, is good by definition, and therefore incapable of mandating what is not moral. That, of course, contravenes God’s own dictates in the Old Testament.  But it’s also circular, because there’s no independent evidence that God is good; in fact, the sad condition of our species leads me to believe that if he does exist, he’s either malicious or apathetic.  Shakespeare knew this in King Lear, where he has Gloucester say,

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.

_______

I’m not going to deal with the many “refutations” of my piece that are appearing on Christian websites, but I do call your attention to the huffy lucubrations of Tom Gilson at Thinking Christian, who says that I willfully ignore an important “solution” to the Euthyphro dilemma.  What is it? It’s William Lane Craig’s argument (similar to that of Polkinghorne given above) that God by definition can’t mandate anything immoral (see Eric MacDonald and Greta Christina’s takes on this).  If God ordered the slaughter of the Canaanites, then by golly they deserved it!

St. Petersburg: Dostoyevsky

August 4, 2011 • 5:48 am

While I didn’t tote up all the votes for the various aspects of St. Petersburg for this week’s show-and-tell, the top three choices seemed to be Dostoyevsky, cats, and food.

Let’s start with Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881; 60 years was a good long life then). I won’t recount his biography, as you can find that in numerous places, including Wikipedia, but I will say that I find him among the world’s very best authors, with Crime and Punishment, set in St. Petersburg, as his best book (The Brothers Karamazov, with its stirring episode of The Grand Inquisitor, detailing the interrogation of the returned Jesus and touching on the conflict between reason and faith, runs a close second).  I have to add that although I consider Dostoyevsky the greatest Russian writer, I think the greatest Russian novel is Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.  I should also add that I’ve read all of his (and Tolstoy’s) novels in the Constance Garnett translations, though I hear there are better ones now (readers, please weigh in here).

Here he is (I took all the pictures in his last apartment; click to enlarge):

He is one of those supreme talents who seem to come out of nowhere.  An epileptic, a chain-smoker, and an inveterate gambler, he rushed out (can you imagine!) Crime and Punishment to settle his gambling debts.  That story, of course, also takes place in St. Petersburg, though I did not visit the building where Raskolnikov was supposed to live, nor the place where he supposedly hid the purse he took from the woman he murdered.

As part of a clique of young intellectuals, Dostoevsky was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul fortress, the original site of St. Petersburg.  In 1849 he was subject to a mock execution: he and several others were placed in front of a firing squad, expecting to die. At the last moment the execution was called off—it was only a ruse to scare the prisoners. One can only imagine the effect this would have on one’s life. Here’s the fortress today; the tall golden spire belongs to the SS Peter and Paul Cathedral, where all the tsars since Peter the Great are buried, including the recently-interred Romanovs who were shot by the Bolsheviks.  (I’ll show that place later.)

He was later exiled to Siberia, a dire experience that produced his House of the Dead.

Dostoyevsky returned to St. Petersburg in 1859 and lived there the rest of his life.  He changed apartments every few years, and had few possessions.  After his first wife died, he married a much younger woman, Anna Grignorevna, who served as his assistant and amanuensis (I’m told that he often dictated his novels to her).

His last apartment, where he lived from 1878 until his death in 1881, is located on Kuznechny street, a short trek from the Nevsky Prospekt.  He lived on the second floor of this building:

There is a plaque on the outside:



The apartment is a small warren of rooms, the most famous being  his study, where he would write all night and smoke.  The couch behind his desk—the desk where he wrote The Brothers Karamazov—was where he often slept. Note the clock.

Here’s is a copy of Crime and Punishment, along with a reproduction of one of the manuscript pages.  My Chicago colleague Ilya Ruvinsky has kindly furnished translations and explanations:

The title page of a book is indeed “Crime and Punishment”. Judging by the date (1867) and that it says “corrected edition” it is either not the first edition, or the first edition as a stand-alone book that was corrected compared to the previous publication (1866) in a literary magazine.

Here’s the desk where Anna Grignorevna would correct Dostoyevsky’s manuscripts, handle his correspondence and finances, and help market his books:

And here is the salon in which that desk resides:

Beside the desk is an autographed portrait of Dostoyevsky, which Ilya translates as

“To my kind Anya from me. F. Dostevsky. 14 June/80 y(ear)”.
The word used for “kind” is a bit unusual in such a context. It is not “dear” for example. I assume “Anya” refers to his wife A. N. Snitkina [Anya Grigovrevna].

On the sideboard beside the desk are two papers, translated by Ilya as:

The printed letters say
“Book sellers
F. M. Dostoevsky
(exclusively for out-of-towners (or nonresidents))
S. P. B. (which is an abbreviation for St. Petersburg) Kuznechny lane, 5 (unclear)

I can’t make out every word of the letter below, but it goes something like this:
Kindly issue (not clear to whom, probably to FMD, and by whom) 1 book of “David Copperfield” in exchange for my publications which will be delivered on Monday, Jan. 26.
Jan. 24 1881, F. Dostoevsky”
(Note, this was written just a couple of weeks before Dostoevsky died.)
I can’t read the writing on the right, except for the top (title) line that stats with “Chapter 5…”

Here is the dining room:

and the children’s room:

Here is Dostoyevsky’s hat, the only item of clothing recovered from his “estate”.  Oh, how I wished that I could have put it on!

Dostoyevsky died on February 9, 1881. His clock was stopped at the moment of his death (Ilya notes, “Which reminds me that the dates as written refer to what is known as OS [“Old Style”, i.e. Julian calendar]. Russia used it until after the Revolution.
For instance, Dostoevsky’s date of death is now given as Feb. 9.”)

To me the most poignant item in the museum is this: a box of Dostoyevsky’s cigarettes signed by his daughter.  Fyodor loved to smoke, even though his doctors forbade it because of his emphysema.  On the day he died, his daughter Lyubov wrote on the bottom of the box, “February 28, 1881. Papa died.”  She was 12.

Here is Dostoyevsky’s death mask:

And his statue in the nearby Vladimirskaya Place:

Sadly, I didn’t have time to visit his grave in the nearby Alexander Nevsky Monastery, but here’s a photo, not taken by me:

Here’s to a very great writer and a great, though flawed, man.

Sweet home Chicago

August 3, 2011 • 7:11 am

I loved being in St. Petersburg, but it’s also good to be home. Here are three shots of Chicago I took right before I left; as I recall, it’s during one sunset.

I’ll begin posting photos and account of my trip tomorrow.  I have tons of things to talk about and show—what would you like to hear about and see first? I can’t decide, so I’ll let you guys do it.

  1. The Hermitage and its art
  2. Other Russian art
  3. The city of St. Petersburg
  4. Dostoevsky’s pad
  5. Russian cats
  6. Russian food
  7. Signs of the revolution
  8. The Tsars

I get email

August 3, 2011 • 3:30 am

In the past two days, since my USA Today piece on secular morality appeared, I’ve gotten about two dozen private emails from the faithful.  One or two of them are reasoned and polite, disassociating themselves with the rabid coreligionists who posted inane comments on the site, but the remainder are remarkably hotheaded and impolite.  I’m always amazed that someone will respond to a fairly non-strident piece with an impolite and harsh response.

Here’s one of the funnier ones, and I don’t think the good reverend (or whatever he is) would mind that I posted his name.  The man obviously knows nothing about speciation!  I’d recommend my book on the topic, but somehow I don’t think it would go down well.

Since you are obviously intelligent I want to send you this important email concerning evolution.  In this email I will prove to you without a shadow of a doubt that evolution is a silly evil lie.  Evolution is not true because each species can only procreate within their own species.  That means that had we evolved from apes as you hold true then we could obviously procreate with those apes, but you and I know full well that that is impossible.  Mankind cannot procreate with apes since apes are not of our species.

If you will get your students in your classroom and get the semen from a human male and inseminate that semen into a female ape, you will see full well after so many days that the female ape will not get pregnant and your students will also see that truth as well.  As you already know, YOU CAN ONLY PROCREATE WITHIN YOUR OWN SPECIES.

Dogs cannot procreate with cats, Horses cannot procreate with zebras even though they look similar to each other, humans cannot procreate with apes or any other animal, tigers cannot procreate with lions etc.  Had we evolved from apes as you say then we could obviously procreate with them since we would be of their species, but that is impossible as you already know, so therefore that totally proves without a shadow of a doubt that evolution is bunk and a total perversion of the truth.

Yes a person can be a good person without God.  The HOLY BIBLE states in John 3:5, “JESUS ANSWERED, VERILY, VERILY, I SAY UNTO THEE, EXCEPT A MAN BE BORN OF WATER AND OF THE SPIRIT HE CANNOT ENTER INTO THE KINGDOM OF GOD.”  That verse means that unless “you” are born of the HOLY BIBLE which is the water of life and born of the HOLY SPIRIT who is the Spirit of God and the Spirit of life, you Jerry Coyne cannot enter into the glories of Heaven.

Go to my beautiful website for the truth and renounce that silly, “damning” lie called evolution now that you have been proven wrong concerning the matter of evolution.  My website is http://www.howtobesaved.com or http://www.JesusBloodRedeems.com.

In Jesus precious name,
JC Ireson
Gospel Mission International
www.howtobesaved.com
http://www.JesusBloodRedeems.com

Kitteh contest: ART!

August 3, 2011 • 3:06 am

Although reader Lori Anne Parker and her partner John Danley own two cats, Lori Anne is also an artist, and submitted a work of art instead of a real cat (you can see more of her work at her website).

Her entry is called Oscar’s Nightmare (The Garden of Evolution #4), 2011. Oil, human hair, snake skins, and leaves on canvas, 30 x 40 in.

And the artist’s description:

This painting depicts a cat from the inside. As I was painting, I started to think that in many ways the pose and mood of the skeleton expressed the quintessential volatility and unruliness of the feline disposition. Basically, the way your cat might be purring one minute only to swat you mid-purr, all the while leaving you wondering about the cause of the sudden shift in mood (was it free will or just some random burst of energy…?). On a deeper level, the pose and mood are about the pain and struggle that is part of evolution. If you look closely, the cat is walking through and on pieces of snakes (made from real snake skins found in my yard). Of course, the snakes, in part, symbolize the other one we’ve all heard way too much about. Though the cat may be sinister and there is the red of blood in this painting, I also want it to reflect the dynamic, wild energy that is simply part of being alive. The title came about through my friend Oscar who was horrified when I told him about handwashing the shedded snakeskins for the painting. Then he confessed to me that he was also creeped out by cats. As a child in Mexico as he was running to school one morning, he took a short cut down an alley, jumped over a mud puddle, only to land with a foot on a plastic bag with a dead cat inside. His foot caused the bag to burst open. When he got to school, he noticed pieces of cat in the treads of his shoe and basically had a panic attack. After he told me this sad story, I said “this painting is your worst nightmare then.” And that was when the title was born.