Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Here is a four-minute video of the highlights of yesterday’s Women’s World Cup final, in which Japan defeated the U.S. in a cliffhanger that went to penalty kicks (apologies to those who complain that my description of football doesn’t comport with that seen in the British press):
The Women’s World Cup final was a superb game, but after dominating most of the play and narrowly missing a lot of goals, the U.S. lost to Japan on penalty kicks. It was a heartbreaker for the American women, but they’re happy in Japan this morning. This is not only the first time that the Japanese national team has defeated the U.S. (out of 25 games!), but it’s also their first World Cup. Congrats to them!
I still think—contrary to every other football fan on this website—that any World Cup final should be more than one game. No world championship should have to be decided on ten kicks. Regardless, though, this was a thrilling match, and I hope it enhances women’s football on the world stage.
Put all the theologians in history together, and their contribution to understanding the universe would not even approach those made by this man. And, unlike theologians, when Feynman didn’t know something, he admitted it.
“When you doubt and ask, it gets a little harder to believe. You see, one thing is that I can live with doubt and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. . . But I don’t have to know an answer; I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things—by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.”
Unlike science, theology starts with conclusions (e.g., God exists, God is good, Jesus died for our sins, etc.) and then, as those conclusions begin to weaken in the face of evidence, tweaks its philosophy to buttress them. (In science, we may begin with tentative conclusion, but we abandon them if they’re not consistently supported by evidence). The reaction of both fields to the Darwinian revolution is instructive. Biologists before Darwin were largely natural theologians, believing that nature testified to God’s grandeur and ingenuity. After 1859, nearly all scientists accepted the fact of evolution. Theologians did too, but still held onto the idea of a good and loving God, even though the argument from design had been their most powerful evidence for His existence.
Ditto with the Holocaust, which should prove to any thinking person that God is either nonexistent, apathetic, or malicious. But instead of taking that as evidence against God, or against a loving God, theology regrouped and quickly came up with a host of reasons why things like the Holocaust fit perfectly into God’s plan. These reasons, of course, are simply post facto rationalizations, as well as being completely untestable. It’s all just making stuff up.
And so it is with evolution. While organismal “design” was once considered strong evidence for God, theologians since Darwin—and especially in recent years—are now telling us that it makes much more sense for God to have used evolution rather than spontaneous creation as his way of producing life, and humans. Instead of adopting the most parsimonious explanation—that the well-understood, blind, and materialistic process of natural selection is the real cause of “design,” with no involvement of God whatsoever—theologians now explain that gradual evolution is the most sensible way for God to have created. Read John Polkinghorne or John Haught for good specimens of evolutionary apologetics.
To anyone with a brain, this kind of intellectual masturbation is laughable, showing the incredible tenacity of a soothing delusion. And it’s amply on display in a six-minute video just appearing on BioLogos, “Evolutionary Christianity,” made by Ryan Pettey. The clip is an excerpt of a full-length film that Pettey is making, “A Leap of Truth.” Petty explains:
With A Leap of Truth, we wanted to put something proactive on the table that could help motivate an elevated conversation about the “war” between science and faith. It was our goal to help Christians see (and accept) the complexity of the issues raised by modern science, as well as help them to courageously engage with the theological conversations happening within the sphere of Christian culture today.
A look at the film will bring you pretty much to date on evolutionary apologetics. It explains not only God’s reasons for using evolution, but also asserts that humans are special in a way not understandable by evolution: they are altruistic.
Here are a few highlights from the transcript.
Dr. Alister McGrath: “And when I stopped being an atheist and became a Christian instead, actually I found that that conversion really brought a new intellectual and spiritual depth to my scientific research. I studied the philosophy of science and began to realize that proof in science was much more complex than I had realized, and above all, I began to realize that the scientific narrative actually pointed to a deeper narrative, which is that of God himself.”
Dr. Jeff Schloss: “Well, why does God use history to achieve his purposes? Why not just have created everything right to begin with? And then, if it were made wrong at a point in time by Adam and Eve falling, why not just have Christ die right there in the Garden and have salvation? Why wait thousands of years for the revelation of Christ? And we don’t get to have the answer to that.”
But Polkinghorne has the answer!
Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne: “That shows us that God is patient and subtle, that God is prepared to create through process, unfolding process, rather than through just divine magic decree.”
More:
Dr. Jeff Schloss: “. . . If you believe in common descent and believe in evolutionary theory, then there is a sense in which no organisms are unique to the extent that they can be explained by the common mechanism of mutation and selection. When we look at human beings, human beings do things that, as of yet, are actually not adequately explainable by the common mechanism of genetic mutation and natural selection.”
This is evolutionary creationism (popularized not only by BioLogos, but by theistic evolutionists like Kenneth Miller and Simon Conway Morris), whose bedrock tenet is that God intervened or designed evolution to ensure the appearance of humans. That, of course, is not the conception of evolution held by biologists, and is why theistic evolutionists can be considered creationists.
Dr. Jeff Schloss: “This is not a God-of-the-Gaps argument attempting to prove that there is a miracle or supernatural causes at work—that actually might be the case. But it might also be the case that there are natural causes at work, designed by God, not operating in other organisms, unique to human beings. Right now, evolutionary theory actually gives content to and illuminates the reality of human uniqueness. E.O. Wilson says that this capacity that humans have for unusual degrees of cooperative sacrifice is the culminating mystery of all biology.”
There are no “natural causes” we know of that operated only in human evolution. And of course other species besides humans show “unusual degrees of cooperative sacrifice.” In fact, some species show more sacrifice. A honeybee that stings you is sacrificing her life (the sting pulls out the bee’s viscera) for the sake of the queen. Other primates, like chimps, show cooperation, reciprocal altruism, and things that look very much like empathy and a sense of fairness. There’s no reason why human cooperation could also have evolved as simply an evolutionary elaboration of behaviors in our ancestors, now furthered by culture and secular reason.
Reverend Dr. Michael Lloyd: “What Mother Teresa did on the streets of Calcutta is not evolutionary useful. It is taking limited resources and giving them to people who are dying. That is not, from a survival point of view, useful. And yet, most of us think, that it’s a rather good thing.”
As I’ve explained before, the existence of this “altruism” is not evidence for God, If you’re going to argue that Mother Teresa’s actions are evidence for God, then so is her chastity, and so are condom use and adoption: all things that could not have evolved directly by natural selection. The difference between humans and other species—a difference that explains why we can act in ways that don’t comport with natural selection—is that we are a social species with big brains, and can reason. Many humans decide not to have any children, adopted or otherwise. Such behavior would have been quickly weeded out of our ancestors by selection. Is that, too, evidence for God? Nope, it’s evidence for reason.
The video ends with some amusing apologetics:
Dr. Jeff Schloss: “There is a fabulous and profound thematic continuity to the history of life: for example, the transition from primitive prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic cells, the transition from single cells to multi-cells, the transition from asexual, basically clonally individually reproducing organisms, to sexually reproducing organisms that have to do it together, the transition from individual to social organisms. Well, there is really no other way to put this, it is progressive. It is exactly what we would expect if a God, who we already believe on the basis of the sacred history of redemption described in scripture, is also involved in incrementally achieving his purposes over the entire course of history.”
Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne: “And when you come to think about it…if the nature of God is love, as Christians believe, then I think that is the way you would expect the God of love to create, not through just brute power, but by the unfolding of fruitful potentiality.”
Yes, yes, evolution is exactly what you’d expect God to do to create all species. But isn’t it curious that the scriptures didn’t tell us this, or that theologians didn’t come on board with the idea until all rational people had embraced evolution?
Theology does change, but not of its own volition. It changes when science forces it to. In contrast, science is immune to the currents of theology. Any “dialogue” between them is purely a one-way street.
The U.S. will face Japan in the FIFA Women’s World cup final today; festivities begin at 8:45 Frankfurt time (where it will be played) and 2:45 ET in the US.
If anybody knows of a free live internet or television broadcast, please put it in the comments below. Coverage begins at 2:45 ET on ESPN, but that’s not on for the few Americans, like myself, who don’t have cable t.v.
Here are some highlights from Japan’s defeat of Sweden, 3-1, in the semifinal.
Philippa (“Pippa”) Middleton, the sister of the Duchess of Cambridge and famous largely for her form-fitting bridesmaid’s dress at the royal wedding, is the subject of a unique artwork.
According to the Daily Mail (of course):
It took 15,000 crumpets and 24 hours of tireless labour from more than a dozen helpers.
But this ingenious tribute to arguably Britain’s most famous face and bottom using one of the UK’s favourite snacks is ready for public consumption.
Cheeky artist Laura Hadland has proved that royal bridesmaid Pippa Middleton really is a tasty bit of crumpet, using more than 100 jars of spreads, including jam and Marmite, to create the shading on the 13 metre by 20 metre giant mosaic.
And here’s what you can do with 15,000 crumpets (which, by the way, weighed more than a ton):
Oh, and there’s a prime example of religious stupidity here.
Over at EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse alerts us to a new post by Michael Ruse on his Chronicle of Higher Education site: “Prayer, menstruation, and the Toronto District school board.” Ruse’s nominal topic is the fact that Muslim religious dictates are creating a bad situation in Toronto’s public schools. Since Muslims are required to pray five time a day, several of those prayers must take place in school.
The thing is, though, that menstruating girls aren’t allowed to join the boys in prayer, although they can at other times. Here’s a photo, from an editorial in the Star, showing two forms of segregation: the boys are bowed in prayer in the first rows, and the non-menstruating girls are praying behind them (I’ve seen this segregation in mosques many times). And behind them all, not praying, is a group of girls having their periods:
Now I’m not sure that Canada has anything like our First Amendment, forbidding public prayer during school hours, but they do have a gender-equity policy in schools, which is being shamelessly violated in two ways: girls must pray behind the boys, and can’t pray at all when they’re “unclean.” The Toronto District school board won’t intervene, and Ruse rightly calls them out for their cowardice.
Does any accommodationist want to defend this despicable religious practice? It’s not limited to Muslims, either: I’m ashamed to say that in many Orthodox Jewish synagogues, women can’t pray on the main floor with the men, but are segregated in the rear, often behind screens. And Orthodox women must immerse themselves in a ritual bath at the end of their periods. This, of course, is all based on Jewish law, and justified by the Old Testament.
This is why Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom (coauthors before their unfortunate schism) called their book, Does God Hate Women? If you go by religious scripture and practice, the answer, of course, is “yes.” Talk about misogyny! But you’ll rarely hear accommodationists raise their voices against such practices—they’re too busy criticizing atheists.
What is curious about this article, though, is that Ruse, the walking definition of accommodationism, starts off his piece like this:
There are days when, I swear to God, I am all set to enroll under the banner of Richard Dawkins and anathematize all religions and those who subscribe to them. I take a lot of criticism from my fellow atheists, including my fellow Brainstormers, for arguing that science and religion are compatible. I still think that, but increasingly I cannot for the life of me see why any decent human being would want to be religious, and increasingly I think one should be ashamed to be religious.
Jason thinks that’s an excellent statement, and it is, but what about Ruse’s other days? For on the very page where he proclaims this, he also mentions his new book, Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science. I haven’t yet read this book, but it seems to push the kind of NOMA accommodationism Ruse has customarily espoused, as in his earlier book Can a Darwinian be a Christian? (see my TLS review here). One review of Science and Spirituality summarizes Ruse’s thesis:
It seems likely that he also prefers most or all of the Gospel miracles to be naturally explained (people were shamed into sharing their private picnic baskets, rather than that Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes, and Jesus’s disciples were weirdly encouraged and enlivened by his execution rather than that he really rose from the dead), though he acknowledges that many Christians take a stronger line. He also acknowledges that some Christians (and other believers) think “natural theology” (that is, the use of reason to uncover divine truths) is possible and even obligatory, but himself prefers to present Christian beliefs as based entirely “on faith”, with only the proviso that they do not contradict the results of “science” (that is, the use of reason to uncover truths about this world here). . . The point of Ruse’s volume is presumably to persuade believers that they need not be opposed to the scientific enterprise and unbelievers that they need not be so vitriolic in their condemnation of “religion”.
As he so often does, Ruse seems to be enabling faith here, in the sense of trying to tell Christians how to forge a theology consistent with science. But this strategy is completely at odds with his statement that “I cannot for the life of me see why any decent human being would want to be religious, and increasingly I think one should be ashamed to be religious.” I doubt he expresses that sentiment in his new book. And if that’s what he really believes, why does he devote so much time trying to help religious people keep their faith?
To paraphrase a review of a book by Dick Lewontin, Ruse is not so much sitting on the faith/science fence as he is pirouetting on it. It’s hard to praise him for the good stuff that comes out of his mouth when it’s immediately followed by nonsense.
