MacDonald continues his defense of The God Delusion

May 24, 2011 • 6:36 am

Eric MacDonald, who knows his onions about theology, is doing a series on the critics of Dawkins’s The God Delusion, showing that they’re largely misguided.  His most recent installment deals with the review, published in the 2007 New York Review of Books, by H. Allen Orr.  Orr was my first Ph.D. student (now a distinguished professor at The University of Rochester) and still a dear friend, but we nearly came to blows over his piece—at least as close as one can come to blows in a telephone conversation.  I vividly remember that two-hour call, for we wound up yelling at each other, with Allen finally telling me that we were never again to talk about religion (we haven’t).

Many of the criticisms that Eric makes were ones I brought up in that call, including Orr’s denigration of The God Delusion as “middlebrow” and his criticism of Dawkins for not engaging the best and most sophisticated arguments of theology.  We all know the response to that one: sophisticated theology is merely smart people using jargon to gussy up their ignorance.  But I want to highlight two places where Eric makes a good point.   The first involves the tenacious hold that religion, especially of the Christian species, has on many people.  Remember that Eric was once an Anglican priest, who left the church when he could no longer abide its doctrines:

As a priest it was impossible for me not to notice the contradiction between what I often said in church and how I lived the rest of the week. That is simply unavoidable, and anyone who is a religious believer is often struck by the inconsistency between life as it needs to be lived, as, it seems, it can only be lived, and life as one’s religious beliefs demand that it should be lived. There are all sorts of fudges used to hide the inconsistency, but it would be foolish to deny that the inconsistency exists. The inconsistency, of course, leads to a perpetual state of dissatisfaction and sense of failure, which is why, no doubt, at the centre of the Christian liturgy lies the acknowledgement of sin and the desperate appeal for salvation.

This seems especially true of Catholicism, which keeps its grip on Catholics by inculcating them with an endless cycle of guilt and retribution.  For a very personal look at how this works, read Miranda Hale’s essay, “A dirty little girl, hanging her head in shame.”  Sex is one of the best ways to do this.  Given the power of the sexual impulse instilled by natural selection, who can avoid being “sinful” in that area?  And of course that keeps you going back to church and confession time after time.

Eric’s second point, which will be familiar to anyone who reads modern theology, stems from theologians’ response to philosopher J. L. Mackie’s arguments about the problem of evil.  Apologists circumvented this theological difficulty simply by asserting that god was not “personal” (i.e., an agency), so god wasn’t responsible.  Eric’s take on this:

Now, my point is this. Here is a kind of theological argumentation. A philosopher takes the standard understanding of god as a personal being who acts, whose purposes are benevolent, and who is all-powerful. Given that understanding, the problem of evil appears insurmountable (as I believe it is). So, what must the theologian do? Simple. Just redefine god. Call god the ground of being, or, as one theologian does, “secure a distinctive locus for Divine personal agency by deploying the spatial metaphors of distinct axes, planes, or levels,” (68) and — what do you know? — problem solved! I don’t want to overdramatise the point, but clearly the theologian believes that, whatever else god is, the concept of god is to an astonishing degree a plastic one which can be moulded into various shapes in order to deal with objections that are brought to bear against this or that aspect of god when seen in relationship to earthly things and happenings.

How true! And this is why theology is not a serious academic subject, for there is no way for its practitioners to test or falsify their assertions about god.  I’ve read my share of “sophisticated” theology—granted, not, as Terry Eagleton requires, “Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope”—but there’s nothing there that would lessen the force of Dawkins’s arguments.

When I read this stuff, I’m always asking myself three questions:

  1. Do they adduce any new evidence for the existence of god?
  2. Do they adduce any evidence for how they’re able to discern the characteristics of god?
  3. Do they suggest a way to test and falsify the two claims above?

And the answer to all three questions is always “no.”  Yes, they can suggest ground-of-being gods, gods that allow the universe “freedom,” gods that don’t do much, or gods about whom nothing can be said, but this is all simply making stuff up, or redefining god so he can withstand the advances of science.  There’s never any evidence, and there haven’t really been any new arguments for god in the last several centuries. It’s an endless process of definition and re-definition, and that’s what constitutes “advances” in theology.

The reason theology is not a fit subject for academics—and I have to admit that it’s studied at my own university—is that its adherents have no way to answer this question:

How would I know if my understanding of god is wrong?

That’s why theology can’t really make “progress”—except to tweak its parameters so it remains compatible with science—and why modern “sophisticated” theology is no advance over the lucubrations of Aquinas or Duns Scotus.  Eric is right on the mark when he says this:

Models of god may help us to skirt the issues raised by philosophers, but without any means of assessing whether the model is actually a model of something — even if this some “thing” does not exist in the ordinary sense as one entity amongst others, but underlies them as their ground — does theology have a subject matter? I don’t think Orr or Eagleton (and others) take this problem with sufficient seriousness.


Rosenhouse on math jargon

May 24, 2011 • 5:36 am

Taking as his starting point my “rant” about the impenetrability of scientific papers in mathematics, Jason Rosenhouse has written a nice essay on what it’s like to be a mathematician who has to try to make sense of the papers of other mathematicians. It turns out that those papers are often as impenetrable to math professors as to us biologists:

Of course, jargon is an affliction common to just about every academic discipline, and not just in the sciences. I would say, though, that math is probably among the worst offenders. The abstract of a typical research paper in mathematics is opaque not just to non-mathematicians, but to all mathematicians who are not specialists in the particular research area being addressed. And when I say opaque, I mean opaque. As in, you won’t make it past the first sentence.

Biology certainly is not as bad. In evolutionary biology I am definitely an amateur, but I find that I can often understand the introduction and discussion sections of a typical paper well enough to explain the gist to someone else. In math, it is usually impossible even to explain the problem to a non-mathematician. . . .

. . . Simply put, it is an awful, almost physically unpleasant experience to read a research paper in mathematics, at least if you want anything more than a superficial understanding of what was done. That is why it takes so damn long to get a paper through peer review. It’s because every time the referee glances over at the paper sitting on top of the filing cabinet, he thinks of something else he’d rather be doing. If you learn the fate of your paper within six months you’ve beaten the odds, but it’s even money that your paper will just disappear into the ether.

Jason goes on to fault math teaching in general, as well as math textbooks, which, by and large, he sees as “simply horrible.” But he also finds hope in the increasing emphasis on expository writing.  The piece is worth a read, if for no other reason than to hear the travails of people in another branch of science.

Spring!

May 24, 2011 • 5:13 am

Life has quickened in Chicago in the past week, for it’s finally gotten warm.  The animals are feeling it, too.  Here are a few photos I snapped on my walk to work.

Making squirrels!  These gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) bonked at least six times in the few minutes I watched them:


Right outside our building is a lovely little pond called “Botany Pond” for the old Botany Building beside it (now unimaginatively renamed “Ehrman Biology Center”). It’s a good place to have lunch and watch the resident koi, turtles, and ducks.

The pond already contains one mother and half a dozen ducklings, but groups of males still come around hoping for an extra-pair copulation, which is often forcible.  I weep for that female!

Here’s the bachelor line.  The commonness of mallards (Anas platyrhynchos) often keeps us from noticing how beautiful they really are.

Several of  the males dived into the water at once, and began performing what seemed to be some kind of display, probably involving dominance.  They’d face each other, and, all of a sudden—with much attendant splashing—go bottoms-up, as if they were feeding. But they weren’t feeding, for they remained upside-down for only an instant.  And the group kept doing it, over and over.

Perhaps some learned reader can enlighten us about this display.  Does the duck who makes the biggest splash win, like the tubby kid doing cannonballs at the local pool?

Lioness steals camera; makes her own film

May 23, 2011 • 6:21 pm

This fascinating video was sent by alert reader Janice C., whose husband works for the company that made the camera in question.  You’ll be some of the first people to see it.  The YouTube caption:

While shooting pictures for our new book on lions at Tswalu Kalahari Game Reserve, we found some lions patrolling the fence line. We placed our GoPro action camera in their path hoping to catch a glimpse of them as they came past. Little did we know that one lioness would take a liking to the camera and cart it off into the bush!

Do sloths dump in the trees?

May 23, 2011 • 10:23 am

The answer is no.  This delicate issue arose in our video and subsequent discussion of sloths:  the beast has the odd habit of defecating on the ground, at the base of the tree it inhabits. That means a looooong, slow climb down from the branches.  And, of course, you’ve seen from that video how awkward sloths are on the ground, so the descent exposes it to all sorts of predatory dangers.  Fortunately, sloths digest their food (leaves) as slowly as they move, so they have to make the round-trip only about once a week.

Here’s an Attenborough video showing sloths at the loo, with His Holiness noting that the behavior is a complete mystery:

Given the difficulty and time involved in the trip, and the helplessness of sloths on the ground, why do they do it? By “why”, of course, I mean what were the advantages of any genes that produced this behavior?  I’m assuming here that this behavior is genetically based rather than simply learned, which seems a reasonable supposition.  I can think of four evolutionary explanations:

  1. It reduces predation from above.  Eagles and other aerial predators are said to detect the sound or appearance of droppings, using them to cue in on the sloth as prey.  By hiding its toilet at the base of the tree, it makes itself less liable to aerial attack.  I don’t find this very plausible given that aerial predators hunt visually, and I don’t see how they could detect a sloth more readily when it’s defecating from a branch.  Indeed, it seems like it would be more likely to detect a sloth climbing down the tree.
  2. It reduces predation from below.  This seems more likely to me than alternative #1.  Terrestrial predators like jaguars can hear droppings striking the forest floor, and seem likely to be able to associate them with prey above.  Cats, for example, are known to climb trees to take sloths (if you’re not squeamish you can see a video of that here.)  On the other hand, couldn’t a cat smell sloth droppings and use them as a way to hunt?
  3. It fertilizes the sloth’s tree.  I’ve heard this bandied about, but it doesn’t seem credible.  Sloths hang out in big trees, and I’m not sure that a sloth with genes to move to the base and deposit fertilizer would really gain a reproductive advantage.  That presumes that that such fertilizing would make such a substantial difference in the tree’s output of leaves that the sloth would wind up better fed and have more offspring.  In addition, I’m not sure (though perhaps a reader can tell me) whether sloths remain in the same tree for years, as is required by this hypothesis.
  4. It’s a way to attract mates.  Creating your own personal dung pile may be the equivalent of expelling pheromones, alerting sloths of the opposite sex that you’re up above.  I know nothing about sloth mating, but given their lassitude and site-fidelity, surely locating a mate—the most important behavior in outcrossing species—is subject to strong selection.  How do you find another sloth two trees over? By sniffing the base of the tree.

The last explanation seems the best to me, though of course the reproductive advantage of sloth toiletry could have involved more than one of these factors.  And in principle these theories are testable.  We could see, for example, how sloths manage to find each other at mating time.  We could also do mock-defecation studies from branches, using model sloths, to see if the noise attracts predators.

I’m pretty sure, however, that nobody is doing these studies . .

Feel free to offer your own explanations: it’s sloth evolutionary psychology!

I was wrong: BioLogos promotes Jesus, not evolution

May 23, 2011 • 5:30 am

For a while some of my readers (especially Sigmund) have been trying to convince me that BioLogos—the organization founded by NIH director Francis Collins, and funded by Templeton to the tune of over two million dollars—was designed to promote the acceptance not of evolution, but of Jesus.  I resisted this interpretation, probably because I didn’t think that even Christians could be that duplicitous, but now I see I was in error.  A post this week by Darrel Falk, the president of BioLogos, has convinced me that I was wrong and the readers were right.

To be sure, I had good reasons: I was going by the funding statements of Templeton and the mission statement of BioLogos, both of which implied that pushing evolution was a big priority. Here’s how Templeton describes its $2,028,238 grant to BioLogos, which expires next February:

These grants support the launch of the BioLogos Foundation with the creation of a website and a series of workshops on the compatibility of theism and evolutionary science. The website will serve as a forum for Francis Collins and other expert consultants to address common questions about the relationship between faith and science. The invitation-only workshops will bring scientists and evangelical leaders together to seek a theology more accepting of science, specifically evolutionary biology. These projects will allow the BioLogos Foundation to build a reputation as a source of sympathetic, authoritative, and accessible thought on matters of science and faith.

And here’s BioLogos‘s own description of its mission:

The BioLogos Foundation is a group of Christians, many of whom are professional scientists, biblical scholars, philosophers, theologians, pastors, and educators, who are concerned about the long history of disharmony between the findings of science and large sectors of the Christian faith. We believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. We also believe that evolution, properly understood, best describes God’s work of creation. Founded by Dr. Francis Collins, BioLogos addresses the escalating culture war between science and faith, promoting dialog and exploring the harmony between the two. We are committed to helping the church – and students, in particular – develop worldviews that embrace both of these complex belief structures, and that allow science and faith to co-exist peacefully.

But Falk’s new essay on the BioLogos site, “The Crutch,” clearly shows that the main goal of BioLogos is not to convince evangelical Christians that faith and evolution are compatible so that they’ll accept evolution, but so that they don’t reject Jesus.

Falk’s piece is poorly written, but its import is clear.  The “crutch” to which he refers is the perceived incompatibility between science and faith.  This crutch is used by atheists or dissatisfied Christians as an excuse to live wantonly and immorally, for if evolution is true, then you have to reject Jesus:

It is true that “belief in evolution” is used by some to prop up their desire to live life their way and not God’s. Like Eve in the Garden of Eden, they are looking for an excuse to become—as the serpent put it to Eve—“like God,” and to be masters of their own fate. The perception that evolution is incompatible with Christianity does provide many with what seems to be the perfect excuse. They do indeed use that excuse to prop up their non-Christian lifestyle. However, the crutch they use to support their rejection of the Christian life is not belief in evolution itself, but rather that Christianity and evolution are incompatible. That is the crutch.

The curious thing is what Falk sees as the source of this crutch.  Accommodationists like Chris Mooney, Nick Matzke, Michael Ruse and their ilk always fault atheists for arguing that people have to make a choice between science and faith.  That, they say, is guaranteed to make religious people reject science. (To be sure, I’ve never said that people have to make that choice, but have pointed out that the incompatibility causes cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy.)  Falk, however—and there’s some truth in his claim—says that this choice is  forced on people not by atheists, but by Christians:

Where does this crutch come from, however? Who manufactures this crutch? If the crutch is simply the proposition that evolution and real Christianity are incompatible, where did that idea come from? Did it not come from us? Many Christians have been telling non-believers that belief in evolution is inconsistent with real Christianity. So if non-believers are looking for an excuse to justify their apostate lifestyle—and they are—Christians have played right into their hand, by passing them the crutch they are seeking. If evolution is true, they hear many Christians say, theology falls apart. If evolution is true, they hear many Christians say, the Bible is untrustworthy. Many evangelical Christians have poured their financial resources into the construction of organizations dedicated to building crutches for non-believers. I think that selling the principle that if evolution is true Christianity fails, is profoundly harmful. Heaven forbid that we Christians should be creating the very crutch that non-believers long to have, but I think that is precisely what we are doing. All of science makes it abundantly clear that evolution has taken place. People everywhere are looking for crutches that will allow them to follow in Eve’s footsteps. And what do we Christians do? We pass them a crutch. Unwittingly, it is almost as though we give them license to conclude: “If evolution is true, God’s Word is a lie, and I am free to do anything I want.” God help us!

Falk then paints a scenario in which young evangelicals, faith propped up by their crutch, limp off to college and learn that the crutch is rotten: evolution is true!  OMG!  What happens? They abandon Jesus and, inspired by Satan, become wanton, drunken fornicators, generally living in a way that will guarantee admission to hell:

Step by step, they are shown why almost all biology scholars have concluded that evolution has occurred. With that, the very crutch that had been used to prop up their Christian faith as teenagers (the perception that real Christianity and evolution are incompatible), becomes the exact tool that Satan needs as he comes along with his words first posed in the story of the Garden: “You don’t need God.” “You can live life your way. “ “Do whatever feels good.” “Did God really say…?” “ Is there really a God who holds you accountable anyway?”

With that, the crutch they learned to lean on as young people now becomes a prop for a different life. It holds up their new unbelief as they embark upon the life of the prodigal son or prodigal daughter. All we can do is hope and pray that they come back into the loving arms of the waiting Father having thrown away the prop that we, heaven forbid, constructed according to our own well-reasoned, good-intentioned, but-oh-so-unfortunate and oh-so-misguided ways.

Satan!  Falk believes in the devil! Isn’t this starting to sound like a Jack Chick comic, the one in which a sweating, bearded professor uses evolution to wrench students away from Jesus?

As the essay proceeds, Falk sounds less and less like a rational scholar and more like a Bible-thumping preacher.  And he soon makes it perfectly clear that the whole mission of BioLogos is to use accomodationism to keep people in the arms of Jesus (my emphasis):

I pray for the day when all Christians will throw away this crutch. I don’t mean that I’m praying they will come to accept that God created through evolution. Most people are not scientists and they are too busy doing other important things to explore the science. What I do pray for, though, is that we will stop portraying that belief in evolution is not consistent with biblical Christianity. This proposition is exactly what gives atheists the excuse they are looking for, and this far-too-human proposition ought not be propping up young people’s walk with God.

This, of course, explains why BioLogos has been busy showing that there may be some truth in the story of Adam and Eve, that God has designed evolution to produce humans, and why they’ve been engaging in apologetics, theodicy, and other nonsensical and nonscientific activities. The organization doesn’t much care that evangelical Christians get an accurate view of evolution.  It cares only that Christians hear that evolution is compatible with faith, and thereby stay in the church, avoiding a life of sin.  If BioLogos wants to characterize evolution as a god-guided process that involves the installation of souls in Homo erectus, or the designation of two individuals by God as Honorary Ancestors, that’s fine.  Anything will do so long as the kids don’t walk.

At the end, Falk abandons accommodation completely and starts babbling to his savior:

And I hope and pray that children and young people won’t be made to feel that the choice is between his view and a life of apostasy.

       In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

In Christ alone, we put our hope. The question of whether creation and evolution are compatible is another matter altogether. Regardless of how we each personally feel about that matter, let’s pray that it not be used as a crutch to support apostasy, or that which is deemed necessary to the vitality of a young person’s walk with Jesus.

Yes, I was wrong all along.  BioLogos‘s fear is not that atheism weans people away from evolution, but that evolution weans people away from Christianity.   I should have realized this given the strength of faith among evangelical Christians like Falk.  As he makes perfectly clear, Jesus is far more important than Darwin.

And Templeton people, if you’re reading this, pay attention.  You’re giving your money not so the faithful can learn about and accept science, but so that Christians don’t leave the fold.  You’re not helping sell evolution—you’re helping prop up faith.

Cocktail party tidbit of the week

May 22, 2011 • 7:16 pm

Charles Dickens had an ivory letter opener whose handle was made from the stuffed paw of his beloved but deceased cat Bob.  The object is now in the possession of the New York Public Library, where, as part of a celebration of the Library’s 100th anniversary, it’s on display  until the end of the year.

The engraving on the handle reads, “C. D. In Memory of Bob. 1862” (the year of Bob’s death).

I learned of this because it was part of Sunday’s New York Times crossword puzzle, successfully solved by Miranda “Holy Rabbit” Hale. (The clue was “The handle of Charles Dickens’s ivory letter opener, in the Library’s collection, is ___________”, and the answer was “The paw of his deceased cat.”)