NYC people: adopt a cat, get a book

May 18, 2011 • 8:07 am

I received this from reader Michael: it’s an adorable cat who needs a home in the NYC area.  If you’re looking for an affectionate felid, this one fills the bill.  And, if you adopt him, I’ll send you an autographed hardback of WEIT.  Now I don’t want you to adopt this cat just to get a book; you have to really want this little guy and the adoption has to last and be vouched for.  Michael writes:

The attached kitteh photos are of a little fellow who was found on the mean streets of Brooklyn, NY and is in need of a home! If you were able to make him one of your featured kittehs, I hoped that a maybe, just maybe, a kind reader of yours might be able to take him in. I can help get him to anyone in the general NYC area.

Sadly, there are many stray cats in Brooklyn, but most of them want little to do with people. This guy, however, came right over late one night and cried for food and attention. Being so friendly, it was easy to scoop him into a kitty carrier and take him in. It seemed to be his goal from the start to find some soft-hearted folks and win them over with his charms. He immediately started nuzzling and promptly went to sleep in my lap. He is honestly one of the most friendly, gentle, and affectionate kitties I’ve ever met. He knew just how to use a litter pan and even let me trim his claws without any fuss.

He has already been to the Humane Society clinic where he got neutered and got his first round of shots and tests (and received a clean bill of health!). You can see him wearing his cone in one of the attached photos. It has since come off and he’s gotten his energy back. We estimate he is about 8 months old and he loves to play. Unfortunately, a cat who is already a resident here is NOT happy with having him, so he has spent most of this week’s time stuck in a single room. Mostly he seems happy with his new warm and dry situation, but he does get antsy for some more space and would love more company. He adores people and dislikes being left alone.

He has no name as of yet, but if one of your readers would be interested in adopting him, I’d like to suggest Jerry as an excellent name!

Anyone can contact me at foundkitty@yahoo.com

Here are a couple of videos of him, just to show how sweet he is. One of his first day inside and another of him getting a sponge bath. (He was still rather dirty at this point)

Hawking upsets a sophisticated rabbi

May 18, 2011 • 6:02 am

As predicted, Stephen Hawking’s comments about the nonexistence of heaven have ticked off people.  Like Mooney, Hawking regularly “strikes a nerve”—except that Hawking is right.  This was particularly grating:

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

Out of the woodwork came Rabbi David Wolpe, identified by The Washington Post thusly: “named the No.1 Pulpit Rabbi in America by Newsweek magazine, Wolpe is the Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and currently teaches at UCLA”. You may remember Wolpe from the Rabbi Smackdown Debate, where he and rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson debated Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.  If you saw that debate, you might remember that Wolpe didn’t seem to believe in heaven.   But he backtracks on this issue in his latest piece at the Post’s “On Faith” site, “Stephen Hawking can imagine there’s no heaven.”

I’m once again ashamed that a rabbi—supposedly a liberal, Number-One rabbi—can write stuff like this.  The pattern is familiar.  First Wolpe denigrates science by showing that its “truths” are ephemeral:

One of the remarkable realities of scientific progress is that in every age its commonplaces have proven to be false in the eyes of later generations. We cannot possibly know which platitude of science will seem as silly now as phlogiston does today. Yet some scientists proclaim with thunderous certainty equal to the most blinkered religionist what is or is not true based on nothing more developed than distaste. Richard Dawkins does not like religion, so it cannot be true. Stephen Hawking has an aversion to theology, so theology is merely wish fulfillment. The careful parsing of possibilities that is so integral to science itself suddenly disappears when the issue is faith. Recently in a debate I had with Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens it became clear that the only truly unscientific approach is to repudiate the very possibility that human beings live on. To deny for its own sake — now that’s dogma.

I think it’s much more likely that in two hundred years water will still be seen to have two hydrogens and one oxygen than that we’ll have evidence for God.  Throughout his piece, Wolpe doesn’t seem to realize that scientific “truths” (even those that are later discredited) are based on evidence, while his belief is based on no evidence at all.  To wit:

Can science and religion coexist? Of course they can if each side is willing to practice a little epistemological humility. Science is a tool for discovering truths about physical reality. As our most powerful tool, it is a natural — though mistaken — leap of logic to suppose that the things to which this tool applies are the only things that really exist. Since science cannot investigate an afterlife, there must not be one.

Talk about epistemological arrogance: how about asserting in the absence of any evidence that there’s a sky father that doesn’t want you to eat bacon!  And science doesn’t rule out an afterlife because we can’t investigate it; we rule it out because there’s no evidence for it.  (There could be, of course—seances or past-life accounts could give us verifiable and unique information about the past or future).  I had thought that Wolpe was a more modern and sophisticated rabbi, but he obviously thinks that “arrogant scientists”, convinced as they are by evidence, as far worse than arrogant theists:

Are many believers also incapable of self-doubt? Without question. It is just more piquant to hear the apostles of doubt and reason and evidence pound the university lectern like a fire and brimstone preacher and cast all careful empirical weighing out the window when religious claims are concerned.

Who, exactly, has “pounded the lectern”? I didn’t see any lectern pounding in Wolpe’s debate with Hitchens and Harris: just four civil people sitting in chairs, cracking jokes and, on the side of the rabbis, refusing to make tangible statements about what they believe.  And who’s casting “careful empirical weighing” out the window when it comes to faith?  The rabbis, of course: they don’t think a lack of evidence means anything when it comes to “religious claims.”

Curiously, although Wolpe, like many Jews, wouldn’t sign on to the existence of an afterlife or Heaven in the debate, he seems to do so here, and says that he, rather than Hawking, is eminently qualified to say it exists:

Stephen Hawking is an estimable scientist and no doubt an admirable man but he has no more competence to pronounce on heaven than any other thoughtful adult. Galileo made the distinction centuries ago that faith was about how to go to heaven and not about how the heavens go. I fully acknowledge Hawking’s expertise in the second half of that sentence. In the first — which we may think of as how to live as sacred life, a life in service to something greater than oneself, a life in which the non-physical is as real as the flesh in which we are encased , or even more real — when it comes to that, I would not choose Stephen Hawking as my guide. Master scientist though he may be, I’ll turn to a still higher authority.

Heaven and god are “more real” than human bodies?  And Wolpe’s idea that faith can tell us how to live a moral life is not only contravened by the evidence, but bespeaks a willful ignorance of the millennia of secular reason and philosophy concerning how one lives the “good life.”

On the site, six other people weigh in on Hawking’s statement; two of them (Tom Flynn and Herb Silverman) are atheists.  You’ll be amused by Anglican bishop Nicholas Wright’s argument that “Hawking is working with a very low-grade and sub-biblical view of ‘going to heaven.’”

Harmon Killebrew (1936-2011)

May 18, 2011 • 4:52 am

In my younger days I was a baseball aficionado, and one of my heroes was Hammerin’ Harmon Killebrew, a great hitter and a truly nice guy.  I won’t recount his exploits here; you can read about them in the New York Times obituary: he died yesterday, at age 74, from esophageal cancer.  In his memory, I ransacked my shelves and dug out the only piece of baseball memorabilia I have: a science journal autographed by Killebrew:

In 1972 I lived in New York City, working at a hospital as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.  I used to take long walks through Manhattan, and would carry some journals with me to read during breaks.  On this occasion I was strolling in front of the Plaza Hotel and noticed a huge bus disgorging sportsmen, who were surrounded by a pack of kids. It was the Minnesota Twins, in town to play the Yankees.  I recognized Killebrew (he was a big guy) and joined the throng around him for autographs.  When my turn came, I proffered the only thing I had to autograph: a copy of the March, 1972 issue of Genetics. (It must have been April then: the 1972 Twins schedule shows them in New York from April 28-April 30).

When Killebrew took the journal to sign his name, he turned it over and saw the title.  He looked quizzical.  I told him, “It’s a science journal, Mr. Killebrew.  I’m a geneticist.”  He looked at me as if I were nuts, but signed it anyway.  This has to be the only copy of a scientific journal signed by a Hall of Famer!

I’m putting this today into my folder of “Letters from famous people.”  (Perhaps I’ll post some of the more interesting ones anon.)

Wake up!

May 18, 2011 • 3:59 am

Was there ever a more smokin’ band than the Allman Brothers? Here they are in 1995 doing one of my favorites (there are many):  “One way out,” as recorded on their album “Eat a Peach”.

Lead guitarist Dickey Betts is almost unrecognizable without his moustache, but he’s in top form.

When I was younger the legend went around that the album title referred to Duane Allman’s death when his motorcycle hit a peach truck (it was a truck, but not a peach-laden one).  The real source of the title is a bit more prosaic.

Mooney snatches victory from jaws of defeat

May 17, 2011 • 12:31 pm

Most of us know that Ron Lindsay, the head of the Center for Inquiry, pretty much took apart Chris Mooney’s feeble arguments for accommodationism in a Point of Inquiry podcast made during a Mediterranean junket (see Ophelia‘s and P.Z’s takes on the podcast).  The only one defending Mooney, apparently, is Josh Rosenau, who didn’t hear the podcast.

I did, and Mooney’s performance is embarrassing, especially where he claims that there’s plenty of evidence that atheism turns people away from science but then admits that he can’t cite any.  Mooney, of course, is incapable of admitting he screwed up, and tries to defend himself in a new post at the Intersocktion (you know it pains me to send you over there).  His defense is twofold, and hilarious:

1.  He’s created a Rorschach test.  If you’re familiar with Mooney, you’ll know that every time he says something dumb, temporarily raising traffic at his blog as people get angry at him, he claims victory, arguing that he’s “struck a nerve” or created a Rorschach test for disparate beliefs.  This podcast is no different:

The response to the show is, typically, polarized. The more I study how we reason on contested issues, the less it surprises me that on this topic, the things I say become a Rohrschach. (That includes this comment, by the way.)

Yes, A Rorschach test for whether you’re slick and willfully ignorant.  How self-important can a guy get?

2. Confrontational arguments won’t work because worldviews, coded in the brain, are there for keeps:

I’m not saying it [the grip of religion on America] can’t change, by the way. Societies do change; US society is itself becoming more secular, although I doubt New Atheism is the reason. I’m just saying I have pretty good reasons for doubting there will be change in response to confrontational arguments among those for whom religion is a core of their identity. Maybe PZ will be more persuaded if I quote George Lakoff, from his book The Political Mind, p. 59:

“One of the things cognitive science teaches us is that when people define their very identity by a worldview, or a narrative, or a mode of thought, they are unlikely to change–for the simple reason that it is physically part of their brain, and so many other aspects of their brain structure would also have to change; that change is highly unlikely.”

Does Mooney not realize that everything we believe is physically coded in the brain, and that every time we form a new memory or have a new and remembered thought, that also causes physical changes in the brain?  If you thought all day that you were going to have roast beef for dinner, but then see that turns out to be duck, that’s a change in a physical part of your brain.  Do Mooney and Lakoff know how many interrelated changes in brain structure are involved in accepting Jebus?  And why, exactly, are physical changes in the brain refractory to confrontational arguments but malleable to congenial ones?


Ruse admits that faith and science are irreconcilable, but messes up on human “inevitability”

May 17, 2011 • 10:08 am

Over at EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse discusses a new piece by Michael Ruse at PuffHo: “Evolution and Catholic theology.”  Surprisingly, Ruse, who’s always been an accommodationist, admits (as I’ve argued many times) that official Catholic doctrine is incompatible with science, for that doctrine not only invokes a literal Adam and Eve, but posits some divine tinkering with or guiding of evolution that guaranteed it would cough up humans.  Ruse sees this teleology as Intelligent Design Lite, and I agree completely:

To put direction into evolution is to be a supporter of the non-scientific theory of Intelligent Design. I should add incidentally that this does seem to be the position of Benedict’s friend Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna, who a year or two back in an op-ed piece in the New York Times came right out and endorsed Intelligent Design. The point I am making is that, as things stand at the moment, there is a flat-out contradiction between the claims of modern biological science and the theology of the Roman Catholic Church. And the fact is that the Pope, for all of his vaulted theological expertise, is either ignoring this fact or is glossing over it, probably because he has made the decision that, when push comes to shove, theology trumps science.

This is why I see theistic evolutionists like Kenneth Miller, Francis Collins,  and the officers of BioLogos as “creationists.”  And I’ve never considered the Catholic Church particularly evolution-friendly.  But, as Jason notes, if Ruse really feels this way, why has he spent his career arguing for a compatibility of faith and science, and excoriating those of us who see an implacable incompatibility?  The man has some ‘splainin’ to do!

There’s one more issue, though: Ruse claims that Richard Dawkins and others have attempted (perhaps unwittingly) to reconcile theology with science by positing that the evolution of complex—ergo God-worshipping—humans was inevitable, so that no creation was necessary.  Ruse argues:

Note what I am saying and what I am not saying. I am saying that “as things stand at the moment” there is a clash and that the Pope is not helping. I am not saying that the clash could not be resolved. Although as it happens — and I have said this on many occasions — I don’t think the clash can be resolved by trying to get more out of science. Richard Dawkins (following Darwin) seems to think that humans are more than chance because evolution works through “arms races” — the prey gets faster and so the predator gets faster — and that ultimately this will produce human-type brains. Simon Conway Morris thinks that there exist always niches waiting to be occupied, one of these niches is for humans, and so at some point it was bound to be filled. Even Gould thought that complexity increases and so at some point, if not here on earth then somewhere in the universe, humans would appear.

This is true for Conway Morris, who happens to be a Catholic, but certainly not for Dawkins or Gould.  Gould was very clear that he saw the evolution of humans as a contingent event, not at all inevitable. He wrote this (in Wonderful Life, I believe):

Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.

And of course I have Richard Dawkins right here behind this sign, attesting that Ruse knows nothing of his work.  Here’s Richard’s response (quoted with permission) to Ruse’s piece:

I’m astonished that he could attribute such a view to Gould, who strongly advocated the opposite. He is a tiny bit nearer the mark with me because, like Conway Morris but unlike Gould, I do believe in something that could be called progressive evolution, mainly because of arms races. Unlike Conway Morris, however, I haven’t gone so far as to suggest that humans were inevitable.

The main place where I have written about progress is the last chapter of The Ancestor’s Tale, called ‘the Host’s Return.’

Ruse, of course, doesn’t give up there.  He helpfully suggests that theology should be tweaked instead.

My own thinking is that if you are going to get anywhere then you need to work on the theology. I have suggested that, since we have appeared, we could appear. Hence, God (being outside time and space) could simply go on creating universes until humans did appear. A bit of a waste admittedly but we have that already in our universe.

As the parent of this idea, I am expectedly rather fond of it. But I am not promoting it now because it is right, but simply to say that some solution needs to be found. At least, some solution needs to be found by Christians. Otherwise, the New Atheists are right, and science and religion cannot be reconciled. Hence, you must take your choice, and since science is right the appropriate conclusion follows at once.

Well, there may indeed have been multiple universes, one or more of which could contain humanlike creatures, but they needn’t have been created by God.  But few religious people are going to accept Ruse’s “solution,” for most Americans, at least, believe in an interactive, theistic God, one who shaped the universe to makes humans its centerpiece.  And for that vast majority of people, even Ruse must admit that science and religion are irreconcilable.

Mark Vernon at the Guardian: What’s wrong with intelligent design?

May 17, 2011 • 6:35 am

You’re probably familiar with this contretemps, recently described last Friday in the New York Times.  The philosophy journal Synthese published an issue on “Evolution and its rivals,” which, among other pieces, contained an article by philosopher Barbara Forrest criticizing the work of another philosopher, Francis Beckwith.  Forrest rightly called out Beckwith for his sympathies with intelligent design (ID) and his lack of qualifications to pronounce on legal issues.

When the journal came out in print, its editors published a disclaimer, aimed implicitly at Forrest, saying that “some of the papers in this issue employ a tone that may make it hard to distinguish between dispassionate intellectual discussion of other views and disqualification of a targeted author or group.” That, of course, represents the journal caving into to ID sympathizers.

Who were they?  The Times reports that they include Notre Dame theologian Alvin Plantinga, Calvin College philosophy professor Kelly James Clark, and Beckwith himself.  Forrest also suspects prominent IDer William Dembski, who denies (using weasel words) any knowledge of a “campaign.” In the meantime, Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a co-editor of the special issue, has complained bitterly about the journal’s disclaimer.

Well, people have a right to complain, but academic journals, when publishing pieces, shouldn’t then publish disclaimers criticizing the “tone” of those pieces.  It’s undermining their own mission and their own authors.

Over at the “Comment is free” section of the Guardian, ex-Anglican priest Mark “Holy Rabbit” Vernon, inspired by the Synthese controversy, does his own tone-trolling in a piece called “Too much heat, not enough light in the creationism war.”

But American ID battles are powerful catalysts of this near hysterical tone too. Do academics – not least analytical philosophers, who stand or fall on their cool – want to be so readily swept up by it too? Is it not the case that those who stand to gain the most from such rows are not philosophers and scientists, but polemicists who seek to politicise evolution?

Arguably, not just the tone but the content of discussion risks distortion too. Staying with the Synthese row, one element in it concerned whether or not the laws of nature preclude the possibility of miracles. It’s a reasonable question, raising interesting issues about the nature of laws of nature and miracles alike. But against the backdrop of ID, philosophers start citing David Hume as if his treatises were infallible scripture, and start accusing their peers of virtual heresy for allowing even the possibility of a defence of miracles.

I have no desire to defend either Hume or miracles. But is this not tantamount to declaring certain subjects off-limits? Again, it’s the biblicists who stand to win the most. “A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies,” observed Oscar Wilde. You will come to resemble them. For evidence of that, observe the culture wars of the present day.

First of all, Hume did not declare miracles “off-limits”.  As most of us know, Hume said that, to establish a miracle, the evidence in its favor would have to be stronger than the likelihood that those attesting to the miracle were either wrong or duplicitous:

‘That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish….’ When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

Clearly, Vernon doesn’t understand why the subject of ID brings so much “heat”, nor why those recalcitrant scientists declare miracles “off limits.”

First, not all of us declare miracles “off limits”.  Although some people, including NCSE director Eugenie Scott and Dr.3 Massimo Pigliucci, say that science simply cannot investigate miracles or the supernatural, others—including myself—disagree.  If theism predicts that God interacts with the world in certain ways, then those ways can be tested.  I once argued with Scott that if, say, native Americans perform certain rituals intended to bring rain, one could in principle do a scientific test of whether those rituals actually have the desired effect.  Ditto with the efficacy of prayer.  Now maybe those “miracles” could eventually be shown to have non-goddy causes, but if we rule out duplicity or error along the lines of Hume, I think we could provisionally accept some results as evidence for the supernatural.

But the main reason why scientists like myself reject intelligent design is not because we’re a priori determined to reject the supernatural. It’s because the idea of the supernatural has never been necessary to explain anything in science.  We have not yet found any phenomenon in which the likelihood of God’s intervention is a more reasonable interpretation than our simple ignorance of a naturalistic cause.  Michael Behe, for instance, famously declared that because he could not see any way that the blood-clotting system could have evolved by gradual, stepwise evolution, the existence of that system testified to an Intelligent Designer.  But subsequent analysis showed that Behe was wrong: there were possible evolutionary precursors to this system, and clotting systems missing some parts were nevertheless still functional (see Kenneth Miller’s argument here).

The problem with ID, then, is that it is, as someone once called it, a “science stopper.”  It’s based solely on a failure of imagination—and scientific understanding—that is then written off as evidence for God.  It’s a biochemical god-of-the-gaps gambit.  And this tactic precludes any further scientific work, the kind of work that eventually showed that blood clotting could indeed have evolved in a Darwinian way.  Since there has been no previous evidence for supernatural intervention in either science or the rest of the world, it is more reasonable for scientists to consider a puzzling phenomenon as reflecting our lack of understanding than as evidence for God.

In a critique of intelligent design I wrote for The New Republic, I said this about Behe’s resort to the supernatural:

In view of our progress in understanding biochemical evolution, it is simply irrational to say that because we do not completely understand how biochemical pathways evolved, we should give up trying and invoke the intelligent designer. If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by labeling our ignorance “God.”

Until Mark Vernon understands how biology works, he should stick to his mushbrained apophatic theology.  Need I add that Vernon was a Templeton-Cambridge Journalism fellow (in 2008)?

h/t: Sigmund