Eric MacDonald reviews Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction

December 16, 2010 • 6:43 pm

I’m pretty much a fan of the Oxford University Press “VSI” (Very Short Introduction) series: they’re often quite useful introductions to many areas of human thought.   But one of them: the Science and Religion VSI (2008), an accommodationist tract by Thomas Dixon, isn’t up to snuff, at least according to Eric MacDonald, ex Anglican priest and regular commenter on this site.

Eric has written a longish but valuable critique of this VSI over at Butterflies and Wheels. Like all good book reviews, it’s far more than just an accounting of a book’s merits and demerits: here Eric takes on the whole idea of “harmony” between science and religion.

A few excerpts:

What may be an issue is the continuing attempt by religionists to claim a relationship between science and religion, an attempt to harmonise religion with science, and to accommodate science to religion. But this cultural struggle is not a scientific concern, except insofar as it interferes with the proper function of the sciences; the pretence that it is, and that there are meaningful parallels between science and religion, is the entire burden of this book. In my view the case is simply not made. . .

Though there is no conceivable basis for speaking of God’s will in regard, say, to specific questions such as the acceptance or rejection of homosexuality, or the ordination of women, continuing as a religion means that such speech must be privileged. In non-religious contexts such disagreements would be about matters of fact, or about disagreements regarding ethical principles which are, at least in principle, resolvable. In religious contexts the assumption is that there is one correct answer to the questions in dispute, and that God knows that answer. The task of the religious is, in humility, to seek to know God’s will, and when found, to submit, in humility, obediently to it. Yet there is no conceivable way of resolving the issues in dispute, if that is what they are. We will come to the question of revelation in due course, but it is clear that where claims are made to revelation, they are always to sources which are unquestionably human and fallible, and, moreover, open to interpretation. There is simply no way that this problem of sources and authority can be solved, except, of course, by main force. So, the simple truth is thatreligion’s continued prominence cannot underwrite religion’s claim to epistemic respectability. And yet it is almost entirely upon this that its claim to relationship with science is based. There is no sound epistemological basis for relating religion and science. If religionists wish to form a bastardised academic speciality it should be called ‘Religion and Science’, not ‘Science and Religion’. But it cannot be a field of knowledge for the simple reason that theology is not one . . .

. . . But Darwin had noticed something that most religious believers simply have not even considered. It is said that after his beloved daughter Annie died of tuberculosis at the age of 10, Darwin stopped attending church. [JAC: I think Annie’s TB is a matter of dispute.] He would accompany his family to the church door, and then carry on with his morning walk. Why? Scarcely anyone asks this question. Why did his daughter’s death topple whatever semblance of faith he had managed to preserve, mainly for his wife’s sake, over whose letter expressing her sense that life would not be worthwhile if she could not believe that they would be reunited after death, he had so often cried? I think I know the answer. It was not just that someone deeply loved had died. The reason was that Darwin had seen, in the death of his ten-year-old daughter, the process of natural selection at work, and the horror of that process, the pain and suffering and the snuffing out of a bright life and all its hopefulness, made it brutally clear that this was an impersonal process, indifferent and blind to the suffering it caused. This was not the product of a caring or benevolent being. It was a mechanical process in which life was indifferently selected for or selected out, much like a stock breeder will choose between the animals that are chosen as studs for breeding and those that are turned into steers for slaughter. And Annie had been selected out. Belief in God could not survive that. . .

. . . The attempt to harmonise religion and science (rather than science and religion) is in fact an attempt to reinterpret scientific findings in such a way that they can be reconciled with people’s religious beliefs, so that people can hold incompatible ideas in their minds without noticing the incompatibility. This will also make it look as if science and religion never conflict, but this is just for religious consumption. It has absolutely nothing to do with history, and even less to do with science.

Eric is particularly good on the repeated and annoying claim that the Galileo affair didn’t really have anything to do with a conflict between science and religion.  I’m going to hurl if I see the apologists make this claim one more time.  But do go read Eric’s piece; he’s been on both sides and knows whereof he speaks.

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UPDATES:  Jason Rosenhouse also panned Dixon’s book about a year ago.  Re Galileo:

Afficionados of science/religion disputes will recognize in this a standard gambit of the genre. Specifically, the attempt to recast situations that are obviously conflicts between science and religion into conflicts about something else.

Also, Thomas Dixon has replied to MacDonald’s review at Butterflies and Wheels.

Wednesday felid!

December 15, 2010 • 12:42 pm

As I said, there were far more deserving cats in the Awesome Kitteh Contest than there were prizes, and over the next few months I want to feature some of the great cats and stories that readers sent in.  This one comes from Rick:

Ashes is our favorite cat. He has incredibly soft fur, and will frequently demand that we sit down on a couch so that he can come snuggle on our laps. He especially likes laps with laptops, presumably for the extra warmth. He has a favorite plush ball that he’ll carry to the top of the stairs, meowing as he goes, only to drop it at the top in order to chase it down. His cutest habit involves our daughter (in the attached picture)—frequently after she leaves the house for school, Ashes will wander into her room and drag an article of clothing (usually something soft, like a sweater or sweatshirt) or a stuffed animal into the upstairs hall, all the while meowing for her.

Ashes loves to visit the family during dinner time. He’ll make his rounds to each family member several times. I’m not sure how this habit started since we never feed him at the table, but without fail he’ll show up in the dining room to rub against legs and politely request some petting.

As all great characters must have a flaw, Ashes has his. He is deathly afraid of the doorbell and has drawn blood on several of us if the doorbell rings while he is being held. He’ll flee to the upstairs master bedroom and hide under my bed for at least an hour. As a result, not many of our guests ever get to meet our favorite cat.

Here’s a lovely picture of Ashes and Rick’s daughter:

Dipteran of the week

December 15, 2010 • 8:24 am

In our continuing series on weird flies, here’s a corker.  At about 1.5 inches long, it’s Africa’s largest fly:  Gyrostigma rhinocerontis, the rhinoceros bot fly.  It’s highly specialized, laying its eggs only on the head of the white and black rhino. The larvae then burrow into the flesh, where they develop in the rhino’s stomach.  When they’re ready for the next life stage, they exit through the rhino’s anus and pupate in the soil.

According to London’s Natural History Museum site,

Despite their large size, adults live only for a few days (3–5 days in captivity) because they have very reduced non-functional mouthparts and do not feed. [You can see the lack of mouthparts in the photo below.]

Within that short life span, female flies have to locate a male, mate and then find a new rhinoceros host for their eggs.

As rhinoceros numbers decline so do the numbers of these flies, and should rhinos become extinct, the flies would probably disappear too, providing an example of co-extinction.

Because the adults are so ephemeral, it’s rare to find one of them, and they’re prized by collectors.  To me they look like wasp mimics, which may afford them some protection:

Photograph Copyright by the Natural History Museum, London

 

Here’s the parasitic larva:

There’s a lot more on this beast in David Barraclough’s article from Natural History in 2006. e.g.:

In 1847 the French naturalist and explorer Adulphe Delegorgue described large numbers of bots in the stomach of a black rhinoceros from northeastern South Africa. He published this vivid description of them in his Voyage dans l’Afrique australe (“Travels in Southern Africa”):

The Rhinoceros Africanus bicornis could well claim the title of foster father of bots. The imagination boggles at the quantity contained in his stomach; they could be shoveled out in bushels…. I am much inclined to think that the viciousness and ill-humor which characterize the Rhinoceros Africanus bicornis are due simply to the presence of thousands of these parasites and can be compared with the irritability of a man infested with tapeworm. However, in spite of their numbers, which sometimes seem to exceed all natural limits, bots do not, as far as I know, cause the death of indigenous animals.

h/t: Matthew Cobb

Sophisticated theology: rabbi admits there’s no proof of God

December 15, 2010 • 7:44 am

Over at HuffPo, Rabbi and real estate magnate Alan Lurie takes up the question, “Can the existence of God ever be proven?”  His answer: certainly not.  Does that, then, mean that he gives up the idea of a God? Heavens, no! Don’t you know about the new theology?

Lurie compares arguments about God to a disagreement about a painting.  One person may be deeply moved by the daubs of paint on a canvas, while another is left cold and unconvinced by the other’s emotional experience.

This person may try to explain her experience, but she will ultimately fail to convince someone who only sees pigment on canvas, and who may conclude that her experience is delusional, and that the study of aesthetics is a waste of time. To the person who was so deeply impacted by the painting, though, such an assertion completely misses the point, and does nothing to convince her that her experience is not real, and that she was not touched and expanded by her encounter.

An emotional experience with a painting is, of course, “real” in a different way than a celestial sky-fairy who cares about us and intervenes in the world is “real.”  One is a subjective feeling about an object, the other an assertion about the existence and nature of something outside of oneself: a universal reality.  People don’t kill each other about their different reactions to paintings, but they do when it comes to the nature of God.

To Lurie, then, the prime “proof” of God’s existence is the emotional experience of God, not evidence for the existence of a celestial being:

In this way, arguments and experiments can not prove the existence of God because God is not an hypothesis. For human beings, God is the experience of a transformative relationship with creation itself, in which we know that the Universe is inherently meaningful, that we were created for a staggering purpose that will unfold over eons, that love and gratitude are the essential actual materials of our lives and that we are holy beings.

The experience of a relationship with God is not one of religious doctrine, does not come from statistics, experiments or argument, and is certainly not in conflict with science and reason in any way. It is also not about righteous certainty or judgment. The experience of God expands the possibilities for our lives and increases the feeling of mystery and intellectual curiosity about the world. Reason and observation are crucial elements in faith. Faith and reason are not mutually exclusive and are no more in conflict than civil engineering and poetry.

As a rabbi and person of faith, I have no interest in proving the existence of God and certainly do not want to convert anyone to my religion or way of thinking. What I am passionate about, though, is helping bring others to an experience and relationship with God because I know that such a relationship can create powerful positive personal and communal transformation. One brings another to the experience of God not through philosophical or material proof, but through living the example of gratitude, purpose, compassion and love.

It’s not clear to me whether the good rabbi is an atheist who simply thinks that there are benefits to entertaining a “transformative relationship” with a nonexistent being (I’m reminded of the old joke, “What do you call a Jew who doesn’t believe in God?” Answer: “A Jew”), or simply someone who will buy the existence of a celestial being without proof (implied in “helping bring others to an experience and relationship with God”).  And he fails to explore the consequences of bringing people into a relationship with a nonexistent being.  Isn’t that really a lie, like having a transformative relationship with Harvey the Rabbit or the notion that David Koresh was a religious prophet?  There’s a reason why Dawkins called his book The God Delusion.

It baffles me that these people take their ideas so seriously, but what’s really amazing is that others take them seriously—so desperate are they to take anything as “evidence” for God.

Lurie, who has apparently abandoned the traditional notion of God, still sees tremendous value in forming a relationship with a God who may not exist. That’s not only delusional, but condescending.  Only clerical garb can render such ridiculous ideas immune to ridicule.

When I read this stuff, I’m often reminded of the first verse of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

Boudry et al. on irreducible complexity

December 14, 2010 • 1:41 pm

Coincidentally, the latest issue of Quarterly Review of Biology, which contains Michael Behe’s paper on microbial evolution in the lab, also has a strong critique of Behe’s ideas about “irreducible complexity” by a group of Belgian philosophers headed by Maarten Boudry.  Their paper is called called “Irreducible incoherence and intelligent design:  a look into the conceptual toolbox of a pseudoscience”, and you can find a free copy here or here.

The main idea is that Behe (and other ID advocates) have gone back and forth between two views of irreducible complexity to avoid being pinned down and refuted with data.  Here’s Behe’s notion of irreducible complexity, as defined in his book Darwin’s Black Box:

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition non-functional. An irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution (Behe 2006, p. 39).

As most of us know, Behe maintains that such irreducibly complex (IC) systems supposedly could not evolve in an adaptive, step-by-step Darwinian way, since the adaptive function supposedly appears only at the end of the process. Ergo an intervening intelligent designer (aka Jesus) must be responsible for such systems.

Boudy et. al, however, show that Behe and his minions have used two distinct interpretations of this notion:

To be sure, it is not difficult to find examples of biochemical systems in which the removal of just one part damages the whole system. But consider Behe’s phrases “effectively ceases functioning” and “by definition non-functional.” There are two possible reconstructions of his definition: 1) the term “functioning” refers exclusively to the basic function currently performed by the whole system (e.g., the rotary motion of the bacterial flagellum) and does not pertain to other possible functions, in other contexts, when one or more components are removed; and 2) the phrases “effectively ceases functioning” and “non-functional” include any function that the impaired system or one of its components may perform in other contexts. In principle, it is not very hard to discover whether a system exhibits IC in the first, weak sense. Leaving aside the ambiguity regarding the natural “parts” into which the system must be decomposed (Dunkelberg 2003; Sober 2008, pp. 135-160), it suffices to knock out these parts one after the other to see if the system can still perform its basic function. Again, evolution by natural selection is perfectly capable of producing complex functional systems exhibiting IC in this weak sense.

. . . In fact, only an IC system in the second, strong sense would be to evolutionary theory, because it would rule out evolutionary precursor systems and function shifts of the system’s components. However, it is hard to see how Behe could even begin to demonstrate the existence of such a system without defaulting to the classical “argument from ignorance” (Pigliucci 2002, p. 67). Interestingly, Behe has disingenuously taken advantage of this very ambiguity in answering his critics.

Boudry et al. then recount the history of Behe’s evasions about these two senses and show that “clarifications” by others such as Dembski have in fact made matters worse.   It turns out that there are simply no data that Behe and his followers would accept as showing a real Darwinian origin of the biochemical systems they see as “irreducibily complex”.  During his testimony at the Dover trial, for example, Behe demanded more than just plausible Darwinian scenarios for the origin of IC; he said he wanted this:

Not only would I need a step-by-step, mutation by mutation analysis, I would also want to see relevant information such as what is the population size of the organism in which these mutations are occurring, what is the selective value for the mutation, are there any detrimental effects of the mutation, and many other such questions.

No bloody way can evolutionists ever provide that kind of data for systems that evolved in the distant past!

If you’re interested in the notion of “irreducible complexity”, and want an up-to-date analysis of its scientific and philosophical problems, Boudry et al. is a good summary for the layperson.

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Boudry, M., S. Blancke, and J. Braeckman.  2010. Irreducible incoherence and intelligent design:  a look into the conceptual toolbox of a pseudoscience. Quart. Rev. Biol. 85:473-477.

Casey Luskin distorts Behe’s paper

December 14, 2010 • 9:47 am

The Discovery Institute has of course picked up Michael Behe’s new paper in Quarterly Review of Biology, and it’s distorted summarized by DI bigwig Casey Luskin here.  As I predicted, the IDers completely ignore the limitations of this paper (see my analyses here and here), and assert, wrongly, that Behe has made a powerful statement about evolution in nature.

This distortion is hardly news, of course—I’m completely confident that Behe not only expected it, but approves of it—but I feel compelled to highlight it once again.  Luskin’s three distortions, which correspond to the three caveats attached to Behe’s results:

1.  Luskin doesn’t mention that Behe’s analysis concentrated only on short-term laboratory studies of adaptation in bacteria and viruses.

2.  Luskin also doesn’t mention that these experiments deliberately excluded an important way that bacteria and viruses gain new genetic elements in nature: through horizontal uptake of DNA from other organisms. This kind of uptake was prohibited by the design of the experiments.

3.  Luskin implies that Behe’s conclusions extend to all species, including eukaryotes, even though we know that members of this group (and even some bacteria) can gain new genetic elements and information via gene duplication and divergence.  And we know that this has happened repeatedly and pervasively in the course of evolution.

Luskin’s intent is clear—to claim that Behe has supposedly shown a profound problem with the theory of evolution and natural selection: it cannot explain the gain of new genetic elements in evolution.  There must therefore most be another source of these new elements.  Ergo Jesus.  Behe did not show this, and Luskin knows it.

Some Luskin quotes from the piece, generalizing from short-term lab experiments on microbes to evolution as a whole in nature:

Behe doesn’t claim that gain-of-function mutations will never occur, but the clear implication is that neo-Darwinists cannot forever rely on examples of loss or modification-of-FCT mutations to explain molecular evolution. At some point, there must be gain of function. But if loss-of-function mutations are so much more common than gain-of-function mutations that the odds of a pathway following a multiple mutation pathway toward the construction of a new FCT before encountering a local adaptive peak that “breaks or blunts” the FCT may be prohibitively small. . .

. . . If Behe’s article is correct, then molecular evolution, in the world of real biology, faces a similar problem. Remember that Behe found that “the rate of appearance of an adaptive mutation that would arise from the diminishment or elimination of the activity of a protein is expected to be 100-1000 times the rate of appearance of an adaptive mutation that requires specific changes to a gene.” If loss/modification-of-FCT adaptations are 100-1000 times more likely than gain-of-FCT adaptations, then logic dictates that eventually an evolving type of organism will run out of FCTs to lose/modify.

In short, the logical outcome of Behe’s finding is that some process other than natural selection and random mutation* must be generating new FCTs. If Darwinian evolution is at work, it tends to remove FCTs much faster than it creates them — something else must be generating the information for new FCTs.

The evidence cited by Behe does not paint a hopeful state of affairs for Darwinian proponents of molecular evolution.

So typical of these clowns to ignore the insuperable problems with extending Behe’s limited conclusions to evolution as a whole.  But I’m absolutely sure that Behe intended his paper to be distorted in this way.

This is only the beginning of the ID distortions to come.  I don’t plan on writing more about this, but feel free to post further ID shenanigans in the comments.

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*[He means Jesus]

A whistling caterpillar

December 14, 2010 • 8:35 am

Well, it may not be smoking, but it’s whistling.  According to MSNBC science news, researchers have found that the walnut sphinx moth caterpillar (Amorpha juglandis), can make whistling noises by forcing air through its external breathing holes (“spiracles”).  The paper, by Bura et al., is in the December issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology.

To confirm their idea, researcher Veronica Bura at Carleton University gently applied latex over all eight pairs of the caterpillars’ abdominal spiracles and then uncovered each pair systematically while pinching the larva. The whistles definitely came from the eighth pair, generating trains of whistles lasting up to four seconds each, and spanning frequencies that ranged from those audible to birds and humans up to ultrasound.

Why do they do this?  The video below gives one clue, showing that they whistle when they’re attacked (they also thrash about):

Video of whistling caterpillar.

To test this theory, Bura et al. exposed caterpillars to a bird predator, a trio of yellow warblers (Dendroica petechia).  When attacked, the caterpillars produced sounds (and thrashed), and the birds were scared off, even when they attacked for a second time.  None of the test caterpillars were injured.  The authors conclude that the sound is a key part of the caterpillar’s anti-predator defenses.  I find this intriguing but unproven, since the authors apparently didn’t do the required controls in which birds attacked caterpillars whose whistle had been silenced by occluding their eighth spiracles (as another control, they could just occlude the seventh pair of spiracles, which also help breathe but can’t whistle).  The sound, then, may play some role or no role (it could, after all, be the thrashing that scares off birds).   More work is needed here!

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Bura, V. L., V. G. Rohwer, P. R. Martin, and J. E. Yack. 2010.  Whistling in caterpillars (Amorpha juglandis, Bombycoidea): sound-producing mechanism and function.  J. Exp. Biol. 214:30-37.