NY Times report on humanism conference

October 16, 2010 • 7:51 am

In the “beliefs” section of today’s New York Times, Mark Oppenheimer reports on the Los Angeles meetings of the Council for Secular Humanism.  It’s a pretty fair article, and, after describing the Myers/Mooney clash about whether Francis Collins is a “clown,” comes to an important conclusion:

But for many in the audience, Mr. Collins’s clown status was not the pertinent issue.

Rather, as atheists in a very religious country, they were looking for solidarity.

For example, I had lunch on Saturday with two young lovers who met earlier this year at “Generation Atheist,” a meet-up for young people at a pub in Hollywood, where they had gone looking for like minds.

“I’m not ‘out’ at my workplace,” said the woman, Claire, a 27-year-old arts administrator who asked that her last name not be used. “Because most people think atheists have no morals, I could damage the organization if I’m honest about where I stand on the issue,” she said.

Mr. Myers and other “confrontationalists” surely do alienate some potential Christian allies. But they may also give comfort to people like Claire, who feel like an invisible minority. Mr. Myers is way out of the closet as an atheist — proudly, outrageously so. We’re here, he’s saying. And we don’t believe. And we have science and reason on our side. Get used to it.

That’s what Gnu Atheism is really about: legitimizing and un-demonizing atheism.  I know from my trip to Kentucky, and elsewhere in the South, that there’s a large but silent minority of atheists in this country.  Their becoming visible is the first step, and becoming more vocal the second.  And then: look out, ye faithful!

Dr. Karl continues his critique

October 16, 2010 • 7:10 am

I’m sure that, like the readers of Oliver Twist who couldn’t wait for each month’s installment, you’ve all been anticipating the latest addition to Karl Giberson’s obsessive multipart critique of my views.  He’s now up to part four.  This time he faults my failure to engage his points. (I plead not guilty.) He also says that I’ve misrepresented the views he set out in a HuffPo piece, a piece in which he claimed that the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” could be taken as “evidence that there is something out there.”  Giberson says that he didn’t necessarily mean that that “something out there” was God.

At no point did I suggest that the transcendent mystery of mathematics was grounded in God. In fact, I intentionally quoted from three mathematical physicists who had no conventional religious beliefs to make my point: . .

Oh for crying out loud!  Of course he meant God; he knows it and we all know it.  After all, the title of his HuffPo piece was “Mathematics and the religious impulse,” and it contains statements like these:

When it comes to science and religion, I think the onus is on the religious believer to justify the existence of religion. .

. . .So why religion?

I want to offer, by way of a short parable, a partial explanation for the religious impulse and why so many of us are driven to embrace realities that go beyond what science can establish with clarity. . .

. . . But those that understand the eternal mystery best impulsively lean over the railing into the abyss because they know in their bones that there is something out there. Whether they encounter something depends on factors that elude many of their less imaginative peers. This is a deeply religious impulse: one that goes beyond science, but not one without motivation.

“Transcendent mystery” is a code word for “God” in precisely the same way that “states’ rights” used to be code words for “segregation.”

Giberson is a professor of physics at Eastern Nazarene College, and by his own admission a deeply religious man.  Nearly all of his blog posts address the BioLogos mission of reconciling science and God—his own Christianity in particular. (They worry a lot, over at BioLogos, about whether Adam and Eve were real people.)  If he didn’t mean religion, what did he mean?

Finally, he wonders why I called him Uncle Karl, and some of his supporters claim that the term “uncle” was mockery.  That’s certainly not true. I called him “Uncle Karl” because he was avuncular and seemed like a pretty nice guy, almost like a religious teddy bear.  I sort of liked him!

But I don’t any more: he seems muddled and even mean-spirited.  From now on he’s “Dr. Karl.”

Caturday felid: Kiddo, the cat who nearly beat Lindbergh

October 16, 2010 • 5:45 am

Exactly one hundred years ago today, six men and a cat set out to cross the Atlantic in an airship.  Leaving from New Jersey in a hydrogen-filled contraption called America, they hoped to reach Europe in only a few days. Had it succeeded, it would have been the first crossing of the Atlantic by air, preceding Lindbergh’s crossing by 17 years and Alcock and Brown’s by 9.  The Telegraph reports:

Steering such a vessel would be no easy task. The airship was comprised of a cotton and silk balloon 228ft long, filled with hydrogen, beneath which ran a long slim ‘car’, or enclosed catwalk, which housed the crew as well as engines to power four propellers. The vessel was steered by a rudder at the stern and a wheel in the front of the car.

Slung beneath the car was a lifeboat and an ungainly, metal ‘tail’ called an equilibrator, which trailed 300ft behind the airship. It was designed to drag in the water and to hold the airship at a steady height.

The idea was that as the air temperature rose, the hydrogen in the balloon would expand, causing the airship to rise. This would pull the equilibrator from the water, making it heavier and controlling the ascent. When the temperature fell, the reverse would happen.

Would you get in something that looked like this?:

America, seen from the deck of the ship that ultimately rescued the crew

And there was a cat aboard: a gray tabby named Kiddo.

As the crew, which also included a radio operator, a chief engineer and two mechanics, climbed on board, Simon picked up a stray cat that had been living in the America’s hangar. Like many sailors, he was superstitious. ‘We can never have luck without a cat on board,’ he wrote.

Here, courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum, is Kiddo (with crewman Melvin Vaniman), snapped in 1911:

Vaniman, the engineer, apparently tried to kill Kiddo as America set out:

Not everyone on board saw it that way and as the airship was being towed from the coast by a tug boat, Melvin Vaniman, the chief engineer, stuffed the cat into a bag and tried to lower it into the boat. However, the attempt to jettison the animal failed and it was dunked into the sea, before being pulled back onto the America.

Alas, Kiddo did not bring luck: the ship was beset by problems, and the crew (including Kiddo) was rescued by a mail ship after six days, only 400 miles off the U.S. coast.  The America, still aloft, disappeared over the horizon (see The Telegraph link for the full account). Nevertheless, it was a worthwhile voyage:

Although the crew had not even got close to crossing the Atlantic, the 1,008-mile, 72-hour flight had broken many records – becoming the longest in terms of time and distance. The crew had also sent the first radio message from an airship to shore and to other ships, and achieved the first rescue of an airship crew at sea. The voyage had also taught aviators vital lessons about the problems of weight and power that would need to be overcome.

The Purr ‘n’ Furr “Famous Felines” website (a site that well repays ailurophilic browsing) recounts Kiddo’s fate:

The crew, including Kiddo, were rescued by the steamboat Trent, with Simon reminding them that it had been a good idea to bring a cat, as they have nine lives!

A tumultuous welcome awaited them in New York, and Kiddo achieved celebrity status by being displayed for a while in Gimbel’s, one of the leading department stores of the time, where he reclined on soft cushions in a gilded cage.

He retired from aviation to live with Walter Wellman’s daughter, but Vaniman was not so fortunate, as he died when the airship Akron, on which he was intending to make another Atlantic attempt, exploded on 2 July 1912, killing all on board.

Vaniman’s premature death is clearly the work of Ceiling Cat, punishing the man for trying to deep-six Kiddo.  Here’s another picture of Kiddo with the nefarious Vaniman:

h/t: Stash Krod

Hitchens vs. Hitchens: the brothers debate the viability of a godless civilization

October 15, 2010 • 5:39 pm

CNN has a short excerpted video of Tuesday’s debate in Washington, D.C. between Christopher Hitchens and his brother Peter.  The topic: Can civilization survive without God?  The excerpt deals with the question of whether one can be good without God.  Nothing really new here, but it’s sad to see the toll that the treatments have taken on Hitch.

Michael Gerson, an op-ed columnist at the Washington Post, judges Peter’s argument—that one needs religion to be moral—the stronger:

But Christopher Hitchens is weaker on the personal and ethical challenge presented by atheism: Of course we can be good without God, but why the hell bother? If there are no moral lines except the ones we draw ourselves, why not draw and redraw them in places most favorable to our interests? Hitchens parries these concerns instead of answering them: Since all moral rules have exceptions and complications, he said, all moral choices are relative. Peter Hitchens responded, effectively, that any journey becomes difficult when a compass points differently at different times.

I find it absolutely unbelievable that a thinking person can, in this day and age, think that Abrahamic religion is a source of morality.  Yes, it may buttress morality, but it can’t serve as a source of moral dictums, if for no other reason than scriptures sanction a lot of behaviors we now find immoral. We reject those behaviors, and accept others, based not on faith but on some antecedent views (be they learned or evolutionary) about what is moral.  And if you realize that, then you know that there are non-God-based reasons to be moral.

Guess the bones

October 15, 2010 • 2:30 pm

UPDATE AND EVOLUTIONARY LESSON: We have a winner!  I thought this would go fast.  Palefury, comment #16, guessed correctly: giant panda (top), grizzly bear (middle) and polar bear (bottom).

Note how well the teeth suit the animal’s diet.  Pandas are herbivorous, nomming the stems and leaves of bamboo, and need tough teeth for grinding.  To do this, their teeth evolved a broad, flat shape.  Grizzlies are omnivores: they have “Swiss Army teeth,” useful for eating both vegetation and meat (note the higher cusps that aid in shearing flesh).  Finally, polar bears are completely carnivorous, and their teeth are “carnassial,” with high cusps for shearing the flesh of seals. These animals are all in the family Ursidae.

____________

I still feel bad that nobody guessed the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine/Physiology.  Therefore, I’m putting up the spare autographed copy of WEIT to the person who correctly guesses the identity of the three mandibles (lower jaws) shown below. I took this photo during my visit to Kentucky.  They’re from three different species in a single family of mammals.  Name the species (giving both the scientific and common names) in order from top to bottom, and explain how you identified these.  Click to enlarge the photos. (Ignore the mandible nestled inside the middle one.)

First correct winner gets the book; contest closes at 4 pm tomorrow or when there’s a winner—which there will be.  Employees or students of the University of Kentucky, and their relatives, are ineligible.

The answer will appear in this space.

Jesus ‘n’ Mo(hler)

October 15, 2010 • 8:01 am

The Jesus and Mo artist has illustrated this week’s dust-up about science and religion (see Baptist bigwig Albert Mohler’s commentary on my op-ed about compatibility):

Note that this circularity also applies in reverse–to the common accommodationist claim that science will always be compatible with true religion (aka “sophisticated religion” or “nuanced religion”).  “True religion,” of course, is defined as that brand of faith that’s compatible with science.  Steve Gould made this tactic famous with his NOMA gambit in Rocks of Ages.

Also, Mohler:

Are science and Christianity friends? The answer to that is an emphatic yes, for any true science will be perfectly compatible with the truths we know by God’s revelation. But this science is not naturalistic, while modern science usually is. Too many evangelicals try to find middle ground, only to end up arguing for positions that combine theological surrender with scientific naïveté. As Jerry Coyne makes very clear, there really is no middle ground.

This is why accommodationism is useless against Mohler and his minions.

h/t: No Astronomer

I get letters

October 15, 2010 • 5:22 am

It’s early, I’m soon to fly to Chicago, and my head is a wee bit tight from overconsumption of the local bourbon (I recommend Blanton’s).  More on the trip to Kentucky later.  Here for your delectation are four letters that USA Today published yesterday about my science-and-faith-aren’t-friends piece. Three are negative, one not, and that’s fair enough given that a paper has to have “balance.”

I want to briefly highlight one because its claim that I made a philosophical boo-boo has also appeared at several places on the internet (see here and here, for example):

Interesting but flawed argument

Jerry Coyne delivers a bold perspective on the compatibility of science and religion. He argues that a scientific viewpoint is contradictory to, and clearly trumps, a religious world view.

However, in his zeal to argue his point, he creates his own internal contradictions. He states that the existence of religious scientists cannot be used to support the compatibility of science and religion, and yet later he states that the incompatibility of science and faith is “amply demonstrated by the high rate of atheism among scientists.”

Before Coyne can convincingly argue that science and religion are incompatible, he needs to take care of the incompatibilities in his own viewpoint.

Brent Metfessel; Eden Prairie, Minn.

I find this argument curious.  My claim was that science and faith are philosophically incompatible. If there were to be evidence for such a philosophical claim, then it would not be that every scientist would be an atheist.  Rather,  we’d expect that scientists would tend to be more atheistic than the general public.  This would reflect either their dawning Laplace-ian awareness that if one doesn’t need God to explain the world, then perhaps there might not be a God at all.  Alternatively,  people with a naturalistic and skeptical frame of mind would be drawn to science.  (I think both are at work.)  Either way, scientists would be a section of the population enriched in atheism.

And that, of course, is exactly what you find: atheists are much more common among scientists than among the general public. If you need find evidence for the argument about philosophical incompatibility, you look at groups using statistics— not single individuals.

There are individuals, like Francis Collins, who will be outliers.  Saying that such individuals do not negate the claim of a philosophical incompatibility does not then prevent us from using statistics on scientists as a whole to demonstrate that incompatibility produces a tangible result in the real world.

The argument of people like Metfessel resembles this “logic” about the relationship between smoking and cancer: “You’ve argued that those individuals who smoke their whole lives and don’t get cancer prove nothing. But if you argue that, then you’re prohibited from using statistics to show that smoking causes cancer.”

Christine O’Donnell ducks question about evolution, disses first amendment

October 14, 2010 • 5:41 am

In last night’s debate between wacko Christine O’Donnell and her opponent Chris Coons, both running for the Senate seat from Delaware, moderator Wolf Blitzer pressed O’Donnell to state her opinion about evolution, reminding her that a while back she claimed that evolution was a “myth.”  She now realizes that she’d lose credibility big-time if she said something that blatantly stupid on national television, so she tries to squirm out of answering the question, talking about evolution in the schools instead.

YouTube has disabled embedding, but you can find the 45-second video here.

“What I believe is irrelevant. . . what I would support in Washington D.C. is for the ability for the local school system to decide what is taught in their classrooms. And what I was talking about on that show [the Bill Maher show; see below] was a classroom that was not allowed to teach creationism as an equal theory as evolution. That is against their constitutional rights and that is an overreaching arm of the government.”

O’Donnell (who showed remarkable ignorance of other issues), doesn’t seem to realize that court rulings banning the teaching of creationism in schools have done so precisely on Constitutional grounds, asserting that creationism is a form of religion and therefore teaching it violates the First Amendment.

Here’s a clip from that Maher show in 1998. O’Donnell didn’t finish her statement, but I’m pretty sure she was going to say that Darwin recanted on his deathbed. And she also asks why, if we evolved from monkeys, monkeys aren’t still evolving into humans today.

HuffPo has selected clips from last night’s debate.