An elusive being

August 18, 2010 • 7:00 am

There’s an entity that I dearly wish existed, for its presence would bring me solace and wonder.  Alas, it’s elusive.  There are rumors that it is actually present in the world, but, sadly, these never pass empirical scrutiny.  A few people have had personal experience of this being, but these haven’t confirmed by others.  Much as I would like to live in a world inhabited by this being, I must reluctantly conclude that it doesn’t seem to exist.

I am an a-woodpeckerist.

About five years ago, biologists were all abuzz with a sighting and a brief and fuzzy video clip suggesting that the Ivory-billed woodpecker was still alive in the Arkansas swamps.  There were later sightings from Florida.  This was dramatic news, since the Ivory-bill (Campephilus principalis), America’s largest woodpecker, was thought to have been extinct since the mid-1940s.  The “resurrection” of an extinct and iconic species gave all biologists and bird lovers a new spring in their step.  How magnificent it would be to see this bird again after 60 years!

But intensive searching by biologists and laypeople over the past five years has failed to turn up the Ivorybill, and I sadly conclude that it’s really truly extinct. If there were an unambiguous sighting, with good video, I would of course change my mind, but for now the species is an ex-woodpecker, singing in the choir invisible.

As PLos Biology reports this week, a new movie on the search for the Ivorybill, Ghost Bird, opens in September.  The movie is reviewed by Jerome Jackson, an ecologist at Florida Gulf Coast University and author of In Search of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.  It’s a nice review that summarizes all the brouhaha around the “rediscovery” of the woodpecker, somewhat resembling the hype about the “ancestral primate” Darwinius.  Although Jackson once thought the Ivory-bill was still alive, he’s now a skeptic.  He gives the movie an emphatic thumbs-up.

Ghost Bird reveals this process and the myriad of impacts it can have. It is a film that will produce a more sophisticated citizen with a better understanding of how science works. While in many ways it is a fun film, a fascinating window on science and the interfaces of science, media, and the general public, ultimately, it tells the story of the tragic extinction of an iconic species and our collective and probably unfounded, yet seemingly inextinguishable hope that maybe, it might still exist. Science can prove that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker still flies. It cannot prove that it does not. With the efforts that have been made since 2004, it has become increasingly likely that it is extinct. But… the truth is still out there.

Sort of like God, isn’t it?

Ghost Bird will be publicly screened in 20 American cities, but only for a short time.  You can find the showings at the movie’s website.

Ivory-billed woodpeckers at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.  Image: Damir Frkovic © 2009/Small Change Productions

Here’s a long (150 minute) video in which John Fitzpatrick of Cornell, the biggest proponent of the Ivorybill’s rediscovery, defends his position. There are some photographs of the bird at 13:15, and you’ll certainly want to see the 1930s movies of the living birds (14:00 to 17:23), showing their huge bills and characteristic “back and forth” movement in the trees.  The crucial new (2004) video and its analysis begin at 42:40.  The argument is about whether the white on this bird indicates an Ivory-billed rather than the darker pileated woodpecker (its size and flight pattern are also issues).

Here’s how the pileated and Ivorybill differ:

Hitchens: I’d do it over again

August 18, 2010 • 5:28 am

In this very short clip, Charlie Rose asks Christopher Hitchens if he’d still smoke and drink a lot if he could rewind the tape of his life.  Some of you might be surprised at his answer.

Like Hitch, most of us have made deliberate choices that will probably shorten our lives, and we’d realize this if we thought about it at all.  We’d all live longer if we lived in a state of semi-starvation, subsisting on roots and broccoli, and completely refrained from eating any food that tastes good.  And we should exercise compulsively.  Few of us live this way. This represents a deliberate choice to exist for fewer years but to enjoy the years we have.

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Fund, pray, love

August 17, 2010 • 6:44 am

The scenario is dreary, and familiar.  The Templeton Foundation gives a prominent science organization money for a conference, or a program, devoted to the “dialogue” between science and faith.  An accommodationist is chosen to dispense assignments and cash.  With Templeton standing by beaming, the conference turns out to be a one-sided lovefest, with both scientists and the faithful assuring everyone not only that there’s no conflict, but that science and faith can actually contribute to each other. There is no dialogue, for everyone thinks alike.  Theology is promoted, and everyone goes home with a smile.

And so it is with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), whose Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion (DoSER) program is funded by Templeton. I reported on this conference in June, and now the video is up.  It’s exactly what you’d expect: pabulum for the ears.

One thing that I didn’t realize is that the newly appointed director of DoSER, astronomer Jennifer Wiseman, is also on the executive council president of the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA), an organization of Christian scientists (note the small “s”).  (The AAAS reports that she’s president of the ASA, but I can’t verify that.) The organization seems pretty dubious, as you can see immediately by their announcement, on their home page, of a talk on intelligent design by Casey Luskin (today, in Chicago!), and a conference by the creationist outfit Reasons to Believe.

It’s even worse. According to Wikipedia, new members of the ASA were (and, I believe, still are) required to agree with this “creedal statement”:

I believe in the whole Bible as originally given, to be the inspired word of God, the only unerring guide to faith and conduct. Since God is the Author of this Book, as well as the Creator and sustainer of the physical world about us, I cannot conceive of discrepancies between statements in the Bible and the real facts of science.

(The organization has a similar “platform of faith”.)

Nowhere do you see the discrepancy between science and faith more clearly than in such statements.  Imagine if I required people working in my lab to swear to this:

I believe in the entire book Speciation, as originally written, to be the inspired word of Jerry A. Coyne and H. Allen Orr, the only unerring guide to the truth about the origin of species.   Since Coyne is senior author of the book, and sustains the laboratory about us, I cannot conceive of discrepancies between statements in Speciation and the real facts of science.

Real scientists don’t sign on to such statements.

With these milquetoast conferences, and their insistence on the compatibility between science and faith, the AAAS is engaging in Templeton-funded theology.  It’s pretty dire, I tell you what.

And it’s nothing new for this body.  In his essay “A designer universe,” Steven Weinberg wrote this about a AAAS conference in 1999:

In an e-mail message from the American Association for the Advancement of Science I learned that the aim of this conference is to have a constructive dialogue between science and religion. I am all in favor of a dialogue between science and religion, but not a constructive dialogue. One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.

h/t:  Larry Moran at Sandwalk

Stenger at HuffPo!

August 16, 2010 • 11:16 am

As a palliative to all the nonsense about science and faith at HuffPo, you can now read Victor Stenger, who has already produced three nice columns there this month.  Curiously, although he’s writing for the “religion” section, Stenger’s posts don’t appear on that page (that’s why I missed them).  What gives?

In his last post, “Absence of evidence is evidence of absence,” Stenger describes four types of evidence that should have been found if the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God actually existed.  Of course there is none, and he concludes:

This absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It refutes the common assertion that science has nothing to say about God. In fact, science can say, beyond any reasonable doubt, that God — the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God — does not exist.

Stenger’s column from a week ago, “Science is not based on faith,” fortuitiously refutes yesterday’s bizarre piece by BioLogos’s Pete Enns, “Atheists are believers, too.” Besides taking some writing lessons to improve his dreadful prose, Enns might want to consult his scientist colleagues at BioLogos before publishing stuff like this:

Also, all people, atheists included, believe worthwhile things for which there is no compelling evidence whatsoever. For example, many people—scientists, philosophers—believe in the principle of uniformity: what we observe now of the laws of nature happens everywhere in the universe, always has and always will.

I happen to believe this is true, but what I believe isn’t the point here. The point is that there is no empirical evidence for this principle, nor can it be logically proven. In fact, there is no evidence for the principle at all unless we assume it to begin with.

Whaddya got?

August 16, 2010 • 7:26 am

Gary Gutting, professor of philosophy at The University of Notre Dame, has been bashing atheism in the New York Times.  His latest column, a critique of Gnu Atheism, has been pretty well eviscerated at Butterflies and Wheels and Pharyngula. I want to talk about something that hasn’t yet come up: Gutting’s complete failure to show that we should take the existence of God seriously.  He’s adept at producing philoso-speak, but a miserable failure at adducing evidence.

First, his claim.  Gutting basically reprises the Courtier’s Reply, saying that nobody should take The God Delusion seriously since

Dawkins does not meet the standards of rationality that a topic as important as religion requires. The basic problem is that meeting such standards requires coming to terms with the best available analyses and arguments. This need not mean being capable of contributing to the cutting-edge discussions of contemporary philosophers, but it does require following these discussions and applying them to one’s own intellectual problems. . . .

Friends of Dawkins might object: “Why pay attention to what philosophers have to say when, notoriously, they continue to disagree regarding the ‘big questions’, particularly, the existence of God?” Because, successful or not, philosophers offer the best rational thinking about such questions.

What is the “best rational thinking” of contemporary philosophers that bears on Dawkin’s case?  First, that God could be simple.  Ergo, Dawkins’s argument that a complex God demands explanation holds no water.  P. Z. and Ophelia have exposed this gambit for the ad-hocery that it is.

Gutting further argues that “Dawkins’ argument ignores the possibility that God is a necessary being (that is, a being that, by its very nature, must exist, no matter what).”  Wrong.  Dawkins certainly discusses—and disposes of—ontological arguments like the “necessary-being” gambit in The God Delusion. He also discusses first-cause arguments analogous to those used to buttress a “necessary being.”

But who cares? I can’t conceive how philosophical argument alone, without any input of data, is going to prove—or even strongly suggest—that God exists. Indeed, as Gutting somewhat poignantly admits, all the “best rational thinking” of philosophers hasn’t settled the case:

Of course, philosophical discussions have not resolved the question of God’s existence. Even the best theistic and atheistic arguments remain controversial.

But the “best atheistic argument” is not controversial: it’s simply this: “I don’t see convincing evidence for God.”  As the best theistic arguments fail, the best atheistic argument becomes even stronger.

But philosophy is overrated here.  The existence of a deistic God—one who doesn’t do anything tangible—is forever beyond the purview of both philosophy and science.  And for a theistic God, philosophy alone won’t do.  You need evidence, and by that I mean something more than revelation or intuition.   Rather than keep countering the feints of apologists wielding the rubber rapier of the Courtier’s Reply, let us go on the offensive, asking  them to state their positive case for God.  And by this I mean answering these three questions:

1) What evidence do you have for God’s existence?

2) Does that evidence, whatever it is, support the particular God you accept rather than gods of other faiths—or a different kind of god entirely?

3) How would you know if you were wrong?

In practice, these good folks never go beyond #1. Nor does Gutting.  So what does he bring to the table? He’s got one argument:

Revelation and intutition.

As Gutting says:

There are sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being, and there are competent philosophers who endorse arguments for God’s existence. Therefore, an agnostic stance seems preferable [sic] atheism.

Leaving aside the issue of whether a person claiming that God exists because she’s “aware of him” could be considered sensible, this is hardly evidence, and certainly no reason to think that, well, maybe there might be a god after all.  Jails and asylums are full of people who have direct awareness of things that don’t exist.  Tons of people believe in alien abduction.  Millions more have direct awareness that diluting one biomolecule in an ocean of water makes a good nostrum.  And if you argue that those who are “aware of God” are much more numerous, I respond that those cases of awareness are not independent, since nearly everyone is taught from infancy that God exists.

As for those “competent philosophers” who endorse arguments for God’s existence, Gutting himself has admitted that those arguments have all failed.  I give those “competent philosophers” no more credence than I do the “competent postmodernists” who declare that there are no objective truths.

And if you dare suggest that we need not just mass intuition, but material evidence, Gutting has an answer:

But what is the evidence for materialism? Presumably, that scientific investigation reveals the existence of nothing except material things. But religious believers will plausibly reply that science is suited to discover only what is material (indeed, the best definition of “material” may be just “the sort of thing that science can discover”). They will also cite our experiences of our own conscious life (thoughts, feelings, desires, etc.) as excellent evidence for the existence of immaterial realities that cannot be fully understood by science.

Here Gutting is wrong, for while science is impotent before the completely immaterial, it’s not before the material effects of immaterial beings. A theistic God is one who has effects on matter, and so comes within the purview of science.  Does Gutting not realize that a virgin birth, or a resurrected dead person, or answered prayers, constitute material realities supposedly produced by an immaterial reality? Gutting’s argument works for an indolent deistic God, but not a theistic one.  Any God who works in the world becomes a god whose existence can be demonstrated empirically.  And of course that’s the kind of God that most Americans accept.

People like Gutting spend their days attacking Dawkins because they can’t themselves confect a convincing case for God.  When they’re forced to produce one, it invariably comes down to asserting either a) “You can’t prove me wrong since my God is totally elusive, dude” or b) “God exists because I and lots of other folks think he does.”  These arguments don’t play well in public, which is why religious scientists always wriggle like eels when asked to explicitly declare their beliefs and justify their faith.

We should spend less time defending ourselves against things like the Courtier’s Reply and more time demanding that our opponents make a positive case for God, answering the three questions given above.   That, I think, is the best way to show that they got nothing.