The most repellent part of religion—and its Achilles heel—is theodicy, the attempt to show why a wise, loving, and powerful God nevertheless permits evil and suffering.  I never tire of seeing the mental contortions performed by the faithful to rationalize things like tsunamis, children with cancer, and the Holocaust.  And now, after Christopher Hitchens’s recent diagnosis of esophageal cancer, the faithful are all over him like ugly on a frog.

The latest is Reverend Robert Barron, a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago, spouting off on “Why Christians Should Pray for Christopher Hitchens” at CNN.com.

This was on my mind when word came out last week that Hitchens was suffering from esophageal cancer, a particularly aggressive and unforgiving form of the disease. I realize that certain believers couldn’t resist the temptation to see in this misfortune the avenging hand of God: the one who for so long blasphemed God was now getting his just reward.

But it’s always a very tricky business to interpret the purpose of the divine providence. After all, plenty of good, even saintly, people die prematurely from terrible diseases all the time, and lots of atheists and vile sinners live long prosperous lives before dying peacefully in their beds.

Hitchens’ disease is indeed ingredient in God’s providence, since at the very least it was permitted by the one whose wisdom “stretches from end to end mightily.”

But what it means and why it was allowed remain essentially opaque to us. Might it be an occasion for the famous atheist to reconsider his position? Perhaps. Might it be the means by which Hitchens comes to think more deeply about the ultimate meaning of things? Could be. Might it bring others to faith? Maybe. Might it have a significance that no one on the scene today could even in principle grasp? Probably. . .

. . . Christopher Hitchens is undoubtedly the enemy of Christianity—even of Christians—but he is also a child of God, loved into being and destined for eternal life. Therefore, followers of Jesus must pray for him and want what is best for him.

Now how does the good Rev. Barron know that God is provident? Or wise? Or that he let Hitchens get cancer when he could have prevented it?

Here are some alternative hypotheses that Barron, in his doubt, forgot to entertain:

• God doesn’t care so much about humanity, and doesn’t give a fig about Hitchens. So he doesn’t interfere.
• God isn’t wholly beneficent. Sometimes he’s malevolent and likes to see people suffer. This was Gloucester’s theory in King Lear:

“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods

They kill us for their sport.”

• God cares a lot, but he really can’t do anything about this stuff because he can’t stop disease.
• There isn’t a God; Hitchens’s disease is a result of uncontrolled cell growth, perhaps caused by a random mutation

Talk about dogmatic atheists!  There’s nobody more dogmatic (and offensive) than someone who just knows that Hitchens’s illness is part of the plan of a loving and powerful God.

Can’t these people just shut up about this?  Must they use someone’s misfortune as an excuse to bang on and on about their loving god and his Mysterious Plan?

If you missed “How microbes defend and define us,” Carl Zimmer’s piece in yesterday’s New York Times, go read it.  It describes new DNA-based work showing that we’re not only colonized by thousands of bacterial species—and the identities of those species differ from person to person—but that many of those bacteria are absolutely essential for our normal functioning.   Excerpts:

• “Lungs have traditionally been considered to be sterile because microbiologists have never been able to rear microbes from them. A team of scientists at Imperial College London recently went hunting for DNA instead. Analyzing lung samples from healthy volunteers, they discovered 128 species of bacteria. Every square centimeter of our lungs is home to 2,000 microbes.”
• “In addition to helping us digest, the microbiome helps us in many other ways. The microbes in our nose, for example, make antibiotics that can kill the dangerous pathogens we sniff. Our bodies wait for signals from microbes in order to fully develop. When scientists rear mice without any germ in their bodies, the mice end up with stunted intestines.”
• “Some microbes can only survive in one part of the body, while others are more cosmopolitan. And the species found in one person’s body may be missing from another’s. Out of the 500 to 1,000 species of microbes identified in people’s mouths, for example, only about 100 to 200 live in any one person’s mouth at any given moment. Only 13 percent of the species on two people’s hands are the same. Only 17 percent of the species living on one person’s left hand also live on the right one.”

The most bizarre part: doctors use “bacteriotherapy” to treat some stubborn bacterial infections: patients can sometimes be cured by infusing their guts with a dilute solution of fecal matter taken from healthy people.

• “Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues have carried out 15 more fecal transplants, 13 of which cured their patients. They’re now analyzing the microbiome of their patients to figure out precisely which species are wiping out the Clostridium difficile infections.”

As Zimmer shows, your body is not just an organism, but an ecosystem.

The is the biological antecedent of Transformers.  The puffed-up owl seems to be making a threat display to a barn owl, but I have no idea what the Dracula display means.  Perhaps an owl expert can weigh in.

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UPDATE: Several readers have suggested that the owl’s “Dracula” pose may make it cryptic, and is an attempt to hide in presence of a large predator.  One reader cited the potoo, a neotropical bird whose coloration and behavior render it cryptic, resembling a tree branch.  Here’s the common potoo (Nyctibius griseus) in a cryptic pose.  It does indeed look like the Dracula owl (note that its eyes are closed, just like the owl’s):

In May of this year the Center for Public Policy of Virginia Commonwealth University, collaborating with VCU Life Sciences, commissioned a telephone poll of 1001 American adults, asking for their views on science and scientific issues (global warming, evolution, stem-cell research, etc.).  They also partitioned out people’s answers by age, education, and religiosity. The survey, conducted by Princeton Data Source, was selected to be demographically representative of Americans, and is claimed to have a 95% confidence interval of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points. You can download the survey results here.

Since the document is 59 pages long, I won’t go into detail about the results, but want to highlight a few items dealing with evolution.

First, what’s the state of American “belief” in evolution?

Which of these statements comes closest to your views on the origin of biological life: biological life developed over time from simple substances, but God guided this process, biological life developed over time from simple substances but God did not guide this process, God directly created biological life in its present form at one point in time? [Note: the order of answers was randomized among people]

God directly created life:  43%

Life developed over time, God guided this process:  24%

Life developed over time, God didn’t guide it:  18%

None of these/didn’t know/refused to answer:  16%

This is pretty much in line with previous surveys over the past 25 years.  67% of Americans are either creationists or believe that God directed evolution; only 18% accept evolution as the unguided process seen by biologists.  Now how many respondents know much about evolution?

How much have you heard or read about the theory of evolution?

A lot:  44%

Some: 32%

Not too much/nothing:  23%

Don’t know/refused to answer:  2%

That 44% seems high to me, and I suspect that if you asked people to explain what evolution or natural selection really are, you’d find that the figure is inflated.  In line with that, these results are a surprise:

From what you’ve hear or read, do you think the evidence on evolution is widely accepted within the scientific community, or do many scientists have serious doubts about it?

Widely accepted:  53%

Many scientists have serious doubts:  31%

Don’t know/refused to answer:  16%

If so many people are widely acquainted with the theory of evolution, it’s curious that nearly a third of them think that scientists have serious doubts about it. But this surely reflects people’s religious biases or what they hear from religious figures.  That’s supported by the following:

In general, would you say the theory of evolution conflicts with your own religious beliefs, or is mostly compatible with your own religious beliefs? [Again, order of responses was randomized among people]

Conflicts with my beliefs:  42%

Is mostly compatible:   43%

Don’t know/refused to answer:   16%

The large chunk who see conflict is bad news for accommodationists.  But the accommodationist response—at least that of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Center for Science Education, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science—is this:  You don’t understand your own faith, because if you did, you would see that there’s really no conflict. They have a big theological task in front of them.

And what do Americans think about religion, specifically the Bible?

Which of these statements comes closest to describing your feelings about the Bible—The Bible is the actual Word of God, the Bible is the Word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally, or the Bible is a book written by men and is not the Word of God?

Actual Word of God:   40%

Not everything to be taken literally:  34%

Bible written by men:    21%

Don’t know/refused to answer:  6%

That’s more Biblical literalists than I would have guessed, but of course it explains why many people see their faith in conflict with evolution.  Good luck, accommodationists, convincing these people that the Bible is just a metaphor.

As expected, the answers to questions about evolution are highly correlated with people’s faith:

Of those see the Bible as the Actual Word of God (378/1001), 69% believe that God directly created biological life in its present form, 12% believe that biological life developed over time but was guided by God, and only 5% believed in unguided evolution (14% don’t know/none of these).

Of those who see the Bible as the Word of God, but not all of it should be taken literally (366), 35% were straight creationists, 42% were theistic evolutionists, and 11% were adherents to unguided evolution (11% don’t know/none of these).

And of those who see the Bible as written by men (205), 12% were straight creationists, 18% accepted theistic evolution, and 56% were adherents to unguided evolution (13% don’t know/none of these).

Finally, there’s a strong relationship between how one views the Bible and whether one sees evolution in conflict with one’s religious beliefs:

Of those see the Bible as the Actual Word of God, 62% see evolution in conflict with their faith, 22% see it as mostly compatible, and 17% don’t know.

Of those who see the Bible as the Word of God, but not all of it should be taken literally, 35% see evolution in conflict with their faith, 53% see it as mostly compatible, and 12% don’t know.

And of those who see the Bible as written by men, 20% see evolution in conflict with their faith, 68% see it as mostly compatible, and 12% don’t know.

What can you conclude from all this except that the acceptance of evolution depends heavily on the nature and extent of religious belief?  That’s not news to anyone—except, perhaps, some accommodationists.  How do we solve the problem?  Many scientists—atheists and accommodationists alike—are trying to educate people about what evolution is and how much evidence supports it.  Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be working very well, at least judging by how little acceptance of evolution has budged over the last few decades.

We diverge from accommodationists, though, in how we go further.  The accommodationist technique is to accept that people are religious but to convince them that evolution doesn’t really violate their faith.  Good luck with that.  We atheists see religion itself, and its adherence to superstition and acceptance of irrational ways of thought, as the root cause of not only evolution denial, but of a whole host of maladies that afflict society.  Our strategy may be harder, but has the benefit of dispelling these other maladies as well.  As Sam Harris observed when discussing Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s Unscientific America:

The goal is not to get more Americans to merely accept the truth of evolution (or any other scientific theory); the goal is to get them to value the principles of reasoning and educated discourse that now make a belief in evolution obligatory. Doubt about evolution is merely a symptom of an underlying problem; the problem is faith itself—conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad ideas protected from good ones, good ideas occluded by bad ones, wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation, etc. Mooney and Kirshenbaum seem to imagine that we can get people to value intellectual honesty by lying to them.

A beautiful goal in the second overtime period gives Spain its first World Cup championship.

If anybody here guessed that—and the score—correctly, the prize will be awarded tomorrow.

Paul is definitely in danger and needs an (eight) armed guard

And my student owes me twenty bucks.

UPDATE:  I’m sorry to say that nobody won the football contest.  Although several people predicted Spain would play the Netherlands in the final, and some thought Spain would win, nobody got the score right, even if you count the final score (1-0) as the score at the end of regular time. Sorry!

Paul has spoken, there’s less than a half hour to go, so let the game begin!