The Hall of Shame: God, evolution, and quantum mechanics

July 5, 2009 • 8:28 am

For those who claim that no religious scientists allow their scientific statements and beliefs to be infected with religion, here’s a counterexample.  It’s from Francis Collins’s BioLogos website (funded by our friends at The John Templeton Foundation) and is a statement about how God may influence the world through quantum mechanics:

The mechanical worldview of the scientific revolution is now a relic. Modern physics has replaced it with a very different picture of the world. With quantum mechanical uncertainty and the chaotic unpredictability of complex systems, the world is now understood to have a certain freedom in its future development. Of course, the question remains whether this openness is a result of nature’s true intrinsic chanciness or the inevitable limit to humans’ understanding. Either way, one thing is clear: a complete and detailed explanation or prediction for nature’s behavior cannot be provided. This was already a problem for Newtonian mechanics; however, it was assumed that in principle, science might eventually provide a complete explanation of any natural event. Now, though, we see that the laws of nature are such that scientific prediction and explanation are ultimately limited.

It is thus perfectly possible that God might influence the creation in subtle ways that are unrecognizable to scientific observation. In this way, modern science opens the door to divine action without the need for law breaking miracles. Given the impossibility of absolute prediction or explanation, the laws of nature no longer preclude God’s action in the world. Our perception of the world opens once again to the possibility of divine interaction.

This view is nearly identical to that of Kenneth Miller in his book Finding Darwin’s God.  What this means, of course, is that what appear to us to be random and unpredictable events on the subatomic level (for example, the decay of atoms) can really reflect God’s manipulation of those particles, and that this is the way a theistic God might intervene in the world.  And of course these interventions are said to be “subtle” and “unrecognizable.” (Theologians are always making a virtue of necessity.  They never explain why, if God wanted to answer a prayer, he would do it by tweaking electrons rather than, say,  directly killing cancer cells with his omnipotence. After all, a miracle is a miracle.  Theology might, in fact, be defined as the art of making religious virtues out of scientific necessities.)  And why did these interventions used to involve more blatant manipulations of nature (several thousand years ago, virgin human females gave birth to offspring, were taken bodily to heaven, and their offspring brought back to life after dying), while  in more recent years the manipulations have been confined to the subatomic level?

And think about how ludicrous this theology really is.  God:  “Well, let’s see.  Johnny’s parents have prayed for a cure for his leukemia.  They’re good people, so I’ll do it.   Now how to do the trick?.  If I can just change the position of this electron here, and that one over there, I can cause a mutation in gene X that will beef up his immune system and allow the chemotherapy to work.”  Why can’t God just say “Cancer, begone!”?  (He apparently did that in Baltimore.) I already how the theists will respond:  “That’s not the way God works, because we know how he works and it’s not that way!”

The BioLogos statement appears as part of the answer to the question, “What role could God have in evolution?”  I submit that the statement is a scientific one that is deeply infected with religious views.  The statement is this:  “God acts by tweaking electrons and other subatomic particles, constantly causing non-deterministic changes in the universe according to his desires.” Further, the clear implication is this:  “God intervened in the evolutionary process, tweaking some electrons to eventually ‘evolve’ a creature made in his image”.  That is a religious statement masquerading as science. And that appears to be the view of some religious theists, especially those Catholics who adhere to the Church’s position that God intervened in human evolution.

Well, what happens if we find out some day that the subatomic “nondeterministic” changes really turn out to be deterministic?  After all, quantum mechanics and its indeterminacy are provisional scientific theories; we might eventually find out that what appear to be totally unpredictable events really do have a deterministic causation.  Where does Collins’s deity go then?  Do you suppose for a minute that Collins and his fellow theistic evolutionists would say, “Right. Everything is in principle predictable after all.  Obviously, there’s no room for God to intervene in nature, so theism is wrong.”  I wouldn’t count on it.

Making quantum mechanics the bailiwick for celestial intervention is a God-of-the-gaps argument, no different in kind from many arguments for intelligent design. Do theistic evolutionists really want to make quantum mechanics God’s playground?  Remember the words of the martyred theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer about the dangers of mixing science and faith:

If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed farther and farther back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat.

______________________________

Note:  Someone once asked me what the “H.” in the expression “Jesus H. Christ!” came from.  I used to reply, “haploid,” since he came from an unfertilized egg.  But now I am starting to wonder if it might be “Heisenberg.”

Darwinius, the “link” and the book

July 4, 2009 • 12:50 pm

Over at the Times Literary Supplement, paleontologist Ian Tattersall reviews Colin Tudge’s new book on Darwinius, The Link.

As you may remember if you read this and other evolution-related websites (see Greg Mayer’s post on this site), Darwinius masillae is an extraordinarily complete primate fossil that was revealed to scientists and the public in May, complete with a paper in PLoS,  overheated press releases, a movie deal on the History Channel, and, of course, Tudge’s book.  What was truly remarkable about this affair was the degree of hype: a publicity explosion that has never been equaled by any evolution-related discovery (indeed, even the completion of the human genome did not receive such fanfare).  Mayor Bloomberg was there, a press release touted Darwinius (known more familarly as “Ida”) as “a revolutionary scientific find that will change everything” (everything??), and one of the authors of the Darwinius paper, Jens Franzen, proclaimed that “When we publish our results it will be like an asteroid hitting the Earth.”

Well, hardly.  Ida turned out to be a really lovely fossil that didn’t add much to our knowledge of primate evolution.  It is almost certainly an adapiform primate, member of a group that went extinct without leaving descendants, and the early reports that Ida was a “missing link” between the two branches of primates were premature and based on incomplete and sketchy analysis by the scientists who described her.  Ida probably belongs firmly in the lemur/loris group.

Several of the science bloggers realized this immediately, although most reporters swallowed the “missing link” description uncritically (to be fair, they are not primate paleontologists).   The whole sorry affair resulted from the agreement between Ida’s discoverers and the publicists to prevent any scientists other than the “dream team” (that’s what Tudge calls them) from looking at the fossil or the research before publication, and blacking out journalists’ access to the paper until after the big press conference.  In the end, it was the bloggers like Brian Switek, and a few intrepid science journalists like Ann Gibbons and Carl Zimmer, who put Ida in the correct perspective.

According to Tattersall’s review, The Link looks as hyped-up and tendentious as were the original announcements.  The book was apparently written in only a couple of months so that it would appear the day after the press conference:

Colin Tudge’s book is part of the media blitz; and, at the risk of damning it with faint praise, I have to say that it is much the best part. It is more restrained and judicious than the other coverage; and while it does strictly hew to the party line, the hyperbolic statements it makes are always carefully attributed to others. To that extent, it is a thoroughly professional job, as one would expect of a distinguished interpreter of science to the public. . .

If The Link deserves a prize of any kind, it is for the speed with which it was written. Your reviewer has it on good authority that the television producers were still trawling around the Book of Ida project as late as January of this year; and Tudge evidently found he could not meet the almost impossibly short time constraints imposed by the TV schedule without co-opting the assistance of his colleague Josh Young. In combination with deadline pressure, this co-authorship presumably helps to explain a pattern of minor and generally harmless inconsistencies and inaccuracies throughout the book that might have been resolved with more time for reflection. It was hard, for example, to credit that the same author could have written on page 13 that “dinosaurs and mammals had coexisted briefly”, and (correctly), later on, that “the oldest known mammals could be older than the first dinosaurs”. And, in a note at the end of the book, we learn that he didn’t.

In this rather unseemly rush to publication, Tudge and Young were not alone. Speed, as well as obsessive secrecy, seems to have infected the entire Ida project from its inception. As reported by Nature, a member of the Dream Team complained that “there was a TV company involved and time pressure. We’ve been pushed to finish the study; it’s not how I like to do science”. I’m sure it’s not how Colin Tudge likes to write books, either.

Let’s just say that my own opinion is along the lines of Tattersall’s, but less charitable. More about that later.

More Jesus and Mo on accommodation!

July 4, 2009 • 8:46 am

I swear, whoever draws “Jesus and Mo” must be reading the web debates about the compatibility of science and religion.  I just found these two strips, published within the last few weeks.

2009-06-16http://www.jesusandmo.net/2009/06/16/nerve/

2009-06-26

http://www.jesusandmo.net/2009/06/26/aback/

Comment:  The artist can do, with humor, what takes the scientist/atheist a lot of boring words to say.  I will put up these strips in lieu of a longer reply in which I would claim that my critiques of faith/science accommodation have never been shrill, strident, uncivil, or militant.  If you think otherwise, read this and get back to me. Thanks, anonymous Jesus-and-Mo artist!

Madeleine Bunting, fifth-rate accommodationist

July 2, 2009 • 7:05 pm

Really, just when you think the hopper of stupidity has emptied itself for the day, something happens to fill it back up. This time it’s the ever-reliable Madeleine Bunting and her minions. Over at the Guardian, Bunting reports on an accommodationist conference at Lambeth Palace, residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Her column is, as the Brits say, a dog’s breakfast.

She first laments that so much time is being wasted by discussing accommodationism:

So what happens when there is an attempt at a very different kind of conversation which is not around the extremes of belief and non belief but largely amongst thoughtful believers, many of whom might be scientists? That was the proposition behind Lambeth Palace’s gathering of scientists, philosophers and theologians yesterday morning.

The discussion can be framed around two very basic, crucial questions put forward by the audience. Firstly, what’s all the fuss about? It reflected a strand of anxiety in the multifaith audience that, frankly, there were bigger questions to worry about. Surely believers should be discussing individualism, consumerism and other social problems rather than indulge in this kind of philosophical reasoning.

Why, then, has Bunting devoted so many of her columns to this very issue? But she regroups and quickly begins reciting the traditional mantras of the fifth-rate accommodationist:

But the Archbishop of Canterbury was brisk, and he warned, “beware of the power of nonsense”. Science’s triumphalist claim as a competitor to failed religion was dangerous. In contrast, he offered an accommodation in which science and religion were “different ways of knowing” and “what you come to know depends on the questions you start with”. Different questions lead to “different practices of learning” – for example different academic disciplines. Rather than competitors, science and religion were both needed to pursue different questions.

I am still waiting patiently for someone to tell me one thing that religious people know is true, and that the knowledge whereof came uniquely from faith. Do we know if Jesus was the son of God? If so, what about Muslims who know something different? Frankly, I am losing patience with people who make this ludicrous argument, because they never specify what religion can help us know.

Oh well. Simon Conway Morris then rears his head:

Simon Conway Morris, professor of evolutionary palaeobiology, argued that the polemical hostile debate which dominates public debate – “the fuss” – is really about a failure of nerve of both science and religion. The response of both is to retreat into their own forms of dangerous literalism – religion into creationism and science into a fundamentalism. Challenging the current deference to Darwin in this anniversary year, he warned that aspects of Darwin’s thought can be taken into very dangerous territory; he cited a diary entry of Josef Goebbels’ in 1942 on the “parasitical Jews” in the struggle for survival. Science needed ethical thinking.

I used to respect Conway Morris for his achievements in paleontology, but it’s hard to maintain that respect in the view of this nonsense. Since when is the idea of “parasitical Jews” an “aspect of Darwin’s thought”? Conway Morris, it seems, has planted himself firmly in creationist la-la land along with Henry Morris, Phillip Johnson, and Ann Coulter. Can’t we just declare a moratorium on the assertion that the road from Darwin to Hitler is straight and unerring? But if we must pursue this line of argument, let us not forget that it was the Jews who were the unique objects of Nazi opprobrium. Why is that? Because they were the despised killers of Christ.
Not content with that, Conway Morris offers this:

The second question from the audience – from the philosopher Mary Midgley – was what comes next? What both science and religion needed, argued Conway Morris was a more fruitful conversation. He raised the possibility that religion might be needed to help develop understanding into questions which have baffled scientists such as the nature of consciousness.

To which one can reply only “not bloody likely!” If religion has ever given rise to any fruitful scientific methodology, I don’t know of it. This suggestion smacks of desperation.

Finally, out of desperationville rides John Houghton:

John Houghton, the climate scientist, took the question in an entirely different direction. It was science which had established the nature of global warming and science would play a role in inventing the innovations which could mitigate its impact, but religion also had a role as an agent of change of personal behaviour. It had a crucial role because religion essentially concerned itself with relationships to other people, to the rest of humanity and to the natural environment.

Perhaps Bunting, and Houghton, have forgotten that much of the opposition to the idea of global warming comes from religion, especially from those evangelical Christians who see humans as having been given dominion over nature. No secularist makes, or can make, such a claim. Has Bunting not observed the remarkable confluence of creationists and global-warming deniers?

I guess I read Bunting for the same reason that I sniff the milk when the carton is two weeks past its sell-by date: you know it’s bad, but there’s a perverse pleasure in making sure.

Almost done: are science and faith compatible?

July 2, 2009 • 3:40 pm

The data say they aren’t, but Chris Mooney tweaks them a bit to claim the opposite.    See here, here,  here,  here, here, and here (in order). (NOTE:  By “tweaking” here I meant “interpret”; I am not of course saying that Mooney fiddles with the data.  Apologies to anyone who construed it that way.)
Here are the relevant facts (my emphasis):

Interestingly, many of those who reject natural selection recognize that scientists themselves fully accept Darwin’s theory. In the same 2006 Pew poll, nearly two-thirds of adults (62%) say that they believe that scientists agree on the validity of evolution. Moreover, Americans, including religious Americans, hold science and scientists in very high regard. A 2006 survey conducted by Virginia Commonwealth University found that most people (87%) think that scientific developments make society better. Among those who describe themselves as being very religious, the same number – 87% – share that opinion.

So what is at work here? How can Americans say that they respect science and even know what scientists believe and yet still disagree with the scientific community on some fundamental questions? The answer is that much of the general public simply chooses not to believe the scientific theories and discoveries that seem to contradict long-held religious or other important beliefs.

When asked what they would do if scientists were to disprove a particular religious belief, nearly two-thirds (64%) of people say they would continue to hold to what their religion teaches rather than accept the contrary scientific finding, according to the results of an October 2006 Time magazine poll. Indeed, in a May 2007 Gallup poll, only 14% of those who say they do not believe in evolution cite lack of evidence as the main reason underpinning their views; more people cite their belief in Jesus (19%), God (16%) or religion generally (16%) as their reason for rejecting Darwin’s theory.

Pat Buchanan makes a monkey of himself about evolution

July 2, 2009 • 2:34 pm

Pat Buchanan has been pretty much an idiot all along, but he really put his foot in it in yesterday’s column on the falsehood of evolution.  Relying heavily on the book The End of Darwinism: And How a Flawed and Disastrous Theory Was Stolen and Sold, by Eugene G. Windchy, Buchanan makes the following blatantly stupid claims (direct quotes from Buchanan’s piece):

Darwin, he demonstrates, stole his theory from Alfred Wallace, who had sent him a “completed formal paper on evolution by natural selection.” “All my originality … will be smashed,” wailed Darwin when he got Wallace’s manuscript.

Yeah, like Darwin hadn’t worked for twenty years before he got Wallace’s letter and manuscript. . .

Darwin’s examples of natural selection — such as the giraffe acquiring its long neck to reach ever higher into the trees for the leaves upon which it fed to survive — have been debunked. Giraffes eat grass and bushes. And if, as Darwin claimed, inches meant life or death, how did female giraffes, two or three feet shorter, survive?

Can’t Buchanan grasp the notion of probability of death, or of relative fecundity? And — God help us — Buchanan drags out the example of Piltdown Man, failing to add that the hoax was uncovered by scientists:

Discovered in England in 1912, Piltdown Man was a sensation until exposed by a 1950s investigator as the skull of a Medieval Englishman attached to the jaw of an Asian ape whose teeth had been filed down to look human and whose bones had been stained to look old.

He can’t help himself, rolling out this old creationist chestnut:

For 150 years, the fossil record has failed to validate Darwin. “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontologists,” admitted Stephen J. Gould in 1977. But that fossil record now contains even more species that appear fully developed, with no traceable ancestors.

I wonder what he’d think of Australopithecus afarensis.  Finally, Buchanan quotes Stephen Jay Gould:

In 1981, Gould had this advice for beleaguered Darwinists: “Perhaps we should all lie low and rally round the flag of strict Darwinism … a kind of old-time religion on our part.”

Buchanan, like all creationists, has failed to give the whole quote (see here), which refers to some paleontologists’ view that perhaps, for the good of the pro-evolution movement, they should mute their discussion of punctuated equilibrium:

But most of all I am saddened by a trend I am just beginning to discern among my colleagues.  I sense that some now wish to mute the healthy debate about theory that has brought new life to evolutionary biology. It provides grist for creationist mills, they say, even if only by distortion.  Perhaps we should lie low and rally around the flag of strict Darwinism, at least for the moment — a kind of old-time religion on our part.

But we should borrow another metaphor and recognize that we too have to tread a straight and narrow path, surrounded by roads to perdition.  For if we ever begin to suppress our search to understand nature, to quench our own intellectual excitement in a misguided effort to present a unified front where it does not and should not exist, then we are truly lost.

Gould’s advice here is to not rally around the flag of Darwinism, but the exact opposite: to engage in open and honest discussion about the data.

Really, Buchanan is being more of an idiot than the IDers themselves — at least they pretend to be sophisticated.  It’s distressing (but not surprising) to see a man whom many regard as a public intellectual show such willful ignorance.  Somebody send him a copy of WEIT!

Thanks to Dan Dennett for calling this to my attention.