I get email too: a convert

July 1, 2009 • 3:15 pm

I’ve received at least half a dozen emails like the following; I’m posting this one (with names changed to protect the apostate) with permission of the sender.  It all goes to show that not all of us scientist/atheists turn people away from evolution. And it’s one piece of data (about six, actually).  So where are the cases of people who wanted to accept evolution but just couldn’t because the “New Atheists” forced them to choose between faith and science? We hear a lot about them, but there is never any documentation.

Accommodationists seem to think that people like this don’t exist: people who will accept evolution based on the facts, regardless of whether those facts are encased in a sugar coating of love for religion.

Subject: Thanks for the Book Why Evolution is True

I grew up in –––– and went to a private Christian School most of my life where evolution wasn’t really taught (though I think my biology teacher believed evolution to be true, I think she had to hide it). Anyways I was raised thinking scientists were just out trying to prove God didn’t exist. About 2 years ago I started really thinking about my beliefs and why I held them. Things just didn’t add up. I had been an evangelical christian my whole life but I decided to put that bias aside and seek truth. I read many books on all kinds of different topics including a book that covered ID and your book on evolution. You presented the evidence very clearly and it was overwhelming. I was told my whole life there was no fossil record along with a bunch of other nonsense. I am now agnostic and finally know what I really believe and why.

I hope you didn’t me contacting you over Facebook.

Thanks for you help!

_____

Mooney and Kirshenbaum: Atheists turn Americans from science, strangle puppies

July 1, 2009 • 2:05 pm

Over at Butterflies and Wheels, Ophelia Benson has begun reading and posting on Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s new book, Unscientific America, an analysis of why the American public is so scientifically illiterate (I’m going by the blurbs; I haven’t read it yet). According to Mooney and Kirshenbaum, one of the main reasons for this illiteracy is — can you guess? — the ATHEISTS. Yes folks, our stridency and militancy have alienated flocks of Americans, turning them away from science. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens all get their licks, with special opprobrium reserved for P. Z. Myers. See link above for Ophelia’s first take, and the second is here.

I will reserve making my own comments until I read the book.

One other note: three liberal English theologians, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, have joined forces to prevent British citizens suffering from terminal illnesses to seek euthanasia in countries like Switzerland. Liberal religion harmless? Not in this case. See the link for Anthony Grayling’s take and the original news item.

WEIT on Newsweek’s “50 Books For Our Times”

June 29, 2009 • 5:36 pm

Faulkner, Twain, Kipling, Whitman, Rushdie . . . and Coyne! Well cut off my legs and call me Shorty, WEIT has made Newsweek’s list of 50 Books For Our Times (it’s on page 2).

What to Read Now. And Why
We know it’s insane. We know people will ask why on earth we think that an 1875 British satirical novel is the book you need to read right now—or, for that matter, why it even made the cut. The fact is, no one needs another best-of list telling you how great The Great Gatsby is. What we do need, in a world with precious little time to read (and think), is to know which books—new or old, fiction or nonfiction—open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help us see ourselves in new and surprising ways. Which is why we’d like you to sit down with Anthony Trollope, and these 49 other remarkably trenchant voices.

WHY EVOLUTION IS TRUE
by Jerry A. Coyne

Even innocent bystanders in the culture wars should understand the evidence that supports evolution, and this book by a leading evolutionary biologist presents it clearly but not pedantically.

I can’t help but be chuffed to see WEIT included on a list with Leaves of Grass, Huckleberry Finn, Midnight’s Children, and Kim. That’s the good news, and I suppose I’m especially pleased to hold this up to those accommodationists who proclaim that I’ve hurt the pro-evolution cause more than have the IDers or other creationists (take that, Michael Ruse!).

Yes, that’s the good news. The bad news is that there appears to be only one other pure-science book on the list, Lee Smolin’s terrific The Trouble With Physics. You’d think that on a list of 50 books — not just new books but books in print — they’d find a couple other science books to tout. What about Richard Rhodes’s The Making of The Atomic Bomb? Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene? Steve Pinker’s The Language Instinct? Given the overweening importance of science in modern culture, and the number of really good science books out there, I would like to have seen, say, at least eight or nine on the list. The two cultures persist!

p.s. Now might be a good time to order a copy or three for your intellectually hungry but evolution-ignorant friends . . . .

Jason Rosenhouse goes to the creation museum and a symposium on theistic evolution

June 29, 2009 • 7:02 am

Jason Rosenhouse is attending the North American Paleontological Convention in Cinncinnati, and reports on his side trip to the creation museum (I won’t dignify it with capital letters) in Kentucky.  He also reports on a symposium on science education and literacy at the NAPC.   Sadly, the symposium, at a major meeting of professional scientists, involved a lot of atheist-bashing and defenses of theistic evolution.  Once again, a scientific organization presents the misleading idea that science and faith are perfectly compatible, and attacks those who think otherwise:

On Thursday afternoon there was a session entitled, “The Nature of Science and Public-Science Literacy” Most of the talks were defenses of theistic evolution, complete with lots of mandatory bashing of “The New Atheists.” The organization of the session was highly annoying. Each talk was fifteen minutes long with no Q and A’s between them. There wasn’t even a break between the talks. After eight straight talks (!!) there was a very brief Q and A session, but it was nowhere near adequate to the task of challenging all the nonsense that was spewed during the session.

The whole thing was rather frustrating. Several of the talks were devoted to taking atheists to task for, in the view of the speakers, improperly mixing science with religion. My understanding is that all of the talks were invited, but apparently no one thought it would be worthwhile to invite someone of a different perspective, if just to make the session more interesting. The speakers were keen to stress their own Christian faith and their dismay that so many feel they must choose between science and religion. This, mind you, at a paleontology conference. Who’s mixing science and religion, again? . . .

To a surprising degree it was the same frustration I felt arguing with the creationists. At one point Murphy [George Murphy, a theologian from Akron] told me that God is the ground of all being, not a being Himself. That is a phrase you often see in high-brow Christian theology, but I haven’t the faintest idea what it means. I asked Murphy what it meant. Words came out of his mouth in reply, but I still have no idea what it means.

Which theology should we respect?

June 28, 2009 • 12:14 pm

Wasting time on the Net, I found the following description of Xenu on Wikipedia.  This is, of course, part of the theology of Scientology.

The story of Xenu is covered in OT III, part of Scientology’s secret “Advanced Technology” doctrines taught only to advanced members who have undergone many expensive hours of auditing and reached the state of Clear. It is described in more detail in the accompanying confidential “Assists” lecture of October 3, 1968 and is dramatized in Revolt in the Stars (a screenplay written by L. Ron Hubbard in 1977).

Hubbard wrote that seventy-five million years ago, Xenu was the ruler of a Galactic Confederacy which consisted of 26 stars and 76 planets including Earth, which was then known as “Teegeeack”.The planets were overpopulated, with an average population of 178 billion. The Galactic Confederacy’s civilization was comparable to our own, with aliens “walking around in clothes which looked very remarkably like the clothes they wear this very minute” and using cars, trains and boats looking exactly the same as those “circa 1950, 1960” on Earth.

Xenu was about to be deposed from power, so he devised a plot to eliminate the excess population from his dominions. With the assistance of psychiatrists, he summoned billions of his citizens together under the pretense of income tax inspections, then paralyzed them and froze them in a mixture of alcohol and glycol to capture their souls. The kidnapped populace was loaded into spacecraft for transport to the site of extermination, the planet of Teegeeack (Earth). The appearance of these spacecraft would later be subconsciously expressed in the design of the Douglas DC-8, the only difference being: “the DC8 had fans, propellers on it and the space plane didn’t.” When they had reached Teegeeack/Earth, the paralyzed citizens were unloaded around the bases of volcanoes across the planet. Hydrogen bombs were then lowered into the volcanoes and detonated simultaneously. Only a few aliens’ physical bodies survived. Hubbard described the scene in his film script, Revolt in the Stars:

Simultaneously, the planted charges erupted. Atomic blasts ballooned from the craters of Loa, Vesuvius, Shasta, Washington, Fujiyama, Etna, and many, many others. Arching higher and higher, up and outwards, towering clouds mushroomed, shot through with flashes of flame, waste and fission. Great winds raced tumultuously across the face of Earth, spreading tales of destruction…

– L. Ron Hubbard, Revolt in the Stars

The now-disembodied victims’ souls, which Hubbard called thetans, were blown into the air by the blast. They were captured by Xenu’s forces using an “electronic ribbon” (“which also was a type of standing wave”) and sucked into “vacuum zones” around the world. The hundreds of billions of captured thetans were taken to a type of cinema, where they were forced to watch a “three-D, super colossal motion picture” for thirty-six days. This implanted what Hubbard termed “various misleading data”‘ (collectively termed the R6 implant) into the memories of the hapless thetans, “which has to do with God, the Devil, space opera, et cetera”. This included all world religions, with Hubbard specifically attributing Roman Catholicism and the image of the Crucifixion to the influence of Xenu. The two “implant stations” cited by Hubbard were said to have been located on Hawaii and Las Palmas in the Canary Islands.

In addition to implanting new beliefs in the thetans, the images deprived them of their sense of personal identity. When the thetans left the projection areas, they started to cluster together in groups of a few thousand, having lost the ability to differentiate between each other. Each cluster of thetans gathered into one of the few remaining bodies that survived the explosion. These became what are known as body thetans, which are said to be still clinging to and adversely affecting everyone except those Scientologists who have performed the necessary steps to remove them.

A government faction known as the Loyal Officers finally overthrew Xenu and his renegades, and locked him away in “an electronic mountain trap” from which he still has not escaped. Although the location of Xenu is sometimes said to be the Pyrenees on Earth, this is actually the location Hubbard gave elsewhere for an ancient “Martian report station”. Teegeeack/Earth was subsequently abandoned by the Galactic Confederacy and remains a pariah “prison planet” to this day, although it has suffered repeatedly from incursions by alien “Invader Forces” since that time.]

In 1988, the cost of learning these secrets from the Church of Scientology was £3,830, or US$6,500. This is additional to the cost of the prior courses which are necessary to be eligible for OT III, which could be well over one hundred thousand dollars. Belief in Xenu and body thetans is a requirement for a Scientologist to progress further along the Bridge to Total Freedom.

I’ll take this as a fairly accurate description of part of the theology of that faith.  For the life of me, I can’t see how this differs materially — at least in terms of its truth — from the mythology of any other religion.   Could somebody please enlighten me?  And am I supposed to respect this view?  Do you?  If you respect  the theologies of Catholicism, Judaism, or Islam more, or give their adherents more credibility than you do Scientologists, why?


Accommodationism: onward and downward

June 28, 2009 • 7:03 am

Well, God may have rested on Sundays, but atheists don’t. A mini-kerfuffle has begun with yesterday’s posting of science postdoc John Wilkins at his website Evolving Thoughts.  Wilkins listed six “points” for discussion, these being reasons why accommodationism is the proper strategy for addressing the faith/science dichotomy.  They are the usual mix of I-am-a-nice-guyness, religion-and-science-both-find-truth-ness, and the-atheists-are-so-uncivil-ness.

Over at Pharyngula, P. Z. Myers throws cold water on the feebly smoking embers of  Wilkins’s arguments, writing with his usual pungency:  “I may not be perfectly rational, but my magic invisible monkeys are!” He takes Wilkins down point by point; here are my two favorites (Wilkins’s arguments in bold, P.Z.’s responses in plain type):

2. The usual excuse that making nice with religion is strategic, coupled with the claim that religion is always going to be around. Other people can be strategic. Scientists just ought to be honest. As for the tired argument that religion will always be around — no. Some of us have shed the old myths. More will follow. I don’t have any problem seeing a coming future where religious belief is an irrelevant minority position. Of course, if you start out with a defeatist attitude, it becomes a bit more difficult.

Frankly, this is one of the more ludicrous arguments made by accommodationists. If carried to its logical conclusion, it would imply that we shouldn’t work to change any long-standing human behavior for, after all, it’s always been with us, so we should just learn to deal with it.  Had the accommodationists been around at the turn of the last century, they might have counseled us to forget trying to get equal rights for minorities and women: people have always discriminated, and we can’t do anything about it.  (And don’t tell me that this comparison is invidious because faith is much nicer than discrimination, because that’s not relevant. Anyway, faith continues to cause dissent, fighting, and murder throughout the world, not to mention the more passive forms of destruction like fighting against condoms in HIV-plagued countries.)

At any rate, we have ample evidence that societies can indeed become less religious: it’s happened over and over again in Europe.  Sweden and Denmark are now virtually atheistic countries, but they didn’t used to be.  France and Germany are on the way.  Don’t tell us that religion will always be with us.  I have faith — if that’s the right word! — that some day grownups will put away their childish faiths.   A corollary to the faith-will-always-be-with-us view is that atheists need to show the faithful how they can survive without religion. Well, that’s really not our responsibility, but clearly people can have full and meaningful lives without religion. See Ophelia Benson on this issue over at the Guardian website Comments are Free.

5. Religion has always been wrong about the natural world, but religion is seeking knowledge of something different. Again, first part fine, second part weird. What knowledge? Can you even call it “knowledge” if it’s nothing that anyone can know? Why should we accept any claims by religion?

Indeed.  Some time ago I ran a contest on this site, offering a free autographed book if anybody could come up with a “truth” about the world that was revealed uniquely by faith.  Nobody won — and it wasn’t for lack of trying!  The “truths” that are supposedly found by faith turn out to be nothing more than moral dictums like the Golden Rule.  This is not, of course,  a truth, but a guide to behavior (and rules like this come from secular ethics as well).  Religion is neither constructed in a way to promote the discovery of truth, nor is particularly good at finding it (think of the “truths” of Adam and Eve, the great flood, and the 6,000-year-old universe). And for every Golden Rule, there’s a “truth” like “adulterers should be stoned to death.” Finally, most of the “truths” of different religions are in irreconcilable conflict with one another.  Was Jesus the son of God? Christians adamantly agree; Muslims think that anyone holding that belief is doomed to eternal torment. Let me say it again:  asserting that science and faith are merely different ways of finding “truth” debases our very notion of what “truth” is.

In their more lucid moments, accommodationists recognize this, but you never see them attacking the common claim (made by, among others, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Center for Science Education, and others) that science and religion are merely different ways of seeking truth.

On his website Metamagician and the Hellfire Club, philosopher Russell Blackford has two relevant posts.  The first is an analysis of Chris Mooney’s position on the faith/science dichotomy.

Chris Mooney is an atheist. Indeed, he is a philosophical naturalist – it’s difficult to be sure what this really means, but for present purposes the point is that Mooney does not believe in the existence of any spooky beings such as gods, ghosts, ancestor spirits, angels, demons, and so on. He is not just a methodological naturalist who, as a matter of policy or practice, avoids explaining the world’s phenomena in terms of the existence of spooky beings. He actually denies that these beings exist. He takes this position because he sees no evidence for the existence of such beings and because the claims made by people who claim to encounter them are so contradictory. It is more rational to explain the experiences of these people by means of some kind of psychological thesis, he thinks, than to think that the experiences are veridical . .

Chris Mooney is an atheist, taking – as far as I can work out – the position described in my first paragraph above. But he thinks it’s bad form for atheists to spell out their positions or to criticise religion in public. Instead of explaining and defending his own substantive position in a consolidated way, he prefers to write posts in which he tells other atheists to shut up . . .

Nonetheless, he calls for other atheists to shut up, in the sense that calls for them to engage in self-censorship, to stop offending and scaring the religious. He seems to imagine that this is a moderate position to take, and indeed it is more moderate (or less radical) than if he took the position of attempting to stop atheist discourse by an exercise of state power. However, this is not a moderate position. Even if he insisted on strict civility, that would not be a moderate position: we do not have to engage in strict civility when we criticise economic theories, political ideologies, or any other non-religious ideas – so why are religious ones sui generis in this regard? There is a long tradition, going back beyond Voltaire, of subjecting religious ideas to satire and ridicule. Satire and ridicule are often needed to convey what is truly absurd about an idea to people who may begin with different premises and are almost immune to argument. . .

I’ve given up on trying to explain this to Mooney. He seems to be dogmatically convinced that his position is the moderate one. Anyone who thinks that religious ideas merit scrutiny and, where we disagree with them, even criticism (let alone satire or ridicule) is taking an extreme position in Mooney’s judgment.

Yes, that’s right.  Although Mooney has repeatedly claimed that he’s not telling any atheist to shut up, I can’t see that he’s saying anything else.  As far as I can make out, Mooney wants the atheists who dislike faith/science accommodationism to simply keep quiet about it, as it’s strategically bad. If he is saying something else, what is it?

In another post, Blackford, who has always been properly concerned with definitions, goes after Wilkins’s characterization of “accommodationism” and “anti-accommodationism,” and suggests definitions that seem reasonable, at least to me.

Anti-accommodationists hold, for various reasons, that when defending science, such as evolution (but not always), defenders should not assert that science is compatible with religion. Instead, they should merely defend science.

Accommodationists, on the other hand, hold that even if science and religion are incompatible, it is politically expedient to deny this incompatibility when defending science. Moreover, for reasons of political expediency, no one should bring up the incompatibility even while doing things other than defending science.

And then Blackford notes that although Chris Mooney and others deny that they were practicing a form of intellectual censorship, they really were:

John laments that the debate got nasty very quickly, but he blames this on the so-called exclusivists. Again, I just can’t see it. The recent phase of the debate began when Jerry Coyne wrote a civil, substantial, and very thoughtful review of books by Karl W. Giberson and Kenneth R. Miller in The New Republic. Jerry has also criticised science organisations for at least hinting at the compatibility of science of religion (John agrees with Jerry on this point; i.e. John agrees that science organisations should not do this).

For his pains, Jerry was attacked very trenchantly by Chris Mooney. Worse, Barbara Forrest said that Coyne should shut up. She said that “secularists should not alienate religious moderates” and gave Coyne’s book review as an example of alienating the these people. If that is not telling someone to shut up, I don’t know what is. Chris Mooney expressed full agreement with Forrest (as he represented her – I’m relying on his representation of what she said).

If Forrest said what she is represented as saying, then she believes that Coyne should not have reviewed the books by Giberson and Miller the way he did. Only a completely favourable review would have been appropriate, and Coyne should have self-censored. If that is so, I could not have written my review of Francisco Ayala’s recent book in the way I did in Cosmos magazine last year. I should have censored myself. We would all have to censor ourselves, and not express reservations, whenever reviewing a book by what Forrest calls a religious moderate. Surely it is not unreasonable when we anti-accommodationists point out the absurdity of such a position.

Mooney also headed his post in a way that suggested that the people who thus “alienate” the faithful are not civil, though he later disclaimed the implication that Jerry Coyne had been uncivil in his review. But the clear implication was that Coyne’s review was an example of incivility (and it also follows that my review of Ayala’s book would be such an example).

I have to agree here (surprise!).  What is Mooney asking me to do?  I have tried long and hard to figure it out, but have failed.  If it’s something other than keeping my mouth shut about the irreconciliability of science and faith, I’d like to hear it. I can’t engage in debate when I don’t know what the other side is saying.

(n.b.  Chris Mooney thinks that Wilkins’s post is “brilliant”)

Krauss attacks accommodationism in the Wall Street Journal

June 26, 2009 • 7:45 am

In the WSJ — of all places — we find physicist Lawrence Krauss attacking the compatibility of science and faith.

Though the scientific process may be compatible with the vague idea of some relaxed deity who merely established the universe and let it proceed from there, it is in fact rationally incompatible with the detailed tenets of most of the world’s organized religions. As Sam Harris recently wrote in a letter responding to the Nature editorial that called him an “atheist absolutist,” a “reconciliation between science and Christianity would mean squaring physics, chemistry, biology, and a basic understanding of probabilistic reasoning with a raft of patently ridiculous, Iron Age convictions.”

This editorial stemmed from Krauss’s participation in the World Science Festival, where he was on a panel with two religious scientists, Kenneth Miller and Guy Consolmagno. (I turned down an offer to join this panel because the Festival was funded by the John Templeton Foundation. I still don’t regret it.)  When challenged about the so-called “truths” of their faiths, both Miler and Consolmagno — who works for the Vatican — apparently maintained that the virgin birth of Jesus was only a metaphor:

When I confronted my two Catholic colleagues on the panel with the apparent miracle of the virgin birth and asked how they could reconcile this with basic biology, I was ultimately told that perhaps this biblical claim merely meant to emphasize what an important event the birth was. Neither came to the explicit defense of what is undeniably one of the central tenets of Catholic theology.

Well, so much for the “truth” of that claim! I look forward to their assertion that the Resurrection was also a metaphor. (By the way, how do they know that the virgin birth was only a metphor but that Jesus was really, actually, the son of God?)

And Krauss’s finale:

Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview with regards to the claimed miracles of the gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Moreover, the true believers in each of these faiths are atheists regarding the specific sacred tenets of all other faiths. Christianity rejects the proposition that the Quran contains the infallible words of the creator of the universe. Muslims and Jews reject the divinity of Jesus.

So while scientific rationality does not require atheism, it is by no means irrational to use it as the basis for arguing against the existence of God, and thus to conclude that claimed miracles like the virgin birth are incompatible with our scientific understanding of nature.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that these issues are not purely academic. The current crisis in Iran has laid bare the striking inconsistency between a world built on reason and a world built on religious dogma.

Perhaps the most important contribution an honest assessment of the incompatibility between science and religious doctrine can provide is to make it starkly clear that in human affairs — as well as in the rest of the physical world — reason is the better guide.

You said it!  Krauss’s piece, by the way, begins with a great quote from the evolutionary geneticist J. B. S. Haldane:

My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world.

— J.B.S. Haldane

It’s encouraging that a mainline newpaper — especially a conservative one — will publish a piece like this. Dare we hope that the “new atheism” is having an effect?