Jesus appears in Marmite

May 28, 2009 • 8:35 am

A little midweek humor from the BBC, although, of course, the family who found the saviour’s image in vegetable goo doesn’t think it’s funny at all.

1

“We’ve had a tough couple of months; my mum’s been really ill and it’s comforting to think that if he is there, he’s watching over us.”

Family sees Jesus image in Marmite

It may not be immediately obvious to everyone, but one family are convinced that they can see the face of Jesus on the lid of a jar of Marmite.

Claire Allen, 36, said she was the first to notice the image on the underside of the lid as she was putting the yeast spread on her son’s toast.

Her husband Gareth, 37, said he could not believe his eyes when he saw it.

Mr Allen, of Ystrad, Rhondda, said: “The kids are still eating it, but we kept the lid.”

He explained: “Claire saw it first and called her dad to come and take a photo of it.

“When I first looked at it I wasn’t sure, but when I moved it away from me it started coming out. I thought yeah, she’s right – that’s the image of Jesus.

Mrs Allen said her 14-year-old son Jamie had also remarked on the likeness.

She told the South Wales Echo: “Straight away Jamie said ‘that looks like God’, and my other boys (Robbie, four, and Tomas, 11) even said they could see a face.

“People might think I’m nuts, but I like to think it’s Jesus looking out for us.”


Image from BBC website.  Thanks to Andrew Berry for calling this to my attention.

Accommodation vs. appeasement

May 28, 2009 • 6:19 am

Over at Metamagician and the Hellfire Club, Russell Blackford has a useful classification of the forms of what I call “accommodationism” between science and faith.  A brief excerpt from his post:

. . . there seem to be a few ways that people try to make a truce between religion and science.

1. The NOMA theory – science is authoritative about empirical issues, while religion is authoritative about issues of morality, “meaning”, “purpose” and so on.

2. Natural and supernatural – science examines the “natural” world, while religion reports on a supposed “supernatural” realm involving gods, spooks, and so on.

3. God at work in the gaps – there is room for God to work in nature in ways that we can’t detect. Science is authoritative about the natural world, but not in a way that excludes the providence of God. . . .

. . . Of these, 3. is the one that is most likely to be damaging to science. Because it wants to locate a space for certain kinds of divine activities to be carried on in certain kinds of gaps, it could have some tendency to discourage research that aims to plug those gaps. Accordingly, it’s at least worthwhile drawing attention to the highly speculative nature of specific hypotheses about how God acts in the gaps (such as by using some sort of interference in quantum-level events in order to guide the process of evolution). Even if we can’t disprove such claims, we can emphasise that they are contrivances with no scientific backing. They are transparent attempts to preserve pet religious dogmas, and should in no sense be viewed as science. Their only basis is reasoning that: “Something like X or Y must be true or else religious doctrine R will be falsified. But I can’t admit that R is falsified, so something like X or Y must be true.”

But, while I can see why hard-pressed scientists get annoyed by this sort of thing, I actually have more sympathy for theists such as Francis Collins than I do for non-believers (atheists, agnostics, sceptics, whatever) who adopt a position such as 1. or 2. in order to grant authority to a religion whose doctrines they don’t actually believe. This is appeasement – it’s ceding important territory to religion without a fight. Religion does not deserve any grant of authority in the moral sphere – it has no such authority, and that should be the end of it. Nor does it have any plausible claim to reveal supernatural truths about such entities as gods and spooks. But it’s as if some non-believers are prepared to give religion whatever authority it wants as long as they are allowed to teach evolution.

I agree with Russell that #3 is the most dangerous to the integrity of science.  This is what I object to about BioLogos and all the forms of accommodationism in which a theistic God is supposed to interfere in nature (and evolution) in some unspecified way.  It pollutes the pure science by giving the public impression that scientists agree that is room for the supernatural in the evolutionary process and, indeed, that the supernatural has operated.  In this sense Collins is not a good scientist, for he’s accepting the existence of magic.  Darwin explicitly rejected this kind of pollution in a letter to Charles Lyell about natural selection:

I entirely reject, as in my judgment quite unnecessary, any subsequent addition ‘of new powers and attributes and forces,’ or of any ‘principle of improvement’, except in so far as every character which is naturally selected or preserved is in some way an advantage or improvement, otherwise it would not have been selected. If I were convinced that I required such additions to the theory of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish. . . I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.

I again recommend reading Sam Harris’s review of Francis Collins’s book (“The Language of God”) to see the extent that Collins mixes science with faith.  And read Larry Moran’s post on Sandwalk about how Collins mixed science with God when announcing the sequence of the human genome.  Collins just can’t keep his yap shut about God when he’s talking about science to the public.  If you’re not offended by what Moran reports, imagine instead that Collins was an atheist, and pronounced that the human genome demonstrated at last that “there is no God.”

An annotated Origin of Species

May 27, 2009 • 8:29 am

Hot off the press — Harvard University Press, that is: an annotated version of the first edition of On the Origin of Species.  James T. Costa, a professor of biology at Western Carolina University, has taken the first edition of The Origin and, page for page, annotated it with explanations, historical background, and so on.  You can download a sample group of pages from the website and have a look.  I’ll be ordering a copy, and my friends who have seen the pre-publication version give it a unanimous thumbs up.

The evolution of house cats

May 27, 2009 • 6:17 am

How could I resist calling attention to this new Scientific American article, which combines two of my favorite things? The piece is by four first-class scientists, and is well worth reading if you’re an ailurophile.  Among the highlights:

All house cats descend from one species, Felis silvestris (otherwise known as the wildcat).  When I was younger there was speculation that house cats had either descended from multiple species, or had been tamed from the one wildcat species numerous times.  DNA studies described in the article now suggest that there was only a single center of domestication (they call it the cat’s cradle”) in the Middle East, and that all cats descend from the subspecies of  African wildcat called Felis silvestris lybica.

Cats may have been domesticated as long as 10,000 years ago, judging from a burial in Cyprus that included a cat.

“Oriental” breeds like Siamese and Burmese may have been isolated from other breeds of cats for more than 700 years.

Most modern cat breeds appear to have been created in the UK.

Lots of other fun facts and information in the article, which also addresses the perennial questions, “Why aren’t cat breeds as diverse as dog breeds?” (see yesterday’s post on dog “speciation”) and “Why did these unruly animals get domesticated in the first place?”

Felis silvestris lybica
Felis silvestris lybica

Photo courtesy of the African Wildcat Foundation


Collins may be NIH director

May 27, 2009 • 6:07 am

Well, we thought we’d seen the last of the theocracy of George W. Bush, but it apparently ain’t so.  The Scientist reports (and this has been the buzz for weeks), that born-again Christian and BioLogos Foundation director Francis Collins is likely to be named as head of the National Institutes of Health:

Francis Collins, the geneticist who led the Human Genome Project, is close to taking over the top spot at the National Institutes of Health, according to areport by Bloomberg News.

Collins, who was the director of the NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute from 1993 to 2008, is in the final stages of being screened by the administration of US President Barack Obama, an unnamed source toldBloomberg.

Elias Zerhouni, Collins’ would-be predecessor, voiced his approval for the pick, telling Bloomberg that Collins has “done things many scientists wish they could do once in their lifetime, and he’s done it repeatedly.”

Collins recently unveiled a new foundation, BioLogos, that promotes “the search for truth in both the natural and spiritual realms, and seeks to harmonize these different perspectives,” according to the organization’s Web site. Collins, who is an evangelical Christian, has said that his new foundation is an attempt to resolve Christian faith with scientific evidence, especially with regard to evolution. In 2006 he published a bestselling book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, that stirred some controversy in the scientific community.

I am funded by the NIH, and I’m worried.  Not about my own funding (although I’m a heathen cultural Jew), but about how this will affect things like stem-cell research and its funding.  If appointed, Collins will have wide latitude in how to disperse the  $30 billion annual budget, and can steer it towards or away from various projects.  I’d  be much more comfortable with someone whose only agenda was science, and did not feel compelled to set up a highly-publicized website demonstrating how he reconciles his science with Jesus.  (Truthdig has published Sam Harris’s evisceration of Collins’s wacko book.)

We are just recovering from the theocracy of G. W. Bush, and I was happy that federally-funded stem-cell research was allowed to go ahead.  Now what will happen?  This is NOT a presidential appointment designed to smooth the waters roiled by our previous administration.

Collins may indeed be a good administrator, but this appointment is a mistake.  At the very least, Collins must remove himself as director of the BioLogos foundation, as holding both posts would represent an unwanted incursion of religion into the public sphere.  I call for him to resign from BioLogos if he’s appointed as head of the NIH. (That, of course, has the attendant benefit of putting the ever-amusing Karl Giberson in charge of BioLogos!)

How do we know that speciation is true?

May 26, 2009 • 9:27 am

Over at his website at Scientific American, Steve Mirsky takes on the creationists’ claim that speciation doesn’t happen because we’ve never seen it happen.  It’s a clever and funny column, and makes a good point. I won’t spoil the fun except to say that Mirsky manages to mention both Mike Tyson and Chihuahuas in the same piece — surely a first.

Unrequited love?
Unrequited love?

Caturday felid (late)

May 26, 2009 • 9:09 am

I’ve been dilatory about the Caturday posting as I was out of town and also afflicted with flu (not of the swineish variety). Here’s the famous “ninja kitty” video, demonstrating not only the very quick reaction time of cats, but also their evolved behavior of not moving when spotted by a stalked victim, at least not until just before the strike.

And many thanks to Greg Mayer for posting in my absence.  He did a terrific job, especially in his posts on the new primate fossil.

Karl Giberson defends accommodationism

May 26, 2009 • 8:37 am

Karl Giberson, whose accommodationist book Saving Darwin I reviewed in The New Republic, is vice president of The BioLogos Foundation, the Templeton-Foundation-Funded organization headed by born-again Christian Francis Collins.  Giberson is also a trained physicist, a professor at Eastern Nazarene College, and head of a faith and science initiative at Gordon College.

I criticized Saving Darwin — and BioLogos as well — for their insistence that the evolution of human beings (or of some humanlike form of devout animal) was inevitable.  As part of a scheme to accommodate evolution with Jesus, BioLogos (and other accommodationists like Kenneth Miller  and John Haught) must devise a way to reconcile naturalistic evolution with the Christian view that humans were made in the image of God as the goal of the whole creation.  This magic is accomplished by claiming that God either set up the evolutionary process so that it would produce H. sapiens as an inevitable outcome, or that He intervened at some juncture(s) to ensure that humans would appear.  Either way, such a view completely violates the scientific presumption (and evidence) that evolution is a purely materialistic and unguided process — a process without a goal or, indeed, any determined outcome.

A weekly feature of BioLogos (which provides hours of entertainment and nanoseconds of enlightenment) is “Science and The Sacred,” a weekly online column where “leaders of the BioLogos Foundation share insights on the latest ideas in science, faith and their integration.”  In this week’s column Giberson takes on yours truly:

God or Matter?

The University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne recently objected to the suggestion that humans might actually be a part of God’s creative plan. Like most of the so-called “new atheists,” he denounces the idea that evolution — all by its lonesome, blind, purposeless, unguided self — would ever find its way to such an improbably unique species as human beings.

Although we know a lot more than we used to about evolution, I don’t see how we can have any certainty whatsoever about what kinds of things evolution might or might not be able to do. It was not long ago we thought 100,000 genes were required to make a human being, and now we know it can be done with approximately 20,000, or roughly the same number as rice and sea urchins. There is a lot we still don’t know about how evolution works, but this is not the point I want to make, for I have no desire to hide inside the shadowy corners of science and hope that they are never illuminated by the light of scientific progress.

Coyne’s objections are really just the traditional objections to belief in God repackaged as scientific objections. Traditional theism — which is the foundation for a majority of people’s worldviews, including scientists — is a richer and more complex version of reality than materialism. As a theist with a deep respect for science, I believe in all the same remarkable laws and particles that undergird the worldviews of scientists. But I also believe this reality is rooted in the creative and sustaining activity of God. God can act in the world and provide a larger understanding of the way things are.

Theists have both God and science as important parts of their reality. But many Americans reject particular scientific ideas like evolution or the big bang theory because they think they are incompatible with belief in God. The BioLogos Foundation is committed to helping religious people make peace with such scientific ideas, a project Coyne describes as a “hilarious goldmine of accomodationism.”

But what about the accommodationism of materialists? How do they reconcile their materialism with the rationality of the world? It seems to me reality has to be grounded in one of two deeply mysterious foundations: God or matter. Each has its own set of questions. Theists wonder about the nature of God’s existence, the problem of evil, how and why God acts in the world and why God has chosen to remain hidden from us. These are difficult questions and certainly must trouble thoughtful believers. But don’t materialists have another set of mysteries? Don’t they have to wonder about the nature of physical existence? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why are the laws of nature so rational? Why is our species so religious? Is the world just a big pointless accident?

In Coyne’s excellent book, Why Evolution is True, he suggests we can “make our own purposes, meaning, and morality.” I know I am not alone when I say I am not entirely satisfied with this. I think the materialists have their own accommodationist project to work on, and I suspect it may turn out to be even more hilarious than ours.

Karl Giberson is executive vice president of The BioLogos Foundation and director of the Forum on Faith and Science at Gordon College in Wenham, Mass.

Well, I appreciate Giberson’s praise for my book but still disagree strongly with his views.  First of all, he mischaracterizes mine: “[Coyne] denounces the idea that evolution — all by its lonesome, blind, purposeless, unguided self — would ever find its way to such an improbably unique species as human beings.”

Not so. I never said this. Indeed, this would be a moronic assertion, since blind, purposeless evolution has found its way to human beings.  My position has always been that the evolution of human beings may not have been inevitable, nor is there any way we can confidently assert from the facts of science that it was.  I won’t go over my arguments, which you can find in The New Republic piece.  The onus is on crypto-creationists like Giberson and Miller to show that the nature of selection, environmental change, and genetic mutation makes the evolution of a creature with humanlike intelligence and rationality an inevitable outcome.  This they have not done, though they must if they wish to reconcile an inevitable appearance of humanoids with straight, undiluted Darwinism.

And Giberson claims that we rationalists have our own set of problems:  “Don’t they have to wonder about the nature of physical existence? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why are the laws of nature so rational? Why is our species so religious? Is the world just a big pointless accident?”

The answer to the last question is “yes — so what?”   And why is there something rather than nothing? As physicist Victor Stenger has shown repeatedly (don’t these guys ever read him?), the answer is “because ‘nothing’ is unstable.”

Why is our species so religious?  We’re working on that, and there are lots of answers that don’t include the existence of celestial deities.

Finally, why are the laws of nature so rational?  That’s a dumb question. The laws of nature aren’t rational: WE are rational, and there are good reasons, based on natural selection and culture, why we should be.

The point is that there are provisional but testable answers to the questions that “plague” us rationalists (for example, physicists’ theories about how our universe came into being), but no testable answers to the questions that trouble supernaturalists like Giberson.  Take the existence of evil: we will never know why, if there is a god, innocent people undergo needless suffering (e.g., the death of children from horrible diseases and the death of thousands from “acts of God” like tsunamis).  There are lots of theological answers (every one ridiculous), and no way to discriminate among them. Indeed, the most sensible answer to the problem of evil is that there simply is no god.  I, for one, am content with the idea that bad things like tsunamis happen to good people for no reason at all other than movements of the Earth’s crust, and that small children get leukemia or cholera because of random mutations or the evolution of pathogenic organisms.

Behind all this, I think, is the longing for the “richer and more complex view of reality” that Giberson finds in religion.  But what could be richer or more complex than the material universe as we have it — a universe full of great mysteries and wonderful things to find out?  What Giberson means by “a richer and more complex view” is “after I die I’ll be able to meet my dead relatives in the sky.”  Such a view may be more complex, but it’s not richer.  It’s impoverished by adherence to magic and superstition.