Last week, C. S. Lewis led us down a rather strange path, in search of some kind of supernatural “reality” that would be more consistent with his “moral law” than the reality we observe. He started off by offering us a hamstrung science incapable of any analysis or observation beyond taking note of what he called the “observed facts” of the natural world. Then he suggested that, if there were a (supernatural) power behind the observed facts of Nature, it could not be any of those observed facts, in the same way that an architect cannot be one of the walls of the house he’s designing. That brought us to the conclusion that we must rely on our own inner feelings, and our subjective interpretations of those feelings, as the sole available guide to whether this supernatural power exists. (It also ruled out any possibility of Biblical miracles being true, but that’s one of the occupational hazards of trying to prove the supernatural, and it’s customary to ignore such trifles.)

So where does all this lead us? Let’s let Prof. Lewis give us his “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your pilot speaking” speech.

Do not think I am going faster than I really am. I am not yet within a hundred miles of the God of Christian theology. All I have got to is a Something which is directing the universe, and which appears to me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong.

He has, in other words, brought us nearly to the point of believing in primitive, superstitious animism as the reason for our subjective feelings of guilt. So far so good, eh? But there’s a catch. In order for animism to work, you need more than just a supernatural law. You need an thinking, purposeful supernatural Being to drive it. And that’s the next leg of our journey. Just what is this supernatural power anyway?

I think we have to assume it is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know—because after all the only other thing we know is matter and you can hardly imagine a bit of matter giving instructions. But of course it need not be very like a mind, still less like a person.

Somehow I’ve got more than just a hunch that Lewis is going to “discover” his mysterious supernatural law creator is very much like a Person indeed, don’t you? He may not be “within a hundred miles” of his destination, but given the care with which he has eliminated not just the possible alternatives, but the scientific means of even looking for other alternatives, it’s pretty clear where he’s headed.

But what about his assumption here—that “you can hardly imagine a bit of matter giving instructions.” Is that reasonable? Does Lewis even realize what he is saying? Granted, he was writing in the 1940′s, and DNA was discovered in the early 50′s, so he could not have been aware of how marvelously its particular molecular structure manages to provide living organisms with a complete set of instructions for assembling themselves out of simpler molecules.

But even so, beer existed even back in the 1940′s. Take anything we know of, that could reasonably be called an instruction, and it’s quite plain that the instruction originated in a bit of matter, aka “the brain.” The brain gives out instructions all the time; drink enough beer to shut down the material functions of the brain, and the thinking stops too. All the instructions we know about are instructions that were originally given (as far as we can detect) by a bit of gray matter.

Now, you can speculate that there exists some kind of supernatural spiritual mind “behind” the material brain, and that this immaterial mind is the ultimate source of the instructions. But the point is, we have never observed any such immaterial, disembodied intelligence. It is mere superstition to ascribe neurological functions to what is essentially a magical power. What we actually observe is thinking matter. We don’t have to imagine it, we observe it, every day. Ordinary beer is sufficient to demonstrate that thinking is a material process that can be influenced by material substances, as well as by material injuries, environmental conditions and so on. Instructions that originate in matter are the only instructions we’ve ever seen or heard of, at least in the real world.

What Lewis is doing, of course, is sidestepping that whole problem by assuming that the real thinking is being done by the presumed supernatural, immaterial mind. An educated man, let alone an Oxford don, ought to be able to recognize how very foolish it is to assume the existence of the supernatural in order to prove the existence of the supernatural. By assuming that all thinking is being done by supernatural/immaterial minds, he ensures that his conclusions will reflect the same premises he started with, regardless of whether or not any of them are true. But Lewis doesn’t let that bother him. In the same calm, common-sense tones, he just tells us he assumes the moral law must originate in a mind, because you can’t imagine thinking matter.

At this point it should be apparent that Starship Lewis has left the realms of observable, objective reality and is blasting off into some kind of subjective fantasy with no particular connection to real life. Where the facts are not in line with his intended destination, he simply steers around them and replaces them with superstitious assumptions. It’s a foregone conclusion that he’s going to “discover” the God he set out to prove, and never mind what scientific and even theological cargo needs to be jettisoned along the way.

In this edition of Mere Christianity, Chapter 4 ends with a kind of footnote/addendum having to do with the original question of materialism versus animism (what Lewis calls the Materialist view and the Religious view). It turns out that, in Lewis’ mind at least, there was also a third view being proposed by some of his contemporaries. This view Lewis dubs “Life Force philosophy, or Creative Evolution, or Emergent Evolution.”

People who hold this view say that the small variations by which life on this planet ‘evolved’ from the lowest forms to Man were not due to chance but to the ‘striving’ or ‘purposiveness’ of a Life-Force.

Kind of a 1940′s “New Age” precursor, sounds like. As any biologist will tell you, there is no long-term goal to evolution. Life tends to survive because things that endure longer end up playing a greater role in the ecosystem than things that don’t, and things that reproduce themselves tend to endure longer than things that never pass on their unique characteristics. This unguided interplay of natural forces happens to have produced us, but that was never its “goal” or “purpose.” In a sense, then, Lewis is right to critique this view, because it does have flaws. Then again, so does Lewis’ critique:

When people say this we must ask them whether by Life-Force they mean something with a mind or not. If they do, then ‘a mind bringing life into existence and leading it to perfection’ is really a God, and their view is identical with the Religious. If they do not, the what is the sense in saying that something without a mind “strives’ or has ‘purposes’?

Bear with me while I play devil’s advocate and argue with myself, because in a way, it almost does make sense to say that mindless Nature “strives” to accomplish certain “goals,” and has (apparent) “proposes” in many of its natural mechanisms, including evolution.

Think for a moment what we mean when we say that a mind has motives and purposes. What do these motives and purposes consist of, and why does the mind have them? We could say that the mind is responding to attractions (positive forces) and repulsions (negative forces). In other words, whatever state we are in now, there are a number of alternative states we could be in. Some of these states represent a positive change in our condition, and these are the conditions we are “striving” to obtain. Others represent a negative change in our condition, and these we try to avoid. Our “propose,” then, consists of navigating a sequence of states so as to maximize the “desirable” levels and minimize the “undesirable” ones.

My language may be rather stilted and contrived, but I think perhaps you see my point. The complex interactions of relatively simple natural forces tend to form patterns roughly similar to the function of a mind choosing between “desirable” and “undesirable” circumstances. All it takes for Nature to manifest something that looks like purpose is for current conditions to allow for a number of alternative changes in state, such that some changes are favored by the natural forces involved, while others are not. And indeed, it becomes easier and more intuitive for us to understand these complex interactions if we express the transitions from one state to another in terms of this mechanism being “designed” to cause that result. Nature, like thinking minds, responds to changes in “pressure” by making some outcomes more likely than others. In minds, we call that “preferring” one outcome over another, or “making choices.” It makes sense to refer to Nature in the same terms.

Thus, though Nature does not actually have genuine intentions and purposes, it has functions that are very similar, not to say analogous, and therefore it’s not entirely wrong to speak of design in nature (just as it’s not entirely wrong to describe the sun as rising and setting). Lewis, of course, takes a different tack: he claims that the reason people propose a Life-Force philosophy is because they want “much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences.” In other words, the little heathens just want a license to go sin. This self-indulgent little slander lets him dismiss the likes of George Bernard Shaw with what may turn out to be the most ironic question in the whole book. In fact, let’s close with that. Here is how Lewis ends Chapter 4.

The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?

There are some questions a Christian apologist should never ask, for fear of getting honest answers.

Last week, we watched a rather sad spectacle, as Prof. C. S. Lewis, Oxford don, tried to convince us all that science can never answer any questions beyond certain basic, elementary observations (e.g. “at such-and-such a time, I saw so-and-so through my telescope,” or “when I heated this substance to such and such a temperature, it melted”). Why would an intelligent and educated man be so eager to blindfold science, and to deny the existence of the various analytical, theoretical, and experimental techniques that define what science is?

Rhetorical question, I know. Lewis wants to persuade us to believe in something that hasn’t got a chance of withstanding any sort of scientific scrutiny, so he’s anxious to get science out of the picture, and to propose an alternative “reality” beyond the reach of science. He wants to make sure we have no way of verifying the truth of what he claims, so that we have to just take his word for it, prompted and consoled by our own (carefully manipulated) subjective feelings and biases. That may not sound very intellectually honest, but you can’t deny that, in marketing terms, it has proven to be extremely effective.

There’s a certain natural pattern in the process of fleecing the gullible. First, you sow doubts and suspicions about the reliability of anyone or anything that might expose your hoax. Then, when you’ve got people wondering whether there’s really anything they can trust, you offer them your exciting new system, that they can trust 100%, and that they can verify by examining it in the light of their own feelings. (You might recognize this pattern, for instance, if you’ve ever spoken with Mormon missionaries for any length of time.)

Lewis follows the same pattern: he spends most of the beginning of Chapter 4 trying to make us doubt that science can answer any kind of “why” questions about the real world at all. That means we’re ready for step 2.

Now the position would be quite hopeless but for this. There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know. And because of that, we know that men find themselves under a moral law, which they did not make, and cannot quite forget even when they try, and which they know they ought to obey.

Slick, eh? Take that, psychologists and sociologists and anthropologists! Science doesn’t know anything about Man, because science can only make “external” observations, and report what it observed. But we know more than science does about Man because we are men. I notice that he doesn’t claim that because we are men, therefore we understand women! Funny, that. Perhaps he might have overstated his case here just a bit.

The problem, or one of the problems, is that, in fact, most of what we know about men does indeed come from external observation. I don’t really know what it is like to be you, and you don’t know what it is like to be me. I know what it is like to be me, but even then, it is a very rare individual who truly understands even himself. Lewis is mistaken: we don’t know Man, and we don’t know as much as we’d like about the one person we do know “from the inside.” And that’s not really a good basis to go on, at least not for this type of question. We might as well say, “Let’s just be superstitious and self-centered” and leave it at that.

Notice, too, the subtle psychological manipulation going on here. Lewis wants us to trust in his biased interpretation of our subjective feelings. He’s priming us with the notion that, whenever we’re unhappy with our choices, and feel some kind of nameless dread regarding present or future consequences, the name of this vague disquiet is “guilt.” All through the book thus far, he’s been planting the suggestion that we should be interpreting our ambiguous feelings within the framework of a supposed “moral law” that we have intentionally violated. And now he appeals to that suggestion, which he himself planted, as being our own personal, subjective, inner validation of the existence of such a moral law. We’re “in the know,” you see, and therefore we should trust this (manipulated) subjective impression as being more reliable than science in determining certain types of “truth.”

Let’s look, once again, at this idea that we know there is a moral law and that we’ve deliberately violated it. Consider, for example, the 98-pound weakling who says to himself (with a certain amount of dread), “Gosh, I should never have let the quarterback’s girlfriend kiss me.” I submit to you that the emotion the weakling feels is the very same feeling that Lewis is calling “guilt.” If we wanted to mess with the weakling’s head, we could tell him that there is a “moral law” that says wimps are not allowed to compete with jocks for girls, and that he is now feeling guilty for violating that moral law.

The truth, of course, is that he’s just worried about what kind of vengeance the 240-pound bully will exact. He did not actually do anything immoral, but he’s feeling the same feelings. And they’re fearful, anxious feelings that are not all that hard to manipulate. Give the poor kid a copy of Mere Christianity, and he’ll identify right away. This is easy stuff. And Lewis has no compunctions about using it.

Mind you, this isn’t to say that people never have any reason to feel truly guilty. Bad behavior does lead to bad consequences, and if the bad consequences haven’t happened yet just because you haven’t been caught yet, then guilty feelings are entirely appropriate and accurate. But the point is, the actual feelings themselves are an anticipation of the negative consequences, not a reflection of some kind of secret knowledge of some kind of moral law that we’ve knowingly and deliberately violated. This “law” is just a superstition that Lewis attributes guilty feelings to, instead of identifying actual, real-world causes.

Let’s move on.

The position of the question, then, is like this. We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason, or whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. Since that power, if it exists, would not be one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it. There is only one case in which we can know whether there is anything more, namely our own case. And in that one case we find there is. Or put it the other way round. If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe—no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way.

Isn’t it fascinating how coincidentally the only way we could detect Lewis’ alleged metaphysical reality just happens to be the specific case he is arguing right now? Funny old world.

One of the hazards of trying to reject science wholesale is that there’s no way to anticipate just how many babies are going to go out with the bathwater, and I think Lewis has missed a rather large preschool here. The goal he’s after is to propose that there’s an important body of knowledge that can only be detected by explicitly rejecting the scientific method and putting your trust exclusively in your own subjective (and possibly manipulated) feelings and emotions. In the process of pursuing this goal, however, he has declared that it is impossible for there to be any valid scientific approach that can tell us whether or not the universe is the product of an Intelligent Designer.

I’ve never heard Bill Dembski or Mike Behe or any of the other luminaries at the Discovery Institute try to address this argument, but it clearly pulls the rug out from under their whole enterprise. The whole point of ID, and indeed of creationism in general, is to try and claim that there exists scientific evidence that the universe was created by a Person. Lewis, in Chapter 4, is categorically denying that such a thing is even possible. It has to be impossible in order for his whole “moral law” argument to work.

After all, if it were possible for science to examine the evidence and draw verifiable conclusions about this moral law, and whether it comes from some other “reality,” then Lewis would be in trouble, because the evidence comes nowhere near supporting his claims. It doesn’t support his claims regarding what this “moral law” even is, let alone backing up his argument that it must come from a supernatural source.

Considering that two of the most popular arguments for Christianity right now are Intelligent Design and “moral law,” it’s a bit ironic that they contradict each other so strongly, don’t you think? But it goes even deeper than that. Notice that Lewis says that this supernatural power “could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe”—part of his argument against allowing science to get close enough to examine his evidence. That fine, but did you notice he just threw out the entire Bible? None of those supernatural powers can show up as facts of the universe, so miracles, prophets, incarnations, resurrections, and so on, are all frauds. God’s only possible interaction with the real world is via some kind of secret, inner knowledge that makes us feel guilty. The Bible stories thus can only be lies. Oops.

It says in the Bible that God is not mocked, and that’s true, except the God is Alethea, not Jehovah. When you take up arms (or arguments) against the truth, God will not be angry. She’s never angry. But She will get even, and the loser will be the one who challenged Her. So sorry, Prof. Lewis, but I think in this case God has had Her revenge.

Once upon a time, a man met three students, and asked each of them, “Why did Jesus die?” The pre-med student replied that Jesus died because he had lost a lot of blood during his beatings, and because of the physiological effects of crucifixion, and because he was stabbed with a spear. The political science student replied that Jesus died because he ticked off the wrong group of guys, and was becoming popular enough to pose a credible threat to the political establishment. And the theology student replied that Jesus died in order to save mankind from sin.

All three answered the same question. All three gave answers that their professors (at least) would count as correct. None of the three contradicted the other two. And yet they gave completely different answers. How can this be? Once we understand the answer to that question, we’ll be ready to look at C. S. Lewis’ claim that science can never answer the question “Why is there a universe?”—or at least, not to his satisfaction.

Lewis, as you may recall, is arguing that there are certain questions science can’t answer. Sure, it’s ok for making observations, and telling us how the world is.

But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes—something of a different kind—this is not a scientific question… The statement that there is such a thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make… After all, it is really a matter of common sense. Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, ‘Why is there a universe?’ ‘Why does it go on as it does?’ ‘Has it any meaning?’ would remain just as they were?

The whole idea of “meaning” in life, of searching for some kind of “purpose” for the universe, has become a fairly dominant expression of religious yearning, and something that many, many Christians today appeal to as a justification for their faith. It’s worth spending a little time on, because once we understand the roots of this appeal, we’ll understand a lot better why Christians cling to it, and what it really implies for their faith.

Let’s begin our own quest for meaning by examining the meaning of the word “why.” When we ask “why?” what exactly are we trying to find out? As the introductory story shows, “why” encompasses at least two different types of question. The first question is “what chain of cause-and-effect led to the event or condition we’re asking about?” For example, if I ask my doctor, “Why do I have a rash on my elbow?” my doctor will examine my elbow and try to find some sort of injury or infection that would be likely to cause a rash.

Obviously, that’s the sort of question science is particularly well-suited to answer. Indeed, you could do a lot worse than to summarize all of science as being the process of answering the question “Why does the world go on as it does?” So when C. S. Lewis describes “common sense” as telling us that science ought to be unable to answer a question like that, it’s clear that Lewis must have some other kind of “why” in mind, because this kind of “why” is science’s bread and butter.

Let’s go back to our three students. The pre-med student gave us the scientific “why” for Jesus’ death by describing the cause and effect relationships that lead to his demise, but the political science major and the theology major gave us a different kind of “why” by describing the motives of those responsible. This is the other kind of “why” question: the question of goals and desires and agendas. In other words, the “social why.” And yet, here too the questions are not immune to scientific inquiry, as witness the fields of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and yes, even political science (not to overstate my case, but it is political “science”).

Notice, though, that we frequently distinguish between “hard” sciences like physics and chemistry, and “soft” sciences like sociology. It’s not that these fields are necessarily less scientific, but rather, the number of variables, and the subtle interactions between the variables, become difficult to manage. Samples, summaries, approximations, and margins of error assume a much more significant role, and researchers are more likely to resort to (dare I say it) intuition for their insights into the problems they’re working with.

So, not to stray too far from my main point, there is a different sort of science that deals with the more social sort of “why” question. But here’s the rub: all of us, by virtue of our membership in a sentient, socialized species, are naturally gifted at answering “social why” questions. Our socially-oriented minds automatically draw instinctive conclusions based on approximations and trends and intuitive pattern detection. We do a very crude version of this sort of “soft science” every time we interact with other people, reading their moods and inferring their motives.

It’s understandable, then, that Lewis would turn to something other than (hard) science for answers to “social why” questions. Even if there are soft sciences like psychology and sociology, you don’t turn to science for answers to questions like, “Who should I marry?” or “What would my kids like for a Halloween costume this year?” The soft sciences tend to give broad, general answers, not individual specifics, and are a lot more error prone (at least on the scale of the single individual) than are relatively simpler sciences like subatomic physics.

In this sense, Lewis is justified in appealing to common sense as proof that there are some questions that science cannot answer. When it comes to concrete cause-and-effect relationships like those that govern physical events in the material universe, then science can give hard, specific answers with very low margins of error. When it comes to people having agendas and desires and social obligations and pride and so on, pure science is less able to give specific individual answers to questions like “why did you do that?”

The catch is that you have to be dealing with a person who has motives and fears and so on, before you can ask a “social why” question. That is, by asking a “social why” question, you are implicitly assuming that some sort of person is involved in producing the event or condition you are asking about.

Let’s go back to the first question that (according to Lewis) cannot be answered by science: “Why is there a universe?” If we ask the “scientific why” question, we can see that the correct answer is that the universe ultimately does not have a cause. Lewis himself would cheerfully explain this to you, if you were to ask him “Why is there a God?” In Lewis’ theology, God has always existed, and has no cause, therefore it makes no sense to ask why there is one. But, as science is currently documenting, material reality itself has the properties Lewis ascribes to God: it has existed for all of time, and has no beginning and no cause. The question “Why is there a universe?” therefore, is not a meaningful question.

So much for the first “why,” then. But what about the social why? This is where our instinctive animism comes into play. If you ask “Why is there a universe?”—meaning “why” in the social sense—you are assuming that there is some kind of person involved in causing the universe, and that this person has motives and agendas in mind for the cosmos. It’s a loaded question, designed to prevent any atheistic answers from being offered.

Clearly, science cannot give a satisfactory answer to this question, because it is a question based on false premises. Science also cannot explain why baseball has more little green men from Mars than soccer has. It’s the same problem. Any answer that would satisfy the question (and its implicit assumptions) would have to involve describing a real-world process in which actual little green men (or actual Cosmic Creators) played a significant role. Science, however, is limited to what it finds in the real world, which sadly does not contain any observable Martian men (or Divine Creators). So while it is true that science cannot answer these sorts of questions, that’s a deficiency in the questions, not in the science.

It all comes back to the principle that truth is consistent with itself. Science is the systematic application of this principle, used to acquire knowledge of new truth based on its consistency with the truth we already know. It’s because of this inherent self-consistency that it’s even possible to ask questions and get meaningful and accurate answers. All real-world truth is interconnected and self-consistent, and therefore science is able to follow the connections, and test for consistency, and make valid discoveries.

This, unfortunately, leaves science without any way to arrive at the animistic conclusions Lewis would like to reach, and therefore he declares science to be incapable of answering certain questions. He proposes a different reality, one that lies outside the reach of science, that he hopes to discover by means of subjectivism (as we’ll see next week). Unfortunately, since truth is consistent with itself, that means all of reality is going to be consistent with the truth as well. Any reality outside of this would have to be a “reality” that was not consistent with the truth (otherwise it would be part of this reality). So the bottom line is that Lewis is rejecting science in order to better pursue a lie. And what better place to find a lie than inside your own head?

Stay tuned.

The Tea Partiers are the intellectual bastard children of Karl Rove and Rupert Murdock (and similar manipulators of public opinion). Bred from the innuendo and suspicion fostered by conservative political strategy, they have grown up unable to trust any authority, even the ones that created them.

The plan was that by using slander and demagoguery, conservatives could control what people believed and how they would vote. It even worked, for a while. But much to their current surprise and dismay, it’s turning out that the victories they’ve bought with their dishonest tactics are victories they’ve charged to a very expensive credit card. And it’s time to pay the bills.

The trouble with rabble-rousing is that you end up with a lot of roused rabble. And in this case it’s a lot of roused rabble with an inherent mistrust of authority. Is it a coincidence that they’re developing a taste for candidates like Sarah Palin and George Bush, whose popularity is based on their lack of “elite” leadership skills? If you don’t trust your leaders, why not put the incompetents in that position, so they’ll be less of a threat, eh?

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. There’s no cure short of waiting for the Tea Partiers to realize that denying reality is mostly self-destructive. The question is, can the RNC survive the monster they worked so hard to create?

The people most inconvenienced by the blizzards weren’t the residents of this region, or the senators-it was the proponents of man-made global warming. Scientists and activists insisted that people on this side of the Atlantic ignore the evidence in their driveways and, instead, trust their computer models.

According to Colson, you can disprove global warming just by pointing out that it’s still snowing.

10 years ago, they told us that, on account of the same global warming, “snow is starting to disappear from our lives.” We were told that, because of all that nasty CO2, British children “just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

Ten years later, they most certainly do. Not only British children, but children in every state except Hawaii. All of Britain, much of the rest of Europe, and the United States have experienced snowfalls this winter. The data suggests, in fact, that “snow is coming earlier and heavier than it used to.”

Ah yes, “they” told us. Nice to have an unimpeachable source, isn’t it?

Well, first things first: what is global warming? Are we talking about the average temperature going so high that in a mere 10 years snow would stop falling in England entirely? No. Climatologists are concerned about changes in average global temperatures of only a few degrees over many years, not the tens of degrees it would take to prevent frozen precipitation from occurring during England’s winters.

Granted, the original quote seems to have been made by a Dr. David Viner of the University of East Anglia. Colson chose not to cite the article he’s quoting from (perhaps to avoid having people find out that Dr. Viner also predicted occasional heavy snows that “will probably cause chaos” in the next decade or so?), but he is probably right to suggest that such dire predictions are unlikely in the short term. Maybe Dr. Viner was exaggerating or misquoted, but it seems a bit much to claim that global warming will make the snow stop falling any time soon.

But consider what happens if the average global temperature rises only a few degrees, say 3°F. Around where I live that might mean a winter where the temperature hovered around 24°F instead of 21°F (i.e. -4°C instead of -6°C for you metric folks). Too warm to snow? Of course not. But increased warmth can have other consequences…

What Colson is forgetting is that we don’t all have the same seasons at the same time. It’s winter in the northern hemisphere right now, but it’s summer for the other half of the planet. And in the warmer parts of the planet, weather is being driven by a number of factors, including one we call “evaporation.”

Evaporation is what puts water into the atmosphere so that it can return to the surface again as rain or snow. Warmer global temperatures mean increased evaporation, which means more moisture in the atmosphere, which means greater precipitation. If Colson had been watching his weather maps, he might have noticed that these unusually heavy snowfalls did not blow down on the east coast from the frigid reaches of northern Canada. They blew up from warmer regions around the Gulf of Mexico.

Thus, it’s not climatologists who are ignoring the evidence in their driveways, it’s Colson. He even admits it, albeit indirectly and with exaggerated incredulity.

Not only did they tell us that this winter’s weather didn’t disprove their global warming data, they told us that the record snows were caused by global warming. Really!

Um, yes, Chuck, really. As amazing as it may sound to you, people whose experience and expertise lie in areas of science that you don’t understand might just know more about what they’re saying than you on the topic of climatology. One snowstorm doesn’t prove global warming of course, but it’s hardly the refutation of science that Colson makes it out to be!

But Colson’s not stopping there, not by a long shot.

If all of the white stuff hasn’t left you doubting those computer models, maybe Phil Jones can help you. That would be ironic since, until recently, Jones was the director of the Climate Research Unit at Britain’s East Anglia University. He was the keeper of the data upon which the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) based its predictions-data that has been, to put it mildly, called into question.

In an interview with the BBC, Jones acknowledged that there has been no significant warming since 1995. Let me repeat that. One of the world’s leading global warming advocates says there has been no significant warming since 1995. Fifteen years.

That sounds like a pretty damning admission if true. But notice that Colson once again omitted the citation that would let us track down the source of his quote. Could it be that he doesn’t want his readers to find out what Jones really said?

B – Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

Notice, the reason Dr. Jones is careful to say that there’s no “statistically significant” warming in the past 15 years is not because he failed to find a warming trend, but because in climatology a 15 year time span is too short. The temperature has been rising at a rate of about a tenth of a degree per decade, but in the interests of accuracy, he’s insisting that we ought to base our conclusions on trends measured over a longer period of time—trends which do show global warming.

That’s rather a different perspective than the spin Colson is trying to put on it, isn’t it? But he’s still not done yet. Here’s Colson’s next observation, based on Jones’ interview:

He also indicated that there is nothing exceptional about the warming the occurred between 1979 and 1995.

Compare this with what Jones actually said:

As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.

So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

Here are the trends and significances for each period:

Period Length Trend (Degrees C per decade) Significance 1860-1880 21 0.163 Yes 1910-1940 31 0.15 Yes 1975-1998 24 0.166 Yes 1975-2009 35 0.161 Yes

So what Jones originally said was that there are four sizable time periods during which significant warming can be documented and that these trends are not significantly different from each other. Colson tries to make it sound like Jones is saying that there wasn’t any unusual warming between 1979 and 1998, but that’s not what Jones is saying at all.

One caveat: I’m assuming that Colson was making his claim in connection with the above quote from the original interview, though the dates don’t quite match. But perhaps he was referring to this question instead:

D – Do you agree that natural influences could have contributed significantly to the global warming observed from 1975-1998, and, if so, please could you specify each natural influence and express its radiative forcing over the period in Watts per square metre.

This area is slightly outside my area of expertise. When considering changes over this period we need to consider all possible factors (so human and natural influences as well as natural internal variability of the climate system). Natural influences (from volcanoes and the Sun) over this period could have contributed to the change over this period. Volcanic influences from the two large eruptions (El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991) would exert a negative influence. Solar influence was about flat over this period. Combining only these two natural influences, therefore, we might have expected some cooling over this period.

This, however, isn’t even remotely like the what Colson claims Jones is saying. Jones is saying that, if manmade causes were not contributing to global warming, we ought to have expected a cooling trend between 1975 and 1998, due to the shading effect of volcanic ash in the upper atmosphere from two major volcanic eruptions. That cooling did not happen. Instead we observed a net increase in average global temperature between 1975 and 2009, per the chart above. So what the hell is Colson talking about?

Colson does do something I’ve never heard a denialist do before. Or at least, he tries to. The one thing I’ve never understood about all this global warming denialism is why all these professional climatologists and researchers would allegedly lie about it. Outside of cartoon villains, people don’t just spontaneously do evil things that involve large amounts of time and effort for no tangible reward. So what’s supposed to be motivating the scientists? Here’s Colson’s slanderous guess:

Why? It’s a matter of worldview.

Activists and scientists have too much invested in human-caused global warming. For activists, it’s the threat by which they can create their version of a better world, and scientists have staked their careers and reputations on the accuracy of those computer models.

Um, right. Only the thing is, Chuck, that there are lots of eager young grad students (let alone all the know-it-all denialists) who would just love to kick-start their scientific careers by coming up with an even more accurate model. If the old scientists were, you know, lying about global warming, that would make it easier for someone to come up with a model that worked better. Almost any car will go faster than one that won’t even start.

Real scientists are always checking each other’s work, and engaging in vigorous, (mostly) friendly competition. Anybody who resorts to fudging his or her results in front of the experts is just setting themselves up for failure. If you’re staking your career and reputation on the accuracy of your computer model, the last thing you want to do is get yourself entrenched in defending an obsolete and inadequate model!

Colson isn’t going to understand this, of course. Defending obsolete and inadequate models is what Christian apologetics is all about, so naturally he assumes that scientists must be doing the same thing. He needs a “worldview” to insulate him from facts that might otherwise lead him to reassess his conclusions, so in his mind that’s what scientists must be doing too.

The result is that conservative Christians like Colson are among the foremost of those who boldly and ignorantly declare that the experts must be wrong and that we must not interfere in the profits of the wealthy merely to prevent environmental disaster. Like Bush ignoring repeated warnings about Saddam’s lack of WMD’s, they proudly and smugly turn their backs on the advice of those who know more about it than they do. Anything else would be a failure to walk by faith. Or something.

Sigh.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I still need to go do some more shoveling.

[O]ver at the Disco Institute, resident Legal Eagle Casey Luskin has started posting an eight-part series on how the Kitzmiller case (the legal case concerning the teaching of intelligent design in Dover PA) was decided wrong.

Dr. Chu-Carroll proceeds to disassemble Luskin’s rather pathetic argument (as does Dr. Wesley Elsberry), and I recommend following the links and reading their analyses. What caught my eye, however, was the way Luskin not only bungles his case, but inadvertently pulls the rug out from under one of William Dembski’s main arguments.

Here’s a quick overview of Luskin’s argument:

The plaintiffs’ attorneys, working with the NCSE, successfully convinced Judge Jones to parrot Miller by stating in the Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling that Miller had “pointed to more than three dozen peer-reviewed scientific publications showing the origin of new genetic information by evolutionary processes.”

Virtually all of those “publications” mentioned by Judge Jones came from one single paper Miller discussed at trial, a review article, co-authored by Manyuan Long of the University of Chicago. The article does not even contain the word “information,” much less the phrase “new genetic information”…

But are Judge Jones’s, Ken Miller’s, and the NCSE’s bold proclamations supported? Does Long et al. actually reveal the origin of new biological information? Is Explore Evolution wrong? A closer look shows that the NCSE is equivocating over the meanings of the words “information” and “new,” and that the NCSE’s citations are largely bluffs, revealing little about how new genetic functional information could originate via unguided evolutionary mechanisms.

So Luskin’s chief complaint here is that the peer-reviewed publications surveyed and reported by the Long paper are all scientific publications that do not discuss whatever it is that creationists mean by “new genetic information.” Instead, as Dr. Chu-Carroll and Dr. Elsberry point out, they discuss the evolution of new genes.

In other words, Luskin isn’t objecting to the scientific conclusions reached by these peer-reviewed papers. Given his lack of scientific expertise, he wisely avoids challenging the research that allows us to understand how new genes evolve. Instead, he simply asserts that this research is not studying whatever he means by “new genetic information.” “New genetic information,” whatever that is, does not play any significant role in the evolution of new genes.

Wow.

Just think about that for a minute. One of the core arguments of intelligent design creationism is that new species require “complex specified information” and that evolutionary processes are incapable of producing whatever they mean by “information.” But now here’s Luskin objecting to the evidence used in Kitzmiller on the grounds that “genetic information” is some topic unrelated to the study of how new genes evolved. New genes, it seems, can evolve without “genetic information” (as defined by creationists) playing any significant role.

That whooshing sound you just heard is Luskin pulling the rug out from under William Dembski and all the fine folks at the Disco ‘Tute, because once you can evolve new genes, it’s trivial to evolve new species specified by those genes. And here is Casey Luskin, official spokesweenie of the premier ID publicity and marketing organization, blithely assuring us that the new genes documented by the research in the Long paper were new genes produced without being in any way hindered by the complete absence of the “new genetic information.”

Whatever he means by that.

6,000 years ago, the remnants of a supernova were swirling away into space.

7,000 years ago, other clouds of dust and gas were very slowly condensing and ultimately giving birth to new stars.

8,000 years ago, the Trumpler 14 star cluster, made up of very young stars only half a million years old, twinkled serenely in the night sky.

9,000 years ago, a huge cluster of stars was shining, barely visible from earth (except in infrared wavelengths), obscured by dust and other interstellar matter.

10,000 years ago, the aging stars in the NGC 2420 cluster were shining calmly, if a bit reddishly, due to their 1-billion-year age.

There’s lot’s more, of course. In fact, if you visit atlasoftheuniverse.com, there’s even a map of all the nebulae and star clusters within 10K light years of Earth—with a companion map out to 20K light years.

Remember, these are not illustrations or artistic renderings of any kind. Light takes time to get from there to here, so by the time we see it here, we’re seeing what was happening in the past. When we look at the parts of the universe pictured above, we’re seeing 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 thousand years into the past, first-hand, eye-witness stuff.

And these sights are visible to everybody. You don’t have to “believe in” Darwin or disbelieve in Genesis. You can even be an ordinary camera, with no beliefs or preferences at all. The same sights are visible and recordable to everybody.

So the next time someone tries to tell you that six days of creation were happening 6 to 10 thousand years ago, ask to see the pictures.

It’s not like we can’t see what’s really out there.

There’s a famous quote from the movie The Princess Bride in which Inigo Montoya tells Fezzig Vizzini, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” See if you can see why today’s installment from I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST reminds me of that quote:

When asked if divorce was acceptable, Jesus cited a scientific fact out of Genesis. … (Matt. 19:4-6). In other words, the nature of marriage is bound up in the scientific fact that Adam and Eve were created for a purpose.

Geisler and Turek are trying to make the argument that the Bible must be scientifically accurate because Jesus treated it as though it were scientifically accurate. Apparently, the Garden of Eden story must be a “scientific fact” because otherwise Jesus’ argument would fail. And we can’t have that now, can we!

In making this argument, Geisler and Turek tell us a lot about how Christian apologists define what “scientific facts” are. In the world of Christian apologetics, the phrase “scientific fact” does not mean “that which can be objectively verified either by direct observation or by the distinctive, verifiable consequences it produces.” No, the term “scientific fact” means only “you can’t argue with it.” Christian dogma is based on authority, and by calling something a scientific fact, all Geisler and Turek are really doing is trying to establish a claim of unquestionable authority to declare the truth.

To Geisler and Turek, the Garden of Eden is a “scientific fact” simply because Jesus appealed to it as though it had the unquestionable authority to declare the truth about marriage. Unlike genuine scientific facts, which encourage further investigation and deeper understanding, the Christianized “scientific fact” is intended to end the discussion and eliminate any further questions. God said it, I believe it, that settles it, end of story. To even ask for some kind of verification that Eden ever existed would be to admit a fatal weakness in one’s personal faith.

The end result, of course, is that Geisler and Turek turn the phrase “scientific fact” into a synonym for “dogma,” and give it a meaning that is the exact opposite of what a genuine scientific fact would actually be. Instead of verifying whether any objective, real-world evidence actually exists for the events described in Genesis 3, Geisler and Turek want us to take their word for it that we can take the Bible’s word for it that we can take Jesus’ word for it that we can take the Bible’s word for it. That, according to G&T, constitutes “scientific fact.”

Perhaps to atone for the shoddy quality of this argument, Geisler and Turek follow up with some of the most clear and logical writing in the entire book.

Jesus taught that if the Bible does not speak truthfully about the physical world that you can see, then it cannot be trusted when it speaks about the spiritual world that you cannot see…  Truth about the universe cannot be contradictory. Since all truth is God’s truth, religious beliefs must agree with scientific facts. If they do not, then either there is an error in our scientific understanding, or our religious beliefs are wrong.

Ok, I did elide a bit in the middle there where they insist that “yes of course Christianity is based on fact.” But that bit of revisionist propaganda aside, the argument they are making here is possibly the most rational and clear-headed thinking in the entire book. It is somewhat ironic that they intend this as a kind of spiritual blackmail to be used against wishy-washy Christians tempted by genuine scientific facts. But the threat is clear: “You must defend the scientific accuracy of the Bible, or else deny the Bible entirely!”

It’s not that belief in the Bible must be contingent on its scientific accuracy, it’s that the scientific accuracy of the Bible is contingent on one’s faith in it. We’ve seen that time and again in the book up to now. Geisler and Turek reject evolution because Darwin’s theory does not provide an answer to the question “What caused the Big Bang?” As we saw before, that’s a common but nonsensical question to even ask, and it has nothing to do with the mechanisms that cause the evolution of biological species. Yet Geisler and Turek find that quibble a sufficient pretext to discard pretty much all of the scientific evidence which supports evolution.

Conversely, when examining the evidence relating to the historical accuracy of the New Testament, they were satisfied that everything Luke wrote must be literal, historical truth just because he happened to mention a few people and places that actually existed. Imagine if I were to swap those two standards of evidence and insist that evolution must be true because Darwin mentioned the Galapagos Islands, and lo and behold, those islands actually exist! Would that be enough to convince them? Or if I point out that the resurrection story fails to give a complete and detailed explanation of the mechanics of reanimating dead and decaying flesh, you think that would be enough to get them to abandon the Gospel as eagerly as they discarded evolutionary theory?

There is a consistent and pervasive pattern in Geisler and Turek’s apologetic, in that they persistently define “fact” in terms of what does or does not support the conclusion they want to reach, based on how badly they want to reach it. We see that here in their argument that the Bible must be “scientifically accurate.” Their argument has nothing to do with providing objective verification of the various significant and unrealistic elements of the story, and everything to do with how the Christian reader feels about the likely consequences of a given claim being true or false. “The Bible must be consistent with science, or else you must suffer the painful, soul-shattering loss of your most cherished beliefs. We report, you decide.”

This is the worst possible approach a sincere seeker of truth could take. It guarantees that one will remain forever enslaved to their own preconceived ideas, to social pressures, to superstitions, and to gullibility. As Geisler and Turek themselves wrote, “Truth about the universe cannot be contradictory.” To discover and understand the truth, therefore, we must adopt a consistent approach to seeking the truth, and must insist that our conclusions be consistent both with themselves and with objective reality. Paying hollow and deceptive lip-service to “scientific accuracy” is not part of the equation.

Recommended reading.

The behavior of rivers is, broadly speaking, fairly easy to explain: water flows downhill. If your specialty is the study of rivers, however, you might want to dispute the claim that all rivers work in essentially the same way. You might want to point out different mechanisms of erosion and silt deposition, and how that interacts with the river to produce variations in the rate of flow due to changes in the riverbed. You might further study how the river affects the climate, possibly inducing changes in rainfall that in turn have an impact on the water flowing into the river. And yet, when you have delved down into all the technical hydrological details, all rivers still consist of water flowing downhill.

It was in that sense that I alluded to microevolution and macroevolution being the same basic process. Evolution is a process of change in the distribution of alleles, coupled with natural variations within the pool of available alleles and with the influence of environmental conditions on the selection of which alleles, if any, come to predominate within the population. Biologists are interested in breaking down this overall process into specialized submechanisms, and studying the factors and processes that produce certain specific types of variation under certain specific sets of conditions, and yes, in that particular technical discussion, you can make a technical distinction between microevolutionary processes and macroevolutionary processes. Such distinctions are of no use to evolution-deniers, however, because even here, we’re not talking about the kind of difference that would make microevolution possible while ruling out macroevolution.

In order to deny that macroevolution is possible (as Geisler and Turek attempt to do), creationists need at least one of two things: either a distinct mechanism for macroevolutionary changes, and/or a standardization mechanism which would triple the amount of genetic information required for each inheritable characteristic. Let’s take these one at a time.

Natural changes are the raw material of evolution. Mutations are the most famous source of natural variations, but there are others, which I’m not going to delve into here. The point is that these variations are all microvariations. There is no macrovariation that would allow, say, a cat to give birth to a horse. There may be subsequent specific processes that operate on these microvariations to produce macroevolutionary changes in the population(s) as a whole, but the fundamental basis for these changes necessarily involves the accumulation of microvariations passed from one generation to the next. Hence, even macroevolution is necessarily the accumulation of microevolutionary changes.

Failing a separate and distinct mechanism for macrovariations, the creationist can turn to the idea of genetic “barriers”—some kind of genetic standard that defines what the limits for a “kind” are, plus some sort of mechanism for enforcing those limits. The problem with this approach (apart from the fact that there is absolutely no scientific evidence or hypothetical mechanism for it) is that it requires each inheritable characteristic to have triple the genetic information required to describe the characteristic.

If a kind is allowed to have only a certain range of skin colors, for instance, the “skin color” gene must have not only the value of the current individual’s color, but also the minimum and maximum ranges that the kind is allowed to have. And even then, what happens if a mutation moves the skin color outside that range? You also need a mechanism for detecting the violation, and repairing it.

That’s a vastly oversimplified description, of course, but I think you get my drift. You could reduce the requirements somewhat by not allowing any variation at all, and requiring each characteristic to be an exact clone of the ancestral characteristic, but what about mutations? And even if you had a mechanism for detecting and repairing variations from the standard, what’s to prevent the mechanism itself from mutating? And even if you could propose a hypothetical self-repairing mechanism for maintaining an independent set of standards, where is there any evidence that any such mechanism exists and operates the way creationists need it to? And why, incidentally, would a wise Creator deliberately afflict His creatures with mechanisms designed to make them less adaptable and thus more fragile and liable to extinction in a hostile and changing environment?

The “barrier” against macroevolution is simply wishful thinking on the part of creationists. It just one more ramification of God’s failure to show up in real life: believers who are looking for evidence of His existence have to go all the way back to ancient prehistory to try and find something technical enough and obscure enough that they can say foolish things about it in order to create a pretext for claiming that divine intervention is necessary. That’s why so many devout believers (myself included) begin their journey away from Christian faith by taking a hard, honest look at creationism.

The Big Bang theory says that time, space, and matter/energy all originate in the same singularity, not that they all originate in “nothing.”
And I’ve seen several philosopher make the case that such a singularity is ontologically equivalent to nothing. You are just question begging.

Because time and the material universe had the same origin, it can truthfully be said that the universe has no “beginning,” since there was never a time when it did not exist.
“Almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the Big Bang.” (Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time,)
I think I’ll go with what the expert physicists say.

I’ll go with what the expert physicists say too. The catch is that sometimes, when writing for a non-technical audience, you have to sacrifice strict technical accuracy in favor of readability. That’s why meteorologists, despite being heliocentrists, will say, “The sun will rise at 6:52 am” instead of saying “At 6:42 am the earth will have rotated to a position relative to the sun such that a line between the sun and the eye of an observer of average height will no longer intersect the body of the earth.” Though the latter version is more technically correct, it is so needlessly complex that it actually obscures the information we’re most interested in knowing.

When Hawking and Penrose speak of the “beginning” of space and time, they’re speaking informally, for readability’s sake. For casual conversation, or a layman’s introduction to advanced physics, that’s ok. Where it gets tricky is when you start to think about what the phrase “beginning of time” might mean, because a beginning is a kind of chronological transition. In other words, when we say that a thing begins, what we mean is that a certain point in time, the thing does not exist, and then at some subsequent point in time, it does exist.

That’s our normal, intuitive perception of what a “beginning” is. We don’t even need to think about it, because we’re so familiar with “beginning” being a chronological transition. If the thing we’re talking about is time itself, however, then our normal, intuitive perception breaks down, because in order for time to begin, in the sense that we mean “beginning,” we must assume that at one point in time, time did not exist, and then at some subsequent point in time, it did exist. But that means that part of our argument involves assuming that time existed when time did not exist—a self-contradictory premise.

What Hawking and Penrose are talking about is not a “beginning of time” in the ordinary chronological sense, but rather an absolute minimum value for time. Stephen Hawking uses the example of the North Pole, 90 degrees north latitude. If you travel to the north pole by dog sled, you will find that you cannot travel north of the north pole. Obtaining more powerful transportation, like a snowmobile or a big snow rig, or even a jet or a rocket of some kind, will not help. It’s not a question of needing more power, it’s a question of there being no more “north” to go to. It just isn’t there.

Likewise with the beginning of time. It’s not that we can’t go back before the beginning of time because we lack power, or that we could travel back before the beginning of time if we were omnipotent, it’s that there’s no “before the beginning” to go back to. “What’s before the beginning of time?” is like “What’s north of the North Pole?” or “What is your speed when you come to an absolute stop and then slow down?” We can assemble the words into phrases that sound like they mean something, but there’s nothing real for them to refer to.

As for the unnamed philosophers who make the case that the singularity is “the ontological equivalent of nothing,” I have to say that’s a fascinating refutation of Geisler and Turek’s argument. The singularity referred to in the Big Bang theory is a construct whose properties are defined by the answer to the question, “What do you get when you follow natural cause-and-effect relationships back as far as they will go?” It is therefore one of the properties of the singularity that it is the origin of the entire space-time continuum that we know as our cosmos, by definition. “Singularity” is simply the label we put on the list of qualities that would have to come at the beginning of all natural causal chains.

Thus, to the extent that these philosophers are proving that the universe has its origin in “the ontological equivalent of nothing,” they are refuting Geisler and Turek’s claim that it is not possible for something to come from nothing. Of course, Geisler and Turek could argue back that these philosophers are simply wrong, and that the phrase “ontological equivalent of nothing” is mere philosophical double-talk and vapid sophistry.

For myself, I’m content to leave this particular argument to Geisler and Turek versus Facilis’ philosophers, because it’s all moot anyway. The universe has no cause, since there has never been a time when the universe did not exist. It is entirely pointless to bicker over whether it was caused by something or caused by nothing or caused by the ontological equivalent of nothing. It was not caused.

Cause and effect are concepts that assume the existence of time. The cause of an effect must happen before the effect, and “before” is a chronological relationship. The cause occurs at one point in time, and then at some subsequent point in time, the effect occurs. If Event A happens after Event B, or even at the exact same instant as B, then A is not the cause of B. The cause and effect relationship depends on which point in time corresponds to which event. Since time must already exist in order for there to be points in time, it is not possible for time to have a cause. And since time and the rest of the material universe all share the same point of origin, there is no point in time when any cause could have happened that would have created the cosmos.

Consequently, while time and the universe have the same origin, they do not, strictly speaking, have what we would normally call a “beginning,” and thus no cause. It is quite literally true that the material universe has existed for all of time and that there has never been any time when it did not exist. So add the “First Cause” argument to the list of failed Christian apologetics. It just isn’t consistent with real world truth.

DD, I don’t see why additional information about ghosts is necessary to test my hypothesis. If we identified a ghost as a deceased person my hypothesis would be confirmed. It doesn’t matter whether you would still have additional questions about ghosts or souls or spirits.

Ok, so it’s not exactly phrased as a question, but the implication is there. Why isn’t the test, taken in isolation and without regard to other factors, sufficient to establish the hypothesis? It’s a good question and it points up an important principle that I neglected to cover in yesterday’s post.

Let’s say that I’m a little short on cash, and so I decide to go into the diet pill business. I make up a large batch of pills, and offer free samples to anyone who wants to lose weight. My pills, I tell people, don’t magically make fat disappear. Instead, they work with your body to multiply the effects of moderate exercise and a bit of portion control in your eating. I get about 100 people to try my free samples, and I predict that if my pills really work, I ought to see people losing weight when they take it.

So I check up on my free sample recipients and find that quite a lot of them experience some weight loss while taking my pill. In most cases it’s more a fluctuation than a steady decline, but at least part of the fluctuation is loss, right? And a smaller number actually do experience the steady decline, with a handful of soon-to-appear-in-my-advertisements people who experience dramatic weight loss. So my tests prove that my pills really work, right? Did I mention that they were just cornstarch and water, formed into tablets and baked until hard?

My experiment fails because I failed to control for other variables. I had a biased sample to begin with: people who wanted to lose weight. I created a context in which they were likely to employ other weight-loss methods (diet and exercise). And my test was designed to single out successful results while discounting the failures (“individual results vary”). Whether by intent or by accident, I created a “test” that produced the biased conclusion I wanted to reach, rather than arriving at the unbiased truth.

So the answer to Jayman’s implicit question is that we want to look at the situation from all angles, and make sure that we’re not just creating a pseudo-scientific excuse for jumping to a predetermined conclusion. Our goal, as skeptics and scientists, is not to try and find some way to confirm someone’s opinion, but rather to discover what the truth really is. That means we want to apply rigorous tests and not just informal assays.

Turn it around just a bit: if our goal is to have a solid, reasonable basis for our conclusions, why would we want to rule out the additional questions about spirits (to return to Jayman’s original hypothesis)? Why would we want to forbid certain questions from being asked? Why would we want to insist on drawing our conclusions before we find out whether the “spirits = ghosts” hypothesis is really consistent with itself and with the real world evidence? If it turns out that spirits don’t actually exist, shouldn’t that have a significant impact on how we interpret the results of our test?

Remember, our core principle is that truth is consistent with itself, and one of the implications of that principle is that when our beliefs are untrue, they’re going to conflict with the real world evidence. If we invent rationalizations to try and explain away the inconsistencies, we may succeed in creating an apparent reconciliation in one specific area, but since the rationalization is untrue, it’s going to create new inconsistencies in other areas. Thus, to know whether we are uncovering new truth, or merely covering up an untruth with a plausible (but untrue) rationalization, we need to explore these other implications of our premises.

My goal, as a Christian, was simple. I knew that different men said different things about God. All I wanted was a reliable means of determining which of those men, if any, were really telling the truth about Him. I didn’t want to simply put my faith in whatever men said was right, even if (especially if!) the man I was trusting was myself. I knew the folly of believing whatever seems right in one’s own eyes, and I eventually learned that this was no less an unreliable source if you transformed it slightly by turning it into “whatever interpretation of Scripture seems right in one’s own eyes.” I wanted to know the real truth, the truth that was not built out of the things men thought were right and wanted to believe. The truth that exists on its own, independently of the beliefs of men.

And yet, despite my good intentions, I deceived myself for decades. I made exceptions. I assumed that the men who wrote the Bible were necessarily telling the truth, and that the men who canonized the Scripture were necessarily correct. After all, God would not allow a false book to bear the name of “God’s Word,” right? I told myself I was being objective and verifying my beliefs when what I was actually doing was setting up isolated little self-contained assays designed to reinforce this or that preconceived idea I was having doubts about. I kept my attention focused on the small picture, so that I would not be troubled by the inconsistencies that arose when you try and put all the little pieces together in one big picture.

And it’s the big picture that gives Christianity problems. I once helped a Mormon lady deconvert from Mormonism by the same approach. Individually, the little pieces of her faith were not a problem, and she had a million and one little tests by which she knew that the LDS church was the One True Faith. When I exposed her to the big picture, though, she started to have some doubts. I showed her some of the contradictions in her faith, in front of her own Mormon elders (a couple 18-year-olds), and she began to realize that it didn’t really all fit together. And, ironically enough, my own faith suffered a similar fate starting a few years later.

If our goal is to merely reinforce our preconceived ideas and to insulate ourselves from real-world truth, then fine, it’s ok to wall off those other, potentially troublesome questions, and just limit ourselves to simple assays that will easily satisfy our desire to claim to have some real-world support for our dogmas. But if our goal is to challenge ourselves, and make reality the standard by which we measure our beliefs instead of vice versa, then we’ll be eager to explore all the questions, and to see whether or not our conclusions really are consistent with the real world, even in areas outside our “little tests.”

Truth is consistent with itself, both in the fact that it does not contradict itself and in the fact that each real world truth is interrelated with other real world truths, such that we can follow the connections to discover new truths on the basis of old ones. If we’re not exploiting these very useful properties of the truth, if we’re reluctant to even try to follow all of the ramifications, maybe we’re trying to tell ourselves something. Maybe we’re not really as fond of the truth as we’d like to think. But that’s a human frailty, and the cure is simple: embrace the truth anyway. In the long run, that’s by far the best approach.

I get the sense that skeptics want even more than a theory and predictions. Perhaps you can tell me why the following theory and prediction does not cut it?

One may theorize that ghosts are the spirits of deceased humans that generally inhabit a location known to them when they were alive. Such a theory allows one to predict that at certain locations ghosts will be observed and that one may be able to identify the ghost as a deceased person who lived at that location.

Have at it.

Technically, of course, Jayman is describing a hypothesis rather than a theory, but that’s a quibble. Let’s look at the larger question(s). What do skeptics really want? Why isn’t it necessarily scientific to have just a theory and some predictions? And how can we tell when someone’s theory (or hypothesis) is just superstition in disguise?

Jayman is right: it’s not enough to have just a theory and predictions. What skeptics want, quite simply, is a set of hypotheses, predictions, and observations that combine to give us an reliable and objective basis for determining which possibility is closest to the real-world truth. Not all theories and predictions do that.

For example, it’s important to have predictions that are the natural and inevitable consequences of the proposed cause, and not just some arbitrary prediction chosen chiefly to reach some predetermined goal. “If Jesus is the Son of God, then I predict the sun will rise tomorrow.” Obviously, this is not a valid set of theories and predictions; the “investigator” has simply taken a very predictable outcome and arbitrarily attached it to the premise he wants to “prove.” Jayman’s hypothesis, above, passes this test: it’s not an arbitrary prediction, and has some reasonable connection to its premises.

The next thing is that the given prediction ought to tell us something about whether or not the hypothesis is true. “My theory is that there exist magical elves that sit around all day making all kinds of shoes. If this theory is true, then we can predict that we will be able to observe the existence of all kinds of shoes in the real world.” Ok, this passes the first test well enough, but it tells us nothing about whether a given pair of shoes is more likely to be the product of magical elves or outsourced shoe factories. It’s a prediction, but it’s not a helpful prediction because it predicts the same results as the alternative explanation.

Jayman’s hypothesis is a bit shakier here, depending on what you count as satisfying the requirement that we be able to observe and identify “ghosts” at particular locations. But let’s say that we’re going to give it a fairly rigorous and objective definition, and insist that it be demonstrable in front of both believers and skeptics (and in particular, skeptics like James Randi who are trained and experienced in detecting ordinary hoaxes). And let’s further specify that if we go to the specified location, and observe that no such ghosts are indeed present, the hypothesis will have been disconfirmed, and less likely to be true.

The next requirement that we need to satisfy is to specify what alternative(s) exist that we are comparing our hypothesis to. Too often people propose this hypothesis or that as being scientific without ever even mentioning what the alternative hypotheses are, let alone how the predictions of one hypothesis measure up to the predictions of the other(s) as compared against the standard of objective, verifiable, real-world evidence. This is something of a weakness in Jayman’s hypothesis, or rather, in his presentation of it. It’s not that the hypothesis itself is entirely lacking, it’s just that the absence of alternative hypotheses makes it more difficult to draw strong conclusions about what it really tells us.

The real failing in Jayman’s hypothesis, though, relates back to the first requirement: the predictions need to be the natural and inevitable consequences of the proposed cause. That means that we need to know enough about our hypothesized cause to be able to determine analytically what consequences it ought to produce. In other words, in order to know whether Jayman’s prediction is indeed correct based on his hypothesis, we need to know first what the characteristics and behaviors of “human spirits” are.

Unfortunately, we don’t. We have no verifiable scientific model for what a “human spirit” would be. All we have are folkloric traditions and superstitions, the stuff of legends, myths and (let’s face it) ghost stories. What’s more, whenever we try to describe what a spirit (or soul) is, even in mundane terms, we end up describing materialistic, biological processes.

Get a case of beer, and start drinking. A spirit (or soul), being immaterial and non-physical, will not be affected by the ethanol in the beer, but physical, biological processes will be. At a certain point, our intrepid scientific investigator will pass out, thus eliminating the physical/biological components from consideration. What’s left, then, to be the soul and/or spirit? Consciousness? Nope. Thought? Feelings? Nope. Desires? Will? Conscience? Memory? Nope, nope, nope and nope. Life? Hmmmwell, hopefully, though enough ethanol will eliminate that too, eventually.

So what’s left to be the spirit? There has to be something, so that we can observe and verify the characteristics and behaviors of spirits well enough to confirm that our prediction is the correct prediction for the “ghosts are spirits” hypothesis. Yet we have nothing, or at least nothing but folklore.

This is where Jayman’s hypothesis really falls down, which is probably what he intended, since he was only suggesting a hypothetical case for us to consider. It’s no reflection on Jayman, he just wanted to know exactly where our criticisms would fall. And this is the big one, at least for me. My guiding principle is that truth is consistent with itself, and that means (among other things) that if you have one proposed cause (like “human spirits”), you should see a lot of areas in which the existence or non-existence of spirits will make a difference. In other words, it’s more than just a question of seeing ghosts (which could be better explained by alternative hypotheses like psychosocially-induced delusions, etc).

If we have spirits, then there must exist some factor which connects our immaterial spirits to our physical bodies. What is that factor? And why/how is it physically attached to us? Why/how does it exist in any particular physical location, let alone following our bodies around? Why do our spirits not encounter and perceive one another in the spiritual “dimension” where they naturally exist? When do they form? How do they form? Why don’t animals, whose bodies form by the same biochemical processes which form our own, also have spirits? Why don’t plants, and bacteria, and viruses, and prions?

We’ve got lots of questions about spirits, but no real answers, and certainly no verifiable basis for predicting what kind of consequences would result from having them. The prediction that Jayman associates with his hypothesis is arbitrary, with no demonstrable connection other than the fact that ghosts and spirits are frequently associated in folklore and fairy tales. That makes his hypothesis at least understandable, but it’s not scientific, and won’t be until we can make some solid, verifiable observations of the character, behavior, and real-world impact of “human spirits.”

Skeptics aren’t unreasonable. We don’t set unreasonable or impossible standards. We just want our conclusions to be based on solid, reliable scientific reasoning. That means we don’t want to fall prey to mock predictions that imitate only the form of genuine science, without conforming to the substance of the discipline.

A new exhibit at the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum argues that natural selection — Darwin’s explanation for how species develop new traits over time — can coexist with the creationist assertion that all living things were created by God just a few thousand years ago.

“We wanted to show people that creationists believe in natural selection,” said Ken Ham, founder of the Christian ministry Answers in Genesis and frequent Darwin critic.

What makes this story particularly interesting is the fact that natural selection, popularly known as “survival of the fittest,” was featured as the centerpiece of Ben Stein’s argument blaming Darwin for the Holocaust. According to Stein, Hitler’s justification for trying to wipe out the Jews was that nature itself allegedly teaches us that weaker kinds don’t deserve to survive. Evolutionists (aka “Darwinists”) obviously disagree with this particular interpretation of natural selection, but Stein sided with Hitler. According to Stein, natural selection implies a justification for genocide, and therefore anyone who says natural selection is true is supporting genocide.

And now the Creation Museum is saying natural selection is compatible with creationism. Fun times, eh?

What Stein and Hitler have overlooked is the fact that natural selection is only part of evolutionary theory. Without genetic variation, natural selection becomes merely a road to extinction, not a mechanism for originating new species. And even if natural selection did teach us that only the strong deserved to survive, genetic variation would teach us the complementary proposition that diversity is what makes us strong. A full and objective understanding of evolution leads us to reject genocide and other forms of mutually destructive behaviors, not to embrace them.

Truth, as I always say, is consistent with itself, and whenever you try to spread a lie (as Expelled! did), you shoot yourself in the foot. Sooner or later the truth is going to come back around to haunt you. Natural selection is part of real life, and even creationists can’t successfully deny it. So when creationists like Ben Stein agree with Nazis about natural selection justifying genocide, they only make themselves look anti-Semitic.

The non-racist alternative is to agree with the “Darwinists” that natural selection, though true, does not justify genocide, nor even present the whole story. And if you can’t understand the truth well enough to agree with that, then maybe you deserve to be expelled, because you’re flunking out.

(2) The term “superstition” does not help move the discussion forward because it is subjective and pejorative. You believe Bernadette’s belief in a miraculous cure is an example of superstition because she explains her cure by ascribing it to a purported cause that cannot be connected to the cure, even in theory. But a theoretical connection between God and the cure can be made. For example, she could posit that God disconnected some tissue attachments that had been stretching her spinal cord. Moreover, even scientists will ascribe a purported cause to an event when they can’t show an actual connection between the two. One need only think of dark matter. The fact is that if one waited for proof that X existed before considering evidence pointing to X’s existence one could never acquire any knowledge. It is a double standard on your part to call Bernadette superstitious while not holding others, including yourself, to the same standard.

I am not using the term “superstition” subjectively, and have taken care to specify the exact, objective criteria by which I declare that this or that proposed explanation can be shown to be merely superstitious. As for the term itself being pejorative, I’ve tried to avoid that, but to a certain degree it’s inescapable. Experience has shown that appealing to magical causes is unhelpful, contributes nothing to our actual understanding, and never proves correct once the actual causes are known. If someone feels embarrassed when they’re caught making superstitious appeals, it’s not because I’m insulting them, it’s because reality has made it too obvious that superstition is silly.

One of the chief differences between science and superstition, besides verifiability, is that a scientific explanation contributes useful knowledge, and superstition does not. Jayman claims that you can make a theoretical connection between God and Bernadette’s cure by proposing that God disconnected the tissues that had been stretching her spinal cord. Yes, but how? What technique would He have used? Surgeons would like to know that, so they can apply the same treatment to other sufferers. But we don’t know how, and in fact even if the tissue attachments were loosened, we wouldn’t know that God did it, because there’s no verifiable or even describable connection between the spiritual Being and the physical changes. Jayman is, once again, merely ascribing a physical phenomenon to a magical cause. He’s being a bit more detailed (and speculative) about what the physical nature of the cure itself might be, but that just shuffles the gap around without making it any smaller. There’s still no verifiable or describable connection to any particular deity.

Jayman brings up a good point, though, and one that’s worth exploring: how is it that science can discover previously unknown causes, if it’s superstitious to attribute things to an unknown causes The answer is twofold. First, science does propose “unknown” causes, but only as possible and preliminary questions to be asked—not as final answers. Second, science does not regard the mere attribution as sufficient to explain the phenomenon. A scientific explanation has to do two things: it has to specify the cause in sufficient detail that we can work out what real-world consequences would result from that cause in operation, and then we have to be able to look at the real world and find those consequences, above and beyond finding the original phenomenon we’re trying to explain.

Dark matter is unfortunately a poor example, because it’s still in the preliminary hypothesis stage. Scientists have calculated the amount of detectable matter, and it’s insufficient to account for the organization and movement of all the celestial bodies that can be observed. One possibility is that there is more matter out there, but we don’t know what it is. It’s “dark” in the sense that we can’t observe it and therefore don’t know much about it. This makes dark matter a question, not an answer, and that’s why modern researchers are so interested in it.

Despite that caveat, the connection between dark matter and the rest of the universe is both describable and verifiable: gravitational attraction. Matter has mass, and mass has gravity, and gravity attracts one mass to another. In the case of dark matter, the connection between the hypothetical cause and the observed effect is the whole reason for inferring the existence of the dark matter. But dark matter would necessarily have other consequences as well, which means we ought to be able to find other evidence of dark matter besides the phenomenon we are trying to explain. And that’s what researchers are looking for now.

A better example of science vs. superstition would be evolution. The scientific explanation for variation among animals and species is that it is the consequence of natural variation in DNA-based genetic information and developmental processes, as filtered by the differential reproductive success of individual organisms with different characteristics (or more simply, variation plus natural selection). At every step of the explanation, the mechanisms are specified in sufficient detail that we can work out what the real-world consequences would be: common genetic flaws traceable back to a common ancestor, taxonomies that naturally resolve themselves into nested hierarchies, adaptation of homologous structures, and so on.

Contrast this with Intelligent Design “theory,” which merely attributes the differences to an indescribable design process with no clear or verifiable connection either to the organisms themselves, or to the mechanisms by which they are produced. Evolutionary theory produces useful knowledge by explaining the processes of variation and adaptation in ways we can exploit to combat disease, or produce better agricultural products, or even predict/prevent birth defects. ID offers us none of that; it’s purely a superstitious attribution to an unknown Designer who magically poofs creatures into existence with characteristics that, coincidentally, happen to be exactly the characteristics that would result from evolutionary processes in action.

So my approach is not a double standard. Quite the contrary, I want to hold all the arguments to the same standard. I want to insist that ID not be accepted as a valid scientific answer until it can spell out all the specific mechanisms in as much specific detail and with as many specific, predictable consequences, as evolutionary theory does. And, fair’s fair, I’ll even call it superstition when and if skeptics and atheists appeal to some invisible, indetectable, magical cause, in the absence of any verifiable connection to the effect they’re trying to explain.

Meanwhile, it is still superstitious (and silly) to claim to have explained something just because we’ve attributed it to some indetectable magical cause with no verifiable or describable connection to the thing we’re trying to explain. This should be pejorative, and we should be embarrassed to resort to such naive rationalizations, because they’re neither knowledge nor truth.

Pack begins by promising everything an apologist could ask for.

This booklet presents numerous absolute, immutable proofs that God does exist. After reading it, you will never again doubt the answer to this greatest of questions! Some proofs will amaze you. Others will inspire you. Still others will surprise or even excite you. All of them will fascinate you with their simplicity. We will first examine some traditional proofs and then consider material that rests on the cutting edge of scientific understanding, before returning to established proofs. You will learn from biology, astronomy, chemistry and mathematics.

Conspicuously absent from this list is anything that would involve, you know, God actually showing up in real life. In fact, Pack’s “proofs” are so vague and superstitious that they could serve equally well as proof of Norse gods, Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Spontaneous Magical Entropy Reversal Fields (SMERFs). Pack could have greatly abridged this piece simply by stating, “I do not know squat about science—therefore GOD EXISTS.”

As you might guess, most of the article is just a rehash of standard creationist arguments, including a few rarely-spotted gems like this one. (Coffee alert: do not drink while reading the following.)

The First Law of Thermodynamics is stated as follows: Matter and energy can be neither created nor destroyed. There are no natural processes that can alter either matter or energy in this way. This means that there is no new matter or energy coming into existence and there is no new matter or energy passing out of existence…

Consider! Uranium has an atomic weight of 238.0. As it decomposes, it releases a helium atom three times. Each helium atom has a weight of 4. With the new weight of 226.0, uranium becomes radium. Radium continues to give off additional atoms until eventually the end product becomes the heavy inert element called lead. This takes a tremendous amount of time. While the process of uranium turning into radium is very long, the radium turns into lead in 1,590 years.

What are we saying? There was a point in time when the uranium could not have existed, because it always breaks down in a highly systematic, controlled way. It is not stable like lead or other elements. It breaks down. This means there was a specific moment in time when all radioactive elements came into existence. Remember, all of them—uranium, radium, thorium, radon, polonium, francium, protactinium and others—have not existed forever. This represents absolute proof that matter came into existence or, in other words, matter has not always existed!

And therefore GOD EXISTS! Um, yeah. Either that or nuclear fusion exists. I wonder where he thinks some of the heavier atomic elements come from?

The article as a whole is pretty much the same thing: grandiose prose pouring forth arguments that range from the predictable (“When applied to the universe, the second law of thermodynamics indicates that the universe is winding down—moving toward disorder or entropy—not winding up or moving toward more perfect order and structure”) to the incoherent (scientists tell time by making astronomical observations, therefore GOD EXISTS). There’s the standard creationist snipes about transitional forms, and some of the newer (but already debunked) claims of the Intelligent Design crowd, and of course lots and lots of triumphal strutting.

What’s missing, of course, is any kind of evidence linking the Christian God to any of the presumed acts Pack gives Him credit for. When OJ’s wife was found murdered (along with the unfortunate “boyfriend”), it wasn’t just a question of “Does a murderer exist?” To prove that a person is responsible for something, you have to show an actual connection of some sort. All Pack does, however, is to simply beg the question.

For many years, until 1967, Naval Observatory astronomers “observed” the motion of the earth, in relation to the heavens, to accurately measure time. All clocks in this country were set in relation to these very precise measurements. It was God who made this Master Clock of the Universe! He set the heavens in motion and mankind learned how to use its wonderful accuracy.

A “clock” exists, therefore God created it. No evidence linking God to this particular “crime,” no motive, no means and no opportunity, just an assertion that Godidit. This is not proof, it is merely superstition, giving some magical power credit for some real-world phenomenon, without being able to show any connection between the two, or even being able to describe how such a connection would work if it did exist (let alone being able to make specific predictions about what consequences would necessarily result from such a cause in action).

It’s significant that whenever believers go looking for “proof” that God exists, the best they can come up with is garbled, ignorant, and superstitious arguments about what something that might resemble some sort of vaguely-specified deity might possibly have done in the dark depths of the ancient past. The Bible isn’t about men discovering God by thinking about the radioactive decay of uranium, it’s about observations that they allegedly made in the present day, of a God who allegedly speaks and acts in the real world, and the proofs of such a God ought to be of the same type. We ought to see present-day evidence, solid, verifiable evidence, that incontrovertibly demonstrates both that God exists and that He is interested and involved in human affairs.

Pack’s argument proves that no such God exists, because if there were a God Who could be observed in real life in the present day, he wouldn’t be reduced to making ignorant and superstitious arguments about what he speculates might have happened back in the lost mists of time. (Or not so lost: we have telescopes that can see back billions of years, and so far there’s no sign of God actually doing any supernatural creating.)

So thanks to Answer the Skeptic for sharing this one and demonstrating once again how desperate and bankrupt Christian apologetics really is. You know you’re hurting for arguments when you have to borrow the failures of the cults.

The important thing for now is that we recognize that our chief obligation is to the facts of our existence, and sometimes reality appears inconsistent and contradictory- and yet there it is.  What does one do in this situation?  Do you throw out your data?  The point being is that you must deal with your data and if you are reasonably confident that your data is legitimate it does not cease to be so just because you perceive it to be ‘inconsistent’ or contradictory.

I say all this because it is absolutely wrong headed to apply Herr Professor’s technique and attitude to supernatural claims and deeply ironic.  Herr Professor, like so many other atheists, deeply imbibes on scientism.  But science itself- meaning, the natural framework alone- provides us with contradictory notions, and yet the data compels us to consider them.  And that’s just within our natural framework!  Never mind revelatory claims!  Nature itself confounds us.

My approach is to verify the facts and to interpret them in the light of the principle that truth is consistent with itself, so it’s hard to see why it would be “wrong-headed” to apply that approach to claims about the supernatural. But I don’t think he really meant to imply that the supernatural is somehow resistant to attempts to discover the truth about it. I think he just wanted to insinuate that scientists have some kind of systematic filter that causes them to reject otherwise-valid evidence just because it happens to be “supernatural.”

This is a combination strawman and red herring. Science does not arbitrarily discard the “supernatural” because of some arbitrary “imbibing” of whatever “scientism” is supposed to mean. Science doesn’t even know the difference between natural and supernatural—it can’t, because it only deals with verifiable facts. No matter what “realm” God is supposed to come from, either His existence is a verifiable fact, or it isn’t. If we could objectively and reliably verify God’s existence, then science would merely expands its definition of the real world to include God. If not, then science has no place for God—not because of any purported bias against the “supernatural” (whatever that means), but because science only works with verifiable facts.

Like many believers, Mr. Horvath overlooks the fact that there is no canonical list of what is natural and what is supernatural. Science only knows what is or is not observable and verifiable in the real world. Science, for example, does not care whether lightning is the supernatural wrath of some offended deity, it only cares what properties and behaviors “fire from heaven” exhibits in the real world. Nor does science have any problem at all with the idea of realms or dimensions beyond the 4-dimensional space-time we commonly perceive. In fact, you can make quite a scientific career for yourself by exploring the theoretical physics of n-dimensional space and multiple universes (provided you do your homework right). An intelligent, powerful being existing in superdimensional space-time (or several such beings) would provide no obstacle whatsoever to science PROVIDED that objective and verifiable evidence could be produced for the existence of such a thing.

Science’s problem with “the supernatural” is that the label “supernatural” is only applied to “explanations” for which claims are made in the absence of evidence, as an excuse for the absence. “Supernatural” means, by definition, that science cannot verify it, because if science could and did verify it (as was the case with lightning, earthquakes, volcanoes, droughts, and other alleged “supernatural” interventions), then it would cease to be categorized as supernatural, and would instead expand the definition of “natural.”

So the idea of scientists having an alleged bias against “the supernatural” is what you might call a “straw herring.” Science is biased against the unverifiable, and rightly so, since the alternative is to descend into gullibility and superstition. Horvath is correct that our chief obligation is to the facts of our existence, which is why his apologetic fails by failing to deliver verifiable facts in support of His God, and offers instead only the rationalization that perhaps this missing evidence might exist in some higher dimension that is conveniently out of reach of scientific inquiry.

Horvath tries to argue that contradictions in the Gospel are analogous to quantum physics, and phenomena such as the behavior of light (like a particle under certain circumstances, and like a wave under others). The crucial difference between these two cases, however, is that you can observe the way light behaves, so your conclusion is based on verifiable observation. God does not show up in real life, however, so you can’t call theological contradictions a case of observed behavior. The two cases are not analogous.

Nor does it help to excuse this deficiency by claiming that God behaved a certain way once upon a time. What you and I have to deal with today is the evidence as it exists today. Ancient dead men said a lot of things, and described a lot of gods (and demons and witches and magic and so on). Our obligation is to consider these stories in the light of verifiable facts, not in the light of arbitrary rationalizations based on speculation about some kind of undefined transcendent dimensionality.

Mr. Horvath made a rather bold (and IMO rather foolish) claim about discerning truth from untruth.

Now, I agree with H. Professor that identifying inconsistencies and contradictions are useful for sorting out falsehoods, but don’t agree that they are the only means.

The reason I think that’s a foolish claim is because inconsistency with the truth is, by definition, what it means for something to be false. If a thing is 100% consistent with the way the truth really is, then it’s not false in any meaningful sense of the word. Conversely, if you’re going to show that a thing is false, then what you are going to show is that there is some way in which it fails to be consistent with real-world truth. Perhaps Mr. Horvath is thinking that some omniscient deity could come along and tell us, “X is false,” but even then, the deity would have to have discovered a contradiction or inconsistency, since that’s what “X is false” means.

As I mentioned before, the big problem with Mr. Horvath’s reasoning is that it is a universal rationalization that boils down to universal agnosticism, the idea that we can’t know the truth about anything. Are there contradictions between the book of Mormon and the Bible? Well, we know from looking at quantum physics that we can see things as contradictions when they really cohere on some higher level, so the apparent contradictions don’t mean that Mormonism isn’t true. Does the Bible contradict the idea that God created some people to be gay, and approves of that sort of relationship? Maybe from our perspective it looks like a contradiction, but you know, when a sphere intersects a plane, it looks different from what it really is in 3D space, so maybe gays are right after all. Or maybe Fred Phelps is, despite the contradictions between his ministry and a whole slew of things the Bible says. You can’t ever really know whether an apparent contradiction is wrong, or if it just looks funny because it’s transcendent.

Or can you?

In the first place we need to be clear about just what constitutes a contradiction. Flat out contradictions are hard to come by. “This is A” and “This is not A” is a contradiction. “This is A” and “This is B” is not necessarily a contradiction. It may be an inconsistency, but that may just be because there isn’t currently enough information to resolve it. One must be careful. For example, “This is a bird” and “This is not a bird” is a contradiction. “This is a bird” and “This is a sparrow” is not a contradiction, and if you didn’t know that sparrows are kinds of birds I suppose you would view this as an inconsistency.

Let’s apply that to a specific case, starting with the idea that “This is A” contradicts “This is not A”. If Jesus is 100% God, then Jesus is omniscient, because God is omniscient. (“This is A.”) If Jesus is 100% man, then Jesus is not omniscient, because man is not omniscient. (“This is not A.”). Therefore “Jesus is omniscient” contradicts “Jesus is not omniscient,” QED. It does not help to say that Jesus is omniscient and is only pretending not to be, or to say that Jesus is omniscient and just isn’t using it at the moment. Hidden omniscience and unused omniscience are not the same as absent omniscience, and therefore the statement “Jesus is omniscient” is a contradiction of the statement “Jesus is not omniscient.”

Or let’s look at “This is a bird” and “This is a sparrow.” That is, “sparrow” is a specialization of the more generalized class of “birds”. In the same way, “person” is a specialization of the more general class of “beings”—all persons are beings but not all beings are persons, just like not all birds are sparrows. And God, as traditionally defined, is a specialization of “person”—all Gods are persons, but not all persons are Gods. Hence, since “God” is a specialization of the broader category of “persons” it is just as contradictory to say “Three persons are one God” as it is to say “Three birds are one sparrow.”

You can try and rescue the Trinity by changing the definition of “God,” and divorcing it from the essential Entity->Being->Person identity specialization. Maybe being God is not a matter of the essence of what an Entity/Being/Person is, but is just an attribute that can be shared in common among many, the way mankind exists as many individuals sharing a common humanity. The trouble is, if you do that, then “God” ceases to be the identity of a specific individual being, and becomes a category of multiple beings, i.e. polytheism. Or you can define “God” as an aggregation of lesser parts, rather than as an individual identity, in which case the Trinity still collapses because each Person in the Trinity becomes less than the whole God.

Or you can combine the two approaches: is Jesus 100% of what God is? If you say “yes,” then that leaves 0% for the Father and the Spirit. But if the Father is also God, then there is some portion of God that is “not-Jesus”, which means Jesus must be “not 100% of what God is.” But if Jesus and the Father are both 100% of what God is, and there is no portion of God that is either not-Jesus or not-Father, then there is no distinction between Father and Son, because what one is, the other is also (the Father can’t be “not Jesus” because the Father is God, and no portion of God can be “not Jesus”). And if you say the Father and the Son are both 100% of what God is, without being the same 100%, then you have a contradiction, because that’s 200%, and a thing cannot be more than 100% of itself.

These are the sorts of “A vs. not-A” contradictions that send apologists like Horvath looking for other dimensions in hopes of finding some place inaccessible enough that the rest of us can’t prove that there’s not some inscrutable resolution hiding there. They’re not issues of form or shape or other attributes that change appearance depending on how you look at them. They’re essential issues of identity and being—the “is or is not” which he offered as defining a “flat out” contradiction—and they make simultaneous, conflicting assertions that reflect the social, political, and theological conflict that gave them their original doctrinal form.

In the end, Horvath’s argument ends up being an Emperor’s New Clothes argument.

Herr Professor’s approach… is to insist on applying the expectations of 2D math and logic to the claim without taking into consideration that nature of the thing allegedly ‘breaking in.’ This results in circular reasoning- a logical fallacy (since we apparently care about logic), for obviously if you insist on interpreting all data naturalistically (as 2 dimensional) then you will always conclude that what you perceived has a naturalistic explanation.

Combined with the “straw herring” fallacy he injected earlier, the message here is quite clear: the only reason atheists are silly enough to perceive a contradiction between the Emperor’s apparent nakedness and the fine clothes he is supposed to be wearing is because they are only looking at things 2-dimensionally, and are failing to consider the possibility that from some lofty and transcendent point of view it might be possible to see clothes. So Christians go ahead and believe that the Emperor must be wearing clothes, because they don’t want to be foolish, like the atheists.

Let me just point out that Horvath isn’t seeing any clothes either. He has no meaningful, verifiable answers for the problems that sent him in search of other dimensions in the first place. He merely raises the possibility of the existence of an unverifiable realm in which there might exist the possibility of some means of reconciling the contradictions and inconsistencies that he can see as well as we can. It’s an Emperor’s New Clothes pose that flatters believers with the assurance that they are wise enough to see what isn’t there, while slandering non-believers with the undocumented assertion that they’re ignoring vital data.

Horvath isn’t working with data drawn from some transcendent realm of existence, he’s dealing with the stories he’s heard from other men. The actual real-world data, which is as accessible to us as it is to him, happens to conflict with these stories, just as the stories conflict with themselves. We need to let the data—the objective, verifiable facts—drive our interpretation of the stories, instead of letting the stories drive our interpretation of the facts. The former is science. The latter, gullibility.

H. Professor’s failure to see how these two fundamental claims about the nature of the thing under discussion connect to the rest of the argumentation I made is the underlying mistake of both of his posts.  That we are talking about an entity that is both transcendent and immanent is absolutely critical to the rest of the argumentation.  In fact, H. Professor makes complaints that I already answered- but because he fails to see the relation between these attributes and the rest I said, he fails to recognize them.

The last sentence reveals the second prong of Horvath’s attempt to make my arguments irrelevant: because I considered each of his arguments step by step, pointing out the problems that require further defense, he accuses me of raising objections that he had already answered (in subsequent parts of his post). He apparently did not understand that I was following the flow of his own logic: that there must be a reason why the “God can’t do nonsense” argument does not suffice to end the discussion, and why Horvath feels compelled to seek other solutions. I simply laid out what those unresolved problems are, at the beginning of the discussion, so that we could approach the rest of the discussion with an appropriate background.

There is a lot more I could have said, of course, and I’m grateful to Mr. Horvath for having given me the opportunity to explore this topic further. He raises some interesting points, and clarifies some others, and, if you can bear with me through a longish post, I think we’ll see why his defense of the Gospel actually constitutes a full-fledged concession of defeat, and a retreat into universal agnosticism.

Just so there’s no misunderstanding this time, let’s lay out the core issue here. The apologetic claim being made, and to which I am responding, is this: “We can think of certain circumstances under which things might appear to be contradictory, when in fact they are not contradictory when seen from the perspective of a “higher” dimension or domain.” The implication is that, seen from some “higher plane” (that you and I can’t see from), the contradictions in Christian theology aren’t actually contradictions.

Despite accusing me of misunderstanding him, Horvath agrees that this is indeed the issue we need to deal with.

The purpose of the Flatland example was not to say that this was how we relate to God, but rather to show how the rules of logic can appear to be violated in one case but when taken from a ‘higher’ plane can be perceived as nonetheless sound…

The whole point of the Flatland example was that what might seem to be inconsistent and contradictory may not in fact be so.

By the way, this is actually a fairly ancient rationalization, and all the “immanence this” and “transcendence that” is just to lend an aura of sophistication and intellectualism to the old excuse that “God works in mysterious ways (and therefore doesn’t need to make sense).”

The problem with the Flatland analogy, however, is that the intersection of a sphere with a plane produces no actual or apparent contradiction, even from the Flatlander’s point of view. The sphere that intersects the plane does not produce a circle whose circumference is less than its diameter, or which possesses four corners joined at 90 degree angles, or in any other way violates or conflicts with the laws of 2D geometry. It produces an ordinary circle whose radius varies from zero to n back to zero again, over a certain period of time. No contradiction, hence no basis for Mr. Horvath’s analogy.

I don’t think a sphere is really the best volumetric solid for this particular analogy anyway. Let’s help him out a little by suggesting a more complex shape: a torus. Imagine a torus (donut shape) standing upright (like a car tire) and slowly sinking down into the plane of Flatland until its center lies within the plane. As it moves, it will first form a point, then an ellipse that gradually grows bigger, then the middle of the ellipse (across the minor axis) will begin to narrow into more of an hourglass shape (as the hole in the torus approaches the plane).

At a certain point, the “waist” of the hourglass shape will shrink until it becomes a figure-8: two ellipses touching at their tips. Then the two ellipses will separate and move apart, becoming more and more circular as they get farther apart, until at last they are two perfect circles. Again, no violations or contradictions of any laws of geometry. The curves may be more complex, but neither of the resulting circles have square corners or diameters greater than their circumferences or any such thing.

But now, something strange does happen. A Flatlander approaches and tries to push the two circles together so that they touch again. He can’t do it. Pushing one circle makes the other circle slide away. He checks all around to see if any lines connect the two circles, but they don’t. As far as he can see, there is no connection in all of Flatland between the two circles (and there isn’t), yet the behavior of the two circles is consistently linked, such that the distance between them is constant. From a 3D perspective, it all seems quite natural: the Flatlander is pushing the whole torus, and when one side moves the other side moves as well, because its part of the same torus.

Now, if all we wanted was an excuse to ignore inconsistencies in what men claim about God, we could stop right here. We could use this “mysterious” torus to justify the conclusion that the problems in the Gospel must be the same sort of thing. Of course, that would be taking things backwards: in Flatland, the observations justify concluding the existence of a higher dimension. That’s quite a different thing from mere speculation about a higher dimension being enough to justify assuming that the observations must actually have happened.

Since we don’t care to fall into that particular converse fallacy, let’s think some more about what Flatland tells us. First of all, it tells us that truth is consistent with itself. We may not understand that self-consistency all the time, and perhaps we might not even perceive it, but the self-consistency of the truth transcends and is immanent within all dimensions of reality and all domains of real existence. The two circles don’t seem to have any connection, as far as a Flatlander can see, but the consistency of their behavior reflects the consistency of the truth itself, across n-dimensional space, and allows the mathematically-inclined Flatlander to draw specific and reasonable conclusions about the 3rd dimension.

In fact, the Flatlander can even make some predictions about the behavior of 3D objects in 2D space. For example, if a sphere moves through a plane at a constant speed, producing a circle of varying radius, you can plot the radius of the circle as a function of time and produce a sine wave. If the Flatland scientist observes a number of circles exhibiting this peculiar-yet-predictable pattern of variation, it would be consistent with the predicted variations for a 3D sphere moving through a 2D plane, and the scientist’s hypothesis would have some supporting evidence.

Likewise, if God were a being from a higher dimension and were interacting with this one, we could make similar observations. For example, just as the Flatlander observed that there was a superplanar connection between two apparently unconnected circles, we could observe God’s “super-natural” existence by the connection He would make between believers. Take two believers and isolate them from one another so that God is the only possible avenue of communication between them, then dictate a short text passage to one of them, and have God relay the text to the other. When the other believer writes down the text correctly, we have the same “mysteriously-connected circles” that the Flatlander does, and there’s a reason for us to conclude, if not God, then at least some hitherto undocumented connection.

In fact, we wouldn’t even need to do the experiment, since this commonality would arise as an ordinary matter of course. All God would need to do is not take supernatural measures to prevent us from noticing the mysterious connection that consistently linked believers together in ways that were verifiably more than just the product of ordinary happenstance. And there are any number of other ways in which the transcendent existence of God could and would verifiably manifest itself even in our allegedly inferior plane. But obviously none of these things are actually happening, which is why Mr. Horvath devotes so much effort to building a case for the answers lying in some speculative and inaccessible “higher plane.”

This is a key point, by the way. If the contradictions in Christian theology could be resolved by answers that lay within this realm of existence, Horvath would have no need to seek some “higher” plane in which such answers might possibly exist. He’s not proposing this speculation because God’s behavior can be observed to show a consistent pattern of superdimensionality that would justify a conclusion of divine transendence. He can’t: God does not show up in real life to give us any transcendent behavior to find patterns in. No, the problem is that Christian theology has a number of glaring inconsistencies and contradictions for which there is no resolution in this “dimension,” and that’s why Horvath needs to postulate the existence of some other, higher, and less accessible realm in which such answers might possibly be hiding.

Horvath takes me to task for failing to address his analogy about the relationship between an author and his characters, so let me rectify that omission right now. This, sadly, is a singularly unfortunate argument for him to make, since the God we’re talking about here is one who only shows up (as far as the real world is concerned) as a character in the stories men tell. We are not observing a God who shows up in real life and whose behavior and characteristics are puzzling to our limited minds. All we can observe in real life is that men tell us things about God that are inconsistent both with themselves and with objective reality.

Horvath himself is participating in the story-building that props up the Gospel. He’s taking the story as it has been told so far, and is using his imagination to try and come up with some kind of scenario that will make the story sound more plausible. If you’ve ever participated in any kind of group fiction-writing (or role play, which can be very similar), you know that this is exactly how fiction is produced. Just imagine something, and if it sounds plausible, add it to the story, and make the story better. That’s how you make a story get better over time, and coincidentally, it’s a theologian’s job description as well.

Trying to patch up the holes in the Gospel, though, only serves to demonstrate that the Gospel does indeed have holes. And that’s the fatal flaw in Horvath’s argument by analogy. When a person creates a story, they’re not creating reality, they’re manipulating abstracted concepts about reality, in ways that may or may not reflect some of the perfect self-consistency of genuine truth. Ultimately, though, all fiction fails at some point to be as consistent with real-world truth as real-world truth is with itself. When humans imagine a story, therefore, what they are doing is not analogous to creating a genuine reality.

In other words, Horvath’s analogy is false, because fiction writing fails to parallel reality at the point where it needs to be strictly parallel in order to be valid. The real world is not merely less self-contradictory that fiction, it is non-self-contradictory. You cannot correctly use the discrepancies between fiction and reality to argue for a corresponding discrepancy between reality and some supposed “higher” plane, because reality doesn’t have the inconsistencies and contradictions that define what it means to be fiction.

Horvath would like to argue otherwise, but my goodness, I’m over 2K words already, and there’s still a bunch of misconceptions and misdirections that I need to correct! I’d better split this into two parts and come back for more tomorrow.

Well, some atheists took that advice to heart, and Dinesh D’Souza would like to give them the “thanks” they deserve.

The central argument of these scientific atheists is that modern science has refuted traditional religious conceptions of a divine creator.

But of late atheism seems to be losing its scientific confidence. One sign of this is the public advertisements that are appearing in billboards from London to Washington DC. Dawkins helped pay for a London campaign to put signs on city buses saying, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Humanist groups in America have launched a similar campaign in the nation’s capital. “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness sake.” And in Colorado atheists are sporting billboards apparently inspired by John Lennon: “Imagine…no religion…”

There is no claim here that God fails to satisfy some criterion of scientific validation. We hear nothing about how evolution has undermined the traditional “argument from design.” There’s not even a whisper about how science is based on reason while Christianity is based on faith…

[A]theists seem to have given up the scientific card.

Congratulations, framers. You’ve made Christians much happier, now that they can claim you’ve conceded defeat in the scientific realm.

Mind you, D’Souza’s argument itself is nothing new. It’s the same old “privileged planet” superstition that ID creationists have been circulating for years. D’Souza simply takes the opportunity provided by the milder pro-atheistic marketing to pretend that there’s been some new development on the IDC front.

If you want to know why atheists seem to have given up the scientific card, the current issue of Discover magazine provides part of the answer. The magazine has an interesting story by Tim Folger which is titled “Science’s Alternative to an Intelligent Creator.” The article begins by noting “an extraordinary fact about the universe: its basic properties are uncannily suited for life.” As physicist Andrei Linde puts it, “We have a lot of really, really strange coincidences, and all of these coincidences are such that they make life possible.”

Too many “coincidences,” however, imply a plot. Folger’s article shows that if the numerical values of the universe, from the speed of light to the strength of gravity, were even slightly different, there would be no universe and no life.

Yes, yes, we’ve been hearing this one for years. It’s the puddle in a rocky depression, marveling at how perfectly the depression has been carved out to be exactly the right shape for the puddle to fit in. But it’s still mere superstition, and not science, to arbitrarily attribute all these so-called “coincidences” to a magical, invisible power when you can neither demonstrate any connection between this alleged Designer and the cosmos, nor can you even describe, in non-magical terms, what such a connection would consist of. Describe for us an objectively verifiable chain of causality from your alleged Cause to the observed effect, and then we’ll talk science.

But the point I want to focus on here is the role of milder atheism in helping to promote this superstitious mish-mash. Truth, especially scientific truth, is not a matter of compromise. If Einsteinian physics seems to contradict Newtonian physics, you don’t settle for answers that are halfway between what Einstein predicts and what Newton predicts. That only additional wrong answers. Instead, you need to understand why Einstein and Newton got different answers, and then present the truth—singular and uncompromising—about how physics really works.

Trying to meet creationists halfway on the question of scientific evidence (whether about creation or Creator) only introduces new wrong answers. Like D’Souza’s closing paragraph:

No wonder atheists are sporting billboards asking us to “imagine…no religion.” When science, far from disproving God, seems to be pointing with ever-greater precision toward transcendence, imagination and wishful thinking seem all that is left for the atheists to count on.

That’s right, framers, your polite approach merely proves that you are indulging in imagination and wishful thinking, that you have no actual evidence for your atheism or your Darwinism or your reality-based approach to science at all. The believers gleefully embrace your approach, even as they sneer at you for being such feeble losers. And in the end, you’ve helped them make the credulous, superstitious, creationist position even stronger. They’re placated all right, because they’re winning thanks to you.

Personally, I’d rather tell the truth straight up. And if somebody calls me “shrill” or “harsh,” so be it. I’d rather have the integrity of the truth than the patronizing approval of people like Dinesh D’Souza.

You write that one of the main things motivating your atheism is the fact that you cannot see any compelling reason to believe in God, and you cannot regard faith as reliably as you can empirical evidence in discerning truth.  I suspect you’ve come under the influence of the fact-value distinction, which modernity introduced, largely influenced by the teachings of Immanuel Kant.  I would strongly recommend that you read Pope Benedict’s lecture at Regensburg…  In a relatively short speech, he summarized the great shift that has taken place in western thinking as a result of the Enlightenment and now postmodernism.  Benedict’s case is the same one I would make, and that is that reason always has to rest on faith.  That’s what gives it the objective standards to appeal to.  What happened in the Enlightenment and what we call modernity was the abandonment of the faith presuppositions, leaving reason naked, cold, and ultimately without a foundation.  It was this rejection of sterile reason that has led us to the postmodern era, which rejects both faith and reason.

But the fact-value distinction is false.  All thought begins with faith.  All intellectual inquiry begins with certain presuppositions.  These by necessity are made without evidence and have to be taken on faith.  The idea that evidence is superior to faith as a root to knowledge is one of those presuppositions: it is unproven and non-provable.  So it must be taken as a priori; that is, prior to experience, or in other words, on faith.

In his book, The Faith, Colson expands on this current evangelical fad of bashing postmodernism. Which is not, in itself, a bad thing. Postmodernism claims to have discovered the truth that there is no truth to discover. All that matters is what you believe about something. There is no right or wrong, there is only faith. But is Colson really saying that postmodernism is wrong, or is he advocating the postmodern idea that faith is all that matters?

Let’s take Colson’s claim that all thought begins with faith, and compare it to the principle that the truth is consistent with itself. Is it possible to know what the truth is? If all thought begins with faith, and if reason always has to rest on faith, then the answer is “No, we can never really know the truth.” A conclusion is only as reliable as its premises, and if our premises necessarily are things we believe just because we believe them—if there’s no objective means of determining whose faith corresponds to absolute, objective truth— then there is no such thing as knowledge of the truth. There’s not even partial or approximate knowledge of the truth. The most we can do is to build up a “worldview” in which our conclusions are reasonably consistent with some arbitrary set of premises, without any assurance that any of it has anything to do with real life.

Now, contrast that with the principle that truth is consistent with itself. Is this a principle we have to take on faith alone? No, because both experience and reason teach us that this must be the case: if the truth is not consistent with itself, if truth contradicts itself and has conclusions that have no predictable relationship to the premises, then reason itself is impossible. The fact that we can reason effectively, and that correct reasoning produces reliable results in real-world experience, confirms that we have a premise that is both valid and relevant to the real world.

From this premise of self-consistency, all other conclusions can be derived. We know that “evidence” (i.e. the truth that we discover in the real world) is superior to faith alone (i.e. things we believe even though we can’t find any real-world evidence to support them) because the evidence already is part of the real-world truth, whereas the faith is defined by its failure to show up in real life, or in other words, by its failure to be consistent with the truth. If we could find that real-world connection, the true evidence that was consistent with what we believe, we wouldn’t be calling it faith, we’d call it the conclusion that was most consistent with the evidence.

Colson is therefore quite wrong. Reliable knowledge does have real-world roots that are superior to just making arbitrary presuppositions. Christians, especially in recent times, have begun to outwardly reject the postmodern idea that the truth cannot be known. Like Colson, however, they are quick to embrace it whenever they need to explain why their beliefs fail to be consistent with the available evidence. Science has repeatedly demonstrated its superior accuracy and reliability as a means of knowledge, and only by rejecting the very possibility of reliable knowledge can Christians put faith and fact back on an allegedly equal footing. In so doing, Christians and other believers make themselves the greatest agnostics of all.

[Dennett] raises [the] possibility that religion is merely a by-product of evolution, otherwise known as a spandrel. It’s here that the philosopher finds himself in logical trouble. Both of Dennett’s memetic proposalsand [sic] his subsequent argument against Starke and Finke’s economic case for the rational value of religion directly contradict his assertion of the way that evolution’s remarkable efficiency means that a persistent pattern amounts to proof—”we can be quite sure”—that the pattern is of benefit to something in the evolutionary currency of differential reproduction. How, one wonders, does Dennett fail to grasp that a creed which explicitly states “go forth and multiply” is likely to be inordinately successful in evolutionary terms, genetic or memetic?

Vox seems to like the argument that religious people are more likely to reproduce than non-religious people—as though nobody really cared much one way or another about sex until Moses came along and showed them in Genesis 1! This kind of silly, superficial thinking suggests that Vox hasn’t really put much effort into trying to understand how religion and evolution would interact in the real world. All he really seems to be interested in is mining the idea for talking points he can use to make religion sound better than atheism.

For instance, here’s Vox elaborating on the above idea. After quoting Dennett’s example of how a lancet fluke can cause an ant to climb a blade of grass, looking for a passing sheep to infect, Vox writes:

It somehow escapes the professor’s attention that it is not the religious portion of the population that is having trouble doing what every other species on the planet does, but rather, the irreligious one. If there is a metaphorical lancet fluke to be blamed for anti-evolutionary human behavior, then it is atheist secularism that most accurately fits the analogy now that the Shakers and Skoptsi are no more. Indeed, the demographic performance of secular post-Christian societies over the last fifty years suggests that from a grand historical perspective, modern atheist secularism will be seen as a fluke indeed.

What escapes Vox’s notice is that Dennett is talking about the origin and propagation of religion, not about the relative behaviors of religious and non-religious populations under circumstances where the dominant population has saturated its environment and is beginning to suffer shortages of food and other resources. (He’s also playing fast and loose with statistics by lumping all the social, economic, and cultural factors together under a simplistic dichotomy of religious vs. secular, but we’ll let that pass.) What Dennett is looking for is a reason for the emergence of religious beliefs and behaviors, at a time when overpopulation was not really an issue—a question Vox ignores in favor of trying to score a few anti-secular talking points.

Vox also castigates Dennett for holding that people ought to trust scientists without necessarily understanding all the scientific details, while at the same time holding that people are wrong to trust in priests to make moral decisions for them.

Dennett attempts to justify these contrary stances by stating that the difference is that the scientific priesthood really know what they’re doing, that they understand their formulas and use them to achieve amazingly accurate results, while the religious priesthood does not.

But Dennett is demonstrably incorrect on both scores. Dennett’s two favorite sciences, cognitive science and evolutionary biology, are primarily distinguished by the way in which no one understands exactly how anything works nor has managed to construct any significant formulas, let alone achieve any results demonstrating the precision of the quantum electrodynamic calculations cited in Dennett’s example. Dennett himself confesses that human consciousness is a mystery, a phenomenon that people don’t even know how to think about yet, and while he is rather more sanguine about the achievements of evolutionary biology, he admits that the science which began with the Origin of the Species [sic] still regards the way in which species begin to be a mystery too, albeit one with more of the details filled in.

Here again, Vox tempts us to conclude that he does not really understand the issues that Dennett is talking about. No understanding of how evolution works? No formulas for calculating mutation rates, genetic drift, and other evolutionary mechanisms? Vox is only highlighting his own ignorance of biology when he attempts to refute Dennett with that argument. It’s true that there are unanswered questions about how consciousness works, and how life first began, but—and here’s the distinction Vox fails to address—science does not claim to know more than it knows, and is prepared to demonstrate the objective, verifiable basis for what it claims it does know.

Priests can’t do that. When you trust a scientist, you are practicing the principle that the truth is consistent with itself. You may not know particle physics personally, but you know there are people who do, and that there is constant dialog between scientists about which possibilities are most consistent with the evidence. Science is reality-based, and interacts with the real world in countless ways, all of which would conflict with and expose any attempt to pass of non-science as science. You can’t fake science and get away with it.

With priests (and prophets and other religious authorities), you just have to take their word for it, and the word of their predecessors. You not only can fake religious truth, at least most of the religions out there are faking it, and getting away with it. There is no real-world verification for what they claim, and wherever their claims interact with the real world, the discrepancies between their claims and the actual evidence only gives job security to the rationalizers and apologists. People have to just take their word for it anyway, which is the practical definition of gullibility. And here’s the real catch:

So while some sciences have proven themselves worthy enough of our complete confidence that we need not trouble our pretty little heads about them, to claim that we are justified in placing blind trust in cognitive scientists, evolutionary biologists, and sociologists because physicists really know what they’re doing is absurd. It’s a bait-and-switch worthy of Dawkins. And Dennett offers absolutely no evidence that any religious faithful are any more prone to unquestioning obedience of their priesthood than science-fetishists are of the various secular bulls issued regularly from the archbishoprics of Oxford, Cambridge, M.I.T., and Stanford.

The catch is that even if you do question the priests, you have no real-world basis for proposing any better alternative. It all boils down to whatever seems right in your own eyes. Faith in scientists is justified, firstly because they can back up their conclusions by showing the objective evidence which led to them, and secondly because of the way all the sciences are interrelated, being studies of the same cohesive, consistent, objective reality. If you’re going to pick and choose which sciences you trust and which you don’t like based on non-scientific criteria, you’re going to lead yourself into a bunch of contradictions and inconsistencies in your own conclusions. But religion has no real-world basis, and even a cursory survey of the religious landscape will confirm that Vox is correct about how easy it is to break with the theological leadership. What’s to stop you? It’s not like there’s any way anyone could come up with real-world evidence that your interpretation of the Bible was inferior to someone else’s.

In short, Vox’s objections to Dennett’s observations are shallow and irrelevant, being based chiefly on Vox’s failure to grasp the real issues Dennett is addressing, coupled with Vox’s apparent ignorance of biology and other sciences. But does this mean that Vox is ignorant, or stupid? I don’t think either term would accurately describe the reason why Vox argues the way he does. It’s not that he can’t grasp and grapple with the issues, but that he simply won’t. He’s got an axe to grind, and some talking points he wants to raise in “rebuttal” to Dennett’s essays, and he approaches each issue seeking only what he needs to reach his own goals. Which, to be fair, is his prerogative. He’s got his job to do. And I’ve got mine.

Between the two of us, we just might get to the heart of the matter.

As we saw before, the flaw in the anthropic principle, as an argument for an intelligent Creator, is that it fails to distinguish between imaginable alternatives and those which are actually possible in the real world. As Vox correctly points out, there is not—so far—any conclusive scientific reason for supposing that any other configuration of the fundamental physical constants of the universe could actually occur in objective reality.

Only by postulating a potentially infinite number of universes can our wildly improbable universe become mathematically probable. Of course, there are no signs of any of these other universes, nor did science ever take the idea of parallel universes seriously until the alternative was accepting the apparent evidence for a universal designer.

If, however, the total number of actual possibilities is limited to one, then it is at least an exaggeration to refer to the 1:1 probability as “wildly improbable.” By Vox’s own argument, the anthropic “problem” is not so much an improbability as a misperception.

There’s another problem with Vox’s use of the anthropic principle as an argument for the Designer: the “wildly improbable” combination of conditions is only considered to be improbable because the constants involved have the values they would need to have in order for intelligent life to arise naturally, without the intervention of a supernatural Designer. (I believe it was PalMD who first pointed this out to me.) Creationists ought to pick a horse and then ride it. Are the laws of nature contrary to what would be required for intelligent life to evolve, or are they, as Vox argues, exactly consistent with what Darwinian evolution would require?

Yet another problem with Vox’s attack on the multiverse concept is that it has theological implications. An alternate universe would be a realm somewhat similar to this cosmos, but independent of it and with different laws. Clearly, heaven and hell are not part of this cosmos, so if they did exist, they would have to be alternate universes. Though Vox does not realize it, his defense of the anthropic argument is not just an attack on Dawkins, it makes a mockery of heaven and hell as well. With his typical flair, Vox draws our attention to the fact of how “utterly non-scientific” it is (at this point) to claim to know that there are other realms besides this natural, material universe.

Perhaps the most serious error Vox makes, though, is when he claims, “The anthropic principle is an explanation for the great mystery of physics: the improbable coincidence of various fundamental constants being set at just the right levels in order to support life in the universe.” The anthropic principle, as Vox defines and uses it, is not an explanation but is instead merely a superstition. It does not describe a verifiable and specific chain of events from the proposed cause to the observed effect, it merely attributes the observed effect to some indetectable, arbitrarily-selected, and unverifiable cause, without showing any actual connection between the two, or even proposing what such a connection would look like if it did exist.

Vox’s anthropic argument is, in fact, a reversion to a very specific and primitive form of superstition known as animism. When an animist encounters a natural phenomenon he does not understand, he leaps to the conclusion that some kind of invisible, magical personality must have intentionally produced it. The anthropic argument “explains” how the cosmos got its constants the same way animism “explains” how evil spirits cause disease—by magical attribution instead of by scientific and verifiable explanation.

Vox argues that, if a Creator is improbable on the grounds that (as Dawkins points out) He would have to be more complex and improbable than His creation, then the multiverse concept is even more improbable. If there’s a one-in-a-million chance of one universe arising, then there would have to be a one-in-a-trillion chance of two. Of course, this kind of math assumes that God only created one of the many different universes, and that heaven and hell, for example, were not created. Otherwise Dawkins’s original argument would still apply. But I rather think that Vox’s math is way off, by failing to take into account that these alternate universes (a) would not necessarily have to produce intelligent life and (b) would likely arise as a result of conditions that would make a wide range of universes all but inevitable. (A full discussion of this will be left as an exercise for the reader.)

Vox mocks Dawkins for suggesting that “We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics” and for saying that “the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.” In particular, Vox picks out the adverb “self-evidently,” which he takes as an admission of lack of proof (instead of understanding Dawkins’s point as being that a weak argument is self-evidently better than a self-defeating one).

“Lacking any means of proving his conclusion, Dawkins simply throws up his hands and declares it to be self-evident! I ask you this, dear atheist reader, would you accept an argument this poorly constructed as conclusive and irrefutable evidence of the existence of God?” The difference, of course, is that Dawkins is precisely not appealing to the notion that his conclusion is self-evident. He made his argument for why Intelligent Design contradicts its own premise in arguing that complex things need a more-complex (skyhook) Creator, and in fact he argued his point so well that the only way Vox could dispute Dawkins’s conclusion was to reject the ID skyhook. Dawkins’s <i>conclusion</i> was demonstrated; the “self-evident” is merely referring to the superiority of a weak argument over a self-defeating one.

And that pretty much does it for this chapter. Dawkins made some brilliant arguments about how ID assumptions lead to untenable conclusions, and the only point Vox could find to dispute with Dawkins was that he could avoid those conclusions if he rejected the idea that complex things need intelligent (more complex) creators. Thus, Vox avoided being defeated in battle through the simple expedient of ceding the territory to the opposition and withdrawing before combat could be joined. True, the field is littered with carnage and destruction. But those were Vox’s allies—he slaughtered them on his way back from the front.

Q7. What’s your favourite theistic argument, and how do you usually refute it?

The evidence argument. It’s proven to be rather difficult to refute since the vast majority of atheists have a very poor understanding of what evidence is – their tendency towards science fetishism often causes them to believe only scientific evidence is evidence – and quickly find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to deny the existence of things they quite clearly believe.

Notice what he’s doing here: he’s claiming to have evidence (“difficult to refute” evidence, no less), without ever offering any actual examples. I can well believe that this sort of empty boast is Vox’s favorite argument, as we’ve seen him use it before.

The nice thing about not revealing your evidence is that keeping your evidence secret also keeps it safe. As Vox himself has stated (by projection onto PZ Myers), empty boasting is a successful strategy precisely when “attempting more would banish the illusion of his intellectual expertise and reveal the paucity of both his knowledge and his intelligence.”

Vox is even kind enough to admit, indirectly, that his boast is indeed empty. When he says “their tendency towards science fetishism often causes them to believe only scientific evidence is evidence,” what he’s saying is that his own evidence is not scientific, otherwise atheists’ dedication to scientific evidence would not be an impediment. All that is required for evidence to be scientific, however, is that it be independently verifiable as true. So Vox, in his own mind, is “triumphing” over those poor saps who base their conclusions on evidence that is verifiably true, whereas his evidence has been liberated from that troublesome requirement.

The only downside to having secret, unscientific evidence is that when somebody like PZ declines to waste his time on you, you can’t honestly claim that he ran away from your evidence, since you never produced any for him to run away from. I might go out of my way to avoid walking through a pile of dog doo, but the pile isn’t any less crap because I “ran away” from it. Let’s see if Vox’s evidence is really as great as he claims. Let’s see if even he thinks it worthwhile to mention in public. Then we’ll see who runs away.

I only mention this because Vox is not the only believer whose favorite argument for theism is to make empty boasts about some secret superior knowledge that allegedly proves them right. A lot of people make that argument, especially since Dawkins, Dennett and the rest have been out-selling their detractors. More and more, people are seeing the inconsistency and irrelevancy of traditional Christian arguments for God, and since the defenders of the faith really have nothing more than hearsay, superstition and gullibility to build on, more empty boasting is the best they’ve got to offer.

Right, it’s a trick question. There’s an infinite number of answers: 48, 823, 1, “walnuts”, and so on. But there’s only one correct and relevant answer: 4. In other words, there’s a difference between the number of imaginable possibilities, and the number of valid possibilities. We need to keep that in mind, because today Vox is going to try and take down Richard Dawkins by appealing to the anthropic principle. Let’s see if he makes out any better than Geisler and Turek did.

The anthropic principle has been an embarrassing problem for secular scientists in recent decades due to the way in which the probability of the universe and Earth just happening to be perfectly suitable for human life is very, very low. The extreme unlikelihood of everything being not too hot, not too cold, not too big, and not too small, to put it very crudely, has often been cited as evidence that the universe has been designed for us, presumably by God.

“Presumably” is right. This is an argument that is built on presumptions, but more significantly, it’s built on a failure to distinguish between imaginable possibilities, and valid possibilities.

For example, if I hold a ball above the ground, and drop it, what is the probability that it will fall down? According to the law of gravity, unless that ball is acted on by some other force, the probability of falling down is pretty much 100%. It doesn’t matter how many different possible directions you can trace out from the ball’s original position, the number of valid possibilities is 1, and therefore the odds of it falling down are 1:1 or 100%.

How many possible universes are there? Well, we can imagine quite a number of them, simply by varying the parameters that describe this universe. We might, for example, imagine a universe in which pi is an even 3 instead of an irrational number starting with 3.14159 and so on. Or why not 2? or 5? or 57,684? On the other hand, how many of those “possible” universes would actually be valid? Could we make any of them actually work?

For example, how exactly would you go about producing a universe in which the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is greater (or less) than pi? Would the distance around the circle increase while the distance across the circle remained the same? If space curved in such a way as to make the circumference longer, wouldn’t it also increase the diameter by the same amount, thus maintaining the ratio?

Many people have speculated about a range of “possible” universes, but so far the only possibility that has been shown to be a valid possibility is this universe we’re in now. I’m perfectly happy to keep an open mind here, and to listen to any new discoveries that someone might make, but by my count, we have one anthropic universe out of a total of one known valid possibility. That’s a 1:1 ratio, hardly a low probability. If we discover another valid possibility, then the odds will drop to 1:2, and then we can start to explore whether or not there are any factors that make some possibilities more likely than others (the way gravity skews the odds in favor of falling down). Vox’s gloating about the anthropic “problem” is both exaggerated and premature.

But Vox has another agenda here: once again, he’s looking for some pretext he can use to disparage Dawkins’s intellect. In this particular case, Dawkins tries to convey, to a non-technical audience, some sense of the unbelievable range of valid possibilities within which life might arise spontaneously. He poses a hypothetical example, using familiar large numbers like “billion,” in order to communicate the idea that the odds are not quite as unfriendly as we might naively suppose. That’s all the pretext Vox needs to accuse Dawkins of mathematical ineptitude:

Now, Richard Dawkins is arguably not an individual particularly well suited to play around with probability. He may not be quite as mathematically handicapped as Sam Harris, but he is known to have some issues in this regard, being openly mocked for his “comic authority” and “fatal attraction” to mathematical concepts by the French mathematician Marcel-Paul Schützenberger.

In a footnote, Vox refers to this interview in which Schützenberger begins by admitting that “Biology is, of course, not my specialty,” and then goes on to prove what a serious handicap this is by making the ludicrous mistake of assuming that, because a gene can be “on” or “off,” its information content is equal to a single binary computer bit.

Schematically, a gene is like a unit of information. It has simple binary properties. When active, it is an elementary information-theoretic unit, the cascade of gene instructions resembling the cascade involved in specifying a recipe. Now let us return to the example of the eye. Darwinists imagine that it requires what? A thousand or two thousand genes to assemble an eye, the specification of the organ thus requiring one or two thousand units of information? This is absurd! Suppose that a European firm proposes to manufacture an entirely new household appliance in a Southeast Asian factory. And suppose that for commercial reasons, the firm does not wish to communicate to the factory any details of the appliance’s function — how it works, what purposes it will serve. With only a few thousand bits of information, the factory is not going to proceed very far or very fast.

It’s easy to see why Vox would embrace Schützenberger as a fellow traveller along Smug Road. Not only does Schützenberger chastize Dawkins for failing to stick to his specialty, he immediately turns around and pontificates about what biology means even though, by admission and demonstration, he clearly does not understand the material he is talking about. (Hmm, where have we seen that before?) And lest we suppose that we might excuse Schützenberger on the grounds that he was speaking of “bits” in the sense of “small pieces” rather than in the sense of computer bits, his very next sentence proves that he is indeed speaking of binary 1′s and 0′s: “A few thousand bits of information, after all, yields only a single paragraph of text,” he says. A few thousand binary bits are about a paragraph; a few thousand “small pieces of information” would be a small book.

A gene, of course, is much more than just a 1 or a 0. How could we recognize so many different types of gene, after all, if each was no more than a single binary digit? Even a mathematician should be able to see how far off base Schützenberger’s error is. Not only does a gene contain much more “information” than a single boolean, it’s a functional biochemical prototype whose chemical properties are part of the manufacturing process that ultimately builds the proteins and other cell components. Rather than just “a paragraph of text,” giving an organism the genes for an eye is like giving a factory the molds, dies, templates, and rigs needed to build the product–essentially giving them most of the production line, with the remainder being parts known to be readily available in the vicinity already. Schützenberger is just out to lunch.

Notice, too, that Vox seems to have overlooked this glaring flaw in this supposed “expert testimony” against Dawkins. He so fixated on discrediting Dawkins that he’s willing to go along with anything Schützenberger says. Sure, a gene is nothing more than a nucleotidal 1 or 0. Anything you say boss. If it makes Dawkins look bad, it’s good enough.

Back to Dawkins. As I mentioned before, when Dawkins talks about “one in a billion” chances of DNA arising spontaneously, he’s not going into the actual research into abiogenesis. Life does not arise by chance, scientifically speaking. If DNA just happened by a lucky, random event, then research into the origin of life is pointless, because you’ll never re-create a purely random occurrence. And that’s not what scientists are trying to do.

Science works by tracing back the chain of causality, the operation of cause-and-effect, which is the opposite of “by chance.” What researchers are doing today is studying the natural forces that affect the combinations of organic molecules. Just as gravity influences dropped balls to skew the odds in favor of falling in only one direction, the laws of chemistry influence undirected chemical interactions in order to increase their chances of moving in one direction rather than any of innumerable other directions. The interactions are sometimes subtle and complex, which is why it is such a tricky question to answer.

This makes the question difficult to discuss for lay audiences, because the average listener would need quite a bit of time and training to come up to speed on the technical details. For popular presentations, it’s more time-efficient to sacrifice detailed technical accuracy for analogies that convey the general sense of the matter without getting bogged down in minutiae. The “one in a billion” is a very rough oversimplification intended for a non-technical discussion with a non-technical audience.

It’s typical, and revealing, that Vox chooses to attack Dawkins about the alleged mathematical “inaccuracies” in Dawkins’s simplified, “layman’s terms” illustrations, rather than finding (or even seeking) any significant problem in Dawkins’s more technical and rigorous scientific work. Dawkins isn’t really wrong here. Vox is just looking for excuses to gripe about Dawkins. But that’s par for the course.

Vox isn’t done with Dawkins by any means, nor is he finished with the anthropic argument. But that’s enough TIA for one week. We’ll pick this up again about 7 days from now, assuming the cosmic constant for the value of a week doesn’t change before then.

As I have mentioned before, anyone who repeats the common atheist talking point that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is demonstrating one of two things. The first option is that they haven’t actually thought about it; they’re simply echoing what they’ve heard before. The second is that they aren’t very intelligent.

There’s also a third option: they’ve realized that truth is consistent with itself, and therefore when you claim that extraordinary things are part of the real world, then we ought to be able to find these extraordinary things in the real world. That, however, does not seem to be an option Vox is willing to consider.

Vox’s post is prompted by the remarks of one Ninja Rabbit on the nature of evidence needed for extraordinary claims.

If your neighbor told you that he watered his plants yesterday, it would be a reasonable claim to believe. But if he told you he fed his pet three headed 50 foot alien, it would probably not be reasonable to believe at this particular point. Your neighbor would have to elaborate and give you evidence that this 50 foot three headed alien exists and is his pet.

Vox’s “rebuttal” tries to escape from the dilemma by changing the scenario so that it supplies exactly what Ninja Rabbit said would be needed:

The reason the analogy is poor is obvious if we consider a more equitable version of it. Ninja Rabbit lives next door so he can see the plants. He knows they exist and are in decent health, so he concludes someone must be watering them. His neighbor claims to be doing so, so he accepts the claim. Now, if he also saw the three-headed 50-foot alien next door on as regular a basis and it appeared to be in good health, his neighbor’s claim to own it and feed it would be no more remarkable than his claim to have watered his plants.

Notice, Vox seems completely oblivious to the fact that it would be highly unusual (aka “extraordinary”) for someone to possess a 50-foot three-headed alien in the first place. If people commonly possessed such pets, or if the neighbor was already known to possess such a pet, then granted, there would be nothing extraordinary about displaying the pet as evidence of the claim. But in that situation, the claim would no longer be extraordinary either. All that proves is that ordinary claims (i.e. claims consistent with what we ordinarily experience) do not require extraordinary evidence (i.e. evidence above and beyond what we ordinarily experience).

What Vox has done, indirectly, is to support the conclusion that extraordinary claims do require extraordinary proof. Ninja Rabbit said the claim would require evidence that the neighbor had an alien pet, and that’s exactly what Vox had to add to the story to make it come out the way he wanted. Vox seems to be a little confused about the results, though: he seems to think that by demonstrating Ninja Rabbit was right, he somehow proved he was wrong. But Vox’s confusion runs even deeper: he seems to feel that “extraordinary evidence” means evidence that is itself supernatural or atypical in some way:

It’s quite amusing to hear self-proclaimed “rationalists” attempt to make use of this quote, since the claim that “extraordinary evidence” is required is fundamentally illogical. Because that which is supernatural must interact with the natural in order to be perceived, most supernatural activity will leave natural footprints which are capable of being evaluated by fully natural means. A poltergeist is supernatural, while a vase smashed by a poltergeist, a video of a vase being smashed by an invisible force, and an audio recording of an observing scientist watching a vase being smashed by an invisible force are all natural things that could be provided as evidence for the supernatural.

A proper scientific study of the supernatural, as proposed by the likes of Daniel Dennett, will look no different and provide evidence that is no more extraordinary than the evidence that is provided for any natural claim. Whether one is studying the utility of prayer, Vitamin C, or surgery in curing cancer, the means and the evidence produced will be the same.

Quite so, and the absence of such evidence is precisely why scientists fail to conclude that poltergeists exist. “Extraordinary evidence” does not mean that we need a fundamentally different type of evidence, it means natural evidence which is consistent with the extraordinary claims being made, such as observable and verifiable smashing of vases without the involvement of any natural agents or forces. Evidence of poltergeists, or levitation, or telepathy or other such things would not be “extraordinary evidence” in the sense of being something other than measurement, observation, correlation, and so on. It would simply be natural evidence consistent with the extraordinary phenomena of poltergeists, levitation, telepathy, and so on.

The relationship of the evidence to the conclusion is, or should be, that that truth is consistent with itself, and therefore before we decide that a particular conclusion is true, we ought to expect (and receive) real-world evidence which is consistent with that conclusion. Where the claim is already consistent with common, ordinary experience, the evidence (which Vox calls “tangential knowledge”) is already supplied, and thus the conclusion is justified without requiring further proof. Where the claim is of something unusual, or even contrary to common experience (such as the resurrection of the dead), the evidence consistent with this claim is lacking, and therefore we need to seek it somewhere else.

This is all fairly simple and straightforward stuff, and really, it’s rather peculiar that Vox would even try to make an issue of it. I suppose it’s because he’s embarrassed about the notable lack of extraordinary evidence for the extraordinary claims of the Gospel.

When Geisler and Turek were trying to make the “DNA=words” argument, they used the example of a teenager coming home from school and finding a note on the refrigerator that said, “Scott, take out the garbage—Mom.” They somewhat snarkily suggest that if Scott had studied evolution in school that day, he could argue that the note was just the result of undirected natural forces spontaneously assembling apparent “messages” out of natural materials, and thus avoid his chores.

They don’t happen to mention the other possibility—that if Scott had been to Sunday school and had heard about angels and demons and their supernatural powers, he could just as easily “explain” the note as the magical handiwork of a mischievous imp. But let’s look at the facts and see which “theory” holds up better.

What is it about the note that causes us to identify it as artificial, and not the result of undirected natural forces? First of all, it’s ink on paper. That is, the note is written in a medium which expresses a message, but which is not the message itself. Secondly, the message is an abstraction, on multiple levels. The pattern of the ink on the paper corresponds to individual symbols or glyphs which represent well-known sounds. These glyphs (and the sounds they represent) combine to form verbal symbols, which are another level of abstraction, representing certain concepts or grammatical functions. These verbal symbols have meaning in a particular language (another abstraction) and context (another abstraction).

It’s important to notice that at no point do the physical properties of the paper and ink tend towards the spontaneous combination of molecules in the particular patterns that make up these various interdependent layers of abstract symbols. Contrast that with DNA molecules: the “message” isn’t the slightest bit abstract. Instead, the physical properties of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and various other atoms cause them to tend to combine spontaneously in molecules that can, under the right circumstances, become quite lengthy and complex. In fact, life as we know it would not be possible without this fact, because all biochemical processes work by atoms and molecules spontaneously combining and interacting according to their electrostatic physical properties. And the “message” itself is simply the functional combination of these physical atoms. No symbolism or abstraction is involved.

Of course, a creationist could still argue that the specific configuration of the DNA molecule is something that cannot arise by undirected natural processes. But he’d just be guessing, and he’s not likely to have invested any significant research into the natural processes involved. Abiogenesis is still an open question, but the results are promising, and spontaneous generation of organic molecules is not something that requires any violation of the laws of organic chemistry, so it’s not really all that implausible (barring a preconceived agenda against it anyway).

What about Scott and the trashcan full of garbage? Well, if he has paid attention in science class, he’ll know that the chemical processes that generate DNA molecules aren’t the sort of processes that write notes with multiple layers of symbolic abstractions. The symbolic abstractions are what distinguish intelligently-designed messages from mere spontaneous combinations, so science can’t excuse him from doing his chores. If it’s any consolation, though, the supernatural explanation is still as valid as it ever was. If the garbage is too stinky, Scott can explain away the note as some sort of spontaneous miracle. That “explanation” works on anything.

In a recent issue of the New York Times, respected columnist David Brooks described how what he calls a “revolution in neuroscience” is shaping “how people see the world.” I agree with him—up to a point…

Our brains are not “cold machines.” Rather, “meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings.”

And Brooks is right when he says that research like this will turn the recent debates over atheism into a “sideshow.” There is simply no way to sustain a “hard-core” materialistic understanding of human consciousness and morality in light of the new research. Where does the consciousness and moral decision-making come from?

That’s a question with an interesting answer, but before we look into that, what shall we make of Colson’s triumphal declaration that recent neurological studies have sounded the death knell for materialism?

The studies Colson refers to have been extensively discussed and basically boil down to doing brain scans of various types on people who are answering questions about morality, like “is it ok to kill a baby whose cries might mean death for villagers hiding from enemy soldiers,” etc. The scans revealed that certain parts of the brain “light up” when the person is busy making moral judgments, indicating that these areas are the structures that compute the “moral calculus” of the question.

Needless to say, this is exactly what a materialist would expect to find: morality comes from the physical operation (measurable by scientific instruments) of specific physical structures in the brain. What’s Colson so happy about then? What makes him think this is atheism’s last gasp? His logic seems a bit strained, but apparently he thinks that the physical mechanisms of morality are “programmed” into us, as in “we’re the work of an Intelligent Programmer” or something.

[This research] corroborates the biblical idea that we are, to use a modern phrase, “hard-wired” for spirituality and God. It suggests that we are irresistibly religious, as philosophers have always argued.

Notice, however, that ascribing this situation to God is merely superstition, not evidence. (It’s also confusing morality with spirituality, but we’ll let that slide.) The research confirms that people are naturally moral, to be sure, but we’ve always known that people are moral. The non-supernaturalist view has always been that this is simply a function of our biology, and not some mystical, magical law operating in and through us. And guess what? That’s just what the research shows: physical functions operate to produce moral judgments.

Colson is claiming that brain structure has a supernatural cause, but he does not demonstrate any verifiable connection between his purported cause and the structure of the brain, nor can he even describe how such a connection could be verified if it did exist. And that’s the definition of superstition: asserting a cause-and-effect relationship where the neither the cause nor its connection to the effect is verifiable (or even describable). If Jehovah, Loki, Athena and Pele (the volcano god, not the soccer star) were put in a police line-up and accused of having tampered with the programming of the human mind, they’d all have to be let go, because there’s no objective evidence to link any of them to the crime. Colson’s claim is a mere superstitious attribution, not an explanation.

Colson would like to argue that this research shows “we have the law of God written on our hearts,” as the Apostle Paul put it. But again, that’s not what the research shows.

Volunteers are asked whether killing the child to save the others is justified. …[T]he vast majority say “no”—thankfully

In other words, our brains are not pre-programmed with black-and-white answers to moral questions (otherwise all the participants would have responded with the same programming). What we have are subjective moral judgments, a biological mechanism that derives an ad hoc answer based on the weighted assessment of a number of inputs. Again, this is a physical function responding to a number of physical variables, just as we would expect to find in a material being like man. (And, by the way, the whole idea of moral “programming” contradicts the notion that men have some kind of free will that God is eager and/or obligated to keep His hands off of.)

Immaterialists would like to have us believe that the true center of consciousness is non-corporeal, an ethereal “soul” that exercises will, moral judgment, consciousness, and so on, independently of the material body. The brain, in their view, functions as a mere interface between the immaterial soul and the physical organism.

Colson alludes to this when he suggests that materialism has no answers to the question “Where does the consciousness and moral decision-making come from?” But in fact the research indicates that Colson’s answer is not the correct one. If the brain were indeed a mere interface between physical senses on the one side and an immaterial soul on the other, it would need circuits enabling it to function as a transmitter (of sensory data to the soul) and receiver (of commands from the soul). We ought to find that these same transmitter/receiver circuits lighting up for all body-soul interactions, whether the soul is making moral judgments, or exercising its will power, or simply experiencing consciousness. Communication with the soul ought to show up as the primary, not to say exclusive, function of the brain.

That’s not what we’re finding, however. We’re finding that the various facets of consciousness and personality reside in the brain, in physical brain structures that physically process the various different aspects of our personality. The “soul” is not something that operates externally on the brain, but is a function of the brain, a pattern of biochemical activity physically real enought to register on scientific instruments. Thus, consciousness is not something that passes through the brain (i.e. from a non-corporeal soul), it is something physically generated by the brain. For Colson to claim that this research shows that materialism cannot explain consciousness is like some guy claiming a botanist couldn’t possibly find a forest with all these trees in the way.

What neuroscientists are trying to do now is to discern which neurological patterns correspond to which perceived aspects of consciousness—a task not unlike trying to describe the harmony of a symphony in terms of the distribution of rapidly fluctuating variations in air pressure. Small wonder that the task rapidly exhausts our limited human ability to assimilate and synthesize large amounts of finely-detailed data. Who knows when, or if, we’ll be able to truly understand it all.

But ignorance is fertile soil for superstition. So long as science continues to ask new questions, people like Chuck Colson are going to claim that their God is the answer, superstition or not. And perhaps it gives them some comfort to think so, but it does nothing to enhance our understanding of the real world. Meanwhile, science keeps learning. Thank God.

Christians Launch Campaign against Global Warming Hype | Christianpost.com
WASHINGTON – While it may seem like everyone believes in global warming and the impending catastrophe it will bring, a group of conservative Christians countered that message Thursday by launching a national campaign to gather one million signatures for a statement that says Christians must not believe in all the hype about global warming.

The “We Get It!” declaration, which currently has nearly 100 signers, is backed by prominent Christians including Tony Perkins of Family Research Council, Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, award-winning radio host Janet Parshall, and U.S. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma.

What supporters of the statement seek is to inform Christians about the biblical perspective on the environment and the poor, and to encourage them to look at the hard evidence, which they say does not support the devastating degree of climate change claimed by mainstream society.

Ok, maybe just one comment: are these the same people who claim to be able to see “signs” of the imminent return of Christ? Any bets on which signs we’re going to see fulfilled first?

What do expects say about this world view? Many of the experts that reject naturalism from within the scientific community are blacklisted so scientific experts are hard to find, but they do exist. In addition to this, the actions of the experts within the field speak volumes. It seems interesting to me that science has started looking at other planets for life. The naturalist knows that life simply could not have happened in such a short span of time here on earth, so they are looking at other planets for evidence that itoccurred elsewhere and was deposited here. This is a silent admission that evolution is in trouble.

Let’s start with the first claim, that scientific “experts” who reject naturalism are “blacklisted.” This is the propaganda that the Expelled folks would like to have us believe, but a moment’s thought will reveal this absurd paranoia for the falsehood it really is. First of all, creationists have more money than most biologists do. For example, a biologist like PZ Myers typically can only dream of having the kind of budget that Expelled had to play around with. The fact that believers consider their money better spent on shoddy propaganda than on serious research tells us two things: 1) even they know that genuine science isn’t going to back up their preconceived conclusions and 2) they don’t care. Science is of no interest to them, because it brings them no closer to God (and in fact tends to the opposite direction).

Secondly, if we’re going to be testing worldviews based on what the experts say, why in heaven’s name are we only listening to that tiny minority of experts who, for personal religious reasons, choose to reject naturalism? Schooloffish is clearly stacking the deck here, because if we listened to the vast majority of people with the training and experience needed to evaluate the evidence, we’d find overwhelming support for the idea that science is indeed producing consistent, reliable, productive results. Far from discrediting naturalism, science has become the authority everyone wants to claim as their own. Why? Because science delivers the goods. Naturalistic science works: predictably, reliably, consistently.

Not surprisingly, the cranks and crackpots who reject naturalistic science are also the ones that never produce any substantial contributions to science. You can’t shoot your horse and ride it too. Some few continue to participate in the scientific process in some small way, but only by swallowing their religious objections long enough to get some real science done. Creationism and other forms of denial simply don’t work well enough to allow genuine progress to be made. Success, for the creationist, consists of merely unmaking someone else’s work. Small wonder, then, that they would attempt to blame their lack of results on some kind of imaginary martyrdom.

As for looking for life on other planets, I think I’ll pass on that particular red herring. There has been plenty of time for life to arise naturally here on this earth, as best science has been able to determine. It’s significant that none of the objections to evolution come from the evidence itself: Jonathan West, Michael Behe, Guillermo Gonzalez and so on all started from a preconceived idea that God had to be the Creator, and looked for some bit of science they could exploit to build a claim against evolution. Those who openmindedly consider the evidence, however (including a number of faithful Christians like Dr. Ken Miller) find that the actual facts overwhelmingly support evolution.

That ought to be a good thing for believers, because if evolution were in trouble, then evolution’s Designer would be in trouble as well. He would be guilty of building an inferior system, or worse, a deliberately crippled one designed to be less innovative, less sophisticated, and less robust than it would have been if He’d just let evolution take its natural course. Darwin would turn out to be a more intelligent and caring designer than God, proposing a system (using only 19th century science!) that far out-performs and out-engineers the clumsy version God referred to as “very good.” No evolutionist damns God with such faint “praise” as creationists give Him!

That’s the problem with believing in Creation, you see. Naturalists believe in the real world, the world that God allegedly ought to have created. Since the object of their belief is the same as what God is supposed to have built, by His great Wisdom and Power, the only way you can call it flawed and inconsistent is if God did a bad job of creating. And that’s an inconsistency in the religious worldview. Set out to disprove naturalism if you must, but poetic justice will be served. The only way you can “succeed” is by disproving your own worldview.

Since evolution postulates that things evolve from simple cell organisms into complex ones, there should never be a stage where the complexity of an organism cannot be reduced to a less complex stage (calledirreducible complexity). Has any one ever wondered how the heart could have continued to work as it mutated from two chambers to four? How could such a defect still keep the mutated creature alive? How could an animal with a half flipper and half leg survive? It seems logical to assume that a half flipper would not allow the organism to swim and the half leg wold make hunting on land impossible as well. It seems that the organism would starve to death of be a perfect meal for a non-defective creature. Lastly, how can abiogensis occur? How did a rock turn into DNA? These questions have been largely ignored because they show that the naturalistic world view should only be rejected as false.

Well, no, actually, that’s not true. Not only have these questions been extensively studied, scientists have made some significant progress towards finding reasonable answers. It’s not the questions, it’s the answers that are being ignored—by creationists.

For example, consider the evolution of the heart from two-chambered to four-chambered. How could an organism continue to survive such a transitions? Could an organism survive with, say, a three-chambered heart? Well, yes, ask almost any amphibian or reptile. Their hearts are three-chambered. Some of them even have a partial septum, the beginnings of a wall that could eventually divide the chamber into two separate ventricles. It does take a bit of thought and effort to work out the exact progression(s) leading from no chambers to two chambers to four chambers. But it’s not an impossible task, if you’re willing to find the answers instead of using the existence of the question as an excuse to bail.

What about creatures like the mudskipper, a fish whose limbs are adapted to serve both as fins and as useful legs on land? Is it true that the species is starving to death because its limbs are transitional between flippers and feet? Not at all; in fact the transitional limbs are rather an advantage. That’s the way evolution commonly works: each transition that arises must first succeed as a net advantage (or at least be adaptively neutral) before it can serve as the basis for the next variation. Until that variation arises, the “transitional” trait isn’t really transitional. It’s simply a sound, functional adaptation. Thus, by the time it has succeeded long enough to become a transition to something else, it has already proven that it is not a show-stopping, evolution-breaking dysfunction.

Abiogenesis, finally, is a question that is still in search of a definitive answer, but notice the difference between the scientific worldview and the creationist worldview: in science, the existence of the question is a reason to look for scientific answers; in creationism, the existence of the question is a reason to stop looking for scientific answers and to turn to superstitious answers (i.e. “God Did It”) instead. Small wonder that science has had better luck in finding reasonable and verifiable explanations for things!

And even though science is still working on puzzling out the answer to the question of what happened billions of years ago (under conditions that leave no fossil records), there is every indication that an answer exists to be found. For example, if life “evolved” from non-life, we would expect there to be intermediate states between life and non-life—chemical structures that, while not entirely alive, are more than just inert molecules. And we do: viruses neither eat nor excrete, but they replicate. So, too, do prions: malformed proteins that are even simpler than viruses and that cause problems like mad cow disease.

So once again, when we evaluate the naturalistic worldview in the light of informed consideration of the evidence, we find that naturalism is so powerfully self-consistent that even in cases where we don’t yet have all the answers, we still find the things that ought to be there if the naturalistic explanation is correct. Contrast this with the supernaturalistic view that God loves us, wants to be with us, and is wise and powerful enough to eliminate any barrier separating Him from us, etc: the things that ought to show up in real life (i.e. God Himself) consistently and universally fail to do so.

It’s clear which worldview has problems with the evidence, even granting that naturalists are not omniscient. The problem with supernaturalism is not just that it lacks answers to complex questions, it’s that the real world fails to be consistent with the plain and obvious answers to even simple, fundamental questions. Go back billions of years, if you must, to try and find some obscure scenario you can claim as God actually doing something real, but the problem isn’t what God might have done somewhere when no one could see Him. The problem is His consistent failure to do the things He’s supposed to be willing and able to do today.

What we see is an orderly Universe where everything is in a perfect location to allow for humanity to thrive. If the sun was just a little hotter, or colder, life could not exist. If the continents were a little bit out of alignment, the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn would seize to flow and the world would be covered with ice. If our sun was just a little bit younger or older, our orbit would be such that the planet would be unable to sustain life. The fact is the Universe seems to be ordered, not in chaos as Darwin would have had us believe.

Needless to say, a scientific theory is basically a reasonably accurate description of some particularly orderly aspect of the natural world. If the universe were “chaos,” as schooloffish puts it, a theory like evolution would not even be possible. The absence of any predictable laws of cause and effect would completely invalidate science as we know it.

What schooloffish seems to miss here is that naturalism is based on the observation that the universe is orderly and makes sense. Of course, part of the reason it makes sense to us is because we are the products of that natural order. We’re used to it, as it were. Our own mental machinery was forged in the orderly, natural environment we are now seeking to know and understand better. Chaos is precisely what Darwin and other naturalists do not expect, because their science (our science) is based on observation, and we do not observe a chaotic universe. We view a cosmos that is complex, interesting and subtle, but amidst all that variety and infinite detail, we find a relatively small number of elegant, basic principles that organize and invigorate the whole.

Schooloffish takes the anthropocentric view that the universe is perfectly adapted to suit humanity, but in point of fact it would be more accurate to say humanity has become perfectly adapted to exist in the cosmos as we find it. This is not surprising: we clearly exist, therefore we already knew that nature was going to be turn out to allow for our existence. All science is doing is uncovering the precise hows and wherefores that made our existence possible. Granted, if conditions were significantly different, then life AS WE KNOW IT might not exist. Perhaps some other race of organisms would be debating whether some deity created the universe specifically for them.

But, as we know, it didn’t turn out that way. We’re here, and the reason we’re here is because of the inherent orderliness of reality. We like to think that we are the ontological center of the universe and that everything revolves around us, but science has a way of penetrating and deflating such selfish conceits. Sure, the world looks flat, in our common experience, from our limited frame of reference, but that doesn’t mean it really is flat. Yes, from where we stand it does look like the rest of the universe is moving around us (after all, it doesn’t feel like we’re flying through some vast, airless expanse), but that doesn’t mean that our home planet is necessarily the center of the universe, or even of our own solar system.

And yes, conditions right here happened to be such that intelligent life happened to arise and start going ooo and ahh over the fact that the conditions were right. But honestly, so what? There is no law of nature that scans through the cosmos, looking for life-friendly conditions, and disrupting them. There’s no particular reason why intelligent life should not arise as one consequence of the subtle and intricate interactions of the laws and forces of Nature.

So once again, schooloffish has failed to find any actual inconsistency in the naturalistic world view. There is no natural law preventing intelligent life from arising under suitable conditions, and (contrary to his mischaracterization of Darwin) neither evolutionary science nor any other science predicts that we should find the kind of chaotic, lawless environment which would prevent natural forces and processes from operating the way we observe them today. Science is based on observation, first and foremost, and what we observe is a self-consistent reality that conforms perfectly to natural and materialistic laws, without exception.

Now, after denouncing Expelled as “wicked, evil” and an “outrage” for pointing out that Darwinism was one of the intellectual influences on Nazism, Dawkins has compared a popular Rabbi who dares to criticize him to Hitler! And he did it no less on World Holocaust Remembrance Day. No, I’m not joking. As I’ve said before, it’s getting really hard to parody the Darwinists. They do it so well themselves.

Who knows what West thinks the “parody” would be here. Apparently, you can accuse “Darwinists” of promoting Nazism all day long, and everything’s just peachy, but if one of THEM dares to do the same to YOU, why, gosh, that’s just so over the top, it’s, it’s…well, I mean really. Even if that’s not actually what they really said.

We could look at the Boteach video (which starts off ranting about the British monarchy being a lie), but in fact it’s not really all that important who called whom the “H” word first. That’s just bickering; if you want more of that, watch trash talk TV. The more important issue is the link West cites above, attempting to blame evolutionary science for the Holocaust. It’s a link to a summary page on Evolution News and Views, listing a number of articles by DI fellows attempting to revive the Nazi propaganda that anti-Jewish genocide is scientifically justified.

The Discovery Institute is not the first, of course, to try and re-affirm the Nazi idea that the Holocaust had a scientific justification. Various racist and neo-Nazi groups have been perpetuating this myth ever since the Nazi defeat in the mid 1940′s. It’s a surprisingly popular misconception that scientists have been fighting against for decades, if not centuries. And one would certainly be tempted to hope that, given the horrific stories that have come out of the concentration camps, one of the most fundamental lessons we would have learned was that the Nazis were wrong.

Sadly, West and other DI propagandists seem not to have learned that. They do not want to admit that the Nazi’s were wrong about the true social implications of biological findings. Instead, they are reviving and recirculating the same claims as Hitler and others were making—claims that did indeed lead directly to the Holocaust.

What’s particularly evil about this is that many DI fellows, such as Paul Nelson and Michael Behe, have conceded that Darwin was right about common descent. Darwin’s observations about the existence of natural variation and of natural selection, are observations so widely and consistently confirmed that even die-hard creationists like Nelson and Behe have to concede them.

To claim that these observations provide a scientific justification for genocide, as the Nazis did and as the DI is doing today, is not only wrong factually, but wrong morally. The common gripe most DI members have with evolution is not that we don’t see natural selection happening, but (they claim) natural selection can’t be enough to do everything on its own. Which is fine, that’s a debate for another time, but why are they reviving and recirculating Hitler’s propaganda about the implications of natural selection? They know (and have no excuse for pretending not to know) that natural selection is real; why then are they repeating Hitler’s false and wicked claim that genocide is thereby justified?

If ID supporters don’t want to be compared to Nazis, they need to cease this attempt to convince people that Hitler was right about science, and they ought to apologize profusely for the efforts they have made so far. If they’re going to pick up the baton that Hitler dropped, and attempt to carry it forward, then they deserve whatever comparisons people make. To paraphrase one of Michael Behe’s favorite sayings, if it goose-steps like a Nazi duck….

This is just absurdly pathetic. The entire article is nothing but a list of excuses for why the model simply can’t do what New Scientist disingenuously insists that it can. Suggesting that something that already took place might perhaps maybe possibly have happened a certain way is not a prediction.

This kind of objection betrays a fundamental ignorance about how science works, and what it means for a particular theory or hypothesis to make “predictions”. In genuine science, it’s not only possible, but often necessary, to make predictions about things that have already happened.

Science is based on the idea that truth is consistent with itself. The way to test a scientific hypothesis, therefore, is to see if it is consistent with the truth (i.e. with what can be objectively observed in the real world). To do this requires two steps: 1) you must formulate your hypothesis in sufficient detail that it is possible to analytically determine what consequences it ought to produce, and 2) you must do the analysis and work out what those specific consequences would be.

The act of specifying these consequences before looking at the real-world data is called “prediction”—that is, not that the event you are describing is necessarily in the future, but that you were able to declare what consequences should result before you check to see what consequences did result. Notice in particular that only the <i>consequences</i> need to be observable today, so even if the event of interest took place in the past, you can still make predictions about what we should be able to see in the present.

This is one of the things that sets genuine scientific hypotheses apart from merely superstitious attributions like Intelligent Design. Science can make predictions because it understands the actual mechanisms involved; ID can’t, because it merely attributes things to some unknown and unknowable Agency whose mechanisms and processes are indescribable and effectively indistinguishable from magic. So even if Vox’s sour grapes were a valid complaint against evolutionary theory, we’d still be able to point out the fact that creationist/ID alternatives fare much, much worse.

What Alexander predicted was that similar environmental pressures might be expected to produce similar evolutionary patterns. By describing what characteristics a eusocial mammal ought to have, based on an analysis of evolutionary mechanisms alone, he was most definitely making a scientific prediction, regardless of how long ago the naked mole rat actually evolved. Because he was able to work out what specific characteristics should be there, he constructed a hypothesis that was testable and verifiable; the fact that predicted characteristics happen to match observed characteristics only goes to show that the hypothesis is indeed consistent with the truth.

It must really irk Vox that, no matter how much he complains about the alleged “failings” of evolutionary theory, it is still orders of magnitude more scientific than anything creationists or ID’ers have been able to pull off, especially in the area of testable scientific predictions. Perhaps that is why he finds it necessary to indulge in silly snipes like this:

New Scientist does manage to perfectly summarize the “science” of evolution when it states in a most authoritative manner: “Evolution is as firmly established a scientific fact as the roundness of the Earth.”

Of course, the Earth isn’t round. It’s a geoid that is very nearly an oblate spheroid.

Free clue time: spheroids do not have corners. The roundness of a geoid is what makes it a spheroid. Just because it’s not perfectly spherical does not mean its surface is not curved. Sheesh.

Vox’s spurious accusations against the <i>New Scientist</i> notwithstanding, <a href=”http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/dn13677-evolution-myths-evolution-is-not-predictive.html”>the article</a> is a good read, if someone abbreviated. Contrary to Vox’s claims, it offers no “excuses” for any failure to make legitimate evolutionary predictions, and indeed gives a number of examples to the contrary. It is quite clear in its presentation, and offers links to more in-depth discussions for those who care to pursue the inquiry further.

The fact that Vox would try and label it “absurdly pathetic” says more about the anti-scientific mind than about anything else.

Reading this article makes it easier to understand why religious fundamentalists of all faiths have so much difficulty in accepting the truth since they stand to lose everything, including their very identity.

Contrast this with Mike Adams’s claim that “Accepting Christianity… is far more likely [than Islam] to have come from a rational appraisal of the evidence. And it is far less likely to have come from the threat of the sword.” But there are other threats besides swords, and more compelling.

The problem with evolution is not that it is unscientific but that it is routinely taught in textbooks and in the classroom in an atheist way…Instead of trying to get unscientific ID theories included in the classroom, a better strategy would be to get the unscientific atheist propaganda out.

Hmm, wonder how this is going to go over with the fine folks at Expelled?

What D’Souza objects to is statements by evolutionists that imply God is not necessary as an explanation for life. For example,

Douglas Futuyma asserts in his textbook Evolutionary Biology: “By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.”

D’Souza’s response to this is to propose a policy against such statements on constitutional grounds.

[T]he First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits public schools from teaching or promoting atheism in any way… If you are fired from your government job because you are an atheist, your First Amendment rights have been violated. In other words, the term “religion” means not only “religion” but also “atheism.”

Yet if the free exercise clause defines religion in a way that includes atheism, then the no-establishment clause must define religion in the same way… This means that just as a public school teacher cannot advocate Christianity or hand out Bibles to his students, so too public school textbooks and science teachers cannot advocate atheism.

I agree, with one slight caveat: if you point out that God is superfluous to a scientific understanding of origins, you are simply stating a fact. “In the beginning God created…” is no longer the sole available option. If an atheist professor in the public school system states tells his students science has proven that God does not exist, then he’s promoting atheism, and has crossed the line into territory forbidden by the First Amendment. If, however, he merely points out that God is not the only possible explanation, he’s only stating objective, verifiable fact, and has not crossed the line.

So I agree with D’Souza to a point. Public school classrooms should, in fact, not be venues for promoting atheism, though if your religion is such that merely stating the facts counts as an argument against it, well, you need a better religion. The educational mission of the public schools includes giving students access to real-world facts about the world around them, and respect for the First Amendment should not involve censoring these facts so as to create a false impression that a Creator is still needed.

If you have heard of the new documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opening April 18, chances are you have heard all kinds of distortions and myths about it. So let me set the record straight about some of the most common myths.

Yes, that’s Chuck Colson’s name in the by-line. Apparently, he’s concerned about all the bad publicity that Expelled is getting, and he’s trying to improve things by appealing to people to ignore it all. (Hey, I thought this publicity was supposed to be good for the movie? Why is an expert framer like Colson trying to get people not to listen to it? But I digress.)

So what are these “myths” that Colson doesn’t want people to listen to?

Myth #1: Darwinists interviewed for this film were tricked into participating.

Not so. Each scientist interviewed for Expelled, on both sides of the evolution debate, knew who would do the interview and what it was for. Each of them signed a release, allowing the producers to use the footage of their interviews.

Uh, right Chuck. The fact that they signed releases proves that they weren’t tricked into signing the releases. Meanwhile, back in the real world, the producers of Expelled registered the domain name expelledthemovie.com on March 2, 2007, as a simple WHOIS lookup will show:

 Domain name: EXPELLEDTHEMOVIE.COM

Administrative Contact:

contactprivacy.com,   expelledthemovie.com@contactprivacy.com

96 Mowat Ave

Toronto, ON M6K 3M1

CA

+1.4165385457

Technical Contact:

contactprivacy.com,   expelledthemovie.com@contactprivacy.com

96 Mowat Ave

Toronto, ON M6K 3M1

CA

+1.4165385457

Registration Service Provider:

FatCow, support@fatcow.com

888-278-9780

Registrar of Record: TUCOWS, INC.

Record last updated on 16-Feb-2008.

Record expires on 02-Mar-2009. Record created on 02-Mar-2007.

The following April, they sent PZ Myers an innocuous looking letter, which he posted on his web site.

My name is Mark Mathis. I am a Producer for Rampant Films. We are currently in production of the documentary film, “Crossroads: The Intersection of Science and Religion”…

We are interested in asking you a number of questions about the disconnect/controversy that exists in America between Evolution, Creationism and the Intelligent Design movement.

Notice, Mathis does not say, “Hello, I’m doing a movie called Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed that tries to make Darwinists look like crypto-nazis out to destroy all that is good and holy by oppressing and censoring the truth about Intelligent Design.” He fed Myers a carefully crafted description that alluded to certain things that were something similar to the truth, while concealing the fact that he was working on Expelled and intended to use the Myers footage to make Darwinists look bad.

In fact, Colson’s own report shows that Mark Mathis is lying when he claims that the movie started out neutral and gradually became hostile. This was intended to be a movie about alleged “censorship” and “oppression” right from the beginning:

The original idea for Expelled, said co-producer and software engineer Walt Ruloff, came to him when he was working on a project with a group of biotechnologists and learned “that there was a whole series of questions that could not be asked.”The prevailing ideology among many scientists—it turned out—he concluded, was keep your mouth shut, take the research money, and publish only the data that fits with “the party line.” The issue that concerns Ruloff and the others behind Expelled is whether the scientific establishment in this country is going to allow genuine “freedom of inquiry,” or simply shut up—and slander—those who do not toe the line.

Given all this, Ben Stein states, “As long as the cause is right, I’m happy to be in an uphill struggle.”

So the producers knew from the start that they were making a movie called Expelled about “the scientific establishment” allegedly trying to stifle freedom of inquiry. But they wouldn’t let PZ Myers know about any of that stuff. Not until it was too late. Muahahahah.

There’s tons of stuff over at ScienceBlogs about the various unethical and dishonest stunts that Ben Stein and company have been pulling in connection with this movie, so suffice it to say that when Colson calls it a “myth,” he’s only adding his own name to the Hall of Shame this movie is building around itself.

Myth #2: The film is anti-science.

Wrong again. Many distinguished scientists were interviewed for this film and given the chance to express their views. Just like their Darwinist counterparts, the advocates of intelligent design and their supporters who are interviewed are there to talk about science, not to dismiss it.

Or more precisely, they’re there to subvert it, not to dismiss it. The goal of creationism, including ID, is to try to appropriate scientific validity for their own superstitious arguments, so naturally they’re not going to try and undermine the authority and credibility of science per se. They want to make science into a yes-man for whatever doctrines they care to preach, but they want it to be an authoritative yes-man, so that it will give believers another reason to believe.

There’s no question, however, that this movie seeks to destroy what science actually does, which is to discern between the things we would like to believe and the things which are actually true. No matter how many Nazi film clips you play while talking about Darwin, the theory of evolution still accurately describes the way in which new species arise via descent with modification from common ancestors. By attacking evolution, Stein and company are most definitely attacking science. But more importantly, by saying you should attack science whenever it contradicts your preconceived ideas, and by calling such attacks a righteous cause, Stein and company are assaulting the very freedom of inquiry that he claims to be defending. It’s hard to be much more anti-science than that!

Having exhausted his list of things he can call “myth” with a straight face, Colson next turns to a bit of jocularity.

Myth #3: Ben Stein, the actor and writer who hosts the movie, has lost his mind.

…I have known Stein well for years, and he is as bright as a button and anything but out of his mind.

“Bright as a button”? Maybe so, but as Forrest Gump’s mama used to tell him, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Maybe he just hasn’t caught on to the Internet yet, or maybe he’s expecting God to divinely intervene to protect him from the consequences of all the lying and deception which he and his associates are busily spreading as part of the meta-plot of the movie. Then again, considering how notoriously gullible Christians are about that whole persecution thing, maybe it’s not so stupid after all.

On a serious note, Stein and his film’s producers explained that the mud that people are flinging at him is just one small example of what happens to people who question Darwinian orthodoxy.

Ah, right on cue. Mud-slinging usually involves slander, which is saying things that are unkind and untrue. The criticisms of the Expelled movie, however, are not untrue, they are documented reports of actual misconduct and dishonesty by the producers and host. Jesus said, “By their fruits you shall know them,” but apparently that’s not the case if they’re crafty enough to pull the “only Darwinists say bad things about my fruit” ploy. The voice of the prophetic watchdog, who rebukes believers for their sins, has apparently been silenced in today’s Christian church. Gullibility and tribalism reign.

Myth #4: Popular author and atheist Richard Dawkins tells Ben Stein in this film that there could have been a designer of life on earth, but it would have had to have been “a higher intelligence” that had itself evolved “to a very high level . . . and seeded some form of life on this planet.”

Well, actually . . . that one is not a myth. He really did say it—striking admission, though it is.

And out of context, though it is. Here is Richard Dawkins’ re-telling of the incident, with the omitted details re-included:

Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It’s the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots (“oh NOOOOO, of course we aren’t talking about God, this is SCIENCE”) and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn’t rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar — semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such ‘Directed Panspermia’ was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent ‘crane’ (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe). Organized complexity cannot just spontaneously happen. That, for goodness sake, is the creationists’ whole point, when they bang on about eyes and bacterial flagella! Evolution by natural selection is the only known process whereby organized complexity can ultimately come into being. Organized complexity — and that includes everything capable of designing anything intelligently — comes LATE into the universe. It cannot exist at the beginning, as I have explained again and again in my writings.

As a myth-buster, Colson fails so badly that he not only fails to debunk the first three of his chosen “myths,” but he’s even guilty of helping to create a new myth in the fourth example. Amazing how this little movie project seems to taint everyone who tries to defend it, isn’t it?

It would be fun to spend some time in Chapter 6, just because it’s such familiar ground. But the creationist distortions, omissions, and outright deceptions which fill this chapter are well-documented elsewhere, so let’s just hit the highlights. In particular, I’d like to look at the ways in which Geisler and Turek’s approach to evolution manifests a corrosive and poisonous brand of “science” that is inherently hostile to the real thing.

Geilser and Turek begin by invoking Sagan’s ghost to try and create the impression that there’s a correlation between the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the search for Intelligent Design. Unfortunately, they shoot themselves in the foot again by citing the brain as a structure so complex that it could not have arisen naturally.

Sagan realized that the human brain has the information content of twenty million books. He also realized that’s drastically more specified and complex than a string of prime numbers. Then why did he think the simpler message required an intelligent being but not the one twenty million books long?… If intelligent human beings can’t create anything close to the human brain, why should we expect nonintelligent natural laws to do so?

The Darwinist response will usually involve “natural selection.” Is this sufficient to account for new life forms? After all it’s a long way from one cell to the human brain.

Oops. There are approximately six billion people on the planet earth right now, and every single one of us received our twenty mega-book brain by the same non-intelligent biological processes by which the single fertilized egg (“one cell”) multiplies, differentiates, and develops into an adult human being. What Geisler and Turek claim that natural processes cannot do, we routinely observe natural processes doing, literally billions of times, over a few relatively short decades.

It seems counter-intuitive. It boggles the layman’s mind that such simple chemical laws could produce anything so complex. And yet it does. Not only that, but it does it new every time. You don’t have your mother’s memories, talents, and other neural connections. Your brain developed on its own, and formed its own connections—20,000,000 book’s worth, and God never opened up your skull for any manual neural welding. So right off the bat, Geisler and Turek confront us with obvious evidence that the power of Nature is vastly more sophisticated and capable than we would normally imagine it to be. And what do they do with this evidence? They ignore it completely.

On to the tour. We’ve got all our standard creationist canards here. We’ve got the distorted distinction between “microevolution” vs. “macroevolution” (p. 140). We’ve got the “survival of the fittest is a tautology” argument (same page). We’ve got the “Genetic limits of macroevolution” argument (p. 142), without mentioning the fact that no scientist of any stripe has ever succeeded in identifying the molecular mechanisms which would be required to enforce such limits. We’ve got the “but it’s still a bacteria (fruit fly, dog, etc)” objection (same page). We’ve got the “irreducible complexity” argument (p. 144). We’ve got the “Nonviability of transitional forms” argument (p. 148), which I didn’t find a link for but which is easily dealt with by remembering that evolution predicts the propagation of successful variations, which means there won’t be any “half-fit” transitions. And we’ve got the “molecular isolation” argument (p. 148), which unfortunately is phrased in such vague terms that I can’t quite make out what it is they’re claiming as the “evidence” (something about unspecified “protein sequences” that supposedly need to be transitional too, and allegedly are not).

Moving on to page 151, we’ve got the quote-out-of-context that makes it sound like Darwin is confessing that geology disproves evolution, due to a lack of transitional forms, and on the next page, a similar misquote of Steven Jay Gould made to sound like punctuated equilibrium disproves evolution. There’s the creationist version of the Cambrian “Explosion” (p. 152), with no mention (of course) of recent discoveries regarding the precursors to the Cambrian era and the gaps that have lately been filled it, and the primitive nature of the various “body plans” that appeared in the Cambrian. We’ve got Wells’ claim that Cambrian-era evolution resembles a lawn more than a tree (p. 153). We’ve got the argument that a progression of fossils does not prove common descent. We’ve got the “fossils don’t preserve soft tissues” argument (both on same page). And of course, we’ve got innumerable arguments about how scientists are all biased, ignoring evidence, stifling criticism, etc, etc, etc. for which responses can be found in the Index to Creationist Claims.

It goes on like that for pages, and it’s standard creationist fare. The point I want to make is that Geisler and Turek are clearly advocating a kind of “science” that “works” only in the sense that it leads to a particular desired conclusion.

As we have seen, science is a search for causes, and there are only two types of causes: intelligent and nonintelligent (natural). The Darwinists’ claim that Intelligent Design is not science is based on their biased definition of science. But that’s arguing in a circle! If your definition of science rules out intelligent causes beforehand, then you’ll never consider Intelligent Design science.

Geisler and Turek pack a lot of distortion into that one short paragraph, starting with the redefinition of science from being a method of understanding how the real world works to being “a search for intelligent and/or unintelligent causes.” Superstition would qualify as “science” under Geisler and Turek’s definition, because all superstition needs to do is to attribute something to an intelligent and/or magical cause (just like ID does). Likewise, Geisler and Turek redefine the “Darwinists” definition of science, portraying it as a biased refusal to consider the possibility of intelligent causes. But the problem with Intelligent Design is not that “Darwinists” refuse to consider the possibility of intelligent design, it’s that ID proponents have yet to define, in scientifically meaningful terms, exactly what is meant, and measured, by such terms as “intelligent,” “design,” “purpose,” and so on.

It’s important to notice that, in presenting this distorted pseudo-science as being the “open-minded” and “unbiased” alternative to mainstream science, Geisler and Turek are not merely attacking one scientific conclusion (common descent), they’re attacking the foundation of science itself, and the objective methodology it requires in order to function as science. There are time-tested and proven techniques for making observations, forming hypotheses, analyzing the results, and making further observations, in order to reach reliable and scientific conclusions. Intelligent Design uses none of them. It attributes an observation to an intelligent cause, and then declares an end to it. The desired conclusion has been reached, no further questions allowed.

Now, one can question the wisdom of continuing to look for a natural cause of life. William Dembski, who has published extensive research on Intelligent Design, asks, “When does determination [to find a natural cause] become pigheadedness? … How long are we to continue a search before we have the right to give up the search and declare not only that continuing the search is vain but also that the very object of the search is nonexistent?”

My suspicion is that Dembski, Geisler and Turek would answer such questions very differently if the object of one’s search were God. However, they are fair questions, and the response is that the search for answers is justified by the fact that we keep finding them—at least when we use genuine science, and not the alternative. Though we do not yet understand everything there is to know about the origin of life, we are learning a lot about how nature operates under such conditions. Intelligent Design proponents, meanwhile, are learning nothing about how nature works. They’ve given God (in His disguise as the Intelligent Designer) full credit for creating complex structures ex nihilo, and thus any further inquiry into origins would only produce more nihilo. Additional ID research would merely be “pigheaded.”

Geisler and Turek’s version of “science” is not a tool for discovering new truth, nor is it a tool for revealing where our existing understanding might be wrong. Geisler and Turek’s version of “science” is based on philosophy (i.e. theology) and is useful only for confirming the answers they already believed, without raising any new questions or objections. It is quite literally an anti-science, a ploy that seeks not to add to their knowledge, but to subtract from it any and all displeasing discoveries. By undirected natural processes alone, Nature turns a single fertilized egg into an adult human being with a brain containing 20,000,000 books worth of interconnected neurons, thus demonstrating its sophistication and power. Only through ignorance can we ignore that power, turn our backs on its readily-available pool of scientific answers, and blithely and superstitiously reach the conclusions Geisler and Turek want us to reach.

I went to attend a screening of the creationist propaganda movie, Expelled, a few minutes ago. Well, I tried … but I was Expelled!

Seriously. They had a uniformed guard pull him out of line and tell him he could not watch the movie that Ben Stein had made about him. But that wasn’t enough. Not only was he not allowed to see the movie, they evicted him from the theater completely, apparently just for being PZ Myers!

But wait, there’s more. Apparently the Ben Stein people are equal opportunity ignoramuses who apply their “No Intelligence” policy to themselves as well as imposing it on others. While they kicked out PZ, they failed to bar his guest: Richard Dawkins. So here they are, making a movie that accuses others of oppression and censorship, which they won’t let the “wrong” people see, a movie accusing scientists of unfairly excluding intelligent design, which they unfairly exclude scientists from seeing—and they can’t even get that right!

They need to put up a big sign out front, with a picture of some drooling moron (played by Ben Stein), that says “Attention patrons: Your IQ must be at least this low in order to watch this movie.” That way it will be clear just who is and is not allowed to be there.

If the producers of Expelled are so confident that they can make a strong case of conspiracy against scientists, then before they start showing this to uninformed politicians, they ought to screen it before scientists and historians and philosophers of science, who will be able to judge it on its merits.

Vox’s answer?

Because, PZ, as we’ve already seen with TIA, whenever someone does make a strong case against secular scientists or atheists, these self-proclaimed champions of intellectual discourse suddenly go silent and try to pretend they’ve never heard of it.

Um, yeah. The reason Ben Stein refuses to let qualified scientists review his film is because doing so would silence his critics.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Science is supposed to be a collaborative activity. Why is it organized (and taught) as if it was a competitive activity? How does that affect science? Negatively, by increasing secretiveness and sometimes outright fraud.

The Web is changing all this. The teenagers already grok that the old selfish notions of intellectual property are going by the way of the dodo. They naturally think in terms of networks, not individuals. And thinking in term of newtorks as opposed to a linear, hierarchical, individualistic focus, is necessary for speeding up the advancement of knowledge and societal good.

In other words, it is not important what each individual knows or does, it is important what the interactions between individuals can do, and how the group or community (or global community) learns and acts upon the knowledge.

Thus, education, especially science education, from Kindergarden through post-doc and beyond, should be organized around collaborations, teaching people and letting them practice the networking skills and collaborative learning and action. Individuals will make mistakes and get punished by the group (sometimes as harshly as excommunication). They will learn from that experience and become more collaborative next time. The biggest sin would be selfish non-sharing of information.

But is there more to the story than what he is telling us? Maybe so. After all, he not only continues to support science himself, but he also tells us that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, is on very good terms with science, and ought to share at least some of the responsibility for bestowing (inflicting?) modern science upon the world. If science is truly as evil as his argument would make it seem, that puts Christianity in a paradoxical and morally suspect position of condoning and promoting an evil which may destroy us all. Instead of arguing whether we should get rid of religion OR science, wouldn’t the prudent course of action be to eliminate both?

Personally, I suspect that Vox doesn’t really buy his own argument, otherwise he would be calling for conscientious men and women to oppose science, and would be arguing that Christianity has been against it all along. His goal is not to prove that science is truly evil, but is rather a classic deployment of the Cold War strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction. Threaten my religion if you dare (he seems to say), but if you take down Christianity, I can take your fancy modern science along with it.

The biggest flaw in Chapter 3 is the one that plagues the book as a whole: Vox has chosen to ignore the central question at issue in the debate between theists and atheists, and therefore he completely fails to take into account the ways in which God’s existence or non-existence figures into the topics under discussion. For good or ill, we’ve got chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and we’ve got people whose belief in afterlife and eternal reward makes them more likely to use these weapons in frankly suicidal ways. Doesn’t it make a difference whether that afterlife really exists, and whether there really is a God (or an Allah) Who blesses and rewards such suicide attacks?

Or take global warming, of which Vox announces himself a skeptic. (Note, by the way, that there’s more to being a skeptic than simply denying someone else’s conclusion.) How many Christians out there “know” that global warming can’t be real or else the Bible would have predicted it? How many believers are convinced that nothing truly bad can be happening to our planet because “God is in control”? Vox blames global warming (“if it happens”) on science, but then turns around elsewhere and argues that politics and commerce are what actually implement scientific discoveries. And both politics and commerce are highly susceptible to the influence of a widespread belief like “God wouldn’t let it happen.” Does it not matter, in this case, whether or not this Divine Protector actually exists? What if He’s not there, and it really is up to us to pay attention, understand the problem and take appropriate countermeasures?

Granted, arguing whether we ought to get rid of religion, or ought to get rid of science, is an exercise in the extravagance of the moot. Nobody is going to be able to get rid of either one, even if they tried. Pass laws against believing if you like, but people aren’t going to stop believing. Likewise with science: you can impede its progress, but people (e.g. terrorists) aren’t going to forget what they already know about nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. So the question isn’t one of simplistic solutions, but rather a problem of practical prudence. Given that such weapons are out there, what steps can we take to eliminate or reduce irresponsible use of this technology (bearing in mind that any use of WMD’s is arguably irresponsible)? And given that changes in the environment have the potential to do us great harm, what measures should we adopt, as a society, to protect ourselves against catastrophe?

If we do have WMD’s out there, whose finger do you want on the button, someone with a rational, reality-based approach to life, or someone who hears voices promising phantom rewards for mass destruction? Or, perhaps, someone who is tuned in to an Almighty, infallible God who loves us and wants what’s best for us? But that’s the issue Vox is avoiding, you see, because if God does not really exist, then the only difference between the last two choices is a purely subjective one. Likewise, if the environment is changing in ways that could cause widespread suffering and death, who do you want to deal with the problem: someone who takes a fact-based analytical approach to understanding the real-world causes and their appropriate solutions, or someone who is disinclined to do more than just sit back and wait for God to do something wonderful? Isn’t it important to know whether that God is ever going to show up and do anything? You can’t properly address the question of religion vs. science without dealing with the problem of whether or not God exists.

Another factor that Vox overlooks is the question of how you would go about dealing with the negative aspects. Let’s agree that it’s silly and overly simplistic to speak in terms of eliminating either science or religion entirely. The prudent thing to do is to address the negative aspects of each in a way that eliminates their harmful effects, or at least minimizes them. For example, I personally would be in favor of efforts to end scientific research into weaponry. Sure, we’d be better off without nuclear weapons, genetically engineered plagues, and various forms of nerve gas. I’ll buy into that whole-heartedly. I want it to be across the board, of course. It won’t do us much good to take the moral high road if our enemies merely exploit their advantage and nuke us all back into the Stone Age. But my preferred answer is to prevent them from possessing the technology either—an arms race is a contest no one wins.

I am also in favor of telling the truth about religion, as the most effective and appropriate way to deal with its negative and harmful aspects. One thing all religions have in common is that nobody ever sees their god(s) show up in real life. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and so on are all believing what men say about the god(s) they worship. Indeed, in the absence of any gods, the only option men have is to put their faith in men, i.e. in what men say and think and feel. (My God, of course, is an exception ) Truth is consistent with itself, and by testing theological claims for self-consistency and consistency with real-world truth, we can accurately and reliably determine that, for example, the Christian Gospel is not the truth. People who think they hear God’s voice in their heads are only hearing their own feelings and impulses, people who think God commands them to smite this or that ethnic group are merely anthropomorphizing their own violent urges.

As I said before, I’m sympathetic to the view that religion per se is not evil or even undesirable. What’s bad are the elements which are so often intrinsic parts of religion: superstition, gullibility, subjectivism and dogmatic self-righteousness. Enlightened religion is possible, but to be enlightened, a religion must be honest about itself, and not rest on the political power of somebody declaring “Because I Said So!” If Jesus and Allah go the way of Zeus and Odin, this need not be the end of religion or the end of God, but merely the end of superstition and credulous fantasy. Good religion does not need either one.

When the 9/11 attackers checked in to a motel room the night before the attacks, one of the first things they did was to cover up a painting of a woman in a low-cut dress. This was not a political measure or an economic measure; they wanted to keep themselves religiously pure in preparation for meeting their God the next morning. Would they have behaved differently if they knew that they were only deluding themselves, and were preparing to lose the only thing they truly owned? Perhaps, and then again perhaps not. I can’t help thinking, though, that the world would be a better place without delusional motivations for murderous suicide, including the suicide of waiting too long for an environmental deus ex machina.

Geisler and Turek began their formal apologetic with a critique of the postmodernist idea that truth cannot be known, using the “Road Runner” strategy of pointing out the fact that postmodernists are standing on thin air. If truth cannot be known, how could you know that it were true that truth cannot be known? Rhetorically speaking, the postmodernists look down, see the yawning chasm below them, and tumble like the hapless Coyote of Saturday morning cartoons.

This tactic backfired badly on Geisler and Turek, however, when they themselves turned around and embraced the postmodernist idea that science is only as reliable as the philosophy it’s allegedly enslaved to. The whole focus of their book is to show that the scientific evidence vindicates their philosophical (theological) approach, but by their own argument, their conclusion is not objective and is simply predetermined by their own underlying philosophy/theology.

Perhaps at some level they instinctively sense the hole they’ve dug themselves into, because their next step is to try and up the ante by claiming that materialism makes reason impossible. It’s a desperate bluff, but one that just might work on some people.

Before we get into Geisler and Turek’s attack on what they call “materialism,” let’s stop for a moment and think. What is materialism? A naive answer to that question might be to say that materialism says only matter is real, and everything that is not made of matter is not real. It is trivial to prove that such an oversimplified version of materialism is false. Matter, for example, has a number of properties or attributes which are not themselves made of matter. If the attributes of matter were made of matter, then the attributes would also have attributes, which in turn would have to be made of matter, which would have attributes, ad infinitum.

But fortunately, this is not the case. Matter has attributes, such as size, mass, location, distance from other particles of matter, etc, that are not themselves made of matter. If we take the naive and oversimplified view that matter = natural and not-made-of-matter = supernatural, we end up with a material world whose attributes are all supernatural. This would unite the natural realm with the supernatural realm (at least in terms of how we defined the concepts), but would do so by incorporating “the supernatural” into the realm that is accessible to scientific verification. And if that were the case, then the scientific approach, which Geisler and Turek dismiss as being “too materialistic,” would be a perfectly valid way to evaluate the truth of supernaturalist claims.

There are other things which are real which are not made of matter, but rather are emergent attributes of material reality. The number ? for example: it’s not made up of molecules or atoms or subatomic particles. It’s not a number that the human imagination invented (in fact, the exact value of ? is impossible to calculate). Yet it is quite real, as are the laws of nature which we discern through science.

Other things exist which are real despite not being made of matter: the act of running, for example, or of thinking, or of dying. Matter is involved with such actions, and the actions require the existence of matter, but if I start running, for example, there is no spontaneous creation or destruction of matter associated with beginning and ending of the act of running. Matter does the running, but the running itself is not made of matter. The action is a change in the state of the matter over time.

Obviously, we’re getting into some pretty subtle and abstract distinctions at this point, but these few considerations should help us to develop a little more sophisticated understanding of what materialism implies. The materialistic view could better be described as the view that objective reality is made up of matter, and of the attributes of matter (including natural laws), and of the changes in state which happen in matter. This definition is probably sufficient to deal with the objections Geisler and Turek raise.

But there’s yet another wrinkle. Scientists, whom Geisler and Turek accuse of being blindered by their materialistic world-view, are actually open to the possibility that this physical cosmos might not be all there is to objective reality. They openly and eagerly consider possibilities like string theory and parallel universes, and higher dimensions whose laws might not only be different from the laws we know, but might in some way define those laws. Scientists, in short, are not at all limited by what Geisler and Turek describe as “materialism.” The only limit on scientific knowledge is verifiability, the principle that you don’t really know that something is true unless and until it can be shown to be consistent with real-world truth.

That said, let’s look at Geisler and Turek’s five-point plan for rejecting mainstream scientific findings based on naive philosophical quibbles.

Here are five reasons why materialism is not reasonable.

First…there is a message in life, technically called specified complexity, that cannot be explained materialistically.

Except that this “specified complexity” is routinely produced, via materialistic processes, every time an organism produces offspring that are not carbon-copies of itself.

Second, human thoughts and theories are not comprised only of materials. Chemicals are certainly involved in the human thought process, but they cannot explain all human thoughts.

This is easy enough to verify. Simply supply the brain with enough ethanol to shut down the material aspects of thinking, and whatever is left over is the immaterial component of thinking. What? You just passed out and all thinking ceased? Imagine that.

Third, if life were nothing more than materials, then we’d be able to take all the materials of life…and make a living being… There’s clearly something beyond materials in life. What materialist can explain why one body is alive and another body is dead?

And who says we can’t make a living organism someday? And materialists can’t explain why one body is alive and another one is dead? Maybe Geisler and Turek can’t, but doctors and biologists might be able to teach them a thing or two if they were willing to listen. Life is a process; complex life is a complex process. Interfere with that process in some way, break the process, and life ceases. Geisler and Turek are making a blatant appeal to superstitious ignorance here.

Fourth, if materialism is true, then everyone in all of human history who has ever had any kind of spiritual experience has been completely wrong.

Oh, no, say it isn’t so! Millions of Muslims, all wrong? Voodoo practitioners and New Age channelers and spiritists and psychics, all mistaken? Billions of Buddhists deceived about enlightenment? If this is true, it would imply that superstitious intuitions were an unreliable source of information! Gasp!

Finally, if materialism is true, then reason itself is impossible. For if mental processes are nothing but chemical reactions in the brain, then there is no reason to believe that anything is true (including the theory of materialism).

Oops, this time it’s the Road Runner falling off the cliff. Truth is consistent with itself. Reality is consistent with itself. What’s so difficult to understand about the idea that a real, material brain might be able to form materially-based perceptions which are consistent with the external, material reality being perceived? That’s all it takes for a material brain to be able to behave in a manner consistent with real-world truth. Material reality has readily-observable properties and attributes, including the properties of being orderly (natural laws) and meaningful (cause and effect). Material brains are a part of that material reality, and share in that order and meaning.

Geisler and Turek are clearly flailing around in desperation at this point, since they’ve as much as admitted that thoughts and knowing and perceiving do have a significant material component, at the very least. Much as they would like to claim that some kind of supernatural component is necessary, they have nothing to offer in terms of telling us what the component would be, or why it would be necessary, or how, exactly, it would contribute anything meaningful to the biochemical processes of registering perceptions and organizing the brain structures involved in thinking and knowing. All they can do is insist that, for some unspecified reason, we ought to feel compelled to doubt the reliability of physical mechanisms and their ability to reflect the true state of the world around them. And that’s a pretty bizarre paranoia.

Vox Day spends much of chapter 2 of The Irrational Atheist arguing that there is no threat to science, either as a profession, a body of knowledge, or a methodology (and therefore Dawkins & Co. are making much ado about nothing). He then writes in Chapter 3:

THE CASE AGAINST SCIENCE

…[T]he New Atheists harbor nearly as great a love for science as they do a hatred for religion. Like the science fetishists who regard science as a basis for dictating human behavior, atheists like to posit that Man has evolved to a point where he is ready to move beyond religion… A more interesting and arguably more relevant question that none of the New Atheists dare to ask is whether science, having produced some genuinely positive results as well as some truly nightmarish evils over the course of the last century, has outlived its usefulness to Mankind. Man has survived millennia of religious faith, but if the prophets of over-population and global warming are correct, he may not survive a mere four centuries of science.

Joseph Smith would be proud.

To hear Vox tell it, one would think that he would have to expect this chapter to sink his whole book, given the degree to which religion is supposed to have embraced science, and indeed even have invented it. As hard as he worked in the last chapter to try and give the impression that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, deserve special credit for sowing the seeds of modern day science, he’s going to spend some time arguing in this chapter that this might have been a very evil thing indeed. Just do the math:

The five major religions of the world, in order of their appearance on the scene, are Hinduism, traditional Chinese folk religion, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. These five religions have approximately 4.85 billion adherents, representing an estimated 71.3 percent of the world’s population in 2007, and they have been around for a collective 11,600 years. During the vast majority of those 116 centuries, the world has not been in any danger of extinction from weapons of any kind, nor has the human race been in serious danger of dying out from pollution, global warming, overpopulation, or anything else. Despite 116 centuries filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of diverse religions, all competing for mindshare, resources, and dominance, the species has not merely survived, it has thrived…

Modern science has only been around for the last 350 years, if we date the scientific method back to the man known as the Father of Science, Galileo Galilei…

So, in only 3 percent of the time that religion has been on the scene, science has managed to produce multiple threats to continued human existence. Moreover, the quantity and lethal quality of those threats appears to be accelerating, as the bulk of them have appeared in the most recent sixth of the scientific era.

Wait a minute, though. 11,600 years? Organized religion hasn’t been around that long. Vox is taking the length of time Hinduism has been around, and the length of time Buddhism has been around, and Christianity, and Islam, and has added them up, as though that number meant anything. It’s like saying, “The temperature on Saturday was 22 degrees and on Sunday it was 24, giving a total temperature of 46 for the weekend.” It’s completely meaningless.

What’s even more striking is that Vox is using this to make a point about the relative importance of science and religion and there’s no need for it. Ok, three centuries is about three percent of 116 centuries, but the 116 centuries figure is completely bogus, and besides, he could just as easily argue that we’ve had organized religions for 70 centuries—3 centuries is still a small percentage. The point he’s trying to make is that religion hasn’t killed us yet, but technology has become a potentially lethal threat in a far smaller time. A 70 century period of religious history would still make the same point, but that’s not enough for Vox. He has to pump up the numbers to make them more impressive. If Dawkins or Harris made a math error like this, Vox would be all over them.

There’s another reason why this is a completely bogus statistic, however. Hinduism is the oldest of the religions he cites, but modern Hinduism isn’t quite the same as the Hinduism of 5,000 B.C. Religions evolve over time (even Christianity has), and the roots of a particular religion may not have a precise starting point. If you look up the history of Hinduism, for example, you’ll find varying estimates of when it actually got started, from 4,500 years ago to upwards of 8 or 9 millennia ago, or possibly more.

The problem with tracing the origin of religion is that it emerged gradually out of a less sophisticated, informal blend of superstition and animism. Yes, you can find “religion” twelve millennia ago, but it was more of the nature spirit, mythological variety. Do we really want to go back to that?

I’ll believe that Vox seriously means what he writes when I hear that he’s given up his computers and Internet connection. He does seem to write as though he meant it though:

[It] is Science, not Faith, which is the factor in the equation that presents a deadly danger to mankind.

This is true of both the military and non-military threats to humanity. While the jury is still out on the precise nature of the threat caused by global warming, there can be no doubt that the scientific method is at least in part responsible for it, along with the threats supposedly posed by overpopulation, pollution, and genetic engineering. Religion simply cannot be held accountable for any of those things, not even overpopulation.

…It was scientists who freely made the choice to develop these theories and, in many cases, the weapons, sometimes in innocence, like Alfred Nobel being stunned to learn that his blasting cap and smokeless explosives would cause him to be remembered as “the merchant of death,” and sometimes in full cognizance of their moral culpability, as in the case of Albert Einstein’s 1939 letter to President Roosevelt written in the hopes of encouraging F.D.R. to build an atomic bomb.

It is not the combination of religion and science, then, but rather the combination of scientists and the scientific method that have created this panoply of mortal dangers to mankind.

Somehow he neglects to mention the fact that Einstein was concerned that the Nazis might be working on their own bomb. The case against science sounds so much stronger when you make scientists look like they invent bombs just because they like blowing up people. But the big factor that Vox overlooks is that science does not tell people what they should do, it merely informs them how to do it, and what the consequences will very likely be if they do. And that’s the real issue here: what should we do with science?

Should we abandon it? Dismantle the Internet, stop making plastics, shut down our hospitals and labs and generators? Is that a responsible use of science? Let people die of new (and old) diseases? Do nothing to learn more about global warming and what, if anything, could be done to avoid disaster?

I don’t think any of us seriously want that, but the important point is that this is not a scientific question. Science can tell you how to build an airliner, how to make it fly, how to navigate it, how to make it more fuel efficient and so on. It takes an ideology to tell you that you should take an airliner and fly it into the World Trade Center. And that’s the important point because as bad as it is when technology is used for harm and death, it’s even worse when the “shoulds” are based on dogmatic ideas that don’t even correspond to any observable objective reality. Tragedy is all the more tragic when it is unnecessary and avoidable.

Science, per se, is not the problem. The misguided “shoulds” are the problem. Science can only tell us how; it’s up to us to decide should or should not. Yes, we’ve gotten along fine up until now because the stakes were lower. There’s only so many people you can smite with a sword, even if God does tell you to do so. But the genie’s out of the bottle now. The stakes are higher. Should or should not is a much more significant question. Would it not be wiser, then, to base our answer on the truth rather than on superstition? Does it really help to wax nostalgic over how the ignorance of the religious ancients prevented them from doing as much harm as they might have liked to do? They used the most effective means available to them, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. We need to do the same, with an emphasis on increasing the good and decreasing the ill.

I’m pretty sure Vox isn’t seriously proposing that we abandon science. He’s just expressing a bit of pique over the suggestion that maybe we ought to outgrow our religious beliefs. (And, incidentally, I do not agree that it is either necessary or desirable to give up religion, though some religions like Christianity do deserve to be exposed as myths.) But whether meant seriously or tongue-in-cheek, Vox’s argument is bogus and foolish. As long as religion continues to tell people what they should do, people will find a workable way to do it, whether they call it science or not. It is the problem of religion, therefore, that needs to be addressed.

By this point, Geisler and Turek have hopelessly confused the crucial distinction between evidence and superstition, and are trying to argue that good science is really bad science, and vice versa.

False science is bad science, and it’s the Darwinists who are practicing it. Their belief in spontaneous generation results from their blind faith in naturalism. It takes tremendous faith to believe that the first one-celled creature came together by natural laws, because that’s like believing 1,000 encyclopedias resulted from an explosion in a printing shop! Atheists can’t even explain the origin of the printing shop, much less the 1,000 encyclopedias. Therefore, we don’t have enough faith to be atheists.

And never mind the fact that theistic evolutionists, whom Geisler and Turek explicitly excluded from their definition of “Darwinists,” look at the scientific evidence and reach the same conclusions. Never mind that the Bible defines faith as “the evidence of things not seen.” No, it’s the “Darwinists” whose “faith” is blind, because they refuse to give superstitious attributions the same weight as genuine evidence.

The next couple sections continue Geisler and Turek’s downward spiral into empty spin and posturing, but before we move on, I’d like to look at a quick example that might help illustrate the difference between superstition and evidence.

The example I’d like to use is the so-called fairy ring. In more superstitious times, people used to think that fairies made those rings, but modern science has suggested a couple of more natural explanations. An Intelligent Design proponent might point out that the circular rings have the appearance of having been created for an intelligent purpose, such as marking out an area for very small persons to dance in. But if we attribute rings of mushrooms to fairies, does that mean that mushrooms are evidence for the existence of fairies?

This is what Geisler and Turek are presenting as “evidence” for a non-natural origin of life. They see features of biology that they do not understand, and they merely attribute these features to a divine cause. Attributing one thing to some invisible cause, however, does not mean that the thing you see is evidence that the invisible thing exists. It’s simply superstition: you are giving credit to something despite being unable to show any real world connection between the cause you claim, and the effect you observe.

On to the next section, where Geisler and Turek very quickly strike out, in terms of their scientific understanding.

In the subsection “Give Time More Time?”, they trot out the tried-and-true tactic of invoking the Second Law of Thermodynamics as “proof” that life could not arise from non-life. Sure, they admit that the Second Law failed miserably to disprove evolution itself (though not quite so frankly as that), but now they claim that it surely must at least forbid abiogenesis. Right? Right?

It would be nice if that were true. After all, things like viruses and prions are not alive, so if Geisler and Turek were applying the Second Law correctly, we could just sit back and let entropy rid the world of viruses, mad cow disease, and so on. But strangely, that’s not what we see in the real world. In real life, organic chemical reactions do happen spontaneously, and do produce increasing complexity even in systems that conform to the Three Laws of Thermodynamics. There’s nothing magically anti-entropic about life, such that the Second Law only affects non-living organisms. The same laws of biochemistry work on the same (non-living) atoms and molecules, regardless of the presence or absence of what we call “life.” Strike One for Team G-T.

Their next swing-and-a-miss is the section called “Give Chance a Chance?” In this section, the authors come perilously close to making a very astute observation.

Chance is a word that we use to describe mathematical possibilities. It has no power of its own. Chance is nothing. It’s what rocks dream about.

If someone flips a fair coin, what’s the chance that it will come up heads? Fifty percent, we say. Yes, but what causes it to come up heads? Is it chance? No, the primary cause is an intelligent being who decided to flip the coin and apply so much force in doing so. Secondary causes, such as the physical forces of wind and gravity, also impact the result of the flip. If we knew beforehand all those variables, we could calculate how the flip would turn out beforehand. But since we don’t know those variables, we use the word “chance” to cover our ignorance.

Ooo, so close. Yes, that’s exactly right, the word “chance” does not describe the actual causes involved, which is why, when scientists are speaking carefully and precisely, they do not attribute the origin of life to random chance. In fact, “random chance” is the complete antithesis of what scientists use to explain origins, because random chance implies that the outcomes are completely unpredictable and therefore impossible to understand scientifically.

Creationists, on the other hand, almost invariably attribute the origin of life to random chance, when speaking of evolution and abiogenesis (which Geisler and Turek insist on describing as “spontaneous generation,” even though that’s a different idea entirely). Creationists imagine that life had an inexplicable, magical origin, and therefore they assume that scientists must also be offering an inexplicable and magical origin. But that’s not at all what real biologists are up to. They are specifically and intentionally studying the processes, laws, and variables whose complex workings combine to produce predictable (and not random) outcomes. These outcomes are undirected, but not random, because they are constrained by rational, understandable, predictable natural laws—the same laws that cause inanimate molecules to combine together to make new cells for the body to grow.

So Strike Two for Team G-T: they almost realized that the science of origins is not about “chance” at all, but about the actual variables, laws, and events by which life can arise from non-life. Sadly, though they realized that chance has nothing to do with it, they had to try and “spin” this fact into some kind of slur against science itself. The count is two strikes, no balls, and Team G-T gets ready to take a swing at science and philosophy.

The statement “science is the only source of objective truth” claims to be an objective truth, but it’s not a scientific truth. The statement is philosophical in nature—it can’t be proven by science—so it defeats itself.

This leads us to perhaps the greatest lesson we can learn from the bad science of the Darwinists: science is built on philosophy. Indeed science is a slave to philosophy.

Notice that Geisler and Turek are not applying this criticism to evolutionary science alone. In their view, what they say is true of all science. This isn’t supposed to be just some flaw in “Darwinist” thinking. Science as a slave to philosophy is how science should be. Geisler and Turek want science to be subjugated to philosophical ideas that cannot be objectively verified. They want to stack the deck in favor of “philosophy” (i.e. theology) over science, because they know that ultimately, science isn’t going to support their theology.

Unfortunately, Geisler and Turek are equivocating over the meaning of “science” here. It’s true that science, in the sense of one narrow branch of applied natural sciences, is not the sole source of objective knowledge. But that’s not all there is to science. Science, at its heart, is the principle that truth is consistent with itself, combined with techniques that help us to differentiate between actual objective truth, and misperceptions due to bias, illusion, and other sources of error. And Geisler and Turek are quite wrong: science as the only reliable source of objective truth is a scientific truth, which we arrive at by applying the scientific principle of observation. We see that science works more reliably than anything else, which is why science has so much status and authority that Geisler and Turek feel the need to claim scientific validity for their own views. Strike Three for Team G-T.

What Geisler and Turek would like to argue is that science is dependent on philosophy, and therefore if you can find some philosophical grounds for disagreeing with science, you can consider yourself entitled to reject the findings of science. What they don’t realize is that the ghost of the Road Runner is going to come back to haunt them. Despite their rejection of post-modernist philosophizing, which they’ve been boasting about in earlier chapters, the argument they’re making now is essentially post-modernist: the findings of science are meaningless and unreliable, and are only given meaning as one applies his or her own personal philosophy to them. Scientific “truth” is only as true as the philosophy behind it.

Of course, Team G-T would argue that this doesn’t matter, since their philosophy IS The Truth. But they have no way to prove it, because they’ve just argued that you have to make their philosophical assumptions first, before looking at the evidence (aka doing the science). By making science into the slave of philosophy, they’ve pulled the rug out from under their whole book (meep meep!), because no matter what scientific or historical evidence they present, the scientific evaluation of that evidence is going to demand that you make their philosophical assumptions first, which turns the whole thing into circular reasoning.

So a brave, if somewhat underhanded, effort by Team G-T, but I’m afraid that they’ve struck out again. There are still quite a few innings left, for good or ill, so stay tuned…

As Dawkins himself admits, the overwhelming majority of scientists throughout centuries in which the scientific process was developed were religious, or at least claimed to be:

Newton did indeed claim to be religious. So did almost everybody until—significantly I think—the nineteenth century, when there was less social and judicial pressure than in earlier centuries to profess religion, and more scientific support for abandoning it.

What’s significant about this statement is the way it contradicts the notion that the Catholic Church had been dogmatically opposing Science, as evidenced by its notorious trial of Galileo Galilee, all throughout the Dark Ages and the Renaissance and well into the eighteenth century.

Notice, the contrary position is set up as being the view that the Church was opposing science, and not just trying to assert ultimate authority over science (including veto power over any conclusions deemed heretical). The conflict between religion and reason has always been over the issue of authority, and has not been (until recently) an attempt by religion to openly oppose scientific facts. Even in the Dark Ages, they weren’t that dumb.

But it suits Vox’s purposes to pretend that “the other guys” are trying to claim a more overt hostility than was actually the case. Just give an example of a scientist with Christian beliefs and voilà, he’s proven that “the other guys” are wrong. But just in case that’s not enough “proof” for you, he has some more ad hominem arguments that ought to convince you.

Edward Gibbon, the author of the classic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire famously describes them as “priest-ridden, superstitious, dark times.” Of course, it can be reasonably suggested that anyone who is fascinated enough with the Roman Empire to write a million-and-a-half words in six volumes about it, and is blindly prejudiced enough to blame its ultimate collapse on a religion that did not become commonplace until centuries after Juvenal was satirizing the mad decadence of imperial Roman society, is perhaps unlikely to be the most accurate guide in these matters.

Call this the “Judge Jones Response.” Anytime someone comes to a conclusion that is unfavorable to Christianity, it’s safe to say that they must be unreasonably biased against religion, and therefore you can consider yourself justified in rejecting their conclusions without even needing to look at the evidence (no matter how well-documented that evidence may be). It’s all about personalities, about Us versus Them. Gibbon was clearly one of Them (even though his book does not claim that Christianity is solely responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire), and therefore if he says that religion played a role in the downfall of Rome, that just goes to show that Christianity was innocent, and might even have been a positive influence. And never mind the actual history of the Middle Ages.

What is fascinating is that this modern misconception of medieval times is at least partly based upon the romantic perspective of a fourteenth-century Italian poet, Francesco Petrarca, a Christian humanist better known in English as Petrarch, who is considered to have created the very concept of the Dark Ages…

Theodore Mommsen, whose essay on Petrarch was recently selected as one of the thirteen most important critical essays on the Italian Renaissance, makes a convincing case of how it was Petrarch’s fixation on Rome’s past glories and his awe of its grandiose ruins led him to conclude, mostly on the basis of his nationalistic contempt for Germanic domination of what had once been an Italian empire, that he lived in an age of tenebrae, or darkness.

The Dark Ages, you see, were invented by a disappointed Italian nationalist who was upset that the Holy Roman Empire was actually German and not really Roman at all. Never mind that, for example, religious superstitions stifled the study of human anatomy for 1500 years after Galen (except in Arabic countries), or that the history of medieval astronomy is a history of what the Arabs were doing. The Arabs were also making significant advances in chemistry centuries before medieval Christians began to turn from superstitious alchemy into more scientific approaches. The early Greeks dabbled in many sciences, including geology, but Christian Europe in the Middle Ages is remarkably slow to pick up where the Greeks left off, looking into geology only in the 17th century (again, preceded centuries earlier by Arabs).

Not that I blame Vox for taking the ad hominem approach to defending the idea of Church and science. I know I certainly wouldn’t want to try and undertake the task of producing evidence that the medieval Church supported and encouraged free scientific inquiry and a rational approach to understanding the world around us. There’s just not that much material to work with. Certainly, some interesting technical advances were made, such as the heavy plow and the artesian well, but Christian Europe lagged noticeably behind the Arabs and even the previous Greek civilizations in terms of real scientific progress.

What makes medieval history a particularly touchy subject is not just that it was a period of Dark Ages, but that it ought to have been a Golden Age. The influence of the Christian Church over the State under Constantine was something modern conservative Christians have wet dreams about. America never has been and never will be as emphatically Christian as the Roman Empire under Constantine. Yes, the people weren’t all Christians (and if Rome couldn’t make them all Christians, Washington surely never will). But that doesn’t matter. The theme we hear time and time again is that God will bless the nation that turns to Him, and that’s exactly what Constantine did do. The Middle Ages ought to be an example to us of the great prosperity, cultural advances, and general well-being that ought to exist when God is allowed to lead the State. Instead, it’s an example of stifled scientific inquiry and the collapse of an advanced imperial civilization into a fractured feudal society. And don’t get me started on Byzantine history! The nation-state-empire that embodies the ideal of church-state fusion has become the by-word for political intrigue, corruption, and all-around sneakiness.

Small wonder, then, that Vox prefers to imply that those who point out such things are icky people. You know, intellectuals and Marxists and stuff.

It is not within the scope of this book to consider why many Enlightenment intellectuals were opposed to Christianity in general and the Church in particular, it is enough to simply note that this was the case…

This was particularly true of the French Encyclopédistes, and the influence of their landmark Encyclopédie paved the way for modern rationalism and the French Revolution, as well as firmly fixing the notion of the irrationality, superstition, and tyranny of the previous millennium in the public consciousness. By waging a fierce intellectual war against Religion in the name of Reason and by defining the two concepts in inherent opposition to each other, it was the philosophes who were responsible for weakening that pre-nineteenth century social and judicial pressure to which Richard Dawkins referred…

Thomas Riggins, in the Marxist journal Political Affairs, notes that many Enlightenment intellectuals were not opposed to religion in itself, but rather to religion being used by “dictatorial religious elements using religion for their own selfish purposes.” In a variant on this theme, I suggest that the New Atheists are not actually particularly interested in defending science in itself, but are deeply afraid of science reaching a friendly rapprochement with religion.

Since we have already established that the opposition of Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris to religion does not stem from any rational fears for science as a body of knowledge, a profession, or a process, and that there was no significant historical enmity between science and religion, it is apparent that the New Atheists’ stated desire to destroy religion must stem from another source.

What Vox is establishing, far better than he intends, is that Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris have very good reason to sound a warning. The Dark Ages happened once before, and by arguing that they really weren’t all that bad, Vox is demonstrating that he wouldn’t be too unhappy to see them happen again. Nor is he alone in this attitude. Be concerned, America. Be very concerned.

(1) ID predicts that although there will be occasional degeneration of biological structures (both macroscopic and microscopic), most structures will exhibit function and thus serve a purpose…

(2) ID predicts that the cell would have such engineering features [as nanotechnology, machines, etc]

(3) ID has always predicted that there will be classes of biological systems for which Darwinian processes fail irremediably, and conservation of information is putting paid to this prediction.

Let’s look at these more closely and see how they differ from actual scientific predictions.

The first point I notice is that these aren’t so much predictions as they are a re-hash of the stock ID talking points. “Prediction” number 1 rehashes the creationist argument that vestigial organs and junk DNA have functions, and therefore evolution is wrong. It’s nicely hedged: only “most” structures need to have a function, so even if it turns out that junk DNA really is junk and vestigial organs really are vestigial, Dembski can still claim the win as long as there are a lot of biological structures that do have functions. “Prediction” 2 rehashes Behe’s argument that if parts of a cell function like “machines,” they are nanotech, and therefore need a designer. And “prediction” 3 repeats Dembski’s own No Free Lunch argument.

What Dembski is saying, more or less, is simply that he predicts ID will win in the end, or in other words, that evolution will be proven wrong, somehow, to at least some extent. What he’s not saying, and cannot say, is that there exists any actual ID theory that could be cited as providing objective support for these predictions.

In a scientific explanation, the theorist proposes a mechanism with sufficient specific detail that anyone can work out what consequences would result from that mechanism operating in real life. Dembski does not do this. There is no specified mechanism for Intelligent Design that allows us to objectively determine that, for example, an intelligent designer would have no wasted parts or obsolete mechanisms in any biological structures. Creationists have taken the notion that the discovery of new things can be used as an argument claiming that evolution is wrong, and Dembski is simply hopping on the bandwagon.

Likewise, intelligent design gives us no reason to believe that the designer of Nature would not use natural mechanisms in his design. There’s no objective reason to predict that machines ought to be present inside cells. The ID “prediction” here is simply a post hoc observation (wow, cells are complicated) being given a superstitious interpretation (gosh, if we can’t intuitively grasp how natural mechanisms could produce such results, some intelligent agent must have done it).

The “No Free Lunch” argument comes the closest to being a genuine scientific prediction, but unfortunately it’s a debunked prediction. Dembski is building his argument on the idea that there is one way that won’t work, but that’s not the same as proving that no way will work. It’s like finding a highway that doesn’t go to Sacramento. That road may not go there, but that’s hardly a proof that no roads lead to Sacramento.

If ID were a valid scientific theory, Dembski would be able to show us the proposed mechanisms of ID so that other people could work out whether or not he has correctly derived the predictions (consequences) that ought to result from those mechanisms in operation. He can’t do that, because ID is a post hoc, superstitious attribution based on the argument from ignorance. So instead, he offers us his best guesses/hopes regarding what he expects to be able to do someday, and calls those “predictions.” And they are; they’re just not scientific predictions.

Geisler and Turek are really hitting their stride now, and as I read over their section entitled “Good Science vs. Bad Science,” two words come to mind: bad faith.

It is commonly believed that the so-called creation-evolution debate (now often called the intelligent design vs. naturalism debate) entails a war between religion and science, the Bible and science, or faith and reason…

Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. The creation-evolution debate is not about religion versus science or the Bible versus science—it’s about good science versus bad science. Likewise, it’s not about faith versus reason—it’s about reasonable faith versus unreasonable faith. It may surprise you to see just who is practicing the bad science and just who has the unreasonable faith.

Do tell. If there’s anything surprising about the creationist screed that follows the above intro, it’s the degree to which the authors are willing to distort the facts, appeal to fallacious reasoning, and in general try to deceive and mislead the reader into concluding that good science is bad science and that naive superstition is good science. They’re not even trying to get it right; they’re presenting their arguments in bad faith.

Logically, there are only two types of causes: intelligent and non-intelligent (i.e. natural).

Right away they’re misleading their readers. First of all, they’re not defining what “intelligent” means, in any quantifiable or measurable terms, so how can they divide causes into intelligent causes versus non-intelligent? It’s a meaningless criterion. Instead of giving us a scientific distinction that can be objectively measured, they simply appeal to intuitive, superstitious animism. “It doesn’t seem to have been created by any natural process that I’m familiar with, therefore some intelligent being must have designed it.”

Notice the implicit flattery here. “You, dear Christian reader, are so wise and so knowledgeable that you can tell just by looking at something whether it is or is not possible for nature alone to produce it. Other people have to devote years of study and hard work to understand all the intricate and subtle mechanisms of biology, but you, being so spiritually enlightened and broad-minded, just seem to know it all instinctively. You do not need to have any respect for the academic qualifications of those who are experts in their fields, because your knowledge is so superior, and theirs is merely wrong. You are wiser than all your teachers, because you agree with us.”

Unfortunately, on the question of first life, Darwinists like Dawkins and Crick rule out intelligent causes before they even look at the evidence.

This is one of the most commonly-repeated lies that creationists tell. It’s not that Darwinists rule out intelligent causes before they look at the evidence. They rule out intelligent causes because they look at the evidence. Sure, there are some who are unabashedly materialistic, and who will proudly tell you that the material universe is all there is, and supernatural explanations are rightly and properly off the table. However, there are plenty of others who look at the same evidence, open-mindedly, and still come to the same conclusions. That’s why we have theistic evolutionists. If the scientific evidence happens to be consistent with the beliefs of the materialists, that’s not the materialists’ fault, and it’s certainly not a sign that the materialists are ignoring the evidence. That’s just the way things happened to work out.

Unfortunately, creationists don’t have any actual evidence in favor of their own preferred conclusions, so Geisler and Turek have little choice but to drive on with their slanders against scientists, buttressed with snippets of quotes carefully selected and removed from their original contexts so that, surprise surprise, it sounds like the scientists are all in a tizzy about the “facts” not supporting their “presuppositions.” And for good measure, they throw in Fred Hoyle’s (now dated) ideas about panspermia, that perhaps life on earth could have been designed by aliens.

Big misstep for Mssrs. G and T. If you’re going to launch into a tirade about how evolution is the result of scientists being unable to let themselves consider the possibility of intelligent design, you really shouldn’t cite examples of scientists considering the possibility of intelligent design. Once again, Geisler and Turek have exposed their own lie. It’s not that scientists won’t consider intelligent design, it’s that ID has been considered, and has been found wanting. Not because of any metaphysical/philosophical bias against intelligent designers, but because the evidence isn’t really consistent with that possibility. No matter how attractive our psychological makeup may find superstitious animism, simply ascribing complicated things to unknown persons is not the same thing as finding evidence that these mysterious designers actually exist.

In short, this whole section is nothing but a long appeal to the ad hominem fallacy: evolution is wrong because some of the people who agree with it are materialists. What’s particularly ironic about this is that Geisler and Turek themselves are just as materialistic about creation versus evolution. The whole reason they’re bent on denying evolution is because they do not believe that the creation story could be true if God were merely the Creator in some spiritual sense. No matter how much they voice their contempt for materialism, the bottom line is that they take it for granted that material reality is the only genuine reality, and that unless divine Creation is materially true, it is not really true at all.

And therein lies the rub. If divine Creation was indeed a material event in the material universe, then the material evidence ought to be available to even materialistic scientists. Never mind any alleged bias against the supernatural, because you don’t need to even get into the supernatural. Just provide the material evidence that supports the material reality of material Creation—if you can. Geisler and Turek can’t, and so they have to resort to double-talk, slander, and distortions to try and make good science (and good scientists) sound bad.

It’s bad faith, in both senses. Creationists aren’t being honest in the things they say (bad faith in the first sense), and the only reason they’re making the argument at all is because they have put their faith in a God who does not show up in real life (bad faith in the second sense), forcing them to resort to speculations and misdirections in order to try and suggest that billions of years ago, somewhere, something unknown might somehow have done something vaguely similar to what they believe God is supposed to have done. That’s as close as they can get to finding “evidence” that God actually exists in real life, and it falls miserably short of adequate. Hence their rage, and bad faith, against scientists.

In other words if there had already been detailed, specific accounts already published in the peer reviewed literature, Mr. Matzke would have felt no need to come up with a model himself. Which means that prior to 2003 the Neodarwinist facile, hand-waving assurances the that BF evolved were nothing but empty bluster.

If that was the state of the scientific knowledge of the origin of the BF in 2003, what has happened since then to justify your assertion that such natural processes have been discovered and the Behe is merely denying what we do know about such processes, and trying to discredit those who have discovered them. But where are the articles in the published literature? Why don’t you provide the cites? Or is it enough for you to simply assert, “It is so!?

What the commenter forgets, and what Behe would like us all to forget, is that it is not scientists who claim to have proven that the flagellum evolved naturally, but Behe who claimed to have proven that no such evolution is possible. The scientific issue, therefore, is not whether or not the flagellum evolved, but whether or not flagellar evolution can be conclusively ruled out.

Behe’s original mistake was that he originally tried to frame the flagellum argument as an actual, testable scientific hypothesis, based on the notion of irreducible complexity. In Behe’s words, “Without any one of a number of parts, the flagellum does not merely work less efficiently; it does not work at all. Like a mousetrap it is irreducibly complex and therefore cannot have arisen gradually.” The problem is that if you take away certain parts of the flagellum, you get a structure that, granted, does not function as a flagellum. This is not the same as being a structure that does not work at all, however. It functions as a Type-Three Secretory System, thus falsifying Behe’s claim that the flagellum as a structure is irreducible. Evolution does not require that the predecessors of a flagellum all function as flagella; it merely requires that they have some function which promotes the natural selection of that structure.

Behe’s response was to abandon the specific and objectively testable claim of irreducibility, and resort instead to the Beggar’s Argument: no matter how much you give him, he insists that more is necessary. It’s a subjective criterion, because there’s no objective specification of how much evidence is “enough”—it’s a moving target, a quantity that has no precise value beyond “more than whatever you happen to have.”

Behe’s insistence on ever-more specific detail is like a Holocaust denier insisting that unless you can document the names of each and every Jew that died in WWII, their specific cause, time, and place of death, and what they had for breakfast the morning before, you can’t prove that the Holocaust happened. The Beggar’s Argument is a form of denial. Anyone can look at the evidence available and then arbitrarily dismiss it as “not enough.” The true scientist, however, does not spend more time denying knowledge than acquiring it. Mere denial, on subjective and arbitrary grounds, is not science.

True science must be based on the principle that the truth is consistent with itself. If we grant this fundamental principle, we can look at the evidence together and easily see that the evidence is much more consistent with an evolutionary origin for the flagellum than it is with the ID non-explanation. For example, we know enough about evolutionary theory to know that it operates by non-directed interactions of organic molecules. This means that there is no directed or intentional goal that would drive it to move in a consistently “upward” direction: it might go upwards, it might wander, it might even backtrack at times. A so-called “irreducibly complex” structure needn’t arise by incremental additions to simpler structures, but would be more likely to arise by reduction of a more complex but non-irreducible structure that arose by incremental improvements coupled with a certain amount of “wandering” (i.e. co-opting of suitable structures for new and different functions).

This tells us what sort of evidence we ought to expect to encounter if evolution is true. For example, we ought to find structures that are similar in structure but different in function (like Type 3 Secretory Systems). And of course, that’s what we do find. More than that, we find abundant evidence that natural laws do exist and do cause things to interact in subtle and complex ways that produce results which seem far more sophisticated than we would naively expect nature alone to be able to produce.

We do not, by contrast, find evidence supporting the existence or influence of any Intelligent Designer, beyond the observations that are arbitrarily and superstitiously ascribed to Him. We know much about the nature of Nature, and how nature produces its results, and the cause-and-effect relationships that connect the things we see with the natural causes that produce them. Nothing like that is true about the so-called Intelligent Designer. And not only do we not know such things about this Designer, ID proponents actively oppose any attempts to find out!

While evolutionary theory is specific and detailed enough that we can analytically determine what sorts of evidence would and would not be consistent with it, ID is a complete non-starter, scientifically. Because we know nothing (and are forbidden to ask) about the motives, methods, and characteristics of the Designer, we have no way to determine what sorts of evidence ought to be produced by this alleged design process until after we look at what the evidence is. It’s strictly a matter of waiting for the arrow to hit before drawing the bulls-eye around it.

Even Behe, for all his personal incredulity, cannot say for sure that a truly Intelligent Designer might not be willing and able to design a natural system capable of evolving a flagellum, in ways that fallible mortals might find difficult to follow. No doubt if we are able, someday, to document a step-by-step process for evolving a flagellum, you can count on Behe to simply backtrack and claim that the Designer must have designed evolution.

Of course, theistic evolutionists have been doing that since the mid-1800′s. Scientifically, it’s a wise approach: though it assigns the credit to God in some ineffable sense, at least it has the dignity and integrity to focus on understanding the processes by which Creation actually works. And that’s the thing that gives science its value and authority. Behe’s subtractive approach to science is an insult to God’s intelligence, and a defiant refusal to acknowledge that God’s ways might actually be higher than his own.

To a Darwinist, you see, there is no distinction between human beings and animals. We all came about by chance; we are made of the same “stuff,” and we all end up as nothing more than dust. Instead of recognizing humans as bearers of God’s image, Darwinism sees us as nothing more than competitively successful bipeds with opposable thumbs. Forget any talk of human dignity.

Oops, little slip there: it wasn’t Darwin who said man was made of the dust of the earth. That was Genesis 1. But that’s not the Big Lie.

Colson claims that Darwinists see no distinction between human beings and animals. Lie number one. Did Colson actually research what “Darwinists” claim about the distinctiveness of the human species? Of course not. There are indeed some people who see humans as being worth no more than any other animal, and yes, usually they do believe in evolution (just like they believe in gravity and atoms and other well-documented scientific conclusions). Such people, however, are not in the majority, and in fact most evolutionists have no problem at all with the idea that man is more significant than other animals.

If you check up on who’s actually making what claims, you’ll find that it is creationists, and not evolutionists, who are the most vocal and insistent about claiming that evolution implies an inferior view of human value. And that’s not too surprising, because if you look at what the creationists say, and what it implies, you can see that they do indeed have an inferior view of human worth.

Fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, for instance, will pay lip service to the idea of human worth, as Colson does, based on “bearing God’s image.” In other words, we aren’t valuable in and of ourselves, we’re simply assigned a value based on someone else’s worth. And what does this assigned value count for? Not much, since according to conservative Christian teaching, the great majority of those who “bear God’s image” are going to bear it all the way down to Hell, where that image will be subjected to cruel, relentless, and unceasing torture. So much for human dignity!

There’s nothing undignified or disrespectful about embracing the truth concerning ourselves, nor does it in any way diminish the worth of man to say that his dignity and worth are intrinsic rather than being arbitrarily loaned to him by Someone else. Indeed, the theistic view of man is the one that sees less value in a person, because it always holds out the caveat that God loaned you your human worth, and He can withdraw it at any time if you fail to live up to His standards of faith and obedience.

In conservative Christian theology, the ideal role (and thus the inherent value) of man is that of a slave. “Freedom doesn’t mean doing what you want, it means doing what God wants,” as many a New-Speaking pastor has proclaimed. But more than just being a slave, man is called to be a joyful slave—not only is he bound to serve with “all his heart, all his mind, all his soul and all his strength,” he is bound to enjoy his servitude!

We don’t treat our animals that way. Hopefully we treat them humanely, and if we put them to work, at least we keep them well-fed and healthy as a reward for their contribution. But we don’t demand that they must always enjoy obeying us. So please don’t lecture me about how understanding evolution puts man into a role that’s worse than what theists imagine man is worth relative to God. It does not dignify man to make him a slave in both mind and body.

But before proceeding, it is intriguing to at least consider the possibility that it is not the threat to science as process that so offends scientists, but rather the potential threat to science as profession that has whipped some scientists into an angry lather.

After all, scientists understand better than most how their bread gets buttered, and no one, not even the most dedicated idealist, is ever pleased with the possibility of the butter being taken away.

Naturally, this is a completely spurious ad hominem, as is shown by the fact that the efforts of the pseudoscientists are not threatening the jobs of anyone. Science teachers would still teach science even if the creationists got their way—it’s just that the science would be watered down with superstitions and supernatural “explanations.” Researchers would still be able to do research, they just wouldn’t be allowed to get government funding for projects that might explain how life arose from non-life, and would have to focus their efforts elsewhere. So the “butter” wouldn’t really get taken away, only the quality of science would be compromised. And even Vox admits that this is so.

It seems unlikely, however, that the passion of Richard Dawkins and the fervent militancy of Sam Harris in defense of science can be tied to any such fears. This would make little sense, since neither Sam Harris nor Christopher Hitchens are even scientists, Daniel C. Dennett has tenure, and the success of Richard Dawkins’s many books has surely put him well beyond any petty pecuniary concerns.

Such is the nature of slander and innuendo that it doesn’t need to be consistent with the facts. The seed is planted, and despite all evidence to the contrary, and despite Vox’s mealy-mouthed disavowals in the face of the blatantly spurious nature of his accusation, he has tagged scientists with the “possibility” that their objections have nothing to do with the quality of science at all, but are merely a selfish power grab designed to protect their own jobs. Anybody want to take a wild guess which message Vox’s conservative Christian readers are going to take away and put in the bank?

If there’s any doubt above Vox’s aims, one need only read on as he furthers his goal of trying to make scientists and science-defenders look obstinate and unreasonable.

Nor can their concerns be realistically tied to any fears for science as a body of knowledge, the occasional rhetorical sally aside. The occasional protest of a biology textbook or a nineteenth-century novel notwithstanding, no one on either side of the debate is advocating the willful destruction or even reduction of the knowledge base. As for the process, the very existence of the Intelligent Design movement is a testimony to a respect for scientific methodology and an attempt to make use of it for marketing purposes, not a desire to destroy it.

And in a sense, that’s exactly right. Creationists do not want to destroy science, they only want to subjugate it and force it to lend its credibility and authority to their religious presuppositions. The only way to “harmonize” science and creationism, however, is by neutralizing those elements of science which give it its considerable credibility and authority. What’s ironic is that Vox denies that anyone is trying to reduce the scientific knowledge base, when in practice creationists do little else but try to nay-say and deny the scientific findings of evolutionists.

“Look,” say scientists, “we’ve found a new transitional form.”

“No you haven’t,” reply the creationists.

“Look, we’ve found a new genetic process that produces evolutionary changes in organisms.”

“No you haven’t.”

“Look, we’re learning more about how life could arise spontaneously.”

“No you’re not.”

And so on. One need look no further than the iconic image of Dr. Michael Behe, surrounded by stacks of books and studies and meticulously-documented research showing the natural origins of “irreducibly complex” systems, blithely denying that any such knowledge exists because he knows it cannot exist. Intelligent Design, like creationism in general, produces no new insights into natural processes, but consists solely of denying what we do know about such processes, and trying to discredit those who have discovered them. Creationism and supernaturalism claim to be trying to add to science, but what they are really trying to do is add science (or at least scientific credibility) to their non-scientific ideas. And in order to do that, they must delete from science those things which prevent science from accepting superstitious conclusions as valid science. It is inherently and inevitably a subtractive process, as far as science itself is concerned.

So despite what Vox says, scientists do have valid, tangible reasons not just to fear that the quality of scientific knowledge might be compromised, but to actively object and oppose efforts that are already underway attempting to impair science, through subverting school boards and school curricula (as has been seen in Kansas, Pennsylvania, and a number of other states, most recently including Florida), through government meddling in scientific research (as has routinely been the case in the Bush administration, particularly in respect to such things as global warming and hazardous emissions of toxic chemicals), and through the advocacy of pseudo-scientific urban legends like the so-called vaccine-autism “link,” or abortion and breast cancer, and so on.

That’s what makes this part of TIA Chapter 2 so reprehensible. Instead of acknowledging that the conflict does exist, instead of dealing with the problems of maintaining high standards of scientific research and education, Vox tries to make it look like scientists are unreasonable, paranoid, and selfish—just the sort of people, in other words, that no reasonable person should take seriously. But all this is just a warm-up for his discussion of science and religion, as we’ll see next time.