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November 06, 2009
Ray Comfort's shamelessness
(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)
You may recall the series of posts where I critiqued Ray Comfort's introduction to his reissue of Charles Darwin's classic work On the Origin of Species (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5). I said that the first part consisted of a brief biography followed by a timeline of Darwin's life. These sections seemed straightforward and so I did not say anything, apart from making fun of him for using the euphemism "went to meet his Maker" instead of the simpler "died". (The original document disappeared for a while and has reappeared in a slightly revised form. One of the changes is that "went to meet his Maker" has now been replaced by "died". I don't think my comments had anything to do with it.)
It was only the rest of the introduction, dealing with his laughably inane arguments against evolution and his final come-to-Jesus plea that I strongly critiqued. At that time, I thought that Comfort was merely ignorant and stupid, which are no crimes, but I now realize that he is also willfully deceptive and totally shameless. Eugenie Scott, head of the National Center for Science Education, called him out on the fact that his reissue left out four chapters of Darwin's book: chapter 9 where Darwin looks at transitional fossils, chapters 11 and 12 where he examines the powerful arguments from biogeography which he found so persuasive, and chapter 13 where he examines the morphological arguments (i.e., arguments based on the similarities in body structures of organisms). In response, instead of squirming with embarrassment at being caught, Comfort merely says that the second printing would contain the missing chapters, as if this were some minor issue and not a gross attempt at deception.
But the horrors do not end there. It now emerges that the reason his brief biography of Darwin was so inoffensive was that most of the words were not his own. Comfort seems to have cut and pasted large chunks of it from a handout prepared for Darwin Day by biologist Dr. Stan Guffey at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville without any attribution whatsoever. And even the timeline that followed the biography was lifted in its entirety from a press release from Britain's Natural History Museum, with only a footnote as to the source, rather than accompanied by the customary statement or other indication (such as indented text or quotation marks) that it was being used verbatim.
To judge how blatant is Comfort's appropriation of Guffey's work, I reproduce Guffey's text in its entirety below, with the bold portion being exactly the same words that appeared in Comfort's introduction. As for the rest, Comfort has paraphrased Guffey's text. The length of 'Comfort's biography' (I put ironic quotes since he cannot claim credit for it) is almost the same as Guffey's, so you can see how similar the two documents must be. (Comfort spells Guffey's "Downe" as "Down" and I have ignored that difference.)
Charles Robert Darwin was born February 12, 1809 in Shrewsbury, England. His family was of the newly emerged, newly wealthy, provincial professional class. Early in his youth he demonstrated predilections for hunting, natural history, and scientific experimentation. In 1825, after public school education, he enrolled at Edinburgh University. His intention was to follow his father in the practice of medicine, but he soon found such studies rather distasteful.
Two years later Darwin enrolled at Christ's College, Cambridge to study theology—a subject which he didn't enjoy either, with the intention of a career in the Church of England. As at Edinburgh, he often neglected his studies. In spite of this, he managed to pass his examinations in 1831 and left Cambridge.
While pondering his future and whiling away the time hunting and exploring local natural history and geology, he was presented with an opportunity that would change the course of his life. John Henslow, Professor of Botany at Cambridge, had recommended him for a position on a British Navy survey vessel. The HMS Beagle was outfitting to sail on a two year coastal survey expedition to South America, and her captain was anxious to have a naturalist and gentleman companion on board. The voyage ended up lasting [nearly] five years, during which time Darwin was able to explore extensively in South America and numerous islands in the Pacific Ocean, including the Galapagos.
On returning to England in 1836, Darwin set to work examining and disseminating the extensive collection of natural history specimens acquired during the voyage. He quickly established a reputation as an accomplished naturalist on the London scene. In 1839 he married Emma Wedgwood, and saw his journal of the voyage of the Beagle published. In 1842 he and Emma moved to Downe house, Kent where Emma would bear 10 children and she and he would live for the rest of their lives.
Shortly after his return England Darwin had begun the first of his “species transmutation” notebooks. On his great adventure as the Beagle's naturalist Darwin had noted and begun to ponder certain aspects of the morphology and biogeography of the many species of plants and animals that he had observed. In particular, he had begun to explore the possibility, and eventually concluded, that species exhibited varying degrees of similarity because they are to varying degrees related. It appears that by 1838 his concept of descent with modification by the mechanism of natural selection was largely formed. And then he mostly, but not entirely, abandoned the enterprise for the time being.
However, in 1858 Darwin learned that a naturalist working in south Asia, Alfred Russell Wallace, was developing ideas about the evolution of species similar to his own. At the urging of friends he prepared a brief paper which was read before the Royal Society along with the paper Wallace had written. He then published in 1859 On the Origin of Species, which he considered an abstract of a larger future work.
During the remainder of his life Darwin continued his research, publishing three additional books on explicitly evolutionary topics, and other books on topics including climbing plants, insect-orchid mutualisms, and earthworms. The gentle and unassuming Charles Darwin, loving and devoted spouse and parent, dedicated scholar, intellectual giant, died at Downe House on April 19, 1882 with his wife Emma by his side.
In his previous efforts to discuss evolution, Ray Comfort has shown that he is ignorant and stupid and a spreader of misery and fear. In this latest episode, this alleged man of god shows that he is totally shameless. Does he not realize that this kind of behavior discredits the very god that he wants to praise?
In the link to his introduction given above, Comfort also supposedly has the full text of On the Origin of Species. No one should trust Comfort to have reproduced it faithfully. He has shown that he is willing to modify that text to serve his purposes. If anyone is interested in reading Darwin's classic works which are all available freely online, I suggest that you go to a trustworthy source.
POST SCRIPT: The Daily Show on the vacuity of TV punditry
This was broadcast on election night Tuesday before the results were out.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Indecision 2009 - Reindecision 2008 And Beyond | ||||
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November 05, 2009
Introducing the 'Unapologetic Atheist'
(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)
The term 'new atheists' has been used to describe those people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Victor Stenger, and Christopher Hitchens who have called for an end to the undue deference paid to religious beliefs and have a leveled a broadside attack on all religious beliefs, not just those of so-called fundamentalists. They (and I) argue that statements of religious beliefs should be treated like any other propositions and subject to the same level of scrutiny. The fact that such beliefs are deeply held by many people is no reason for giving them a pass, any more than we would give a pass to beliefs about astrology or homeopathy or crystal-ball gazing or any other evidence-free superstition.
But the label 'new atheism' does not sit well with some 'new atheists' because it is seen as inaccurate. After all, there is nothing really new in the arguments of the new atheism, except in so far as new science is making the god hypothesis increasingly superfluous. And many of the 'new atheists' have been atheists for almost all their adult lives and are not recent disbelievers.
In a previous post titled Being a new atheist means not saying you're sorry, I said that what really distinguishes the so-called 'new atheists' from other atheists (such as those who are labeled accommodationists) is that the new atheists do not feel the need to feel sorry about their unbelief, as if it were something they should not have or would prefer not to have. The expected behavior of atheists seems to be that they should go to extraordinary lengths to soothe the feelings of believers, by prefacing any statement about atheism by sighing regretfully and saying things along the lines of "I hate to say this but I don't believe in god. But this is a personal belief that I have reluctantly accepted and I can understand why others might choose to believe in god. In fact, I envy the emotional satisfaction that religious beliefs provide. I hope you are not offended by my saying I am an atheist and if you are I sincerely apologize." This is an absurd expectation.
In a comment to that post, 'Wonderist' made the excellent suggestion that instead of the term 'new atheist', we should use the term 'unapologetic atheist', and that what we advocate is 'unapologetics' to counter the 'apologetics' of religious believers. In further comments to that same post, he says that looking around the web, the term 'new atheist' originally had a somewhat neutral meaning but later began to be applied by accommodationists like Chris Mooney and Michael Ruse in a negative way by implying that it carried with it all the old stereotypes of atheists being arrogant, rude, uncivil, etc.
Wonderist's idea makes a lot of logical sense but I am not certain that this term will catch on. For starters, it will have to be picked up by more prominent people and repeated in more prominent media to gain traction. Wonderist says in his comments that he has made a start in this direction by triggering discussions elsewhere on various sites and the feedback seems to have been positive so far.
Simply from a marketing standpoint, there is some advantage to staying with the word 'new'. The word new has very positive connotations, despite its vagueness and inaccuracy. It is short and snappy. 'Unapologetic' is undoubtedly more accurate but it has two major disadvantages: it is six syllables long, and is defined negatively, as not something else or opposite to something else. These may or may not be fatal flaws to its final adoption. As I value accuracy more than marketing, I am going to start using the label 'unapologetic atheist' unless 'new atheist' is required by the context.
There are many ways that this could go. Control over the meaning of the term 'new atheists' may be taken over by those to whom the term is applied and branded positively, the way that the gay community took the formerly pejorative word 'queer' and are starting to make it their own. The word 'feminist' is currently undergoing a similar struggle for meaning with feminists trying to retain the positive meaning of the word from those who are trying to make it into a negative stereotype.
The ownership of 'new atheist' is up for grabs. While advocating for the label of 'unapologetic', I think we should not cede control of the term 'new atheist' to those who want to use it pejoratively. We should use it positively and proudly and make people realize that it in this context, new is just a synonym for unapologetic.
POST SCRIPT: Jon Stewart on how Fox 'News' works
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| For Fox Sake! | ||||
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November 04, 2009
Why Ussher's calculations undermine the credibility of the Bible
(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)
Bishop James Ussher actually did quite an impressive feat of calculation, careful and thorough, to arrive at his creation date of 4004 BCE. Once he had got the year of creation fixed, Ussher was able to provide precise dates for other key events in the Bible:
2348 BC - Noah's Flood
1921 BC - God's call to Abraham
1491 BC - The Exodus from Egypt
1012 BC - Founding of the Temple in Jerusalem
586 BC - Destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon and the beginning of the Babylonian Captivity
Although creationists take Ussher's work as correct, this causes problems for them. For example, since Noah's flood in 2348 BCE supposedly wiped out everything (except those living things that could swim or float or were saved in the Ark), according to Biblical literalists, all history must be compressed within the last 4,500 years, even less time than the commonly used figure of 6,000 years.
Since there is convincing evidence that agriculture began around 10,000 years ago and that Egyptians have records of kings dating back to around 3,000 BCE, that already contradicts Ussher's chronology. There is also evidence that Egyptian cultures (and even the pyramids) existed further back than 4,500 years ago, before the flood. There are even trees whose root systems date back to nearly 10,000 years. But if you are determined to believe that the Bible is literally true, you can always make up something to overcome any problem.
More sophisticated religious believers tend to treat as myth the pre-Abraham story and thus discount the idea of a 6,000 year old Earth. They are quite comfortable with a 4.7 billion year old Earth and the evolution of life. But they tend to think that the post-Abrahamic story is largely true, just embellished with some miracles that can be explained away.
But we should only take seriously those things for which there is independent evidence, such as alternative source material establishing dates and events and people, or archeological discoveries of artifacts that can be scientifically dated that can provide corroborating evidence. Almost none of these things exist for almost everything in the Old Testament. In fact, the more science uncovers things, the less credible ancient Bible history gets.
The fact that we now know that Ussher's result has no relationship to reality should not take away from his accomplishment. So why did I state earlier that Ussher's calculations, which are taken as strictly true by so many Christians now, is actually evidence in favor of treating the Bible as fiction?
The point is that even for someone like Ussher who undoubtedly believed that the Bible was literally true, the earliest event that he could historically verify and date from other sources was the death of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 562 BCE. This means that even a true believer could not independently verify the historicity of any earlier event. The events in the Bible pretty much end around 425 BCE, which is when the last book of the Old Testament was written by the minor prophet Malachi. So the whole text is pretty much useless except as fiction, except for the interval of about 150 years from about 575 BCE to 425 BCE, when it might have been recording contemporaneous events.
It is easy to overlook how quickly events fade into myth if not recorded contemporaneously by multiple independent sources. I recently read T. H. White's The Once and Future King and The Book of Merlin, which recount the story of Camelot, with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Queen Guinevere, Sir Lancelot, the Holy Grail, the works. The books were fun to read. I had always assumed that the Camelot story was entirely fiction but discovered that scholars still debate its historicity, with some thinking that elements of this story are true and that someone like King Arthur actually existed around the 5th and 6th centuries CE. Other scholars think that the Arthur legend was created as a romantic and fanciful tale centuries later.
You would think that we would know with some confidence who the kings of England were during that period and could say definitively whether King Arthur existed or not. But we can't. What we know is mixture of fact and legend, which are hard to disentangle.
Historical fact fades into myth as we go back in time, much more rapidly than we imagine, except for those rare civilizations that kept careful records which were not destroyed by wars and other calamities. By even as late as 1,000 CE, things start to get highly murky. So to take the events in the Old Testament, which occurred about 1,000 BCE and earlier and are uncorroborated, as actual history is to stretch credulity. This is why we need the kinds of corroborating evidence that only modern science can provide, using multiple sources, archeology, and all the tools of radiometry that are now available.
The Old Testament should be treated as literature composed by many authors over a long period and designed to serve varying purposes over time. It is definitely not history. If we cannot believe the stories that a mighty and famous king like Arthur ever existed, why should we believe stories of kings David and Solomon who existed 1500 years before Arthur and for whom there is little or no supporting evidence?
POST SCRIPT: Radio interview about my book
UPDATE: I have been bumped to accommodate the big serial killer story so will not be on the radio tomorrow after all. Will let you know the rescheduled date.
On Thursday, November 5, I will be interviewed on the Cleveland NPR affiliate station WCPN 90.3 from 9:00-10:00 am on its program The Sound of Ideas. The topic will be my latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom. You can listen online live on its webcast or listen to the podcast after the show.
You can all in during the program: Local 216-578-0903 or toll-free 866-578-0903.
November 03, 2009
Ussher's calculation methods
(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)
Bishop James Ussher arrived at his creation year of 4004 BCE by going backwards, starting by first fixing the date of the earliest event in the Bible that could be corroborated with other historical sources. This occurred after the capture and taking into exile of king Jehoiachin of Judah by Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 597 BCE. The death of Nebuchadnezzar in 562 BCE (the date of which was known from other sources) is reported in the Bible to have coincided with the 37th year of exile of Jehoiachin, as stated in the Bible in 2 Kings 25:27. (Note that the dates are sometimes off by a year or two because of the differences in the calendars in use at that time.)
From that fixed reference point he worked backwards using the Bible alone, first by adding up the years that the successive kings ruled the divided kingdoms, the southern one of Judah and the northern one of Israel, and then going further back using the famous 'begats' in the Bible which gives a genealogy that goes back to Adam. For example, Genesis 5 gives the chronology from Adam to Noah, and then after a lot of stuff about the flood, Genesis 11 gives the genealogy from Noah to Abraham.
It is interesting that in addition to saying how long each person lived, it gives the crucial information as to the age of the person when his eldest son was born, without which Ussher's calculation cannot be done. I am intrigued as to why the authors of the Bible put in that gratuitous piece of extra information, which is not an obvious thing to do, unless they wanted to create a timeline.
It is interesting that from Adam to Abraham, there is an unbroken line of males. The youngest age at which any of them had their first son was 65 but Noah is the clear record holder for the oldest father, his oldest son being born when he was 500! The oldest man ever was Methuselah who lived to the age of 969, though he had his first son when he was a mere child of 187. Oddly enough, after Noah, although the men still lived for hundreds of years, the age at which they became fathers for the first time drops suddenly to the early thirties, until it gets to the father of Abraham who was 70.
Although the genealogies say that sons and daughters were born, only males are named. As far as I can tell, after Eve, all the women who are born are nameless until we get to Sarah, Abraham's wife, about 1,800 years later.
Ussher's choice of the Hebrew Bible to obtain his chronology may have been influenced by the fact that this particular Bible gives a nice round date of 4000 BCE for the year of creation. The then current belief was that the world would last only 6,000 years, this being the interpretation of the six days of creation in Genesis combined with the statement in Psalms 90: 4 that "For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night" and the New Testament statement (2 Peter 3:8) that "With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day." Thus according to his chronology, Jesus was born 4,000 years after the creation and the world would end in 2,000 CE (also called the Anno Domini or AD calendar), which provided a nice symmetry, no doubt showing that god was a careful planner.
However, that rounding of dates had to be adjusted because the creator of the CE calendar had made a mistake. When corrected, it was noted that King Herod had begun his reign in 37 BCE and died in 4 BCE, so Jesus had to have been born sometime during that period because the New Testament says Jesus was born during Herod's reign. Ussher fixed Jesus's birth year as 4 BCE and this required the shifting of all the dates by 4 years, moving the year of creation to 4004 BCE.
Wikipedia has an summary of how Ussher managed to pin point the very day when god created the world.
The season in which Creation occurred was the subject of considerable theological debate in Ussher's time. Many scholars proposed it had taken place in the spring, the start of the Babylonian, Chaldean and other cultures' chronologies. Others, including Ussher, thought it more likely that it had occurred in the autumn, largely because that season marked the beginning of the Jewish year.
Ussher further narrowed down the date by using the Jewish calendar to establish Creation as beginning on a Sunday near the autumnal equinox. The day of the week was a backward calculation from the six days of creation with God resting on the seventh, which in the Jewish tradition is Saturday — hence Creation began on a Sunday. The astronomical tables that Ussher probably used were Kepler's Tabulae Rudolphinae (Rudolphine Tables, 1627). Using them, he would have concluded that the equinox occurred on Tuesday October 25, only one day earlier than the traditional day of its creation, on the fourth day of Creation week, Wednesday, along with the Sun, Moon, and stars (Genesis 1:16). Modern equations place the autumnal equinox of 4004 BC on Sunday October 23.
Ussher stated his time of Creation (nightfall preceding October 23) on the first page of Annales in Latin and on the first page of its English translation Annals of the World (1658).
You can read the first page of his book (a revised edition with the English updated to be easily intelligible to the modern reader) here. Sometimes one hears that he fixed the time of creation as 9:00 am but that claim was made by someone else before Ussher and has been mistakenly attributed to him.
I have to admit that I kind of like Ussher's calculations. The fact that it is totally wrong and that to take it seriously now is to live in an alternative reality does not diminish his achievement.
POST SCRIPT: How to choose your religion
Looking for a religion but not sure which to pick from the wide variety of choices? GrrlScientist has put together a nifty little flowchart to help you out. (via Pharyngula)
November 02, 2009
Bishop Ussher's calculations
(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)
Long time readers of this blog may recall a series that I did that dealt with the Bible as history. I argued that there was little or no evidence to support any of the major events described in the Bible. While Biblical literalists believe that everything in the Bible is true as both history and science, other Christians and Jews are willing to concede that the story of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, and Noah's flood are fictional, merely creation myths generated by the authors of the Bible who were trying to make sense of the world without the insights and knowledge that modern science provides.
But what even the latter group of Christians and Jews may not realize is that the later stories in the Bible of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the slavery of the Jews in Egypt, Moses, the exodus, the kings David and Solomon, and so on are completely fictitious also, or at best legends woven around minor events that became part of the folklore.
The most likely emergence of the Jewish people in the region is not by a dramatic escape from Egypt but that they emerged from a small polytheistic indigenous grouping that lived in the region we now call the Middle East that separated itself from the others because of dietary and other restrictions that prevented intermingling. They stumbled upon their monotheistic religion because one of their leaders (King Josiah, who ruled from 641-609 BCE) found it useful as a political strategy to eliminate rival kings and their supporters by claiming that they deserved to die because there was only one true god (his, of course) and they were worshipping the false ones.
There seems to be little controversy about these facts amongst archeologists and Biblical scholars other than those religiously committed to supporting the historical accuracy of the Bible. I have no doubt that many religious leaders and theologians know all this too but do not publicize it for obvious reasons. It is to the advantage of institutionalized religions to preserve the fiction that their religious texts like the Bible actually are records of ancient history although anything written in it that refers to events prior to 600 BCE is best considered as fiction.
Support for the view that the history in the Bible is almost entirely spurious comes, oddly enough, from Bishop James Ussher of Ireland. Almost everyone has heard of his famous calculations for the age of the Earth that fixed the date of creation as the night before October 23, 4004 BCE. Annotated editions of the King James Bible once included this date and as a result Biblical literalists take it very seriously since they believe that anything in the Bible must be true. But if you look at how Ussher did his calculations, it becomes clear that this date has no objective basis and that no rational person should take it seriously.
Because the idea that the world was created in 4004 BCE is now considered patently absurd, people not familiar with how Ussher did his work may be tempted to dismiss him as some kind of religious nut who used some weird form of numerology for arriving at his date of creation. But Ussher (1581-1656) was by no means just another religious believer simply making things up to support his beliefs. He was a serious scholar indulging in what was, at the time, considered a reasonable scholarly activity. He was trying to do an honest-to-goodness calculation of the age of creation using what information he had. Other eminent scholars such as Isaac Newton (1643-1727) were doing similar calculations around that time, all arriving at dates of creation that differed from his by less than 100 years, lending credibility to his work.
The date of creation that Ussher arrived at was not obviously preposterous given the state of knowledge at the time. After all, the idea of the heliocentric universe began gaining ground only around 1543 with the publication of Copernicus' work. The idea of the universe being a small and young place was commonplace and not unreasonable. The immensity of space and the immensity of time that the universe has been around are ideas that boggle the mind even now, so one can imagine that they would have been inconceivable to people then.
Like almost all the people of Ussher's time who lived in Christian countries, scientists and non-scientists alike, they believed the Bible to be literally true and saw the purpose of other fields of scholarship as serving, among other things, to flesh out the Biblical narrative and filling in the details so as to achieve consistency between the Bible and other new emerging sources of knowledge that we now call science. The idea that they could contradict each other was not seriously considered.
Next: So how did Ussher, like the others, arrive at so precise an estimate for the age of the Earth?
POST SCRIPT: Secularism on the upswing?
Christopher Hitches on what he has learned debating religious believers around the world:
Thanks to the foolishness of the "intelligent design" faction, which has tried with ignominious un-success to smuggle the teaching of creationism into our schools under a name that is plainly stupid rather than intelligent, and thanks to the ceaseless preaching of hatred and violence against our society by the fanatics of another faith, as well as other related behavior, such as the mad attempt by messianic Jews to steal the land of other people, the secular movement in the United States is acquiring a confidence that it has not known in years, while many of those who put their faith in revelation and prophecy and prayer are feeling the need to give an account of themselves. This is a wholly good development, and it is part of the pluralism and polycentrism that distinguish the sort of society that we have to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.