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Entries in "Religion"

July 17, 2008

Cloning god

Thanks to this blog, I keep learning interesting new stuff. You may recall that I expressed bewilderment at the possibility that any adult could possibly believe in the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which asserts that when the priest during the communion service consecrates the bread and wine, the bread becomes the actual body of Jesus and the wine becomes his actual blood.

In response to my posting on the fuss over a college student taking home a consecrated wafer, a commenter Timothy said that the desecration of the wafer was indeed much worse than murder, genocide, etc, if you believed that the wafer was the body of Jesus-god. As evidence that it was, he provided a link to an event that supposedly occurred in the Italian city of Lanciano around 700 CE.

This was news to me. According to that article, a monk who doubted the doctrine of transubstantiation was astounded when the 'host' (i.e. the wafer/bread) physically changed into human flesh, and the wine changed into globules of actual blood, causing a sensation amongst the people in the church.

The article says that, "Various ecclesiastical investigation ("Recognitions") were conducted since 1574" and that the flesh and blood remained remarkably well preserved over the centuries, despite being exposed to the environment.

We are also told that "In 1970-'71 and taken up again partly in 1981 there took place a scientific investigation by the most illustrious scientist Prof. Odoardo Linoli, eminent Professor in Anatomy and Pathological Histology and in Chemistry and Clinical Microscopy. He was assisted by Prof. Ruggero Bertelli of the University of Siena." What these people found was that the flesh was real flesh from a human heart and the blood was human blood, with the blood in both being of the AB type, supposedly the same as found in the Shroud of Turin.

(For more detailed accounts, see here and here. One report even says that "in 1973, the chief Advisory Board of the World Health Organization appointed a scientific commission to corroborate Linoli’s findings. Their work lasted 15 months and included 500 tests. It was verified that the fragments taken from Lanciano could in no way be likened to embalmed tissue.")

That is pretty impressive, spectacularly so, if taken at face value. In fact, it is amazing that the Catholic Church does not make it a centerpiece of its message to its followers, or use it for its public relations, and that the items themselves are not a magnet for the faithful to go and see. It definitely puts other pilgrimage sites like Lourdes to shame.

But as another commenter Greg pointed out in response, all reports on this phenomenon seem to be from Catholic sources and that information is scarce about Professors Linoli and Bertelli. I too found (admittedly after just a Google search, nothing deeper) that references to this event seem to have very similar wording, suggesting a common source document, and all references to Linoli are with reference to this one event.

As Greg points out in his comment, the most likely explanation is that the original claim of a miraculous transformation of bread and wine was a hoax based on a simple sleight-of-hand substitution, to convince doubters in the church at that time that the doctrine was not nonsense. After all, all that we have now is this flesh and blood. There is no evidence that any transformation took place at all to convert bread and wine into them, except for the claims of the monk who says he observed it happening, and he is hardly an impartial source.

But suppose we set aside skepticism and take the story at face value and follow its implications. The first problem is that much of the religious apologetics concerning transubstantiation is designed to explain why the wafer and wine look just like ordinary wafers and wine, and even have the same physical properties of ordinary wafers and wine, even though it has been transformed into the flesh and blood of Jesus. So why in this particular case did it physically change into actual flesh and blood? What could be the point of such a one-off event? To convince a single skeptical monk 1,300 years ago?

The really interesting thing about taking this story at face value is that since we now have the actual flesh and blood of Jesus, we can now obtain the actual DNA of god. Knowledge of the DNA may enable us to answer the very puzzling question of whether Jesus really was blonde and blue-eyed, even though he was a Middle Easterner.

The whole virgin birth thing has also been a bit of a problem genetically and the availability of Jesus's DNA would enable us to solve the following puzzle: Since each human gets half his or her genes from each parent, a male like Jesus would get his X-chromosome from his mother and the Y-chromosome from his father. The baffling question is if, how, and from where Jesus would get his Y-chromosome, if he had a virgin birth. There seem to me to be four options, and DNA studies could resolve which one is correct.

If Jesus only got one set genes from his mother, then he would have only half the genetic make up of a normal human and he would not really be human, which upsets the doctrine that Jesus lived among us as a human. It also means that the normal means by which the DNA and cells divide and multiply could not work. A whole new mechanism would be needed for Jesus to physically grow, both in the womb and after birth.

If he got both sets chromosomes from his mother, that would make him an XX and thus female. The idea that Jesus was a woman in drag would boggle the mind of a believer. Also, if the two sets of chromosomes were identical, he would be susceptible to any of the ailments present in all the harmful recessive genes in Mary since there would be no dominant healthy genes from the father to shield him. All of us have many deleterious genes that we inherit from each parent but fortunately most of them are recessive and their effects are not manifested because of the dominant 'good' genes from the other parent.

A third possibility is that god somehow inserted his own set of genes (and the Y-chromosome) into Mary's egg so that Jesus did have the full set of genes that a normal man would have and this would also justify the claim that Jesus was god's son. This would be pretty conclusive evidence that god is also of the male gender and we can dispense with all the efforts to use cumbersome gender-neutral language when talking about god.

But all these three options have the problem that at least half of Jesus's DNA comes from Mary, a human, so Jesus cannot be fully god as well. The fourth possibility is that god inserted his own entire DNA into Mary's egg and that fertilized egg eventually became the flesh-and-blood Jesus, with Mary as simply the conduit, a surrogate mother to use the current terminology. Thus Jesus is both god (since his DNA is entirely god's) and human (since he has a full set of human chromosomes), Mary is his mother (since he gestated in and emerged from her womb), it was a virgin birth, and god is his father, thus solving almost of the theological problems of Christianity rather neatly.

We can also now map Jesus's DNA completely and thus know what god's DNA is. Presumably that would be the perfect DNA, having none of the disorders associated with ordinary human DNA. Right now, the Human Genome Project maps out a kind of 'average' DNA. We would now have a perfect standard to compare it to.

There would still be some interpretive problems. Since a person's DNA can be used to trace their matriarchal and patriarchal lines of ancestors, we could trace the DNA back through the ancestral lines and see the geographical distribution of its origins. But what would that mean for god, since he has no ancestors?

But those are mere technicalities. The really exciting possibility is this: As I have written about before, the latest techniques of genetic engineering enable us to take the nucleus of a cell from any piece of tissue from any part of a body and use it to clone a new being, someone with the same DNA as was contained in that nucleus.

So if the Lanciano story is true and we have the actual tissues of Jesus, we are now able to clone god!

Looking back over this post, I see that not only has it has provided answers to all the major difficult issues of Christian theology, it has also proposed the most important scientific experiment in human history.

I think I need to go and lie down and rest.

POST SCRIPT: Missed opportunity

In a new book, While America Aged: How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis , Roger Lowenstein looks at how pension and health care obligations to workers became the responsibility of employers and not the government, and what is happening now as the bills come due.

In the 1950s, the United Auto Workers won generous pension and health care benefits from General Motors, even to the extent of securing medical coverage for retirees. The union leader Walter Reuther, while getting these benefits for his members, felt that such benefits should be extended to all workers everywhere and to all Americans in general. He also had the foresight to realize that the benefits he was obtaining were unsustainable for the company over the long run. He suggested to GM management that together they lobby the government to put pensions and health care under federal administration, basically creating a single-payer universal health care and pension system, as exists now in many countries, and which I have long advocated.

But GM, powerful and profitable then, wanted to have nothing to do with what seemed to smack of socialism. Now, GM and other US automakers are in deep financial trouble and teetering on bankruptcy because they still pay for pensions and health care while Japanese automakers do not, thus giving the latter a huge advantage in pricing. It is claimed that health care costs alone add about $1,500 to the cost of each car produced by a US automaker.

You can listen to an NPR interview with Loewenstein here.

July 16, 2008

Natural and unnatural lifestyles

I recently had a discussion with someone whom I had known well growing up in Sri Lanka and who was visiting the US. She asked me my opinion about the recent highly publicized raid by the Texas Child Protective Services on the compound where polygamous Mormon families lived. All the children were separated from their parents by the Texas CPS on the basis of a single anonymous phone call alleging that sexual abuse of a minor had occurred. The decision by the CPS was first upheld in the lower court but an appeals court overthrew the verdict saying that you could not separate children from their parents without finding specific cause in each individual case. The CPS then appealed to the Texas Supreme Court but they lost and were ordered to reunite the children with their parents.

I responded that I agreed with the appeals courts. In my view the child welfare authorities had gone completely overboard and had resorted to such drastic action because the targeted community was a polygamous one and thus was disapproved of by the authorities. They would not have dreamed of entering a village of monogamous, heterosexual couples and separated all the children from their parents on the basis of a single anonymous and unsubstantiated allegation of child abuse. I personally have no problem with the practice of polygamy and think it absurd that we are still trying to regulate by law those things that should be strictly the private concern of individuals.

My visitor from Sri Lanka also asked me my views about gay marriage and the adoption of children by gay people. I said that I had no problems with this practice either and that the kind of prejudice that exists against polygamists was also at play when people argued against the adoption of children by gay couples.

She made the point that the adopted children of gay couples or the children of polygamous families might suffer harm from the stigma associated with their families' nontraditional lifestyles, and thus such arrangements might not be in the best interests of the children. In addition, she suggested that the lifestyles of these people were not 'natural' and that was why it may be appropriate to discourage them by treating them differently.

One hears these arguments all the time, that the norm is that marriage is between one man and one woman and that anything else is deviant behavior, worthy of disapproval, if not outright banning.

To counter this, some people try to argue that such nontraditional lifestyles are 'natural' because parallels can be found to occur in nature, that nonhuman animals often practice homosexuality or have multiple partners. In addition, there is currently some evidence that homosexuality is at least partly genetic and thus influenced by biology and is thus not a free choice. Such studies are used by gay rights advocates to support the view that homosexuality is as natural as heterosexuality.

I frankly do not see the point of this argument. Whether some behavior is acceptable or not should not depend on whether it occurs 'naturally' (i.e., spontaneously) in nature or whether it is encoded in our genes. After all we, as humans, do any number of things that are not found in nature or are in defiance of our genetic drives. Practically our whole lives involve activities that do not have analogs in the animal kingdom. That is because we have developed language and culture and technology that enable us to be social animals capable of functioning at a highly abstract level and make collective decisions. Furthermore, there are lots of things going on in the animal kingdom (killing, cannibalism, forcible sex, infanticide, among others) that we consider unacceptable behavior. The idea that we should take our moral cues from the nonhuman animal world seems bizarre. We would not accept a defense of murder, for example, that argues that it is ok because animals do it to each other.

It seems to me that the evolved ability to converse and create culture enables us to transcend out biological drives, to be more than our instincts. Because of our ability to converse and arrive at agreed-upon norms of behavior, we can develop general principles as to what is acceptable and what is not that are independent of whether other animals do similar things. The principle of 'justice as fairness' advocated by John Rawls in his book A Theory of Justice seems like the kind of thing we should be seeking to order our lives and society, not borrowing from animal behavior.

So if it turns out that future research shows that there is no genetic basis whatsoever for homosexuality and that it is purely a matter of choice, so what? As long as they are not harming others, why is it of any concern to me if other people choose partners of the same sex or opposite sex? As for the argument that adopted children of gays or the children of polygamous families might suffer from the stigma, the only reason there is a stigma at all is because the rest of us have an intolerant view of such lifestyles. It is we who have a problem and who should change, not them.

Similarly, if a woman decides that she wants to marry three husbands and they all freely consent, why should I care? If for whatever reason, two men and three women decide that they would like to all be married to each other and live together as a single family unit, they won't get any objection from me.

I think my relative was a little startled by my views. Since I have lived in the US for about three decades, many of the people I grew up with in Sri Lanka have little idea of my thinking on many issues and these often come as a surprise to them. She did ask if my views have changed as I have got older and I had to agree. As I age, I have become more and more accepting of the lifestyle choices made by others. Perhaps it is because I have an increasing sense that life is a precious gift that we each possess for just a short time and thus people should not be denied the harmless pleasures that life affords.

As long as decisions are being freely made by consenting adults and do not harm others, people should be free to choose whatever lifestyles that suits their needs.

What surprises me is that such a viewpoint is not more universally held.

POST SCRIPT: Solar powered car

See the video of a completely solar-powered car that is on a round-the-world trip without using a single drop of gas. It has already been to 27 countries and the US is the 28th. Quite amazing.

(Thanks for the link to my daughter Dashi who was lucky enough to actually see the car in Berkeley, California and listen to a presentation by its inventor Lewis Palmer, a Swiss schoolteacher.)

July 15, 2008

Much ado about transubstantiation

In the previous post, I suggested that the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which asserts that when the priest during the communion service consecrates the bread and wine, the bread becomes the actual body of Jesus and the wine becomes his actual blood, was a fairly bizarre thing to believe in this day and age and raised the possibility that perhaps even Catholics did not really believe in it but were just humoring the church by going along with a doctrine that came into being a long time ago.

I wrote that post some time ago but late last week brought to my attention a news item that suggested that there are many Catholics who not only believe it literally but for whom it is a very big deal indeed.

Webster Cook, a student at the University of Central Florida, went to mass on his campus but instead of immediately, as is the custom, eating the wafer (which is the modern day substitute for bread), he tried to take it back to his pew. And that was when the trouble started.

Cook claims he planned to consume it, but first wanted to show it to a fellow student senator he brought to Mass who was curious about the Catholic faith.

"When I received the Eucharist, my intention was to bring it back to my seat to show him," Cook said. "I took about three steps from the woman distributing the Eucharist and someone grabbed the inside of my elbow and blocked the path in front of me. At that point I put it in my mouth so they'd leave me alone and I went back to my seat and I removed it from my mouth."

A church leader was watching, confronted Cook and tried to recover the sacred bread. Cook said she crossed the line and that's why he brought it home with him.

"She came up behind me, grabbed my wrist with her right hand, with her left hand grabbed my fingers and was trying to pry them open to get the Eucharist out of my hand," Cook said, adding she wouldn't immediately take her hands off him despite several requests.

He did manage to take it back to his dorm. But when word of his action got around, a major-league hoo-hah ensued. A spokesperson for the local diocese said that this act should be considered a 'hate crime' and called upon the university authorities to punish the student severely enough to discourage future such acts. The church also demanded that Cook return the wafer.

Of course, William Donohue (head of the Catholic League and founder member of The Church of Perpetual Outrage in Order to Get Publicity) seized another golden opportunity to get himself in the media and issued a statement saying that the act went 'beyond hate speech' and called for the student's expulsion. He said that the wafer was being held 'hostage'. Carol Brinati, with the Diocese of Orlando, is reported to have said that the Catholic community was "concerned about the possible desecration of the Eucharist," and pleaded for its 'safe return'. The parallel to a hostage taking popped up everywhere. Father Miguel Gonzalez of the Diocese was quoted as saying, "Imagine if they kidnapped somebody and you make a plea for that individual to please return that loved one to the family."

In fact, Gonzalez says that treating the blessed bread with anything less than the highest respect is considered a 'mortal sin'. This is the worst class of sin, pretty much guaranteeing a lifetime in hell.

After Cook started receiving death threats and learned of attempts to break into his dorm room to 'rescue' the wafer, he eventually returned it to the church in a Ziploc bag.

The fuss over this matter was taken so seriously that the university even sent armed uniformed guards to watch over the next mass to make sure another such 'hostage taking' did not occur. The diocese also dispatched a nun to stand guard. There was no mention of whether she was also armed.

As a coda to this story, University of Minnesota evolutionary biologist and staunch foe of religion P. Z. Myers had some fun with this episode over at his blog Pharyngula, which is where I got most of the links. Since Cook had returned the wafer seemingly undesecrated, Myers requested his readers to obtain a consecrated wafer and send it to him, so that he could personally desecrate it.

This naturally moved the outrage meter of Donohue even further into the deep red zone and he has started a letter writing campaign against Myers to the university president, trustees, and Minnesota state legislators.

There is a curious thing about the overheated rhetoric on this matter. True, Myers may have gone overboard in causing offense in order to emphasize his sense that the whole incident was ridiculous, but I would have thought that the most one could say is that he acted in bad taste, like those Danish newspaper that published cartoons lampooning the prophet Mohammed or the US soldier accused of shooting the Koran.

These kinds of insults are like those silly "Your mama is . . ." taunts that one can hear on children's playgrounds or among immature athletes in competition, trying to goad the other person into doing something stupid. The mature thing to do is to ignore such taunts. But it is usually the case that the more fragile a belief is, the more vehement and angry the defense, in order to discourage other people from questioning it.

Donohue takes the bait put out by Myers and stretches credulity by saying in response that, "It is hard to think of anything more vile than to intentionally desecrate the Body of Christ". Really? He can't think of anything viler than fooling around with a wafer that has had some words said over it? What about murder? Rape? Genocide? Slavery? Child abuse? Those things are lesser evils than violating some ancient and esoteric church doctrine?

And what exactly constitutes desecration? If you eat the wafer, as required by the Church, the 'Body of Christ' gets digested in the stomach and intestines and eventually emerges as excrement to be flushed down the toilet. That's pretty serious desecration, you would think, unless the wafer somehow ceases to be the 'Body of Christ' as soon as it passes from the mouth into the throat and reverts to becoming an ordinary food item. I have no idea if that also is part of the doctrine of transubstantiation. No doubt the Vatican has a crack team of senior theologians on its Transubstantiation Task Force studying this very question.

But it is an example of the kind of never-ending increasing complications and contradictions that arise when you elevate ritual and symbolism into something more or try to make sense out of religious dogma.

POST SCRIPT: Childhood religious indoctrination

Irish comedian Dave Allen described his own experience with learning Christian doctrine as a child at the hands of nuns.

(Thanks to OneGoodMove.)

July 14, 2008

Why religions expect you to believe preposterous things

On a recent trip to Sri Lanka, I visited the mother of an old friend of mine, and the conversation turned to religion. She was a Protestant who had married a Catholic. She had thought about converting to Catholicism but in the end found it impossible to do so. She said that she found she could not accept three things that the Catholic Church required you to believe: transubstantiation, the infallibility of the Pope, and the assumption of Jesus' mother Mary (i.e., the belief that Mary did not die but was 'assumed' directly into heaven).

These things are pretty tough to believe. Transubstantiation alone is enough to give anyone pause. This doctrine asserts that when the priest during the communion service consecrates the bread and wine, the bread becomes the actual body of Jesus and the wine becomes his actual blood.

I have often wondered if, in their heart of hearts, Catholics actually believe this. It seems to me that if they did, it would be hard to avoid having the gag reflex that accompanies the thought of engaging in what are essentially cannibalistic practices. Yet millions of Catholics go through this ritual every week with seeming equanimity. Perhaps they don't really believe but convince themselves that they kinda, sorta do in order to not seem like heretics. Or maybe they just don't think about it.

But although this is a particularly striking example of the kinds of extraordinary things that religious people are expected to believe, it is not by itself more preposterous than believing that Jesus rose from the dead or that god ordered the sun to stand still during the battle of Jericho or that the angel Gabriel dictated the Koran to Mohammed.

In fact, organized god-based religions sometimes seem to go out of their way to create difficult things to believe in. It seems like if you are a member of any organized god-based religion, you are expected to believe preposterous things. Abandoning reason and logic and evidence and science and accepting preposterous things purely on faith is deemed to be a virtuous act.

In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, the White Queen tells Alice that it is easy to believe impossible things. "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." She says her trick to believing in something that is wildly improbable is to simply draw a long breath and shut her eyes. Sounds a lot like praying.

Of course, many people find it hard to abandon reason and believe impossible things, and thus leave religion and become atheists or at least agnostics. Some modernist theologians have tried to counter this problem by stripping as much of the extreme forms of the supernatural as possible from religions to make it more acceptable intellectually. They argue that god is some mysterious essence, some life force that gives 'meaning' to our lives, a 'ground of our being', and so on, but is not a physical human-like entity that we communicate with or can expect to intervene in our lives. In this approach, it is attempted to free religion from all those difficult beliefs that are hard to accept.

Would such a trend make religion more acceptable to more people, largely freeing them from having to choose between religion and common sense? Superficially, one would think so but some research suggests otherwise. The success of religions seems to depend on having people believe difficult or impossible things. Paradoxically, the more difficult the belief is to accept intellectually and the more rigid rules with which it binds believers, the more successful the religion is in holding onto its adherents. "[T]he most successful religions, in terms of growth and maintenance of membership, are those with absolute, unwavering, strict, and enforced normative standards of behavior." (Study cited by Peggy Catron, Encountering Faith in the Classroom, Miriam Diamond (Ed.), 2008, p. 70.)

This may be why those religious doctrines that are really hard for a rational person to accept (fundamentalist Christianity and Islam, Roman Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism) don't seem to be in any danger of going extinct in the face of modern science that undermines their doctrines. They may even be experiencing growth, while it is the more open-minded liberal religious traditions that are in decline. It is as if people want their thinking to be bound and confined and that they fear intellectual freedom. It seems like a form of intellectual masochism.

Why is this? I don't really know. Perhaps it is because once you have convinced someone to believe an impossible idea as an entry point to membership in an organization, they have crossed a threshold that makes them accepting of all the other impossible ideas that come as part of that religious package. Since people pride themselves on being rational, getting them to accept something bizarre at an early age, like a virgin birth, means that they will then try to construct reasons why such a belief makes sense or suppress any questions and doubts. I find it interesting that believers in a god, instead of frankly saying, "Yes, it is irrational but I believe anyway", will go to great lengths to try and use reason and logic to convince others that their beliefs are rational when they are manifestly not.

Once you have got people to suspend their rational thinking in at least one part of their life, all the other seemingly small, but equally preposterous, beliefs that are required don't seem so hard to swallow. This may be why religious organizations carry out induction ceremonies for new members mostly when they are children, before their skepticism is fully developed and when the desire of children to join the organization of their parents is still strong.

It is also perhaps similar to how brutal hazing is sometimes used to bond people to a fraternities or secret societies. Once you have overcome that kind of hurdle, it is emotionally harder to back out, to admit that one must have been crazy to ever do or believe such a thing.

Note: I wrote this post some time ago but never got around to posting it since there seemed to be no urgency. To my amazement, transubstantiation, of all things, suddenly burst into the news late last week down in Florida. I will write about that tomorrow.

POST SCRIPT: The propaganda machine at work

In my series on the propaganda machine, I spoke about how publishing houses like Regnery seem to exist largely for the purpose of subsidizing and promoting authors who promote their specific agenda, irrespective of the quality of the work or even that of the author. Here is another example.

July 03, 2008

It's smiting time!

The last time we encountered Christian evangelist Ray Comfort he was, along with his trusty sidekick the Boy Wonder Kirk Cameron, arguing that the exquisite design of the banana was absolute proof of the existence of god. The banana, Comfort pointed out, was "the atheist's nightmare."

You said it, Ray! You convinced me. Now whenever I eat a banana, I cannot help but think of god carefully tinkering with its design so that it could be easily eaten by me.

But Comfort is not content to simply demolish evolution with such brilliant arguments. He also runs a Q/A on his website providing deep insights into other metaphysical questions, the kinds that have baffled philosophers and theologians for centuries.

He recently responded to a theodicy question posed by a reader identifying herself as Weemaryanne.

There've been several hundred gay marriages enacted in California in the past few days. Maybe a couple of thousand by now, I haven't checked the numbers. And in the non-gay-marrying Midwest, they're fighting floods, while in California it's fair and dry. How is The Golden State managing to escape the wrath of your imaginary friend, I wonder?

This is a fair question, something that I too had been wondering about. While the obvious sinfulness of the people of New Orleans was clearly the cause of the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina, why was god mad at the people of Iowa who, by all outward signs anyway, seem like people whose worst vice is growing obscene amounts of corn?

By snarkily referring to god as 'your imaginary friend' Weemaryanne (which I suspect is not her real name) was revealed as a godless hussy. This infidel clearly thought that she had caught Comfort in an embarrassing contradiction. She did not realize that his ministry is not called The Way of the Master for nothing. The Master shot back at her with that incisive logical reasoning that has put atheists on the run everywhere.

Maryanne. At present there are 840 wild-fires that are burning at once in California, destroying many homes. The fires were started by lightning strikes. Guess who’s in charge of the electrical department? These are from thunder storms that have no rain. Guess who gives the rain? You said "while in California it's fair and dry." We are having the worst drought in our recorded history. Last year 1,155 homes were destroyed. You live in an imaginary world. I suggest you get out more.

Ha, ha! That's telling her, Ray! Of course god hates gay-marriage-loving California, as well he should, and is busily smiting people there at this very moment. Weemaryanne has probably crawled back to her terrorist-loving, Islamofascist, feminazi witches coven after that elegantly delivered smackdown by The Master.

But while that explained that the sinful Californians were very much in god's crosshairs, Comfort unfortunately did not address the issue of why Iowans were being smitten (smote?) at all. That was, however, explained by another Christian by the name of Jason Werner, a god-loving man who apparently resides in my very own city of Cleveland. He investigated what was going on in that seemingly bucolic state and was shocked by the incontrovertible evidence of Iowa's appalling sinfulness.

I learned that Cedar Rapids was an absolute city of corruption. There are about 124,000 residents in the actual city. And in Iowa, gambling is legal, whereby there are 17 casinos. Embryonic stem-cell research is funded. Liberal governors have run the state into the ground for the past 20 years including a former conservative Republican many years ago. Human cloning is legal. Referendums by the citizens are often shot down. Spending for education is the most consistent increase of any issue. The University of Iowa is among the ten best colleges to party in the country. The University of Iowa is very homosexual-oriented. Grinnell is extremely homosexual-oriented. I found five blood alleys in Cedar Rapids. Homosexual organizations are very popular in Cedar Rapids and Des Moines. Prostitution and adult entertainment is actually worse than Cleveland, which has a population of nearly 400,000. There were nearly 100 bars in a radius of one mile although the nearby college is dry.

Wow! Am I glad that I don't live in that cesspool!

But I am getting a little nervous. While god is omnipotent and omniscient and omnipresent, he does not seem to be omniaccurate. His punishments for sinfulness, like hurricanes, floods, tsunamis, wildfires, etc., seem a little indiscriminate, risking the lives of the innocent along with the guilty. He seems to get a little carried away when he gets angry and in a smitin' mood and lets fly in all directions, like the Incredible Hulk or the people one reads about in the papers who snap under pressure and let loose with automatic weapons in crowded places. I am worried that I might become collateral damage when god gets round to dealing with all the sinners on my street.

What sinning is going on down my street, you ask? Thanks to having my eyes opened by good Christians such as Comfort and Werner, I have realized that I am surrounded by depravity. First, a gay couple moved into my street about a dozen years ago. Presumably because we did not keep the neighborhood pure by driving them away with pitchforks, our street may have been perceived as gay-friendly and about two years ago a lesbian couple also moved in a few doors away.

They all pretend to be like normal people, cutting grass, weeding flowerbeds, sometimes sitting on their front step in warm weather, and waving and smiling to neighbors. But as the kind of sinners that god hates the most, even worse than murderers and child molesters and corporate executives who embezzle people of their life savings, they are putting the rest of us at risk just by living close to us. The gay couple are even brazen enough to fly a rainbow flag on their house, practically taunting god to deliver a thunderbolt!

I just hope that they haven't taken the ultimate evil step of going to California and getting married because if they did that, we know that all the godly heterosexual marriages on our street are going to be undermined and fall apart.

And who knows what acts of depravity are going on in the homes of even my supposedly heterosexual neighbors? Oh sure, they put on a normal face by walking their dogs, playing catch with their kids on the lawn, organizing block parties, and the like. But one can only imagine the depraved orgies that are being held inside their homes once the curtains are drawn in the evening.

I am thinking that in order to be safe from the inevitable coming wrath of god, I may need to buy about 500 acres in some remote area of Montana or someplace and live right in the middle of the property, far away from any potential sinning neighbors. I figure that that should provide enough of a distance cushion so that whatever blunt instrument god chooses to use next for smiting sinners, like an earthquake or an asteroid collision with the Earth, I will be able to escape the side effects.

What god really needs to do is develop some precision-guided smiting weapons with built-in lasers, GPS trackers, and stuff. That would be cool. Then I could stay in my present home, sit on the front step, and watch the homes of my sinning neighbors be neatly and precisely destroyed.

Tim the Enchanter shows what such a carefully targeted smiting might look like.

Maybe god could make this into an annual event, replacing Fourth of July fireworks.

June 19, 2008

The Language of God-9: An appeal to the scientifically minded

(This series of posts reviews in detail Francis Collins's book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, originally published in 2006. The page numbers cited are from the large print edition published in 2007. The complete set of these posts will be archived here.)

At the very end of his book, Collins appeals to those who may feel that science is incompatible with belief on god.

Have you been concerned that belief in God requires a descent into irrationality, a compromise of logic, or even intellectual suicide? It is hoped that the arguments presented within this book will provide at least a partial antidote to that view, and will convince you that of all the possible worldviews, atheism is the least rational. (p. 304)

I am afraid that this is a forlorn hope. If anything, this book with its mish-mash of faulty logic, ad hoc assumptions, contradictions, and question-begging rationalizations may actually achieve just the opposite. After all, if this is the best that an eminent scientist like Collins can come up with in defense of religion, then the situation is truly hopeless.

It may be that there are other scientists who can come up with better attempts and reconciling god with current scientific knowledge. Finding Darwin's God by biologist Kenneth Miller tries to use the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics to get around the question of how god can influence the course of events without being detected, but that argument has no credibility whatsoever. Also Miller's book does not have the breadth of Collins's work. Whatever the faults of Collins's book, and there are many, he has to be commended on facing up squarely to the major problems and trying to come to terms with them.

In reading Collins's book, one finds a refreshing honesty and lack of guile. You get the sense that he knows he is grappling with very difficult issues of science and faith and genuinely believes what he writes. This is in contrast with much of the writing emerging from (say) the intelligent design creationism camp that, while also sophisticated, strikes one as propagandistic, that they understand the weakness of their case but are trying to cover it up.

Collins's problem is just that his solutions to the problems are so inadequate. But even here, the fault cannot be laid entirely at his feet. It is partially due to society at large which has given belief in god a respectability that has persuaded even people who should know better that it must have a rational basis, even though all the evidence is against it. Once Collins had taken the step to decide to believe in god, he simply cannot avoid slowly sinking into the sea of contradictions that eventually engulfs him.

Although I have tried to review Collins's book fairly, some readers may think I have been too harsh. If so, they are not going to like Sam Harris's review at all. He gives his review the title of The Language of Ignorance and says:

Francis Collins—physical chemist, medical geneticist and head of the Human Genome Project—has written a book entitled “The Language of God.” In it, he attempts to demonstrate that there is “a consistent and profoundly satisfying harmony” between 21st-century science and evangelical Christianity. To say that he fails at his task does not quite get at the inadequacy of his efforts. He fails the way a surgeon would fail if he attempted to operate using only his toes. His failure is predictable, spectacular and vile. “The Language of God” reads like a hoax text, and the knowledge that it is not a hoax should be disturbing to anyone who cares about the future of intellectual and political discourse in the United States.
. . .
If one wonders how beguiled, self-deceived and carefree in the service of fallacy a scientist can be in the United States in the 21st century, “The Language of God” provides the answer. The only thing that mitigates the harm this book will do to the stature of science in the United States is that it will be mostly read by people for whom science has little stature already. Viewed from abroad, “The Language of God” will be seen as another reason to wonder about the fate of American society. Indeed, it is rare that one sees the thumbprint of historical contingency so visible on the lens of intellectual discourse. This is an American book, attesting to American ignorance, written for Americans who believe that ignorance is stronger than death. Reading it should provoke feelings of collective guilt in any sensitive secularist. We should be ashamed that this book was written in our own time.

Collins's hope expressed towards the end of the book that scientists who read it will be persuaded that "of all the possible worldviews, atheism is the least rational" is a statement revealing wishful thinking on a massive scale. My own feeling is that anyone who reads his book without suspending their powers of logic and reasoning will arrive at exactly the opposite conclusion.

Although I have been critical of Collins's attempts at arguing for the existence of god, there is no question that when dealing just with science he writes and argues well. In fact, the Appendix of his book The Moral Practice of Science and Medicine: Bioethics is an excellent primer on some of the critical ethical issues facing us today as a result of the rapid advances in science in which he has played such an important role.

I will write about them in the next two posts.

POST SCRIPT: The Two Johns discuss Bush's policies in the Middle East

June 18, 2008

The Language of God-8: The problem of free will, omnipotence, and omniscience

(This series of posts reviews in detail Francis Collins's book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, originally published in 2006. The page numbers cited are from the large print edition published in 2007. The complete set of these posts will be archived here.)

The one new (to me at least) and interesting argument in The Language of God was the attempt by Francis Collins to reconcile the idea of free will with god's omnipotence and omniscience. This knotty problem is caused by religious people wanting to hold on to three beliefs simultaneously: (1) We have free will. (2) God is omnipotent (all-powerful). (3) God is omniscient (knows everything in the past present and future).

Can all three things be simultaneously true? In the absence of a comparison with data, the only way that one can judge whether a proposition is false by reason alone is if it leads to a logical contradiction. Most people would immediately see that these three assumptions lead to irreconcilable contradictions and that one has to relinquish at least one of them. But Collins, like a lot of religious people, cannot bring himself to do that. He wants to believe in the traditional properties of god.

He also has the problem that although evolution by natural selection is not purely a chance-driven process, chance does play a role in one part of the process, that which causes mutations and variety. Chance can also play a role in the kinds of events that can change the environment in which an organism finds itself and thus change the way that the non-random natural selection process operates. For example, the asteroid collision that occurred about 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs profoundly affected the subsequent evolution process because it created opportunities for other species to emerge that might otherwise have been destroyed by dinosaurs.

This element of chance prevents religious people from simply assuming that god created the universe with its laws and then let it run its course because there is no guarantee that chance events like that asteroid collision would have occurred. Then how can you guarantee that humans would emerge without God intervening? The idea that humans emerged because of that chance collision does not cause atheists any problems. We are just thankful to have had that lucky break. But for religious people, humans were the goal of creation and their appearance cannot be left to chance. So what to do?

In item #4 of his basic tenets of BioLogos, Collins says that god never intervenes in the evolutionary process once he sets it in motion along with its associated laws. But he knows that there are contingent factors in evolution. So how can he ensure that humans must eventually appear? Again, to his credit, he does not duck the question or try to pretend it is not there.

Collins tries to deal with it by greatly expanding his concept of god:

The solution is actually readily to hand once one ceases to apply human limitations to God. If God is outside of nature, then He is outside of space and time. In that context, God could in the moment of creation of the universe also know every detail of the future. That could include the formation of stars, planets, and galaxies, all of the chemistry physics, geology, and biology that led to the formation of life on earth, and the moment of your reading this book – and beyond. In that context, evolution could appear to us to be driven by chance, but from God's perspective the outcome would be entirely specified. Thus, God could be completely and intimately involved in the creation of all species, while from our perspective, limited as it is by the tyranny of linear time, this would appear a random and undirected process. (p. 272)

This is a truly remarkable passage, essentially saying that everything that would eventually occur was known by god at the time of creation, although to us it may seem like we have random events.

He had foreshadowed this extraordinary claim in an earlier part of the book (p. 113, 114) where he laid out his claims step-by-step.

• If God exists, he is supernatural
• If He is supernatural, then He is not limited by natural laws.
• If He is not limited by natural laws, there is no reason He should be limited by time.
• If He is not limited by time, then he is in the past, the present, and the future.

The consequence of those conclusions would include:

• He could exist before the Big Bang and He could exist after the universe fades away, if it ever does.
• He could know the precise outcome of the formation of the universe even before it started.
• He could have foreknowledge of a planet near the outer rim of an average spiral galaxy that would have just the right characteristics to allow life.
• He could have foreknowledge that the planet would lead to the development of sentient creatures, through the mechanism of evolution by natural selection.
• He could even know in advance the thoughts and actions of those creatures, even though they themselves have free will

It seems to me that in this passage, Collins has given up on free will altogether and reverted to a strict determinism, although free will was invoked by him in defense of suffering caused by people and free will is an essential component of the concept of sin. After all, sin has no meaning if we are all just automatons playing out our pre-ordained roles in a drama authored and directed by god.

But as is usually the case, trying to adjust god's qualities to take care of one problem immediately creates new problems elsewhere. John Allen Paulos (Irreligion: A mathematician explains why the arguments for god just don’t add up, 2008), points out one:

[E]fforts by some to put God, the putative first cause, completely outside of time and space give up entirely on the notion of cause, which is defined in terms of time. After all, A causes B only if A comes before B, and the first cause comes – surprise – first, before its consequences. (Placing God outside of space and time would also preclude any sort of later divine intervention in worldly affairs.)" (Paulos, p. 5,6)

Paulos also points out that Collins's efforts to have both omniscience and omnipotence runs into another well-known contradiction.

Being omniscient, God knows everything that will happen: He can predict the future trajectory of every snowflake, the sprouting of every blade of grass, and the deeds of every human being, as well as all of His own actions. But being omnipotent, He can act in any way and do anything He wants, including behaving in ways different from those He'd predicted, making his expectations uncertain and fallible. He thus can't be both omnipotent and omniscient. (Paulos, p. 41)

I think that these are insurmountable obstacles for any religious believer to overcome. Francis Collins tackles them gamely but is defeated by them.

POST SCRIPT: Man Crushes

James Wolcott analyzes this phenomenon that exists amongst male journalists and politicians.

June 17, 2008

The Language of God-7: The problem of theodicy

(This series of posts reviews in detail Francis Collins's book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, originally published in 2006. The page numbers cited are from the large print edition published in 2007. The complete set of these posts will be archived here.)

Any defense of god has to confront a tough question: Why would a benevolent and omnipotent god allow suffering? The Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-271 BCE) posed the essential and, to my mind, ultimate contradiction that believers in god face: How to explain the existence of evil.

Is god willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is god both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him god?

Collins has nothing really new to say about this age-old problem but to his credit he does not avoid it. On the question of suffering to people caused by other people, he blames free will.

[We] have somehow been given free will, the ability to do as we please. We use this ability frequently to disobey the Moral Law. And when we do so, we shouldn't then blame God for the consequences. (p. 64)

Collins seems to give a curious excuse for the evil caused by religious people, the very people who should be acutely able to distinguish between right and wrong.

In some unusual cultures the [Moral Law] takes on surprising trappings – consider witch burning in seventeenth century America. Yet when surveyed closely, these apparent aberrations can be seen to arise from strongly held but misguided conclusions about who or what is good or evil. If you firmly believed that a witch is the personification of evil on earth, an apostle of the devil himself, would it not then seem justified to take such drastic actions? (p. 39)

He also points to the suffering caused by non-religious people throughout history, as if that explained anything. I hear this argument often and always find it an odd one for religious people to make, even accepting for the moment the dubious proposition that throughout the course of history nonbelievers have caused more suffering than religious people. Is it really considered an argument in favor of a benevolent and omnipotent god that his followers have caused less suffering than non-believers?

On the more difficult question of suffering caused by natural disasters that god presumably has the power to avert and in which free will is not involved, Collins gives a confused answer, suggesting that these occur due to 'natural' laws and causes, and for god to prevent such events would require him to make repeated interventions in contravention of these laws. He says that this, for some reason, would be bad.

Science reveals that the universe, our own planet, and life itself are engaged in an evolutionary process. The consequences of that can include the unpredictability of the weather, the slippage of a tectonic plate, or the misspelling of a cancer gene in the normal process of cell division. If at the beginning of time God chose to use these forces to create human beings, then the inevitability of these other painful consequences was also assured. Frequent miraculous interventions would be at least as chaotic in the physical realm and would be interfering with human acts of free will. (p. 65-68)

The notion that people prefer suffering to the 'chaos' caused by repeated intervention by god in the world is a specious argument. If parents had a child who was dying of cancer, I bet that they would want more than anything for god to intervene and cure her, and wouldn't give a damn if that caused 'chaos' for anyone else, including those scientists doing cancer research. In fact, religious people are always praying for god to intervene in such ways. That is when their need for god is greatest. If the people god supposedly created and whom he supposedly loves deeply want god to intervene to do a manifestly good thing and don't care about chaos, why does god care? Or if he really wants natural laws to work but also cares about curing people of cancer, why doesn't he whisper in Collins's or other scientists' ears the mechanism he used to cause cancer cells to emerge and how they can cure it?

Recognizing that saying what is effectively "Hey, stuff happens!" is weak consolation for massive and widespread suffering due to natural disasters or the actions of people, Collins inevitably retreats to a reliable refuge and plays that old get-out-of-jail-free card, the 'mysterious ways clause'.

[If] God is loving and wishes for the best of us, then perhaps His plan is not the same as our plan . . . We may never fully understand the reasons for these painful experiences, but we can begin to accept the idea that there may be such reasons. (p. 65-68)
. . .
Recognize that a great deal of suffering is brought upon us by our own actions or those of others, and that in a world where humans practice free will, it is inevitable. Understand, also, that if God is real, His purposes will often not be the same as ours. Hard though it is to accept, a complete absence of suffering may not be in the best interest of our spiritual growth. (p. 305)

In other words, suffering might be good for us. But while pleading ignorance of god's intent when it comes to suffering, like all religious believers, Collins seems to have extraordinary knowledge of god's character and nature when it works to his advantage, like when he knows which act is a miracle of god and which isn't or how god has chosen to act. For example, when arguing against young Earth creationism ideas, he says "Is this consistent with everything else we know about God from the Bible, from the Moral Law, and from every other source – namely, that He is loving, logical, and consistent?" (p. 237)

Eventually this is what all believers in god end up doing: Defining god in such a way that it suits their own personal emotional needs, adding ad hoc assumptions to deal with any and all problems created by their definition, and invoking the mysterious ways clause as a last resort when even the ad hoc additions aren't sufficient.

Francis Collins, for all his sophistication and scientific expertise, is no different.

POST SCRIPT: Tim Russert

It should be no surprise that his fellow Villagers are praising the late Tim Russert as a great journalist. He was, after all, one of them, serving their interests faithfully. But while I am sorry that he died suddenly at an early age, Jonathan Schwarz captures my feelings exactly about how people like Russert endlessly drive their preferred chosen narrative, even if it is contradicted by facts.

How Tim Russert Planted The Seeds For Iraq War

December 19, 1999: With Al Gore as guest, Tim Russert says on Meet the Press: "One year ago Saddam Hussein threw out all the inspectors who could find his chemical or nuclear capability." Russert asks Gore what he's going to do about this.

Soon afterward: Sam Husseini leaves a message on Russert's answering machine, and speaks to two of his assistants, telling them the inspectors were withdrawn by the UN at the request of the United States.

January 2, 2000: With Madeleine Albright as guest, Tim Russert repeats the error on Meet the Press: "One year ago, the inspectors were told, 'Get out,' by Saddam Hussein." Russert asks Albright what she's going to do about this.

January 21, 2000: Sam Husseini writes a letter to Russert, again laying out the facts, and requests a correction.

January 22, 2000-March 19, 2003: Russert never corrects his error.

March 19, 2003-present: Hundreds of thousands of people die in Iraq War. Russert dies, not in Iraq War. Official Washington weeps copious tears for Russert and his Extraordinary Journalistic Standards.

Notice that even if Husseini was not considered important enough to be listened to, it looks as if none of the many, many Village journalists who knew Russert bothered to tell him the truth about the inspectors either. They all live together in their Village and believe their Village myths, and then foist them on us. It was because of this relentless driving of the White House's preferred war narrative that so many people, even now, believe so many false things about the Iraq war.

David North and David Walsh provide a much better review of Russert and his career than the hagiography that went on over the weekend.

June 16, 2008

The Language of God-6: Existence and universal claims

(This series of posts reviews in detail Francis Collins's book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, originally published in 2006. The page numbers cited are from the large print edition published in 2007. The complete set of these posts will be archived here.)

Collins also takes the familiar tack of using negative arguments for god as a wedge to get his foot in the logical door and, after doing so, to make sweeping claims. This chain of 'reasoning' will be familiar to anyone who has ever discussed the existence of god with a believer and it goes like this:

1. Start by identifying some features of the universe for which we do not currently have a good scientific explanation.
2. Assert that we cannot prove that god was not the cause of those specific events.
3. Assert that therefore it is possible that god could have been the cause.
4. Assert that therefore it is possible to believe that god can exist.
5. Assert that since god can exist and I feel that god exists, therefore god does exist.
6. Assert that since god exists, he can do anything at all, so any and all miracles are possible.
7. Grant miracle status only to those that I personally or my particular religious sect approve of.
8. Hence only my particular religious belief in god is correct and everyone else's is wrong.

This is basically how all religions justify their claims that they are the one true religion. Here are some examples from Collins's book of the first three steps of this reasoning at work. (The next four steps were also taken by him elsewhere, as I showed in previous posts. Collins is an inclusive evangelical and tries to avoid the right religion/wrong religion debate and thus does not explicitly make the last claim, although his belief in Jesus Christ as the son of god is an indirect statement of it.)

[Dawkins] argues that evolution fully accounts for biological complexity and the origins of humankind, so there is no more need for God. While this argument rightly relieves God of the responsibility for multiple acts of creation of each species on the planet, it certainly does not disprove the idea that God worked out His creative plan by means of evolution. (p. 220)
. . .
The major and inescapable flaw of Dawkins's claim that science demands atheism is that it goes beyond the evidence. If God is outside of nature, then science can neither prove nor disprove His existence. (p. 222)

This fails the logic test. As mathematician John Allen Paulos argues in his book Irreligion: A mathematician explains why the arguments for god just don’t add up (2008), basic logic requires that existence claims and universal claims be treated differently.

Existence claims can be proved but not disproved. "No matter how absurd the existence claim (there exists a dog who speaks English out of its rear end), we cannot look everywhere and check everything in order to assert with absolute confidence that there's no entity having the property." (Paulos, p. 42) But all the person making the existence claim needs to do to prove it is to produce just one specimen. So the burden of proof is on the person making the existence claim, and in the absence of such proof, it is perfectly logical to deny the validity of the claim.

On the other hand, universal claims can be disproved but not proved. For example, the claim that all swans are white can be disproved by producing just one black swan. But no one can prove the universal claim since we can never say we have checked each and every swan. So the burden of proof is on the person denying the universal claim and in the absence of such proof, it is perfectly logical to assume the validity of the universal claim.

This is how science works. Claims that Higgs bosons with certain properties exist (as is claimed by the currently dominant theory in particle physics) is an existence claim and until evidence is produced for it, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that there is no such thing. That is why over 2,000 physicists from 32 countries are involved in the building of a huge and expensive accelerator in Europe known as the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) that is designed to produce at least one such Higgs particle, even though theorists feel confident that it exists.

On other hand, the claim that "all electrons have the same rest mass" is a universal claim based on observations of a limited set of electrons and it is logical to accept it as valid until someone produces a counter-example.

The claim that god exists is clearly an existence claim, and so the burden of proof is on the believer to produce god. If believers fail to produce god or to provide indirect but credible evidence of his existence, the rational thing is to assume non-existence.

When it comes to religion Collins, like many others, abandons the reasoning powers he has demonstrated in his scientific work when he says "Atheism itself must therefore be considered a form of blind faith, in that it adopts a belief system that cannot be defended on the basis of pure reason." (p. 222)

Collins's claim is simply wrong. Atheism is the logical and rational consequence of the failure of believers to produce evidence in favor of their existence claim for god.

POST SCRIPT: Why you shouldn't throw paperclips

We have all had experience with the co-worker or acquaintance who thinks he/she is being funny by repeating something over and over when it is just infuriatingly annoying. Well, sometimes it is just too much to take.

June 13, 2008

The Language of God-5: The nasty problem of miracles

As I said before, sophisticated religious believers like Francis Collins and John Lennox always start out by arguing for a God of the Ultimate Gaps. The insurmountable problem that they then face is that their emotional need to believe in a Personal God who communicates with them individually and can answer their prayers requires them to go well beyond the narrow role they initially assigned to a God of the Ultimate Gaps, and results in them getting tied up in all kinds of logical knots.

Because they have to find ways for god to act in the universe, they inevitably make additional assumptions to allow for that. Collins does this by expanding the powers of god, so that miracles violating natural laws are now possible, even though this contradicts his earlier claim that god is not in our universe and thus we should not expect to find tangible evidence of his presence in the universe.

He tries to suggest, like Lennox, that miracles are possible because once you accept the existence of god, all things become possible: "Miracles thus do not pose an irreconcilable conflict for the believer who trusts in science as a means to investigate the natural world, and who sees that the natural world is ruled by laws. If, like me, you admit that there might exist something or someone outside of nature, then there is no logical reason why that force could not on rare occasions stage an invasion." (p. 77) He further justifies this by saying, "Is not God the author of the laws of the universe? Is He not the greatest scientist? The greatest physicist? The greatest biologist?" (p. 235)

The fundamental illogic of saying that god acts in nature and thus miracles are possible, just after arguing that god is outside of nature, does not strike a true believer like Collins.

He seems to think that this flat-out contradiction can be waved away by arguing that miracles are rare. He writes: "Perhaps on rare occasions, God does perform miracles." (p. 65) And again, "But for the most part, the existence of free will and of order in the physical universe are inexorable facts. While we might wish for such miraculous deliverance to occur more frequently, the consequence of interrupting these two sets of forces would be utter chaos." (p.65) And again, "On the other hand, in order for the world to avoid descending into chaos, miracles must be very uncommon." (p. 77)

The idea that this hopeless muddle can be rescued by saying that such miraculous 'invasions' from outside the universe are rare only makes the logical hole he is digging deeper. If god can do one miracle then we already have the chaos Collins fears because we do not know in advance which event is the miracle and which is not. It would be different if god were to announce when he was doing a miracle but that is not what happens. By allowing for any miracle at all, Collins has effectively lost the argument that he has carefully made against the YEC and ID people.

He seems to think that he can minimize the damage he has caused to his logic by requiring of his rare miracles "that they should serve some purpose, rather than representing the supernatural acts of a capricious magician, simply designed to amaze." (p. 77) This allows him to find reasons to accept the 'miracle' that Jesus rose from the dead while dismissing the 'miracle' of Jesus appearing on a piece of toast or a French fry. But by now logic and reason have been thrown to the winds, leaving only self-serving assertions, because Collins is now effectively saying that it is only religious sophisticates like him who know the mind of god well enough to judge what is a miracle and what is not.

He tries to have it both ways even when dealing with the Biblical stories of creation.

The real dilemma for the believer comes down to whether Genesis 2 is describing a special act of miraculous creation that applied to a historic couple [Adam and Eve], making them biologically different from all the other creatures that had walked the earth, or whether this is a poetic and powerful allegory of God's plan for the entrance of the spiritual nature (the soul) and the Moral Law into humanity.

Since a supernatural God can carry out supernatural acts, both options are tenable. (p. 275)

It is sad that a gifted scientist like Collins cannot see that his religious beliefs have blinded him to the obvious truth that was expressed by another evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin much earlier: "We cannot live simultaneously in a world of natural causation and of miracles, for if one miracle can occur, there is no limit." (Scientists Confront Creationism, Laurie R. Godfrey, (ed.) 1983.)

POST SCRIPT: Thinks tanks and enviroskeptics

In my series on 'think tanks' (titled The Propaganda Machine), I discussed how they are often used to provide a scholarly veneer on propaganda. A recent study says that over 90% of the books expressing skepticism on threats to the environment have think tank roots.

(Thanks to Machines Like Us.)

June 12, 2008

The Language of God-4: The contradictions start piling up

(This series of posts reviews in detail Francis Collins's book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, originally published in 2006. The page numbers cited are from the large print edition published in 2007. The complete set of these posts will be archived here.)

Thoughtful religious people have always faced the problem of explaining why there is no tangible evidence for god anywhere. They have sought to "explain" this by fiat, by simply asserting, as Collins does, that god exists 'outside the universe' (whatever that means) and therefore we will not find evidence for him within the universe.

It would seem, then, that Collins would support Stephen Jay Gould's idea, suggested in his book Rocks of Ages (1999), that the two realms occupy 'non-overlapping magisteria', where all explanations for physical phenomena are reserved for science while leaving the moral and ethical realms for religion. Gould was expanding on an earlier (1984) formulation by the National Academy of Sciences that said that "[R]eligion and science are separate and mutually exclusive realms of human thought whose presentation in the same context leads to misunderstanding of both scientific theory and religious belief."

I have pointed out in an earlier posting and in my own book Quest for Truth: Scientific Progress and Religious Beliefs (2000) that this approach of the NAS and Gould leads to terrible contradictions. Collins shares my dislike of this 'two realms' model, but for different reasons. Unlike Gould, who did not believe in god himself but was merely trying to negotiate a truce between moderate religion and atheism so that they can join forces against the creationists, religious people like Collins are seeking a unifying vision of god and science and hence the 'two realms' model does not work for him.

Collins wants to be able to be in personal communication with god and so he is obliged to find a way to cross the bridge that separates the 'inside' and 'outside' of the universe, or the two 'magisteria', and there is simply no way to do so without creating all kinds of logical problems. This is similar to the kinds of problems faced by writer J. K. Rowling in creating a magical world that is parallel to the real world. Once you step on the extremely slippery slope of trying to find ways for god to act in the universe, you quickly slide to the bottom and land in a mess of contradictions, circular arguments, and question-begging ad hoc rationalizations.

We see the contradictions beginning right out of the gate, on page 15. After rejecting the two realms model as "potentially unsatisfying", Collins immediately contradicts himself, starting on the very same page.

In my view there is no conflict with being a rigorous scientist and a person who believes in a God who takes a personal interest in each one of us. Science's domain is to explore nature. God's domain is in the spiritual world, a realm not possible to explore with the tools and language of science. It must be examined with the heart, the mind, and the soul – and the mind must find a way to embrace both realms. (p. 15)
. . .
It also became clear to me that science, despite its unquestioned powers in unraveling the mysteries of the natural world, would get me no further in resolving the question of God. If God exists, the He must be outside the natural world, and therefore the tools of science are not the right ones to learn about him. (p. 47,48)
. . .
BioLogos doesn't try to wedge God into gaps in our understanding of the natural world; it proposes God as the answer to questions science was never intended to address, such as "How did the universe get here?" "What is the meaning of life?" What happens to us after we die?" Unlike Intelligent Design, BioLogos is not intended as a scientific theory. Its truth can be tested only by the spiritual logic of the heart, the mind, and the soul. (p. 270, 271)

The expression to examine something with the 'heart and mind and soul' can be viewed as a mere rhetorical device, to imply that one is devoting one's full and undivided and enthusiastic attention to the task. But when religious people talk about the 'heart, mind, and soul', it is clear that they have entered a squishy world where resonant phrases are used to cover a lack of content.

I can understand what people mean by the mind (it is the cognitive processes of the brain) and what it means to use the mind to examine something. The tools of science enable one to study phenomena and the mind is unquestionably a part of those tools since we need to think and reason about things. The brain-based mind is necessary to do so. But what does it mean to examine things with the 'heart and soul' as well? As far as I can infer, it seems to refer to just emotions. If you feel good about something, your 'heart and soul' approves. If you feel misgivings, your 'heart and soul' is saying no.

Neuroscientists know that our emotions are the result of certain chemicals called neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, and adrenaline excreted by various parts of the brain. Hence emotions are also merely the result of the working of the brain. But religious people tend to take these emotional chords as the language that god uses to communicate with them.

Since many people seem to feel an emotional need for god, it is hardly surprising that their 'heart and soul' says yes to the idea that god is talking to them and they then take this as 'evidence' that god exists. But is this kind of self-indulgent thinking really to be taken seriously as evidence for god?

As John Allen Paulos says in his book Irreligion: A mathematician explains why the arguments for god just don’t add up (2008, p, 75), this kind of argument for god can be summarized as follows:

1. People feel in the pit of their stomach that there is a God
2. They sometimes dress up this feeling with any number of unrelated, irrelevant, and unfalsifiable banalities and make a Kierkegaadian "leap of faith" to conclude that God exists.
3. Therefore God exists.

Of course, the unrelated, irrelevant, and unfalsifiable banalities do play a role. It's been my experience that, everything being equal, many people are more impressed by fatuous blather that they don't understand than by simple observations that they do.

In the next post, I will look at how Collins deals with the knotty problem of miracles.

POST SCRIPT: Religion? What religion?

Guess who 'believes that Earth’s appearance is a recent geologic event — thousands of years old, not 4.5 billion' and that "The most incredible thing I believe is the Christmas story. That little baby born in the manger was the god that created the universe"?

None other that the chairman of the Texas state education board, Dr. Don McLeroy, a dentist in Central Texas

"But Dr. McLeroy says his rejection of evolution — “I just don’t think it’s true or it’s ever happened” — is not based on religious grounds."

Whew, that's a relief. For a moment, I thought he was one of those crazy people trying to bring their religious beliefs into the science classroom.

June 11, 2008

The Language of God-3: The God of the Ultimate Gaps again

(This series of posts reviews in detail Francis Collins's book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, originally published in 2006. The page numbers cited are from the large print edition published in 2007. The complete set of these posts will be archived here.)

The subtitle of Francis Collins's book A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief leads one to expect evidence, and scientific evidence at that, for the existence of god. But the book does not actually present any evidence. What it does is rework the same philosophical arguments that have been around for a long time, especially as reformulated by Oxford academic C. S. Lewis, another atheist who later converted to Christianity and whose writings (especially Mere Christianity) have been influential in Christian apologetics in general and for Collins in particular. It was Lewis's writings that started Collins on his own journey from atheism to belief. (Lewis is also the author of The Chronicles of Narnia.)

Rather than present any evidence for god, Collins' book suggests simply that modern scientific knowledge can be made consistent with earlier religious arguments for god. In other words he, like Lewis and other theologians before him, try to establish the existence of god by reasoning alone. They have to try and do this since they have no evidence but they immediately face a logical problem. "As David Hume observed, the only way a proposition can be proved by logic and the meaning of words alone is for its negation to be (or lead to) a contradiction, but there's no contradiction that results from God's not existing." (John Allen Paulos, Irreligion: A mathematician explains why the arguments for god just don’t add up (2008), p. 40)

Collins's arguments for the existence of god run into difficulties when he presents his own model reconciling his belief in god with science. When one examines closely his arguments, one sees that they are very similar to the ones made by John Lennox in his debate with Richard Dawkins and which I have examined before. In fact, it follows precisely the same pattern, varying only in its details.

Both Lennox and Collins start out by arguing on a highly abstract plane. Collins asserts, like Lennox, that the god he believes in is not a 'God of the gaps'. But for the concept of god to have any real meaning one needs some opportunities for god to act and so Collins ends up, like Lennox, arguing that science has not ruled out the possibility of a 'God of the Ultimate Gaps'. Then, like Lennox, he uses sleight-of-hand. After first arguing that it is logically impossible to rule out the existence of a God of the Ultimate Gaps, he takes that as a license to believe in any and all things supernatural

Where Collins differs with Lennox lies in his choice of Ultimate Gaps being a little different from Lennox's. While mathematician and philosopher of science Lennox sees the Ultimate Gaps as being the origins of the universe and the beginning of life, Collins (being a biologist and more familiar with the latter area) thinks that the origins of life is probably something that can and will be solved by science and warns against invoking god as an explanation for it.

Given the inability of science thus far to explain the profound question of life's origins, some theists have identified the appearance of RNA and DNA as a possible opportunity for divine creative action . . . Faith that places God in the gaps of current understanding about the natural world may be headed for crisis if advances in science subsequently fill those gaps. Faced with incomplete understanding of the natural world, believers should be cautious about invoking the divine in areas of current mystery, lest they build an unnecessary theological argument that is doomed for later destruction. . . [While] the question of the origin of life is a fascinating one, and the inability of modern science to develop a statistically probable mechanism is intriguing, this is not the place for a thoughtful person to wager his faith. (p. 127-129)

Collins's Ultimate Gaps are the origins of the universe (as was expected from point #2 on his list of the fundamental tenets of his BioLogos philosophy) and what he identifies as the existence of the "Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history" This is his point #6. (p. 264)

Collins says that "[M]aterialistic skeptics who wish to give no ground to the concept of the supernatural . . . will no doubt argue that there is no need to consider miracles at all. In their view, the laws of nature can explain everything, even the exceedingly improbable." (p. 78) He then flatly asserts, "There is at least one singular, exceedingly improbable, and profound event in history that scientists of nearly all disciplines agree is not understood and will never be understood, and for which the laws of nature fall completely short of providing an explanation." (p. 78, my italics.)

After making this sweeping and unjustified statement about an unexplainable gap, Collins fills it with god, saying "The Big Bang cries out for a divine explanation. It forces the conclusion that nature had a defined beginning. I cannot see how nature could have created itself. Only a supernatural force that is outside of space and time could have done that." (p. 94)

This kind of argument has been derided as 'the argument from personal incredulity' ("I cannot imagine how X could have happened. Therefore god must have done X.") and is exactly the same as that of the intelligent design advocates that Collins had just criticized. This is always a dangerous argument, because science is never static and what is unexplained today may not be so tomorrow. In fact, just recently, some physicists are claiming to have found clues to the time before the Big Bang.

Also, as Sam Harris points out in his review of the book, the Big Bang argument for god is weak on other grounds.

It is worth pointing out the term “supernatural,” which Collins uses freely throughout his book, is semantically indistinguishable from the term “magical.” Reading his text with this substitution in mind is rather instructive. In any case, even if we accepted that our universe simply had to be created by an intelligent being, this would not suggest that this being is the God of the Bible, or even particularly magical. If intelligently designed, our universe could be running as a simulation on an alien supercomputer. As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a Creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To insert an inscrutable God at the origin of the universe explains absolutely nothing. And to say that God, by definition, is uncreated, simply begs the question. (Why can’t I say that the universe, by definition, is uncreated?) Any being capable of creating our world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed with untiring eloquence, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.

Any intellectually honest person must admit that he does not know why the universe exists. Secular scientists, of course, readily admit their ignorance on this point. Believers like Collins do not.

As for Collins's other Ultimate Gaps, it comes from Christian apologist C. S. Lewis. Collins claims that everyone around the world seems to have the same intuitive sense of what is right and wrong (what Immanuel Kant called the Moral Law) and that they all seem to yearn to believe in god and that this is evidence that these things must have come externally from god. He arrives at this conclusion by simply dismissing the possibility (as he did for the origin of the universe) that our sense of right or wrong or the ubiquitous belief in god may have perfectly natural causes, despite much research (which I will explore in future posts) that point to just such a possibility.

If the Law of Human Nature cannot be explained away as cultural artifact or evolutionary by-product, then how can we account for its presence? There is truly something unusual going on here. To quote Lewis, "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. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves. Surely this ought to arouse suspicions?" (p. 45, 46)
. . .
In my view, DNA sequence alone, even if accompanied by a vast trove of data on biological function, will never explain certain special human attributes, such as the knowledge of the Moral Law and the universal search for God. (p. 189-190)

Note carefully his argument. He says that god is "outside the universe" and therefore we should not expect to find evidence for him "as one of the facts inside the universe." Collins says that the evidence for god must be what we find "inside ourselves as an influence or command trying to get us to behave in a certain way." Since we have such a thing in the Moral Law and also our yearning for god, we have the necessary evidence for god.

This argument conveniently serves the purpose of providing an answer to pesky atheists like me who keep asking why we never seem to find any credible and objective evidence of god. We keep being asked to accept people's personal testimonies, by saying that such internal experiences are the way that god acts in the world.

The logical flaw in this argument is obvious. If some thing is inside us, and we are inside the universe, then the basic logic rule of syllogism implies that this thing must also be inside the universe. So how can Collins claim that this thing that is inside us is outside the universe? The only way to do that is to invoke magical Cartesian dualism and assume that our mind (and consciousness) is also outside the universe, although it can somehow communicate with us enough to make our bodies do things. But then you are back to the old unsolved problem that always plagues religious believers of how something that is asserted to be outside the universe can communicate with something inside the universe.

In the next post, I will look at how Collins tries to deal with this problem.

POST SCRIPT: On a French Fry?

Someone claims another sighting of Jesus.

June 10, 2008

The Language of God-2: Theistic evolution aka 'BioLogos'

(This series of posts reviews in detail Francis Collins's book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, originally published in 2006. The page numbers cited are from the large print edition published in 2007. The complete set of these posts will be archived here.)

As I said in the previous post, Francis Collins rejects both young Earth creationism and intelligent design creationism. Instead he says that he is an advocate of 'theistic evolution', or as he wants to rename it, BioLogos. He outlines the basic premises of this belief structure:

1. The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 billion years ago.
2. Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life.
3. While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time.
4. Once evolution got under way, no special supernatural intervention was required.
5. Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes.
6. But human are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history. (p. 264)

Collins suggests that this is a view that could be, and is, held by many Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and Christians, and suggests that people like Pope John Paul II, Maimonides (the 12th century Jewish philosopher) and Saint Augustine would have also signed onto them if they had lived today and been aware of current scientific knowledge.

Points 1, 3, 4, and 5 are unimpeachable and would be accepted by any scientist (atheist or not) as well. As we will see, point #2 hints that he is going to invoke the anthropic principle, and point #6 is where his main argument really lies.

The best parts of the book (for me at least) were chapters four and five where he deals with biological evolution and molecular genetics. This is his field of expertise and he is sure-footed and authoritative in his writing as he explains clearly the principles of these fields and how our understanding of the genome has enriched our knowledge of evolution and helped in developing medical treatments.

All the scientific evidence he marshals in these sections is used against the religious arguments of the YEC and ID people. Collins leaves no doubt