"Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview..."

Thus spake Lawrence Krauss in a Wall Street Journal article titled "God and Science Don't Mix." I think that it's about time that a scientist as generally diplomatic as Krauss has come out with a vigorous and overt defense of atheism and its implied defense of philosophical materialism. For years he has said that he is an atheist and that science and fundamentalist versions of religious belief are incompatible but I haven't read him go after religious belief in general like this, even taking on the evolutionary defender and Catholic biologist Ken Miller. [I am glad for Miller's work, very glad, but his very public religiosity is confounding. I agree with Jerry Coyne and others that Miller's grandstanding on this issue is intellectually dishonest and/or philosophically inconsistent.]

Krauss writes,

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

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

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

And there it is. The world of a God who is active in our lives would be very different from the world we live in. Quite simply, there is no evidence whatsoever that this God exists and for active and engaged scientists to defend and propagate the view that such an activist God as the ones in the Abrahamic religions exists and acts is kind of nuts. As Carl Sagan said, "Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence." Sans the evidence, why should we buy the most extraordinary claims - the virgin birth, raising people from the dead, and a bodily resurrection - ever made? There are no good reasons and it's perplexing that some scientists are keen to protect it.

Krauss does point out that science doesn't require atheism. That is, it is methodologically atheistic and naturalistic (he quotes Haldane on this at the article's opening), but it needn't be philosophically atheistic. That is, you can believe whatever you want to about any number of things and still use science to understand nature and ignore its philosophical implications for the breadth of your thought. But to deny it access to the breadth of your thinking is to live in a divided mind.

The Bible and homophobia

This Monday a woman in town near mine wrote a letter to the editor that I found preposterous and vicious. It is immoral homophobic nonsense of close to the worst kind. She's no Fred Phelps but she's pretty awful. As you read it, wonder at this person's conception of morality. Obedience. Follow the rules and it will make you good no matter how absurd those rules are.

So I responded and it was printed. Here is the beginning.

A recent letter exemplifies poor moral reasoning to continue oppressing gays and lesbians.

The writer argues that “our Creator” mentioned in the Declaration of Independence is both the Christian God and the source of our human rights. I invite the letter writer to visit a few facts.

First, there is no mention of any Christian deity in the founding documents.

Read the full response at the Centre Daily Times here. Leave comments there or here.

The excitement is just barely contained.

Our friend, Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis and the father of the Creation Museum, is going to bring us a state of the nation address tonight at 8 pm, subtitled, THE COLLAPSE OF CHRISTIAN AMERICA. This will be something insurmountably ridiculous I'm sure.

The site states,

America has more Christian resources and Bible colleges than ever in its history, yet the nation is on a spiritual downward spiral. What has happened? Why is the church not reaching the culture today as it has in the past? Get the full report on June 25 at 8:00 p.m. as Ken, in his dynamic style, recounts the secularization of American culture and explains why we are losing generations from the church—why, in fact, they are already gone!

You know, I might usually just laugh at this as just so much hand-waving and chicken little garbage. But recent polling shows that 16% of Americans self-identify as non-religious. This is a huge shift from the past Pew and other surveys that have shown the religious "nones" to be ~8%. Maybe Ham does have something to worry about. More people are tired of the fundamentalist anti-reason and arm-waving garbage that clogs our airwaves.

I don't doubt for a second that he will ramble on about some ridiculous problems that evolution causes in the United States. He will likely claim that Christians are being attacked by a secular state and that a new state-sponsored religion of secular humanism is being placed on people by the government and a liberal evolutionist elite who are doing wicked anti-Biblical work. He might even be right.

Of course, I am speculating now. But given the incredible volume of anti-evolutionary, anti-science, anti-reason, and anti-liberal logorrhea he's produced over the years, I'll wager I'm right.

"For the Bible Tells Me So": A few thoughts

Last night my wife and I watched For the Bible Tells Me So, a movie about the way that lots of branches of Christianity crush gays' sense of self and self-worth. It's a moving film that looks at the experiences of gay children of straight Christian parents. For those of you interested in this, I highly recommend it. I am going to offer some spoilers and a small critique.

Each of the stories is quite different:

• A gay black woman whose preacher father and very active mother have difficulty accepting her lesbianism but are able to get to some kind of reconciliation.
• Anglican bishop Eugene Robinson and his family's journey.
• A woman whose daughter was active in drama and singing in school, went to college and decided that she was gay, and then became totally alienated. The daughter, Anna, eventually committed suicide. It is heart-wrenching and a bit graphic with a picture of the suicide.
• Senator Dick Gephardt's daughter, Chrissy, who got married to a man and then divorced as she finally "woke up" to understand that she was gay (pictured above from the movie website's gallery).
• A teenage Minnesota boy whose parents were at first quite upset and read a great deal to learn about homosexuality. Some of what they read was by Focus on the Family founder James Dobson. At the film's end, they try to confront Dobson and are arrested.

Each story is both touching and instructive. Learning these families' journeys is both heart-wrenching and sometimes beautiful. My sister is gay, so I had much in common with the people I was watching, though we were always very accepting and open to my sister's sexuality. Today, she is happily married to her wife and they are a model for other couples. But I am reminded of all of the shame that was instilled in her by our culture, much of which comes from the kind totalitarian religion.

The movie goes to great pains to try to distance the "true" message of a semi-liberal or liberal Christianity from the "false" message of literalists/fundamentalists. Bishop Desmond Tutu, Harvard's Peter Gomes, Orthodox Rabbi Steve Greenberg and Reverend Jimmy Creech all discuss at length how literalists take things out of context and cherry pick from the Bible to support their homophobic agenda. They castigate the Falwells, Robertsons, and Dobsons of the world for decontextualizing the word "abomination" in the book of Leviticus 18. I concur. It's placed among verses that tell you not to eat shrimp and so on. Many of today's Christians are shrimp eaters...including the liberals. So why are they selective about what they follow and what they don't?

Let me say that I am certainly sympathetic to and seem to share the values of many of these liberal Christian thinkers. But when they say that the fundamentalists are cherry-picking verses and keeping this and throwing out that, they are engaged in a big act of hypocrisy. They are using non-divine information all the time to make logical and ethical judgments about an allegedly divine book. I really don't see why we should believe that the book is actually the written word of any God at all. There's a lot of this strange theological circumlocution in this movie and I find it socially pleasant and ethically more responsible insofar as it encourages compassion and understanding. But it is also logically appalling. It's so many intellectual gymnastics moves - it's a lot of elaborate and difficult thinking that gets us to a conclusion we like with false thinking and justification of a culturally authoritative book. It just reinforced my already pretty sturdy belief that theology is just a dressed-up version of fantasy literature theory and criticism.

I recommend this movie for its insight and hope for a more compassionate world. It is also a fantastic critique of Christianity by Christians so those of you who are religious might find it useful. The unbelievers among us are invited to see a panoply of views and feelings. I, for one, was a bit more hopeful at the movie's end.

Epistemic authority

Jerry Coyne has a really solid post up on the problem of conceding authority to faith and faith-based views titled "Does religion have greater “epistemic authority” than science in some areas?" In short: faith-based authority on most matters is null because it lacks any evidentiary grounding. It's a game of "he said, s/he said" and fantasy. The lack of hard corroborable evidence for supernaturalistic beliefs - religion, astrology, astral projection, UFOs, ghosts, etc. - removes its epistemological authority.

More reasons the Disco Tute is bunk

They're trying to censor people on YouTube. They can't take the heat so they have to strong arm people using pseudo-legal methods. I guess a bunch of dishonest lawyers are good at something: virtually mugging critics.




I take it that it's about something like this.

I'm shrill. I'm now boycotting Coke.

I didn't really drink soda anyway, but now I can really hate Coke for selling at the Creation Museum and being their soft drink of choice. Making a buck means endorsing creationism I guess. Anything for a dollar.

The Stoopid 50

This Sunday I will do the Stoopid 50. A 50-mile (maybe actually 53 or something) mountain bike race with a good bit of trail and tons of climbing...something like 7,000' of it. Yikes. I hadn't planned on doing it but here it is and it's become part of my training for the Wilderness 101 - a 101-mile mountain bike race. I haven't raced in a couple of years and even then it was not very serious at all. But this year I am hoping to get back to something like the form I had 4 and 5 years ago when I was actually pretty quick. All the miles will probably pay off and the races I do in the next few weeks will put me in good shape for the 101.

Anyway, here's a map of this year's Stoopid made by my friend Ray Crew (sweet eh?). The race is sponsored by Shenandoah Mountain Touring with help from Freeze Thaw Cycles and The Bicycle Shop. No doubt volunteers are coming out from the locals in the Nittany Mountain Bike Association and Centre Region Bike Coalition.

Wish me luck.

My new favorite book: The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible

I've been lent Paul S. Taylor's The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible (only $10.19 at Amazon!) by a friend and peer in my program. This book is brilliant. It is a no-holds barred pile of fantastic silliness so that you too can convince your children that dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth together, that the Bible says so, and that some very scientifical sciencey science supports this tissue of poor imagination.

The whole thing begins with a "Special Note" from our friend, Henry M. Morris, Ph. D. (founder of the Institute for Creative Creation Nonsense Research). He assures us that it "will prove delightfully enjoyable to the children for whom it was written [and] it is also a significant contribution to Biblical apologetics." Would you like a side of indoctrination and brainwashing with that too? Sure thing!

It has small chapters on fossils, where dinosaurs came from, why they became extinct, the Noachian flood, the "Lost Paradise," dinosaur ferocity, and "Important Things to Remember." The section on what happened to the dinosaurs after the flood is particularly touching...err...ridiculous. Apparently, dinosaurs lived on for a few centuries after the flood, but even still, earthquakes, volcanoes, extreme temperature, and harmful radiation made the world "too harsh for dinosaurs. No longer did the earth have the same great forests of huge nutritious plants." I guess that goes for every other extinct species too?

And in case your were wondering whether creationists think that everyone was a vegetarian in the Garden of Eden: the answer is "Yes." "Before the Flood, there is no indication in the Bible that any of he animals ate meat or were violent and vicious. It is the people that God says were so terrible and violent." So I guess we have to wonder why so many Christians still eat meat if it's so bad? Why is lamb slaughtering sanctioned by God? Why show how great you are by killing yourself as your own son in front of a bunch of people if a world without death is ideal? Why would Jesus give all those dead fish to those hungry people? Not very peaceful of him. I think this book is cranially-rectally inverted.

Do you believe the Deinonychus ever ate anything but meat? Didn't think so. Look at the hooked sharp teeth, perfect for gripping and tearing? What's it going to do? Shred some wheat? Jump up into the air and viciously rip some papayas down and pulp them with those steak knives? And that claw is for tapping out some modern dance too.

But what do YOU and your kids really need to know about dinosaurs? It's not science. The last two pages (58-59) are full of useful dinosaur information. "Dinosaurs fit in perfectly with the Bible's record of history." They didn't evolve. Jesus made everything. The perfect world fell because people were disobedient which brought sin, death, pain, the Flood, and punishment. But don't worry, Jesus loves you and will forgive you, you can live forever, and the world will be perfected again. But the decision is yours.

Okay. I'll take the science please. The real stuff.

Eastern Box Turtle on the Lewistown Contingent trail

Check this little guy out. I was moving pretty quickly on this low boggy trail, the Lewistown Contingent, when I came upon this Eastern Box Turtle. Those oranges were really kind of brilliant up close and watching him move along the leafy ground you could see how well-camouflaged they are. I harassed only momentarily, picking him up for a minute to look at his underbelly and claws and to share him with my riding buddy.

Gorgeous. We saw a mother turkey with chicks, a turkey take off, and some turkey vultures too. Sadly, my camera battery was not charged. Next time perhaps.

Join the Facebooks group Paranormal State Blows

I hate this show. It sucks. Join the group Paranormal State Blows.

AGU: Human Impacts on Climate Change and Biological Evolution

I've been doing literature searches on ethics and climate change and various groups' positions on climate change. So I was looking at the American Geophysical Union's position statement on Human Impacts on Climate Change. Big shock. They say it's a problem.

With climate change, as with ozone depletion, the human footprint on Earth is apparent. The cause of disruptive climate change, unlike ozone depletion, is tied to energy use and runs through modern society. Solutions will necessarily involve all aspects of society. Mitigation strategies and adaptation responses will call for collaborations across science, technology, industry, and government. Members of the AGU, as part of the scientific community, collectively have special responsibilities: to pursue research needed to understand it; to educate the public on the causes, risks, and hazards; and to communicate clearly and objectively with those who can implement policies to shape future climate.

So they have a range of position statements available, including one on biological evolution. Kaching!

AGU affirms the central importance of including scientific theories of Earth history and biological evolution in science education. Within the scientific community, the theory of biological evolution is not controversial, nor have “alternative explanations” been found. This is why no competing theories are required by the U.S. National Science Education Standards. Explanations of natural phenomena that appeal to the supernatural or are based on religious doctrine—and therefore cannot be tested through scientific inquiry—are not scientific, and have no place in the science classroom.

Hmmm. Where's the controversy? The denialists among us - notably economic and religious conservatives with vested power interests - would have us endlessly debate non-issues as real issues. The armies of corporate greenhouse gas production and the American christofascists want us to remain ignorance of real science and the ramifications of false beliefs to further tie us to their short-term economic gains and the perpetuation of bronze age lunacy. Hell! Here I am engaging their manufactroversy. Sigh.

Though these little position statements do little on their own, their ubiquity - from the NAS, the AAAS, NOAA, IPCC, NSTA, etc. - make this manufactroversy less and less tenable every day. Now when will our politicians wake up?

OH! The wonders of cycling

Just a brief note for today. I've been cycling like a madman the last few weeks which have taken my time away from blogging a lot. I'm training for the Wilderness 101 again after two years off. It's a 101-mile single-day mountain bike race that I've done pretty well in before. That's me traversing the rock garden at Three Bridges Trail at mile 30 (pic courtesy of Leah). The time off has served its purpose and I have fallen in love with my bikes again.

I'm hoping that on today's ride we'll get some pictures of some of Rothrock State Forest's wildlife - salamanders, frogs, turtles, hawks, crows, hemlocks, rhodedendron, and maybe more. Good ones will be posted later.

Don't worry, there's still plenty to bitch about in the world of evolution and climate change denial though. Really, just read the most recent ICR Acts & Facts and your head will explode. Why is it impossible for some people to understand the evolutionary linkages between turtles and other reptiles?