Speaking of pistol whipping (see previous post), Newsweek ran an article on how evangelicals are taking the debate world by storm, with their eyes set on the goal of transforming the culture through political power. The article largely focused on Jerry Falwell’s Liberty College, which apparently has a very good debate team.

Seems that newsweek made a little mistake, and offered a correction at the end of the article.

Correction: In the original version of this report, NEWSWEEK misquoted Falwell as referring to “assault ministry.” In fact, Falwell was referring to “a salt ministry” — a reference to Matthew 5:13, where Jesus says “Ye are the salt of the earth.” We regret the error.

Oh the beautiful irony of it all. I’m not so sure if Newsweek didn’t get closer to the actual meaning the first time.

Update: for those interested in this story, Ed Brayton over at Dispatches has put up some analysis in how debates are scored, revealing that the Newsweek article greatly exaggerates the quality of Liberty University’s rank.

Apparently, they’re much harder to come by than you’d guess. If blogging is an activity for loud mouthed and opinionated people (that’s why you’re here, right?), then imagine my surprise when I tried to seek out reasonable people for their insight’s on religion.

Well, I found one that I think’s worth reading.

(That buzzing sound you hear, like high voltage electricity, is the sound of my millions of readers — okay, dozens — allright allright, ten — getting ready to pass final judgment on my orthodoxy, based on who I linked to…)

Real Live Preacher has some interesting, and often funny insights, and he’s going on the blogroll.

ZAP!

As examples of his good writing, I proffer the following two three articles.

Something reflective: What are the chances that I’m actually here to write this dribble, and you, my reader, are actually here to read it? Real Live Preacher has a post titled Unmade Children and Never Written Words which points out that the answer to this question is, abysmally low. I really like that he’s asked a question head on that has no easy answer, perhaps no answer at all.

Something hilarious: In examining a recent NBC miniseries on Daniel, he wrote an article for Salon.com titled, Sinfully Bad TV. You’ll have to watch a short ad to read the article. Don’t let your ad filters block you. (He writes in various places, but if he’s not posting the whole thing on his blog, he’ll always point you to his writings.)

I wanted so badly to like “The Book of Daniel,” NBC’s new series about an Episcopalian minister and his rather interesting family. I wanted to like it if only because some of the religious right are soundly condemning it. I usually can’t pass up an opportunity to distance myself from those guys.

But I couldn’t like it. I just couldn’t. Not because it is sacrilegious, but because it is bad. It is very bad. This is a bad and boring show. I stayed with it as long as I could, but when the two bishops were having a torrid affair while the priest with the Mafia connections was calling in favors to find the missing $3.2 million, all the while trying to convince the reverend to hire a Mafia construction company — something the reverend seems to be seriously considering — I had to call it a night.

[…]

And I’ve got news for you, Christian. If your faith isn’t changing your life enough to make a difference in the world, you’ve got bigger problems than NBC.

Oh, there is something a little ironic that I want to mention. The first six chapters of the actual book of Daniel — the one in the Bible — are about a young man named Daniel and some of his friends who are trying to live out their faith in a very hostile foreign land. Trust me, the Babylonians were much worse than NBC. Daniel’s solution was to doggedly worship God in their own way, and let their lives be a quiet and steady witness of their faith.

Their devotion produced a living and real goodness that even won the heart of the King in the end. And all of this happened because they were not foolish enough to try to change Babylon, but rather changed themselves.

Yeah, I’m a big fan of good religious satire to get the point across without pistol whipping those you disagree with.

Something profound*: To the man who claims, “I believe every word of the Bible”, Real Live Preacher offers some reflections that show how profound it would be to truly believe one verse of the Bible…

And so while I can’t guarantee that I’ll like or agree with everything he posts, it appears to me that he’s worth keeping an eye on, for something spiritual to reflect on in addition to the vast amounts of scientific gibberish that I try vainly to understand each day.

* The last example was added a few hours after the post had been published.

While out birding this past weekend, my wife and I stopped by a cemetery in the middle of nowhere. In winter, I like checking large juniper trees for owls. Rural West Texas cemeteries make great places since they often have the only trees as far as the eye can see. I’d especially like to find some Long-eared Owls, but so far no luck.

It’s also an incredible experience to walk around the grounds and look at the headstones. You’d be amazed at what you can learn, and what you can guess, by looking at only names and dates.

For example, one that especially stands out was a large headstone with a husband and wife’s name on it. Right by, was a headstone with the same last name. The baby was born October 31, 1947 and died around the end of November, 1947. We noticed a fresh wreath on the headstone, and wondered who might have placed it. The husband had passed away in the late ’90s, but the wife’s death was still an empty space on the headstone. Here’s a woman that came out, probably (just guessing) on the day her baby died, almost 60 years ago now, to place wreaths at the headstones of her lost child and husband. What’s her life like now? Lonely? Sad? Waiting?

We also noticed a man buried next to a wife that died young. It’s always a little scary to look at that and think, that could be my wife. We noticed that his headstone said something about being buried with “his two loved ones” and on the other side, he had another wife he’d married after the first passed away. He even outlived her by a few years.

There was a headstone with a star of David, a veteran who’d fought in World War II. Next to his grave, someone had stuck a white cross in the ground. Was he a Jewish Christian or did someone try a little proselytizing after the fact?

There was a man born in 1830, the earliest we could find. You sit there and think about it and you realize his granddad and America might share the same birthday.

There were many husbands and wives, with the date of their marriage between their names. I realized that we usually think of people who die as being old. Yet being old is just one part of their life and not the only part. Here, lying in the grave, they seem young again. They were once my age. They had a new wife. They became parents. They went to school or started careers. Yet we seem to think of them only as old. (Perhaps this is a greater fallacy of younger generations.)

One thing that really got me thinking was the common statement Gone But Not Forgotten. Written on the tombstone of a man who died in 1925, it’s a lie! It’s something that we defiantly proclaim, for those who are living, in spite of what we know will inevitably happen. Gone for over 80 years now, I’m guessing that man is forgotten. Even if his own family remembers him, it’s likely only by name.

And the great thing about walking a cemetery is the inescapable fact that you’re going to join them. It’s sobering, but I find it peaceful. In life, death seems so scary. It seems painful. Yet this weekend, there I was, surrounded by dozens of people who’ve passed through its door. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem so bad. You realize it’s normal. Lots of people do this! And I too will be forgotten. Yet the lives I touch and the contributions I make can have a profound impact. And I think in this way, you’re not forgotten and life’s not meaningless.

The next time you’re out in the middle of nowhere and see a sign directing you to a cemetery, take the detour. Imagine the stories, imagine the people, and reflect on the story you hope is told about you when your time is up.

It’s great when your school assignments promote your blogging. I’m taking undergraduate evolution. It’s not that my religious private school where I did my undergrad didn’t teach it (what respectable biology department wouldn’t?) but rather that you won’t find it on any transcript as a course named such. And thus, I’m taking it as a leveling course in graduate school.

The professor has really been doing a great job of trying to tell the students that evolutionary theory doesn’t mean you have to throw your faith away, and that there are evolutionary biologists of various faiths. I appreciate him for bringing up these subjects, and I think it’s wise. Any teacher in west Texas that would stick their head in the sand and not realize that at least of few of the students probably resist the theory isn’t doing his students any favors in educating them.

So, we’ve briefly hit upon intelligent design, and what it’s implications for science are. The professor assigned a reading, The Perimeter of Ignorance by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Tyson is a astrophysicist and is the director of Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. The article’s excellent, and I’ll be going through it shortly, but I can sum it all up with one line and a cartoon — When scientists reach the limits of their understanding, they can either invoke a higher power, or keep searching for natural causes.

I thought that Tyson did a better job in the first of his article than the last.

He starts out by noting that many past scientists believed in a higher pattern but notes a pattern in their invocation of God.

But a careful reading of older texts, particularly those concerned with the universe itself, shows that the authors invoke divinity only when they reach the boundaries of their understanding. They appeal to a higher power only when staring into the ocean of their own ignorance. They call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.

He notes Newton’s difficulties with his theories of gravity and planetary motion.

Newton feared that all this pulling would render the orbits in the solar system unstable. His equations indicated that the planets should long ago have either fallen into the Sun or flown the coop—leaving the Sun, in either case, devoid of planets. Yet the solar system, as well as the larger cosmos, appeared to be the very model of order and durability. So Newton, in his greatest work, the Principia, concludes that God must occasionally step in and make things right:

“The six primary Planets are revolv’d about the Sun, in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. . . . But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. . . . This most beautiful System of the Sun,

Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.”

But here’s the result of not simply throwing up our hands, saying “God did it”, and forgoing our search for answers.

A century later, the French astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace confronted Newton’s dilemma of unstable orbits head-on. Rather than view the mysterious stability of the solar system as the unknowable work of God, Laplace declared it a scientific challenge. In his multipart masterpiece, Mécanique Céleste, the first volume of which appeared in 1798, Laplace demonstrates that the solar system is stable over periods of time longer than Newton could predict. To do so, Laplace pioneered a new kind of mathematics called perturbation theory, which enabled him to examine the cumulative effects of many small forces. According to an oft-repeated but probably embellished account, when Laplace gave a copy of Mécanique Céleste to his physics-literate friend Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon asked him what role God played in the construction and regulation of the heavens. “Sire,” Laplace replied, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”

Tyson hits upon the fact that the same scientists who invoked God for areas they didn’t understand, also didn’t throw out their findings when they conflicted with the prevailing religious doctrines of the day.

As reverent as Newton, Huygens, and other great scientists of earlier centuries may have been, they were also empiricists. They did not retreat from the conclusions their evidence forced them to draw, and when their discoveries conflicted with prevailing articles of faith, they upheld the discoveries. That doesn’t mean it was easy: sometimes they met fierce opposition, as did Galileo, who had to defend his telescopic evidence against formidable objections drawn from both scripture and “common” sense.

He then discusses Galileo’s views on science and religion. It seems that Galileo really got it, and the part below that I’ve highlighted is just right on the money.

Galileo clearly distinguished the role of religion from the role of science. To him, religion was the service of God and the salvation of souls, whereas science was the source of exact observations and demonstrated truths. In a long, famous, bristly letter written in the summer of 1615 to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany (but, like so many epistles of the day, circulated among the literati), he quotes, in his own defense, an unnamed yet sympathetic church official saying that the Bible “tells you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”

The letter to the duchess leaves no doubt about where Galileo stood on the literal word of the Holy Writ:

“In expounding the Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might fall into error. . . .

Nothing physical which . . . demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath their words. . . .

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. ” [emphasis mine]

A rare exception among scientists, Galileo saw the unknown as a place to explore rather than as an eternal mystery controlled by the hand of God.

Next, the author notes that theologians took a turn in the 17th and 18th centuries and put forth the view that the laws of nature themselves were evidence of the wisdom of God. But then the author points out that basically, the Earth and universe are trying to kill us.

Turns out that some celestial bodies give off more light in the invisible bands of the spectrum than in the visible. And the invisible light picked up by the new telescopes showed that mayhem abounds in the cosmos: monstrous gamma-ray bursts, deadly pulsars, matter-crushing gravitational fields, matter-hungry black holes that flay their bloated stellar neighbors, newborn stars igniting within pockets of collapsing gas. And as our ordinary, optical telescopes got bigger and better, more mayhem emerged: galaxies that collide and cannibalize each other, explosions of supermassive stars, chaotic stellar and planetary orbits. Our own cosmic neighborhood—the inner solar system—turned out to be a shooting gallery, full of rogue asteroids and comets that collide with planets from time to time. Occasionally they’ve even wiped out stupendous masses of Earth’s flora and fauna. The evidence all points to the fact that we occupy not a well-mannered clockwork universe, but a destructive, violent, and hostile zoo.

Of course, Earth can be bad for your health too. On land, grizzly bears want to maul you; in the oceans, sharks want to eat you. Snowdrifts can freeze you, deserts dehydrate you, earthquakes bury you, volcanoes incinerate you. Viruses can infect you, parasites suck your vital fluids, cancers take over your body, congenital diseases force an early death. And even if you have the good luck to be healthy, a swarm of locusts could devour your crops, a tsunami could wash away your family, or a hurricane could blow apart your town.

I think Tyson’s view is a little pessimistic here, but I think he’s on the money. If people like to view nature as something that proves God, you have a hard time doing that scientifically. Tyson’s right, that nature is not simply built for our pleasure. It is a dangerous world out there, with lot’s of uncertainty about our futures. As a religious person myself, I feel very comfortable with God as the creator and sustainer of scientific laws (or the way we observe nature behaving). But you run into rocky places if you turn around and claim that these laws which bring us good things don’t also bring us bad things.

It’s after this that Tyson takes a turn I’m slightly uncomfortable with. He basically points out how poorly the human body is “designed” if that’s the way we want to look at it. The reason I’m uncomfortable with this is that you can use arguments like this (and lots of people have) to claim there’s no God. This becomes an extension of science into the realm of metaphysics. Science oversteps its bounds.

Indeed, I will agree with Tyson that people who make the claims that humans are “designed” are cherry-picking their data, to show how “wonderful” our bodies are. And in that sense, I think Tyson has fair game to point out that this is an illogical view, as there are evolutionary leftovers in our bodies that cause discomfort, poor health, etc.

But as a Christian, it makes perfect sense to me that we have these things. I have an appendix not because a “designer” gave me an organ which serves no purpose other than putting me in the hospital on a moment’s notice, but rather because I share an evolutionary history with the rest of creation.

Tyson then gets around in a lengthy way to concluding his article. Once again, he gives sound reasoning.

Another practice that isn’t science is embracing ignorance. Yet it’s fundamental to the philosophy of intelligent design: I don’t know what this is. I don’t know how it works. It’s too complicated for me to figure out. It’s too complicated for any human being to figure out. So it must be the product of a higher intelligence.

What do you do with that line of reasoning? Do you just cede the solving of problems to someone smarter than you, someone who’s not even human? Do you tell students to pursue only questions with easy answers?

There may be a limit to what the human mind can figure out about our universe. But how presumptuous it would be for me to claim that if I can’t solve a problem, neither can any other person who has ever lived or who will ever be born. Suppose Galileo and Laplace had felt that way? Better yet, what if Newton had not? He might then have solved Laplace’s problem a century earlier, making it possible for Laplace to cross the next frontier of ignorance. [emphasis in original]

If anything though, I think Tyson makes his points and makes them well in the first 2/3 of the article. The last third of the article seems to trickle out, less cohesive and more “frustrated” than the beginning. (Kind of like my posts!)

Still, it’s a great article, one that’s worth reading and reflecting on. Like the cartoon above points out, I think the general public needs to understand how we scientists pursue this endeavor we call science.

Kudos to John Lynch for finding the dumbest quote I’ve seen from a politician in recent memory.

South Carolina’s governor, Mark Sanford, has proudly stepped forward to compete for the claim of most scientifically confused politician in an interview with a Columbia TV station. Here’s the quote:

Q: What do you think about the idea of teaching alternatives to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in public schools; for instance Intelligent Design.

Sanford: I have no problem with it.

Q: Do you think it should be done that way? Rather than just teaching Evolution?

Sanford: Well I think that it’s just, and science is more and more documenting this, is that there are real ‘chinks’ in the armor of evolution being the only way we came about. The idea of their being a, you know, a little mud hole and two mosquitoes get together and the next thing you know you have a human being is completely at odds with, you know, one of the laws of thermodynamics which is the law of, of.. in essence, destruction. Whether you think about your bedroom and how messy it gets over time or you think about the decay in the building itself over time. Things don’t naturally order themselves towards progression. Uuummm.. in the natural order of things. So, it’s in fact, it’s against fairly basic laws of physics… and so I would not have a problem in teaching both. Uh, you saying this is one theory and this is another theory.

Here’s an inside tip for those that wondered. Evolution doesn’t believe that mosquitoes in mud holes lead to humans. Now obviously Sanford is speaking tongue in cheek, but the quote shows his massive ignorance on the scientific theory.

But in case that ignorance wasn’t fully exposed, the part about thermodynamics should seal the deal. I can explain real quick. The second law of thermodynamics states that in a closed system, things move toward entropy (or disorder). The earth is anything but a closed system of course, having that big ball of gas undergoing constant nuclear fusion, and sending the love our way. (The sun gives us energy.)

Whatever exposure Sanford had to science, it obviously didn’t sink in too well. Who do you want creating your kid’s science curriculums? People that know a little about science? Or politicians bent on protecting the little ones from the evils of science by “teaching the controversy”?

Red State Rabble, a blog from a guy caught in the nastiness of the Kansas evolution battle, has a really funny post that made a point I hadn’t quite thought of before.

In those long-ago days when RSR lived in the Big Apple, we were often accosted on the street by young men who were selling “scents,” by which they meant marijuana. As we wove our way down the street between competing sales teams, we were often struck by the paradoxical situation the job of selling drugs placed these guys in.

On the one hand, they had to be visible enough to move product. On the other, they had to stay hidden in order to avoid arrest and remain on the street.

[…]

This contradiction is inherent in intelligent design. ID apologists can spin it, they can deny it, they can try to hide it, but there’s nothing they can do to change it. Their supporters will always demand reassurance that ID and God are one, while the legal and political strategy that ID represents demands that they deny it.

Like those long-ago pushers on the streets of New York, ID proponents must keep their motives both hidden and public. They are, and always will be, compelled to lead a double life.

He’s right too. Many Christians I’ve encountered who are opposed to evolutionary theory for theological reasons also don’t buy into intelligent design because they view it as too subversive, too covert.

If scientists know who the designer is, and if young earth creationsists know who the designer is, why do ID advocates spend so much time trying to have it both ways?

Good post RSR.

I blogged about the book with a talking elmo that asks, “who wants to die” on my weekly roundup (see the last point).

My wife found a video of this subversive toy in action. Perhaps the little ones would enjoy better reading material.

My wife is student teaching in kindergarten this semester. It’s great to hear her stories each day when she comes home. Kids cry when they get it trouble. They sulk off into corners and refuse to even eat lunch if they’re mad. They abruptly change course, apologize, and promise to be good the rest of the day (and sometimes even are!). It’s great.

The story the other day made me cringe though. The kids have vocabulary words each day. This day, the word was penguin. As the teacher explained what penguins were, she made connections with previous words of the day. The day before, the word was polar. And the day before that, the word was arctic.

Yes, the teacher described penguins by connecting them to the word arctic. My wife (the better half that she is) did what I surely would have been unable to do. She kept her mouth shut. But it did not escape her notice that a biological fallacy was passed on to the little ones. She intends to inform the teacher, gently.

Now just so we’re clear, penguins are totally confined to the southern hemisphere. This is not the place where Santa Claus resides, nor is it the home of large, white, unusually acquatic Ursids.

Penguins and polar bears inhabit different ends of the world. Don’t let Coca Cola, your kindergarden teacher, or anyone else pull the fur over your eyes.

Scientists have discovered the world’s smallest species of fish.

Mature females of the Paedocypris progenetica, a member of the carp family, only grow to 7.9 millimeters (0.31 inches) and the males have enlarged pelvic fins and exceptionally large muscles that may be used to grasp the females during copulation, researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, published Wednesday by the Royal Society in London.

The fulltext of the journal article where this discovery was published is available online for a limited time.

(Via Pharyngula).

For those that followed the Dover Trial closely, this should be old news. But if you don’t know what Cdesign proponentsists is, then you’ve got to read it for yourself to find out.

A little background first: During the Dover Trail, the plaintiffs subpoenaed the publishers of the book Of Pandas and People for any early drafts they had of the text. What they discovered was shocking.

The publishers had done a find and replace with a word processor to change the words creation to design. A witness for the plaintiffs, Barbara Forest, illustrated this at the trail with the following graph. The red line is usage of the creationist and the blue line is intelligent design.

Click for full size

“What happened in 1987″ would be a good question for anyone that can read graphs. The answer is simple. The supreme court ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard that teaching creation science was unconstitutional. (Creation science is of course the idea that if you look at the scientific evidence, it supports a young Earth, instantaneous creation, etc.)

Now it seems that ID proponents didn’t like this comparison too much. On October 6th 2005, here’s what Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute wrote:

“Forrest is playing word games, without looking at the meaning of the words.”

[…]

At the time the authors began work on Pandas, there was no widely accepted way to describe the scientific position being advocated there,” said Luskin, “namely that there are indicators of design in nature, that scientists should remain open to the possibility of intelligent causes, and that such evidence does not tell us the identity of the designer.”

So what was “the scientific position being advocated”? Here are excerpts taken from the early drafts, the emphasis is obviously mine. These were put up on the web by the National Center for Science Education on November 7, 2005.

Creation Biology (1983), p. 3-34:
“Evolutionists think the former is correct; creationists because of all the evidence discussed in this book, conclude the latter is correct.”

Biology and Creation (1986), p. 3-33:
“Evolutionists think the former is correct, creationists accept the latter view.”

Biology and Origins (1987), p. 3-38:
“Evolutionists think the former is correct, creationists accept the latter view.”

Of Pandas and People (1987, creationist version), p. 3-40:
“Evolutionists think the former is correct, creationists accept the latter view.”

Of Pandas and People (1987, “intelligent design” version), p. 3-41:
“Evolutionists think the former is correct, cdesign proponentsists accept the latter view.”

A search and replace to change “creationists” to “design proponents” went awry, and we ended up with cdesign proponentsists. So Cdesign proponentsists represents a rare transitional fossil in the evolution of creation science.

This is old news! I thought I’d put it up today simply because many of my readers may be unaware of the fossil evidence for intelligent design. I can think of no funnier or more poignant example of ID’s true beginnings than this.

So the next time someone tells you that ID is science, ask them about Cdesign proponentsists.