Uh-oh. I’m being chastised by Jason, and by more than a few commenters in the thread about Mitt Romney’s views on evolution. You’re all going to have to crack the whip harder, though, because I am still unpersuaded, and I’m still mildly disgusted with all the people praising Romney for his anti-science statements.
First, let me deal with a misconception: I am not proposing to run Romney out of the country on a rail. I mentioned that I expected the candidates in the Democratic field would probably say exactly the same mystical line of crap … and come the election, I’m going to hold my nose and actually vote for one of those clowns who consistently pander to the religious. It’s a fact of life in this country, and I’m well aware that no politician with any hope of a career here is going to alienate the god-soaked electorate.
Importantly, however, I am not one of those politicians. Neither are most of the critics. Neither are the people who happily posted articles suggesting that Romney’s stance was pro-science. Here’s some good news, people: you don’t have to pander to Sour Old Ms. Haggarty, the wife of the deacon who lives down the street, to get her vote. Romney and Clinton and Obama do, but you aren’t running for office—so please do speak your mind, and do demand that your representatives should meet your standards, even if it pisses off the deacon’s wife.
In fact, it’s your responsibility. This is supposed to be a representative republic, where you elect leaders who will try to follow the consensus of your region. Every interest group is tugging on these people. If a candidate takes one feeble step in your direction, and you announce, “Hey, that’s good enough! You’re on my side!”, that means he can then ignore you. He knows you’re content with an occasional token nod, so he can follow the wishes of the more demanding interest groups. While Ms. Haggarty is demanding the candidate’s obedience on gay marriage, abortion, taxes, and keeping all that wicked ‘controversial’ science-based immorality out of the schools, tugging on him with a length of steel cable, your line on him is a limp loop of rubber band, and you’re getting all happy and excited because he used the word “evolution” once without promising to outlaw it. Woo freakin’ hoo.
I’m not holding my breath waiting for politicians to announce their complete rejection of god-belief. I don’t expect it to happen in my lifetime, although I do have some hope that it will happen in my children’s lifetime. What would content me is for the godless voters in this country to get some fire in the belly and unambiguously stake out their rejection of god-belief, rather than constantly running to follow in the shadow of the religious.
The second big issue is the complaint that I can’t tell the difference between a theistic evolutionist and an intelligent design creationist.
That’s a fair complaint, actually. I can’t.
Pretend I’m a Martian (not hard to do, I suppose; to a lot of people, my complete rejection of “faith” as a reason for believing in something seems to make me alien, anyway). Explain it to me. I even explicitly laid that out as a question at the end of my post; no one seems to have tried. At best, what Jason and poke do is point out that there is a difference in tactics—the theistic evolutionists are willing to move their god out of gaps in our knowledge as they are closed and place them in other gaps; the IDists want to fight to keep the gaps open, usually by misrepresenting the science that threatens them. That’s a fine distinction by me; I propose then that we just keep kicking the theistic evolutionists away, since they’re so meek. Will they turn into IDists when we threaten some particularly juicy and cherished gap?
Finally, I have to address one particular comment by Chris Ho-Stuart.
What do you imagine this next court case will be about?
If the text book explicitly advocates a religious perspective, like a creator God, then the case will be easy. It will be out on the basis of the first ammendment.
If they avoid mentioning God, and describe the scientific models — and if they use the same scientific models as we do — then why will there be a case?
Are we going to bring a court case because the author of a book describing conventional evolutionary biology is known to believe that God creates by the agency of those natural processes?
You’ve already got in the schools a textbook by one of these theistic evolutionists. It’s Biology, by Ken Miller and Joe Levine.
Do you want to raise a court case about that one? If not; then what do you expect to be different with books by other Christians who think that natural processes are the means of God’s creative activity?
That’s completely backwards from my thinking; he couldn’t have reversed my position more if it had been done intentionally.
I don’t want to raise a court case about Miller and Levine. It’s an excellent book, and I wish more high schools would use it seriously and teach their kids evolutionary biology from it. I have no idea what the religious beliefs of Campbell and Purves and Johnson and Raven and Brooker (to name a few on the shelf in front of me) and so forth were, and they don’t matter as long as the science within their books is competently done.
Remember, though, I’m a Martian. I don’t have your preconception that Miller is one of the good guys (I’m not arguing that he isn’t, either). What I’m saying is that in the last trial, one of the killer arguments was that Of Pandas and People was the product of authors who were trying to push religion, but that they had sneakily excised all mention of the word “Creator” from the book. Apparently, authorial motives are relevant; what’s to stop the next trial from pitting one proudly Christian author of a book that doesn’t mention god or religion against another proudly Christian author of a book that doesn’t mention god or religion? If it came down to that, we couldn’t reject either.
I’ve seen the new book that the DI is going to be pushing. It doesn’t mention God, and you’ll be shocked to learn that it doesn’t even mention Design or a Designer. It does describe some of the scientific models, very poorly. It describes at length objections to those models, again badly and with a consistently misleading slant; it might be described as a glossy version of Icons of Evolution. It’s “Teach the (contrived) Controversy” with a vengeance. It’s also an incredibly bad textbook.
I predict the next trial will be completely different from the last one, unless it’s another loose-cannon old school creationist trying to sneak Answers in Genesis tracts into biology class. It’s not going to be tried on the basis of separation of church and state unless we want to be doomed: as I pointed out before, there’s more overt religiosity in the theistic evolutionist camp everybody loves so much than there is in this new book, so taking the tack of trying to tar it with that tenuous association with Howard Ahmanson and the same people who published Pandas is going to be futile. The DI’s careful avoidance of words that tripped the trigger of Judge Jones, and our own side’s sloppy endorsement of superstitious rationalizing for godly intervention in evolution, have closed the door on finding relief in the First Amendment.
The IDists are science-ignorant frauds, but they aren’t stupid, usually. The next fight is going to be harder.
Indeed. It seems to be true that we are seeing a new phase in the ID campaign, which does in fact seem indistinguishable from what so many cherish as theistic evolution. I struggle to see how the latter can remain tenable (from a purely practical point of view; it never has been from a scientific perspective) if the signs are correct.
That’s the thing. School boards might not be able present creationism of any form in schools, but they are going to do their hardest to misrepresent evolution. All they need is a textbook or two that don’t have the smoking gun of creationism, but simply contain bad descriptions of the actual science.
ID vs TE? One difference: IDers (nominally) won’t give the ID a name. TEers will.
(Although I said ‘one difference’ I can’t immeditately think of another…)
If we’re being pragmatic about it, the best we can hope for from contemporary candidates is a kind of deistic evolution, where their god-guy is reduced to some kind of excuse for a First Cause (who, for whatever reason, gets to be exempt from causation himself!) and who keeps his mitts off the cosmos thereafter. Many theistic evolutionists (and virtually all the IDists) want God to poke his fingers in every so often to tweak this or that genome (or infuse one of those intangible soul things). Sort of the way God used to have to keep the planets in their orbits before Newton made that unnecessary. That notion makes a shambles of the scientific enterprise and is unacceptable.
And however theistic a candidate is, I do insist that they recognize the bright line that separates science from religion. Romney seemed to tip his hat in that direction when he said creationism doesn’t belong in science class. That distinction is a nonnegotiable minimum to me. (Not that borning-again Romney has a prayer when it comes to my vote.)
Let me try to explain the difference between “evolutionary” ID (Behe accepts common descent of life; of course ID is a big tent that includes everything from Behe to YEC) and theistic evolution.
Theistic evolution posits a deity establishing physical laws and initial conditions (anthropic fine-tuning via divine fiat) which he/she/it knows will unfold in a certain course. God has one shot. (I recall that Miller uses a pool table analogy.)
“Evolutionary” ID involves innumerable divine interventions – for example, influencing directions of mutations – in order to produce various features (allegedly irreducible complex features) and taxa over geological time. God is constantly mucking around in the course of life on earth; evolution is micromanaged by a long succession of miracles.
Between these positions there is a continuum of views. For example, Collins seems to believe that God intervened to instill moral values in our ancestors. Some might posit that God rarely intervenes except in order to influence major contingent historical events (e.g. K-T event.) (and maybe does so undetectably through chaos or quantum events. Got a problem with that? Take it up with theistic scientists, not me.) However, at the ends of the spectrum these are still very different views.
P.Z.-
Just so we’re clear, my praise for Romney is very limited. The way I see it, the simplest and most politically expedient position for Romney to have taken would have been to talk about teaching the controversy and presenting both sides in science classes. That’s a popular position among the American public generally; even more so among Republican primary voters. That’s what I would have expected an opportunist like Romney to have done. So I give him some credit for taking a position that certainly will not win him any votes in the Republican primaries, and might even cost him some.
But I really think you have it wrong in characterizing theistic evolution as essentially a God of the gaps position. I see no evidence of that in books like Finding Darwin’s God or God After Darwin. I don’t see people like Ken Miller or John Haught arguing that you should invoke God to explain aspects of the natural world that are currently mysterious. Instead they say that scientists are right to approach their subject the way they do and they are basically correct about evolution, but that there is also a transcendent reality beyond the natural world. I think they are wrong about that, but I do not believe that merely holding that view makes you anti-science.
I do not “love” theistic evolution. In fact, I despise it. I think it’s intellectually lazy and I think it suffers from insurmountable conceptual problems (at least when it’s the Christian God being referred to). But for all of that it’s still a considerable improvement over the creationists and ID folks.
Romney:
“True science and true religion are on exactly the same page,” he said. “they may come from different angles, but they reach the same conclusion. I’ve never found a conflict between the science of evolution and the belief that God created the universe. He uses scientific tools to do his work.”
So God was twirling strands of DNA one day, and he says to himself… “I think I’ll invent me a tuna fish… yeah… T000000NAAAAA. I like the sound of that. Let me just… get… this… moleculey think right so the tuna will be tasty for the humans I invented the other day. There. Tuna! TOOOOONAAAAA. God am I good!”
Is that how it works? Help me here. I don’t understand!
PZ describes a scary scenario.
One in which the IDists manage to get students using a textbook which describes evolution so poorly that the students come off with the impression that there’s no way that this stuff could work.
It reminds me of Bill Maher’s quip that Republicans are the party which tells us that government doesn’t work and then goes on to prove it.
I agree with PZ, but change is oh so slow. Just like gays have to deal with civil unions before they “get” to have marriage, we will have to wait for people to accept evolution without a designer. In the interim, we have god-designed evolution (although that would make him an incredibly lazy god, waiting 13.7 billion years to get us)…
Romney:
“True science and true religion are on exactly the same page,” he said. “they may come from different angles, but they reach the same conclusion. I’ve never found a conflict between the science of evolution and the belief that God created the universe. He uses scientific tools to do his work.”
God was creating the universe one day, and he said, “Gee, I forgot to evolve that Finch a beak that can break open those hard seeds. I think… I’ll make it… a little bit more pinched. There! Have at it, Finchy. [aside] Let no one say that evolution does not work! A little pinch here, a little pull there, and voila! Things get along swimingly. God am I good!”
Life is funny, ain’t it? I’m poking around the Internet, not being a bother to anybody, when suddenly I come across a whole string of words: first Rosenhouse, then Myers, then Rosenhouse again, and look, there goes Wilkins. . . like the motions of gears in an orrery. At times like these, I get an impression that everyone I read is a character in a Borges story. You know, a story where everyone dies and then they discover they were all the same person, or where their words slowly reveal themselves to have been written on the endless pages of the book of sand.
It’s difficult to shake this impression. And when somebody I’ve met in person turns out to be a Borges character, what does that mean about me? And that way lies madness.
I suppose this might all just be a spandrel in the works. My genes have left me an ability to detect pattern and significance which was optimized for the savannah. I see animals in the clouds which are backed like weasels, or like heroic secret-agent mice, thanks to the particular sequence of accidental influences I received during my upbringing, so in the same fashion, I interpret the odd moments of meta-structure through which I pass in terms of the books I’ve enjoyed.
Well, if I’m to be cursed with this maladaptation, I figure a blind librarian in Buenos Aires isn’t a bad framework for it.
As for the Romney matter:
I’ve found that most intellectuals, amateur or otherwise, reflexively assume that a person’s statements reflect what they think, or at least to the extent that the person is able to express themselves. If that assumption holds true, then I guess it’s perfectly legitimate to do a “close reading” and write for pages and pages about the ideas and the implications.
I’m not so convinced that’s a worthwhile task for the words of a politician. Are his statements the product of any deep thought — do we even expect they’ll be consistent between one interview and the next?
I note that Romney has also said,
My emphasis.
You’re right that the book you are describing has no chance of being thrown out under the 1st Amendment. But that has absolutely nothing to do with Judge Jones or theistic evolution or the inquiry into the motives of the IDeologists at Dover (which was actually a legal sideshow at the trial, despite how much people focused on it).
If your description is correct, that book will be permissible in public schools because there is no Constitutional prohibition against teaching science badly and never has been.
The only possible defense against that is to convince parents, particularly the ones who want their children to get into the best schools, that they have to insist on the best education for their children.
If you can’t, there is always selection to effect a cure.
Some might posit that God rarely intervenes except in order to influence major contingent historical events (e.g. K-T event.) (and maybe does so undetectably through chaos or quantum events. Got a problem with that? Take it up with theistic scientists, not me.)
Simple logic should show why this is problematic. If God acted through quantum events to produce humans, God’s influence is no longer undetectable since humans are detectable.
I can’t tell the difference between a theistic evolutionist and an intelligent design creationist.
Pretend I’m a Martian (not hard to do, I suppose; to a lot of people, my complete rejection of “faith” as a reason for believing in something seems to make me alien, anyway). Explain it to me.
One martian to another, I think it works out like this:
IDers/creationists have to have a tangible god that does tangible things. So they look at the flagellum or the eye and say “God made that”. Theistic evolutionists tend to have a very intangible god, and consequently, a god of vageries. It sort of did something with some laws or some plan we can’t distinguish that had billions of years of algae followed by the relatively rapid ascent of man (I know it sounds silly, work with me here). The TEs assign no specific task to their god, and as such don’t have to deny any science.
I think the point is that theist evolutionists aren’t going to be bringing these silly court cases because they don’t dispute anything about the science of evolution or how it’s taught.
Source for previous quotation (tip o’ the fedora to Greta Christina at EvolutionBlog).
Sounds like he sure thinks God has more interest in our personal fiddlybits than a being who just started the process and waited for a critter of sufficient complexity to come along, ripe for uplift.
“what’s to stop the next trial from pitting one proudly Christian author of a book that doesn’t mention god or religion against another proudly Christian author of a book that doesn’t mention god or religion? If it came down to that, we couldn’t reject either.” – PZ
If one of those books is pushing a religious position and the other is not, then there’s a basis to reject one and not the other. The DI book will be pushing a religious position with bad science and by setting up a false controversy, right? Whether is mentions God/Creator/Designer or not.
Still, in the end, this has to be won in the public sphere rather than a courtroom. That’s why some of us see this as an encouraging sign – even someone from a very conservative background is backing what the textbook says about evolution. One could take that optimistically as a sign that we’re making some progress in terms of what the public thinks.
PZ wrote:
…no politician with any hope of a career here is going to alienate the god-soaked electorate.
Ah, but it’s not “no politician” anymore. Come live in Pete Stark’s district where he is cheered for his non-belief.
Joshua points out that Romney also quote-mined the line which was the inspiration for the quiverfull movement. And if that’s not spooky. . . .
> I can’t tell the difference between a theistic evolutionist and an intelligent design creationist.
Well, TE are not afraid with the Big Bang; they can even discover it.
chuko wrote: Still, in the end, this has to be won in the public sphere rather than a courtroom.
I would disagree with this. Some very important changes have been made in the courtroom that ran counter to public opinion. After all the “public sphere” believes overwhelmingly that creationism should be taught either alongside or instead of evolution. Only the courts have prevented this from actually happening. What few seem to realize is that another court case could easily go the other way even though the anti-evolution gang has no better arguments than they had in Dover or even arguments used twenty years ago in the Louisiana case. After all, they convinced Scalia back then and his influence is growing, not receding.
One problem with Romney is that if actually elected, far-fetched as it sounds, he will have no problem appointing anti-evolution judges – that will be at the very bottom of his list of requirements.
windy: “If God acted through quantum events to produce humans, God’s influence is no longer undetectable since humans are detectable.”
I don’t know why I ought to bother explaining a view I myself do not even hold myself, but here goes: humans are not undetectable, but the causal connection to God is scientifically undetectable. Look, it ain’t science.
I have to say, I used to be more critical of theistic evolution – but I rather enjoy how much it scandalizes the starchier of my fellow atheists.
The inaccurate book loses. A fight on the basis of academic standards, with standard rules of accuracy to decide by? Evolution should win, where academics are hardest.
I’m with Blake when he points out that Romney’s words are unlikely to be a considered position. Politicians are in the business of being likeable, if not lovable. Even if there is no deceit involved in Romney’s statement, even if you credit him for coming down on the side of the evolutionary angels, we should remember that it is intended for broad consumption, and that its main purpose is to broaden Romney’s appeal to swing voters.
We should not, therefore, praise Romney for being pro-science, or be satisfied with his scientific literacy, as those things are far from demonstrated. Rather, we can breathe a sigh of relief in the fact that such sound bytes fall short of being anti-science, and (with the right audience) could prove useful talking points for promoting good policy where science and education are concerned.
I invite comments…SH
Nice for the East Bay! But remember that Minnesota had a governor who not only wore feather boas, he declared in Playboy magazine that he is an atheist. Don’t be too smug, we weren’t.
The difference between TE and ID: As I understand the Catholic position God created the means by which evolution happens and it is all too wonderful to comprehend and at some point in Man’s evolution God inserted souls just like he does at conception. ID says “Gosh, isn’t the world so wonderful, there has to be a designer and evolution can’t explain everything by itself; and since we don’t really want to get into all the ‘details’ of how evolution works, let’s just tell the kids that God gets all the credit so they won’t grow up and shoot other kids on the playground.”
But slacking off on politicians who rest on TE to please the scientists does lead to the dangerous position that there is still an inability on the part of the sciences to determine the answers to the question of how we came to be here. Good guns, PZ.
I think the Evangelicals will look at what Romney is spouting and believe it comes from the mouth of Satan himself. They will reject it simply because Romney is a Mormon. Romney said “True science and true religion are on exactly the same page.” The Evangelicals know that Mormonism isn’t the True Religion, so whatever Romney’s Mormonism is on the same page as can’t be compatable with it.
Rather, we can breathe a sigh of relief in the fact that such sound bytes fall short of being anti-science, and (with the right audience) could prove useful talking points for promoting good policy where science and education are concerned.
Bah! Sighs of relief are reserved for politicians who actually decide to make sense. After years of assualt on evolution, you get this little sop of recognition from a right-wing politician, and you cheer!
Why are people so willing to give this moron a break! He just went to Regent U., bastion of Bush’s political appointees! His favorite author is L. Ron Hubbard. He thinks unmarried couples are bad, that marriage is eternal. He advocate the quiverfull philosophy!
He said THIS:
Romney: (Chuckling) “Let me, uh, let me offer just a thought. And that is, uh, one of the great things about this great land, is we have people of different faiths and different persuasions. And uh, I’m convinced that the nation, that the nation does need, the nation does need to have people of different faiths but we need to have a person of faith lead the country.”
http://atheism.about.com/b/a/258788.htm
Let that sink in!
He’s a bastard!
The absurdity of a bad biology book for christian kids is amusing. I wonder if this is part of a series. Bad astronomy/astrophysics for christians to take care of that annoying big bang and 13.7 billion year old universe. Followed by bad anthropology, paleontology, and, of course, bad geology.
At this point, I wonder how much of this is just going through the motions so the DI guys have some way of keeping their paycheck going for pushing pseudoscience in the schools. If the pseudoscience gets watered down too much, the kids probably won’t notice or care. As I recall from those school years, much of what was taught went in one ear and out the other anyway.
One big IMPORTANT difference: TE (and not ID) is the slipperly slope to reality.
ID is creationism, gussied up to (they thought!) past constitutional muster. It is openly anti-science, anti-intellectual, irrational, and intellectually dishonest. The theological boundries are starkly painted and fiercely defended with visions of the wrath of god and threats of the moral collapse of all our cherished ideals if an adherent strays.
TE is none of the above. It accepts (with perhaps just a tad more scepticism; but only a tad) the consensus findings and conclusions of the scientific community. The god hiding in the gaps yields without significant resistance upon evidence that gap doesn’t exist.
“I can’t tell the difference between a theistic evolutionist and an intelligent design creationist.”
Basic difference, to my mind, is that ID is a tool, part of the wedge strategy to insert a particular brand of religion into all aspects of our life. TE is a personal position, a comfortable way for someone with religion to reconcile faith and science. In other words, ID supporters want to control other people; TEists are setting standards for themselves.
Of course, there is nothing to keep an IDist from pretending to be a TEist in order to fake us out.
They might. Mormonism is an esoteric blend of christianity with their own elements. Among many other differences:
1. God has a wife. We are their spirit babies. So was Jesus. So the difference between JC and us is…….??
2. When you die, you and your wife have a chance of ultimately becoming a god yourself with your own planet of spirit babies.
3. The above implies that there are large, maybe infinite numbers of other gods.
4. They are the real jews and the other jews are really gentiles. Catholics for some reason I don’t remember are on their B list.
There is more but that is enough. They have historically taken a dim view of older christian sects who have returned the favor.
It is openly anti-science, anti-intellectual, irrational, and intellectually dishonest. […] TE is none of the above.
Are you kidding?
Theistic = bringing god into the picture.
This is automatically anti-science (I don’t care how distantly active he is made to be – there is no evidence for any claim that god exists!).
It is certainly anti-intellectual (TE proponent Francis Collins kneeling in front of a waterfall and giving it up for Jesus is stupidity personified.)
It is utterly irrational to believe in God. Belief is delusion, for all the reasons Dawkins documents in his book.
It is intellectually dishonest to mix god and science. They are like oil and water. People who do it are usually doing it for political reasons, not because it makes any sense.
I do not understand why so many people here are buying ito this TE stuff. It’s frightening to see that so many people here are okay with it. What is wrong with you all? Are you all having a Teilhard de Chardin moment? Snap out of it!
Dawkins:
“The whole point about evolution is that it explains things without the need for designers, without the need for magic, without the need for spells. If you take on board what Darwinian natural selection really does for human understanding, what it does, is it explains how you get from primeval simplicity, which is easy to understand, just chemistry, how you get from there, to the prodigies of complexity which we see in ourselves, in trees, in wallabies, in all living things. In a stunning accomplishment of the human intellect, Darwin and his followers showed how something which looks as though it must require a designer, doesn’t. And that’s a beautiful piece of explanation. It’s a beautiful, wonderful, elegant achievement of the human intellect. To suddenly go from that, and say, oh well, god was there too, that’s superfluous, it’s gratuitous, and I think, fundamentally, it’s intellectually cowardly.”
http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2007/05/richard_dawkins_10.html
CalGeorge wrote: “It is intellectually dishonest to mix god and science.”
I agree. Science is an inherently atheistic proposition. But (and this is important) TE’s typically *don’t* mix god and science. They are not out there advocating that we change the way science is to be done, as the IDevotees do. Rather, TE’s typically conflate God with the object of science, Nature, but they do so as a personal matter. I don’t have to be anyone’s cheerleader to point out that salient distinction.
Peace…SH
“People who do it are usually doing it for political reasons, not because it makes any sense.” -CalGeorge
Most theist evolutionists are such for personal reasons. For the most part, religious people aren’t especially stupid or opportunistic. They’re psychologically snared. This doesn’t appear to be a political ploy, except insofar as it’s a common American belief.
I don’t know about Romney (and the gods know that I don’t support him or his policies), but most people who say this kind of thing are really trying to reconcile what their eyes and heads are telling them with the faith they’ve grown up with. You and I both know that that’s an illusion, that no reconciliation is possible, but they’re still blinded by faith.
“I do not understand why so many people here are buying into this TE stuff.”
Hardly anyone here is. I’m not arguing that we should be going easy on them or to be closet atheists, or any of that. I’m not pandering to anybody. But can’t you see that there’s some sort of questioning going on here? They’re not taking the Bible literally, they’re not ignoring the scientific evidence for evolution. This doesn’t seem to be DI politics or crazy insane YEC. They’re potentially people you might be able to reason with. So seeing theist evolution in a place you might expect to see DI or YEC is a good thing. Yes, yes, not good enough. But it is progress.
Education is where it’s at. It seems like any solution requires journalists, voters, etc… to be informed enough to detect bad science and bad arguments. Otherwise you are simply asking them to transfer their ignorant sheep-like gaze from religious leaders to scientific ones.
How much time is spent teaching accurate detailed understanding of evolution in american high schools? Does Jonh Q. Public know what is at stake in the design vs. evolution argument?
It seems like every ounce of activism outside teaching evolution (& creating/protecting opportunities for teaching) is a giant waste.
PZ wrote:
Have you read Why the gods are not winning on the edge website?
TE’s typically conflate God with the object of science, Nature, but they do so as a personal matter.
I don’t know why, but I find the attempt to link theism to evolution to be almost more reprehensible than the complete rejection of evolution.
If I could get someone to accept evolution, I would be very upset if they still managed to believe in a god who is propping the whole thing up.
All that beautiful science has been embraced, but it’s like a last little step has not been taken, the essential step that frees one from the superstitions that have plagued mankind for thousands of years.
Romney: Opportunistic fraud.
Theistic Evolution as a philosophical position isn’t anti-scientific. What is non-scientific (and reprehensible) is passing it off as a scientific position, as a substitute or more legitimate counterpart of a distinct Something (atheistic) Evolution which is entierely imaginary.
I was going to comment at some length, but upon reflection decided that it would be more efficient and productive to simply slam my head against the nearest wall ’til one of us gives . . .
I will say, though, that I just finished Humes’ book Monkey Girl about the Dover trial – including the bit about PZ . . .freaky, that. Anyway, I found it striking how all of the theists stuck together, how TEs landed squarely on the school board’s side, while all of the plaintiffs – and their witnesses and legal team – were composed solely of lonely atheists.
Of course, that’s because I’m typing this from an alternate reality. In your world, iirc, all the plaintiffs (who got a great deal of grief, and small-town grief at that, for what they did) were TEs, one major scientific witness for the plaintiffs was a TE (Miller, of course), at least one member of the plaintiffs’ legal team seems to have been a TE. Judge Jones also seems likely to fall under that general heading, and specifically stated in the Conclusion of his decision that:
“Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.”
Of course, if I understand correctly, in an alternate reality where a majority of creationist school board members had managed to not get booted out in the subsequent election, Kitzmiller v. Dover could well be appealing its way up to the Supreme Court, where Scalia would get a chance to revisit his Edwards v. Aguillard dissent from two decades back. So let’s see – I’d guess that Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito would rule for the school board – that’s 4. Kennedy has (in County of Allegheny v. ACLU, 1989) put forward the idea of using a looser standard than the Lemon test in establishment clause cases (the coercion test); it may be plausible that he would join them, giving a 5-4 Supreme Court victory – after so many years – to the damn creationists.
In that case, kids getting anything like a decent science education would depend largely upon parental pressure – the same kind of pressure that today has driven evolution virtually underground in countless classrooms across the country. Part of that would spring from an understanding (however sketchy) of the importance of such an education – that evolution isn’t ‘just a theory,’ but the cornerstone of the biological sciences, and an ever-more-important part of medical and technological advancement and careers. For many people, it might also need to spring from the idea that evolution isn’t anti-God. Creationism has always garnered enormous strength and support from the idea that is is – handing this to them, if it is not required, seems a strange thing to do.
Are we saying that evolution doesn’t just make it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, but necessary? Now, intellectual honesty is important – I don’t want us to be no stinkin’ Discovery Institute equivalent – so if one thinks that’s the case, they have to act accordingly. Perhaps it would help if one defines TE as not a scientific belief, but a religious belief that incorporates modern science (when it presents itself as a specifically scientific matter is when I see it crossing the line into some variety of ID creationism. (ie, TE wouldn’t show up in a proper high school bio textbook (unless, perhaps in some science and society sidebar where it was presented as a social view, not a scientific argument)
PZ may be right that perhaps by sometime in his children’s lifetimes politicians will fall over themselves to announce their complete lack of god-belief . . . but given the entirely plausible possibility, given what he says, of the creationists winning the next round, I’d really rather not wait until then for decent science ed to become commonplace, if that could be avoided.
“It is utterly irrational to believe in God. Belief is delusion, for all the reasons Dawkins documents in his book.” [Etc.]
Ok. How does this help support real science education?
If I can try my own hand at explaining the difference, since my family is essentially TE:
Theistic evolution is merely the tacking on of God as an initial cause to science. It’s essentially deism with foresight. There is zero conflict with science or evolution, since TE just says that whatever we find out about evolution and the world, whatever that is, is simply part of this universe which was created by god.
ID is the proposition that god exists and interferes, and thus there *must* be gaps in science for god to be present it. It’s a presuppositionalist belief, basically. It says that we see holes, and those holes must be a designer, since we believe that designer exists, and there must be a place for him.
TE sees science and tacks on god. ID sees god and plugs it into science.
“Sort of the way God used to have to keep the planets in their orbits before Newton made that unnecessary. That notion makes a shambles of the scientific enterprise and is unacceptable.” –Zeno
A little off topic, but Neil deGrasse Tyson in one of his Beyond Belief presentations lead me to believe that it was actually Netwon who invoked God and “intelligent design” to keep the planets in place and that it took Pierre-Simon de Laplace and his perturbation theory to explain the stability of the orbits of the various bodies of the solar system.
Newton took us part of the way, giving the concepts of gravity and explaining two-body attraction, but when he tried to account for the motions of the whole solar system, his math wasn’t quite up to the task, so he called it quits and decided to wax poetic about the divine instead. Laplace saw the motions of the heavenly bodies as an unanswered scientific challenge, tackled it head-on and gave us a scientific understanding of their movement and stability.
On the topic at hand, Jason Rosenhouse’s comment closely mirrors my own sentiments.
As long as politicians continue to unnecessarily invoke God (in one way or another) when talking about evolution, there’s still a fight to be fought. The notion of theistic evolution is silly. Do we have theistic general relativity? Theistic electromagnetism? No. Gods have no place in science. Gods have no place in scientific education or scientific discourse.
Instead of making a “non-overlapping magisteria” argument, I’d like to see a politician with the integrity and scientific literacy to publicly endorse good science education (such as teaching evolution in classrooms without ID or Creationism) without immediately following any such statement with religious apologetics. Until then, I guess we’ll just have to what we can get and choose the lesser of the available evils.
“Theistic = bringing god into the picture.
This is automatically anti-science (I don’t care how distantly active he is made to be – there is no evidence for any claim that god exists!).”
It’s no anti-science. It’s merely non-science. Deism is anti-scientific to you?
Romney:
“True science and true religion are on exactly the same page,” he said. “they may come from different angles, but they reach the same conclusion. I’ve never found a conflict between the science of evolution and the belief that God created the universe. He uses scientific tools to do his work.”
True science and true religion on the same page!
WHEN we look to the individuals of the same variety or sub-variety of our older cultivated plants and animals, one of the first points which strikes us, is, that they generally differ much more from each other, than do the individuals of any one species or variety in a state of nature.
Be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people, unto whom this work shall come: That we, through the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, have seen the plates which contain this record, which is a record of the people of Nephi, and also of the Lamanites, their brethren, and also of the people of Jared, who came from the tower of which hath been spoken.
When we reflect on the vast diversity of the plants and animals which have been cultivated, and which have varied during all ages under the most different climates and treatment, I think we are driven to conclude that this greater variability is simply due to our domestic productions having been raised under conditions of life not so uniform as, and somewhat different from, those to which the parent-species have been exposed under nature.
And we also know that they have been translated by the gift and power of God, for his voice hath declared it unto us; wherefore we know of a surety that the work is true.
It seems pretty clear that organic beings must be exposed during several generations to the new conditions of life to cause any appreciable amount of variation; and that when the organisation has once begun to vary, it generally continues to vary for many generations.
And we also testify that we have seen the engravings which are upon the plates; and they have been shown unto us by the power of God, and not of man.
There is, also, I think, some probability in the view propounded by Andrew Knight, that this variability may be partly connected with excess of food.
And we declare with words of soberness, that an angel of God came down from heaven, and he brought and laid before our eyes, that we beheld and saw the plates, and the engravings thereon; and we know that it is by the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, that we beheld and bear record that these things are true.
No case is on record of a variable being ceasing to be variable under cultivation. Our oldest cultivated plants, such as wheat, still often yield new varieties: our oldest domesticated animals are still capable of rapid improvement or modification.
And it is marvelous in our eyes. Nevertheless, the voice of the Lord commanded us that we should bear record of it; wherefore, to be obedient unto the commandments of God, we bear testimony of these things. And we know that if we are faithful in Christ, we shall rid our garments of the blood of all men, and be found spotless before the judgment-seat of Christ, and shall dwell with him eternally in the heavens. And the honor be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, which is one God. Amen.
They go so well together, don’t you think? Darwin the acute observer of nature and the Mormon observers of angels, glorifying those marvelous plates of translated wisdom!
Jason Rosenhouse wrote:
This is exactly right. PZ may have a problem with theists in general, but something like 90% of the people in this country are theists. If a political candidate is not a Creationist or an Intelligent Design proponent, that is a plus. PZ is essentially saying he doesn’t recognize a difference between Ken Miller and Michael Behe. That is a weakness on PZ’s part, not on Ken Miller’s part.
Deism is anti-scientific to you?
Yes. Deism is religious philosophy. Religion is antithetical to science. It takes things on faith. Science does not.
Theistic evolution is merely the tacking on of God as an initial cause to science. It’s essentially deism with foresight. There is zero conflict with science or evolution, since TE just says that whatever we find out about evolution and the world, whatever that is, is simply part of this universe which was created by god.
Human beings cause science to happen, not god. There is no evidence that god exists or that he created any universe.
If you are going to posit this universe-creating god, please tell us what he is doing now.
Also tells us how you know this.
CalGeorge,
Is anything in the world to you non-scientific without being anti-scientific? Or is it a binary thing – you’re either a scientific concept or an anti-science concept.
Religion is a philosophy. Philosophy is not a science. Deism is no more anti-scientific than Solipsism or Samsara. They aren’t trying to be science, and they aren’t.
PS: Deism is not a religious philosophy – it’s theistic. Religion and theism are not in any way the same thing.
Crystal clear elucidation on the cowardice of praising nominal endorsement. :D
Gerry L said –
Basic difference, to my mind, is that ID is a tool, part of the wedge strategy to insert a particular brand of religion into all aspects of our life. TE is a personal position, a comfortable way for someone with religion to reconcile faith and science. In other words, ID supporters want to control other people; TEists are setting standards for themselves.
The other major difference, is that I don’t know of any theists who also believe that evolution is the explanation for the origin of life, who think their theism has a place in any science classroom. The science belongs in the science class, my faith belongs at home and at church. My theism has nothing to do with science, though science has definately shaped my religious beliefs.
ID on the other hand, seems to make a lot of claims that are absolutely counterintuitive to evolutionary theory. It seeks to twist science to conform to dogma.
I doubt this changes anyones feelings about either much, but make no mistake, there is a difference. The most glaring to me, is that ID is inherently dishonest. Deluded or not, I don’t lie to others, nor to myself, about what I believe. I am a Christonist theist with universalist deist leanings. I believe in a personal God who is active in my life. I also think that my religious beliefs are my own and have nothing to do with science and no place in public schools at all, unless it’s in a comparative religions class.
ID on the other hand seeks to twist and distort science and their own aims. They have no interest teaching some controversy, they seek nothing less than to put religion and the supernatural, into a context it does not belong, into places it does not belong.
Cal George –
Yes. Deism is religious philosophy.
While Damn Yankee is mistaken, deism is distinclty not theism and theism is inherently religious, deism is not a religious philosophy. Deists do not worship any god or particularly believe in any god, they merely postulate the potential that some godlike figure or intelligence, may have been responsable for the big bang. But that if such a being or intelligence did/does exist, it is impossible for humans to ever know for sure. How you can stretch that into being a religious philosophy, I cannot comprehend.
My biggest complaint against theistic evolution is this:
Consider if the Big Bang really wasn’t the “event that created everything”. Suppose that science simply stopped with the assumption that it was. We’d have to wait for another Darwin (this time probably in physics or chemistry) to ignore religious intuitions and come up with an elegant theory to explain how the universe/multiverse/whatever came into being. We’d have to go through a few more centuries of religious gewgaw and apologetics before people finally rejected their old theistic evolution arguments.
Saying theistic evolution is essentially pro-science is wrong. It’s essentially pro-evolution. Evolution is just one part of one branch of science, though.
(By the way, don’t you just love that word? Gewgaw.. Geewwgaaaw…)
dittos! PZ is right!
Reading the initial quote from Romney in the best possible light, he worded it so that he could by a stretch be pantheistic about evolution (while creationist about cosmology). Luckily he, being politician, isn’t consistent between sound-bites and here reveals himself as the TE he really is. Thanks Blake!
And I don’t know of any TE formulation that isn’t proposing interaction (by intervention) or unnecessary agency, thus perverting working scientific theories to something else. So yes, it is nefarious gods-of-the-gaps anti-science.
In other cases theists have finally given up hijacking science. (Remember when gods were assumed to be the ultimate cause in mechanics?) But the young sciences of cosmology and evolution are still under fire from the old perverts.
Another problem with such quantum woo, by Miller for example, is that QM is shielded against unnecessary agency. We know by highly restrictive experiments that this type of action, equivalent to local hidden variables appearing, are excluded. (If it is global hidden variables acting, the woo agencies are cheating us about our physics.)
I would like to turn that proposal back to the TE’s: if nature is constructed to make agency not only unnecessary but actually difficult, why isn’t that a strong hint that gods is an, ehrm, unnatural idea?
Reading the initial quote from Romney in the best possible light, he worded it so that he could by a stretch be pantheistic about evolution (while creationist about cosmology). Luckily he, being politician, isn’t consistent between sound-bites and here reveals himself as the TE he really is. Thanks Blake!
And I don’t know of any TE formulation that isn’t proposing interaction (by intervention) or unnecessary agency, thus perverting working scientific theories to something else. So yes, it is nefarious gods-of-the-gaps anti-science.
In other cases theists have finally given up hijacking science. (Remember when gods were assumed to be the ultimate cause in mechanics?) But the young sciences of cosmology and evolution are still under fire from the old perverts.
Another problem with such quantum woo, by Miller for example, is that QM is shielded against unnecessary agency. We know by highly restrictive experiments that this type of action, equivalent to local hidden variables appearing, are excluded. (If it is global hidden variables acting, the woo agencies are cheating us about our physics.)
I would like to turn that proposal back to the TE’s: if nature is constructed to make agency not only unnecessary but actually difficult, why isn’t that a strong hint that gods is an, ehrm, unnatural idea?
“Will [theistic evolutionists] turn into IDists when we threaten some particularly juicy and cherished gap?”
Good question, the short answer to which is “no”. Here’s how I see it:
– Define theism as “the belief that God is directly responsible for the universe”.
– Define creationism as “the belief that God is directly responsible for the universe, and that this should be scientifically demonstrable”.
Then both theistic evolution and intelligent design fall inside theism, but only intelligent design falls inside creationism. Of the two groups, only IDers believe that the lack of scientific evidence for God represents a failure on the part of science.
By contrast, TEers don’t need to hunt for gaps, because they expect God to do a very good impression of natural processes. From the viewpoint of the reality-based community, this is just as daft. However, from a political perspective, it’s a form of daft that’s on our side in all the science-related battles.
From a philosophical perspective, it’s one step closer to atheism, because the only “evidence” that’s left is faith. Once people lose their personal need for a sky daddy, reality is only one small step away.
Any thoughts/comments/insults/ratings/etc?
How you can stretch that into being a religious philosophy, I cannot comprehend.
Blame Wikipedia:
Deism is a religious philosophy and movement that became prominent in England, France, and the United States in the 17th and 18th centuries. Deists typically reject supernatural events (prophecy, miracles) and divine revelation prominent in organized religion, along with holy books and revealed religions that assert the existence of such things. Instead, deists hold that religious beliefs must be founded on human reason and observed features of the natural world, and that these sources reveal the existence of one God or supreme being.
Hiding, obviously (and very effectively, too). Otherwise we would have found solid evidence of his existence sometime in the last several millennia.
Not addressed to me, I know, but I’ll answer anyway. Opinions. If I like chocolate, that’s not scientific (I can try to scientifically understand *why* I like chocolate, or what specific processes in my brain and body I experience as “liking chocolate”, but that won’t necessarily make me like it any more or less). But it’s not anti-scientific either; it is not a statement of fact at all, and therefore *genuinely* outside the magisterium of science.
But most religious statements aren’t like that. They are statements of fact – there was a great flood, a man rose from the dead, etc. – which are either true or false. They concern events which did or did not happen.
To believe a statement of fact without sound evidence for it *is* anti-scientific, and that is just what religions (in general) do.
Religion and theism are not in any way the same thing.
No?
re·li·gion(r-ljn)
n.
1.
a. Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe.
b. A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship.
2. The life or condition of a person in a religious order.
3. A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader.
4. A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.
the·ism [ th ìzzəm ] (plural the·isms)
noun
Definition:
1. belief in God: belief that one God created and rules humans and the world, not necessarily accompanied by belief in divine revelation such as through the Bible
2. belief in god or gods: belief in the existence of a god or gods
If we can show that god is a supernatural power, religion and theism start to look very much alike.
In fact, Pastor Jim Feeney, Ph.D. says god has supernatural powers (If Jim says it, that’s good enough for me – after all, he would know):
If this generation is to be reached with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, it will have to be a Gospel confirmed by the supernatural power of God.
http://www.jimfeeney.org/supernaturalpowerofGod.html
Pastor Dan (all hail Pastor Dan!) thinks god is a supernatural power:
We need help with problems and situations that are beyond our power to deal with. The desire to experience the supernatural was put in our hearts by a supernatural being, God our creator.
http://www.full-life.org/blogger/2005/04/experience-supernatural-provision.htm
Pastor Dan knows what he is talking about! I can only conclude that theism and religion are in some ways the same thing.
But most religious statements aren’t like that. They are statements of fact – there was a great flood, a man rose from the dead, etc. – which are either true or false. They concern events which did or did not happen.
I take issue with this. MOST religious statements are “thou shall” or “thou shalt nots” — rules that a believer is supposed to live his or her life by or else God (or the gods) will hurt them somehow. Don’t lie about your neighbor in a legal proceeding, don’t try to take your neighbor’s cow, do unto others as you’d have done unto you, don’t eat the meat of a kid goat that has been boiled in its own mother’s milk, don’t eat shellfish, etc.
There’s a large body of mythology and poorly transcribed history that makes up a large portion of most religious texts, but those aren’t actually religious statements as such. Some are parables that couch the rules that you’re supposed to live by into more easily digestible stories (or occasionally “just so” stories explaning why you have to follow that particular rule). Some are mis-remembered history that makes one side of an ancient argument look better or worse than the other side of the same argument. (And in the Bible, whole chapters seem to be poetry written to someone’s mistress that someone else snapped up and shoved in later — now they’re justifed as psalms to God, but you really have to stretch the metaphors to make it work that way.)
Now, it’s true that a lot of shallow believers MAKE these things into religious statements, because their religion is easier to follow if you make it less about the rules to live by and more about just believing that the myths are real and the distorted history actually happened that way. But the big religious statement of any religion is “these are the rules to live by and you have to do it because God (or the gods) says so” — that’s the big “fact” that underlies the religions.
The inaccurate book loses. A fight on the basis of academic standards, with standard rules of accuracy to decide by? Evolution should win, where academics are hardest.
***
So, it’s a matter of fixing the textbook selection process?
Texas school boards and book publishers don’t seem to me to be the ones to rely on but they do pop up in the news.
Nance
I take issue with this. MOST religious statements are “thou shall” or “thou shalt nots” — rules that a believer is supposed to live his or her life by or else God (or the gods) will hurt them somehow.
But these statements also imply that it is a fact that God interacted with a believer at one point and passed down such rules. They are not simply expressions of preference.
Why is it not a fact? Unless you are lying to us about liking chocolate, it looks like a statement of fact to me.
I’m not holding my breath waiting for politicians to announce their complete rejection of god-belief.
I’m turning beet red.
Come on, pols! God-belief is so yesterday! Come to atheist country! No more twisting yourselves into pretzels (we know you know we know you’re bullshitting us).
Voters! God is not going to become any more real because you scream his name from the rooftops over and over and over again (go ahead, scream yourselves hoarse – it won’t achieve diddly squat). You’re fighting a sad, losing battle. Thomas Jefferson would want you to shake off your religious chains and be free!
Scientists! Your washed-out theo-deism is nothing but a desperate half-measure – drown that cherry-picked Bible in the bathtub and enbrace full-blown disbelief!
All of you! Embrace plain old, beautiful, vanilla evolution and the beautiful god-free universe.
This instant!
Actually, so far as I’m aware, both of them do so. Miller asserts the historical existence of scientifically inexplicable miracles, such as the virgin birth, and invokes God to explain them. Haught makes fine-tuning arguments for an intelligent designer, and also argues that God is required to explain subjective consciousness, abstract curiosity and our ability to form accurate mental models of the world.
So they do both argue for a God of the gaps; it’s just that the gaps they focus on are (mostly) outside evolutionary biology. It’s nice to have them on our side in the fight against creationism, and neither is trying to get their beliefs taught in school. And I think Miller is as close to 100% methodological naturalism as any theistic evolutionist out there. But their positions still aren’t fully compatible with science IMO.
I think science-compatible theism is possible, but you have to get to Martin Gardner-style “I have absolutely no empirical reason whatsoever to believe in God, and I realize this, but it still feels plausible” fideism. And that’s an awfully rare position.
I prefer chocolate.
Thanks for the answer to my question, PZ. I am genuined honoured that you give it such prominence.
However, you did not really answer it. I asked a question, in all seriousness. I was not trying to project a point of view onto you, but asking for an explanation of your position in a bit more detail, because I have trouble understanding it. I don’t see what you think is going to be the problem at the next big court case.
Furthermore, I did not think that you want to remove books like Miller and Levine; and this leaves me somewhat puzzled as to what you were saying in your earlier post, when you asked us “Try to imagine the next big court case to get ID out of the schools.”
What do you think will be different about this next big court case? I still don’t know. You’re concerned about a new repackaged intelligent design, but as far as I can tell by that you mean theistic evolution, which is quite different from intelligent design as proposed by the Discovery Institute. And we already have books – like Miller and Levine – by people who are theistic evolutionists.
So if it not about the books, what is the problem?
Your hypothetical next court case has the “DI lawyers” making a point about how scientists support all these theistic evolutionists.
But that was Dover vs Kitzmiller, wasn’t it? The lawyers there had this argument available to them already; but it can’t work as a way to get ID into schools. It’s badly out of touch to think that our side (defended by a coalition of theistic evolutionists and chamberlain unbelievers) was ever at any risk from a DI lawyer trying to raise our recognition of theistic evolutionists.
Contrary to your implication (as I read it), none of those who recognize the scientific standing of theistic evolutionists are saying that theistic evolution itself is a scientific model. We rather recognize that theistic evolutionists can still do perfectly good science. I don’t see how the DI could get any leverage from that at all – just the reverse!
Contrary to your implication (as I read it), none of those who recognize the scientific standing of theistic evolutionists actually want theistic evolution in schools. So as a tactic for the DI lawyers, this approach would have backfired immediately.
Contrary to your implication (as I read it), the support of theistic evolutionists from their unbelieving colleagues is not an endorsement of theistic evolution. It is rather recognition that the position is consistent, although we don’t agree with it or think that it has any good empirical support. It is a kind of theistic add-on to conventional science, which is not presented as an alternative to the scientific models or as a denial of them.
Contrary to your implication (as I read it), we do not ignore or deride scientists who insist of purely natural explanations of evolution. We do disagree with you when you make statements about your believing colleagues that are (IMO) pretty damn stupid; but it seems to me that even the theistic evolutionists themselves insist on purely natural explanations when it comes to teaching evolution. If anyone was proposing to add on as a part of evolutionary biology an explicit requirement that “there is no God”, then that would be opposed by our side of the case. But I don’t think anyone wants that. So what do you think the Dover team were ignoring or deriding? They ignored – because it had no bearing whatsoever on the case – your arguments that there is no God. They certainly did not repeat your (apparent?) claims that any form of theism is inconsistent with science. That would have been actively counter productive in the legal case; and would be undercut some of their best witnesses; and also two superb theistic lawyers who were making the case for undiluted solid science education.
You imply that our side, exemplified by Nick, would want to argue that “I believe God is intelligent and I believe he designed the creation” is pro-science. That is a stunning failure on your part to understand what Nick or I or others is about. We are not saying that is “pro-science”; we are saying that, as it stands, it’s neither pro nor anti science. It’s a belief that is not itself science, but which can’t be refuted scientifically either. Theistic evolution is pretty much a way of thinking about theism that attempts to avoid any conflict with evolution. The evolution itself is unchanged, and that’s as scientifically grounded for you as it is for them. The theism is not scientifically grounded, but it is deliberated formulated to avoid any denial of any part of the scientific model.
Much of the difficulty seems to arise because you don’t quite grasp theistic evolution. You say so yourself, and solicit attempts to explain it. My comment here is already too long; and it’s a topic I have wanted to take up in any case. So I have proposed a humble explanation at my own blog. See Explaining theistic evoloution to Martians, at Duas Quartunciae.
Screwed up the link in my previous post. I refer to Explaining theistic evolution to Martians at “Duas Quartunciae”.
Chris Ho-Stuart wrote:
I don’t see what you think is going to be the problem at the next big court case.
Until people figure out that the issue is not a scientific one but rather a political one then you won’t see the problem until it’s too late. It’s not about the content of textbooks but about who decides what is acceptable to teach. This country is riddled with judges, or even worse, juries who would find it perfectly acceptable to teach alternatives to evolution, usually under the guise of “fairness”. Those who are confident that when all else fails the Supreme Court will save the day, because they have several times in the past, are in for a rude surprise.
Theistic evolution
The theistic evolutionist considers that natural processes like evolution are the means by which the creator creates. How this works is unclear, and it is not something that is argued from an empirical basis.
http://duoquartuncia.blogspot.com/2007/05/explaining-theistic-evolution-to.html
“How this works is unclear.” Truer words were never spoken.
1 frozen waterfall + 1 gullible human being + 1 dose of stupidity = theistic evolution
tomh says:
I agree with all of that; but are you saying that the problem is that next time we might not be so lucky with the judge? I agree; that is the most plausible big problem for next time.
But you have it completely backwards if you think theistic evolution will make this worse. As matters stand in the USA at present, theistic evolutionists are some of the most powerful contributors to the fight for a solid undiluted science education.
Bear in mind!
(1) Theistic evolutionists are not trying to get theistic evolution recognized as a scientific model for teaching in schools.
(2) If they did, it would immediately run foul of the first ammendment. It would be teaching religion. After all, unlike the IDists, TEs are quite up front that their belief is in God. There’s no downside for them in this, because of point (1).
(3) If you persuade most people to drop religion altogether, then sure, there’s no problem. Until then, in schools you are going to have most of the teachers, pupils and parents as some kind of Christian. Kitzmiller was a Christian, for example. The two main laywers for Kitzmiller were theists (RC and Jewish) and they were superb. If the concern is with good science education, theistic evolutionists are on the same side as we are.
(4) Even if your main fight is against religion, I suspect that Theistic Evolution is on a kind of slippery slope. If I’m wrong, I don’t really care all that much. But I don’t think I am; I think that any significant shift from creationism to theistic evolution is bound to be followed by a substantial shift away from religion altogether.
Disclosure: I’m from MA, so naturally I can’t stand Mitt Romney. I believe that what he says publicly has little or no relationship to his actual beliefs or intentions, so nothing I say should be interpreted as supportive of Romney’s presidential ambitions.
However, as a scientist, I pretty much am not interested in religion. There is so much interesting stuff that there is data about, why should I waste my time thinking about a topic or bothering to take a position when there is no reliable data and no way to get any? Figure out a way to biopsy God, and I’ll take an interest.
I’ve worked with scientists with a variety of different religious beliefs, and as far as I can tell, religious belief is not an obstacle to excellence in science, so long as whatever deity or deities they believe in has the good taste to keep itself far enough removed from what they are actually studying that it does not enter into their hypotheses or interpretation of data. As far as politicians are concerned, I think that a god who works via theistic evolution is far enough removed from anything that a politician is likely to be called upon to make decisions about that it is unlikely to be an interfering factor. It makes more sense to worry about his politics, experience, and record.
Francis Collins, Theistic Evolutionist:
“I see God’s hand at work through the mechanism of evolution. If God chose to create human beings in his image and decided that the mechanism of evolution was an elegant way to accomplish that goal, who are we to say that is not the way,” he says.
Collins believes that science cannot be used to refute the existence of God because it is confined to the “natural” world. In this light he believes miracles are a real possibility. “If one is willing to accept the existence of God or some supernatural force outside nature then it is not a logical problem to admit that, occasionally, a supernatural force might stage an invasion,” he says.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article673663.ece
He believes in miracles. That’s much more than just “an unscientific add-on to conventional science.” He’s saying that sometimes supernatural forces invade nature.
That’s anti-science bullshit.
Chris Ho-Stuart wrote:
… are you saying that the problem is that next time we might not be so lucky with the judge?
Yes, a thousand times yes. And the farther up the legal ladder you go the worse it looks. When the next case gets to the Supreme Court it may well be a nightmare.
But you have it completely backwards if you think theistic evolution will make this worse.
I don’t think that and never said anything like it. I might think TE is wrong and even silly but that’s immaterial. Religion is not going away in our lifetime, or perhaps even as long as humans are around, (easy to make predictions beyond our lifetimes :)). No, I think the focus, at least here in the US, should be political. Not just who is elected president but on how much we can pressure our Senators to insist on making appointed judges commit themselves to science before confirming them. Even a dumb question such as was asked the Republican candidates, about “believing” in evolution, is beyond what is normally asked of judges about to be confirmed. For instance, Judge Jones, of Dover fame, was appointed because politically powerful people from his home state said to confirm him. No one knew what he thought about science. That’s just wrong. When you get to confirming Supreme Court justices it becomes even more important. The next apointee should be grilled on teaching ID, etc. The only way this will happen is if enough people pressure their Senators.
Do you people realize what you’re doing here, especially you, CalGeorge? You’re talking about what people should or shouldn’t believe. Don’t do that. What someone does or doesn’t believe shouldn’t have a damn thing to do with anything, and really isn’t any of your business anyways, right?
Anyone can believe anything they want, in the privacy of their own head. Actions only are actionable. Romney isn’t a bad choice for president because he’s a Mormon or because all kinds of scary fundamentalists like him. He’s a bad choice because you have good reason to believe that he will legislate based upon his faith. That’s bad because legislation enacted out of a religious concern measures its effectiveness according to something other than observable, measurable factors.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s religion itself that’s bad, because it’s merely correlated with bad decisions. Causation has yet to be proven, and tolerance and acceptance is the only higher ground.
BOB ABERNETHY: … We talked again with Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. I asked him first: Does religion affect how we vote?
Mr. ANDREW KOHUT (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press): Absolutely. Religious belief, religious commitment is one of the most important correlates of voting behavior. It’s like income; it’s like gender; it’s like age. In fact, in many elections, it –it’s more important than some of those other characteristics.
[…]
ABERNETHY: One of Kohut’s findings is that there’s a growing reaction against religious conservatives, largely among those he calls secular.
Mr. KOHUT: A growing number of Americans, probably about one in 10 or a little more at this point, say they have no religious belief, they have no formal religion, they don’t attend church. And they are increasingly Democratic; that the seculars say the Republicans are preaching morality too much. They want to legislate what goes on in bedrooms too much or the way morality is practiced in the country. On the secular side, “No, no. That’s not for us.”
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week321/perspectives.html
Sounds to me that what a person believes has lots to do with how they vote. How they vote will effect how legislation is made.
For CalGeorge, who wrote:
“If I could get someone to accept evolution, I would be very upset if they still managed to believe in a god who is propping the whole thing up.”
Well, I accept evolution, whether you define it broadly in terms of the major discontinuities in the fossil record or in terms of changes of frequencies of an allele in a population. Evolution is a fact, as is natural selection. Speciation events due to evolution through natural selection have been documented. So these are all facts that can be *accepted* on the basis of credible reports. To elaborate: I don’t need to ‘believe’ in them, because there is sufficient evidence within our domain commensurate with the claim’s scope, and that leads me to regards them as credible.
On the other hand, the option of ‘believing’ in that which can’t be falsified, such as God, remains. If I choose to affirm it (as I do), I can only do so by way of ‘belief’. The evidence within our domain, such as it is, does not seem commensurate with the claim’s scope. The claim is incredible and cannot be ‘accepted’ on the basis of the evidence.
I conclude that these are very different kinds of claims and that *acceptance* of the one is independent of the question of whether one would *believe* the other. Evolution is a fact, but evolutionism of any sort is more like a belief system, present company included.
Does it really follow, then, that acceptance of evolution must lead to atheism, as you seem to imply? No more so than the claims from some creationists that acceptance of the Big Bang must lead to some sort of God.
Does it really follow, then, that acceptance of evolution must lead to atheism, as you seem to imply? No more so than the claims from some creationists that acceptance of the Big Bang must lead to some sort of God.
No, because there is nothing that “must” lead away from theism because people don’t need anything at all in order to have very strong theistic belief systems.
I know, Scott. I thought of you when I wrote that.
No, of course not.
I think that acceptance of evolution should lead to atheism. It’s what I would prefer to see, that’s all. It annoys me, too, that someone like Collins, who I believe should know better, makes that leap.
All that beautiful science knowledge mucking around with belief in miracles in someone’s head. Yuck.
That’s just me.
Because “like” is not defined (and, IMO, not definable). What would constitute evidence that this sentence is true? What would constitute evidence that it is false? At most you might be able to confirm (or deny) that similar physiological processes occur in my brain when I eat chocolate as when other people do things they claim to like. How do you know whether or not we’re really experiencing the same kind of “liking”?
But if you don’t like that as a non-factual statement, I’ll give you another: Murder is morally wrong. Is that true? Is it false? How do you know? It rather depends on what you mean by “morally wrong”, doesn’t it? Lots of people would agree that murder is morally wrong, I’m sure – but consensus is no substitute for evidence when we’re talking about genuine factual questions. But what would the evidence look like? You can’t exactly say “I aimed my evilometer at this murderer and obtained a reading of 7.4 microhitlers”. That kind of problem (IMO) is a clue that you’re dealing with a non-factual issue.
I think there are some sentences that don’t describe a fact. But religion is full of sentences like “God created the heavens and the earth” and “the Lord gave Moses these commandments”. Religions are not philosophies – they’re not the Ten Good Ideas, they’re the Ten Commandments that a really powerful guy is going to torture you for eternity if you don’t obey. Unless, of course, he isn’t, which is a question of fact.
If you just happen to think that it’s a good idea to not steal and murder and commit adultery, that’s fine; but it’s not religion. If you think that God will punish you if you steal and murder and commit adultery, THAT’s religion. And a factual statement which is either true or false.
The New Atheists have succeeded where scores of theists from C.S. Lewis to Martin Luther King to Ken Miller have failed – they have made me wish there were a God. Not so I could worship and praise such an entity, but because His existence would be really rankling for PZ Myers, Dawkins, Caledonian et al.
It’s not exactly defined, but I imagine such expressed food preferences can predict your eating habits to some degree (probabilistic, not deterministic, of course)
Let’s say I am another Martian: I beam you to my ship, have you pull some levers that produce either chocolate or vanilla flavored food… :)
I don’t think it matters. I can study food preference in a grazer even if I have no idea if it “likes” one type of plant better. If the animal would suddenly start talking and say that it “likes” the plant it tends to eat, all the better.
And presumably neither of us came up with the concept of “liking” independently, we learnt it from other humans and then mapped it on to our own mental states. That would suggest that it’s not completely impossible to obtain a reasonable approximation of those mental states. Otherwise there would be lots of people each generation getting it wrong and saying stuff like “I like dog poop”.
LOL!
Not so I could worship and praise such an entity, but because His existence would be really rankling for PZ Myers, Dawkins, Caledonian et al.
If god could be shown to exist, PZ would not be an atheist.
But you have it completely backwards if you think theistic evolution will make this worse. As matters stand in the USA at present, theistic evolutionists are some of the most powerful contributors to the fight for a solid undiluted science education.
But wasn’t one of PZ’s main points that depending upon the future fight, the TE people won’t be on the evolution side anymore?
I’m not sure Collins should even be called a theistic evolutionist rather than an IDer. He makes fine-tuning arguments, and claims that altruism is evolutionarily inexplicable and requires divine intervention.
I think Ken Miller and Collins between them define the theistic evolution spectrum, from evolutionary theory to ID. (Miller believes in miracles too, but his tend to be a) small-scale and b) within human history.)
As matters stand in the USA at present, theistic evolutionists are some of the most powerful contributors to the fight for a solid undiluted science education.
Yeah, I get it.
The despised and marginalized atheists, destined to remain forever out of the mainstream, shoved into oblivion by the glorified, powerful theistic-scientists, whose creator-saving arguments are beloved by the godly hordes and smarmy politicians.
All’s right with the world. Compromise abounds.
Pardon me while I go puke.
This is no more or less a problem than with any other empirical statement. How do you know that the sky is blue, or that gravity falls off with the square of the distance? You can never be 100% sure your sensory perceptions correlate with physical reality the same way everyone else’s do. If there’s a category of factual statements at all, I think likes and dislikes have as much right to be there as anything else.
I would agree that that’s non-factual, but it generally implies a factual statement–that you feel murder is morally wrong. That’s something you can test and investigate.
Religion may also involve moral statements, though. Plenty of religions have held that God may punish you for stuff without being morally justified in so doing, whereas Chrisitianity asserts that God is morally perfect.
CalGeorge, I like your style. For the record, if I thought that the vengeful tyrant who inhabits much of the Bible really existed, I’d give him the finger rather than kiss his posterior.
But that’s just me! :)….SH
Well, Helen Clark is an agnostic. How’s that for ya?
Two points. First, in merely practical terms, I don’t see why those who support the teaching of evolution should not make common cause. The dean of my college is responsible for the clergy letter project, and I am convinced that this is an extremely helpful enterprise. The book Monkey Girl about the Dover trial shows what many of us concerned with science education tend to forget: most opponents of evolution haven’t looked at, much less understood, the evidence. They just parrot words they’ve been told. Overcoming such opponents cannot be accomplished simply by presenting the scientific evidence more clearly or more effectively – the most effective method is to show that their faith-based objections to evolution are off the mark. That’s why I focus on trying to do my part in my own field, Biblical studies.
Second, it seems to me to be rather over-optimistic about our human perspective to feel confident in saying that the universe cannot have higher levels of meaning and organization, ones that we may not be able to perceive directly. I often use the analogy of two cells discussing whether there is ‘something more’, something bigger of which they are a part, or whether their lives are meaningless and everything is just cells – they are born, they die, and that is it. Lots of scientists feel able to speak about this something more, to leave room for the mystical, in a way that is not at all opposed to or in conflict with science. I know Dawkins claims Einstein and others like him are really “sexed-up atheists” rather than pantheists, but I don’t find him persuasive on that point.
http://blue.butler.edu/~jfmcgrat/blog/
“occasionally, a supernatural force might stage an invasion,” he says.”
Uh-oh. Well, if supernatural forces might be staging an invasion, we better prepare ourselves to fight them off. Perhaps we could form an institute of some sort, and call it . .. I dunno, Torchwood?
(ok, ok, that’s aliens, but hey, close enough.)
“ I know Dawkins claims Einstein and others like him are really “sexed-up atheists””
Because an image of Einstein in a leather bustier and knee-high boots is just how I wanted to start the morning . . .
James – re: Monkey Girl – was it Yingling or Geesey who testified that when the science teachers tried to explain the issue to the board she sorta tuned them out and doodled, just like back when she herself was in high school science? (with one of the same teachers, whom she apparently developed some dislike for- one gets the impression of a sort of dim and incomprehending resentment . . . I was reading it in my local soulless chain bookstore (because, y’know, hardcover), and I’m not sure I managed to avoid a loudly disgusted snort or two at that point.
And indeed, the Dover case is almost a ridiculously (and quite depressingly) good example of how for so many people these battles have nothing to do with evidence and research, which they don’t understand or really have any interest in (remember, they didn’t really know or care what ID creationism was, even) – it’s all about feeling that their beliefs and values are threatened, and reacting. Most of the folks who utter the 183,639,792nd , -3rd, -4th and so on repetition of ‘Evolution is only a theory (for example) don’t just not grasp the meaning of “theory” in science, they don’t really care. It seems to me that the only way we can finally end this (well, at least partially), is by getting enough people to decide that teaching science in science class doesn’t really threaten their beliefs and values. Now, how that could be done (and what form that would take) is obviously the cause of a little disagreement in these here parts . . . but does the premise seem to be correct?
Back in the beginning of ’05, when the creationist tide seemed to be at its height, there was a little bloggy debate over tactics, including whether reliance on the courts was just hurting us, and should be dropped (Perhaps better than my obsolete and tiny blog would be a link to pre-sciblogs Pharyngula, where an ’05-model PZ starts worrying about “a tendency in pro-evolution arguments to instead emphasize the compatibility of religion and science, and to promote rational religious people as our representatives“, but declares nevertheless that “we need is to clearly declare our fellowship with the reasonable theists who believe in reason and science, ” (while, of course, “at the same time be willing to proudly acknowledge our affiliation with the community of atheists and agnostics.“). Anyway, while I still don’t think that we should abandon the courts, it’s quite possible they will end up abandoning us, and we have to be prepared. Either way, our string of legal victories for science teaching, while certainly welcome, have turned out to be often very partial ones. Holding off formal creationism is good, but too frequently evolution remains pushed to the end of the year, downplayed, or basically disappeared due to pressure at the parent and community level (and in the absence of countervailing pressure ) – as well as the kids who will refuse to learn because they’ve been told by people they trust that it’s against their beliefs.
Of course, even if there were (for example) teams of theistic evolutionists going door to door talking about how science isn’t really anti-God (no, no I’m not proposing this!), a lot of folks would refuse to listen – if you think the inter-atheist wars are bad, I hear it’s not a patch on how right-wing fundies feel about their liberal counterparts. But some people are gonna be beyond reach. How do we talk to the ones who aren’t?
Man, I’m glad Ed put you in your place PZ. It’s pretty awesome when a failed standup comic/college dropout is smarter than you.
James McGrath wrote: … most opponents of evolution haven’t looked at, much less understood, the evidence. They just parrot words they’ve been told.
And how is this any different than your typical god-worshippers who just mindlessly repeat stories they’ve been told that were invented long ago.
it seems to me to be rather over-optimistic about our human perspective to feel confident in saying that the universe cannot have higher levels of meaning and organization, ones that we may not be able to perceive directly.
And what could this conclusion possibly be based on other than an over-active imagination?
If cells = humans in this analogy, sure there’s something “greater than us”: society, ecosystem, planet…
And if individual cells were intelligent and had science, they bloody well would be able to detect the body! A better analogy would be a couple of religious cells whining “but there has to be something more than the human, some greater force that cares about us individual cells”…
Why do you think this would be particularly effective? So far as I can tell from the last two thousand years, believers don’t generally pay much attention to other sects telling them they’re interpreting their scripture and doctrine poorly.
Most atheists, including Dawkins, agree with this. The question is whether we ought to believe that the universe actually does have such levels.
True. But that’s because the mystical is not necessarily the supernatural; it’s simply whatever inspires mystical feelings. Many scientists experience those feelings in response to natural wonders.
Actually, what Dawkins claims is that naturalistic pantheism is “sexed-up atheism.” Their beliefs about reality are the same as those of an atheist or agnostic; their labeling of nature or its laws as “God” merely expresses an emotional/spiritual attitude.
What makes you disagree?