Sally Kern is at it again

Oklahoma’s bible-thumpingest congresscreature has issued a Proclamation of Morality.

WHEREAS, the people of Oklahoma have a strong tradition of reliance upon the Creator of the Universe; and

WHEREAS, we believe our economic woes are consequences of our greater national moral crisis; and

WHEREAS, this nation has become a world leader in promoting abortion, pornography, same sex marriage, sex trafficking, divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse, and many other forms of debauchery; and

WHEREAS, alarmed that the Government of the United States of America is forsaking the rich Christian heritage upon which this nation was built; and

WHEREAS, grieved that the Office of the president of these United States has refused to uphold the long held tradition of past presidents in giving recognition to our National Day of Prayer; and

WHEREAS, deeply disturbed that the Office of the president of these United States disregards the biblical admonitions to live clean and pure lives by proclaiming an entire month to an immoral behavior;

NOW THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that we the undersigned elected officials of the people of Oklahoma, religious leaders and citizens of the State of Oklahoma, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world, solemnly declare that the HOPE of the great State of Oklahoma and of these United States, rests upon the Principles of Religion and Morality as put forth in the HOLY BIBLE

Notice that the only solutions she proposes to her perceived problem of immorality is 1) pray for a day, and 2) read her holy book. Even if you grant that her declared problems are real moral problems (and I do not: I find it incredibly offensive and obtuse that she would lump same sex marriage together with sex trafficking) these are solutions that do not work. If you want to find a hotbed of divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse, alcoholism, etc.…just look for a high density of churches.

Auf wiedersehen

Tomorrow, I get to spend a very long day traveling to the Lindau Meetings, which will be great fun, and you can expect some science blogging from that event (Bora will also be attending, so Scienceblogs has you covered).

However, I am seeing some troublesome stirrings here. A certain demented ex-commenter is morphing to avoid his banning, we’ve just had a flood of weird spam (a dental office using spam tools? Tsk, tsk), and I just know my ability to police the site is going to be hampered by meetings…or good Bavarian beer. So just be warned: I may have to turn user registration on again. I know you hate that, but I also hate accumulated spam.

I’ll think about it overnight, but I may have to put the handcuffs and ball gag on you guys tomorrow. For a while.

Christian faith is at odds with science

Yesterday morning, I was in a discussion on UK Christian talk radio on the topic of “Is Christian faith at odds with science?”, with Denis Alexander of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. It’s going to be available as a podcast at sometime in the next day, but I may not be able to link to it right away — tomorrow I fly away to Germany for a week, so my schedule is going to be a bit chaotic for a while.

Don’t expect fireworks. It was the usual feeble accommodationist claptrap, but I had my nice man hat on and actually tried to get across some basic ideas. To no avail, of course, but at least I tried.

I have now discovered that I was trying to make the same points Lawrence Krauss is doing in the Wall Street Journal: religion is wrong. It’s a set of answers, and worse, a set of procedures, that don’t work. That’s the root of our argument that religion is incompatible with science.

That word, “incompatibility”, is a problem, though. The uniform response we always get when we say that is “Hey! I’m a Christian, and I’m a scientist, therefore they can’t be incompatible!” Alexander was no exception, and said basically the same thing right away. It’s an irrelevant point; it assumes that a person can’t possibly hold two incompatible ideas at once. We know that is not true. We have complicated and imperfect brains, and even the most brilliant person on earth is not going to be perfectly consistent. When we talk about incompatibility, we have to also specify what purposes are in conflict, and show that the patterns of behavior have different results.

For instance, if you just like to go to church because you enjoy the company, then the purpose of religion to you is to reinforce social bonds — so of course there is no incompatibility between science and religion there. If you go for the choir (as Stephen Jay Gould was known to do), you’re there to enjoy the music, and science does not dictate that human beings are not allowed to enjoy music. For that matter, science doesn’t say that someone is not allowed to enjoy the perverse circumlocutions of theology, so if someone attends for the religion sensu strictu, no problem.

But in a debate about the compatibility of science and religion, we have to put the argument in an appropriate context and define a specific shared purpose for both science and religion — it’s the only legitimate ground for discussion. In this case, what we’re trying to do is address big questions (remember, the Templeton Foundation says they’re all about those “big questions”) about the nature of the universe, about our history, about how we function, and then we encounter a conflict: religion keeps giving us different answers. Very different answers. They can’t all be right, and since no two religions give the same answers, but since science can generally converge on similar and consistent answers, I know which one is right. And that makes religion simply wrong.

We have to look at what they do to see why. In order to probe the nature of the universe around us, science is a process, a body of tools, that has a long history of success in giving us robust, consistent answers. We use observation, experiment, critical analysis, and repeated reevaluation and confirmation of events in the natural world. It works. We use frequent internal cross-checking of results to get an answer, and we never entirely trust our answers, so we keep pushing harder at them. We also evaluate our success by whether the end results work: it’s how we end up with lasers and microwave ovens, and antibiotics and cancer therapies.

Religion, on the other hand, uses a different body of techniques to explain the nature of the universe. It uses tradition and dogma and authority and revelation, and a detailed legalistic analysis of source texts, to dictate what the nature of reality should be. It’s always wrong, from an empirical perspective, although I do have to credit theologians with some of the most amazingly intricate logical exercises as they try to justify their conclusions. The end result of all of this kind of clever wankery, though, is that some people say the world is 6000 years old, that it was inundated with a global flood 4000 years ago, and other people say something completely different, and there is no way within the body of theology to resolve which answers are right. They have to step outside their narrow domain to get an independent confirmation — that is, they rely on science to give them the answers to the Big Questions in which they purport to have expertise.

So what theistic scientists have to do is abandon the operational techniques of religion and use science to address those questions. The “theistic” part of their moniker is nothing but useless baggage which, if they take it at all seriously, would interfere with their understanding of the world. That is what I mean by an incompatibility between the two.

Krauss uses a marvelous and well-known quote from J.B.S. Haldane to make that point more briefly.

My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world.

I got Alexander to agree that he does not use religion in the laboratory — I don’t know anyone who would say that they do, other than creationist kooks — but it didn’t seem to sink in that that is an admission of incompatibility. Religion doesn’t work to answer questions in science, which always leaves me wondering…if you accept that, why do you go on thinking it might be giving you correct answers in ordinary daily life? It has an awfully poor track record.

Now one way the defenders of religion like to get around this empirical problem is to change the game in mid-play: one moment we’re talking about tools for understanding the world, where there is a conflict, and then they switch to a completely different purpose, that of establishing a common morality, or appreciating art, or falling in love. I would be the first to admit that science does not and should not dictate morality: the cases in the past where this has happened (eugenics comes to mind right away) have been disastrous. Science is good at explaining what is and how it works, and not so great at telling us how it should work. I also wouldn’t use the scientific method directly to determine whether I like some music or poetry or not.

However, I’m going to have to say that religion doesn’t do a good job at that either. SJ Gould tried to partition the domains of authority for science and religion by explicitly setting a boundary, and saying religion should have the job of defining what is right and good…but I think he failed, because he gave far too much credit to religion for being able to discern and act on a reasonable morality. It’s foundation on authority and its role in defining in and out groups means it is too exclusionary, too narrow and inflexible, and also too willing to ignore empirical evidence. It’s why we have religion behind such immoral acts today as trying to restrict civil rights to people who have only a certain range of sexual behaviors, or facilitating the spread of sexually transmitted disease in Africa by damning sex education and condom use.

And when it comes to other questions than the cosmic ones about the nature of existence, I prefer that we apply just about any discipline other than religion to the problem: at least they are evidence-based, where religion is not. I’d rather consult a philosopher than a theologian on morality; they’ve been thinking about it with a broader scope than the pious promoters of sectarian belief, anyway, don’t restrict their principles to worshippers of one particular idol, and usually don’t invoke magical rewards and punishments that have never been seen to justify decisions. If I’m in love I’m better off pulling a book of poetry off the shelf than consulting a celibate. I’d rather hear about economics from an economist than from a ouija board or a pulpit, and I like the idea of policy decisions being evaluated for effectiveness, rather than ideological purity. When we’re looking at communities and interactions between individuals, give me a psychologist or a sociologist over a priest any day. The only useful priests in those matters are the ones who understand the principles of psychology and sociology, and apply those, rather than pulling a quote out of their holy book.

Accommodationists are a problem not because accommodation is bad, but because they are pushing for the wrong kind of accommodation. Science doesn’t need to conform, religion does. Religion demands a special kind of privilege in these discussions because if we actually get down to assessing views fairly and objectively, on the basis of what works, it fails. I say, let it.

This is also why so many of us object to the Templeton Foundation. Their agenda consists solely of mixing up science and religion, to the detriment of the former. They just want to compromise…but asking us to compromise science that works with faith that doesn’t is a fool’s bargain. Why should we?

Don’t do it!

Whirled Nut Daily has announced that the Ark of the Covenant has been discovered and is going to be unveiled in Rome! I urge any of my Italian readers to close your eyes and don’t look, because we all know what will happen when the Ark is opened.

You know this is serious—WND even illustrates their very scholarly article with a photo taken from the Indiana Jones movie.

King of all science media! Or, craigslist for crackpots?

There are science crackpots, and then there are journalist crackpots. Suzan Mazur is a strange writer who runs about trying to convince the world that there is going to be a revolution in evolutionary biology…but her sources tend to be fringe figures like Stuart Pivar, or she relies on mangling quotes from people like Massimo Pigliucci or Richard Dawkins. Her theme, as you might guess from her fondness for Pivar, is that structuralist tropes are going to replace genetic/molecular explanations for development.

That is complete nonsense.

Apparently, she reads Pharyngula (hi, Suzan!), where, to her delight, she discovered Vincent Fleury, a fellow crackpot. She scurried off to procure an interview with Fleury, which turns into a weird complaint session about me mixed with boosterism for overhyped flaky science.

Suzan Mazur: PZ Myers, the Howard Stern of sciencebloggers, recently reviewed your paper Clarifying tetrapod embryogenesis, a physicist’s point of view, which was published in The European Physical Journal: Applied Physics. It appears Myers is increasingly doing a pas de deux with the physical approach to evolutionary science, trying to reposition himself now that a paradigm shift is afoot. In essence, so he can maybe say, well I knew it all the time.

Last week he praised D’Arcy Thompson and Brian Goodwin, saying he found Goodwin’s work “thought-provoking”. What is your response to Myers tactics?

Oooh, “the Howard Stern of sciencebloggers”…I’m going to have to renegotiate my contract with Seed so I can get $100 million/year, and once I do, I’ll start live-blogging strippers!

As usual, though, Mazur gets the science all wrong. There will be no paradigm shift. I am confident that there will be a gradual integration of more developmental biology into evolutionary theory, a process that is going on right now, but that this will require no radical re-evaluation of theory — evo-devo is exciting and opens up new areas of productive research, but it doesn’t turn the world upside-down. It’s a specific subset of evolutionary theory, not a replacement. As for structuralism, it has its place, too, and this isn’t some sudden ploy by me — you can find me writing about it in 2003 and 2004, for example. Again, it will not replace the molecular/genetic approach to development, but it can supplement it.

Look at this bit of amateur psychologizing:

Vincent Fleury: Well that’s fine. But I have a problem with this fellow. He uses a very rhetorical technique. He starts off with some smooth positive statement and then progressively trashes the paper. I’m not so sure it’s sincere.

Suzan Mazur: It’s his way of saying I love you. He knows he can’t maintain his present ground, so he’s increasingly introducing the newer evolutionary science, however he can. He projects himself as a bully so he won’t look like a sissy when he has no choice but to go with the flow.

There’s a simpler explanation than some strange conspiracy theory where all of evolutionary biology is trembling on the verge of collapse and I’m trying to dance on the edge of the avalanche. How about this one: Fleury’s paper was very poor. It proposes a mechanism that he does not support with any evidence, and implies that we need to throw out a huge and useful body of knowledge. It was far too long, and larded with superfluous information that he largely ignored in his conclusion. He relied on the fact that he published a paper on biology in a physics journal, where he could bamboozle a body of reviewers with no knowledge of the scientific discipline being discussed.

That’s why I trashed the paper — because it deserved to be trashed.

It’s really that simple.

And no, Fleury’s work does not represent the “flow” of modern biology. It’s more like a small stagnant eddy far from the major currents of research. If I were trying to position myself in the vanguard of science, I guarantee you that I wouldn’t be trying to cozy up to the likes of Fleury or Pivar or Mazur. That’s the crackpot club.

(via Wilkins, who is clearly angling to be my Baba Booey)