You may vaguely recall that Deepak Chopra claimed the results from the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) labs supported his religious ideas. In a very timely bit of news, Jeffrey Shallit reports that PEAR is closing after 27 years of embarrassing futility. About time.
I have to preface this with the comment that I like Eugenie Scott, I think she does a wonderful job, and she’s trying to accomplish the difficult task of treading the line between being a representative of science and building an interface with culture and politics. I couldn’t do that job. I’d be inspiring rioting mobs outside the office window. However, I also think she’s wrong, and that she’s working too hard to pander to public superstition to be effective at communicating science.
Jon Voisey took notes on her recent lecture in Kansas. Much of what she said I can go along with, although I think sometimes she’s failing to go the step further necessary to make the fundamental point. Like this:
Yet despite this, science is a limited way of knowing. The reason for this is that science can only explain the natural world, the universe of matter an energy, and as such, it can only use natural causes.
When a commenter says she is a 14 year old girl who is a home-schooled genius, thinks Evolution, Genetics and Astral Projection are neat-o, peppers her comments with grammatical and spelling errors and “giggles”, says she wishes a sexy man would give her a massage, claims that her hobbies include body painting — nude body painting — and posts links to photos purportedly of herself engaging in that hobby…shouldn’t there be little alarm bells going off in your heads? Actually, maybe big bells, a giant cathedral carillon, sirens going whoop-whoop-whoop, and flares going up? I know, sometimes it’s hard to believe how kooky some people in the real world can be, but this 14 year old girl wrote more like how a 40 year old virgin male would think a 14 year old girl would write.
Shorter version: ‘Victoria Fox’ is banned, and the last couple of days worth of ‘her’ trolling have been disemvowelled. Please don’t encourage the preverts, OK?
It’s all very nice that Elayne Riggs refers to me as an A-list blogger, but it’s not true. We weird scienceblog types have to be placed on a completely different alphabet, and I have decided that I want to be on the ζ-list. Mainly because I like the squiggle.
Update your blogrolls appropriately, please.
Also via Elayne, I had to try this site that lets you figure out where you’d end up if you dug a hole through the center of the earth. I have discovered that there is a place more remote, empty, and isolated than Morris, Minnesota: it’s the center of the Indian Ocean. Although it probably does have cephalopods, so it’s a bit of a toss-up.
There’s some loony Indonesian witch doctor trying to put a voodoo curse on GW Bush. While I can sympathize with the sentiment, the method is a stupid waste of time (except, perhaps, that it has gotten the witch doctor in the news, so maybe it’s just a high-tech way to drum up business)—and it’s not something anyone could take seriously.
Or so I thought, until a link on Alicublog led me to this fairly well known wingnut, Rod Dreher. He starts out with some offensive macho colonialist remarks, punctuated with a description of this well known scene:
One of my favorite scenes in all of cinema is in one of the Indiana Jones movies, the first I think, when some grand, scimitar-wielding assassin leaps in front of Indy inside a souk, does some whoop-de-do presentation with his sword as a prelude to chopping the American to bits. Indy, unperturbed, laconically pulls out his revolver and blows the dude away.
Personally, I have mixed feelings about that scene—it’s not just a commentary about the superiority of Western technology, but also personifies the casual destruction of non-Western peoples by the European side of the world. But OK, go with the flow, it’s a cartoonish movie that probably doesn’t warrant that kind of cultural concern…and since Dreher started this with the silly witch doctor story, he’s probably talking about the inefficacy of old ideas against new technology and science.
But no…
Nevertheless, I can’t honestly say I don’t believe this stuff can work. If you want to disbelieve in it with ease, don’t hang out with exorcists, or talk with people intimately familiar with the occult. I’ll be praying for the president’s safety, though I would have done so the minute he got there, given how jihadi-infested Indonesia is. I wish he weren’t going, frankly.
What? I read that as Dreher siding with the occultists, supernaturalists, and religious with the Indonesian witch doctor in believing that magic might work. These two procedures are identical in their effectiveness:
Ki Gendeng Pamungkas slit the throat of a goat, a small snake and stabbed a black crow in the chest, stirred their blood with spice and broccoli before drank the “potion” and smeared some on his face.
I’ll be praying for the president’s safety
The one on the left does have a lot more “whoop-de-do”, but both are indistinguishable otherwise—they’re invocations of invisible supernatural spirits. I therefore think it’s appropriate that we take a “crunchy con” like Dreher about as seriously as we do Ki Gendeng Pamungkas—as a kook, a joke, a rather laughable and backwards clown, a silly political punchline. Maybe we can start calling him “Mr Bone-Through-the-Nose”, too. Ooga-booga.
What if Stan Lee worked for Chick Publications? You’d get apocalyptic tracts with giant planet-eating space men.
(via Pen-Elayne)
This is all you’re getting from me for a while. I just finished a 9 hour long meeting (freaking uncivilized, if you ask me), and next I have to go attend some god-awful Christian propaganda — my daughter is the stage manager for the high school production of “Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat”, so I have to go — and I suspect my day is going to continue its trend of ongoing frustration and exasperation. It is in my best interests to avoid further posting to the web until the demons fade away.
I just hope I don’t rise up in the middle of this play, barking and howling in tongues, with my head spinning around on my neck. It could happen.
Please, Galactus, come eat me now.
On Tuesday, I’ll be in the Twin Cities to pick up #2 Son for Thanksgiving break, and as long as I’m there, I’ve been invited to join in the fun of this month’s Cafe Scientifique: it’s the Physics of Bowling, to be held at Bryant Lake Bowl in Minneapolis. This has the potential to be very interesting, since they’re pitting the best of BRB bowling team against…scientists. They promise that there will be science-based bowling tips, so maybe there’s hope. (Anyone else remember Egghead Jr., the smart chicken in the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons who excelled at sports by scrawling formulas to calculate what he’d do next? I don’t think that works in the real world, but we’ll see.)
To entice people to show up, this could be dramatic entertainment. I am a very bad bowler. There is a chance of pratfalls. There could be injury and death and destruction, and blood on the floor. I could fall over, burst into flames, and explode. At the very least, you’ll get to watch a geek do a spastic dance and throw a heavy ball somewhere. You don’t want to miss this!
(Unfortunately, if the organizers read this they may decide that somebody else might be preferred to bowl—liability issues, you know. Having all the spectators laid out prostrate with laughter could be risky.)
This has got to be a devious plot. My wife has been known to tell me to dress more formally (it’s a polite way of pointing out that I’m a slob), and in particular, that I should wear…a tie… more often. Now a reader sends me a link to ties with cephalopods and brains on them, and it’s the month before Cephalopodmas. This is horrible. I don’t want to even be tempted by a tie.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune published a very foolish editorial in their Faith and Values section, carping about that Dawkins fella and his atheistic Darwinism. It’s typical creationist dreck, I’m afraid. If you want just one good argument against religion, it’s that it seems to promote idiots to positions of leadership.
Richard Dawkins, author of the book “The God Delusion,” intends that religious readers of his book will be atheists when they finish it. Let’s put some of the statements he made in his Nov. 4 Star Tribune interview to the test.
Dawkins claims that evolutionary science “offers a brilliant and beautiful explanation of origins and existence.” But evolutionists assert that this universe and everything in it has come about by chance. There is no plan, no divine planner/creator — just random combinations of atoms. What’s brilliant about a random, unplanned process?
Oh, come on now. Evolution is not simply a random process. There are strong elements of chance throughout, and random events are certainly a dominant contributor to the patterns we see—every child, for instance, is partly the product of a chance combination of alleles and biasing developmental events—but natural selection is not random at all.
What is utterly brilliant about Darwin’s insight was that he saw how the combination of random variation and a selective filter could lead to the diversity and complexity of the world around us. I’m not surprised that Pastor Hellmann is baffled by the value biologists place on Darwin’s idea, because he clearly does not understand it.
Can such a random process actually work? Sir Fred Hoyle, noted English astronomer, studied the problem and concluded this: The probability of one cell coming into being by chance was the same as the probability that a tornado striking a junkyard would produce a fully functioning 747 jet airplane. In other words, the chance of it happening is virtually zero.
Fred Hoyle did not study the problem at all—as noted, he was an astronomer, neither a biologist nor a chemist, and he was speaking far, far outside his domain of expertise. It is correct that the probability of a cell coming into being by chance is prohibitively low, but what did I just say? Evolution is not simply a chance process. The Hoyle analogy does not apply, even if it is a staple of simple-minded creationist thinking.
What is beautiful about evolution? It requires a struggle in which the fit survive and the weak are trampled in the dust. Progress is made by almost endless generations of creatures living, struggling and dying. Where is there beauty in an every-organism-for-itself struggle? Even though the fit may survive a little longer, they are trapped in an existence without purpose or meaning. Such a dreary and hopeless spectacle can only be described as ugly.
This objection is hilarious.
Look at the world around you. There is death, competition, struggle for limited resources, predators killing prey, disease, brutality, and waste. This is the way the world is, and Darwin (or any competent observer) can see that. This situation did not suddenly emerge in 1859 when Darwin published his book. What’s beautiful about evolution is that it explains how complexity and diversity and even beauty can arise naturally out of such callous and uncaring processes.
Does it somehow make the death of a gazelle by slow strangulation while it’s being mauled and eaten alive more beautiful to imagine that this is done under the watchful, loving eye of an omnipotent supernatural being?
A world without religion
Dawkins asks us to imagine what a world without religion would look like. We don’t have to imagine it. We have seen it and the results were horrific.
Communism, based on atheism and evolution, was tried in the Soviet Union. Stalin, the Communist dictator, ordered the murders of about 30 million of his citizens during his ruthless rule. Those who escaped liquidation lived in a “workers’ paradise” of poverty and oppression.
About 100 years ago, evolution spawned two abhorrent social movements. Social Darwinism was used by some titans of industry to justify their predatory, ruthless business practices. Eugenics was a racist movement that some used to try to keep people they considered undesirable (the infirm, disabled, racial minorities) from reproducing. Hitler, an atheist and evolutionist, used that idea to justify purging his favored Aryan race of the disabled or weak, as well as killing millions of Jews and others he deemed undesirable.
Communism is not based on evolution. In fact, its principles are anti-evolutionary, proposing a pattern of progress by force of the people’s will; if you want a political philosophy that’s much more compatible with the ideas of evolution, I’m afraid it’s capitalism.
Hitler was a Catholic, not an atheist. One might argue that he wasn’t a very good Catholic, but he sure paid a lot of lip service to religion.
Eugenics did find its rationalizations in biology, but it was bad biology and was based on principles rooted more strongly in the selective breeding used in agriculture for millennia.
Similarly, Stalin used atheism to purge the power of the orthodox church in Russia, but I’m afraid he was a very poor sort of evolutionist. He promoted Lysenkoism.
Atheism and evolution are based on the philosophy (religion) of materialism. Materialism asserts that matter is all that exists and that there is no God. Since materialists begin by denying the existence of God, it’s no surprise that they don’t find God revealed anywhere.
I challenge Richard Dawkins to study the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and the book of Acts. Jesus invites all to come out of the hopelessness of the religion of atheism and live in his light and the salvation that he offers to all.
Robert Hellmann is pastor at St. Paul’s and Trinity Lutheran Churches in Montrose, MN.
Atheism is built on that philosophy, I’ll agree; evolution is not. Atheism is a natural consequence of understanding the power of purely material processes, though, so I have to agree that atheism is often a product of education and scientific training—but it isn’t as if you can’t believe in a deistic god and also practice good science.
And I’m sorry, but seeing a pastor, one who doesn’t understand science and has read nothing in the literature of biology, tell me that I need to read the Bible is unconvincing. I’ve read the gospels. I was brought up a Lutheran, just like Pastor Hellmann. I rejected the masturbatory cycle of reading the dogma of theologians because I opened my eyes and looked at the real world, and the rocks and trees and the milling multitudes of nature all cry out that the books of the religious are impoverished shadows of reality. Why sip from the recycled piss of Christianity when I can drink deep from the Pierian Spring?
A reader conspires to make me feel old—I don’t have any little kids running around in my house anymore, so I’ve completely missed this new cartoon, Peep and the Big Wide World. It’s a science program for pre-schoolers! They’ve got sample videos online, and a list of science-related books. It looks like they do exactly the right thing, encouraging kids to observe and experiment and most importantly, ask questions.
Darn kids. Why’d they have to grow up and stop being my excuse to sit down and watch morning cartoons?
