Gambling at Rick's Bar

According to New Scientist, Francis Collins's BioLogos site (wherein Collins, an evangelical Christian, advocates theistic evolution) not only faces the wrath of the neo-militant atheist secularists like Coyne and Myers, but has also been criticised by the Discovery Institute, who advocate Intelligent Design. They have a new site at Faithandevolution.org where they explain why Collins is wrong by quoting the Bible.

I'm a bit puzzled by this, as I thought that Intelligent Design was a hack get around the firewall that is the United States judiciary. The courts say you can't teach religious opinion as fact in state schools, so if you want to get creationism into public education, you attribute creation to an anonymous Designer. You can then claim that you're shocked, shocked I tell you (your Honour), that some kids might reach the conclusion that the Designer is the Christian God. I don't want to tell these people their business, but setting up a web-site full of New Testament quotes gives the game away, doesn't it?

Sun, moon and bumper sticker cry "Jesus is Lord"

Anyhoo, as it happens, the Discovery Institute quotes Romans 1:20, which I've mentioned before as a verse that supports the common evangelical belief that everyone knows there's a God really, even if they don't want to admit it. The DI say that Collins's argument that God could have made stuff happen in such a way that his intervention was undetectable goes against the Apostle Paul's statement that God's existence is visible from what has been made.

I got into a discussion of undetectable divine intervention over on gerald_duck's LJ. gerald_duck had criticised atheists for saying that evolution proves there is no god, which is a valid criticism (if indeed there are any atheists saying that), but he's oddly attached to the idea that it's desirable to be agnostic about unwarranted beliefs, like Collins's belief that the Christian god did it and carefully hid his tracks. I don't really understand this. I accept that evolution is sufficient to explain the history of life after abiogenesis, because I think there's good evidence for it. If evolution is sufficient, I require further evidence before I can conclude that, say, a god was involved. Without that evidence, I do not believe a god was involved (if gods there be: again, this isn't an argument about their existence), just as I do not believe that any Flying Spaghetti Monsters were involved. I can't strictly rule it out, but gods and FSMs are one of an infinity of possible additions to the hypothesis which I don't seem to need, so why bother with any of them?

Over at the Discovery Institute, the cdesign proponentsists part company with Collins on whether evolution is in fact a sufficient explanation. If they could show that it isn't, and further show evidence of design, they'd be on firmer ground than Collins is. Unfortunately for them, they can't, but they were really following the evidence (which there's some reason to doubt), their methods would be more rational than Collins's.

New Scientist's Amanda Gefter has summarised it well:

Watching the intellectual feud between the Discovery Institute and BioLogos is a bit like watching a race in which both competitors are running full speed in the opposite direction of the finish line. It's a notable contest, but I don't see how either is going to come out the winner.

Ken again

Andrew Brown went to the lecture on God and evolution by Ken Miller, the one which robhu mentioned in the comments last time. Brown was impressed by Miller. I commented using the same arguments as my previous posting.

The wonderful thing about standards is

In other news, top geneticist Francis Collins has started his own Christian apologetics site, Biologos.org. Collins is a theistic evolutionist. He's got answers for those awkward creationist questions (mentioned last time) on evolution and the Fall and death before the Fall. Not just one answer, in fact, but several, which could all equally well be true, because as far as I can see there's no possible way to chose between them on the basis of evidence (except possibly on the evidence of a strong inner conviction, I suppose). Still, several answers are better than one, right?

Atheists can be wrong too

The usual suspects in atheist blogland are having fun with Biologos: here's Jerry Coyne, P. Z. Myers, and P. Z. Myers. The latter P. Z. Myers refers to a post at Evaluating Christianity. Myers says this article at Biologos is making the argument that evolution is impossible because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a (badly mistaken) argument that is popular among creationists.

This is unfair to Collins, who knows the creationist argument is wrong. Collins is actually making a God of the Gaps argument. The low entropy condition of the early universe is an unsolved problem in physics, as Sean Carroll explains in Scientific American (Carroll commented at Evaluating Christianity confirming this). Unsolved problems in physics are fertile ground for Christians looking for something for God to do.

I hope Myers will issue a correction, because I think it's important to get stuff like this right.

Following on from his review of two books by theistic evolutionists, Jerry Coyne recently wrote an article criticising the US National Academy of Sciences for saying that evolution and Christianity are compatible. Richard Hoppe at Panda's Thumb disagrees with Coyne, but P Z Myers supports him. Atheist fight!

Is evolution compatible with Christianity? Well, yes and no. I was a Christian who believed in evolution. This means not having good answers to some stuff Christians might care about: was the Fall a real event, and if not, where does original sin come from? Did physical death really enter the world through sin? If, as Christians usually argue as part of their theodicy on natural disasters, creation itself was corrupted in the Fall (whatever the Fall was), how exactly does that work? If you're a Christian who accepts evolution, you don't need atheists to ask these awkward questions, your Creationist brothers will do a much better job of it.

But that doesn't show incompatibility. If you keep running into these problems and have to keep adding ad hoc patches to your theory, you should consider discarding it, but there are things I don't have good answers to as an atheist, and that hasn't stopped me being one.

I was a student of science who was a Christian. That seems to be where the real problem lies. Theistic evolutionists tend to say stuff like "Evolution could have been the way God did it" or "Maybe God nudges electrons from time to time". They might make a wider point about "other ways of knowing". At some point, someone is probably going to say "well, Science cannot prove your wife loves you, but you believe that, don't you?"

The Less Wrong crowd recently discussed whether their community is and should be welcoming to theists. Theism, Wednesday, and Not Being Adopted is a good post which deserves reading on its own merits, but I was particularly interested in Eliezer Yudkowsky's comment about compartmentalising rationality.

If Wednesday [the child of Mormons mentioned in the article] can partition, that puts an upper bound on her ability as a rationalist; it means she doesn't get on a deep level why the rules are what they are. She doesn't get, say, that the laws regarding evidence are not social customs that can be different from one place to another, but, rather, manifestations of the principle that you have to walk through a city in order to draw an accurate map of it.

Sam Harris mocks this compartmentalisation in his satirical response to Coyne's critics (the paragraphs following "Finally, Kenneth Miller, arrives" are the key ones). Science is one manifestation of the principle that you draw a map by walking the streets, not by sitting in your room and thinking hard about it. There are other legitimate forms of cartography, such as the one you apply when you conclude that someone loves you (assuming you're not actually a stalker). Perhaps, like the Tube map, they're not doing quite the same precise measurement as you'd expect from science, but they make useful maps.

Recall the original point of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, before it developed into a cod-religion for annoying Christians with, like the worship of Invisible Pink Unicorn (PBUHHH). The FSM's inventor used it to point out that if you're going to say your god created the universe because you sat your room and had a strong inner conviction about it, on your own argument, the FSM revealed to me as a Pastafarian is as legitimate as the creator your conviction revealed to you. This point is not lessened if you say your god sometimes happens to do stuff in a way which isn't directly incompatible with known science.

Perhaps theism isn't incompatible with evolution, but it is incompatible with good cartography.

One of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism, Sam Harris, appears to have undergone some sort of conversion. This is serious stuff.

The people over at Edge have been talking about Jerry Coyne's book reviews and thoughts on the incompatibility of science and religion (mentioned here previously). The authors of the books, Karl Giberson and Ken Miller, have both responded to the reviews.

Yet it is Harris, a former militant atheist himself, who responds most resoundingly to Coyne (and his supporter, Dennett), in a sweeping, magisterial essay whose sophistication, not to say length, rivals the work of William Lane Craig. I commend it to you.

( Just one more thing you should know before you comment )

Jerry Coyne has an article in The New Republic. It's notionally a review of new books by two Christians who defend evolution against creationism, whether it be traditional young Earth creationism, or creationism's more recent adaption to a major predator (the US court system), intelligent design. One of the Christians is the biologist Kenneth Miller, who testified against the IDists in the Dover School District trial; the other is Karl Giberson, a physicist.

Coyne argues that, while there are Christians who are accept evolution, this does not mean that these things are compatible ("It is like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers"). Having dismissed IDists' attempt to have the definition of science extended to religion, and the God of the liberal theologians, a god who almost nobody actually believes in, Coyne moves on to address Miller and Giberson's attempts to harmonise science and religion. He does so with civility and directness:

( Good bits )
He concludes that:

This disharmony is a dirty little secret in scientific circles. It is in our personal and professional interest to proclaim that science and religion are perfectly harmonious. After all, we want our grants funded by the government, and our schoolchildren exposed to real science instead of creationism. Liberal religious people have been important allies in our struggle against creationism, and it is not pleasant to alienate them by declaring how we feel. This is why, as a tactical matter, groups such as the National Academy of Sciences claim that religion and science do not conflict. But their main evidence--the existence of religious scientists--is wearing thin as scientists grow ever more vociferous about their lack of faith. Now Darwin Year is upon us, and we can expect more books like those by Kenneth Miller and Karl Giberson. Attempts to reconcile God and evolution keep rolling off the intellectual assembly line. It never stops, because the reconciliation never works.

Coyne does, I think, over-commit himself to one particular answer to the Fine Tuning Argument (just as Dawkins does), and he mis-states what the Strong Anthropic Principle is, but overall the article is excellent, and you should all read it.

There is a difference between creationisms (like YEC and ID) which contradict well established scientific theories, and Miller and Giberson's efforts to argue that God did it but carefully hid his tracks (or that God set things up so that intelligent life would arise on Earth, though Coyne argues that this argument is contradicted by science to some extent). With YEC and ID, we've good reasons not to believe them. With a God who carefully hides his tracks, we must instead ask how we'd know if we were wrong (we might also ponder the arguments from God's silence). The problem with Miller and Gibson is not facts but method.

If we accept a proposition merely because we can't show it's wrong, we might believe all sorts of things, so why credit the Christian God rather than my particular favourite deities? It seems that Miller and Giberson's theories start from the conviction that God did it and work backwards to an explanation which is not directly contradicted by current science. As we saw when talking about biblical inerrancy, there's always a logical way to make that sort of thing work; yet to do it is unskillful, the opposite of the fourth and seventh virtues in the Noble Twelvefold Path. In science "the first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool."

Timothy Keller is pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, a successful church in New York. He's written a book, The Reason For God, which he says is for people doubting Christianity, and for Christians wanting to answer questions from their non-Christian friends. nlj21 lent me the book, and I read it while on holiday recently. If you'd like to see Keller in action, you can watch his talk at Google, which rehearses some of the arguments from the book.

The success of Keller's church sounds surprising when you learn that the church is pretty evangelical in theology, because (going by the people he quotes objecting to Christianity) New York is apparently full of the American equivalent of Guardian readers. But having seen Keller's style, I can see why he's successful. He deals sensitively with the human problems people might have had with the church or with conservative Christians as well as the factual arguments. He admits where arguments are only suggestive rather than conclusive, and he mentions the arguments against his position. He admits that there's no argument that will persuade everyone, so the best thing is to look for arguments that will persuade most of the people, most of the time.

Ultimately, though, I think Keller shows more good will than reason, which makes the title a bit of a misnomer. Keller shows that you can construct a Christianity that hangs together, that a belief in God isn't completely crazy. That's certainly necessary, but hardly sufficient, for a reasonable person to believe it. A lot of the book is assertions without evidence for them, when evidence is precisely what is required.

That said, since the book is better than most Christian attempts at evangelism I've read or seen lately, I thought I'd do a couple of posts on it, of which this is the first.

Arguments against God

The book is divided into two parts: one dealing with the arguments against God, which Keller wants to show are faulty; and one dealing with the arguments for God. We'll look at his responses to objections, using the chapter headings from the book.

There can't be just one true religion

( Read more... )

How could a good God allow suffering?

( Read more... )

Christianity is a straitjacket

( Read more... )

The Church is responsible for so much injustice

( Read more... )

How can a loving God send people to Hell?

( Read more... )

Science has disproved Christianity

( Read more... )

You can't take the Bible literally

( Read more... )

Summing up

Some of the objections Keller gets from New Yorkers are ill considered, and Keller bats them aside easily. In other cases (theodicy and Hell), his method is to argue that there's still a chance that Christianity is true, so the objections aren't completely conclusive. I don't find this that impressive, because the sensible objector isn't claiming that their objections are conclusive, merely that they're strong evidence. To defeat that, one must produce stronger evidence, which as we'll see in the next part, Keller fails to do.

Mattghg posted something about how Scott Adams, the Dilbert artist, doesn't believe in evolution. I responded:

Scott Adams also thinks that gravity is caused by the fact that everything is expanding, and that if you write down something you want to happen several times a day, it will come to pass. While this doesn't mean he's necessarily wrong about evolution, I think he's a contrarian who likes to throw out wild ideas about how the scientists are wrong. To deny evolution is on a par with the expansion=gravity idea: it's only Americans who think there is a controversy, because of the wedge strategy of the creationists (now known as intelligent design advocates).

Matt has made another post about my last sentence, taking issue with my assertion that there is no controversy. He links to Jerry Fodor's recent article in the LRB as an example of a someone who says that there is a controversy. He also objects to me lumping the Intelligent Design (ID) crowd in with the Young Earth Creationists.

I have at least two PhD biologists on my friends' list. They know much more about this stuff than me, so I hope they'll point out my errors in what follows. That said, I thought I'd have a go anyway. So:

I probably should have said that by "controversy" I mean the specific idea that ID-ers want taught in schools, namely that there's some serious disagreement among biologists about whether an intelligent designer is required to explain some biological structures. I'm not saying all biologists agree on every detail of how evolution works.

That said, Fodor's article is, I'd guess, a typical example of someone from outside the field misunderstanding the details of debates within it (hence my hope that my biologist friends will correct me where I'm wrong). He talks about the constraints of embryology and existing forms as if this were breaking news to people like Dawkins. As it happens, I'm reading Climbing Mount Improbable as the moment, where Dawkins, writing back in 1996, talks about the evolution of the eye. He tells us that "Once a good eye has started to evolve with its retina back-to-front, the only way to ascend [the fitness landscape] is to improve the present design of the eye... the vertebrate retina faces the way it does because of the way it develops in the embryo, and this certainly goes back to its distant ancestors". A recent entry by davegodfrey, a paleobiologist, addresses some of the other oddities in Fodor's essay.

But biologists do disagree. ID-ers like to see this disagreement, because it allows them to tell the biologists that the resolution is right in front of their noses: God did it! (if you doubt that the ID-ers' intelligent designer is God, read their own strategy document, which lays out the aims of the movement). This is just the sort of "me too Daddy" helpfulness that you get from New Agers about quantum physics. Unfortunately it loses its charm when grown-ups do it (and it's not made any more convincing by the fact that some very distinguished scientists go along with it: there's no idea so silly that you can't find a PhD, or even a Nobel prizewinner, who'll agree with it). No wonder the biologists are annoyed by this sort of thing.

ID-ers assume that if there is a disagreement among biologists, evolutionary theory is in crisis, and that the solution must be ID. As the ID-er linked to by Matt said "Of course, one of those alternatives, not mentioned by Fodor, is ID." There's a reason by Fodor didn't mention that alternative. As Dawkins and Coyne said in their Guardian article: "The other side is never required to produce one iota of evidence, but is deemed to have won automatically, the moment the first side encounters a difficulty - the sort of difficulty that all sciences encounter every day, and go to work to solve, with relish."

On the point of what "creationism" means, it's clear from the Discovery Institute's own documentation that their aim is to provide a stepping stone to creationism while sneaking around the American restrictions on the establishment of religion, specifically on the teaching of creationism in schools. This is so well known that I suspect ID will need to reinvent itself soon in its continual game of cat-and-mouse with the US court system. Wikipedia links to Panda's Thumb, which claims that "critical analysis of evolution" is the new buzz phrase. We'll have to see how that one works out for them, I suppose.