Geoff Arnold's Blog

PZ tears into Nisbet and Mooney for their op-ed in the Washington Post, in which they argue that scientists should shut up and make nice with those who prefer Biblical fairy-tales to evolution. I fully agree with PZ’s “uppity” stance.
Nisbet and Mooney ask:

Can’t science and religion just get along? A “science and religion coexistence” message — conveyed in Sunday sermons by church leaders — might better convince even many devout Christians that evolution is no real threat to their faith.

PZ’s response:

No, science and religion cannot get along. They offer mutually contradictory explanations for the world, and it is bizarrely naive to pretend that people who believe that the literal events of Genesis are an account of the original sin of which we must be redeemed by faith in Jesus can accept a scientific explanation of human origins. The ‘frame’ there is that one side has an account of chance and complexity and an oh-so-awkward affiliation with ancient apes that is based on evidence, and the other side has threats of hellfire if you don’t believe in an Eden, a Fall, and a dead god reborn. Evolution is a strong and explicit threat to that faith.
If Nisbet and Mooney think a non-literal religious faith that allows that humans evolved from apes and are apes is going to be acceptable to every church-going Christian in America, they aren’t very familiar with what we are combating. Proposing that we can sneak support for science into the public’s mind by advocating a lesser heresy than atheism is ludicrously absurd.

Yes, of course there is a minority of religious believers who have found a way to reconcile their faith with science, usually by adopting a symbolic or metaphorical interpretation of their holy texts. If they were in the majority, it might make sense for Dawkins et al to moderate their language, to avoid asking questions about the limits of this symbolism. But according to all recent surveys, they are not in the majority, at least in the USA. And for these people, there is no science – not evolution, not geology, not astrophysics, not biochemistry, not even physics – that is not a threat to their faith.
Evolution is a fact: it is observed every day. The earth is not 6,000 years old. There was no global flood, and no ark: one is incompatible with (literally) mountains of evidence, and the other is logically incoherent. There was a place called Jericho, but in the unlikely event that a person called Joshua actually stood outside it, shouting, the earth did not stop rotating. That’s just for fundamentalist Christians and Jews. For Moslems: every ear of corn does not have 100 grains. Ants do not talk. Semen does not come from between a man’s backbone and ribs. The earth is not flat, and the sun does not set in a small pool of water near the edge. Like the Bible, the Koran contains many statements which are incompatible with science. That’s just a fact.
Politicians in this era are fond of asking what kind of message an action sends. So to Nisbet and Mooney and their pandering ilk, I would ask this: what kind of message does it send to a bright young student in his or her early teens, who is trying to decide whether to embark on a career in science or medicine, if we urge scientists to suppress the facts in deference to mythology? Do those esteemed op-ed writers want more or fewer children to grow up to be physicists, cancer researchers, and geneticists? They talk about the importance of global warming, and presumably they know that renewable power sources such as solar, geothermal, tidal, and wind are going to be critical to addressing our energy problems. Do they want potential geologists to be frightened off, because scientists are discouraged from challenging the biblical accounts of the flood and the age of the earth?
They want to have it both ways, of course. But how do they propose to achieve this? They write:

Simply put, the media, policymakers and members of the public consume scientific information in a vastly different way than the scientists who generate it. If scientists don’t learn how to cope in this often bewildering environment, they will be ceding their ability to contribute to the future of our nation.

But why on earth is this the sole responsibility of science? Do not the media and policymakers and and priests and teachers – yes, and even a professor in the school of communication – all have a moral obligation to educate themselves, to become less scientifically illiterate? Expecting science to do all the work needed to bridge the gulf seems like an abdication of civic responsibility.

There’s a fascinating thesis advanced in Unsettling History of That Joyous ‘Hallelujah’ in today’s NYT. Far from being a celebration of the Christmas season, it seems that Handel’s Messiah was intended as a Lenten attack on deists, as well as the Jews who supposedly inspired them. The research seems thorough, and the conclusion inescapable:

To create the “Messiah” libretto Charles Jennens, a formidable scholar and a friend of Handel’s, compiled a series of scriptural passages adapted from the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Version of the Bible. As a traditionalist Christian, Jennens was deeply troubled by the spread of deism, the notion that God had simply created the cosmos and let it run its course without divine intervention. Christianity then as now rested on the belief that God broke into history by taking human form in Jesus. For Jennens and others, deism represented a serious menace.
Deists argued that Jesus was neither the son of God nor the Messiah. Since Christian writers had habitually considered Jews the most grievous enemies of their religion, they came to suppose that deists obtained anti-Christian ammunition from rabbinical scholars. The Anglican bishop Richard Kidder, for example, claimed in his huge 1690s treatise on Jesus as the Messiah that “the deists among us, who would run down our revealed religion, are but underworkmen to the Jews.”

I imagine that I will continue to enjoy The Messiah just for its music; the religious content has been largely irrelevant to me for nearly 50 years. But who knows? Will I find myself paying attention to certain passages, and will that affect my experience? It’s hard to tell….
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[Via Robert Elisberg in HuffPo.]

While his predecessor was fairly restrained and sensible about the subject, Pope Benedict is starting to sound unfortunately stupid, claiming that “the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory.”. Of course this simply reveals that he doesn’t understand what a scientific theory is. One could argue that he’s just abusing the concept of “proof”; a lot of philosophers and theologians expect science to be like (pre-Gödel) mathematics or logic, proving theorems rather than testing hypotheses against data. From this standpoint, one could substitute any scientific theory for “evolution” in his statement – gravity, relativity, thermodynamics, whatever. Sloppy, uneducated, but not necessarily malicious.
But that’s too charitable an interpretation:

Benedict added that the immense time span that evolution covers made it impossible to conduct experiments in a controlled environment to finally verify or disprove the theory. “We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory,” he said.

So not only does he really not understand science, but he’s using the kind of fallacious argument beloved of the ID crowd. Or perhaps he understands this stuff really well, but wants to pander to the gullible. Either way, it’s a load of Papal bull…….

An unusually clueless creationist (i.e. really low on a scale that runs from moronic to barely sentient) showed up at Pharyngula’s today, spouting reams of nonsense cut-and pasted from various places. PZ gave him one warning, and then disemvowelled him. Delightful! I wonder if there’s a “disemvowel comment” plugin available for WordPress?