I’m a little worried. Jason Rosenhouse wrote about this new paper by Peter Hess, the Faith Project Director (I’m already rolling my eyes) of the NCSE, and I learn that the first failing of Intelligent Design creationism is that it is blasphemous.
Uh-oh.
I am proudly and unapologetically blasphemous, and I encourage other people to join my heretical ranks all the time. If ID is blasphemous, it’s the first element of their program that I can approve of — anything that weakens the grip of faith has got something good going for it. It’s simply not a problem. It can’t even be a problem for a religious program in America — we’re a pluralist society, and everything is blasphemous to someone. The mild-mannered theistic evolutionists think ID is blasphemy, but so does Ken Ham…and Ham also thinks the theistic evolutionists are heretics, apostates, and blaspheming bastards who defile the Holy Word of God. Lutherans are blaspheming Catholics. Baptists blaspheme against the sacred doctrines of Calvin. Every time you pull out a cell phone, you’re insulting the Amish way of life, and Ron Jeremy is glad the Shakers died out. So? We can’t use and absence of blasphemy as a criterion for truth and accuracy. It’s silly to bring it up. And, as Jason points out, the same religious arguments applied against ID are equally valid when aimed at theistic evolutionists.
I’m also troubled by this whole position of Faith Project Director. Peter Hess is almost certainly a nice guy, and he’s on the side of evolution, or he wouldn’t be working at NCSE…but why is the NCSE now actively engaged in the business of promoting Faith Projects, and why do they have a professional Bible thumper to pontificate on hair-splitting matters of dogma? They’re all wrong. Having a theologian on staff to tell us that some of them are more wrong than others on matters sacerdotal, from his position which is just as shaky as everyone else’s, seems to me to be so bad that it falls into the category of not even wrong.
And then there’s the matter of this paper. It is titled, “CREATION, DESIGN AND EVOLUTION: CAN SCIENCE DISCOVER OR ELIMINATE GOD?”, and the answer Hess gives is no: “The scientific quest for the designer behind the veil of nature ultimately fails—science can neither discover nor eliminate God.”
That’s easy, then. God is irrelevant. These guys always seem to use “science” as a word demarcating a very narrow field of endeavor involving white lab coats, test tubes, and strangely colored solutions, but it isn’t. Science is simply a process for examining the world, and anyone can do it, even if you do’t have a lab coat. If something has an effect or influence, you can try to examine it using the tools of science — so when someone announces that gods cannot be detected by observation or experiment, they are saying they don’t matter and don’t do anything, which is exactly what this atheist has been saying all along.
This is the strange thing about the whole argument. When I was on my daily walk today, I was surrounded by a million mysteries: what’s in that house? How was this sidewalk made? What signaling molecules are moving through that tree to trigger new bud formation? What insect was making that odd sound? Why was my left ankle sore this morning? Were there any neutrinos whizzing through me right now? How did that boulder get on that lot? You get the idea. We’re immersed in a piece of the universe and we don’t know a lot about it, but we’re seeing these curious eruptions of natural phenomena all around us, and we can pursue them if we want.
That’s the obnoxious part of religion, and why it’s in conflict with science. Science is the world of Let’s-Find-Out, while religion is always the land of You-Can’t-Know-That. One tries to build fences around sacred domains, the other has great fun knocking them down. Go ahead, pretend that your god is safe and hidden away where scientists can’t poke at him with needles or measure his emanations with widgets that go beep or photograph his spoor and stick it in a chromatograph — we don’t care. The only way he can escape our probes is if he doesn’t exist…so the more you protest that he is absolutely indetectible, the more we nod and say, “Then you’re admitting that he isn’t even vapor.”
Denying god is yet more blasphemy, isn’t it? That’s why I’m in trouble. Of course, claiming that god has no measurable influence in the world is probably also blasphemy, which puts Peter Hess in the theological clink, too.
The thing that gets me is, who the hell do they imagine they’re reaching out to? “Moderate” believers already have no problem with evolution, and that isn’t going to change just because they don’t like PZ or Richard Dawkins. On the other hand, as to the reachability of the evolution-denying fundies, just ask ex-professor of theology Bruce Waltke.
These guys always seem to use “science” as a word demarcating a very narrow field of endeavor involving white lab coats, test tubes, and strangely colored solutions, but it isn’t. Science is simply a process for examining the world, and anyone can do it, even if you do’t have a lab coat.
PZ, I’m gonna disagree with you, well maybe agree with you. You’ve put science in scare quotes, so you don’t mean peer reviewed science. Which is what most seem to mean by science. I’ll wager you mean scientific attitude to questions, which could also be called rationality and/or skepticism (not denialism). Which is fine, science is part of rational thinking, which we use everyday (hopefully) and includes mathematics, logic and critical thinking among other things. But to say mathematics, logic, critical thinking, etc is science is wrong I reckon.
Well, maybe wrong is too strong, but it makes the definition of science so broad as to allow a lot in that we’d not call science.
Regarding your question “Were there any neutrinos whizzing through me right now?”
As I recall a Discover magazine cover put it a couple of years ago. Place hand on spot. Count to 3. Approximately 1 000 000 000 000 neutrinos passed through your hand.
So the answer to that one is ‘yes’.
Still, it’s not an unimportant caveat that science make epistemic, not ontic, statements. And a lot of scientists will fudge when someone’s woo is threatened by science, and note that science really can’t flat-out deny that blank assertions of magical stuff happening are somehow “real.”
Of course, ontic claims either collapse to (are treated essentially as) epistemic claims, or they’re meaningless to humans. We can’t get past epistemological limits, after all.
But on to “blasphemy,” it’s not like most of us don’t enjoy showing how absurd a designer the IDiots must have. For theistic evolutionists, that becomes a charge of “blasphemy,” which the IDiots ought to take seriously. Really, how can they say that God “designs” like a genetic algorithm or some such thing? It does become blasphemous when one really thinks about it.
Theistic evolution might blaspheme, too, although I assume that some variants could avoid the “blasphemy” inherent in ID and much of TE. Which doesn’t change the fact that the IDiots’ God is an appalling a-hole, which is considered to be blasphemous when directly stated by atheists.
So why let IDiots off the hook for connoting that their God is akin to a computer program, and far from evincing omniscience?
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Nit pick: actually, the Amish don’t reject modern technology out of hand, they evaluate it, use what they like, and reject what they don’t like. Two of the things they seem to accept are roller blades and cell phones (as long as you turn them off in the house, which is why they reject land lines). Thus the incongruous mental picture of an Amish fellow rollerblading down the road talking on a cell phone is no doubt real.
Except in an old, largely (but not totally) obsolete sense of “science.” Occasionally you will hear mathematics called “a science,” “one of the sciences,” or some such thing. Originally, “science” denoted primarily “knowledge,” hence you could call math a “science,” and that meaning is not entirely lost in the present.
I didn’t write this to disagree, but to fend off the possibility that someone will find a quote where math or one of the other branches of “non-science” knowldge is in fact called “science.” Because that is done using an exceptional meaning of the word “science,” while math is not a part of science as normally understood.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Except for the subcontinent of I-Know-This-But-Don’t-Ask-Me-For-Evidence-It’s-A-Matter-Of-Faith.
In order to declare something to be blasphemous, don’t you need to know what “God” would consider insulting or disrespectful? And who is Peter Hess to make that determination? Doesn’t this mean that the NCSE is going beyond just taking the mealy-mouthed “religion and science are compatible” view, and directly opining on which theological beliefs are correct?
You know, exactly the thing us “New Atheists” are supposedly doing wrong?
Or more properly, the “mathematics as a discipline” is not a part of science as normally understood. Mathematics is definitely a part of scientific methodology.
This should have been recognized as my meaning, but pedants do lurk on this board, and so…
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Regarding your question “Were there any neutrinos whizzing through me right now?”
As I recall a Discover magazine cover put it a couple of years ago. Place hand on spot. Count to 3. Approximately 1 000 000 000 000 neutrinos passed through your hand.
So the answer to that one is ‘yes’.
Glen, I was thinking the same thing myself. I’ve read a little bit of early-modern philosophy (Descartes, Kant, etc) and they use science in the sense of scientia (knowledge), and natural philosophy for science as we understand it. I think Metaphysics was the ‘Queen of the sciences’ or something. I have a book by Carnap (I think) that concerns ‘logic and the deductive sciences’ which sounded odd to me when I obtained it a few years ago before I understood less recent uses of the word science.
I can’t settle for a mental picture on this. I need an actual photograph so I can make it my wallpaper picture. Right now I just have this.
Nope, it was by Tarski and called ‘Logic and the methodology of the deductive sciences’.
Hey, if you’d been listening you’d know that Nintendos pass through everything.
“If something has an effect or influence, you can try to examine it using the tools of science — so when someone announces that gods cannot be detected by observation or experiment, they are saying they don’t matter and don’t do anything.”
You have made my day!
Science evolved as a series of methods designed to eliminate individual and collective error and bias as much as possible. To say that something is beyond science, then, is to say that it’s permanently subjective. This may be reasonable if we’re talking about matters of taste or value: but it shouldn’t apply if we’re dealing with matters of fact. Otherwise, it means that some people are so far “above” others, they need not concern themselves with finding common ground.
Loving your mother, is not the same as claiming that you have a mother. The religious seem to want to confuse what is believed in, with the belief itself. They also seem to assume that a person who has an experience, is always the best and only person who can analyze what that experience meant — thereby conflating the experience, with its interpretation. If you felt as if X, then X.
People believe in God and spiritual realities because of evidence and experience that seem to point that way. They are hypotheses. They might be right; they might be wrong; and they are subject to the same methods of investigation as every other hypothesis.
I think it’s funny that the NCSE is going to try to promote the idea that the best way to view God is to see God as a humanist would see God. The whole point of religion is that it has to give you knowledge and benefits the worldly would not know or benefit from.
It’s rather like when people ask a room full of atheists what religion they think they’d belong to, if God really did exist. Off the cuff, we usually say Unitarian, or Buddhist, or some other religion that’s only marginally different than a secular philosophy, and has minimal supernatural component. The assumption is that God is reasonable, and makes sense. But there is nothing in theology which forces God to be reasonable, and make sense to an atheist. In fact, that’s usually the kiss of death for a religion. God turns into a metaphor for reality, or love, or something useful — and fades away.
Depending on the day, I am either an atheist or a pantheist, so I don’t spend much time worrying about whether a magical force has spent time imagining squid eyes or spleens. But it has always struck me as sort of illogical that people who purport to believe in an being that is omnipotent, omnipresent, and operates outside of our understanding of both logical causation and time can spend so much time fussing about how this totally-beyond-our-comprehension being has to be sticking metaphorical fingers into the mechanism to produce eyes or whatever. A couple years ago I asked a friend who actually is a conservative evangelical Christian this same question and she said “Well, of course it’s blasphemy. But don’t tell anyone I said so.”
I suspect there are a lot of people like her out there who need to start speaking up instead of letting the loudest fools speak for them.
Oh, c’mon: every theist knows God agrees with him or her. It’s everybody else that’s got Him wrong.
Now he tells me, after I spent all that money on ebay buying used lab coats.
ID specifically denies god(s). It uses an Intelligent Designer, no resemblance to god whatsoever. Possibly there’s incredibly advanced space aliens or just someone who’s really, really, really smart, but not god. ID using god would violate the First Amendment of the US Constitution and IDers would never do that.
So if there’s no god, how can there be blasphemy?
Say it ain’t so, Genie! Looks like NCSE might be headed for the doghouse. They’ll be in good company, though. *Looks out back at HRC.*
Nicely written PZ. Your musings on topics like this just seem to get better and better.
Why in the hell does NCSE have a Faith Project Director?!?
In the words of Charlie Brown, AAAUUUUUUUGGHHHH!!!
As a nature educator at a public institution, I am constantly scolded by 7 year olds for suggesting that there might be a reason for an animal’s adaptation to its environment that isn’t “because god made it that way.” Just because I think that the influence of religion is largely malign doesn’t mean that I don’t have to come up with something to tell those kids that will keep their minds open long enough for them to get to a point where they can question for themselves. To the extent that a faith project director at NCSE can help with that, I’m all for it.
Just continue telling them the truth. What makes you think you (or the NCSE) can successfully argue with the crap their parents and preachers have put in their heads, on their terms? Stick to your own ground.
Or, what I already said @1.
Better title for the guy: “Director of Wasted Time and Resources”
While I agree with this completely, this argument somehow fails to reach people. I wonder sometimes if it’s because they equate science with test tubes or petri dishes or something like that, so the existence of, say, qi would be forever beyond the reach of science even if it were found to reliably cure 100% of ill patients. So when they say, “science doesn’t know everything“, they really mean that in their mind science and scientists don’t ‘believe’ in anything that can’t be titrated or analysed through mass spectrometry.
If astrophysicists found out that all the dark matter in the universe spelled out “I made this. Signed, God”, I’d sure become a believer.
If biologists discovered that every organism on the planet had encoded in their DNA an ASCII picture of Jesus, I’d become a believer.
If epidemiologists found someone who successfully brought about ten plagues, and hydrologists found that they also parted a sea, I’d become a believer.
If physicists revealed someone who literally created matter out of nothing, and fed people with it to boot, I’d become a believer.
If physicians showed that someone was actually dead by all detectable means, stayed that way for three days, then got up and walked around, I’d become a believer.
There are plenty of ways in which science could discover the presence of a god, to the same level of confidence that it discovers other things.
Something just occurred to me regarding this:
It may be the case that some of the “science is bad” types believe that their god was here, actively messing around with everyday life, until we invented things for measuring and recording. That every time we look closer, their god has to retreat further away, in order to stay hidden. Thus, science “chases away” their god. So that why science is bad: their god is a-feered o’ it!
The problem with this argument is first, that I have to have something to say in front of the large group of third-graders that isn’t rude and that keeps them interested, and second, that many of the kids are from families who seem to be in the intellectually mushy position of believing both the Bible and evolution, so it’s important to be able to help them into that intellectually mushy camp so that they can (hopefully) get out of it eventually. So even though I’m officially forbidden to use the word “evolution” in talks with kids, I make sure to use fossils, the phrase “descent with modification,” and geological ages in EVERY talk I do. And I explain over and over what a scientific theory actually is.
It’s depressing for those in the trenches to have to deal with this on a regular basis. It’d be a lot easier to hang out, homeschool my delightful kids and associate only with scientific misanthropes such as those who populate the scienceblogs boards.
I think this begs the question against the theist since the issue is over the existence of supernatural causation.
Welcome to the club of NCSE apostates, P.Z. The organization is getting weirder and weirder: once it simply accommodated faith, now it pronounces on what is good vs. bad faith. I don’t feel much kinship with them any more.
where are you that you are forbidden to use the word evolution? Is this a private school? I think you have a case to make if you have the spine to stand up for yourself. I was a physical science teacher for a few years (7-8 grade) and, though we were mostly doing intro chem and physics lessons, evolution came up occasionally when talking about the world. If I was asked about evolution I said it was the best explanation we had, did a two minute lecture on how evolution works (“you know about tectonic plates right? Imagine a species exists on two adjacent plates that are moving apart, one plate moves into a very warm climate, one moves into a very cold climate. Assuming members of each species can survive in each climate, do you still think they’re going to look the same in a few million years?”), directed unconvinced students towards good research, and agreed to privately (outside of class) discuss at length any contradictory evidence they would like to bring in. This can be adapted to any age group. Will you get parents who complain? Yes. They are looneys. When they complain to you, you can provide them with factual answers, point them towards good sources, and dismiss claims that are false outright. If they get beligirent, point them towards your district’s literature on homeschooling and private school options.
Given that you said most parents you deal with believe both, it sounds like they had wishy-washy, spineless science teachers too.
“Faith Project Director”
Is it just me, or does anyone else get a mental image that’s much like a SNL skit where a number of people get together and decide how best to go about believing things without evidence ?
“nope … nope … that won’t work see … there’s actually evidence for that … “
I work for a parks and rec system in suburban Maryland. We do a lot of science programs for both public and private schools and I make sure that what I say is in line with the state science education standards. I won’t do programs for schools that call to schedule programs with a “no evolution” caveat. I’m not spineless, I’m just trying to foster kids’ curiosity and enthusiasm about the natural sciences in a very limited amount of time.
ambook | April 12, 2010 4:44 PM:
You can’t associate with misanthropes. By definition, we hate you. The dictionary requires it.
“… and Ron Jeremy is glad the Shakers died out.”
Ah, did they really die out or did they just go to heaven? Or perhaps they evolved into better, godless, beings?
“The scientific quest for the designer behind the veil of nature ultimately fails …”
Goddamn. There goes my scientific career of proving the existence of god. I wonder how many other scientists have a doctoral degree in mumbo-jumbo?
Ambook,
I’m still confused. Why can’t you use the word evolution? Who has imposed the restriction?
It sounds to me almost as if the dance you are doing around the restrictions is such that you are unable to speak with authority.
“Today we’re talking about science, I encourage you to talk about the Bible with your parents and your pastor.”
And I also agree with those who say you need to find a job where you’re not “forbidden” from using appropriate scientific terminology; otherwise you’re becoming part of the problem rather than of the solution. In fact, that restriction is almost certainly illegal since you say your institution is public.
Actually misanthropes make excellent company for other misanthropes. It’s humankind that we dislike, not individual humans…
And I don’t have to contort myself too horridly to do programs about “this is a mammal” for first or second graders. The “don’t mention the e-word” thing just ticks me off and makes me sure to mention it as much as possible. And wasn’t “descent with modification” Darwin’s phrasing anyway? I do think that one of these days I’ll put together a program for schools that addresses evolution expressly and is targeted specifically to meeting the state science standards (which are not bad). Then we can see how seriously parks and rec takes its whole no-e-word policy…
I think a letter from an ACLU lawyer might help them figure that out.
Hey Ambook, good luck with all that. I do a similar kind of job talking to museum visitors about palaeontology, and though (being in Australia, even though it is Queensland) there’s no restriction on what I can say, I STILL find myself hesitating a fraction of a second before pronouncing the word ‘evolved’. Gives me time for a quick scan of the punters looking for the one most likely to start spouting Genesis… apparently it only takes one or two of these (over 6 years) to seriously creep me out.
‘Descent with modification’ is a perfectly good workaround, but it’s hard to see how a ‘no e-word policy’ wouldn’t be illegal for a public institution where you are.
Loved the “Let’s-Find-Out” against the “You-Can’t-Know-That”.
As Hypatia of Alexandria said to the bishop of Cyrene in Amenábar’s Ágora a bit before being savagely murdered by Christian zealots:
“You never question your beliefs. You cannot. I *must*”
Hey Tulse:
love your list and will use it indiscriminately in rebuttal of the IDiots and rrr’ists.
thanks!
PZ Myers: a man with a mind like a steel trap and a pen like a rapier.
Er, keyboard. Keyboard like a rapier.
That image doesn’t work. Sorry.