I can’t believe I watched the whole thing

Here’s Ray Comfort’s “movie”, all 40+ blah, repetitive minutes of it. It’s the standard schtick: Comfort sticks a microphone in somebody’s face, asks a leading question, and then edits their answers and splices them into an appalling gemische of Smug Ray vs. Ambushed Folk.



He loves to go after students — he can get lots of confusion and uncertainty from them that he can assemble into a long litany of doubt. And when he got four professors, who are confident and know their stuff, and he edits the heck out of them. He pretends here that we have no examples of evidence for evolution, but as you’ll see if you bother to watch the piece of crap, every time we offered strong evidence, he rejects it by assertion, insisting that we have to show him evidence that one “kind” transformed into another “kind”, where he gets to define whether something is a new “kind” or not. And if we mention the fossil evidence, he rejects that, too, because he wants evidence of a transformation he can see right in front of his eyes, and all that dead stuff was millions of years ago (we say).

The last bit of this monstrosity is a long commercial for Way of the Master and the Creation Museum, plus lots of Jesusy nonsense. It really isn’t a movie by any stretch of the imagination — it’s an overlong infomercial for Comfort’s clownish apologetics act.

Skip it unless you’re feeling deeply masochistic.

Mormon evolution

Mormonism had its origins in the 19th century equivalent of science-fiction fandom — there was a real craze for dressing up religion in the lab coat of science even then — so it’s not surprising that Mormons love to mingle evolution, dinosaurs and faith (it helps to be living on a giant fossil bed, too). That ol’ charlatan Joseph Smith loved to squeeze his self-serving dogma into a package draped with the latest (and entirely erroneous) theories about Indian origins, for instance, to give it an aura of authority.

This article in the Deseret News explains how they teach evolution at BYU…and it’s the usual superficial phenomenological approach that annoys me so much. It’s not just Mormons that do this, but every well-meaning Christian who wants to make the data fit his or her preconceptions.

As Whiting’s lab lets out, the model skulls on every desk are lined up chronologically. Whiting said that although some students have trouble accepting human evolution, the students in his lab typically do not have any problems. He said many of his students come to see evolution not as a theory that threatens their beliefs, but as a tool God uses to "accomplish his design."

"They leave the class thinking, ‘Isn’t this cool? Isn’t the creator so clever?’" he said.

Blech. Whiting leaves out the most important parts of evolutionary biology. Sure, you can line up a bunch of skulls and make up a story about how they came to be, and that can include gods, elves, or aliens, but evolutionary biology is also about the mechanism: the changes in gene frequency brought about by selection, drift, etc.

Nowhere in evolutionary theory is there any mention of a creator. We have no need of that hypothesis. A chronological array of bones is not evidence of magic.

But the Mormons have more. They have Church Authority, so their version must be true.

The controversy died down in 1992, when the university released a packet with comments from the LDS Church’s First Presidency and the Encyclopedia of Mormonism.

"The scriptures tell why man was created, but they do not tell how, though the Lord has promised that he will tell that when he comes again," William Evenson said in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, a statement reprinted in the packet for BYU professors and students.

Oh, yes, that old fallback. Science says how, religion says why. The problem with that, though, is that while spokespeople for religion can say any damn fool reason they want, there’s no reason to think they’re right. They also don’t consider the possibility that there is no “why”: we are the product of happenstance and necessity, not planning, and human populations have simply been buffeted by the exigencies of local events that did not occur with people in mind: climate, shifts in game, competition from other species, disasters, warfare, all these sorts of things and many others happened to us, and biology responded, but none of it was with intent of any kind to cause an evolutionary response. There was no “why”.

The LDS church, an organization with no scientific credibility at all, loves to make statements about science. These should be treated with all the respect they deserve.

Whiting said the packet and statements have helped reduce the stigma that evolution is something that contradicts religion. Today, he said, many students view evolution as a logical explanation for biological diversity and that it’s compatible with their faith.

Scott Trotter, spokesman for the LDS Church, offered further clarification:

“Science and religion are not at odds in our faith. We accept truth wherever it is found and take the pragmatic view that where religion and science seem to clash, it is simply because there is insufficient data to reconcile the two.”

You know what really reduces the stigma? Recognizing that religion has no special authority in the first place, so contradicting it is a fine thing to do.

That last statement is so typical, though. Their religion is true by definition, so the default assumption is that science is in error, and further data will support the faith. Their belief is untestable, then: they will cheerfully accept the evidence that supports their preconceptions, and any evidence that falsifies the goofy myths of Mormonism will be ignored as “insufficient data”.

Boom times for delusionists

delusionist

True confession: I have not read Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. I have a copy, I started it on the basis of recommendations from smart people, and…I couldn’t make it past the introduction. It’s 800+ pages long, and it’s a solid block of rambling philosopherese. You know how some philosophers think that saying something ten times in increasingly convoluted language is communication? That’s Charles Taylor. It’s also Stephen Meyer, another philosopher who babbles on for 800 pages, but that’s about evolution, so I feel compelled to force my way through the nonsense. Taylor is a Catholic writing about secularism (but with less bias than you’d think, I’ve heard!), and so I lacked the imperative to plow ahead.

But now I’m in luck — a NY Times op-ed writer, which we all know is a sign of quality, has written a summary of the book. Only it’s by David Brooks. So now I get to see what a badly-written, complex book is about, as seen through the comfortably muddled brain of a painfully shallow tendentious thinker and equally awful writer. Others will have to judge whether Brooks summarizes the book fairly; all I can see is Brooks cheerfully wallowing in ideas that he already “knew” were correct.

I can see glimmerings of stuff I agree with, but it all gets a final twist that is most disagreeable. It’s frustrating because I don’t know how much of it is Brooks’ gloss and how much is Taylor. For instance, Taylor rejects a common myth of secularism:

Taylor’s investigation begins with this question: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say 1500, in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy but even inescapable?” That is, how did we move from the all encompassing sacred cosmos, to our current world in which faith is a choice, in which some people believe, others don’t and a lot are in the middle?

This story is usually told as a subtraction story. Science came into the picture, exposed the world for the way it really is and people started shedding the illusions of faith. Religious spirit gave way to scientific fact.

Taylor rejects this story. He sees secularization as, by and large, a mottled accomplishment, for both science and faith.

See, phrasing it as a “subtraction story” is what I find objectionable: it’s an additive story. Science and culture grew, adding more richness to society and the world of the mind, and making certain old ideas untenable but replacing them with many more. Why is it being called “subtraction”? I don’t know. At least Taylor is said to disagree with it too, although what the heck does he mean, “a mottled accomplishment” by “both science and faith”? Curse you, David Brooks, you cracked and sooty lens!

Advances in human understanding — not only in science but also in art, literature, manners, philosophy and, yes, theology and religious practice — give us a richer understanding of our natures. Shakespeare helped us see character in more intricate ways. An improvement in mores means we take less pleasure from bear-baiting, hanging and other forms of public cruelty. We have a greater understanding of how nature works.

These achievements did make it possible to construct a purely humanistic account of the meaningful life. It became possible for people to conceive of meaningful lives in God-free ways — as painters in the service of art, as scientists in the service of knowledge.

OK, where’s the “mottling”? This is secularism as an unalloyed good.

But, Taylor continues, these achievements also led to more morally demanding lives for everybody, believer and nonbeliever. Instead of just fitting docilely into a place in the cosmos, the good person in secular society is called upon to construct a life in the universe. She’s called on to exercise all her strength.

People are called to greater activism, to engage in more reform. Religious faith or nonfaith becomes more a matter of personal choice as part of a quest for personal development.

That’s the downside? That now we’re expected to be autonomous moral agents rather than unthinking servants of an established order? Sign me up for more of that. Brooks goes on to list doubt as a negative for religious people. I really don’t get it. I regard doubt as a virtue.

And then Brooks tells us about another problem: malaise.

Individuals don’t live embedded in tight social orders; they live in buffered worlds of private choices. Common action, Taylor writes, gives way to mutual display. Many people suffer from a malaise. They remember that many people used to feel connected to an enchanted, transcendent order, but they feel trapped in a flat landscape, with diminished dignity: Is this all there is?

Whenever a conservative uses that word, “malaise”, you know what’s coming: people are going to be said to be miserable because they aren’t living in a world exactly like the conservative’s ideal of the situation 50 to 100 years ago. That “enchanted, transcendent order” was the Catholic church that has spent the past few hundred years shaming healthy human sexuality while supposedly celibate priests were raping children. I suppose it was great if you were high up in the social ladder — hierarchies are always wonderful if you’re at the top of they pyramid of human misery — but imagine being a woman or poor in Western society at any time in the past: “trapped in a flat landscape, with diminished dignity” is a good description.

Secularism has the potential to break the old order and allow a new flourishing. What sad-faced Brooks describes is not malaise, but a new hope that encourages a restlessness for change, one in which smug overpaid NY Times op-ed writers are probably going to lose a few privileges.

Brooks’ (and maybe Taylor’s) only consolation is that maybe people will successfully find new religious lies to believe in.

But these downsides are more than made up for by the upsides. Taylor can be extremely critical of our society, but he is grateful and upbeat. We are not moving to a spiritually dead wasteland as, say, the fundamentalists imagine. Most people, he observes, are incapable of being indifferent to the transcendent realm. “The yearning for eternity is not the trivial and childish thing it is painted as,” Taylor writes.

Yes, it is.

Maybe Taylor is unable to see it himself since he doesn’t personally share the secular mindset, but yeah, seeking justification for your life in imaginary wish-fulfillment and magic is the real dead-end. When you turn away from that immature dream and look at how wonderful life is, that’s when you’ve grown up and can hope to find deeper satisfaction. I’m reminded of the end of the epic of Gilgamesh, when the hero returns disillusioned from his quest for immortality and realizes how awesome the accomplishments of real people are.

But this refocusing on the real world is not for Brooks. Oh, no; the happy message he takes away is that we’re still spiritual.

Orthodox believers now live with a different tension: how to combine the masterpieces of humanism with the central mysteries of their own faiths. This pluralism can produce fragmentations and shallow options, and Taylor can eviscerate them, but, over all, this secular age beats the conformity and stultification of the age of fundamentalism, and it allows for magnificent spiritual achievement.

I’m vastly oversimplifying a rich, complex book, but what I most appreciate is his vision of a “secular” future that is both open and also contains at least pockets of spiritual rigor, and that is propelled by religious motivation, a strong and enduring piece of our nature.

What the hell is a “spiritual achievement”? How can you have “spiritual rigor”?

I can imagine the relief that Brooks felt on reading a book about secularism and discovering that people are still buying the bullshit the priests and New Age wackos and other spiritual charlatans are selling. The kingdom still has employment opportunities for delusionists, his job is secure.

Sleazy Ray does it again

He’s still promoting his cheesy little home video, this time with a video featuring me. He has me briefly stating that “Evolution is an amoral process, a cruel and harsh process…” and then — well, watch it for yourself. You’ll be stunned at the crude response he makes, but you probably won’t be surprised.

I had to laugh. The man really is a simpleton with no moral compass, or as he would think, a typical product of evolution.

We can get those, too?

Speaking as a man, I think I should have all the things and be the final authority on everything. Perhaps some of my resentment of women is because they are biologically permitted some experiences that I can’t share, which is NO FAIR. I must be the boss of everything!

So I am deeply impressed with this Brave Hero, who has apparently discovered a way to do something that I once would have thought was unique to reproductive females.

abortionregret

Well, he certainly has all the authority on that issue now, doesn’t he?

Here’s a useful word for you: confabulation

Eben Alexander, the doctor who claimed to have visited heaven, is slowly getting exposed as a guy who makes stuff up (sadly, most of the story is behind a paywall…you’ll have to get the details second-hand). I could have told you that. Wait, I did tell you that.

What’s really unfortunate is that even discovering that the entire story was a hallucination by a diseased mind is probably not going to matter a bit to producers of the planned Hollywood movie.

Hey, my colon was talking to me all day yesterday — it was a miracle. Can I get a movie deal?

Imagine if an atheist jumped onto a Christian monument as it was being dedicated…

Remember this. When American Atheists set up a monument at a Florida courthouse (it was part of an agreement that the court would permit many different flavors of ideas), Eric Hovind leapt on it to “proclaim the truth that Jesus Christ is Lord”.

What an ass.

And we atheists are supposed to be the intolerant ones? Right. Anyone want to take any bets on whether some of the local Christians aren’t planning to vandalize the monument at the first opportunity?

Lie harder, little man

Ray Comfort is pushing his new creationist movie with a lie. He’s setting it up that Richard Dawkins talks about the evidence for evolution, but that he went to real scientists and asked them, and Ray is going to spring a surprise on him — Comfort implies that the scientists disagreed.

I was one of those scientists. NO, I did not disagree with Dawkins about evolution or the evidence for evolution; NO, nothing I said provided any support to creationist claims; NO, there is not a lack of evidence for evolution.

What actually happened is that I briefly discussed the evidence for evolution — genetics and molecular biology of fish, transitional fossils, known phylogenies relating extant groups, and experimental work done on bacterial evolution in the lab, and Ray Comfort simply denied it all — the bacteria were still bacteria, the fish were still fish. I suspect the other scientists did likewise: we provided the evidence, Ray Comfort simply closed his eyes and denied it all.

Richard Dawkins will not be at all surprised that Ray Comfort is a dishonest fool.