AAAS Response to “Expelled”

Religion and Science

I don’t personally agree with all of the viewpoints, but I think that this video, thanks to The Panda’s Thumb, helps to illustrate Stephen’s position.  Intelligent Design is a misdirection to try to show that science is an attempted refutation of a Creator, when in reality science is a method for exploring nature and testing causal links to phenomena.

Intelligent Design really is a muddled attempt to achieve contradictory philosophical goals:

1. Science shouldn’t be talking about God, because science isn’t theology.
2. Science proves theology.

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“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect…”

During my romantic stroll through Uncommon Descent many weeks ago, I was struck by one of the recurring claims of some of the residents of that asylum.  The claim is that “design” in nature is what a Christian should expect to see, based on some basic biblical pronouncements concerning God and his creation.  Here’s an example, from a comment in a thread bashing “theistic evolutionists:”

As Psalm 19 instructs us, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” And, of course we read in Romans 1:20, that the invisible things are clearly seen “being understood by the things that are visible.”

Now I would expect even a mainstream Christian to take these passages seriously, but a “devout” Christian ought to be downright passionate about them. According to St. Paul, design is a self-evident truth, so much so, that a Christian, agnostic, cynic, or anyone else who questions it is “without excuse.” What can we say, then, of those who, in fact, don’t believe it at all and yet publicize their Christianity for strategic advantage.

Pretty inflammatory stuff, actually, and we can look some other time at the way in which this fellow is badly twisting the intention of those scriptural passages.  Here I’d like to explore the basic idea that we ought to expect certain things in a universe that is or isn’t designed or otherwise directed by God.

People of all sorts of persuasions seem to think this way.  Creationists like Hugh Ross at Reasons To Believe claim to believe that the properties of creation are just like the Bible says they should be, cooking up painfully contrived comparisons between the expansion of the universe and the Ancient Near Eastern (and biblical) cosmology of a firmament “spread out like a tent.”  Design proponents like David Snoke have published arguments that are indistinguishable from the UD comment above.  Consider what Snoke wrote in a 2001 article in Perspectives on Science & Christian Faith (the official journal of the ASA):

Both theism and atheism are theories that make falsifiable predictions about things we should see in the realm of science. Specifically, the atheist theory predicts that we should find a mechanism by which all life could have arisen as the result of many simple, uncorrelated causes; Christianity says that the world is explained by a unifying Purpose, and expects that the hand of God should be evident in the world around us (Rom. 1:20).

And what is the evidence we expect to see?

The present “gap” in the atheistic theory comes from a successful prediction of the theistic theory, that we should expect evidence for exquisite fine-tuning and apparent design.

Richard Dawkins has clear expectations as well.  This famous quote is occasionally misattributed to Darwin:

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

That’s from River Out of Eden.

Now, I’m not convinced that any of these people knows what they really ought to expect.  It’s obviously way too easy to report, post hoc, that everything you’ve just seen is just precisely the way you thought it should be.  We humans are famously prone to such elaborate rationalization, and I think we should be suspicious of such confident assertions regarding the expected properties of the whole bloody cosmos.  Snoke, at least, admits that the jury is out, but he makes it clear that he expects a certain kind of universe.

So am I the only one who is agnostic on all of this?  My position is radically different from Ross’s and Snoke’s, and surely accounts for much of the incompatibility between my approach and that of the ID movement.  I maintain that Christians ought not assume much of anything about the structure or governance of the cosmos, because God created it and governs it without restraint.  He is free to proceed as He sees fit, and for me to assume that it must unfold in a certain way is to decree that He cannot or should not proceed in other ways.  This, to me, is ludicrous and blasphemous.

(Of course, if God has specified certain modes or preferences regarding biological creation or anything else, then it’s reasonable to ascribe those preferences to Him.  He hasn’t done that, and this is clear when considering the general nature of the biblical passages – Psalm 19, Romans 1 – that are always quoted by creationists and ID proponents in this context.)

Similarly, I just can’t take seriously Richard Dawkins’ claim that the universe has “precisely” the characteristics that he would expect.  Whether a universe ruled by “blind pitiless indifference” would look like this one, I don’t know, and neither does he.  As popular discourse on the Problem of Evil, I guess it works as well as anything else, but his blatant assertion about the “properties we should expect” is pure bluster.  (Imagine.)

What kind of universe did you expect when you got here?

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Thoughts on “respecting” religion

Mike has brought up the question of “respect” for religion again, this time drawing some interesting parallels between a fictionalization of the life of Muhammad and the desecration of a Eucharistic wafer by atheist blogger PZ Myers.  We had an interesting discussion of the desecration a month ago, and I emphasized my view that there is a very important difference between respecting beliefs or ideas and respecting people.  It seems to me that this distinction is being missed in the comparison of PZ’s stunt and the Muhammad novel, and I’d like to try again to put issues of respect into a more complete context.

Here’s the section of Mike’s post that got my attention:

When we recoil in fear from offending the beliefs of another group, we give religion a power it doesn’t deserve.  We let it control even those of us who don’t share the religion.  The people who bugged me the most in the crackergate fiasco were not so much the rabid catholics who wanted to see him destroyed and humiliated, the people who made me most angry were the equivocating atheists who said we should excoriate him because he wasn’t showing the proper respect to a religion he didn’t believe.

Now, I don’t know who these “equivocating atheists” are, but if they are bashing Myers for not “showing the proper respect to a religion he didn’t believe,” then Mike is right to be annoyed by them.  I’m not an atheist, and I’m sure annoyed by that kind of talk, because I want to reserve the right to be critical of beliefs, ideas and religions, without being harassed by bogus accusations of intolerance.

I’m not sure, though, that this is the issue.  Specifically, I don’t think Myers is being excoriated for merely failing to show “respect to a religion,” and I sure don’t think that this captures the reason why I and others found his stunt repugnant.  Let me offer a few case studies to illustrate why I don’t buy the juxtaposition of Crackergate and the effective censorship of a historical novel about Muhammad and his marriage bed.

1.  Suppose a friend of mine in Minnesota – we’ll call him Mike – ran a website that regularly criticized, in the most dismissive of terms, my religion.  The usual stuff: comparisons of God to fairies or the FSM, baldly dismissive descriptions of Jesus of Nazareth, regular updates on the most embarrassing and outrageous antics of my fellow believers.  Then suppose one day that his website featured a picture of the church I attend, digitally altered to look like a crematorium and emblazoned with swastikas.  Or suppose that when Mike and I eventually met in person, he continually used the name of Jesus as an expletive and ignored my requests to stop.

In my opinion, Mike’s website is appropriate criticism of ideas and religion, but his personal smear of my church (even if it reflects his honestly-held beliefs about Christian complicity in the Holocaust) and his contemptuous attitude toward my personal convictions (even if he thinks ‘Jesus’ is just another collection of phonemes) represent something else.  Treating religion or tradition with complete disrespect – even contempt – is just not the same as treating a person that way.  I think that should be obvious, even if the finer demarcations in practice can get tricky.

2.  One protester burns an American flag at a public rally against American policy.  Another burns an American flag in front of a graveyard during the funeral of a WWII veteran who was murdered in front of his wife.  Is there a difference?  Why?

3.  Cultures have various traditions and rules pertaining to “respect for the dead.”  I happen to think that corpses are morally insignificant chunks of meat, ripe for biochemical recycling, and I don’t have a particularly high regard for practices that seek to provide comfort or preservation to corpses.  If I nevertheless choose not to, say, walk on graves while people are watching, am I “recoiling from offending the beliefs of another group,” and thereby giving “respect for the dead” a power it doesn’t deserve?  Or am I taking steps to show respect for other people?

And this final case study is the one I want to hear PZ’s defenders discuss.

4.  Once there was an outspoken critic of Catholicism and many other religions who was well known for his bare-knuckled attacks on beliefs he considered ridiculous.  He ran a website that was known throughout cyberspace and was occasionally the subject of mainstream news reports.  One day he desecrated a religious worship service, specifically to protest what he perceived to be the outrageous nature of the beliefs of those present at the service (which was held in a public place).  Those in attendance at the service were outraged, and began a campaign against the critic, hoping to destroy his organization and his livelihood.  The critic insisted that he didn’t intend to hurt people, and pointed out that no one had been injured in any significant way.  His position is clear: he doesn’t accept or respect the religious beliefs of nearly all of the people in world.  Although most of those close to him defend him vigorously, he is regularly excoriated for his behavior, and many people are angered by the fact that he wasn’t showing the proper respect to a religion he didn’t believe.

His name is Fred Phelps, and in my opinion he’s the guy to look at when trying to put PZ’s stunt into a moral context.  He and his sick followers believe that homosexuality has doomed the inhabitants of the planet to damnation, and he feels compelled to raise the nation’s consciousness regarding this moral tragedy.  So he applauds the deaths of soldiers, at their funerals, holding signs that say stuff like “Thank God for dead soldiers.”  I won’t desecrate our blog with links to his hate speech.

In my opinion, thinking about Fred Phelps and his obscenely misnamed church helps bring into focus the reason why respect, in the context of religion, does make sense.  It’s not because any set of beliefs should be respected.  It’s because people should be respected.  I’m not saying that the distinction is always easy to make.  But I think it’s a mistake to continue portraying behavior like PZ’s as merely disrespectful toward religion.  At least give some thought to the ways in which decent people continually show respect for others who hold divergent – even wildly, irrationally divergent – beliefs.

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I Am Only a Mortal, Like You

(cross-posted from Tangled Up in Blue Guy)

More Book Hysteria

Stephanie has an alert on a book being pulled from the presses based on a review by a scholar in Texas.  The book hasn’t even hit galleys yet, only reached advanced preview copy stage and already calls have been placed by people who haven’t read the manuscript to demand that it not be published by Random House.  Some have demanded that the book be pulled from the bookstores (?) and an apology issued to all Muslims worldwide.

Aisha and Muhammad Wedding Night

The book is a(n) historical fiction based on the life of Muhammad’s child bride, Aisha. Aisha was nine years old when she was married off to the Prophet Who Shall Not Be Depicted.  Many of us are familiar with the edict against depictions of the prophet who started Islam.  It is considered blasphemy, which is odd because Muhammad is not considered to be the son, brother or cousin of Allah.  He was a man who claimed to have been visited by an angel and given the Koran.

The professor who put a stop to the book is Denise Spellberg, an assistant professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.  She’s not a Muslim, but the novel apparently so disturbed her that she started spreading the word to Muslims who she thought should know about this upcoming affront to Islam.  From an article in the Wall Street Journal by Asran Q. Nomani:

This time, the instigator of the trouble wasn’t a radical Muslim cleric, but an American academic. In April, looking for endorsements, Random House sent galleys to writers and scholars, including Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of Islamic history at the University of Texas in Austin. Ms. Jones put her on the list because she read Ms. Spellberg’s book, “Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of ‘A’isha Bint Abi Bakr.”

But Ms. Spellberg wasn’t a fan of Ms. Jones’s book. On April 30, Shahed Amanullah, a guest lecturer in Ms. Spellberg’s classes and the editor of a popular Muslim Web site, got a frantic call from her. “She was upset,” Mr. Amanullah recalls. He says Ms. Spellberg told him the novel “made fun of Muslims and their history,” and asked him to warn Muslims.

In an interview, Ms. Spellberg told me the novel is a “very ugly, stupid piece of work.” The novel, for example, includes a scene on the night when Muhammad consummated his marriage with Aisha: “the pain of consummation soon melted away. Muhammad was so gentle. I hardly felt the scorpion’s sting. To be in his arms, skin to skin, was the bliss I had longed for all my life.” Says Ms. Spellberg: “I walked through a metal detector to see ‘Last Temptation of Christ,'” the controversial 1980s film adaptation of a novel that depicted a relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. “I don’t have a problem with historical fiction. I do have a problem with the deliberate misinterpretation of history. You can’t play with a sacred history and turn it into soft core pornography.”

Rather than deal too much with the subject of the story here, as Stephanie has done a great job of discussing the issue, I am going to ask you to watch with me the reaction that people have to this story.  I think that the publisher should be ashamed of pulling it.  I think that the author, Sherry Jones, should be free to shop her book to other publishers without having to return her advance money.  I think that the book should be given a chance at the bookstores.  What I want to watch in the reaction to this is to see if the same people who took affront at PZ Myers will join in on the call to publish this novel.

The issue I am concerned about is where people are willing to draw the line at respecting others’ religious beliefs.  Do you see where I am leading?  The feeling that certain people have about the sacred ban on graphic depictions of the prophet is the same one that Catholics have about the Eucharist.  It is a killing offense, a blasphemy against Allah, the Prophet and all Muslims.

Will the same people who called for PZ to be reprimanded, fired or even killed for his actions now turn around and demand that the book be published; illustrating the hypocrisy that religion engenders?  Or will they now join with the Muslims and Dr. Spellberg to call for respect of others’ beliefs and demanded that Sherry Jones apologize and humble herself before the worldwide anger of Muslims?

Spellberg defends herself in a letter published Saturday in the Wall Street Journal:

As a historian invited to “comment” on the book by its Random House editor at the author’s express request, I objected strenuously to the claim that “The Jewel of Medina” was “extensively researched,” as stated on the book jacket. As an expert on Aisha’s life, I felt it was my professional responsibility to counter this novel’s fallacious representation of a very real woman’s life. The author and the press brought me into a process, and I used my scholarly expertise to assess the novel. It was in that same professional capacity that I felt it my duty to warn the press of the novel’s potential to provoke anger among some Muslims. (emphasis mine, tuibguy.)

I am not sure why she felt it was her responsibility to frantically call Sahed Amanullah and warn him that the book was coming out, and I am not sure if she knew that he would run the Twilight Bark of an Islamic listserv.  It seems so, but it isn’t fair to take his word that she was frantic.

I’ll never be in the position of judging the historical accuracy of the novel, but even though Spellberg thought it was poorly researched, I think that her judgment in telling him that it was offensive without offering to let him read it and make up his own mind was irresponsible and yes, it did lead to the book being pulled.  This happened even though she opposes censorship.  She advocated its censorship in a passive aggressive manner so that she could claim a plausible deniability.  Her hands are clean, she says.

When we recoil in fear from offending the beliefs of another group, we give religion a power it doesn’t deserve.  We let it control even those of us who don’t share the religion.  The people who bugged me the most in the crackergate fiasco were not so much the rabid catholics who wanted to see him destroyed and humiliated, the people who made me most angry were the equivocating atheists who said we should excoriate him because he wasn’t showing the proper respect to a religion he didn’t believe.

Sherry Jones is not showing disrepect, she is writing a novel based on a historical person.  It may or may not be accurate. Stephanie says it is not, in fact, pornographic.  It is a novel, and if it were to be published perhaps it would stimulate interest in Aisha and people would look to Spellberg’s work on Aisha to research further if they were drawn into the story.  She has blocked off this avenue because of her own equivocation, the warning of great danger, and she gave in to the false power of religion to declare offense.

So, let’s see if the Catholics who hate PZ respond to Random House’s decision to call of the book by demanding that they not give into terrorists and go ahead with publication.  If they do, it would be both amusing and infuriating. Muhammad should not be “hands off,” nor should Aisha, but then neither should be a wafer.

All this saddens me. Literature moves civilizations forward, and Islam is no exception. There is in fact a tradition of historical fiction in Islam, including such works as “The Adventures of Amir Hamza,” an epic on the life of Muhammad’s uncle. Last year a 948-page English translation was published, ironically, by Random House. And, for all those who believe the life of the prophet Muhammad can’t include stories of lust, anger and doubt, we need only read the Quran (18:110) where, it’s said, God instructed Muhammad to tell others: “I am only a mortal like you.”

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Seven Years of Shackled Stem Cell Science

Today marks the seventh anniversary of George W. Bush’s controversial policy banning federally sponsored research on embryonic stem cell lines.  I still remember when I heard his speech: I was on a mission to find a part for an art project I was working on – there’s an ‘antique electronics’ store in North Seattle I thought would do me well.  It was one of three times I’ve ever pulled over to listen to a radio broadcast.  (The other two: Bill Berry’s retirement and NATO activity in Kosovo.)  On August 9, 2001, I wasn’t yet a stem cell researcher, but I had a decent grasp on the scientific and political implications of some of the various proposals Bush could have put forward.  I also had read that this statement would be the first the new president would make about an issue his conservative evangelical Christian base cared deeply about.

Electron Microscopic Image of an hESC

Before moving on, interested readers might wish to reacquaint themselves with the federal policy about human embryonic stem cell research.  The bottom line is that human embryonic stem cell (hESC) lines created after 9:00 PM EDT on August 9, 2001 could not be used in research supported by federal funds.  Despite the policy being called in the media a ‘stem cell ban,’ there was no prohibition of stem cell research – if you had your own money, you could do whatever you wanted.

What’s funny about the policy decision Bush ended up making is that it was framed as a compromise between science and religion.  A compromise is usually an agreement that both sides agree on; this one is one that both sides were unhappy with.  Would have representatives of science and faith communities actually sat down to make a proposal, I think the outcome would have been different.  Instead, a small group of insulated advisers devised a proposal that they thought would cut political losses.

Consider one Catholic thinker’s perspective.  Michael Mendiola wrote about stem cell policy in 2001:

I am uncomfortable with the language of compromise, for it seems to intimate too easily that we may ethically give up or water down our most deeply held convictions.  My point, rather, is that we may indeed hold on to those convictions, yet still allow public policies and practices that go against those convictions on good ethical grounds.

He implicitly acknowledges that research on embryonic stem cells could be permitted with the caveat that the policy was founded on some (other than his own) good ethical grounding.  As one of my stem cell researching colleagues recently reminded me, this policy overlooked what should be the basic objection to hESC research in the first place: a mass production (and subsequent destruction) of potentially viable human embryos by the in vitro fertilization (IVF) industry.

Not a single embryo being saved from ultimate destruction, as the IVF industry remains without serious regulation. By delaying research, human health was harmed. An opportunity for a serious discussion and enduring compromise on both fertility treatments and stem cell research was bypassed for political expediency.

This is what Catholic and Evangelical opponents to hESC research should have been concerned about.  Instead, they were deceived that embryonic stem cells came from aborted fetuses.  Sorry folks, the stem cells that come from aborted fetuses are by accepted definition adult stem cells.  (By an ironically sick twisting of fact, one adult stem cell proponent included fetal brain cell treatments for Parkinson’s disease as proof that adult stem cells were better than embryonic cells, but that argument is for a different day.)  No, IVF wasn’t in the cross-hairs of the Bush policy.  It was actually – you guessed it – abortion.

Ask someone on the street today where embryonic stem cells come from and a surprising number belive they are taken from aborted fetuses.  You’re not stupid to think this.  Some really smart people get this confused, and even more had the science mixed up back when policy discussions about stem cell research were in their prime.  The NIH has a good informational sheet about where embryonic stem cells come from at their stem cell website if you need to get back up to speed.

A lot of what I read back in 2000-2004 conflated stem cell research with research on aborted fetuses.  Noted ethicists and theologians would base entire arguments against stem cell research upon the notion that people would start getting paid for abortions.  The oft-cited quote by Karl Barth that

No community, whether family, village or state, is really strong if it will not carry its weak and even its very weakest members

is a slogan of the anti-abortion movement, and rang familiar to sympathetic people of faith.  I think it is fair to use this quote if you agree that a blastocyst in a freezer is in fact a member of a family, village or state.  Practically the embryo is neither.  These balls of cells languish in liquid nitrogen until their owners decide they are no longer needed, at which point they are thawed and disposed of in bleach.

The end result of the policy is that, anything goes if you have your own money.  This slowed down all of the richest universities, but did not stop them, because research was still permitted on the ‘presidentially approved’ lines.  This decision to allow certain lines to be researched still bristled with many in the religious community, because respect for the lives of those 60 11 approved lines was still lacking.

Last year, the Bush Administration paid a few minutes attention to the effects of their stem cell policy.  The group that first derived human embryonic stem cell lines (Thomson et al) confirmed a Japanese group’s discovery that genetic modification of a few (4!) genes could result in immortalized pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) that looked a lot like human embryonic stem cell lines.  The idea is that hESC research was rendered superfluous in the context of a technique that generates the same cells but without destroying embryos.  For many reasons (offered by the iPSC developers themselves) this is not true, but it does make for a good story.  And these cells do present a true middle ground between the scientific proponents and religious opponents to hESC research.  But for the Bush administration to take credit for enacting policies that made this research possible is absurd.  The groundbreaking studies were conducted in Japan.

I personally believe these iPSCs are more scientifically tenable than hESCs as sources for human therapy, and applaud continued research with them.  But so far, every experiment they have been used for has been informed by results from hESC research.  Now that Harvard and several other large universities have set up institutes run completely independent of government funding, hESC research will proceed – if at a still delayed pace.

The unfortunate moral of this story is that the Federal government had an opportunity to enact a responsible set of regulations that could have addressed the unacceptably high rate of embryo destruction in IVF clinics, set reasonable guidelines on the use of those samples in research, and taken the lead in conducting responsible life-giving research.  Instead, President Bush made a political statement that failed to address both the moral concerns of his religious constituency and the health care concerns of the average science-revering American.

For stem cell scientists, August 9, 2001 is a day that will live in infamy.

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