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Videos from the Interpreter conference, Science & Mormonism: Cosmos, Earth & Man, are now available.
I'm still working my way through them, but I want to congratulate the organizers and participants for a stimulating discussion.
Last February Elder Jeffery R. Holland gave a talk (recently published) at the J. Reuben Clark Law Society Conference in Washington D.C. that touched on the growing influence of the 'new atheism.' Elder Holland acknowledged the influence of men such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, and called for more effective persuasion.
In the face of such waning religiosity—or, at the very least, waning religious affiliation—Latter-day Saints and other churches must be ever more effective in making the persuasive case for why both religious belief and institutional identity are more relevant than ever and deserve continued consideration and privilege within our society.Given the venue and purpose of his talk, I would not expect Elder Holland to take on that task in this speech. Frankly I was impressed to see him call attention to the issue and name (even quote) some of the most prominent voices of atheism. However, it isn't clear to me from this speech that Elder Holland has paid close attention to their arguments. For example, Elder Holland said that militant atheism is untenable,
simply because it would take someone with God’s omniscience and omnipresence to be sure that nowhere in the universe was there such an omniscient and omnipresent being. Catch 22. But I digress with philosophical nitpicking.This was clearly a line designed for laughs. But Dawkins (who is often called 'militant' for his blunt style) doesn't hold that view, and I doubt his compatriots do either because it's so obviously logically flawed. Dawkins' argument in his book, The God Delusion, is one of probability based on what we know from science, reason, and history, and is directed toward conceptions of God with certain characteristics.
In this Church that honors personal agency so strongly, that was restored by a young man who asked questions and sought answers, we respect those who honestly search for truth. It may break our hearts when their journey takes them away from the Church we love and the truth we have found, but we honor their right to worship Almighty God [or not, in this case] according to the dictates of their own conscience, just as we claim that privilege for ourselves.Many atheists are truth seekers and hold their position because that's where their conscience has taken them. Indeed, it appears that many young atheists are disappointed idealists. Making caricatures of their arguments and experience is an indicator to them that our claims are empty because we cannot engage their concerns head-on.
Inasmuch as more than two-thirds of the religiously unaffiliated nevertheless do say they believe in God, it may well be that part of the reason for this drift away from formal church affiliation has something to do with how churches are perceived. More than two-thirds of the religiously unaffiliated say “religious institutions are too concerned with money” (70 percent) and tooWe should recognize that the mapping of our religious values onto public policy is a tricky business. Often people of opposing political parties share many of the same values. Their disagreement is rooted in the prioritization of those values and their application to law and public policy. Church leaders decide how the institutional Church should interact with specific laws and policies. As for individual members, I think we would do well to emphasize the things we value and avoid shallow cultural warfare.
deeply entangled in politics (67 percent). A word to the wise for all churches.
Millet: Oddly enough, I’m currently doing a good bit of reading on atheism. Not to become one, of course, but I am concerned with how our people are responding to atheism. There is currently an upsurge in interest in the new atheism, as it’s called, and they’re proselyting!I am not aware that any such conference has occurred (not that that means much), but I think it would be a great idea. Done right, it would help fulfill Elder Holland's call.
Thayne: So you’re reading Christopher Hitchens?
Millet: Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris. And I’ve read about ten or twelve responses to atheism. It’s a project I started on my own. Then, out of the blue, I discovered a group of faculty members in other colleges who were doing the same. We are planning a major conference on the subject.
A few days ago Slate.com published a fun (in a bit of a perverse kind of way) article, The Most Adorable Animals Engage in the Most Reprehensible Behavior. My favorite line:
There is no animal that is made of rainbows and kisses and goodness all the way through.This is something I think we all would freely acknowledge. Yet because we urban dwellers live a life largely removed from the wild--or even farm life--it's easy to forget that the world is not like a Primary lesson on the creation.
What is natural is not inherently good or evil: It simply is, and we’d be fools to take such examples as models of right or wrong. The dark side of superficially cute animals is a part of their nature that reminds us that the wild does not exist for our entertainment and whimsy. We can find beauty and poetry in nature, but we can also find terror and savagery, all essential parts of the entire picture.
I enjoy reading physicist Sean Carroll because he is a penetrating thinker and good communicator. A recent blog post of his hits on a theme that raises fundamental issues of concern to Mormons. First, let's set the backdrop. We're all familiar with the following statement from Joseph Smith, canonized as D&C 131:7-8:
There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.
Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die. If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?
If you believe in an immaterial soul that interacts with our bodies, you need to believe that [the Dirac equation, which describes the behavior of electrons] is not right, even at everyday energies. There needs to be a new term (at minimum) on the right, representing how the soul interacts with electrons. (If that term doesn’t exist, electrons will just go on their way as if there weren’t any soul at all, and then what’s the point?) So any respectable scientist who took this idea seriously would be asking — what form does that interaction take? Is it local in spacetime? Does the soul respect gauge invariance and Lorentz invariance? Does the soul have a Hamiltonian? Do the interactions preserve unitarity and conservation of information?
Among advocates for life after death, nobody even tries to sit down and do the hard work of explaining how the basic physics of atoms and electrons would have to be altered in order for this to be true. If we tried, the fundamental absurdity of the task would quickly become evident.
Current events in Syria--the alleged use of sarin gas--have brought the opaque methods of intelligence gathering to the national attention again. This seems like as good a time as any to briefly recount the story of "yellow rain."
In 1981 the United States accused the Soviet Union of having backed the use of chemical weapons on the Hmong people, who had allied with the U.S. during the Vietnam War. Hmong refugees described aircraft spraying a yellow liquid over them, which was followed by sickness and death. Yellow spots on leaves and other materials were collected and sent to the U.S. and elsewhere for analysis, with a lab at the University of Minnesota confirming the presence of trichothecene mycotoxins, toxins produced by fungi. Combined with eyewitness testimony, including both victims and a defected Lao pilot, these results formed the foundation of the U.S. accusation. The Soviets dismissed the accusation as a lie.
Things took a strange turn as scientists, doctors, and others began investigating. The yellow spots were found to contain local pollen, other labs were unable to reproduce the initial chemical analysis, and the eyewitness testimonies turned out to be shaky. It turns out that yellow rain, as it was called, was most likely bee feces from the mass defecation of swarms of bees, but the chaos of war combined with bias and differences in language and culture turned a strange natural phenomenon into evidence of chemical warfare. The U.S. has never withdrawn the charge, and of course there are a number of documents that remain classified, including a CIA critique produced a few years ago.
I don't think anybody would put it past the Soviets to facilitate chemical warfare, but there seem to be significant problems with the evidence behind the original accusation. Although a definitive conclusion may never be forthcoming, outside of the government the sentiment is largely (but not exclusively) one of skepticism.
You can read a 2008 book chapter by one of the leading scientific skeptics here.
Radiolab did a fascinating episode on yellow rain that turned out to be somewhat controversial because the Hmong interviewees felt attacked by the journalists.
Does any of this have anything to do with the current situation? I don't know; probably not. Mostly I find it interesting on its own. But then again, it might.
There are a lot of news stories out today about a new study that explains the recent 'pause' in global warming. The background is that the rate of surface temperature warming over the last 10-15 years is lower than in decades previous, which has led some to claim that global warming has stopped or slowed down. The new study says that this can be explained by a natural cycle in the Pacific Ocean that has been burying some of the heat, thus masking the true warming.
Adopting the term 'pause' or 'hiatus,' as almost all of the stories do, is a little problematic and may lead to confusion, I think. So a couple of clarifications are in order.
1. While it is true that the short-term rate of warming has been lower than before, there is still a good case to be made that this is statistical noise, due to natural variability, in a long-term trend. If you look at the temperature record, you can find other similar 'pauses' in the middle of clearly upward trends. See the figure below.
Over at Interpreter, Gregory Smith has written a longish review of several books on the theme of evolution and religion. I haven't read his review in detail, but my skimming (and past experience) suggests that Smith has what I take to be a pretty healthy view on the issue. One of the books reviewed was written by William Dembski who, although I don't hear much about him anymore, was once one of the leading lights of Intelligent Design at the Discovery Institute. Several of the comments below Smith's review are supportive of ID, with one person wondering why LDS scientists don't align with ID more than they do.
It has been a while since I have mentioned ID. Although it hasn't gone away, it is much less of a public issue lately than it used to be. Nevertheless, I thought I would take a moment to review why I do not accept ID (something I first articulated here.) For fun, I have arranged it in a question-answer format.
Q: Isn't Intelligent Design a scientific idea?
A: ID is more of a religious/cultural movement than a scientific one. Defenders of ID complain about ID being lumped together with young-earth creationism and assert that it has secular intellectual merit on its own. However, it is a matter of historical record that the ID brand, so to speak, was formulated as a response to court rulings prohibiting the teaching of creationism in public schools, and as a weapon in an ideological battle against naturalism. The scientific component of ID has always been minor, which is to say that scientific research has not been a focus of ID proponents. ID is mostly polemics, and it was the Discovery Institute that sought to introduce ID into public schools notwithstanding the fact that it had scant support in higher education and among professional scientists. When the background of ID and its proponents are considered, it becomes clear that ID is a religiously/ideologically motivated movement.
Q: Don't some scientists advocate Intelligent Design?
A: There are a few practicing scientists, such as Michael Behe, who openly advocate ID, but most ID proponents tend to be non-scientists (e.g. lawyers, philosophers, mathematicians, etc). Others have an educational background in science, but did not pursue a career in science. For example, as a member of the Unification Church with a Ph.D. in religious studies, Jonathan Wells went on to obtain a Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology with the specific intent of fighting against 'Darwinism,' and has spent his career doing so. Again, ID is not really a scientific movement.
Q: OK, but if we put aside motivations and history, couldn't Intelligent Design have some merit?
A: Sure, any part of this world and life on it might have been designed, but ID arguments for such have been unconvincing. Usually the arguments boil down to simple disbelief that things found in nature could have been produced by nature. Many biological features that appear designed can be understood in the light of normal biological principles, although the exact step-by-step history may forever remain unknown. That is simply not good enough for ID proponents like Michael Behe, who once demanded each mutational step,
And not only a list of mutations, but also a detailed account of the selective pressures that would be operating, the difficulties such changes would cause for the organism, the expected time scale over which the changes would be expected to occur, the likely population sizes available in the relevant ancestral species at each step, other potential ways to solve the problem which might interfere, and much more.In other words, ID is impossible to falsify. So sure, it could be true on some level, but so could many other unprovable or unfalsifiable propositions.
To anyone familiar with [the science], it is simply laughable and pretty much insulting to see Stephen Meyer proclaim throughout his book that fossils with transitional morphology don’t exist, that the Cambrian body plans look like they originated all-at-once in one big sudden step. These statements don’t respect scientific process, they don’t respect the peer reviewed literature, they don’t respect the intelligence and knowledge of people who actually do know what they are talking about, they don’t respect the hard work of all the scientists that went out in the field and found these fossils, and then spent countless hours preparing them, describing them, inspecting them in microscopic detail, coding them in a morphology database, and analyzing them, all with care and effort and detail never taken by any creationist/IDist writer in any effort of comparative biology. And most importantly, Meyer’s statements don’t respect the data. They don’t follow the evidence wherever it leads, mostly because Meyer is ignoring most of the evidence.In my experience, Matzke's critique applies more generally to many ID proponents. They not only spread an idea that is scientifically dubious, they damage scientific understanding in the process.
I came across a nice essay in praise of the scientific method. It's actually an excerpt from a new book, You Are Now Less Dumb, by David McRaney. The tone is similar to a friend giving us a good-natured ribbing for how dumb we can be. Here's a snippet.
The people who came before you invented science because your natural way of understanding and explaining what you experience is terrible. When you believe in something, you rarely seek out evidence to the contrary to see how it matches up with your assumptions. That’s the source of urban legends, folklore, superstitions, and all the rest. Skepticism is not your strong suit. In the background, while you crochet and golf and browse cat videos, people using science are fighting against your stupidity. No other human enterprise is fighting as hard, or at least not fighting and winning.Boyd Petersen told a story of the time Hugh Nibley joked that he had found a mistake in the Book of Mormon. Whereas Alma 42:10 says that "man is carnal, sensual and devilish," Nibley said, "They left out stupid."
When you have zero evidence, every assumption is basically equal. You prefer to see causes rather than effects, signals in the noise, patterns in the randomness. You prefer easy-to-understand stories, and thus turn everything in life into a narrative so that complicated problems become easy. Scientists work to remove the narrative, to boil it away, leaving behind only the raw facts. Those data sit there naked and exposed so they can be reflected upon and rearranged by each new visitor.
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