Bring it on, Teabaggers

From Jennifer Hancock:

On Saturday June 19th, The Atheists of Florida hosted a “Meet the Atheists” event at the Pinellas Park library. 29 people attended this event, 17 of which self identified as atheists. Included in the group were two women who appeared to be affiliated with the tea party as their van had “Pinellas Patriots” written on the windows in pink liquid-chalk.

Aside from the two “Patriot” women, most of the participants were friendly and stuck to the requested format of asking questions of the panel, which included Rob Curry - Executive Director for the Atheists of Florida, Ed Golly – Chair, Tracy Thomas – Secretary, Ellenbeth Wachs – Director Lakeland chapter, and Gina Harvey – President of the USF atheist student alliance.

The two tea party “patriots” were described as confrontational and had to repeatedly be reminded that they were supposed to be asking questions and not just making assertions and belligerent statements.

Eventually Ellenbeth Wachs, who is known to get a bit testy when her patriotism is questioned, had had enough. In response to a barrage of questions along the lines of “why can’t you people be more tolerant?” And “would you be tolerant of a historical prayer in city council as an invocation?” Ellenbeth responded with a very loud “NO!!!” She then went on to point out that just because anti-Semitism was a tradition didn’t mean it was ok when Germany established itself as a Christian nation and wrote anti-Semitism into it’s 25 point charter.

The tea party lady said she thought the comparison of wanting to have a city council say a “traditional Christian prayer” with what happened in Nazi Germany was silly. What is silly is the fact this very same women doesn’t seem to realize that her own hate against people named Juan as evidenced by the “Hate Juan” slogan written on her van is the same sort of hate that led to the slaughter of the Jews by Hitler. Or that her hate is justified by the same adherence to a very angry and exclusive form of Christianity as practiced by the Nazi party in Germany.

Angry form of Christianity? You mean like the style practiced by many teabaggers?

What We've Learned Since Lucy

"Whatever we’ve been saying about afarensis based on Lucy was mostly wrong."

Much like the revolution of modern astronomy in the late 1400s and early 1500s dissolved the notion that the Sun revolved around the Earth, a renaissance in paleontology is dissolving virtually any doubt that remained about man's origins. Another new discovery has just been completed, the latest of several high profile publications over only the last year.

The new skeleton is a male Australopithecus afarensis, which has been discovered in Ethiopia’s Afar region. The skeleton joins the celebrated "Lucy" skeleton, unearthed by paleoanthropologists in 1974, and a child skeleton unearthed last year.

The ancient male, an ancestor of modern man, lived approximately 3.6 million years ago in the plains of Eastern Africa, according to several dating techniques. Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who led the team, says the skeleton offers some major new insights into the species.

The skeleton has been nicknamed "Big Man" as it towers at 5 to 5½ feet tall over the much shorter 3½-foot-tall Lucy, who lived 3.2 million years ago. That large height deviation raises questions over which of the specimen is the norm in terms of height. The new skeleton was unearthed between 2005 and 2008 at a dig site only 48 km from where Lucy was found.

The skeleton also reveals new insights into the bone structure of the species. Big Man's 32 discovered bones reveal long legs, a narrow chest, and a inwardly curving back. All of these indicate that he walked much like a human and enjoyed a ground-based lifestyle. This is very different from the awkward gait that Lucy was thought to have. Lucy also had been thought to climb trees a great deal.

The shoulder blade of Big Man is quite different from chimpanzees or gorillas. And the ribs also appear human-like. All of these factors indicate a far different chest shape than the chimplike, funnel-shaped chest that reconstructions of the Lucy skeleton indicated.

While confusing perhaps in context with Lucy, the conclusion that ancient hominids were not chimplike is consistent with the analysis of the 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus hominid that was conducted last year.

Professor Haile-Selassie states, "Whatever we’ve been saying about afarensis based on Lucy was mostly wrong. The skeletal framework to enable efficient two-legged walking was established by the time her species had evolved."

Carol Ward of the University of Missouri in Columbia seems to agree with these conclusions, stating, "This beautiful afarensis specimen confirms the unique skeletal shape of this species at a larger size than Lucy, in what appears to be a male."

While the discovery may have cleared up debate about whether Lucy was more chimplike or humanlike, the debate about gait is sure to continue. Harvard University anthropologist Daniel Lieberman states, "There’s nothing special I can see on this new find that will change anyone’s opinion."

Anthropologist Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University, however, believes that the discovery shows Big Man to be a good runner, which could have made the 3.6-million-year-old footprints found more than 30 years ago at Laetoli, Tanzania. Among the evidence supporting this hypothesis are Big Man's pelvis supported humanlike hamstring muscles and human-like arched feet.

The full study on the Big Man discovery is published here in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A separate 3.3 million year old skeleton of a 3-year-old baby female A. afarensis was presented four years ago. Nicknamed "Selam" (the word for "peace" in several African languages), the near-complete skeleton was found in 2000 south of the Awash river by a team led by Zeresenay Alemseged of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The paper on that discovery was published in a 2006 edition of Nature and can be found here.

These discoveries add to the aforementioned recent discovery of "Ardi", the discovery of Australopithecus sediba, and the completion of an early draft of the Neanderthal genome. All of these wonderful discoveries have helped to blow away the fog of uncertainty surrounding human evolution and offered a much clearer picture of how man arrived at its current form after a slow process of evolution that took millions of years.

Fundamentalists? No

http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/15844

A pastor is trying to frame atheists as fundamentalists:

Wrote Pastor Prather: “Atheists remain a tiny minority, but they’re far more vocal and combative than they used to be, an approach advocated by [Richard] Dawkins and others. They have every right to state their views. The irony is that this current brand of aggressive atheism is just another form of fundamentalism. These particular atheists are zealots on the subject of faith who see no shadings of gray, only black and white. They’re dead-set against religion but weirdly obsessed with it.”

What Prather has done here, as theists often do, is confuse fundamentalism with passion. While I'm not going to argue on whether Dawkins/Hitchens/Harris/Dennet's everything about religion is bad view is right, I will say that calling them fundamentalists is off the mark.

A fundamentalist applies to those of faith you hold views that contradict all known evidence and reason. I am strongly passionate and vocal about my atheism but the moment there is evidence to prove god I am going to be a theist. On the other side though you have theists who would likely still believe in god even if we could manage to disprove his existence.

Replacing Religion

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201006/why-atheism-will-replace-religion-ii

From Nigel Barber:

Thanks to the many people who responded to my previous post. Some comment writers put words into my mouth by suggesting that this would happen "soon." Others claimed I said that religion would disappear completely. Let me clarify these and other issues.

Worldwide, disbelief in God is around a tenth of the population according to surveys conducted around 2004 for 137 countries that remains the best estimate. Even if it were true that the other nine tenths will eventually lose their faith in God, this would take a long time.

How long? The world population continues to grow and much of the growth is in religious countries where women have larger families. Religion is thus unlikely to decline appreciably for several decades, after world population begins to decline.

In writing about atheism (strictly disbelief in God) replacing religion, I meant two things. First, at some distant point in the future, the number of believers will decline as the number of non believers increases. How far can this process go? Based on what has already happened in a handful of developed countries, mostly in Europe, it is clear that disbelief in God can become a majority opinion. So disbelief in God may replace religion as the majority view which would be a remarkable transition from the 99% of believers in underdeveloped countries.

Of course, any predictions concerning the future of belief in God are predicated on our notions of economic development. I happen to believe that economic development will continue throughout the world and that increasing prosperity will bring down birth rates of poorer countries, just as happened for developed nations.

It is not hard to imagine scenarios where this does not happen from rogue asteroids to radical global warming, and the emergence of epidemic diseases like bubonic plague, any of which that could arrest economic development and secularization.

If the world economy does continue to grow and lifts currently poor nations into prosperity, how sure can one be that the improved confidence of survival and better living conditions (i.e., existential security) will translate into higher levels of disbelief in God? My statistical analysis of this problem finds that as much as three-quarters of the country differences in disbelief are explainable in terms of existential security and control variables. This means that as such matters go we can be very sure indeed (less than one chance in 10,000 of being wrong).

To summarize, if economic development is inevitable so are increasing levels of religious disbelief.

Much is made of the U.S. as a bastion of religion but this is exaggerated. Some 13% of American adults reported in 2008 that they had no religion which is above average for the world and a further 3.5 million (or 1.5% of adults) self describe as atheist or agnostic. Another 5% of people refuse to answer the question which is three times as many as refused 20 years ago. Religious practice is also in decline based on attendance data (Norris & Inglehart, 2004, p.92) a fact is sometimes missed due to poor wording of survey questions by Gallup and others.

Some readers were offended by the notion that religion serves as a security blanket but that is seemingly more a matter of semantics and rhetoric than a real issue. After all, most religions, including Christianity promise peace of mind and it is not something to be scoffed at either considering the health impact of psychological stress.

Others contented themselves with arguing that religion is always more than just coping with uncertainty and distress. I can certainly appreciate that there are other aspects to religion including rituals, rules of conduct, ethical implications, and so forth. Yet, the moral high ground claimed by religious people is an illusion as I pointed out in detail in three previous posts.

Creationism in Russia

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-zimmerman/russian-creationism-sound_b_610266.html

From Michael Zimmerman:

Religious fundamentalists have begun promoting creationism in Russia -- and they are doing so using many of the same strategies and buzzwords adopted by fellow extremists in the United States.

According to a news story released by Reuters, Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev of the Russian Orthodox Church recently called for Russian schools to begin teaching "religious explanations of creation ... alongside evolution." The Archbishop wants to end what he called "the monopoly of Darwinism."

Archbishop Hilarion went even further, noting that "Darwin's theory remains a theory. This means it should be taught to children as one of several theories, but children should know of other theories too."

He made it clear that this attack on evolution was part of a broader mission claiming that he "was dedicated to fighting 'fanatical secularism' of liberals hostile to religion."

All of this is painfully similar to the rhetoric being promoted by the religious right in the United States. Archbishop Hilarion's "fanatical secularism" sounds just like the Discovery Institute's call for the "overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies" and its related cry for a new type of science: "Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."

Creationists have long argued that evolution is "only a theory," purposefully ignoring the meaning of theory within the scientific community. Simply put, within science there isn't anything better than theory. An idea is elevated to the status of theory only after many multiple studies have provided data consistent with predictions and when the idea has been shown to make useful predictions about the future while comprehensively explaining the past. Evolution does this as well as, if not better than, every other scientific theory across all fields of science.

And the Archbishop's implication that evolution and religion are in direct conflict also mirrors the endless messages spewed forth by creationist organizations in the United States. Take, for example, a couple of the ridiculous comments made by Ken Ham, the president of Answers in Genesis, the folks who brought us the $27-million creationist museum-cum-theme-park where we can view humans and dinosaurs cavorting together in amazingly realistic dioramas.

In a podcast with the intriguing title "Darwinism -- It Can Lead to Satanism," Ham asserts, "I've always said that evolution is an anti-God religion and that the more people believe it and act consistent with it, the more anti-God they'll become."

Similarly, in an article explaining the need for his theme park, Ham argued, "When visiting many secular museums around the world, I've watched thousands of children gaze with wonder at evolutionary displays which were, sadly, indoctrinating them in humanistic, anti-God thinking."

Although the narrative that evolution is anti-God is popular within creationist circles in the States and, apparently, around the world, there's simply nothing to support it -- and there's plenty to argue against it.

In Science, Evolution, and Creationism, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) addresses this issue head on.

Science and religion are based on different aspects of human experience. In science, explanations must be based on evidence drawn from examining the natural world. Scientifically based observations or experiments that conflict with an explanation eventually must lead to modification or even abandonment of that explanation. Religious faith, in contrast, does not depend only on empirical evidence, is not necessarily modified in the face of conflicting evidence, and typically involves supernatural forces or entities. Because they are not a part of nature, supernatural entities cannot be investigated by science. In this sense, science and religion are separate and address aspects of human understanding in different ways. Attempts to pit science and religion against each other create controversy where none needs to exist.
Additionally, the Clergy Letter Project was founded to dispel the myth that evolution is anti-God. More than 13,000 clergy members in the United States have signed the Christian Clergy Letter, the Letter from American Rabbis, or the Unitarian Universalist Clergy Letter. Each of these Letters makes it clear that evolution is fully consistent with the religious belief of the thousands of clergy members who have added their endorsements, and each makes it clear that evolutionary theory, and only evolutionary theory, should be taught in public school science classrooms and laboratories.

The creationists believe that if you repeat a message often enough and loudly enough, people will begin to accept it as accurate, regardless of the truth of the matter. Archbishop Hilarion has either adopted their strategy of vocal dissemination of disinformation, or he has been fooled into accepting this anti-intellectual nonsense. Either way, the world is a poorer place because of his actions, and many more people will be suckered into accepting the false premise that they must choose between religion and science.

Help combat the spread of this disease by joining forces with those clergy members and scientists who understand that science does not attempt to disprove the existence of a deity; indeed, as the NAS has made clear, science does not possess the tools to undertake such an endeavor.

And share with me the outrageous belief that if we repeat the truth often enough it will make a difference in public understanding and in public policy.

"Science Will Win Because it Works"

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20006990-71.html

From Chris Matyszczyk:

There were some techies Monday who believed they experienced a sighting of God somewhere in San Francisco.

Those people might care to hark at deeply relevant news. God will be defeated by science. No, not by faltering Wi-Fi systems at a conference. And, no, these are not my words. This is the considered opinion of someone sometimes referred to as the cleverest man in the world, Stephen Hawking.

In an interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer, due to air Monday evening, Hawking expounded upon the largest questions, those that transcend iPhones and androids: Can science and God live happily ever after?

According to ABC News, Hawking first tried to define God in a way that he, as a scientist, might feel comfortable: "What could define God (is thinking of God) as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that God," he said.

Indeed, he expressed disappointment at how humans have thought of deity.

"They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible," he said.

Perhaps there will be some who might conceive that stranger things have happened. Others will nod sagely, while still secretly hoping there is another life after this one. However, couldn't one imagine a point at which science and religion somehow meet, shake hands and positions and agree on a concord?

Hawking, who has already recommended that we should steer clear of aliens, suggested to Sawyer that this was somewhat less likely than North Korea winning the World Cup: "There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, (and) science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works."

I wish I could live in and with such certainty. Somehow, the more we know, the further away we are from something that feels real.

I cannot help thinking of baseball players, filled to their hat peaks with science's latest creations: HGH, steroids, and all sorts of female hormones. They smite the ball into the nearest river.

Yet, as they stomp on to home plate, what do they do? They look up at the sky and cross themselves. Perhaps they get their HGH from aliens. Perhaps, though, there is still some way to go before we can be sure that science will prove absolutely everything about our weird and occasionally wonderful universe.

I mean, can science really explain the deity that is Justin Bieber?

The True Goals of the ID Movement

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-ruse/charles-darwin-and-adolf_b_601718.html

(And why you can't blame evolution for the Holocaust)

From Michael Ruse:

You could make a good case for saying that Intelligent Design Theory (IDT) started two and a half thousand years ago with Socrates, because it was he who first thought up the Argument from Design to prove the existence of God. The world is too complex and functional to be the product of blind, unguided laws of nature, the argument goes. Hence there must be another reason, an intelligence that we can call "God." The modern form of IDT started in 1991 with Darwin on Trial by now-retired law professor Phillip Johnson. This was followed later in the decade by Darwin's Black Box, by Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, and then by The Design Inference by mathematician and philosopher William Dembski. It was argued that certain aspects of the world, the world of organisms particularly, exhibit an "irreducible complexity" -- the flagellum of bacteria was a favorite example -- that and the only satisfactory explanation is a guiding, intervening intelligence. This argument asserts that the Darwinian theory of evolution through natural selection is just wrong.

IDT is not straightforwardly a variant of traditional American creationism. For a start, although Young Earth Creationists represent supporters of IDT who believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old, other IDT proponents, notably Behe, are very comfortable with the generally accepted ages of 15 billion years for the universe and about 4.5 billion for the Earth. However, there are links between IDT and creationism to the extent that some (myself included) refer to it as "Creationism Lite." In a devastating critique, Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, philosopher Barbara Forrest and scientist Paul Gross showed just how deeply IDT is entwined with an evangelical Christian agenda. Moreover, IDT is pushed as a front for a very conservative social program -- anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, pro-capital punishment, and anti-feminism. (I used to wonder why Phillip Johnson was so obsessed with cross-dressing. I really don't think that Richard Dawkins goes home and slips into a bra and panties. Then someone pointed out to me that the real target is stroppy broads in pant suits -- think Hilary Clinton meeting world leaders.)

IDT has had a somewhat mixed second decade. In the first part of the 1990s it did really well, aided especially by the support of the conservative Discovery Institute, a think tank in Seattle. But then the forces of science started to fight back seriously. First-class books refuting IDT were published, notably Brown University biologist Ken Miller's Finding Darwin's God, which shows just how threadbare are the scientific pretensions of IDT, and Michigan State University philosopher Robert Pennock's The Tower of Babel, which did the same on the philosophical front. As is well know, in 2005 the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania wanted IDT introduced as part of the biology curriculum in their schools; after a much-publicized trial the judge, a conservative Christian appointed by George W. Bush, wrote a scathing condemnation of the board's actions.

However, it would be silly to think that IDT has just curled up and died or gone away. It is still cherished in the hearts of many American evangelicals, and recently it has even been making inroads in the most respectable of circles. For instance, in my own field of philosophy the leading philosopher of religion, just-retired Alvin Plantinga, has long been sympathetic to its claims. (Even though he worked at Notre Dame University he is a Calvinist, which makes his sympathy for IDT all the more surprising given Calvin's insistence on the rule of law down here in God's creation). Now, the no-less-leading social philosopher from New York University, Thomas Nagel, has come out in favor of teaching IDT in schools. He has endorsed a recent book by Discovery Institute associate Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, naming it in the Times Literary Supplement as one of the top books of 2009.

I don't here want to go back over the criticisms of IDT as science. I really just don't see anything new that needs saying on that front. And in an earlier blog I drew attention to what seem to be grave theological problems with IDT. Namely, if you get God involved on an ongoing basis in the creative process, then although He deserves praise for the good things, He also walks right into criticism for the horrendously bad things, like deleterious mutations that cause lifelong suffering and pain. However, I do want to draw attention to a different tactic that is now employed by IDT supporters: trying to tar Darwinian natural selection theory with the sins of National Socialism. There is a direct line, so we learn, from Charles Darwin to Adolf Hitler. As some have tried to pin the blame on Martin Luther, so now the blame is being pinned on the author of the Origin of Species. From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, by Discovery Institute associate Richard Weikart, is a prime example, although if you go to Amazon.com you will see that there are others. In like vein, the movie Expelled, featuring former New York Times columnist Ben Stein, made the connection a major story theme.

Prima facie, you might think that there is something to all of this. If you look at Charles Darwin's Descent of Man, published in 1871, you will find some pretty conventional Victorian ideas about the races. At the other end, if you look at Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, you will find some passages that do seem to draw on Darwinian theory: "Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live."

Now, let me say, speaking now as a historian of ideas, I don't think you can or should say definitively that there are no links. Apart from anything else, something had to lead to Hitler and the Nazis, and if you eliminate Luther and eliminate Darwin and eliminate -- well, you know the tune -- then you end up with no causes at all leading to the horrendous movement that overtook Germany in the 1930s. I would be very surprised if the anti-Semitism of Christianity and the racism of the nineteenth century had no causal role. However, before you rush to conclude that the IDT crew is correct and that significant links can be found between Darwin himself and Hitler, there are a number of points that should be considered.

First, the members of the Darwin family were fanatical anti-slavery campaigners. In the early part of the nineteenth century, when the young Darwin was growing up, this was the family obsession. And it rubbed off on him. On the voyage of the Beagle, he had a horrendous row with his captain, Robert Fitzroy, over slavery in South America. And during the American Civil War he was a strong supporter of the North, precisely because of the slavery issue (many Brits supported the South because of the links with the cotton trade). Descent of Man, for all that it did reflect the concerns of a middle-class Victorian gentleman, was no clarion call to racial superiority. Darwin was explicit that when the races met and (as so often was the case) the non-Europeans suffered, it came not from intellectual or social superiority but because non-Europeans caught the strangers' diseases and suffered and died.

Second, while it is true that many used Darwin's ideas to promote specific social policies, and that some used them to promote aggression -- the pre-World War One German general Count Friedrich von Bernhardi argued strongly for the moral imperative of Germany fighting and destroying competitors -- there were others who promoted very different ideas. The co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, was an ardent socialist and feminist in the name of Darwinism. The Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin argued for anarchy in the name of Darwin. And Vernon Kellogg, associate of then future president Herbert Hoover, argued for pacifism on Darwinian lines. Wars kill the best and brightest and that is biologically stupid.

So you can argue that Darwinism, a bit like Christianity, supported a plethora of quite contradictory positions. This being so then, a bit like Christianity, one might ask just how genuine and important was the support being offered. There was a propaganda value, true. But genuine links are another matter. (I should say that since I am criticizing the IDT folk for thus tying Darwin to Hitler, I am no less critical of Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion tying Jesus to Hitler. The truth, as always, is much more complex than it appears in such simplistic analyses.)

Finally, when you turn to Hitler himself, the story is murky. To put the matter politely, he was not a well-educated man. There is no evidence he studied Darwin's writings or much about them. At most, he was picking stuff up off the street or from the barroom or from the doss house where he lived in Vienna before the War. And when you look at Mein Kampf in more detail, the story seems less straightforward. Just before the apparently Darwinian sentiments quoted above, he wrote: "All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning." What he is really on about is the Jews. Darwin would have been appalled at such a connection.

So take my advice. Reject IDT as bad theology, bad philosophy, and bad science. And while you are at it, reject it as bad history. Charles Darwin was not to blame for Adolf Hitler.