The history of the Science vs Religion Myth

From The Gospel Coalition:

Ronald Numbers grew up as the son of a fundamentalist Seventh-day Adventist minister, attending Adventist schools and being taught young-earth creationism until adulthood, where he lost his faith and became an agnostic. Today he is perhaps the world’s leading scholar on the history of the relationship between science and religion.

If you were to ask Professor Numbers for the “greatest myth” about the historical relationship between science and religion, he would respond that it’s the idea the the two “have been in a state of constant conflict.”

Timothy Larsen, a Christian historian who specializes in the nineteenth century, agrees: “The so-called ‘war’ between faith and learning, specifically between orthodox Christian theology and science, was manufactured . . . . It is a construct that was created for polemical purposes.”

If these two historians—one an agnostic, one a confessional Christian—both agree this is a manufactured myth, then who is to blame for inventing it?

That distinction falls to American scholars from the nineteenth century: (1) Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), the founding president of Cornell University, and (2) John William Draper (1811-1882), professor of chemistry at the University of New York.

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Is Transgenderism based on science?

From Dr. Margaret Hagen

In recent months, there has been an explosion of highly controversial legislation, threatened executive edicts, and heavy-handed federal mandates regarding discrimination and public accommodation laws that require—among other things—public and private institutions, businesses, and schools to allow biological males who self-identify as females to use the toilet facilities and locker rooms of females (and vice versa). These developments have been accompanied by a chorus of pundits and editors expressing derision for “bigoted” opponents and cheerleading the valiant proponents of “transgender equality.”

What is missing from the conversation about these laws is any sound legal or scientific basis for the proposed changes. Who, exactly, are the groups who are supposed to be protected or accommodated? On what legal basis are those groups to be protected or accommodated? What are the consequences and implications for the larger society?

The Spectra of Nonconforming Sexuality

Lawmakers and commentators should grasp the variety of people who claim to be “nonconforming” to American understandings and expectations of sex and gender before leaping into action on their behalf. A continuing legal education program held recently in Massachusetts taught participants that nonconformists fall on various places on five different spectra of being, expression, and attraction:

1. Sex: “The sex you were assigned by the doctor in the hospital” at birth. Sex is either Male or Female—a binary distinction.

2. Gender Identity: The sex you know yourself to be. Gender is also Male or Female, but is a spectrum, not binary.

3. Gender Expression: A characterization of how you dress, talk, style your hair, accessorize, use makeup, and so on, which is described as being more or less Masculine or Feminine.

4. Sexual Orientation: The sexual attraction you experience, whether to those of the same sex, opposite sex, or people of both sexes.

5. Affectional/Emotional Orientation: The pattern of romantic attachments you form; whether you tend to “fall in love” with and  seek emotional closeness with men, women, both, or persons who see themselves as somewhere between or beyond the categories of male and female.

While there is no consensus even among transgender people on these distinctions and definitions, it seems abundantly clear that modern discrimination law based on dividing people into various subgroups is going to be under severe stress within such an extremely complex scheme. Is it possible or desirable for people with widely different types of “nonconformism” to be treated as a single identifiable group?

While the application of discrimination law to a particular individual can involve a complex analysis, “Nonstandard Sexuality” would be a protected group that truly makes a mockery of our already risible “protected” categories. Who, specifically, within the spectral clusters of nonconformist sexuality, is to be protected from discrimination? Should, for example, the simple desire to cross-dress place a man into a legal category of citizen “protected” against discrimination, or require businesses and institutions to accede to his request to use women’s facilities?

Full Article

A privileged species

Documentary from the Discovery Institute:

Cheer up Bill Nye, I don’t think you are just a speck

Bill Nye insists that he is just a meaningless speck, living on a speck, surrounded by other specks. Don’t despair Bill, neither science nor revelation agrees with you.

Americans, lawmakers, sometimes ignore or overrule science. That’s a good thing.

From Dr. Adam Seagrave

The feature article of the March issue of National Geographic attempts to explain the results of a January 2015 Pew Research Center report that demonstrates how many Americans seem to be out of step with the triumphal march of modern science. Not only are decreasing percentages of the American public expressing positive stances toward science in general, but many are rejecting outright the scientific consensus on several key issues. When it comes to topics such as evolution, climate change, vaccination, population growth, and GMOs, large numbers of ordinary people in the US seem to think that they know better than the scientific community. How could so many people—a substantial number of them highly educated, no less—be so backward?

According to the article’s author, it’s because “the scientific method leads us to truths that are less than self-evident, often mind-blowing, and sometimes hard to swallow.” “The scientific method is a hard discipline,” requiring us to repress the “naïve beliefs” to which we tend to cling like a child does to a tattered and useless blanket. “Science tells us the truth rather than what we’d like the truth to be,” jolting us awake from our intuition-induced and religion-reinforced stupor. The conclusion to which the author is led is that “scientific thinking has to be taught.” Ordinary Americans must be dragged out of the cave of naïve pre-scientific thinking and brought into the light of day where they can see and understand what scientists have been trying to tell them.

Scientist-Kings?

The cave analogy is particularly apt here, for the argument represented in this article (and repeated in many other places) is not merely that science is valuable because it furthers our understanding of the world in which we live. The scientific method that characterizes the scientific profession is, in fact, the onlyway to really understand the world in which we live, and as such should be “our only star and compass” (to paraphrase Locke) when formulating public policy. Science education isn’t important the way taking a child to a local discovery museum is important; it’s important the way Plato’s philosopher-king is important.

The crux of the argument is far from new, and was put best by Plato millennia ago:

Until [scientists] rule as kings in their cities, or those who are nowadays called kings and leading men become genuine and adequate [scientists] so that political power and [science] become thoroughly blended together . . . cities will have no rest from evils . . . nor, I think, will the human race.

Of course, Plato speaks of “philosophers” rather than scientists, but in the self-presentation of modern science these amount to the same thing. “Science” simply means “knowledge,” and “wisdom”—the Greek “sophia,” from which we get “philosopher”—means knowledge of the highest things or of the whole. And so we are brought to the real exposed nerve of the modern scientific method and the myriad modern scientists it has spawned: namely, that this scientific method presents itself as the way of knowing absolutely everything there is to know. Of course, the ultimate goal of knowing everything may never be reached—the same way “philosopher” means “lover of wisdom,” not “possessor of wisdom”—but the scientific method is offered to us as the only avenue of approach to this goal.

As the modern guardians of all knowledge, scientists wield a tremendous amount of power. And like Plato’s philosopher-kings, some scientists have engaged in the dissemination of “noble lies” for the purpose of aligning public policy with their judgments of what is desirable for all of us. As the author of the National Geographic article admits, even scientists are susceptible to “confirmation bias,” or the tendency to tailor their interpretations of the evidence to the theories and predilections they unavoidably bring to their work. Scientists are human beings too, subject to precisely the same “will to power” Nietzsche ascribed to philosophers.

This danger has become evident in recent years in the cases of embryo science and climate change. In the case of embryo science, as is shown in a 2006 exchange Patrick Lee and Robert George had with Lee Silver, it is clear that at least some policy-minded scientists distorted key scientifically-established facts in order to further the political agenda of embryonic stem cell research. And in the case of climate change, the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University has been twice embroiled in scandal over the release of numerous emails that clearly belie the usual story of an objective scientific consensus on the issue.

Power corrupts and knowledge is power, and so it should come as no surprise that some scientists succumb to the temptation to use their position as the gatekeepers of knowledge to further their political influence. Political influence, moreover, often translates into economic advantage, another universally potent motivator for human beings. Dishonest scientists exist and should be exposed; but what of the many honest, competent scientists? Should they be treated as scientist-kings?

Can Science Know Everything?

Science is often juxtaposed with religious belief in popular discourse as the two primary—and opposed—pathways to understanding the world. Religious believers argue that the scientific method runs up against a limit in its quest to know everything, and that this limit marks the starting point of faith. Scientists tend to bridle at this proposed limitation. Perhaps this is because the objects of religious belief—God, Heaven, Hell, the Devil, Angels, etc.—would, if they did exist, obviously be more important and compelling than the objects of scientific knowledge.

I would argue, though, that this sort of argument regarding the limitations of the modern scientific method already concedes far too much to scientific pretensions. One need not even go beyond the realm of mundane, ordinary, everyday human life to see clearly that the reach of modern scientific knowledge stops well short of what is most important to human beings. Modern science might have the teeth, and certainly the roar, of a T-Rex, but it also has its arms.

Take the recent movie Gravity. This film provided the most stunning widely-viewed visual depiction ever seen of outer space, perhaps the most widely intriguing object of modern science. The stars of the movie, though, were not the actual stars, but, rather, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. Nor, moreover, were Bullock and Clooney of interest because of any of their scientifically-accessible features, such as the physical composition of their bodies, the chemical reactions going on inside them, or their medical health.

Bullock and Clooney were of interest because of their relationship with each other, their relationships with those they had left behind on Earth, and their relationships with themselves. They cared about each other. They experienced happiness, despair, hope, and love. When Clooney’s character was lost, much more had been lost than his physical-chemical existence; he even reappeared to save Bullock’s life after this scientifically-analyzable aspect of his existence was presumed to be long gone.

There is a reason why these elements of the movie were the most compelling ones to most viewers, and it’s not that most viewers are “naïve” and deficient in scientific education. Things like happiness and love are simply much more important to human life than astronomy and astrophysics, as “mind-blowing” as these undeniably are. People care much more about being happy, finding love, fighting for justice, and securing peace than they do about the chemical composition of the atmosphere—and they should. The scientific method can certainly tell us quite a bit about the physical, chemical, or otherwise material epiphenomena surrounding the things that are most important to our lives as human beings, but it can’t even begin to analyze or understand these things in themselves.

Upon seeing a loved one, for example, there are all sorts of scientifically measurable and analyzable chemical and physical changes in one’s body. These changes captured by the scientific method and understood by the scientist, though, aren’t themselves the love that is experienced. If one remains steadfast in claiming that such scientifically accessible properties are in fact constitutive of love, then one is merely claiming that what we mean to signify by the term “love” doesn’t exist—a claim that is ridiculous on its face. And such is the case even more clearly for more abstract concepts such as justice or peace. Because these things aren’t made of stuff that the scientific method can get its hands on, does that mean they don’t exist? Or that we can’t know anything about them?

Science and Public Policy

This brings us back to the puzzlement of the National Geographic article’s author, who cannot comprehend the failure of Americans to allow scientific facts and the various consensuses of scientists to dictate public policy on issues such as climate change, evolution education in schools, GMOs, population growth, or vaccination.

Perhaps it isn’t the ignorance or naiveté of ordinary, non-scientific Americans that prevents them from accepting what scientists tell them; perhaps it’s their knowledge of and experience with realities which they rightfully judge to be more important than the objects accessible to modern science. Perhaps it isn’t that “scientific thinking has to be taught” to non-scientists; perhaps it is scientists who should learn from the rest of us.

Adam Seagrave is an assistant professor of political science at Northern Illinois University and author of The Foundations of Natural Morality: On the Compatibility of Natural Rights and the Natural Law.

Science confirms what everyone else already knew for centuries about gender

From the Telegraph:

In My Fair Lady Professor Higgins sings a song about the difference between the sexes, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” It comes from an amusingly, ludicrously biased male point of view, but I have used it as the title for my new book on the subject to remind us that the differences between men and women remain a major issue.

I am a developmental biologist who has studied how embryos develop from the fertilised egg. Genes control the development of the embryo by providing the codes for making proteins, which largely determine how cells behave.

The cells in the human embryo give rise to the structure and function of our brains and bodies. These cells determine whether we are male or female, and I want to understand the extent to which important differences in the behaviour of men and women are controlled by their genes during development and by the action of hormones both in the womb and in later life.

Exactly how different men and women are is, of course, a controversial subject. The view that there are inborn differences between the minds of men and women is being challenged by others who call this the pseudoscience of “neurosexism”, and are raising concerns about its implications. They emphasise instead social influences, such as stereotyping, in determining the differences in the behaviour of the sexes.

^{The development of the brain leads to many sex differences, says Lewis Wolpert (Chris Martin)}

It has been suggested by Deborah Cameron, professor of language and communication at Oxford University, in her book The Myth of Mars and Venus“that some writers on this subject can be thought of as latter-day Galileos, braving the wrath of the ‘political correctness’ lobby by daring to challenge the feminist orthodoxy which denies that men and women are by nature profoundly different”. Cameron also recounts how Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge University, set aside his bookThe Essential Difference for several years because “the topic was just too politically sensitive”. In recent years the politically correct argument has emphasised social causes to such an extent that it has sometimes virtually ignored our genetic inheritance and the role of genes. I have set out to look at the important biological evidence we may have been ignoring.

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From Darwin to Hitler (the mini-documentary) featuring Historian Richard Weikart

A few years ago, I read Historian Richar Weikart’s fascinating book From Darwin To Hitler, tracing the origin of Nazi ideology to Darwinian biological and social ethics.  A 14 minute documentary of the story concerning Darwinism and the first world war (Second Reich) is now available online:

 

Former atheist and Cornell Geneticist Dr. John Sanford on Darwinism and the Genome

Here’s an interview with him

“The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.” But the snowflake says…

Breathtaking.  Begs the simple profound question, why should there be something like this in this world?  Why the detail? Why the beauty? Why the diversity?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/03/alexey-kljatov_n_4373888.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false

 

How are intelligent design and creationists interpreting the recent “baffling” fossils in Georgia?

The recent “baffling” fossil discovery in Georgia (not pecan pie Georgia) has many evolutionary paleontologists perplexed (a mixture of human-like fossils from thought to be different ancestry lines and years all discovered in the same place). But what are intelligent design and creationist scientists making of this discovery?

The baffling discovery of DNA evidence that does not fit with current theories of human evolution is causing scientists to rethink the whole story of human biological development, Juan Luis Arsuaga, a paleoanthropologist at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, told The New York Times this week.

The Times, interviewing only believers in Darwinian evolution, reported the retrieval of ancient human DNA from a fossil dating back about 400,000 years. The fossil came from a cave in Spain where 28 nearly complete skeletons have previously been found. Since researchers believe all 28 of the skeletons are from the Neanderthal species, they expected the new fossil would also be a Neanderthal. Much to their surprise, DNA analysis suggests the fossil is of Denisovan origin.

This finding perplexes evolutionists who believe the Neanderthals lived in Asia and Western Europe, while Denisovans were thought to be limited to East Asia, nearly 4,000 miles from the cave where the fossil was discovered in Spain. Since it is doubtful that a Denisovan could have traveled that far, evolutionists have no explanation for the presence of a Denisovan fossil among the Neanderthals.

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Sherry Turkle on Being Alone Together | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

“What concerns me as a developmental psychologist is watching children grow in this new world where being bored is something that never has to be tolerated for a moment.”

Sherry Turkle on Being Alone Together | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com.

The Truth about Truth in Science; or Science as Religious Dogma

Kant may have placed science in a separate category of knowledge; one where Truth is discoverable, unlike knowledge gleaned from ethics or religion.  But, as Thomas Kuhn pointed out in his book Structures of Scientific Thinking, reality about Truth in science is quite muddled.  Henry Gee, senior editor of the journal Nature, writes about this issue in The Gaurdian.  An excerpt:

All scientific results are in their nature provisional – they can be nothing else. Someone will come along, either the next day or the next decade, with further refinements, new methods, more nuanced ways of looking at old problems, and, quelle surprise, find that conclusions based on earlier results were simplistic, rough-hewn – even wrong.

The problem is that we (not the royal we, but the great unwashed lay public who won’t know the difference between an eppendorf tube and an entrenching tool) are told, very often, and by people who ought to know better, that science is a one-way street of ever-advancing progress, a zero-sum game in which facts are accumulated and ignorance dispelled. In reality, the more we discover, the more we realise we don’t know. Science is not so much about knowledge as doubt. Never in the field of human inquiry have so many known so little about so much.

If this all sounds rather rarefied, consider science at its most practical. As discussed in Dr McLain’s article and the comments subjacent, scientific experiments don’t end with a holy grail so much as an estimate of probability. For example, one might be able to accord a value to one’s conclusion not of “yes” or “no” but “P<0.05”, which means that the result has a less than one in 20 chance of being a fluke. That doesn’t mean it’s “right”.

One thing that never gets emphasised enough in science, or in schools, or anywhere else, is that no matter how fancy-schmancy your statistical technique, the output is always a probability level (a P-value), the “significance” of which is left for you to judge – based on nothing more concrete or substantive than a feeling, based on the imponderables of personal or shared experience. Statistics, and therefore science, can only advise on probability – they cannot determine The Truth. And Truth, with a capital T, is forever just beyond one’s grasp.

Full article here

 

 

 

We are not our brains

Great review of a book I should read about the theory that all human behavior is mindless.  That is, our choices are perfectly determined by neurological processes, rendering free agency (and therefore, moral culpability) an illusion only.  From William Briggs:

 My nomination for Worst Use of Inference in a Scientific Paper (2009) is “The neural correlates of religious and nonreligious belief” by brain scientist cum philosopher Sam Harris and colleagues. It is a circus of manipulation, hire-wire extrapolations, a midway of rigged scientific-sounding games, and a glittering sideshow lined with colorful lights.

The lights were from a functional magnetic imaging device, or fMRI, an instrument which Sally Satel (psychiatrist) and Scott Lilienfeld (psychologist) in their terrific Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience compare to an automated phrenological machine, a contrivance which when placed in proximity to the skull is purported to reveal all secrets, desires, motivations; even to expose lies and to prove that we are nothing but wet meat machines, mere automatons.

In his three-ring work, atheist Harris puzzled over why anybody would be something as strange as a Christian. Until he hit on the idea that they didn’t have a choice. Their brains made them. The brains of believers and non-believers must be different! He set out to prove this, and by failing to distinguish between kinds of Christians and unbelievers, biased use of stimuli, and by treating believers unbelievers differently within the experiment, his fMRI “confirmed” what he hoped would be true. This delighted the press, which is always seeking to serve up sexy-sounding science which aligns with its conceits.

And there is nothing sexier than brains. Besides the granddaddy neuroscience, reporters are drawing upon the newborn bustling press-releasing fields of neuroeconomics, neuroethics, neuropolitics, neuromarketing, neurolaw, neurophilosophy, and neurotheology; and there’s surely more neurothises and neurothats on the way.

We have learned plenty that is true about the brain, but with the increasing availability and falling prices of gee-whiz instruments and the stampede of researchers into all things brain, we have also “discovered” much that is false. Satel and Lilienfeld caution that “Neuroimaging is a young science, barely out of its infancy” where “the half-life of facts can be especially brief.” Yet experiments are tripping out of labs, all caution forgotten in the desire to be there first.

A good reason for circumspection is that brain research is usually conducted on the WEIRD; or Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, the label Joseph Henrich and colleagues in a 2010 Nature article gave to the college students who form the bulk of experimental subjects (in many fields). Henrich warned that American college kids aren’t representative of the world’s population and that conclusions gleaned from studies will be accordingly over-certain.

Studies also rely on those colorful brain scans which are not, as many think, “photographs of the brain in action in real time. Scientists can’t just look ‘in’ the brain and see what it does. Those beautiful color-dappled images are actual representations of particular areas in the brain that are working the hardest—as measured by oxygen consumption—when a subject performs a task such as reading a passage or reacting to stimuli” or when they go off script and wonder why they volunteered to be squeezed into a claustrophobia-inducing tube and told to lie as “still as a corpse” for over an hour.

This distinction is important because there is no (non-circular) way to check if a person is thinking what he is told, thus it’s only a possibility that the heavy oxygen-using regions are directed toward the specified experimental tasks. The best that can be said is the areas which glow brightly are correlated with the emotional states said to be under investigation—never minding that emotions are difficult to define, extraordinarily complex things. Is the “hate” center of the brain found in one experiment that same “hate” found in another experiment?

And then even the non-glowing regions of the brain seethe with activity. Satel and Lilienfeld quip, “The only truly silent brain is a dead brain.” They recount the now infamous experiment in which Craig Bennett and pals loaded a dead salmon (sushi grade) into an fMRI machine and asked it a series of personal questions. Yes. Behold, “a tiny area in the salmon’s brain flared to life in response to the task.” How? Because those beguiling glows are not pictures of the brain, they are the output of an immensely complex statistical model, one which is capable of falsely crying “Success!” Even worse, the already-manipulated fMRI outputs are further massaged and modeled, perhaps several times as in Harris’s work, before the experiment ends. The uncertainty present in each level of analysis is never carried forward, with the result that conclusions are stated with unwarranted confidence.

These limitations would never be guessed from the glittering prose which touts fMRIs as marketing tools, lie detectors, and identifiers of “brain disease.” Incidentally, the chapter on the science and politics of addiction as “disease” is worth the price of the book alone.

Now it gets strange. Many researchers are curiously anxious to turn fMRIs into exculpation engines. When somebody done somebody wrong, it’s not because they chose sin, it’s because (say) their amygdalae were on the fritz. The amygdala are the pair of pistachio-sized beads smack in the medial temporal lobes of the brain, and there is nothing evil an amygdala cannot do. They have been blamed for men not understanding women, why the brains of conservatives differ from whatever it is progressives carry in their noggins, racism (naturally), that women can spot snakes faster right before they menstruate, why scarier faces are scarier than non-scary faces, and on and on. Withered amygdalae are a sure sign of lack of control and reduced judgmental powers.

So perhaps it won’t surprise you to learn that I had no choice but to write this review. Maybe my amygdalae are over-sized. I didn’t want to write this—I’d rather be out for a walk—but my brain made me do it. Just as yours is making you read these words. Blame my brain for the bad jokes, too, and yours for not laughing at them. Turns out that we’re nothing but slaves to our our brains, the creatures.

Or so say folks like neurolawyers (my term) David Eagleman and Jerry Coyne, Hard Determinists and the Scrooges of neuroscience. (Recall Ebeneezer speculated that Marley was only a vision produced by “a fragment of an underdone potato.”) Hard determinists claim there is no free will, that there is no I in me, that we are nothing but perambulating bundles of chemicals following predetermined courses of action, that everything is guided by immutable, unwilled laws of physics.

Eagleman and Coyne believe that if only people knew they had no choice in their actions, then they would make better choices and thus society would be improved. Yes. They’re especially keen that criminals don’t get their comeuppance because, Coyne says, it is a “false notion that people can choose to do wrong.” They would keep punishment but jettison “retributive justice” which is “scientifically mistaken” and instead embrace “utilitarian punishment.” Makes a difference if the hangman scowls and says, “Take that you despicable rat!” or smiles and says, “It wasn’t really your fault, but we all have our roles to play” as he pulls the lever.

But hold on. If a crook was forced by rogue neurons to murder then isn’t the judge who sentences him to death obeying the irrefragable dictates of his own brain? Neurolaw accounts depressingly are one-sided: it’s the guilty who aren’t guilty and the not-guilty, society and victims, who are really at fault. Where have we heard this before?

Satel and Lilienfeld aren’t buying it. “The question whether humans can live in a material world and yet be morally responsible is not empirically testable. It is not a scientific problem.” And thus not one which can be solved by neuroscience no matter the precision of brain scans.

But you should buy it: the book I mean.

Darwin told us not to trust our eyes; how scientific is that?

From Political Scientist Adam Seagrave at the Public Discourse:

Today professional athletes are almost always evaluated by “scientific,” i.e. statistical, measurements of success and value, but the old-fashioned “eye test” is sometimes still invoked. The eye test refers to one’s impression from actually watching an athlete or team compete, and its results sometimes contradict the armchair judgments of statisticians. Occasionally a player or team may look much better “on paper” than they do in real life—as might happen with a good player on a bad team or a good team in a bad conference—or, of course, vice versa.

The longstanding evolution debate has traditionally pitted proponents of science against proponents of religious belief, battle lines drawn by Darwin himself in his portrayal of evolutionary theory in The Origin of Species. Proponents of religious belief have been joined, moreover, by some noted philosophers (such as C. S. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga) in challenging the modern scientific monopoly on knowledge of the world.

Although science, religious belief, and philosophy are all vital sources of our knowledge of the world and our place in it, they are not in fact exhaustive sources. We also have yet another type of lens: our own two eyes. Before scientific inquiry, philosophical refinement, and even religious belief, the operation of our eyes and other senses first acquaints us with the world around us.

This most literal of lenses, corresponding with the “eye test,” posed a major stumbling block to Darwin’s arguments for his evolutionary theory both inThe Origin of Species and in The Descent of Man. In these works, Darwin clearly struggled with the objection that his theory looked much better “on paper” than it did in real life.

This concern emerges first when we consider Darwin’s case for a universal “struggle for existence,” a concept foundational to his ideas of “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest.”  In Darwin’s vivid words,

We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing around us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey; we do not always bear in mind, that, though food may be now superabundant, it is not so at all seasons of each recurring year.

In classic Debbie Downer style, one can picture Darwin casually ruining an unsuspecting bird-watcher’s day by reminding him that these birds are murderers whose children will be murdered in turn and who, even if they avoid this murderous cycle, will likely die of starvation at some point anyway.

Pessimism aside, though, Darwin is trying to accomplish something crucial and profound in this passage. He wants his reader to look past—or overlook—how we normally “behold the face of nature.”

Darwin is striving to undermine our first impressions of the world by labeling them merely superficial and even grossly misleading; the way the world looks to our ordinary senses is not only different from, but directly contrary to, the way the world actually is. We see peaceful beauty where there is actually ugly warfare. If we want to see the world accurately, we need to take off our natural rose-colored glasses. When it comes to evolution, Darwin argues, the “eye test” leads us astray.

Darwin’s most telling struggle with the “eye test” comes later in The Origin, in his treatment of—what else—the eye itself. Darwin opens a section titled “Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication” with the following admission:

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.

This absurdity, for Darwin, means that “it is indispensable that the reason should conquer the imagination,” and that his theory should overcome the apparent “common sense” of the matter.

At the same time, Darwin admits to feeling “the difficulty far too keenly to be surprised at others hesitating to extend the principle of natural selection to so startling a length.”

Darwin is clearly aware—and bothered by the fact—that his theory of evolution through natural selection is not only unsupported by, but actually contradicts, the reports given to us through our senses, as well as the “common sense” we gain from these reports over time. So he argues, in response, that this common sense is founded on mere “imagination” rather than “reason,” and with a Kantian determination he asks that we repress our “empirical” impressions in favor of our abstract theoretical convictions.

Yet why, we can ask, should we trust Darwin’s theory more than our own eyes? As persuasively as this theory explains many phenomena of nature and archeological discoveries, is its acceptance worth having to admit that the world is actually nothing like our experience of it? If a theory that the earth rests on the shell of a giant sea turtle explained enough phenomena, would it similarly command our assent?

Regardless of whether Darwin is right, the fact remains that we clearly see fixed and distinct species existing in ordered hierarchical beauty, not the fluid and formless continuity his theory depicts. As far as we know from direct observation and recorded history, trees seem to have always been trees, starfish to have always been starfish, squirrels to have always been squirrels, and human beings to have always been human beings. Species appear to have fixed and ordered relationships with one another and to fit together in a rational way, and not to lie on a disorganized continuum.

While this tension between Darwin’s theory and our experience may not be an insurmountable problem—indeed, science has discovered other truths that run more or less counter to common sense (such as the appearance of the sun traveling around the earth rather than vice versa)—it should be given more serious consideration than Darwin, or anyone since, has given it.

After all, some serious philosophers—most notably Aristotle, Aquinas, and Locke—think that all of our knowledge of the world comes initially through our senses. Our eyes and other senses, according to this line of thinking, tend to inform us rather than deceive us.

This is a most sensible (for lack of a better word) position, and remains more plausible than the skepticism Darwin’s theory requires. The assumption that we are ill-fitted to the world we seek to understand is just that, and one much less likely than its opposite. While our senses might not be infallible, there is little reason to think they are outright deceptive. And while we shouldn’t simply reject evolutionary theory because it contradicts our ordinary sensory experience of the world, we should also be wary of committing the opposite mistake.

S. Adam Seagrave is an assistant professor of political science at Northern Illinois University and the managing editor of the journal American Political Thought.

Bio-Ethics scholar Leon Kass on the Gosnell Trial

Excerpt from a piece in the Wall Street Journal by Sohab Ahmari:

[The] appalling details of the Gosnell trial elicit reactions that might be called revulsion or disgust or horror. The word that eminent bioethicist and physician Leon Kass prefers is “repugnance.” This intense human reaction reflects a sort of deep moral intuition, he says, and it is one that deserves much more serious consideration than our too-sophisticated culture allows.

“As pain is to the body so repugnance is to the soul,” Dr. Kass says as we sit down for an interview in his book-lined office at the American Enterprise Institute, where he is the Madden-Jewett Scholar. “So too with anger and compassion. Repugnance is some kind of wake-up call that there is something untoward going on and attention must be paid. These passions are not simply irrational. They contain within them the germ of insight. You cannot give proper verbal account of the horror of evil, yet a culture that couldn’t be absolutely horrified by such things is dead.” . . .

Dr. Kass says his critics misunderstand the role of repugnance in his thinking. “It’s not that repugnance is always right,” he says. “There was once repugnance at interracial marriage, and there have been other repugnancies that turned out to be mere prejudice. But you wouldn’t want to live in a society where people feel no guilt or shame just because guilt and shame are sometimes disruptive—or in a society that doesn’t feel righteous indignation at the sight of injustice.”

Read it all here

“We want to ensure you don’t have another one of those!” Eugenics in Australia

I say again, let society lose its fading memory of the basis for human rights historically in the West (human beings bear the image of God), and you will quite logically end with The Abolition of Man (as C.S. Lewis called it).  Shocking story from Australia.  I’d like to personally thank First Things for making this a free read.  Intro:

I belong to a very ordinary Australian family, albeit with two obvious differences. First, compared with the stereotypical sports-loving, tough Aussie, some of us are quite weak and physically frail, thanks to a mutant gene. Second, my family has resisted the secularism that is a dominant feature of modern Australian life.

I believe it is no accident that we preserved our Christian profession. One reason ill-mannered New Atheist attitudes gained little traction among us is that Christian theism provides a secure footing for our family in a darkening world, which, thanks to the recent proliferation of “genetics counseling” clinics in modern hospitals, is increasingly hostile toward the congenitally weak and imperfect.

Although my form of brittle bone disease (OI, osteogenesis imperfecta)is quite mild, I experienced some fifteen or so fractures in my youth. My high school classmates gave me such winsome nicknames as “Fragile Phil” and “Brittle Burcham.” OI also affects one’s hearing: Wearing bulky hearing aids from age thirteen did little for the machismo of a teenage boy coming of age in 1970s Australia.

After marrying my wife in the United States on completion of my postdoctoral studies, we returned to Australia, where our daughter was born a few years later. One day, our petite ten-month-old infant was trying to pull herself up using a chair leg for support. My wife heard a popping sound and a whimper as she flopped back onto the floor. X-rays indicated she had snapped a tibia.

Upon learning of the disorder affecting my family, the emergency-room staff in the local children’s hospital told us about a gifted doctor who knew a lot about OI. I was keen to meet the doctor, given my positive memories of the orthopedic surgeons who cared for me in childhood. A pharmacologist by training, I also knew that the bisphosphonates—a class of drugs developed for osteoporosis sufferers—were then being tested on OI patients. I hoped the doctor would know if they might help our daughter.

We found the doctor had little interest in the clinical management of pediatric OI patients and knew little of bisphosphonate pharmacology. The doctor and attending nurse initially engaged us in chatty small talk, but their intentions soon became clear: They wanted to know whether we hoped to have another baby. After my wife said we did, exasperated grimaces passed between them.

“If that is the case,” the doctor replied, turning toward me, “we will need to obtain blood samples from some members of your extended family to allow DNA testing.” Fearing my family might be reluctant to participate in a research project, I naively asked why the genetic data was required. Waving a dismissive hand toward our daughter, who until this point had tried her darndest to win the doctor’s attention with coy smiles and giggles, this gifted physician who knew so much about the disease abruptly replied, “We want to ensure you don’t have another one of those!”

Read the rest here

The Left’s War against Science

According to many, especially among the secular and liberal cultural elites, the arrow runs only one way.  Conservatives and evangelicals have been engaged, we are told, in an ongoing “war” against modern science (science defined as acceptance of Darwinian evolution, global warming, and embryonic stem cell research).  Despite evidence to the contrary, I simply want to point out in this post that it is rather easy to make the case that liberals too are blatantly guilty of readily dismissing or denying hard empirical data when even well-established facts don’t fit their ideological dogma.  Here are a few examples:

The impact of traditional family breakdown:

One of the most well-established empirical facts in the study of sociology, family and parenting, socio-psychology, political science, education studies, criminology, etc. is the relationship between the well-being of children raised in traditional or nuclear families versus those raised in alternative family arrangements.  Many times on this blog, I’ve pointed to this evidence, so I’m not going to do so again here.  But whether we are talking criminal behavior, poverty, health, educational performance, mental disorders, satisfaction with life, and other measures of social and personal well-being, the most important variable, cause, or factor is routinely the breakdown or nuclear family.  There aren’t even any close seconds.   But these facts don’t fit the liberal narrative, dogma, faith, that families are utterly malleable, kids utterly adaptable, all you need is love, there is no such thing as the “ideal” family design, fathers are unnecessary, marriage is unnecessary, gender roles in parenting are meaningless, there is no “right way” to raise kids, etc.  So, it appears that even when the facts and principle causes of so many social problems (or social “injustices”) that so trouble the left are perfectly clear, they are simply ignored or explicitly denied if they get in the way of an ideological narrative.  When empirical evidence meets dogma, in this case, the left does precisely what they accuse the right of doing, they stick their head in the sand or jam fingers in their ears.  Ironic? Yes.  Hypocritical?  True.  But most importantly, sad, because millions of suffering children are the result.  In many ways, this fact denying behavior is far more consequential than whether high school science textbooks describe human evolution as scientific fact or just a theory.

The reality of differences between genders:

The science is pretty doggone clear that real, significant, persistent differences in men and women exist.  From virtually every field, psychology and psychiatry, sociology and anthropology, anatomy and physiology, the evidence is overwhelming.  Even the secular left’s favorite theory of everything, evolutionary socio-biology and evolutionary anthropology, explains these theses stubborn (plainly obvious too) differences as perfectly normal, a natural part of the way humans survive and thrive.  But none of this matters because none of this works well with the dogma that men and women are interchangeable in society, families, parenting, the workplace, military, and so on.  When the belief or goal of a gender-blind society conflicts with established empirical and scientific fact, which does the left choose to give up?  Do they just objectively follow the facts or ignore, deny, dismiss them for the sake of an ideological paradigm and agenda?

The physiological nature of the unborn:

Early on in the abortion debate, the defenders of abortion argued that abortion can’t be wrong if the fetus is just a blog of undeveloped tissue.  When advances in medical technology and biological research began to yield clear evidence that this description was simply untenable, that instead, the fetus is far more developed at earlier stages than originally thought, did the pro-choice left bow the knee to science or stick to dogma?  You guessed it.  Their argument simply changed from it’s not life or it’s not human to it’s not a person or it’s not a person with rights that trump those of the mother, so it can be a person “worth sacrificing.”  Take a seat science, we’ll call you when we need you.

I’m not saying that conservatives are never reluctant believers in scientific consensus.  I’m only saying that many of us are, regardless of worldview persuasion, when that consensus or evidence doesn’t fit our most cherished beliefs.

The Enlightenment as parasitic on Christianity

I’ve lectured on American politics for several  years now.  It is always a delight to expose students to an understanding of Western civilization that they are utterly ignorant of, probably won’t hear even in many political science classes, and yet one that is utterly historical (for a taste, see my blog posts here, here, here , here, here and here).  The usual narrative is that liberal democracy, modern science, human rights, universal education, treatment of women, disestablishment of religion, are all byproducts of an enormous rescue mission spearheaded by brave secular intellectuals working and writing during a period collectively known as the Enlightenment.  Until that time, the mythology goes, the world was thrown into a religious dark age… and then there was light, and the light was the light of Reason and Reason was the light to men and Reason dwelt among us and so on.  But historians of  the history ideas know better.  From modern science to liberal democracy to separation of church and state, the values that Westerners cherish find their root firmly in Christian soil.  Brian Mattson has a blog post about this here:

I’ve been known to ascribe the supremacy of the Western world in just about every disciplinary metric to the Judeo-Christian worldview, or “Christendom,” for short. Whether it is law and justice, human dignity and value, science and technology, I maintain that the astonishing success of the Western experiment is due to distinctively Christian values.

I do not intend to prove this assertion in a blog post. Volumes would be required and, thankfully, volumes have been written. Well, that’s a link to at least one, anyway. There are many others.

But I do want to address a common objection to this point of view. Any time I’ve writtenan article along these lines, I hear this objection. I notice that Carl Trueman met this objection in a recent debate with an atheist.

It is this: Isn’t the success of Western values, science, and technology due to the philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment, rather than Christendom?

It is a powerful objection on the surface. I don’t think there is any real question that, for example, the Founding Fathers of the United States were to a significant degree influenced by the Enlightenment. It is John Locke, after all, to whom we owe our allegiance to the specific language of “the laws of nature and nature’s God.” The rise of rationalism and empiricism would seem on its face a serious “fly in the ointment” to my point of view.

So what about that? Is Western supremacy due to Enlightenment rationalism?

Only if you’re content to read things off the surface and assume the conventional myth of the so-called “Dark Ages” instead of digging deeper. The “rather than” assumes a radical ideological disjunction between Christendom and the Enlightenment, the former representing darkness, the latter representing light. I do, actually, think there is an antithesis between the two; but there are some important commonalities often overlooked. Here are some questions leading to my answer.

Why is it that when I read Rene Descartes, the father of Enlightenment philosophy, his first item of business after establishing his methodological skepticism is to prove rationally the existence of God? Why did he think that was important?

Why is it that when I read Immanuel Kant’s Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reasonhe is so intent on retaining beliefs like human immortality and “God” as an ethical limiting concept? Why was it important for Kant to retain these Christian beliefs and incorporate them, albeit on purely rational grounds, into his philosophy?

Why is it that John Locke sought to establish on purely rational bases, time and again, distinctively Judeo-Christian ideas? It is silly to think his views on, say, private property, sprang fully formed ex nihilo  from his brain. There was already some conviction, born of the Western Legal Tradition and the 6th Commandment, inscribed on his “tabula rasa.“

Why did Hegel build his Idealism around an aberrant doctrine of the Trinity? Why Christian categories at all?

My simple answer to these questions, and surely much more remains to be explored, is that these Enlightenment philosophers did not want to jettison wholesale what Christendom bequeathed to them. They loved the rule of law, human dignity and freedom (leaving aside the significant asterisk of *slavery), and scientific dominion over creation. There is no question that they wanted to jack up Christendom’s house and pour a new foundation. “Reason” would be the concrete rather than revelation, of course.

But regardless of whether their new foundation was sound in the end (still today a matter of great debate), to me the significant observation is that, in the main, they wanted very much to retain the house.

The Enlightenment is thus a parasitic movement. On many important philosophical questions it pursues the exact same ends as the worldview it allegedly rejects (how else do you explain Descartes’ arguments for the existence of God or Kant’s arguments for immortality?). But it tries to get there by another route.

This means the house, as it exists, belongs to Christendom. The Enlightenment is a movement of squatters. And the efforts of the squatters to dig a new foundation are irrelevant, at the end of the day, because on so many of the important topics people care about (natural law, scientific discovery, individual freedom and dignity) they were still trying to reproduce Christendom’s house. They wanted all the benefits of the Judeo-Christian legacy without all the “revelation” stuff. But that fact alone is more telling than any arguments I could actually produce for all the “revelation” stuff.

The success of the Western experiment is due to Christendom, and to those seeking to reproduce, in many ways, Christendom in the laboratory called “Pure Reason.” It is not a “rather than” sort of question, after all. Maybe they wanted a Christendom without Christ. No doubt many of them did.

But imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

There is nothing scientific about Darwinian Materialism. Plus, it’s wrong.

From the Eminent Philosopher Alvin Plantinga on the Eminent Philosopher of Science Thomas Nagel’s new book:

ACCORDING TO a semi-established consensus among the intellectual elite in the West, there is no such person as God or any other supernatural being. Life on our planet arose by way of ill-understood but completely naturalistic processes involving only the working of natural law. Given life, natural selection has taken over, and produced all the enormous variety that we find in the living world. Human beings, like the rest of the world, are material objects through and through; they have no soul or ego or self of any immaterial sort. At bottom, what there is in our world are the elementary particles described in physics, together with things composed of these particles.

I say that this is a semi-established consensus, but of course there are some people, scientists and others, who disagree. There are also agnostics, who hold no opinion one way or the other on one or another of the above theses. And there are variations on the above themes, and also halfway houses of one sort or another. Still, by and large those are the views of academics and intellectuals in America now. Call this constellation of views scientific naturalism—or don’t call it that, since there is nothing particularly scientific about it, except that those who champion it tend to wrap themselves in science like a politician in the flag. By any name, however, we could call it the orthodoxy of the academy—or if not the orthodoxy, certainly the majority opinion.

The eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel would call it something else: an idol of the academic tribe, perhaps, or a sacred cow: “I find this view antecedently unbelievable—a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense. … I would be willing to bet that the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two.” Nagel is an atheist; even so, however, he does not accept the above consensus, which he calls materialist naturalism; far from it. His important new book is a brief but powerful assault on materialist naturalism.

Read the rest here at the New Republic