Thoughts in a Haystack

Lord Adonis, an education minister, is to issue guidelines within two months for the teaching of "intelligent design" (ID), a theory being promoted by the religious right in America.

Until now the government has not approved the teaching of the controversial theory, which contradicts Darwinian evolutionary theory, the basis of modern biology.

Adonis said in a parliamentary answer: "Intelligent design can be explored in religious education as part of developing an understanding of different beliefs."

It has emerged that 12 prominent academics wrote to Tony Blair and Alan Johnson, the education secretary, last month arguing that ID should be taught as part of science on the national curriculum.

They included Antony Flew, formerly professor of philosophy at Reading University; Terry Hamblin, professor of immunohaemotology at Southampton University; and John Walton, professor of chemistry at St Andrews University.

Robert Boston, a spokesman for the group, warned against the teaching of ID in Britain.

He said it "could possibly leave an entire generation of people not capable of meeting the scientific challenges of this century".

Everything needs to be explored, so that children can ask sensible questions. Though I see no huge difficulty with exploring intelligent design or creationism or flat Earth, they happen to be misguided, foolish and flying in the face of all evidence. I see no problem with Darwinian theory and Christian faith going hand in hand.

I don’t see why religious education should be a dumping ground for fantasies. If it is claimed that this is a scientific theory, why isn’t it explored in science classes? Its validity or otherwise should be tested against the usual criteria.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Make it illegal to indoctrinate or define children by religion before the age of 16.

In order to encourage free thinking, children should not be subjected to any regular religious teaching or be allowed to be defined as belonging to a particular religious group based on the views of their parents or guardians. At the age of 16, as with other laws, they would then be considered old enough and educated enough to form their own opinion and follow any particular religion (or none at all) through free thought.

... If I had read that, I certainly would not have signed the petition, because, as explained in The God Delusion, I am in favour of teaching the Bible as literature, and I am in favour of teaching comparative religion. In any case, like any decent liberal, I am opposed to the element of government coercion in the wording. Furthermore, the Prime Minister, thank goodness, does not have the power to 'make' anything 'illegal'. Only parliament has the power to do that.

I signed the main petition, because I really am passionately opposed to DEFINING children by the religion of their parents (while 'indoctrination' is such a loaded word, nobody could be in favour of it). I was so delighted to hear of somebody else who cared about the defining or labelling of children by the religion of their parents (how would you react if you heard a child described as a 'seclular humanist child' or a 'neo-conservative child'?) that I signed it without reading on and without thinking. Mea culpa.

... I really do regret signing the petition, and I don't see why that is not regarded as admitting that I was wrong. I regret signing it, and I admit that I was wrong to do so. OK?

I also regret the confusion resulting from the fact that, in my past writings, I have used the word abuse in two different contexts. Both are important. One is the labelling of children with the religion of their parents. The other is terrifying children by threatening them with violence, whether that violence is physical (as in whipping them) or mental (as in telling them they will roast in hell). Both labelling and the threat of hell are potentially abusive. Neither is a necessary part of religious education. I have never said that religious education per se is abusive, nor have I opposed religious education per se.

"Bad Astronomy" by Philip Plait (Wiley, 2002).

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Philip Plait is a California astronomer who evidently became so exasperated with the contemporary warping of science by ideology or just plain ignorance that he wrote "Bad Astronomy" as an antidote. This primer on basic astronomy explains, among much else, why the moon sometimes hits your eye like a big pizza pie (it happens when the moon reaches the perigee of its elliptical orbit and is closest to us). But Plait's astronomical discussions also take on creationism. My favorite part of the book: when he goes after the crowd that claims the Apollo moon landings were a hoax. Years ago, Buzz Aldrin showed one way to deal with this bizarre belief when someone shoved a Bible at him and demanded that he swear he actually landed on the moon; Aldrin decked the guy. Plait achieves the equivalent with words.

As a consequence, NPS staff has no official guidance as to how to answer questions from the public concerning topics such as creationists’ "young earth" claims. Further, media inquiries to the Grand Canyon superintendent seeking an official statement on the geologic age of the Canyon have produced replies such as "no comment" and referral of the reporter to NPS Headquarters.

To quiet the resulting furor, NPS Chief of Communications David Barna told reporters and members of Congress that there would be a high-level policy review of the issue.

According to a recent NPS response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by PEER, no such review was ever requested, let alone conducted or completed.

According to responses PEER obtained from NPS under the Freedom of Information Act, NPS deliberately avoided conducting the review in order to let the controversy die down.

This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.

Evolution stands out alone as the only area of science that is absolutely cordoned off from any criticism; there is a great wall around it and they simply do not admit any dissenting voices. [However,] that [wall] is beginning to crumble a little bit, because inside the camp of Darwin, there is tremendous dissent.

It would be easy to get lost in the meanderings of the filamentary structures or get stuck in the web of the giant arachnid, as is easily experienced with the zoom-in feature provided on the associated photo page, and it is therefore difficult to mention all the unique objects to be discovered. Deserving closer attention perhaps is the area at the right-hand border of the Tarantula. It contains the remains of a star that exploded and was seen with the unaided eye in February 1987, i.e. almost 20 years ago. Supernova SN 1987A, as it is known, is the brightest supernova since the one observed by the German astronomer Kepler in 1604. The supernova is known to be surrounded by a ring, which can be distinguished in the image.

The problem is in gaining a pound or two and not working it off, even with good intentions and New Year's resolutions. The gain stays on and adds up each year; in a decade it's 10 or 20 pounds. That can lead to obesity and related health problems such as hypertension, stroke, diabetes and other maladies.

The key is moderation, Ms. Sandon said. Eating large portions of even healthy foods can prompt weight gain. Even an extra 150 calories per day -- the amount in a 12-ounce soda or a chocolate chip cookie -- can add up to a pound of extra weight in about three weeks.

In a number of our key pro-life things we were defeated – the unborn pain awareness, the Plan B. We got setbacks on intelligent design. A lot of the social issues it was a year we tried to make progress, we had the debates, but we lost.

... it is understandable that books about science and religion sell well and that they have a more tangible political impact than they do in Britain. In this American context, Richard Dawkins’s recent atheistic broadside, The God Delusion, also makes a little more sense. It is really a book to keep up the morale of that embattled 10 per cent of Americans who think God has nothing to do with evolution.

Although Dawkins of course has no truck with "irreducible complexity", one thing that he and his Intelligent Design antagonists agree about is that God’s existence or non-existence is, in Dawkins’s phrase, "a scientific fact about the universe".

Most theologians would want to reject Intelligent Design, along with the theology of The God Delusion, for exactly that reason. For them it is axiomatic that if we are going to talk about God at all, then God is not part of the natural order and should not be expected either to conform to the laws of physics or to feature as another entity in scientific accounts of life or the cosmos. Whatever theology is, it is not the attempt to provide empirical confirmation for "the God hypothesis". Many theologians consequently regard the whole area of science and religion with some suspicion. They fear that this is an academic field entirely built on an outdated view of knowledge that might be described variously as empiricist, scientistic, or foundationalist.

As a historian of science, Gingerich is well aware of the complexities involved in producing scientific and religious knowledge. The debates about Galileo’s support for the new heliocentric astronomy, as Gingerich explains, involved a mixture of empirical evidence, theoretical assumptions and rhetorical persuasion on both sides.

I am almost always left feeling that the question is confused and the answer unconvincing. How do we know whether or not to be surprised by any given configuration of physical constants? Surely any combination is almost infinitely improbable? How, in any case, do we know that these constants are free to vary in the way these arguments assume they are, and are not simply fixed by nature or linked to each other in a way we do not understand? And should the actual existence of trillions of other universes, as opposed to their merely possible existence, really make us any less surprised about the existence and physical make-up of our own (supposing we were surprised in the first place, which honestly I wasn’t)? As Hume’s Philo put it, "having found, in so many other subjects much more familiar, the imperfections and even contradictions of human reason, I never should expect any success from its feeble conjectures, in a subject so sublime, and so remote from the sphere of our observation".

It is suitable testament to Gingerich’s caution that his speculations on this subject are not presented as confirming any scientific or theological hypothesis but come in a chapter entitled simply "Questions without Answers".

The Language of God is aimed at those tens of millions of Americans who still believe that they must choose between the Bible and Darwinism. Collins’s primary ambition is to persuade his fellow Christians away from their commitment to either young-Earth creationism or Intelligent Design. He champions instead a version of theistic evolution which he calls "BioLogos", embracing both God and Darwinism. His attempt to show that there is a "satisfying, enriching, consistent" harmony between his scientific world-view and his personal "surrender" to Jesus Christ will probably persuade few theologians and even fewer scientific atheists. ... Yet this [guitar] strumming, sentimental Christian geneticist will do more to promote the acceptance of Darwinism in modern America than any number of polarizing and polemical atheistic tracts could hope to do.

Neither altruism nor religious experience presents an insurmountable challenge to those seeking entirely naturalistic explanations of human nature, as exponents of the human sciences have been demonstrating for well over a century.

Tremlin tells us that this new theoretical approach to religion "is already proving itself to be the most significant and fruitful approach to the subject ever undertaken". Throughout the rest of the book this disciplinary self-appreciation continues. The writings of Pascal Boyer, Robin Dunbar, Harvey Whitehouse, Tom Lawson, Bob McCauley, Dan Sperber and others in the field of cognitive science are regularly quoted and their research described as extremely valuable, fruitful, exciting and important, but never as contested, problematic, hard to interpret or even open to debate. I am afraid that my reaction to all this is the same as it is to people who phone me up to tell me I have won a free holiday, or who knock on my door to say that I can have a half-price kitchen, but only if I sign up today. If the product is any good, I ask myself, why the hard sell? Can’t I judge for myself how new, exciting and valuable the cognitive science of religion is without constantly being told?

... the origins and function of religion are to be explained not in terms of social utility or cultural transmission (indeed, "cultural relativism" and the "Standard Social Science Model" are among the villains of this story), but primarily in terms of individuals and their brains. Religion, for the cognitive scientist, is primarily about beliefs in supernatural agents, and these are beliefs that originally began "quite naturally in people’s heads" through the activity of the "Agency Detective Device" and the "Theory of Mind Mechanism". The former leads us to infer conscious agency to explain unexpected changes in our environment. The latter seeks to understand agents in terms of beliefs and desires. The result? An almost irresistible natural tendency, embodied in every single human brain in much the same way, to explain natural phenomena as the results of deliberate actions by thinking, feeling, supernatural agents.

... scientific studies of the evolution of the human mind to reinforce and reinterpret Christian teachings about human uniqueness and the imago Dei ... by setting up an extended interdisciplinary dialogue between palaeoanthropology and Christian theology. The key idea is that the "image of God" should be thought of as something that emerges in flesh-and-blood human beings during the course of their evolution. On this account, language use, symbolic thought and religious imagination, along with bipedalism, a large brain and social morality, can all be seen both as fundamental to human uniqueness and also as entirely natural phenomena.

The contributions of a historical tradition of religious writing are just as essential as the natural operations of the human brain. While Tremlin systematically overemphasizes the latter, van Huyssteen’s postfoundationalism avoids exclusive claims for either. What is interesting is that both authors resist the temptation to make hasty inferences from their observations about the naturalness of religious beliefs to a conclusion about either the truth or the falsity of those beliefs.

... most of us assume that all our beliefs – the true ones as well as the false ones – are, among other things, products of an evolved brain. The fact that many writers about science and religion no longer assume that such an observation is a knock-down argument either for or against religious faith is surely a sign of progress in the field of science and religion.

Defendants, their officers, agents, successors, servants, employees, attorneys, and anyone acting in concert with them are enjoined from restoring to the science textbooks of students in the Cobb County schools any stickers, labels, stamps, inscriptions, or other warnings or disclaimers bearing language substantially similar to that used on the sticker that is the subject of this action.

[Defendants] are further enjoined from taking the following actions that would prevent or hinder the teaching of evolution in the School District:

a. making any disclaimers regarding evolution orally, in writing, or by any other means;
b. placing on students’ science textbooks any stickers, labels, stamps, inscriptions, or other warnings or disclaimers referring or relating to evolution or Charles Darwin;
c. placing on students’ science textbooks any stickers, labels, stamps, inscriptions, or other statements relating to creationism, creation science, intelligent design, or any other religious view concerning the origins of life or the origins of human beings;
d. excising or redacting materials on evolution in students’ science textbooks; or
e. violating [Georgia statutes], which requires that local school boards adopt the State Board of Education’s "uniformly sequenced core curriculum as the basis for its own curriculum," including the state’s requirements with respect to the teaching of evolution, and ... which deems each local schoolboard "responsible for ensuring that," among other things, "the uniformly sequenced core curriculum . . . [is] fully and effectively implemented."

This Order is binding on the Cobb County Board of Education and its officers and members in perpetuity, notwithstanding any changes to the Board’s membership that may result from future elections, appointments, vacancies, or other changes to the Board or its composition. ... Defendants are deemed to have submitted irrevocably to the jurisdiction and venue of this Court, and to have waived any objection thereto, for any proceeding to enforce this Order.

Soon after Stalin took power, pictures of his rival Leon Trotsky -- a monumental figure in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions--began to disappear. Heroic and wholly anhistoric paintings of Stalin and Lenin together directing the Bolshevik Revolution took their place, with Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army, nowhere in evidence. These images became icons of the state. You could see them in every office building, on outdoor advertising signs sometimes ten stories high, in museums, on postage stamps.

New generations grew up believing that was their history. Older generations began to feel that they remembered something of the sort, a kind of political false-memory syndrome. Those who made the accommodation between their real memories and what the leadership wished them to believe exercised what Orwell described as "doublethink." Those who did,not, those old Bolsheviks who could recall the peripheral role of Stalin in the Revolution and the central role of Trotsky, were denounced as traitors or unreconstructed bourgeoisie or "Trotskyites" or "Trotsky-fascists,'' and were imprisoned, tortured, made to confess their treason in public, and then executed. ...

In our time, with total fabrication of realistic stills, motion pictures, and videotapes technologically within reach, with television in every home, and with critical thinking in decline, restructuring societal memories even without much attention from the secret police seems possible. What I'm imagining here is not that each of us has a budget of memories implanted in special therapeutic sessions by state-appointed psychiatrists, but rather that small numbers of people will have so much control over news stories, history books, and deeply affecting images as to work major changes in collective attitudes.

We saw a pale echo of what is now possible in 1990-1991, when Saddam Hussein, the autocrat of Iraq, made a sudden transition in the American consciousness from an obscure near-ally -- granted commodities, high technology, weaponry, and even satellite intelligence data -- to a slavering monster menacing the world. I am not myself an admirer of Mr. Hussein, but it was striking how quickly he could be brought from someone almost no American had heard of into the incarnation of evil. These days the apparatus for generating indignation is busy elsewhere. How confident are we that the power to drive and determine public opinion will always reside in responsible hands?

He said he's reluctant to share stories about the party because "the Discovery Institute will say, 'Here's star-struck Judge Jones.'"

But he gives in.

"Stephen Colbert ... was moving quickly (around the room) and he sort of arrived in front of me and he said, 'Judge Jones,' and I started laughing because I think he's funny.

"And I said, 'Stephen Colbert.'

"Then, squinting his eyes, he said, 'Intelligent design: Seemed like a good idea at the time, didn't it?'

"And I said, 'I guess it did.'"

"(Testifying) was daunting and at once exhilarating. I very much enjoyed the back and forth in the courtroom. ... I felt my own testimony went very much better than the opinion reflects.

The one thing I want you to remember, if I leave you with nothing else tonight, is that the Rule of Law is not a conservative or liberal value. It is assuredly not a Republican or Democratic value either; rather, it is an American value. ... The challenge for our time, then, as it relates to the cherished system of justice created by our Founders, is to ensure that threats against judges -- and by implication to judicial independence -- are ratcheted down, and that our independent judiciary is thus preserved.

Linwood Gunn, an attorney for the school board, said the agreement is not an admission that the stickers were unconstitutional, as critics claim.

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"When we started down this road, we were threatened with lawsuits by both sides," Gunn said, noting that some parents did not want evolution taught at all. "The school board attempted to reach what they thought was a reasonable compromise."

The board agreed to pay about one-third of the plaintiffs' court costs, Gunn said.

I am a white Anglo-Saxon male born in late-20th century America—in other words, one of the most privileged beings to walk the earth. And yet insofar as my godlessness is concerned, I am a member of a despised minority. It's like being gay.

I do appreciate the company, and the ammunition in these books [Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation, et al.], and the occasional exchanged glance of solidarity in the bookstore. But I'm just slightly alarmed. The new atheism is pretty hard-core, militantly insisting we challenge religiosity wherever we meet it, or else enable its darker extremist tendencies. In other words, the new atheism is on a quest for conversion. Having insisted on tolerance of our non-faith, Dawkins and Harris' take-no-prisoners orthodoxy would have us be intolerant of others' faith. Oh boy, just when I was beginning to enjoy being an atheist.

I can't bring myself to confront others on the truth-data of their religious beliefs, even if they do involve some strange convoluted myth of Old Testament prophesy and Hellenistic blood cults. I was brought up better than that. Believe what you like, insofar as it does not interfere with my lack of belief. Believe in Thor's mighty hammer, for all I care. Tell me Merry Christmas when I'm coming out of Wal-Mart. And happy holidays right back at ya.

a) We get to see the continuation of the pathetic, but amusing, whining of two alleged adults involved in the soapiest of Geek tragedies;

b) The potential economic benefits flowing from the transfer of several large bribes coming from the various wings of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy, particularly the Clement Attlee "brook no dessert" camp currently in a steel cage of death match with the Anthony Eden "appetizer" faction;

c) Perhaps most importantly, maybe, if the rest of us play our cards just right, we can chivvy them into a nude mud wrestling match for the inevitable sequel to Borat.