The "Strange Doctrines" Undercroft

Scientific Imbecile or Craven Panderer?

Or both? We report, you decide.

UPDATE: More at Pharyngula, who includes a politically ecumenical list of those in the anti-antiscience cohort.

Evolution, Genesis and the Jeffersonian Creator (Slight Return)

Mark Kleiman and I had a bit of a back-and-forth via email on this post (Mark's original post is here). With all the advantages of theft over honest toil, I'll reproduce our colloquy here Mark's side of the conversation is in italics). This should make for some fascinating reading on your Sunday morning (this is the early edition, of course):

Of course Jefferson wouldn't have stood with the Bible-thumpers, and of course he'd grasp what evolution is about.  My point was that he found a use for the Genesis story  (which was really no more plausible as science then than it is today, since one version of it had green plants being created before the Sun).  "God created Man" is not, I suggest, a proposition in biology, but in ethics.  I further suggest that many people who worry about "teaching evolution in the schools" aren't ignorant Bible-thumpers. 

I must say that I find it strange that something intended as no more than a plea for tolerance has attracted so much static.

Mark, I may be misunderstanding your argument, but surely it is more than a mere plea for tolerance. One can ask others to "tolerate" a particular viewpoint without adducing an argument that rationalizes that viewpoint, as you have done; it's that argument I am trying to assess (and doubtless the argument that has elicited all the "static" you rue).

As I understand the 18th Century deist view (at least Jefferson's version of it), that "God created Man" entails nothing whatsoever about man. Rather, it is the discernable properties of nature and of man that entail certain (very circumscribed) properties of Nature's God (including the fact that It exists). Hence, that all men are "created equal," and that they enjoy the "inalienable rights" they do, were not inferences drawn from the proposition "God created Man," but were in fact "self evident truths." That's why I think your analogy of Jefferson's language in the Declaration to the moral argument from Genesis is inapposite.

I'm not defending the argument; I'm pointing out that some of its entailments are things that rational people might not want to let go of easily.  Jefferson says that it's "self-evident," not that people have rights because of their observable characteristics, but that they are created equal and endowed by their Creator with such rights.  I'm not analogizing Jefferson's argument to "the moral argument from Genesis;"  I'm claiming Jefferson's argument as an example of an important moral argument that rests on Genesis.

I just don't agree that Jefferson's argument "rests on Genesis" (or more generally depends on divine creation). Even in his own day, Jefferson would I think almost certainly have disagreed with this conditional: "If there is no Creator, then men have no right."

And even if Jefferson would have agreed with it then, I still don't see how that makes the underlying argument intellectually respectable (i.e., "non-foolish") now: Jefferson would have adjusted; so too should all those who want to preserve the old entailments. We have both new wine and new skins.

As to toleration, I'm happy to "tolerate" persons who insist on reciting the totalizing arguments of Christianity as a bulwark against sound science education (so long as they'll "tolerate" my arguments and criticisms to the contrary). I'm also happy to forgo raising the issue sua sponte in mixed company. But I see no reason personally to indulge the fiction that a lay person's resisting the scientific consensus on evolution (for example) is not substantially born of ignorance. Acknowledging that a fig is a fig need not prevent us from fulfilling our duty of tolerance, such as it is.

I'm asserting that a large fraction of the people who come down on the anti-evolution side in polls aren't "resisting the scientific consensus" about biology, but expressing a deeper concern about the moral impact of a certain kind of reductionistic teaching about what human beings are.  You can choose to believe that 60+% of our fellow-citizens are just ignorant boobs, or you can try to figure out what's really bugging them and see if there might be common ground.  The fact that our founding document, written in part by two deists, is much harder to parse without Genesis was intended to illustrate one of the good uses to which the Genesis story can be put.

We're walking past each other in a very narrow hallway:

1. I completely agree that politesse is important if you want to reach the segment of anti-evolutionists who aren't epistemic wantons.

2. Of course I agree we are enriched by certain figurative interpretations of the classic sacred texts. However...

"Figurative," like "metaphorical," is an ambiguous term.  You assume that the biology is real, and that the poetry and the ethics are merely frills and furbelows.  That's not an unreasonable view, but I maintain that it's not the only reasonable view.

3. I don't see how recognizing (1) and (2) defeats the conclusion that anti-evolution sentiment is a product of a lamentable and profound (if in a significant number of cases remediable) ignorance. The broad-strokes literalism that drives it is far more pervasive than you let on in your posts on this topic, and I have yet to meet a theologically liberal Christian who has any serious qualms with teaching evolution to schoolchildren...

That's one place we differ.  The teacher I cite said to me "I don't have any problem with my children learning Darwin, but I find that they're being taught Herbert Spencer."  A younger friend who is a top-rank professor at a top-rank university, and who keeps his Christianity under wraps for fear of damaging his academic career, has the same view.

4. Acknowledging amongst ourselves the ignorance effectively bound up with anti-evolutionist sentiment (and doing so without shouting epithets like "boob" and "Bible thumper"--see (1) above) won't prevent our seeking "common ground" in the existential and moral concerns that naturally preoccupy anti-evolutionists. After all, those concerns preoccupy us, too...

Right. So we should clearly say, "We have a common concern. Let's make sure that biology teachers are sticking to biology and not sneaking in the Social Statics," not "Why the $%$#% are you folks so worried about teaching evolution?"

5. I still don't understand why you contend that the "Creator" clause of the Declaration is "hard to parse without Genesis." It's pretty clear Jefferson treated ethics as independent from cosmogony,* and while Genesis might provide an enriching gloss to the Declaration's text, so too might the battle of Marduk and Tiamet.

Yes, it might.  But in either case an origins myth is being used to make a political point.  You and I might imagine that we can live without such myths, but ordinary folks know they can't.

In closing, let me just state that I'm very skeptical about this idea that incipient Spencerianism is a significant problem here: in all my years of schooling I never once heard the Spencerian line seriously forwarded by a teacher or professor--though I have heard it many times criticized.

That being said, if it is a problem, then if anti-evolutionists draw up an appropriate treaty, I and I'm sure every other evolutionist I know would be happy to sign it.

Evolution, Genesis and the Jeffersonian Creator

Mark Kleiman argues that the Jeffersonian "Creator" mentioned in the Declaration of Independence might provide "non-foolish reasons...for defending the account of human origins in Genesis against those who think that the Darwinian account is right...":

Thomas Jefferson, a deist widely suspected of atheism in his own time, [and] whose own religion was anything but orthodox, nonetheless chose to express his central argument for republican as against monarchical government in terms that assume that human beings are the creations of a Divine Being with specific intentions toward them:

... all men are created equal ... endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights ...

[]

That argument [] doesn't make very much sense without the background idea that humans were created by a deity with specific intentions for them.

God bless Mark Kleiman, I say, but I think this argument is wrong, on at least two levels.

First, an argument lodged more than 75 years before Darwin secures only the flimsiest epistemic support for holding to a like position more than a century after Darwin. We've stood on the shoulders of several giants since Jefferson's time, and Jefferson (were he alive today) would chafe at the suggestion that his argument in the Declaration provides any succor to the irrational musings of contemporary creationists.*

Second, it's not at all clear that the Jeffersonian "Creator" is a personal being in any way relevantly similar to the God of Genesis. Certainly, Jefferson's Creator was conceived by 18th century deists as having power and intelligence. But if the Book of Nature is our only indication of the divine properties, the Creator's specific intentions towards humans are irremediably ambiguous. Without "revealed truth" and the hermeneutic of Original Sin (both of which Jefferson rejected), Jefferson could not have claimed to discern anything of the divine image in human kind: human nature is far too fallible, the divine image far too inscrutable.

(I'll set aside the question of whether the argument from Genesis itself provides a "non-foolish" reason to reject the Darwinian account, since I'm a little late to that party.)

* Actually, Jefferson would have chafed at that suggestion if you'd asked him back in 1776.

"It's the Stay-Puffed Marshmallow Man"

Eugene Volokh responds to Michael Shermer's blog item about evolution and "intelligent design" at the Huffington Post. In particular, Volokh argues:

[H]ow exactly do scientists come to the conclusion that “God had no part in this process [i.e., evolution]”? What’s their proof? That’s the sort of thing that can’t really be proved, it seems to me -- which makes it sound as if scientists, despite their protestations of requiring proof rather than faith, make assertions about God that they can’t prove.

Well, imagine the following exchange:

CHILD: Did the Stay-Puffed Marshmallow Man play a part in evolution?
BIOLOGIST: Er, no.

Would Volokh criticize our biologist for his answer in such a case? I suspect (and hope) not. But if not, then why does the question of God's hand deserve greater deference?

UPDATE: Pharyngula has more. (Via Brian Leiter.)

The Phylogeny of Evil

In an L.A. Times op-ed, David Buss argues that for various evolutionary reasons, "we all have the capacity to become murderers."

(Via Neuroethics & Law Blog.)

Why I Believe In Space Aliens

A film that "makes the case" for a notional, nonscientific "theory" that someone (an "intelligence") made the Earth an the universe is shown in the institution that " represents...the scientific promise of the future."

I just know I wasn't born on this planet.

Delusions of the Fittest

From Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene (as quoted in this article on evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers):

[If deceipt] is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray-by the subtle signs of self-knowledge-the deception being practiced.

We fool ourselves, the better to fool others.

Plants and Dogma

Creationists claim we should teach "both sides" of the evolution "controversy" because Darwinism is "dogmatic."

Poppycock:

Challenging a scientific law of inheritance that has stood for 150 years, scientists say plants sometimes select better bits of DNA in order to develop normally even when they inherited genetic flaws from their predecessors.

The conclusion by Purdue University molecular biologists contradicts at least some basic rules of plant evolution that were believed to be absolute since the mid-1800s.

[]

Other scientists described the result as "spectacular" because it reveals a novel way in which the genome can heal itself.

Whether or not the scientific result here turns out to be right, the sociological aspects of the story point up an important moral for creationists: you're a lot more likely to overturn a scientific law by doing actual science than by lobbying the local school boards.

Intelligent Decline

Intelligent design gets a boost on the New York Times opinion pages, where biologist Michael Behe recapitulates a refrain familiar to connoisseurs of the evolution-creationism "controversy."

Now, I think there is a legitimate place in the Times op-ed for the discussion of intelligent design. Just not as a scientific theory. Times readers aren't equipped to evaluate opinions about a scientific theory, or indeed to determine whether a notion forwarded even counts as a scientific theory (which intelligent design doesn't).

But I trust Times readers are equipped to decide whether a notion about biology that enjoys the support of approximately zero percent of professional biologists be taught to school children as biology.

An op-ed that focused on that issue would be legitimate. Not to mention brief.

Evolutionary Headlines

From Reuters: "Study Suggests Whales May Be Related to Hippos."

Not to be pedantic, but as a straightforward matter, of course whales are "related" to hippos. And badgers are "related" to clams, elephants to gerbils, the hyrax to the jellyfish, the sea horse to the wasp, and all of the above to bacteria.

(Well, okay, that was all just to be pedantic. Obviously, the article discusses the emerging consensus that modern cetaceans are more closely related to hippos than any other living species/order.)