Good Stuff

Uberkuh brings us Ehrman on Colbert about Misquoting Jesus.

Daniel Dennett has now reviewed (.pdf) Dawkins' The God Delusion. Also see here for Orac's fisking of the claim that Dawkins has advocated eugenics. Here is some TO stuff on eugenics as an argument against evolution. (HT: Ed Brayton)
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Technorati tags: God, Religion

COTG #54

The 54^th edition of the Carnival of the Godless is up at Hellbound Alleee's.

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Technorati tags: COTG, God, Religion, Philosophy

Lots of Hate Groups Around G'Ville

I've been to places like Putnam County, and so I figured there would be a few dumb hicks putting on the white sheets around here...but man, there are a lot of hate groups in this part of the state...within 1 hour's drive of Gainesville 35 out of the state's total 50!:

HT: PZ
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Technorati tags: Hate Groups

Feeling Festive this Xmas Season

Is using "X", from the Greek upper-case chi, "taking the 'Christ' out of 'Christmas'?" Boy, I hope not. After all, the chi-rho was how early Xians identified themselves. So, in this picture, courtesy Christmas Jesus Dress-up, from Normal Bob Smith, I made sure to leave the Christ in Christmas!

I've already heard the first shots in the war on Xmas...and I heard some Xmas carols, too:

GOD REST YE, UNITARIANS
by Christopher Raible

God rest ye, Unitarians, let nothing you dismay;
Remember there's no evidence
There was a Christmas Day;
When Christ was born is just not known,
No matter what they say,

O, Tidings of reason and fact, reason and fact,
Glad tidings of reason and fact.

Our current Christmas customs come
From Persia and from Greece,
From solstice celebrations of the ancient Middle East.
This whole darn Christmas spiel is just
Another pagan feast,

O, Tidings of reason and fact, reason and fact,
Glad tidings of reason and fact.

There was no star of Bethlehem,
There was no angels' song;
There couldn't have been wise men
For the trip would take too long.
The stories in the Bible are historically wrong,

O, Tidings of reason and fact, reason and fact,
Glad tidings of reason and fact.

SOY TO THE WORLD (Joy to the World)
by Ronald Crowe

Soy to the world, legume is come:
Let earth receive her bean.
Let every gut prepare it room
Let stomach and colon sing,
Let stomach and colon sing,
Let stomach and stomach and colon sing.

Soy to the earth, the tofu reigns
Let men, their ploughs employ;
while sun and rain
grow beans on hill and plain
our bowels sound their joy,
our bowels sound their joy,
Repeat, repeat the sounding joy.


ANT HILLS I HAVE SEEN QUITE HIGH (Angels We Have Heard on High)
by Ronald Crowe

Ant hills I have seen quite high
scattered over my own front yard.
when they bite me I do cry:
Nature, why are you so hard?

Glo--o-o-o-o-o, o-o-o-o-o, Glo-o-o-o-oria,
Please bring me the Benedryl!

WRECK THE HALLS (Deck the Halls)
by Ronald Crowe

Wreck the halls, the walls, and ceilings
Fa-la-la-la-la---la-la-la-la
Crashing sounds are so appealing
Fa-la-la-la-la---la-la-la-la

Dust clouds rise as bricks go flying
Fa-la-la-la-la---la-la-la-la
What joy to watch old buildings dying
Fa-la-la-la-la--la-la-la-la.

Wrecking balls are fun by golly:
Fa-la-la-la-la---la-la-la-la.
Smashing things makes us feel jolly:
tra-la-la-la-la--la--la--la-la.

Don we now safety apparel:
Fa-la-la---la-la-la-la
Bring TNT in the old wheel barrow
Fa--la-la-la-la---la-la-la-la.

GREAT LIES WE HAVE HEARD ON HIGH
by Ronald Crowe

Great lies we have heard on high
surely of a right-wing strain.
And the sheep baa in reply
happy to be shorn again.

Screwed ew-ew-ew-ew ewed, ew-ew-ew-ew ewed,
ew-ew-ew-ewed again, by right wingus Georgy-O.

Shepherd, why this jubilee,
Why these songs of happy cheer,
when our treasury is bare
and our outlook is quite drear?

Screwed ew-ew-ew-ew--ewed, ew-ew-ew-ew--ewed,
ew-ew-ew-ewed again, by right wingus Georgy-O.

WE THREE KINGS
by Ronald Crowe

We three kings of Orient are,
loaded with oil we traverse afar--
prices soaring, Yankees boiling
oh how we sympathize.

Oh--Oh, western blunder western blight,
Oil's the star of eastern night,
U.S. use is still increasing--
prices rise quite out of sight.

Oil was found on Bethlehem's plain,
in Saudi, Iraq, Iran and Bahrain.
King forever, ceasing never over us all to reign. .....

Oh--Oh, western blunder western blight,
Oil's the star of the Eastern night,
U.S. use is still increasing;
prices rise quite out of sight

On oil we're hooked--its bitter perfume
Casts o'er our lives a gathering gloom:
Paying, sighing, spending, crying--
upwards gas prices zoom.

Oh--Oh, western blunder western blight,
Oil's the star of the Eastern night,
U.S. use is still increasing;
prices rise quite out of sight

Perhaps a little too political for my taste, and not atheological enough. Maybe I should write some...??
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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Politics

How to Talk to Each Other

I'm a pretty young fellow. That said, I think I have a few things figured out pretty well, although I'm still open to persuasion via argument. That is why I wanted to pass along the following two resources -- because I have learned from theists, and I know they have learned from me:

• How to Talk to Atheists (by drunkentune)
  
• How to Talk to Believers (by soulster)
  

I spend a great deal of my time in serious conversation/debate with theists, and these guidelines are quite essential for productive and progressive communication.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Philosophy

On the Heels of Jesus Camp: What Is Becky Fisher Doing Now?

First check out the NYT note about this peer-reviewed article in Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging (v148 i1 p67) on speaking in tongues, or glossolalia, and this commentary at world-science.net.

Second, have you heard of "Jesus Camp" yet? If not, you must be living under a rock. I've placed more resources on the documentary below, but I'm not going to retread that territory with my own (predictable) thoughts on it:

• "Jesus Camp: Documentary" (Wikipedia)
• "Film Shows Youths Training to Fight for Jesus New Documentary Features Controversial Bible Camp, Evangelical Movement" (ABC News Short Article)
  
• ABC News Story -- Video
  
• Trailer of "Jesus Camp"
• Article in Colorado Newspaper: (Ted Haggert is in the film, and his church is in Colorado Springs)
  
• Christianity Today Article

Now that you are have at least a passing familiarity with Jesus Camp, want to see some follow-up? Don't be optimistic. If you haven't eaten your breakfast yet, you may want to do so before reading this article in The Guardian (UK). Note it's filed under their "health" section...think "mental health". It follows Becky Fisher, leader of the program which Jesus Camp documents, to a new "Extreme Prophetic Conference" in MO, where we see her up to the same ol', same ol' antics: brainwashing children.

Here's the printer-friendly version (all on one page, no ads). I have the full-text below.
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Kindergarten of Christ

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 18/11/2006

The American evangelical organisation Kids in Ministry trains children as young as five in the gifts of healing, prophecy and speaking in tongues. Mick Brown attended its Extreme Prophetic Conference in Missouri Audio: interview with Mick Brown Sound & vision: Christ camp At 9pm – a time when most of the children might have been expected to be in bed – the atmosphere in the Christ Triumphant Church was approaching fever-pitch. On stage, a teenage Christian rock band called Signs and Wonders was playing something sweet and exultantly hypnotic. (image 1) caption -- Keep the faith: children as young as five are trained to use their 'gifts' Some of the children were dancing, their bodies writhing and twisting, their arms flailing in the air, perspiration on their foreheads. Some had fallen to the ground, 'slain in the spirit', as the phrase has it, and were now crouching and kneeling in prayer, while the grown-ups moved among them laying on hands, some speaking in tongues. Ruth, who is eight years old, was sobbing quietly. Earlier that day she had been one of those to come forward during the 'prophetic dance' session, when Pastor Becky Fischer asked if anybody had heard the word of God and had something to impart. Ruth had stood up and addressed the gathering of perhaps 150 children and half as many adults, seated in neat, attentive rows: 'Is there a boy in here named Alex, and a girl in here named Abi?' Two children had risen in different parts of the room. Ruth had addressed each of them in a clear, unwavering voice. 'I saw, like, Abigail was going to bring people back to Jesus in China. And you, Alex, I saw that you were going to be a missionary in India.' Afterwards, I had asked Ruth what made her say these things. 'When I was dancing,' she said, 'I just heard "Abigail and Alex, Abigail and Alex" come into my mind. And then a voice told me they were going to be missionaries.' She had never met Abigail and Alex before. And where did she think the voice came from? Ruth looked at me, as if to say, isn't it obvious? 'God,' she said. The numberplates on the cars and camper-vans parked outside the Christ Triumphant Church in Lee's Summit, Missouri, suggested that some families had travelled hundreds of miles to attend what was billed as 'The Extreme Prophetic Conference for Kids'. The event was hosted by an evangelical organisation called Kids in Ministry, founded by Pastor Fischer. Kids in Ministry describes its aims as to promote a vision of 'how God sees children as His partners in ministry worldwide'; with the purpose of equipping children 'to do the work of ministry and release them in their giftings and callings'. What this means, in simple terms, is training child-ren, some as young as five, to use the 'gifts' of healing, prophecy and speaking in tongues more commonly associated with Old Testament prophets and Jesus Christ Himself. It is estimated that there are up to 70 million evangelical Christians in America, of whom about a third would describe themselves as Charismatics – which is to say, emphasising a belief in 'charismata', or the supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit, including healing, speaking in tongues (or glossolalia, as it is more properly known) and a belief in prophecy, the ability to communicate directly with and to 'channel' the word of God. A heavy-set woman with a helmet of teased and tinted blond hair, and a cheerfully purposeful demeanour, Fischer, 55, grew up in a Pentacostalist family in North Dakota. Both her father and grandfather were ministers and as a child, she told me, she was always 'hungry for the things of God'. Her early life was spent in business. She managed a motel and a country music radio station, where she would do her best to 'weed out the really ungodly songs, even if they were top 40. Things like Tight Fittin' Jeans by Conway Twitty – we wouldn't play that.' For 13 years she managed her own sign company, called – inevitably – Signs and Wonders. At the same time she began working in children's ministry, first in a local church, and then in an organisation called MorningStar. It was there, Fischer told me, that she 'really got educated in the prophetic', and in the mission of nurturing 'prophetic gifts' among children. She travelled to Tanzania and South Africa as a missionary, and in 2001 returned to North Dakota and founded Kids in Ministry. Central to the evangelical movement is a literal belief in the prophecies of the Book of Revelation pertaining to the apocalypse, or 'End Time', and the Second Coming of Christ. This, it is believed, will be heralded by chaos and warfare, but also by a proliferation of signs and wonders and the emergence of a new generation of prophets and apostles, heralding a great Christian revival. Children, Fischer told me, are 'part of God's End Time army', as capable as adults of operating in the 'gifts of the Spirit', including preaching the Gospel, laying hands on the sick, raising the dead and speaking in tongues. She cited the biblical book Acts, 2:17: 'In my last days I will pour out my spirit and your sons and daughters shall prophesy. Your young men shall see visions, your old men shall see dreams.' Fischer allowed that not many people took this to apply to children as young as five. But children, she said, are 'naturally in touch with the supernatural. You have to remember this is a relatively new phenomenon. "When people start hearing that children are prophesying and preaching they get goosebumps. But this is happening across the face of the earth. I've got a friend in Tanzania who runs a school where children are healing the sick and casting out devils.' (image 2) caption -- Child's play: many of the students speak in tongues There was not, it has to be said, much evidence of healing the sick or casting out devils to be seen at Christ Triumphant, but what was on display was remarkable enough. Over the course of three days, the conference offered a series of structured courses in 'prophetic art' ('reveals the truth of God'), 'prophetic dance' ('You're dancing with the Lord…') and 'prophetic music' – all designed to channel messages from God. The climax of each session would be the moment when Fischer would ask children to come forward to prophesy. There was always a sense of anticipation when this occurred. On the first night, a dozen or so children stepped forward. 'You in the green shirt…' A boy of about 10 with a crew-cut pointed to a middle-aged woman in the audience. 'God told me that at some time you've been broken, and you've never really got over it. But God says He's going to build you back up, and don't think about your past, think about your future.' The woman called back, 'Right on!' Then a boy named Levi spoke. 'God told me there's someone here and your hands are really on fire. God has something for you. Your hands are really hot, sweating almost.' A young girl raised her hand. 'Hey, Chelsea!' Levi said. 'God just told me there's heat in your hands, and if you just keep studying the word and chasing after God, every day there's going to be heat in your hands, and every time you touch somebody they will be healed.' There was a round of whoops, yeahs and applause. 'You are not a normal generation,' Fischer told the congregation. 'When they say history-maker, that is you. And our enemy, who is also God's enemy, is going to do anything he can to destroy the plan that God has for your life; he is going to try to destroy you. And if you don't make the decision to serve God, it'll be too late.' Becky Fischer's mission has not passed without controversy. Shortly before my visit to the Extreme Prophetic Conference, a documentary about her work called Jesus Camp had received its first screening at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. The film follows the course of a 'Kids on Fire' summer camp organised by Kids in Ministry. It shows children praying in front of a cardboard cut-out of George Bush, and at one point Fischer seems to equate the preparation she is giving her young charges with the training of Islamist terrorists. 'I want to see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as young people are to the cause of Islam,' she says. 'I want to see them radically laying down their lives for the gospel.' These pronouncements had led to allegations that Fischer was brainwashing children and 'raising up an army of Christian terrorists'. When I raised this with Fischer, she insisted she had been misinterpreted. The children were not praying to Bush, she told me, but praying for him – as they would for whoever happened to be President. The talk of 'raising an army for Christ' and of children 'laying down their lives' was merely metaphor, of the sort commonly found in scripture. To her congregation at least, she remained defiant. 'We've got the liberals quite stirred up,' she announced one morning, to loud cheers. 'Some people think I'm a nut and dangerous. Well, they ain't seen nothing yet.' But it was evident, too, that the criticisms had left their mark. There were no cardboard cut-outs of Bush to be seen at the conference, and in the course of one address Fischer went out of her way to emphasise that the main weapon in the Christian 'armoury' was love. 'Islam wants to take over the world, and so does Christianity. But we take it by love, by compassion, We take it by tenderness.' What Jesus Camp, and the reaction to it, does show is just how divided America is on the question of religion. But while liberal America perceives the Christian right and its burgeoning political influence as a threat to individual freedoms, reason and common sense, what I sensed among the gathering at the Christ Triumphant was rather a defensiveness – almost a sense of beleaguerment. Like Christians in Ancient Rome, they saw themselves as the victims if not exactly of persecution then certainly of a 'conspiracy' by the media, Hollywood and the forces of secular liberalism to attack and undermine their faith. 'I've been accused of brainwashing these children,' Fischer said, 'but they're brainwashing our kids 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can't turn on TV without seeing witchcraft, perversion, homosexuality, jumping in and out of bed with anybody and everybody. It might be common behaviour, but it's not normal.' You want to screw up a kid's life, Fischer said, send them to university. 'They'll turn his head so inside out and upside down he won't even know which end he's supposed to wipe.' The next morning, there was an appearance by a guest speaker named Stacey Campbell, well-known in Charismatic circles for her work with children. A small, energetic woman in her forties, she began by asking for the Lord's intervention over the matter of the pornographer Larry Flynt opening a Hustler boutique in Nashville – 'Because if he can take Nashville, he can take America…' I wondered how many of the eight-year-olds in the congregation had heard of Larry Flynt or knew what pornography was. 'There is a living Devil, and he is after your generation,' Campbell went on, recounting a story about seven-year-olds being sold into prostitution in Thailand. 'The Devil knows about your generation. He wants to steal from you and kill you. But God knows about you, too.' Then she called a boy named Jordan to the stage and told him that she had been praying for him and had had a vision that he would become 'a leader for his generation. I could see you standing in front of crowds of people and leading many, many to righteousness.' The audience whooped their approval, as Jordan blushed and returned to his seat. At the end of her talk there was a prayer session. Campbell knelt beside a young girl who was praying with her eyes tightly closed, and whispered in her ear. 'I see that God is going to start talking to you in dreams.' She moved to another child. 'Nolan,' she asked him, 'do you ever hear God talk to you?' A mixture of confusion and alarm flickered in Nolan's eyes until, at length, he shook his head. 'No.' That afternoon, the children divided into groups for lessons in 'prophetic' painting, music and dance. The dance class was conducted in the main hall by Carol Koch, one of the pastors of Christ Triumphant, and afterwards people began to gather there for Fischer's talk on interpreting prophetic symbols and colours. They were greeted by the sight of a small child lying on the floor, twitching and groaning. It was Ruth, the eight-year-old whom I had noticed prophesying the day before. 'Don't worry about her,' Fischer said. 'They had a really sweet moment in the dance class today and she was touched by God.' She carefully stepped around the prostrate body and attempted to press on with her talk, then gestured to Koch. 'She's kind of distracting.' Ruth's father came out of the audience, picked up his child and carried her off to a side room. Fischer was talking about interpreting prophetic visions of animals. Bat: witchcraft – bad. Beaver: industrious, diligent – good. The children were told to 'let God speak to you', and then invited to give prophecy. Ruth had apparently recovered and now came forward and pointed to another girl in the audience: 'I saw a deer, lying down. I think it means you're nice and loyal.' A boy of about nine stepped off the stage and walked directly to a girl in the audience and pointed at her: 'God has told me that if you keep on praying every day, you will blow people's brains out.' There was a moment's hesitation – could he mean? No, surely not – and then a thunderous round of applause. The more I watched the children giving prophecy, the more I wondered about what it could mean. Some of the messages seemed unerring in their specificity; some so vague they could have meant anything, to anybody; and some, simply the first things that came into the children's heads. For Fischer and Koch it was 'the word of God'. Others might have called it simply intuition, or perhaps, if you had a mind for such things, the cultivation of nascent clairvoyant gifts. Others still, of course, would have dismissed the pronouncements as figments of the imagination, the fruits of expectation placed on the children by what psychologists would call the 'set and setting' – the music, the prayers, the emotional catharsis, the dangling carrot of approval and applause when a message or pronouncement seemed to hit home. Koch was alive to the possibility that some of the children at least might have been simply making it up. 'You'll get a few, when they share something, they're saying it to get attention,' she told me, 'because they do get a lot of attention when they say something; people are… wow! But one thing I like about kids is that, for the most part, their response is genuine. I always tell them, you don't have to say anything, and don't say ever anything that's not true. I tell my own daughter, I'm more proud of you for not giving prophecy when you don't feel anything, than when you give one because you feel like you have to.' These were early days, Fischer said. Eighty per cent of children's prophecy was comprised of what I had been watching unfold over the last two days: messages of comfort, inspiration and uplift. 'But if these children continue this as they grow into their twenties and thirties, they will begin to prophesy at very high levels. At that point they will prophesy national events, international events, things for their church, speaking to political issues. I know of people who are known among prophetic circles for their accuracy in prophecy for world events who have private audiences with the President.' For some reason, I did not find this reassuring. On her website, Fischer publishes what she claims is prophecy from children, speaking spontaneously during prayer at a church in Tulsa, Oklahama, in 1998, supposedly foretelling the events of September 11, 2001, a full three years before they occurred. One example reads: 'Islamic group, the chief guy in the Islamic group of terrorist, not pacifists but destroyers, CIA reveal, Islamic group, blinders remove, CIA, you see, reveal, borders, border patrols, Canada, raids, search, all USA borders, patrol, search, get ready, see, reveal, American 757/767, get off, back to the gate, you're grounded… Sadaam, underground in Babylon, blueprints, drawings, plans, plagues, viruses, God disgusted by terrorists, but His Hands are tied, it's up to us to pray, wake up from your slumber, you'll be held accountable…' Even more unsettling to the outsider was the mood of high emotion in which the prayer sessions invariably ended – the weeping and sobbing, the young bodies littering the floor, 'slain in the spirit', the mood of abandon and catharsis. When I asked one young girl why she had been crying she replied that it was 'because I was happy to be in the presence of God'. And what did it feel like, I asked, to be in the presence of God? 'It feels awesome,' she said. 'God,' a boy standing next to her said, 'is so powerful it's hard not to cry.' Kids in Ministry has outreach programmes in Africa and India, but not yet in Britain. However, the idea of instructing children 'in the prophetic' has a growing currency among the Charismatic community in this country. Heather Thompson is the director of Powerpack Ministries, which produces teaching resources and advises Charismatic churches on ministering to children, and runs child-ren's groups at large evangelical events such as Spring Harvest and Faith Camp. 'We are seeing children filled with the Holy Spirit, praying for one another, and giving word of knowledge,' Thompson told me. 'We wouldn't feel we'd done a good job unless we were seeing these things happening.' Graham Richardson, an associate pastor at the Hemel Hempstead Community Church in Hertfordshire, told me that children among his congregation were encouraged to talk about any prophetic experiences they might feel during prayers. 'To me, it's what I call low-key prophecy. It's encouragement, edification. But we believe that children have just as much access to hear from the Lord as we do.' The Rev Chris Hand is an authority on the Charismatic movement. The pastor of a Baptist church in Derbyshire and editor of the Christian magazine Today's Contender, Hand is a former Charismatic who left the movement some 12 years ago, unable to find any Biblical justification for its prophetic claims. 'My feeling is these things are not from God,' he told me. 'It's more the grey area of psychic activity that the Bible calls mediumship and forbids.' The emotional hysteria generated in Charismatic gatherings was also, Hand told me, 'alien to the Christian faith'; and, he thought, 'particularly questionable and at times dangerous' where children were involved. 'These kinds of experiences have immense potential to deceive both the children themselves and the adults who encourage them. For most of these children, they'll look back in 10 years' time and wonder what on earth it was all about.' Hand is the father of two children, aged five and eight, whom he is trying to raise in the Christian faith, he told me, 'and I would not let them come within a million miles of Kids in Ministry'. I had recognised Levi from the Jesus Camp film and was not surprised to see him at Lee's Summit. Tall, skinny and bright-eyed, he wore his hair cropped with a long ponytail at the back. Every T-shirt he wore was branded with the name of Jesus. Of all the children, Levi had a particular air of maturity and authority. Whenever Fischer called for those who had the word of God upon them, Levi would be among the first to step forward – a preacher in the making, with a commanding style of address that made people sit up and pay attention. Earlier that day, Levi had taken to the stage with the message that God had told him there were people here who were, 'like, really depressed, and God said be released today! When you go home, it'll be different! You'll be getting phone calls from family members telling you they're sorry, and your life is going to be changed! Your financial problems are going to be released… Stand up if that's you!' A number of people rose from their seats, their hands in the air. 'Pray over them, Levi!' Fischer called. Levi's voice rose in an excited incantation. 'I release this on them, God, that the oppression that Satan has put on them to keep them from your calling, just take it off of them now. And when you get home there'll be some phone calls on your answering-machines.' Levi is 13, and had come to the conference with his younger brother, Luke, and his mother, Tracey. They were members of a Charismatic church in St Robert, Missouri, which taught the prophetic. Attending the conference, Tracey said, was a way to encourage Luke and Levi in the practice. 'And it's like an encouragement to them to see other children doing this and realise it's not some weird fringe thing that our church does, that it's a normal part of the culture.' Levi, she told me, was 'just an open vessel that God can work through. The spirit of the Lord has found a home in him, I think.' I asked Levi, how did he hear the voice of God? God, he said, 'doesn't really speak to me in a voice. I hear Him as a thought.' And how did he know it was God? 'Whenever a thought comes there are three things that come at you. There's your own mind; then it might be Satan trying to speak to you – because he doesn't want you to speak these things from God. But you just know when it's God. You just get this great feeling – like, yes! That's it!' When he was 10, Levi said, God had told him he was going to be a missionary in India. 'But you can't just go to India and say you want to be a missionary. So I'm going to go there to be a doctor, and then through that I'm going to tell the people about the Lord.' He planned to attend college there. 'That way I can be there as quickly as possible.' Like many of the children at the conference, Levi and his brother were home-schooled. In 2001 a US Census Bureau report stated that more than two million children were home-schooled, the number rising at a rate of between 15 and 20 per cent a year. It is estimated that 75 per cent of them are from evangelical families. Tracey told me the principal reason she and her husband home-schooled their children was to be able to spend more time with them. It also gave them control over the curriculum. 'We don't shy away from any issues. We talk about abortion, homosexual issues, creation versus evolution, the environment. We try and come at it from every angle; some people believe that, but we believe this, and this is why we believe it.' The belief that God created the world in six days was not simply an article of faith, Tracey said. There were 'a lot of facts that supported the creationist view. In fact Levi did a pretty good study on that, and it really takes more faith to believe in evolution.' The more time I spent with Becky Fischer, the more I liked her. I disagreed with almost everything she said, but I was in no doubt about her sincerity and her commitment to the spiritual welfare of the children. She had never married – she had never found a man 'that had a heart after God, like I wanted. Also I had a very strong personality, and I don't think men are attracted to that.' And so she had been denied the blessing of family. 'God wants to keep us from marrying the wrong person,' she said. 'And if I can raise a generation that will just marry the right one, I'll have done my job.' I thought I understood her better after that. On my last day at the church, she suggested that some of the children might prophesy over the photographer, Evan, and me. She thought it might be more appropriate to do this privately, rather than in front of the congregation – a small mercy for which I, at least, was grateful. We adjourned to a side room with five children whom Fischer deemed the most gifted in prophecy. Levi was among them. After a short prayer, the children closed their eyes, while Evan and I waited. Then Levi spoke. 'This is for Mick. I saw a big star and it was blue, and it was right here where your heart would be. The blue means you're sensitive to things around you. I think the star means you're shining a light on to things – you can sense it, and you're shining it out. And that's probably why you're a reporter.' It would be unbecoming of me to find this uncannily accurate. Then Rachel spoke. She was about 11, the very picture of sweet innocence. 'This is for you.' She looked me in the eye. 'I saw you as a shark.' A shark? 'Like, someone who knows what they want and goes for it.' Fischer attempted to pour balm: 'So positive, certain in his aims.' Levi had messages for Evan – more specific things about crossroads and choices of direction that Evan said were 'spot-on'. Then Rachel said she had another vision for both of us. She saw us as mice being approached by a snake, that was Satan, and having to make a choice about which way to run. I was still thinking about being a shark. But sharks are God's creatures too, aren't they? That night was the last of the conference, and the children were once again invited on stage. Chelsea, aged about 12, and wearing a T-shirt saying perfect angel, stood up. 'I had a vision about everybody here, and I saw them dressed as angels in white robes going up to heaven and having a party.' And what do you think that means, Fischer asked. 'I think it means that everybody here is going to heaven to have a party.' There was tumultuous applause. The band started to play – something sweet and uplifting – and all the children rose from their seats, came forward and started to dance. Almost imperceptibly, the mood had changed, as if some un-spoken permission had been given for abandon. Around me, people began to moan and pray and speak in tongues. Adults moved among the children, laying on hands. Then the music changed, to something anthemic, tribal. 'We dance! We shout! We lift up our voices and His kingdom comes down…' Someone produced drums, congas, tambourines. Fischer's voice rose above the tumult. 'Stomp on the Devil's head! Stomp on the Devil's head! Tread on scorpions!' The children began to stamp their feet, flinging themselves up and down, screaming to the heavens in a frenzied intoxication of the senses, until there was just the drums, the screaming and sobbing, and Fischer's voice, shouting like a woman possessed. 'Sound the alarm! Sound the alarm!'

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Technorati tags: God, Religion

My Posts at Debunking Christianity

The following are all of my contributions to Debunking Christianity thus far. Last rev. 4-23-08

[oldest to newest]

1. My Story (Sat, 3-18-06) -- introductory post, includes testimony and explanation for deconversion


2. "This is Your Brain...on God" (Wed, 4-12-06) -- reflection on studies in neuroscience that posit [and evidence] a physical basis for religious experiences


3. Atheism and Evangelism (Fri, 4-14-06) -- juxtaposes the "right" of theists to evangelize, based on their motives, against our right as atheists to "deconvert" and advocate the abandonment of faith


4. Question: Does Religiosity Correlate Strongly to Charity? (Sun, 4-23-06) -- response to question #1 posed by Kaffinator


5. Question: Does Faith or Religious Activity Improve Health? (Sun, 4-23-06) -- response to question #2 posed by Kaffinator


6. Probability of Cognitive Dissonance = 1/0 (Sun, 4-30-06) -- comment on Swinburne, and his calculation of the probability of God’s existence, incarnation, resurrection as Jesus, etc.


7. The Sad State of Science (Wed, 5-3-06) -- comment on the 2006 Science and Engineering Indicators, especially reflects the correlation between poor science education and superstitious thought/belief


8. There is no Jehovah-Rophi, no Covenant (Wed, 5-3-06) -- investigates the promises of the old and new covenants, particularly with respect to health/healing, and concludes that either God is a liar, or there is no Covenant (and never was)
   


9. Swine and Science (Thur, 5-11-06) -- A response to Steve at the Triablogue regarding ex nihilo creation and my relative silliness at attempting to "talk science" with those who incur miracles at any needed opportunity


10. Do the Ends Justify the Means? (Tue, 5-16-06) -- throws out two instances where Paul appears to imply that they ends justify the means, if the means include subtle deception. The major crux of this post was encountered in the comments section, as we discussed where Paul blurred ethics as he had Timothy circumcised and participated in a Nazarite vow


11. America and Christian Nationalism (Wed, 5-24-06) -- links to some recent articles on theonomy/theocracy and related topics, basically an open thread for comments and arguments


12. Paul Kurtz, "Why I Am A Skeptic About Religious Claims" (Thur, 5-25-06) -- Paul Kurtz, editor in chief of Free Inquiry, professor emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and the chair of the Center for Inquiry, has a featured article in this month's issue, "Why I Am A Skeptic About Religious Claims". One of Paul's aims is to examine the reasons for skepticism, but another is to provide us with a new working label to use to avoid the stigma of "atheist" without falling into the overly-general "skeptic".


13. I Feel Jeebus (Tue, 6-27-06) A bunch of drama involving the Triablogue's defense of Frank Walton. Not worth your read, no atheological material here.


14. Ashamed of Their Ancestry (Wed, 7-05-06) Examining the oft-repeated claim [not much of an argument] that the process of evolution intrinsically undermines reason.


15. The Antithesis of Our Values (Tue, 7-18-06), A response to Steve Hays' post "Answer a Fool According to His Folly", in which he attempts to Biblically justify and defend his acerbic manner of dealing with unbelievers. Written while I was in Buffalo, NY.


16. Not "Answering A Fool According to His Folly" (Tue, 7-18-06) Steve tries to falsify my last post about mutual respect by quoting anonymous unbelievers on a public forum who insult Christians -- a pretty silly endeavor. Written while I was in Buffalo, NY.


17. More Chain Pulling for the Anti-Intellectualist Right (Fri, 8-18-06) My thoughts on an article in the American Family Association Journal, "Colleges Turn Left, Students Think That's Right," which concludes: "what students and parents don’t realize is that today’s campuses are functioning as an indoctrination into the realm of liberalism."


18. Oh My Sweet...Lord! (Tue, 8-22-06) Humor. Highlighting the "Armor of God PJs".


19. There IS Reason to Hope (Mon, 8-28-06) A response to recent studies that show trends in secularism among youths in Australia and Spain.


20. Godlessness Rare Behind Bars (Sat, 9-2-06) I saw two articles on the relative proportion of atheists in prisons versus religious groups, and I thought the results worth sharing.


21. A Little Levity (Wed, 10-4-06) Top Ten Reasons Religion is Like Pornography [humor]


22. Journal Article Researching Deconversion (Wed, 10-11-06) I briefly review a journal article by Heinz Streib studying deconversion experiences.


23. Christian Presuppositionalism, a General Response (Wed, 10-11-06) On Sept. 26, I asked Prof. Witmer if he would talk to our group, and we discussed possible topics a bit before he decided to talk about CPS at our meeting 9. I have now made the abstract of the talk, and the full-text (.pdf) of his presentation available online. Please download and feel free to comment on his arguments and major points. I especially enjoyed his presentation of a "conditional PoE", wherein he argues that either there are moral facts or there aren't, but either way, the PoE shows that God does not exist.


24. Richard Dawkins Interviewed on the Colbert Report (Wed, 10-18-06)Best opening line, ever: "My guest tonight is a scientist who argues there is no God...and you know what? He'll have an eternity in hell to prove it!" Get the QuickTime .mov video from the RichardDawkins.net site or see the interview at YouTube.


25. Nice Resource on Debate re God's Existence (Sun, 10-22-06) Philoso?hy Talk has a nice episode centered on the God debate. They interview Prof. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Phil) of Dartmouth, then go out on the streets of Berkeley to talk to people about their beliefs. Here is the audio file (Real Player). [HT: Uberkuh]


26. Steve Hays Responds to Prof. Witmer re Presuppositionalism (Sat, 10-28-06) Steve Hays has weighed in on Prof. Witmer's response to PS. In a recent post entitled Machiavellian Atheology, Steve spends a great deal of time complaining that Prof. Witmer chooses to take a tactical perspective, focusing on debate, rather than addressing more of the substantive philosophical issues (in Steve's opinion).


27. Haggard Resigns Amidst Allegations of Gay Sex (Fri, 11-3-06) Following the story as it broke


28. Responding to ID -- A Review of Their Positive Arguments with Rebuttals (Fri, 11-17-06) I want to lay out a fair representation of the positive case for intelligent design (ID) in this article, and examine why the case has been ruled a failure by the greater scientific community.


29. Carnival of the Godless 53 (Fri, 11-17-06) I compiled 34 submissions and showcased 10 posts here at DC for the COTG.

Last rev. 4-23-08

Exposing one of the World's Biggest Frauds

Who? Benny Hinn. [HT: Triablogue]

PS: I just bought Marjoe (I paid $16) and you should too. Amazon
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Technorati tags: God, Religion

What a Strange Universe We Inhabit

[Update: a co-alumnus of VT just alerted me to the fact that global E is not always conserved in GR; I need to quit over-simplifying things out of indolence and ignorance. He also opined both of the papers as crack science. He is probably right.]

First, head over to New Scientist and get a load of this: 70 great minds in science forecasting the next big thing in their area of expertise. [HT: Cosmic Variance]

Second, a caution: what follows are the musings of a scientist speaking outside of his area of expertise. You've been warned.

Third, apropos my title: in volume 12, issue 1 of New Astonomy, a very interesting article by Greg Bayer appears on pp. 47-51. The title of this article is, innocently enough, "Nonconservation of energy by the vacuum". It only addresses the question of whether or not black holes are capable of generating energy via gravitational repulsion, but it challenges the most basic assumption of science -- that energy and matter are conserved entities; something doesn't come from nothing. Most scientists who have been interviewed by world-science.net have dismissed it, but no one has yet weighed in with a definitive reason why the paper is flawed [aside from the obvious issue of breaking a fundamental assumption].

With­in black holes or si­m­i­lar ob­jects, he ar­gues, ex­treme con­di­tions may in­ject “in­sta­bil­i­ty” in­to the vac­u­um, con­vert­ing parts of it in­to non-vac­u­um, or mat­ter. “Mat­ter cre­a­tion can be said to arise from some new par­ti­cle in­ter­ac­tion which vi­o­lates en­er­gy con­ser­va­tion,” he wrote in an email.

Ein­stein de­ter­mined that an ob­jec­t’s grav­i­ty de­pends not just on its mass, as was known be­fore, but its pres­sure. If an ob­ject has enough neg­a­tive pres­sure, its grav­i­ty can al­so be­come neg­a­tive, and hence re­pul­sive rath­er than at­trac­tive.

Bay­er ar­gued that mat­ter cre­a­tion is as­so­ci­at­ed with re­pul­sive grav­i­ty be­cause it’s al­so linked to neg­a­tive pres­sure. “The flow of en­er­gy in­to the Uni­verse can be de­scribed as be­ing caused by an ex­ter­nal pres­sure from the vac­u­um,” he wrote in an email. “Viewed from in­side the Uni­verse, the pos­i­tive ex­ter­nal pres­sure looks like a neg­a­tive in­ter­nal pres­sure.” (link)

And, most importantly, to establish this as more than just armchair ramblings:

Bay­er said his the­o­ry of en­er­gy non-conservation could be tested us­ing par­ti­cle ac­cel­er­a­tors, which bash sub­a­tom­ic par­ti­cles to­ge­ther to help see what they’re made of. Nor­mal­ly, conserva­tion of en­er­gy is used to cal­cu­late prop­er­ties of the par­ti­cles fly­ing out of the bang-up. But the law is as­sumed, rath­er than prov­en, in these ex­per­i­ments, Bay­er ar­gued. “A se­ri­ous test of en­er­gy conserva­tion in high-en­er­gy col­li­sions will re­quire care­ful anal­y­sis of ma­ny com­plex multi-par­ti­cle events,” he wrote in his paper. This would be hard, he ad­ded, but it can be done. (link)

Following this issue, we find in v.12 i.2, pp.146-160, an article that may or may not tie in to this question. Abhas Mitra writes in the abstract,

Eddington was the first physicist to introduce special relativity into the problem and correctly insist that, actually, total energy stored in a star is not the mere Newtonian energy but the total mass energy (E = Mc²)...This concept has a fundamental importance though we know now that Sun in its present form cannot survive for more than 10 billion years. We extend this concept by introducing general relativity and show that the minimum value of depletion of total mass–energy is t_E = ∞ not only for Sun but for and sufficiently massive or dense object. We propose that this time scale be known in the name of “Einstein–Eddington”. We also point out that, recently, it has been shown that as massive stars undergo continued collapse to become a Black Hole, first they become extremely relativistic radiation pressure supported stars. And the life time of such relativistic radiation pressure supported compact stars is indeed dictated by this Einstein–Eddington time scale whose concept is formally developed here. Since this observed time scale of this radiation pressure supported quasistatic state turns out to be infinite, [t_E = ∞] such objects are called eternally collapsing objects (ECO). Further since ECOs are expected to have strong intrinsic magnetic field, they are also known as “Magnetospheric ECO” or MECO.

I will be interested to read the first detailed response to Bayer's article, and to see whether or not the second article ties into it, both in the blogosphere (at sites like Sean's) and in the journals. There has always been something about black holes that made scientists believe they may reveal key discoveries about the origins of our own universe. Sean thinks we'll know much more very soon (link).
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Technorati tags: Cosmology

Should Science Tell Us the Greatest Story Ever Told?

True or False:

...in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told...(link)

Well, you already know what I think -- tell the story that's true, ergo, not religious ones.

November 21, 2006
New York Times
A Free-for-All on Science and Religion
By GEORGE JOHNSON

Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for “progress in spiritual discoveries” to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book The God Delusion is a national best-seller.

Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.

She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”

She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck called Earth.

There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of “anti-Templeton”), the La Jolla meeting, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,” rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)

A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is “a mustard seed of DNA”) was dismissed by Dr. Dawkins as “bad poetry,” while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is “brainwashing” and “child abuse”) was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who said he had “not a flicker” of religious faith, as simplistic and uninformed.

After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice president, lashed back, denouncing what he called “pop conflict books” like Dr. Dawkins’s “God Delusion,” as “commercialized ideological scientism” — promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth.

That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who said his own book, Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine, was written to counter “garbage research” financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.

With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful (a few believing scientists, like Francis S. Collins, author of “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” were invited but could not attend), one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief. “The core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty,” said Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience and the author of “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”

“Every religion is making claims about the way the world is,” he said. “These are claims about the divine origin of certain books, about the virgin birth of certain people, about the survival of the human personality after death. These claims purport to be about reality.”

By shying away from questioning people’s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. “I don’t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,” he said.

Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, “The First Three Minutes,” that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” went a step further: “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”

With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace, most of the discussion came down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?

“There are six billion people in the world,” said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. “If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming — it is like believing in the fairy godmother.”

“People need to find meaning and purpose in life,” he said. “I don’t think we want to take that away from them.”

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. “I think we need to respect people’s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,” he said.

“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”

That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said. “Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.”

By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”

“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”

His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.”

Dr. Tyson put it more gently. “Persuasion isn’t always ‘Here are the facts — you’re an idiot or you are not,’ ” he said. “I worry that your methods” — he turned toward Dr. Dawkins — “how articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective, when you have much more power of influence.”

Chastened for a millisecond, Dr. Dawkins replied, “I gratefully accept the rebuke.”

In the end it was Dr. Tyson’s celebration of discovery that stole the show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations involving an intelligent designer, he said, but history shows that “the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the same thing.” When Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” failed to account for the stability of the solar system — why the planets tugging at one another’s orbits have not collapsed into the Sun — Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was “an intelligent and powerful being.”

It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next step. Hautily telling Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton’s mathematics and opened the way to a purely physical theory.

“What concerns me now is that even if you’re as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops — it just stops,” Dr. Tyson said. “You’re no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn’t have God on the brain and who says: ‘That’s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.’ ”

“Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance,” he said. “Something fundamental is going on in people’s minds when they confront things they don’t understand.”

He told of a time, more than a millennium ago, when Baghdad reigned as the intellectual center of the world, a history fossilized in the night sky. The names of the constellations are Greek and Roman, Dr. Tyson said, but two-thirds of the stars have Arabic names. The words “algebra” and “algorithm” are Arabic.

But sometime around 1100, a dark age descended. Mathematics became seen as the work of the devil, as Dr. Tyson put it. “Revelation replaced investigation,” he said, and the intellectual foundation collapsed.

He did not have to say so, but the implication was that maybe a century, maybe a millennium from now, the names of new planets, stars and galaxies might be Chinese. Or there may be no one to name them at all.

Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old aunt.

“She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she’s getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once,” he lamented. “When she’s gone, we may miss her.”

Dr. Dawkins wasn’t buying it. “I won't miss her at all,” he said. “Not a scrap. Not a smidgen.”

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It's a difficult thing, in my view, to say what the role of science is, insofar as "encouraging itself". Science is a method to knowledge, and it is also embodied in who scientists are, to some degree. Religion is not a method to knowledge, it's circumvention of justified knowledge via belief.

If people want justified knowledge, then encouragement is not necessary. Some people don't seem to want it at all, preferring their cherished hopes and dreams over the sometimes cold facts of the natural universe.

I don't know if the inherent nature of science is evangelical, or if it should be. Perhaps if we lived in a better world, the people whose ignorance and fear keeps them from accepting the reality of scientific knowledge and progress would not have to be "converted", because their fear and ignorance wouldn't exist in the first place.

But we don't live in the best of possible worlds, do we?

I am already an athevangelical, I suppose I can become a scientangelical as well ;-)
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Technorati tags: Science, Religion

John Safran Proselytizes for Atheism

Oh, my belly hurts from laughing.

Watch John go door-to-door and try to tell people the "good news" of atheism at Youtube.

HT onegoodmove:

John Safran vs. The Mormons. Trading places is priceless. DVD available here

The Youtube clip is available for download here.

Also see other Safran vids on Youtube.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Humor

Thoughts on the "N-Word"

Back in May, CNN had a special debate on "The N-Word", contrasting the views of Prof. Michael Dyson against Dr. Bill Cosby, which I weighed in on. Given the recent antics by Kramer, I thought it germane to link to them.

My thoughts were basically reiterated by Earl Hutchinson at the HuffPo -- it is imperative that the black community stop using the N-word in order to see the extinction of this racial epithet:

The obsessive use of and the tortured defense of the word by so many blacks gave Richards the license to use the word without any thought that there'd be any blow back for doing it. He was terribly wrong and got publicly called out for it. The blacks that use and defend that word should be called out too. Who's willing to do that?

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Technorati tags: Culture, Racism

May the Lord Bless Thee, Harry Reid

Remember, PERA has a few more days of the lame duck session before it is effectively dead in the water. You know those pathetic Religious Right Repubs are pushing things like this hard before their chance expire on Jan 20, 2007. Thank Jesus for Harry Reid:

Senator Seeks to Protect Religious Freedom

Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., is urging his colleagues to allow a vote on the Public Expression of Religion Act (PERA) — a measure the House approved 244-173.

PERA would eliminate the awarding of attorneys' fees to groups that challenge religious displays on public property — many communities give in to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) after just a threat of litigation.

"The ACLU and others use these legal fees as blackmail against a community putting up a Nativity scene or having a Ten Commandments expression," Brownback told Agape Press.

Brownback filed PERA as an amendment to the Veteran's Administration Appropriations bill. But incoming Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., used a procedural tactic to keep it from a vote.

Religious-liberty advocates say there may still be time to pass PERA before the 109th Congress adjourns.

Amanda Banks, federal policy analyst for Focus on the Family Action, said it's important for people to call their senators and urge them to support a vote on PERA.

"This may be the best chance we have to pass another pro-family bill before Congress adjourns," she said. "It's crucial that senators hear from their constituents on this legislation right away."

Religious liberty my ass. This bill is the most blatant anti-1st Amendment piece of trash to be passed through the House in decades. It confers more power to the government, safeguarding the government from being scrutinized and penalized when they break the law and trample on religious liberties.

Want to know just a bit about this cock-knocker Brownback? Well...

when [Pat] Robertson was asked on ABC's "This Week'' who he thought might make a fine Republican nominee in 2008, he began his answer: "There's an outstanding senator from Kansas ...''

Enough said. If Pat Robertson supports this guy for president, all rational people should run like hell the other way.

On a related note, Dobson will be on Larry King Wednesday.
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Technorati tags: Politics, Religion

Center for Inquiry

There's a WaPo article on the CFI's new DC thinktank -- the Office of Public Policy.

This office was mentioned at the summer conference at the CFI that I and 5 others from AAFSA attended in July. The CFI is by far the biggest and best institution to get things done and advocate freethought and secularism. I'm looking forward to reaping the efforts of their hard work.

Responding to ID -- A Review of Their Positive Arguments with Rebuttals

**UPDATE (2/9/07): See Ken Miller's Youtube presentation on the errors and problems with ID arguments**

Intro: I simply want to lay out a fair representation of the positive case for intelligent design (ID) in this article, and examine why the case has been ruled a failure by the greater scientific community. Because ID is so vague, eg defined by the Discovery Institute as,

The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.

Therefore, making an argument for such a claim is going to be difficult from the outset. "Some features"? "An intelligent cause"? We see the vagueness of the definition come back to haunt ID advocates in their inability to put forth convincing arguments which line up with "this is best explained by an intelligent cause" versus "random mutation/natural selection". For example, some of ID's cosmological arguments in The Privileged Planet (largely the anthropic principle) do not [obviously] fit this criterion.

And thus lot of what passes for "arguments" coming from ID/Creationism (IDC) these days against biology is simple: find some part of evolution that people don't know a lot about and say, "How do you explain X?!" This argument from ignorance is common among laypeople, because they don't know enough about the science to make positive arguments for the claims of IDC. Therefore, a great deal of the "noise" and political theatre of IDC is just critiques of evolution. As Judge Jones eloquently pointed out, there is a false dichotomy between showing someone else's explanation isn't good and proving your own case [not granting that the former has been done in the case of IDC]. Just because you do the former doesn't mean you've done the latter -- established evidence for IDC. I would call these critiques and arguments from ignorance negative in character, because they do not purport to demonstrate the truth of IDC.

However, there are some positive arguments for IDC, and they will be the focus of this review. I am going to go through and list the positive arguments (that I'm aware of), and link to strong rebuttals/refutations of those arguments.

Almost everyone already knows the basic arguments of IDC: "design detection" (DD) and "irreducible complexity" (IC). Generalized arguments, though very useful in philosophy, don't work in science. You have to pick particular examples (data) and use these to demonstrate your argument works. Until then, you haven't yet crossed the threshold of science. I'll pick back up on this at the bottom.

Responses to the claims IC are abundant, and here are layman-friendly resources to familarize onesself with the mechanisms by which scientists explain complexity and apparent IC: exaptation/cooption, scaffolding, gene duplications, etc:
1) Prof. PZ Myers' Powerpoint presentation, see slides 29-50
2) Prof. Dave Ussery's paper delineating the four different RM/NS pathways to complexity
3) Don Lindsay, How Can Evolution Cause Irreducibly Complex Systems?

Two particular systems are touted as crucial examples of IC: i) the blood-clotting cascade (BCC)/immune response; ii) the flagellum.

i) The IC arguments for IDC are the brain-child of Prof. Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh U. The BCC arguments can be found throughout IDC websites. One of the most well-informed responders to these arguments is Andrea Bottaro. Last year, as more evidence came in that transposons were involved in the human immune response, Dr. Bottaro put together the pieces and completely refuted the claim of IC as it applies to BCC. How did Prof. Behe respond? By moving the goalposts -- not in any way denying the evidence, but demanding a mutation-by-mutation account of the pathways involved. Thus, he undercuts his own argument by rendering the burden of proof unattainable by any scientific pursuit.

Also see Matt Inlay's article on the supposed IC of the BCC. Matt rigorously examines different branches of the tree of life to demonstrate the fallacious nature of the claim by evidencing the reducible nature of the immune response.

The single best place for you to start in looking at IC as it relates to the immune response is here.

These technical papers, as well as others that can be accessed via this long bibliography on the subject, here, here, and peer-reviewed literature like this Nature review and via searches on PubMed and other scientific databases, decisively defeat the claim of IC as it relates to BCC or the immune response. Again, the very important thing to do is focus in on the specific systems that are being examined, and claimed as evidence, and force the burden of proof upon the claimant. In the cases of IC, these claims have been refuted by the research of biologists and biochemists, which have always shown evidence of cooption and homology of these systems -- completely undercutting the identification of IC.

ii) The evolution of the flagellum is probably the keystone argument of IC. IDC proponents use this system because they feel it is best compared to a "machine", is most difficult to reduce, and is the strongest evidence for intelligent design in biology. One of the most comprehensive resources on this argument is from a continually-updated paper written by NCSE staffer Nick Matzke. Another resource is the PandasThumb section here on flagellum evolution.

In addition, Nick Matzke got a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature Reviews which unequivocally demonstrated, for the first time, that of the 42 proteins involved in the flagellar system of a particular bacterium, all but 2 of them had known homologs! This research involves doing BLAST-type searches in the genome of the bacterium being considered, and showing that the raw evidence of co-optation/exaptation is abundant -- there is no good reason to suppose that all 42 of these components originally had the function that they now do. See also Matzke's reader background page.

Moving on to the second prong of the "case for design" involves taking on those claims that design has been "detected" via mathematical research in IC or other biological systems.

iii) Design detection is the specialty area of William Dembski. Dembski took the "No Free Lunch" (NFL) theorems developed by David Wolpert and others (background with citations) and attempted to use these mathematical constructs to argue a few different things. One of his arguments was the the NFLs showed that evolutionary RM/NS would theoretically not be successful in the development of complexity. Although we can find numerous responses and refutations of this claim (here, here, here , here and see references here -- Wein 2002a,b; Shallit 2002; Rosenhouse 2002; Perakh 2001a, 2002a, 2002b, 2003; Young 2002; Orr 2002; Van Till 2002), I think it best to turn to the person who actually developed the NFL theorems in order to take Dembski to task for misrepresenting them and their implications. Wolpert almost immediately refuted Dembski's claims, and it took a few years before Dembski further tweaked his claims:

[David H. Wolpert] The values of the factors arising in the NFL theorems are never properly specified in his analysis. More generally, no consideration is given to whether some of the free lunches in the geometry of induction might be more relevant than the NFL theorems (e.g., those free lunches concerning "head-to-head minimax" distinctions that concern pairs of algorithms considered together rather than single algorithms considered in isolation).

Indeed, throughout there is a marked elision of the formal details of the biological processes under consideration. Perhaps the most glaring example of this is that neo-Darwinian evolution of ecosystems does not involve a set of genomes all searching the same, fixed fitness function, the situation considered by the NFL theorems. Rather it is a co-evolutionary process. Roughly speaking, as each genome changes from one generation to the next, it modifies the surfaces that the other genomes are searching. And recent results indicate that NFL results do not hold in co-evolution. [emphasis mine]

It may well be that there is a major mystery underlying the performance of some search processes that one might impute to the historical transformations of ecosystems. But Dembski has not established this, not by a long shot.

Dembski refined his arguments and published (2003) a response which attempted to show that even in co-evolutionary processes, that the NFL theorems do still hold. A great deal of the problem with Dembski's work is that it is all on his own website and books, and none of it in peer-reviewed literature. That means that mathematical laymen (like me and most of you) are often going to miss the subtleties in Dembski's articles that peer-review would immediately weed out. The most basic mistakes and differences between arguments by Wolpert and Dembski will be caught by other professional mathematicians and fixed in the MSS before publication. This keeps the "certitude" factor on the IDC side to a minimum, because while Wolpert's arguments are accepted by the mathematical community, which immediately lends substantial credibility to them, and evidences Wolpert's authority, none of this can be said for Dembski. An argument from silence may then be made that Dembski's work cannot clear the bar of legitimacy. Why else would he not want it published academically, if it is valid?

Dembski may possibly complain that he can't get his work published due to discrimination, but this complaint makes little sense: Behe has published work since he published his Darwin's Black Box, and Dembski's work, being mathematical in nature, need not even address the question of evolution directly. Therefore, if any case can be made about anti-creationist bias, it would be much more likely for Behe's work to be "censored", [as they love to claim (without evidence)] due to its intrinsically anti-evolutionary content, versus Dembski's abstract math. Dembski's work may or may not apply to biological systems. Behe's is directly about biology. Therefore, which is more likely to be "censored" by anti-creationist bias, and so does Dembski have any excuse for not publishing his work in a respected academic format?

Conversely, Wolpert has recently published, via peer-reviewed literature, about the co-evolution which accurately models biological systems:

Abstract: Recent work on the foundational underpinnings of black-box optimization has begun to uncover a rich mathematical structure. In particular, it is now known that an inner product between the optimization algorithm and the distribution of optimization problems likely to be encountered fixes the distribution over likely performances in running that algorithm. One ramification of this is the "No Free Lunch" (NFL) theorems, which state that any two algorithms are equivalent when their performance is averaged across all possible problems. This highlights the need for exploiting problem-specific knowledge to achieve better than random performance. In this paper, we present a general framework covering most optimization scenarios. In addition to the optimization scenarios addressed in the NFL results, this framework covers multiarmed bandit problems and evolution of multiple coevolving players. As a particular instance of the latter, it covers "self-play" problems. In these problems, the set of players work together to produce a champion, who then engages one or more antagonists in a subsequent multiplayer game. In contrast to the traditional optimization case where the NFL results hold, we show that in self-play there are free lunches: in coevolution some algorithms have better performance than other algorithms, averaged across all possible problems. However, in the typical coevolutionary scenarios encountered in biology, where there is no champion, the NFL theorems still hold.

Dembski has seized on this last sentence as evidence that he is right. It isn't true. Note that the problem here is still that the NFL theorems are about "algorithms averaged across all possible problems".

It is thus hardly convincing to say that the specific ecological "fitness landscapes", or "search space", is not beautifully searched by RM/NS versus a blind search. Simply put, in order to model biological systems properly, the algorithm itself would have to be altered such that it was not specific-target-directed [multiple positive adaptations are possible], such that each "score" improved the algorithm [the scope of the organism's ability to adapt further], and such that each "score" altered the competitiveness of the landscape [the domain in which fitness is evaluated, here, the ecosystem, which coevolves with the players]. This is the true nature of biological co-evolution -- as organisms adapt, the machinery by which they acquire adaptations itself adapts (consider that increasing surface area for sunlight is useless to animals, but not to plants), and the environment around them is full of other "game players", co-evolving just like them. This is, so far as I am able to tell, the definition of an "open algorithm" during the permutations. This is not what Wolpert has even considered at this point.

Dembski has not modeled a system in this way as of now. Thus, in the shortest way to respond to the "postive case" Dembski has laid forth, it is simply a strawman representation of biological evolution. Modeling real evolution in simple mathematical terms is probably one of the most daunting and complicated of tasks. The NFL theorems do not take into account an algorithm that itself adapts with increased fitness of the player, and changes the landscape with each successful target. Wolpert explained this in his earliest response to Dembski, and published his findings that take this into account w.r.t. NFL theorems. This intrinsic flaw is continually overlooked and undermines the positive case for design completely.

To his credit, Dembski's formalistic abilities are not in question. That is, his ability to evaluate a given model, and perform the correct analysis, is A-ok. The problem is the relevance and correlation of this model to anything resembling reality. "Let the reader judge," as Dembski says in response.

The real problem here is that Dembski has never addressed the most substantial critiques of his work. As Mark Perakh points out in this extensively referenced article (a good place to start for an overview of the status of Dembski's claims:

When encountering critique of his work, Dembski is selective in choosing when to reply to his critics and when to ignore their critique. His preferred targets for replies are those critics who do not boast comparable long lists of formal credentials – this enables him to contemptuously dismiss the critical comments by pointing to the alleged lack of qualification of his opponents while avoiding answering the essence of their critical remarks. (See, for example, Dembski’s replies to some of his opponents [3]) This type of behavior provides certain hints at Dembski’s overriding quest for winning debate at anycost rather than striving to arrive at the truth. For example, in his book No Free Lunch [4] Dembski devoted many pages to a misuse of Wolpert and Macready’s No Free Lunch (NFL) theorems [5]. (Some early critique of Dembski’s interpretation of the NFL theorems appeared already in [6 a, b]. A detailed analysis of Dembski’s misuse of the NFL theorems is given, in particular, in [6 c].)

Dembski’s faulty interpretation of the NFL theorems was strongly criticized by Richard Wein [7] and by David Wolpert, the originator of these theorems [2]. Dembski spared no effort in rebutting Wein’s critique, devoting to it two lengthy essays. [3] However, he did not utter a single word in regard to Wolpert’s critique. It is not hard to see why. Wein, as Dembski points out, has only a bachelor’s degree in statistics – and Dembski uses this irrelevant factoid to deflect Wein’s well substantiated criticism. He does not, though, really answer the essence of Wein’s comments and resorts instead to ad hominem remarks and a contemptuous tone. He can’t do the same with Wolpert who enjoys a sterling reputation as a brilliant mathematician and who is obviously much superior to Dembski in the understanding of the NFL theorems of which he is a coauthor.

Dembski pretends that Wolpert’s critique does not exist.

Dembski has behaved similarly in a number of other situations. For example, the extensive index in his latest book The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design [8] completely omits the names of most of the prominent critics of Dembski’s ideas.

We don’t see in that index the following names:
Rich Baldwin, Eli Chiprout, Taner Edis, Ellery Eels, Branden Fitelson, Philip Kitcher, Peter Milne, Massimo Pigliucci, Del Ratzsch, Jeff Shallit, Niall Shanks, Jordan H. Sobel, Jason Rosenhouse, Christopher Stephenson, Richard Wein, and Matt Young.

All these writers have analyzed in detail Dembski’s literary output and demonstrated multiple errors, fallacious concepts and inconsistencies which are a trademark of his prolific production. (I have not mentioned myself in this list although I have extensively criticized Dembski both in web postings [9] and in print [10]; he never uttered a single word in response to my critique, while it is known for fact that he is familiar with my critique; the above list shows that I am in good company.)

Thomas D. Schneider, another strong critic of Dembski’s ideas, is mentioned in the index of [8] but the extent of the reference is as follows:

"Evolutionary biologists regularly claim to obtain specified complexity for free or from scratch. (Richard Dawkins and Thomas Schneider are some of the worst offenders in this regard.)"

Contrary to the subtitle of Dembski’s book [8], this reference can hardly be construed as an answer to Schneider’s questions. Essentially, all the listed writers have asked Dembski a number of questions regarding his concepts. The absence of any replies to the listed authors makes the title of Dembski’s new book [8], sound like a parody. It should have properly been titled The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design. Of course we already know that Dembski is a stubborn purveyor of half-baked ideas [10]. Is he also of the opinion that selectivity in choosing when to respond to opponents and when to pretend they do not exist is compatible with intellectual honesty? [edit: Check out the article for the references: http://www.talkdesign.org/people/mperakh/perakh_ddq.pdf]

Welsley R. Elsberry has an impressive set of links (left sidebar) on Dembski's work and its ramifications. Mark Chu-Carroll has an entire section examining some of Dembski's work, Richard Wein has written extensively about the problems with it, also TalkDesign, as does TalkOrigins, on the NFL and his work in information detection, for more reading. Another awesome resource is the PandasThumb IDC archive. Furthermore, this post at the PT lays out some good refs on the background arguments of Dembski involving complexity via RM/NS:

1. Peter Schuster, How does complexity arise in evolution? Complexity, 2:22-30 (1996)
2. Christoph Adami, Charles Ofria, and Travis C. Collier Evolution of biological complexity, PNAS | April 25, 2000 | vol. 97 | no. 9 | 4463-4468
3. Lenski RE, Ofria C, Pennock RT, and Adami C, The Evolutionary Origin of Complex Features Nature, 423:139-144 (2003).
4. Tom Schneider, Rebuttal to William A. Dembski’s Posting and to His Book “No Free Lunch”
5. Tom Schneider ev: Evolution of Biological Information Nucleic Acids Res, 28:14, 2794-2799, 2000

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As we discussed at our freethought group's 11/9 meeting, there are actually some good philosophical arguments in ID. Teleological and anthropic principle-type arguments certainly aren't invalid, although the veracity of their premises is, of course, crucial. However, they simply aren't science, or scientific arguments, without meeting some pretty strict criteria, and without going through the process of peer review, experiment, and eventual scientific consensus. As of now, they are completely philosophical in nature. That only means that ID still has to pass the standard hurdles before including itself into the scientific community as a valid idea to teach in science classes.

As Prof. Joe Meert pointed out at that night's meeting, Einstein didn't take out ads in newspapers asking people to write their congressional representatives to get relativity included in high school curricula. Einstein didn't try to get a relativity-sympathetic school board voted in, and include his ideas in high school textbooks. Einstein wanted legitimacy among his scientific peers and to establish his ideas via empiricism and the method of science, and then, he knew, getting into textbooks would follow. Those sorts of political tactics by IDCists are what undermines their claim to legitimacy in the scientific community. They want their philosophical verbiage smuggled into science classrooms since they can't get a single scientific argument going for them.

Conclusion: irreducible complexity fails as a critique against evolution, as the proposed systems have viable, published explanations for their evolution; and Dembski's work in design detection fails as it is a critique against quasi-evolution -- a strawman, which does not even intersect with the robust work done by geneticists and computer scientists in mathematically modeling evolutionary theory.

The good philosophical ideas intrinsic within teleological arguments is lost amidst the "culture war" that IDC's are waging against evolution and materialism, in their own words. Hopefully, once the dust settles, and cooler heads prevail, some of their ideas can be incorporated into places that they belong (history, philosophy, etc.), and continue to be excluded from the science classroom until they become scientific...hopefully.
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