Mr. Moderate

I have written two recent posts, one about the lost art of logic and the other about young Earth insanity, where I discussed a recent poll reported in USA Today that claimed 66% of Americans now believe “that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” In this third post about that same poll result I’m going to discuss the long-term implications for this rise of fundamentalist religious belief in our nation’s population. What it really amounts to is a national death wish, as such beliefs require the abandonment and rejection of scientific thinking. This leaves science to “those other countries” which have no religious restrictions on scientific advances, most importantly nations like China. As China becomes the leading scientific power over the next few decades, it will take over the leadership of the world, and will eventually be in a position to dictate its policies to the west, including the United States.

Is this what you folks really want to see happen? Do you want to abandon the world to a Chinese hegemony of scientific power?
Continue reading ‘America Rejects Science; Adopts Suicide Plan’ »

I wrote yesterday about the lack of logic it requires to simultaneously believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, and that God created humans much as we are today at one time in the past 10,000 years. It would seem from the USA Today poll that roughly 22% of all Americans believe both ideas to be definitely or at least probably true. Yesterday’s post was about the total illogic involved with that 22% of Americans believing both ideas to be true.

In this post I would like to take seriously the idea, expressed in that same poll, that 66% of all Americans believe “that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” Ever since Bishop Ussher produced his Bible chronology that “deduced that the first day of Creation began at nightfall preceding Sunday October 23, 4004 BC in the proleptic Julian calendar, near the autumnal equinox,” back in the 1650s, people who desired to take the Bible literally have asserted that no fact produced by science can possibly contradict the idea that God created everything that now exists about 6,000 years ago. Some modern young-Earth creationists, disturbed at chronologies of Egyptian civilization that seem to be unbroken to much earlier dates, have accepted that Ussher might not have computed everything exactly right, and they are willing to push back the creation of the universe to somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, but no further than that.
Continue reading ‘Young Earth Insanity’ »

USA Today reports the results of a national poll which purports to measure whether people believe that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is true or whether people believe that the Creation story of the Bible is true. In spite of greatly-slanted questions that left no room for an overlapping decision, roughly 22% of the population of the United States appears to believe that both ideas are true. What this really means is that roughly 22% of the population either did not understand the questions or else they refuse to recognize the total impossibility of a rational human being holding both ideas, as stated, to be true.
Continue reading ‘The Lost Art of Logic’ »

Today I watched a C-Span show where Al Gore talked about his latest book, The Assault on Reason. Gore clearly recognizes the problem: reason is getting shoved out of public dialog. But he also clearly misperceives why that is happening. The advocates of God have realized that they are in a battle against rational thought and that they have been loosing since at least the Enlightenment. What we are witnessing in the arena of public discourse is just the most obvious examples of them fighting back. And, unfortunately for those who associate rational thought with civilized behavior, God is winning, and reason is on its way out.
Continue reading ‘God vs. Reason’ »

Implicit in any battle between evolution supporters and opponents is the conflict between the sides as to whether or not science intrudes into the religious Magisterium. The late Dr. Stephen J. Gould propounded his view that science and religion occupied nonoverlapping magisteria (NOMA), leading to this oft-quoted observation by Dr. Gould:

The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty). To cite the arch clichés, we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven.

When it comes to the science of evolution, as early as 1922, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science had this to say:

The Council of the Association affirms that, so far as the scientific evidences of evolution of plants and animals and man are concerned, there is no ground whatever for the assertion that these evidences constitute a “mere guess.” No scientific generalization is more strongly supported by thoroughly tested evidences than is that of organic evolution.

In other words, within the Magisterium of scientific inquiry, nothing “is more strongly supported by thoroughly tested evidences than is that of organic evolution.” Thus, to reject evolution is to reject the very foundations of modern science; it is to deny, on grounds of religious belief, the entire Magisterium of science!
Continue reading ‘My Dog In This Fight’ »

One of the greatest speeches in the history of US trial courts was given by Dudley Field Malone on Day 5 of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” where he argued in favor of admitting expert testimony on the subject of evolution:

There is never a duel with the truth. The truth always wins and we are not afraid of it. The truth is no coward. The truth does not need the law. The truth does not need the force of government. The truth does not need Mr. Bryan. The truth is imperishable, eternal and immortal and needs no human agency to support it. We are ready to tell the truth as we understand it and we do not fear all the truth that they can present as facts. We are ready. We are ready. We feel we stand with progress. We feel we stand with science. We feel we stand with intelligence. We feel we stand with fundamental freedom in America. We are not afraid. Where is the fear? We meet it, where is the fear? We defy it, we ask your honor to admit the evidence as a matter of correct law, as a matter of sound procedure and as a matter of justice to the defense in this case. (Profound and continued applause).

The above comments represent a touchstone of intelligent discussion and debate. We recognize that some people may have been indoctrinated to believe falsehoods, or that some people might have misunderstood the evidence presented for examination, but the truth allows for any question to be met with facts and reason. To survive, untruth must protect itself from exposure by any means possible. This is, in essence, the morality play that the Scopes trial represents.
Continue reading ‘Eternal Truth Always Beats Orthodoxy’ »

Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1

There are many barriers that mankind cannot cross and return. Hamlet (above) referred to the barrier between life and death. Billions of years ago, the first living things on Earth arose. Since that time, none have died and returned to life so far as science is concerned; at least none for which a sufficiently-loose definition of the word “died” is applied. True death must mean more than mere sleep or hibernation. Some species plant their seeds and disappear for many years, only to reappear on cue when their time comes around once again. Such life-forms are not truly “dead” in the sense implied by the above verses.
Continue reading ‘The Undiscoverable Country’ »

A story is told of a family moving to a very small town in the Midwest and then looking to see what church was available for them to join. They were quite surprised to find two very large and expensive-looking churches situated right across the street from each other. A bit confused, they asked a local resident how such a small town could possibly afford to maintain two such churches, and wouldn’t it be better if they merged together? The local replied that merger was not an option as the two churches had deep religious differences that were irreconcilable. And “what are those differences?” they asked? “Well,” the local replied, “that church over there believes there ain’t no Hell, and the other one asserts ‘the Hell there ain’t!’”

Up until the time of the Enlightenment, virtually all Christians believed in demonic possession. But Enlightenment viewpoints and scientific understandings have undermined that uniformity of Christian beliefs, and these days “liberal” Christian churches have cast aside beliefs in demonic possession, preferring to view the Bible stories of such events as alegorical for political events or other meanings altogether. But the New Testament is so riddled with stories of demonic possession that it becomes very difficult indeed to reconcile modern views about the subject with the idea that the Bible is in any way an accurate narrative of the life of Jesus.
Continue reading ‘Swimming With The Gadarene Swine’ »

One of the clear lessons from the Holocaust of the 20th century is that certain types of scientific inquiry are clearly immoral (or unethical) to perform. The infamous Nazi human experiments on prisoners disgusted the entire world, and such activities have been all-but-universally condemned. It is even questionable whether the ethical scientist ought to use or cite to the results of such ethically despicable research. I agree with those who would permit it under extraordinary circumstances and with appropriate condemnation of the unethical basis of the research in question. But few would question that scientific inquiry into medical subjects must be subordinate to considerations of medical ethics, and frankly I would condemn the ethics any who would question such subordination.

As I have written, my ethical hierarchy is grounded in survival. But we are all aware that even animals will sacrifice themselves in some ways to preserve the survival of their species through their own young. So, it does not necessarily follow that ethical scientific inquiry must necessarily avoid death for the organisms under study. To put this in a readily-understandable human context, we are “at war” with certain diseases, and in any war, some soldiers will die even if we do our best to preserve their lives. Since animals are viewed as “property” the ethical concerns with animal experimentation are somewhat different than they are with human experimentation. However, even there, we recognize that owned animals have certain rights to treatment according to recognized ethical standards. Accordingly, most of us would agree that there are limits to what scientific researchers can be allowed to do to owned animals for the purpose of scientific research. However, most of us would disagree with the limits sought to be imposed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The benefit of having an organization which takes such an extreme view of animal rights is that at least we can attempt to have a conversation about the proper limits upon the treatment of animals.
Continue reading ‘Ethical Concerns Limit Scientific Inquiry’ »

Most English translations of the Christian Bible begin with words like these:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Well, this isn’t a blog post about the word “God” in the above quote, but rather about the word “beginning.” Some prominent Christian apologists (for instance, William Lane Craig) want to take the scientific theory of the Big Bang and assert that this event in the past history of our universe is a “beginning.” Well, I suppose that the nuclear explosion at the Trinity test site in New Mexico was in some sense a “beginning” (it was the first manmade nuclear explosion), but it did not mark “the beginning of time” in any real sense. And frankly, I see no real reason to view the Big Bang as “the beginning of time” in any sense more than the Trinity test explosion.
Continue reading ‘The “Big Bang” Is Not A Beginning’ »