Darwin award

Jerry Coyne has an article in The New Republic. It's notionally a review of new books by two Christians who defend evolution against creationism, whether it be traditional young Earth creationism, or creationism's more recent adaption to a major predator (the US court system), intelligent design. One of the Christians is the biologist Kenneth Miller, who testified against the IDists in the Dover School District trial; the other is Karl Giberson, a physicist.

Coyne argues that, while there are Christians who are accept evolution, this does not mean that these things are compatible ("It is like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers"). Having dismissed IDists' attempt to have the definition of science extended to religion, and the God of the liberal theologians, a god who almost nobody actually believes in, Coyne moves on to address Miller and Giberson's attempts to harmonise science and religion. He does so with civility and directness:

( Good bits )

He concludes that:

This disharmony is a dirty little secret in scientific circles. It is in our personal and professional interest to proclaim that science and religion are perfectly harmonious. After all, we want our grants funded by the government, and our schoolchildren exposed to real science instead of creationism. Liberal religious people have been important allies in our struggle against creationism, and it is not pleasant to alienate them by declaring how we feel. This is why, as a tactical matter, groups such as the National Academy of Sciences claim that religion and science do not conflict. But their main evidence--the existence of religious scientists--is wearing thin as scientists grow ever more vociferous about their lack of faith. Now Darwin Year is upon us, and we can expect more books like those by Kenneth Miller and Karl Giberson. Attempts to reconcile God and evolution keep rolling off the intellectual assembly line. It never stops, because the reconciliation never works.

Coyne does, I think, over-commit himself to one particular answer to the Fine Tuning Argument (just as Dawkins does), and he mis-states what the Strong Anthropic Principle is, but overall the article is excellent, and you should all read it.

There is a difference between creationisms (like YEC and ID) which contradict well established scientific theories, and Miller and Giberson's efforts to argue that God did it but carefully hid his tracks (or that God set things up so that intelligent life would arise on Earth, though Coyne argues that this argument is contradicted by science to some extent). With YEC and ID, we've good reasons not to believe them. With a God who carefully hides his tracks, we must instead ask how we'd know if we were wrong (we might also ponder the arguments from God's silence). The problem with Miller and Gibson is not facts but method.

If we accept a proposition merely because we can't show it's wrong, we might believe all sorts of things, so why credit the Christian God rather than my particular favourite deities? It seems that Miller and Giberson's theories start from the conviction that God did it and work backwards to an explanation which is not directly contradicted by current science. As we saw when talking about biblical inerrancy, there's always a logical way to make that sort of thing work; yet to do it is unskillful, the opposite of the fourth and seventh virtues in the Noble Twelvefold Path. In science "the first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool."

Link dump

In other news:

• I've brought out this old icon in honour of disgraced pastor Ted Haggard, who was all ready to make a comeback (as it were) until fresh revelations emerged recently. I've mentioned him before, but somehow neglected to mention that Ted Haggard is Completely Heterosexual (Roy Zimmerman = Tom Lehrer for the Naughties).
  
  
• I've been contributing to some threads over at Unreasonable Faith, the blog of Daniel Florien, an ex-Christian. Daniel asks other ex-Christians whether believing was a complete waste of time (you can see my answer). He's also posted about the Ehrman/Williams discussion on Premier Christian Radio, which I've mentioned previously, so I stuck my oar in. There are a few Christians with a strong inner conviction that the Bible is inerrant on there, so I responded to one of them.
  
  
• There's a meme doing the rounds on LJ where you get very angry about something called "cultural appropriation", or get very angry about people getting angry about it. The threads I've seen have largely involved the sort of people who use the word triggering to mean "a bit upsetting" (see also Monstrous Vegiment), so I've stayed out of it. However, livredor linked to an interesting post by nextian about the Jewish attitude to Christian readings of the Hebrew Bible, which reminded me a bit of Karen Armstrong's take on it in The Bible: the biography. livredor also has some discussion on her LJ.
  
  
• scribb1e and I watched Maverick last night. I somehow managed to miss it in 1994. It was funny, in a gentle sort of way.