Author: Ophelia Benson

  • The hermeneutic auction

    First there’s Daniel Harrell’s essay for BioLogos explaining that Adam and Eve were really truly. The introduction (perhaps written by someone else – it’s not clear) says “science does not rule out the possibility of a historical Adam and Eve.” Wull, yes it does. A historical woman and man who were the only humans on the planet and lived about 4 6 thousand years ago? Yes it does. So does history.

    Anyway, Harrell explains that we can decide that Eve and Adam were really truly in a different way from being created all of a sudden by god and then filled up with fake DNA to trick everyone.

    Can we use “formed” and “breathed” to mean created through the long and continuous history of biological evolution (as were the other living creatures in Genesis 1)? If so, then perhaps “the Lord God formed the man” could be read emphasizing the novelty and uniqueness which humans inhabit.

    Yeah, we can; sure. It’s a silly way to say that, but hey, whatever floats your boat.

    But pesky sciency Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers said it’s silly to bother working out a way to say that Adam and Eve are really truly.

    So the president of BioLogos, Darrel Falk, wrote to Dawkins to tell him he’d misunderstood. Dawkins answered to say oh no I didn’t. He didn’t, too. He was saying the second option, partially quoted above, was silly, not that the first one was. Of course the first one is – the first one is just “it was just like it says here on the page.” The point is that the contortionist one is silly too.

    Now Darrel Falk is all weary and washed out, because here he is offering the middle ground and all these people stomp their foot and say No! we don’t want your damn middle ground.

    He wants us to see there is middle ground between saying Adam and Eve were really truly in just the way the bible says, and saying there were no such people as Adam and Eve. He wants to make it a matter of negotiation and adjudication and splitting the difference, rather than a matter of getting it right. What should we do, bargain away a bit at a time? They lived five thousand years ago. Ten thousand. A million. No? Five hundred thousand? Sold! They were part of a group of forty humans. Sixty. A hundred. A hundred thousand. No? Ten thousand? Sold! They had parents and grandparents. They had ancestors going back ten generations. They had ancestors going back a thousand generations. No? Fifty? Sold!

    And then that’s what goes in the textbooks, and that becomes the consensus? Or what? What’s Darrel Falk looking for? What kind of middle ground is he talking about? Epistemic? Political? Both at once?

    It won’t do. Either way it won’t do. Even if it’s just political, it won’t work, because it will be so obvious when all the sciencey types go right on saying humans began to split from other apes some 6 million years ago whenever they’re not doing politics.

    Another cunning plan breaks down.

  • Dawkins and BioLogos’s Darrel Falk

    It’s a misunderstanding. No it isn’t.

  • Stephen Law on playing the mystery card

    “We must acknowledge that science and reason have their limits. It is sheer arrogance to suppose they can explain everything.”

  • Germany: Jewish dance group stoned

    Police said several Muslim immigrant youths were among the attackers; some shouted “Juden Raus.”

  • Cops raid headquarters of Belgian Catholic Church

    The archbishop’s palace has been sealed; a retired archbishop’s computer has been seized.

  • Jerry Coyne on natural selection in humans

    There is evidence – not conclusive, but suggestive – that it happens.

  • The blessing is not that God will actually do anything

    At the end of his oil spill speech last week, Obama got into some god talk – quite a lot of it, as a matter of fact. He told us about that pretty custom, “The Blessing of the Fleet.” He explained that what’s so pretty about it is not that it works, because it doesn’t, but that we have goddy company while we drown or choke on oil.

    For as a priest and former fisherman once said of the tradition, “The blessing is not that God has promised to remove all obstacles and dangers. The blessing is that He is with us always,” a blessing that’s granted “even in the midst of the storm.”

    The blessing is that he is with us, standing by and refusing to help, watching us as we struggle and gasp and flounder and kick, like the poor birds in the oil.

    Remind me why that is a blessing, exactly? Having an all-powerful witness who could help but doesn’t, watching?

    Sometimes the insult is just too god damn insulting.

  • Nothing fails like prayer

    Obama told us to pray over the oil spill. How’s that working?

  • Prince William made Fellow of Royal Society?!

    His father, the well-known science hater, is also a member of Britain’s national academy of science.

  • Reasons

    As we’ve seen, Chris Mooney remarked a couple of days ago that “The fact is, journalism (and dialogue) about science and religion are pretty difficult to oppose.”

    Actually they’re not. There are reasons for opposing some general enterprise of treating science and religion as necessarily connected, and there are reasons for opposing much of the product of that enterprise, too. There are also reasons for doing the opposite.

    One reason for opposing the product, frankly, is that it tends to be a boring vacuous waffly waste of time. Witness the detailed blow-by-blow account by Tom Paine’s Ghost of the World Science Festival session “Faith and Science” for instance.

    Check it out. It’s mostly harmless, it’s pleasant enough, but it’s at best drearily familiar, and weightless, and futile. Enterprises in squaring the circle usually are, I would guess. They don’t have anything really substantive to say, so they just discuss, in a circling inconclusive “what am I doing here” way. Mooney is probably right that there’s not much need to oppose that kind of talk with any energy (its implied messages are another matter), but it does look like a waste of time and effort.

    Mooney himself felt somewhat the same way about the theology parts of his Templeton fellowship.

    To be sure, we hear a fair amount about theological thought here–and I have my difficulties with theology as a field, simply because of my personal identity if nothing else. Being an atheist, it is pretty hard to relate to a theological perspective on something like, say, the meaning of the doctrine of creation. Why would something like that speak to me, resonate for me, or even make sense to me?

    Why indeed – but it’s not primarily a matter of personal identity. He should have talked about the “if nothing else” part – the something else is the part that counts. Atheism is not just an identity; identity should come last rather than first. People are atheists for reasons. I assume even Mooney is an atheist for reasons, although he is careful not to mention them these days. That’s perhaps one of the most distasteful aspects of his anti-atheism: his reluctance to do more than say he is an atheist – rather as a non-observant Jew might say she is a Jew. It’s as if Mooney is a non-observant atheist.

    But not all of us are. Lots of us really do have reasons for our atheism, and we think the reasons matter. Treating them as beside the point or unimportant seems odd to us. And the reasons we are atheists are the reasons we think science and religion don’t go together. We think they are different, for reasons, that matter.

  • Mo believes in women’s rights

    Their very own special, different, unequal rights.

  • Jesus and Mo on ‘so did Mohammed’ campaign

    Damn those Islamophobes – always digging around in the past, looking for dirt.

  • No prayers before Leicester City Council meetings

    Mayor: “religion, in whatever shape or form, has no role to play at all in the conduct of council business.”

  • Other hatemongers on list of Toronto conference

    Such as Sheikh Hussein Yee, who once said Jews are the “extremists of the world” and will “go to Hell.”

  • Togetherness

    One more thing about Mooney and the jollification at the AAAS last week. Mooney keeps talking about dialogue between religion and science, bringing religion and science together. But what actually happened at the jollification, and what Mooney asked about there, was religious people and scientists talking. That’s a different thing. Obviously religious people and scientists can talk any time, and it’s unexceptionable that they do. But the fact that religious people and scientists talk to each other doesn’t mean that religion and science are somehow getting closer together, or even having a dialogue.

    Oh don’t be silly, you may say; that’s what they mean – by “bringing religion and science together” they mean religious people and scientists talking to each other. But is it? I’m not so sure. I don’t think it is. I think we’re supposed to think that the two are sort of the same – that accomplishing the one is accomplishing the other.

    Maybe this is a good thing, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a sop to believers. Maybe the idea is that if religious people and scientists get together and talk, religious people will get the idea that science isn’t so scary after all, without science having to make itself a little bit more like religion. But on the other hand, maybe it works the other way; maybe the idea is that if religious people and scientists get together and talk, then BioLogos will somehow become part of science, and pretty soon it will be part of the curriculum, and…

    Hold my hand, I’m scared.

    There’s another thing. It wasn’t actually a dialogue on science and religion – it was a Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion. How did ethics get in there? What’s ethics got to do with science or religion? Why didn’t they throw in ballet and literary criticism while they were at it?

  • For real?

    Is this true?

    A London council was at the centre of a religious row last night after it announced it had dumped Christian prayer in favour of poetry readings at the start of council meetings…The vast majority of councils choose to start meetings with Christian Prayers while a handful of other local authorities begin with other faiths.

    Is that true? Most councils start meetings with prayers?

    It sounds crazy. Anybody know the facts?

  • Canada Says No to Zakir Naik

    Yesssssss.

  • Tarek Fatah on a parting insult to Aqsa Parvez

    The Toronto Star sent a reporter who has for years celebrated the hijab and niqab to cover the trial of her father and brother.

  • Gita Sahgal’s speech at One Law for All rally

    Beware when you hear talk of balancing of rights. Generally, it a code for denying women rights.

  • The eyes of Texas are bloodshot

    The Texas Taliban Republican Party really is a hoot. Their new platform wants to set up an Inquisition, take the suffrage away from women and Nigras, send Jews to Iceland to do sumpin about that there volcano –

    Okay, I’m lying. No all the platform wants to do is, for instance,

    restrict citizenship to children born in the United States whose parents are citizens

    That’s all – it just wants to repeal the 14th Amendment, that’s all. You know – the one that was passed in the wake of the Civil War, that undid the infamous three fifths rule in the Constitution and the equally infamous Dred Scott decision. And you know what else that particular red-hot idea would do? You do if you’ve seen the latest News item, because I spilled it there already. Look at it. It would make the current president a non-citizen according to Texas. I find that fascinating – it makes my blood run cold.

    The platform would also like the reinstatement of laws banning “sodomy,” and to make gay marriage a felony. A felony! With jail time!

    I’m canceling that vacation trip to Lubbock right now. I don’t think I would feel cheerful there.