Rescuing Darwin from His Detractors (and Supporters)

TITLE: Rescuing Darwin

AUTHOR: Paul Fayter

SOURCE: The United Church Observer

SUMMARY: Ever since the Origin of Species was first published 150 years ago, scientists and creationists have tried to spin the religious views of Charles Darwin their way.

COMMENTARY: This article by Paul Fayter (appearing on a website sponsored by The United Church Observer, a Christian organization) directly contradicts many of the assertions made by some evolutionary biologists and most ID supporters, including most of the egregious distortions in Benjamin Wiker's recent book,
The Darwin Myth: The Life and Lies of Charles Darwin.

Unlike Wiker and most ID supporters, Paul Fayter has spent a significant fraction of his professional life studying Charles Darwin and his work. Here's what he found:

- Darwin was not an atheist when he wrote the Origin of Species and therefore could not possibly have written it as an "apology" for his atheism;

- the most important factors in his eventual agnosticism were 1) the death of his daughter, Annie, and 2) his view that a benevolent deity would not have created a world with such horrors as parasites (and the indiscriminate death of innocents);

- that despite his agnosticism, Darwin remained a "practicing" member of both the Church of England and his local parish church;

- that despite his embrace of the science of evolutionary theory, he did not descend into a life of libertinism and immorality, nor did he distort his theory to support any political position (including eugenics or "social darwinism");

- he remained a dedicated scientist, a loving husband, a doting father, a devoted member of his parish, and an unwavering opponent of slavery and its concomitant evils; and

- he also remained what would now be considered to be a "theistic evolutionist" until his death.

Here is Faytor's conclusion:

Darwin was able to reconcile the power and glory of a good and loving God with nature's cold indifference and manifest cruelty - the infamous and pitiless "survival of the fittest" - by viewing struggle, pain, suffering and death not as the direct will of God but as the result of the impersonal operation of universal laws. The process of evolution by means of natural selection was deadly and wasteful, and yet, as Darwin concluded in The Origin, it had a higher, nobler purpose. Higher species would evolve. The Creator - the God of scientific theism - lawfully drew good out of evil and progress out of pain.

Near the end of his life, Darwin thought it impossible to conceive that "this immense and wonderful universe" was "the result of blind chance or necessity." No, it still seemed that the world had been willed into being. "I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man," he wrote in his autobiography, "and I deserve to be called a Theist." At the same time, Darwin believed that "the mystery of the beginning of all things" was simply unsolvable; and so he also declared, "I for one must be content to remain an agnostic."

All of this directly contradicts Wiker's biography of Darwin and the opinions of most ID supporters. Demonizing Darwin, especially when there are very good (and unbiased) biographies of Darwin (not to mention his own, very candid autobiography) does nothing to harm Darwin's scientific reputation. By contrast, the fundamental misunderstanding among many ID supporters of how real science is done does quite a bit to harm ID's scientific reputation.

Neither evolutionary biology nor ID will be advanced or forestalled as scientific enterprises by pro- or anti-hagiographies of Charles Darwin (or any other individual scientist or ID supporter). This will happen only when sufficient field and laboratory work has been done and the results published in reputable scientific journals to decide between them. So far ID supporters have chosen to pursue a political program and the vilification of world-renowned scientists, rather than do the requisite science. Until they decide to abandon ad hominem arguments and actually focus on the science, they will remain (like "scientific creationism") a cautionary footnote to the history of the triumph of evolutionary biology.

In closing, I find it quite significant that only ID supporters refer to Darwin as a "little God". Like all evolutionary biologists, I consider him to have been a dedicated and talented observer of nature and a genuinely good person, but (like all of us) a plain and simple (and, of course, fallible) human.

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As always, comments, criticisms, and suggestions are warmly welcomed!

--Allen

The Answer (Now, What Was The Question?)

For what it’s worth (and because I have been rather sneeringly referred to as an atheist at other websites), here is some information that readers of this blog may find interesting.

I am a Quaker. That is, I am a member of the Ithaca Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. The actual name for “Quakers” is "Friends". When they started out (in England in the 17th century) they tended to refer to themselves (rather grandly, IMHO) as the “children of the light” and/or “the publishers of truth”. However, by the time they had come to America they had settled on the Society of Friends. “Quakers” was a somewhat derogatory name given to them by their opponents in Cromwell’s England.

It is important to note that there are two different kinds of Friends, known as “programmed” and “unprogrammed” (sometimes referred to as “evangelical” and “traditional”, respectively). The programmed/evangelical friends are a lot like Methodists: they meet on Sundays in buildings that look like churches (but generally without steeples), there is a minister who gives a sermon, there is often a choir, and the congregation sits auditorium-style facing the front of the “church” where the pastor speaks. Following the service there is generally “fellowship time”, with coffee and snacks in the fellowship room, etc. Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon were both brought up in “programmed” Friends meetings.

The other kind (the original kind, the kind invented by the founder of the Friends, George Fox, and the kind of meeting that I belong to) meets in silence in a simple (often very plain) meeting house, with no minister, no choir, no hymns, no sermons, indeed no “program” at all. Everybody waits in silence for the “gathering of the spirit”, usually all facing each other in a roughly circular (or square) arrangement of chairs or short pews. Sometimes a person in meeting is “moved” to stand up and speak (or, much more rarely, to sing). This almost never happens until at least a half hour of silence has gone by. No one comments while they speak, although people sometimes join in with a familiar song. When they have finished speaking, they sit back down and all wait for the silence to “settle”. I’ve never been at a meeting at which more than a half dozen people spoke, and I’ve been at plenty at which nobody spoke for the entire hour (and sometimes much longer than that, as some special meetings have no set time limit).

In an unprogrammed/traditional meeting such as the one in Ithaca there are no officials except for the Clerk of the Meeting, whose responsibility it is to keep people informed of when and where meetings are happening, and to take notes at “meetings for worship with attention to business”, which generally happen once a month. The Clerk also “breaks” meeting by catching people’s eyes and turning to the people next to them to shake hands. At the “rise of meeting” the Clerk makes announcements and invites members of the meeting to share concerns. There is also a Treasurer, who keeps accounts, but is not considered to be an “officer” and is not elected. Both the Clerk and the Treasurer have assistants, and are usually chosen annually by the committee for ministry and oversight (which used to be referred to as the elders, a now archaic term). I was for many years a member of this committee.

Probably not surprisingly to some at this website, I am known to some of the older members of the Ithaca Meeting as a “minister”; that is, someone who is often moved to speak. I haven’t done so in about a year, but that’s not unusual, especially for our meeting. Some meetings have a tradition of recording and drawing attention to ministers, but this is rare and becoming more so among “traditional” Friends meetings.

Although as one might expect there are a number of Cornell and Ithaca College professors in our meeting, the overwhelming majority of our members are not professional academics. Rather, they are working people from the town; everything from secretaries to lumberjacks to farmers. Quite a few of these, as it turns out; Ithaca is “centrally isolated” and is known for having a "cow college" on east hill...and yes, I grew up in the middle of farm country and spent some of my summers and vacations in college milking cows (and I'm a proud graduate of Cornell's "Ag school", class of '69).

Membership in a traditional Friends meeting is gained by petition to the committee on ministry and oversight, who appoints a “clearness committee” for the prospective member. Clearness committees work together with members to “come to clearness” on particular issues. People can ask for a “clearness committee” to join the meeting, get married “under the care of the meeting” (FWIW, the Ithaca meeting has been recognizing marriages between same-sex couples “under the care of the meeting” for almost thirty years), decide on taking a particular job, pursue a particular academic degree, get divorced (yes, it happens, although not often) or whatever is of concern to them. Anyone can ask to join a meeting, and there is no prohibition against people becoming members of a Friends meeting while remaining full members of other churches or religions. Indeed, there are a number of agnostics and atheists in our meeting (but, as I stated earlier, I’m not one of them). Because of this process, we say that a person becomes a Friend by “convincement”, not conversion, and that “convincement” must come from within, not from a minister or the group.

Perhaps the most noticeable difference between “traditional” Friends and other religious groups is the total lack of a creed or “confession of faith”. Instead, we maintain a collection of written “Queries and Advises”, which are periodically read and revised by clearness committees. We feel that it is each person’s responsibility to come to whatever “measure of the light” we can. All decisions (and I mean ALL decisions) are made by pure consensus. There are no votes taken at any Friends meetings, including those held with attention to business. This means that some decisions take a generation or more to be reached, but when they are finally arrived at, everyone in the meeting has agreed to the decision and will back it wholeheartedly.

Friends are one of the three historic “peace churches” (along with the Brethren and Mennonites). To be a Friend means never to participate in war or the preparation for war in any form whatsoever. I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, and remain one to this day.

This doesn’t mean that Friends are pacifists, however. Quite far from it; Friends are very active in our “peace witness”, often placing ourselves between combatants and doing humanitarian work around the world. The Friends service group, the American Friends Service Committee, received the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Friends worldwide, for our corporate work for peace and reconciliation.

Friends also don’t proselytize (indeed, there is a heavy but unspoken prohibition against doing so), and so the foregoing should be considered to be informational only. If you would like to learn more about the Society of Friends, I recommend this website, and here is the website for the Friends meeting I attend.

“Dearly beloved Friends, These things we do not lay upon you as a rule or form to walk by, but that all, with the measure of light which is pure and holy, may be guided: and so in the light, walking and abiding, these may be fulfilled in the Spirit, not from the letter, for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.”

– Given forth at a General Meeting of Friends in the Truth at Balby in Yorkshire, in the ninth month 1656, from the Spirit of Truth to the Children of Light

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As always, comments, criticisms, and suggestions are warmly welcomed!

--Allen

On Weird Theories

AUTHOR: Allen MacNeill

SOURCE: Original essay

COMMENTARY: That's up to you...

"... say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos."
- Walter Sobchak, The Big Lebowski (1998)

I had a next-door neighbor who worked for an aerospace company. One summer afternoon we were sitting beside his barbeque in his back yard, having one of those stream-of-consciousness conversations that often accompanies the guzzling of a six pack or two (his brand was Pabst Blue Ribbon™). I don't remember how the subject came up, but somewhere along the line I must have done what my wife calls "hitting the core-dump button." And he did; for the next couple of hours I listened in semi-horrified fascination as he expounded on his "theory" of reality. Basically, it was a weird variant on the "eagle and snake" mythology of the Aztecs, except that in his own weird theory the snake was the major icon. He went on and on about how the world (and time and everything else) was, at some much deeper level of reality, a snake. Ouroboros and the Midgard Serpent and Satan in the Garden of Eden and Freud's phallic symbols and the Caduceus and on and on and on...it was all tied together in a huge, complicated, and ultimately deranged web of relationships. It clearly was very meaningful to him; at times he seemed on the verge of tears. He showed me a medal of the Aztec eagle-and-snake image, which he wore around his neck at all times (even to bed and in the shower). He told me how it got him through some bad times in Vietnam, and later when he almost broke up with his wife. The emotional connections were so intense that he was shaking at times, and there was a catch in his voice.

This wasn't the first (or the last) time something like this has happened to me. Several times – on the bus or in the bus terminal, on a long car trip with a friend, at the airport, over lunch, at a picnic for work or a fraternal organization – someone hears or thinks of the word or phrase that "hits the core-dump button" and out it all comes. You sit there, in awe and trepidation, while the core-dumper gives you their entire "weird theory" of reality, all in one huge, steaming, highly charged, stream-of-consciousness pile. Sometimes it's clear that they have never articulated this before to anyone. Other times it's clear that they've been working on this particular monolog, maybe for years, and have already "gifted" others with a very similar version. Every time it's always intensely emotional for them, as the whole weird mess unspools and they search your face for some sign of recognition, of empathy, of understanding.

And, with me at least, they don't get that. I listen politely, trying not to look perplexed or horrified, waiting for the whole thing to come tumbling out, and hoping for something to then divert us – the burgers starting to burn or the bus arriving or the teller asking for my driver's license. I nod sometimes, and grunt in what I hope is a non-judgmental way, and quietly wish for someone or something to intervene before the core-dumper realizes that, not only to I not empathize, I think they're nuts.

Because they are, at some very deep level. Almost all of us are; completely whacked. What we almost all have, buried deep in our psyche, is what I call a "weird theory of reality," in which we believe passionately, and into which we shoehorn almost every perception we have about reality. Furthermore, it's clear to me that people have always had such "weird theories" about reality. Today it's alien abductions or UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster and the theory of Atlantis. Yesterday it was angels and demons, fairies, gnomes, trolls, heaven and Hell, transubstantiation, faith healing, walking on water, flying, and speaking in tongues. Tomorrow...well, I can't say for sure, but I am sure it will be something weird.

What makes modern "weird theories" different from those of the past is that today everyone has their own "weird theory". When people lived in small agricultural villages or even smaller hunter-gatherer groups, people had weird theories, but these were pretty similar within those groups. Heresy was difficult, if not virtually unthinkable, because everyone in a particular group was in constant verbal and emotional contact with virtually everyone else, and there was a strong incentive to conform to group norms of belief.

This pattern persisted into historic times with the establishment and enforcement of "state religions" - that is, weird theories of reality that had the force of political coercion behind them. People may have had personally idiosyncratic versions of the group's weird theory, but they generally kept these to themselves. These "group weird theories" (GWT) were the mythologies that held such groups together, that gave them a sense of shared experience and shared purpose, and that facilitated group coordination. This was often a good thing, but sometimes a bad thing: it made possible group coordination in agriculture and response to natural disasters, but also facilitated warfare and small-scale genocide.

What characterizes us now is that our weird theories are almost entirely idiosyncratic, especially in the First World. We have largely given up the large-scale group mythologies and religions of the past, and replaced them with what could be called "personal mythologies and religions". That Protestantism is the most influential religion in America today is precisely because it isn't a single religion: it's thousands, even millions of little idiosyncratic religions, with some shared similarities. Schism, right down to the individual level (and even within individuals at different times in our lives) is the norm, and so our weird theories are not only weird, they're mutually incomprehensible.

So, are the various sciences also "weird theories"? Anyone acquainted with the current state of quantum physics would almost certainly agree, as would most evolutionary biologists. But, it's not really the same, because although there are many weird theories in science, there is also an underlying agreement that is deeply "unweird" – the idea that empirical verification and logical inference is the basis for all of our weird theories.

Ultimately, the difference between non-scientific and scientific "weird theories" is that eventually the latter become generally accepted by the scientific community in the same way that the grand overarching religious weird theories of past centuries were. Yes, there are still schisms in science (think of the controversies surrounding punctuated equilibrium versus phyletic gradualism), but in the long run these schisms tend to heal themselves. Thomas Kuhn described this process well, but he also asserted (and most scientists would agree) that eventually the various scientific communities agree on their dominant paradigms. Science, in other words, tends to become more unified over time, as deep connections between the various weird theories stitch them together into "grand unified theories".

By contrast, the non-scientific "weird theories" schism and schism and schism, until they become the incomprehensible idiosyncratic messes that one taps into when one hits the "core-dump button". Indeed, one of my personal weird theories is that this is a good way to distinguish between useful (i.e. "true") and pointless (i.e. "false") weird theories: the former tend to unify your ideas with those of the other members of your community, whereas the latter tend to separate us to the point of mutual incomprehensibility.

Hence, the quote from The Big Lebowski: say what you say what you like about the tenets of (insert scientific discipline here), Dude, at least it's an ethos.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Shermer, M. (2002) Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time. Holt, New York, NY, ISBN #0805070893 ($17.00, paperback), 384 pages. Available here.

Sowin, J. (2008) 25 reasons people believe weird things. Pseudoscience, Life, Science, Religion, 28 April 2008. Available online here.

As always, comments, criticisms, and suggestions are warmly welcomed!

--Allen

Thank Goodness! for Daniel Dennett

SOURCE: The Edge.com

AUTHOR: Daniel Dennett

COMMENTARY: Allen MacNeill

I thought readers of this blog might be interested in the fact that notorious atheist (and "Darwinist") Daniel Dennett very nearly died of a dissecting aortic aneurism last week. Did he "find God" like Anthony Flew and A. J. Ayer? Not quite…

THANK GOODNESS!
by Daniel C. Dennett

There are no atheists in foxholes, according to an old but dubious saying, and there is at least a little anecdotal evidence in favor of it in the notorious cases of famous atheists who have emerged from near-death experiences to announce to the world that they have changed their minds. The British philosopher Sir A. J. Ayer, who died in 1989, is a fairly recent example. Here is another anecdote to ponder.

Two weeks ago, I was rushed by ambulance to a hospital where it was determined by c-t scan that I had a "dissection of the aorta"—the lining of the main output vessel carrying blood from my heart had been torn up, creating a two—channel pipe where there should only be one. Fortunately for me, the fact that I'd had a coronary artery bypass graft seven years ago probably saved my life, since the tangle of scar tissue that had grown like ivy around my heart in the intervening years reinforced the aorta, preventing catastrophic leakage from the tear in the aorta itself. After a nine-hour surgery, in which my heart was stopped entirely and my body and brain were chilled down to about 45 degrees to prevent brain damage from lack of oxygen until they could get the heart-lung machine pumping, I am now the proud possessor of a new aorta and aortic arch, made of strong Dacron fabric tubing sewn into shape on the spot by the surgeon, attached to my heart by a carbon-fiber valve that makes a reassuring little click every time my heart beats.

As I now enter a gentle period of recuperation, I have much to reflect on, about the harrowing experience itself and even more about the flood of supporting messages I've received since word got out about my latest adventure. Friends were anxious to learn if I had had a near-death experience, and if so, what effect it had had on my longstanding public atheism. Had I had an epiphany? Was I going to follow in the footsteps of Ayer (who recovered his aplomb and insisted a few days later "what I should have said is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief"), or was my atheism still intact and unchanged?

Yes, I did have an epiphany. I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say "Thank goodness!" this is not merely a euphemism for "Thank God!" (We atheists don't believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now.

To whom, then, do I owe a debt of gratitude? To the cardiologist who has kept me alive and ticking for years, and who swiftly and confidently rejected the original diagnosis of nothing worse than pneumonia. To the surgeons, neurologists, anesthesiologists, and the perfusionist, who kept my systems going for many hours under daunting circumstances. To the dozen or so physician assistants, and to nurses and physical therapists and x-ray technicians and a small army of phlebotomists so deft that you hardly know they are drawing your blood, and the people who brought the meals, kept my room clean, did the mountains of laundry generated by such a messy case, wheel-chaired me to x-ray, and so forth. These people came from Uganda, Kenya, Liberia, Haiti, the Philippines, Croatia, Russia, China, Korea, India—and the United States, of course—and I have never seen more impressive mutual respect, as they helped each other out and checked each other's work. But for all their teamwork, this local gang could not have done their jobs without the huge background of contributions from others. I remember with gratitude my late friend and Tufts colleague, physicist Allan Cormack, who shared the Nobel Prize for his invention of the c-t scanner. Allan—you have posthumously saved yet another life, but who's counting? The world is better for the work you did. Thank goodness. Then there is the whole system of medicine, both the science and the technology, without which the best-intentioned efforts of individuals would be roughly useless. So I am grateful to the editorial boards and referees, past and present, of Science, Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and all the other institutions of science and medicine that keep churning out improvements, detecting and correcting flaws.

Do I worship modern medicine? Is science my religion? Not at all; there is no aspect of modern medicine or science that I would exempt from the most rigorous scrutiny, and I can readily identify a host of serious problems that still need to be fixed. That's easy to do, of course, because the worlds of medicine and science are already engaged in the most obsessive, intensive, and humble self-assessments yet known to human institutions, and they regularly make public the results of their self-examinations. Moreover, this open-ended rational criticism, imperfect as it is, is the secret of the astounding success of these human enterprises. There are measurable improvements every day. Had I had my blasted aorta a decade ago, there would have been no prayer of saving me. It's hardly routine today, but the odds of my survival were actually not so bad (these days, roughly 33 percent of aortic dissection patients die in the first twenty-four hours after onset without treatment, and the odds get worse by the hour thereafter).

One thing in particular struck me when I compared the medical world on which my life now depended with the religious institutions I have been studying so intensively in recent years. One of the gentler, more supportive themes to be found in every religion (so far as I know) is the idea that what really matters is what is in your heart: if you have good intentions, and are trying to do what (God says) is right, that is all anyone can ask. Not so in medicine! If you are wrong—especially if you should have known better—your good intentions count for almost nothing. And whereas taking a leap of faith and acting without further scrutiny of one's options is often celebrated by religions, it is considered a grave sin in medicine. A doctor whose devout faith in his personal revelations about how to treat aortic aneurysm led him to engage in untested trials with human patients would be severely reprimanded if not driven out of medicine altogether. There are exceptions, of course. A few swashbuckling, risk-taking pioneers are tolerated and (if they prove to be right) eventually honored, but they can exist only as rare exceptions to the ideal of the methodical investigator who scrupulously rules out alternative theories before putting his own into practice. Good intentions and inspiration are simply not enough.

In other words, whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain, no religion holds its members to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does! And I'm not just talking about the standards 'at the top'—among the surgeons and doctors who make life or death decisions every day. I'm talking about the standards of conscientiousness endorsed by the lab technicians and meal preparers, too. This tradition puts its faith in the unlimited application of reason and empirical inquiry, checking and re-checking, and getting in the habit of asking "What if I'm wrong?" Appeals to faith or membership are never tolerated. Imagine the reception a scientist would get if he tried to suggest that others couldn't replicate his results because they just didn't share the faith of the people in his lab! And, to return to my main point, it is the goodness of this tradition of reason and open inquiry that I thank for my being alive today.

What, though, do I say to those of my religious friends (and yes, I have quite a few religious friends) who have had the courage and honesty to tell me that they have been praying for me? I have gladly forgiven them, for there are few circumstances more frustrating than not being able to help a loved one in any more direct way. I confess to regretting that I could not pray (sincerely) for my friends and family in time of need, so I appreciate the urge, however clearly I recognize its futility. I translate my religious friends' remarks readily enough into one version or another of what my fellow brights have been telling me: "I've been thinking about you, and wishing with all my heart [another ineffective but irresistible self-indulgence] that you come through this OK." The fact that these dear friends have been thinking of me in this way, and have taken an effort to let me know, is in itself, without any need for a supernatural supplement, a wonderful tonic. These messages from my family and from friends around the world have been literally heart-warming in my case, and I am grateful for the boost in morale (to truly manic heights, I fear!) that it has produced in me. But I am not joking when I say that I have had to forgive my friends who said that they were praying for me. I have resisted the temptation to respond "Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?" I feel about this the same way I would feel if one of them said "I just paid a voodoo doctor to cast a spell for your health." What a gullible waste of money that could have been spent on more important projects! Don't expect me to be grateful, or even indifferent. I do appreciate the affection and generosity of spirit that motivated you, but wish you had found a more reasonable way of expressing it.

But isn't this awfully harsh? Surely it does the world no harm if those who can honestly do so pray for me! No, I'm not at all sure about that. For one thing, if they really wanted to do something useful, they could devote their prayer time and energy to some pressing project that they can do something about. For another, we now have quite solid grounds (e.g., the recently released Benson study at Harvard) for believing that intercessory prayer simply doesn't work. Anybody whose practice shrugs off that research is subtly undermining respect for the very goodness I am thanking. If you insist on keeping the myth of the effectiveness of prayer alive, you owe the rest of us a justification in the face of the evidence. Pending such a justification, I will excuse you for indulging in your tradition; I know how comforting tradition can be. But I want you to recognize that what you are doing is morally problematic at best. If you would even consider filing a malpractice suit against a doctor who made a mistake in treating you, or suing a pharmaceutical company that didn't conduct all the proper control tests before selling you a drug that harmed you, you must acknowledge your tacit appreciation of the high standards of rational inquiry to which the medical world holds itself, and yet you continue to indulge in a practice for which there is no known rational justification at all, and take yourself to be actually making a contribution. (Try to imagine your outrage if a pharmaceutical company responded to your suit by blithely replying "But we prayed good and hard for the success of the drug! What more do you want?")

The best thing about saying thank goodness in place of thank God is that there really are lots of ways of repaying your debt to goodness—by setting out to create more of it, for the benefit of those to come. Goodness comes in many forms, not just medicine and science. Thank goodness for the music of, say, Randy Newman, which could not exist without all those wonderful pianos and recording studios, to say nothing of the musical contributions of every great composer from Bach through Wagner to Scott Joplin and the Beatles. Thank goodness for fresh drinking water in the tap, and food on our table. Thank goodness for fair elections and truthful journalism. If you want to express your gratitude to goodness, you can plant a tree, feed an orphan, buy books for schoolgirls in the Islamic world, or contribute in thousands of other ways to the manifest improvement of life on this planet now and in the near future.

Or you can thank God—but the very idea of repaying God is ludicrous. What could an omniscient, omnipotent Being (the Man Who has Everything?) do with any paltry repayments from you? (And besides, according to the Christian tradition God has already redeemed the debt for all time, by sacrificing his own son. Try to repay that loan!) Yes, I know, those themes are not to be understood literally; they are symbolic. I grant it, but then the idea that by thanking God you are actually doing some good has got to be understood to be just symbolic, too. I prefer real good to symbolic good.

Still, I excuse those who pray for me. I see them as like tenacious scientists who resist the evidence for theories they don't like long after a graceful concession would have been the appropriate response. I applaud you for your loyalty to your own position—but remember: loyalty to tradition is not enough. You've got to keep asking yourself: What if I'm wrong? In the long run, I think religious people can be asked to live up to the same moral standards as secular people in science and medicine.

DANIEL C. DENNETT is University Professor, Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. His most recent book is Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.

See also: The Brights

COMMENTARY:

While I have sometimes found myself disagreeing rather vehemently with Daniel Dennett, in this case I think he is absolutely right on. I had a somewhat similar experience last month - I was rushed to the hospital with my right ureter blocked by a HUGE kidney stone. It was extraordinarily painful, and was causing my right kidney to swell, and would probably have eventually caused it to die, with me following not long after. But, with the help of the ER staffs in two hospitals, an ambulance crew who drove me from the little town of Howell, Michigan to the University of Michigan Hospital, and my urologist and the surgical staff at my home hospital here in Ithaca, I am now much better. Anyway, while I lay there in a drug-induced haze (dilaudid, a morphine analog), I too mused on the question of prayer and the efficacy of religious belief versus "belief" in the protocols and practices of modern medicine (which is, of course, entirely based on the empirical sciences), and concluded just what Daniel Dennett did: that I would much rather have an atheist medical doctor, well trained in medical science, operating on me than a deeply religious person without such training.

Don't get me wrong: I don't begrudge religious believers their beliefs. But, if I had to make a choice and my life (or the life of someone I loved) were on the line, I would choose science every time. In other words, if it were a choice between a deeply religious but poorly trained doctor without much "bedside manner" and an atheist but highly trained doctor with the bedside manner of a Marine drill sargeant, I would choose the latter every time.

And would I appreciate anyone praying for me? I would of course appreciate the sentiment, but would not expect it to have any effect whatsoever on the outcome. Unlike science, prayer has no observable effect on the course of events in the real, physical world...which is, as far as I know, the only world there is.

--Allen

Is Intelligent Design Distinguishable from Deism?

SOURCE: Dispatches from the Culture Wars

COMMENTARY: Allen MacNeill

There is a very interesting thread at Dispatches from the Culture Wars on the difficulty (and importance) of distinguishing between deism and "intelligent design theory (IDT)." Specifically, there is a long discussion between several posters on whether IDT is fundamentally different from “theistic evolutionary theory (TET)” (which is, IMO, indistinguishable from simple deism).

In particular, several of the posters have argued that if IDT and TET are equivalent, then there is literally no science in IDT at all. That is, if God (remember, as I have posted earlier, it’s easier and more intellectually honest to type "God" than “the intelligent designer”) created the universe with just exactly the right set of natural laws that things like the bacterial flagellum could have evolved by purely natural processes alone (i.e. without further supernatural intervention), then that version of IDT is indistinguishable from deism (DEI). In that event, both would be entirely without scientific value, since both IDT and DEI would thereby accept the operation of all natural laws as both necessary and sufficient to produce all natural objects and processes.*

This means that if we are to distinguish between IDT and DEI (and, by extension, from TET) it must be incontrovertably shown that natural laws as they now exist are insufficient to produce existing natural objects and processes. As many others have pointed out, this requires proving a negative. That is, unless we assume that all currently known natural laws are literally all there are or even can be (as Lord Kelvin infamously did at the end of the 19th century), then it is possible that in the future new versions of purely natural laws will be discovered that can explain the existence of those entities now claimed to be possible only through supernatural intervention.

This, of course, leads to all kinds of logical fallacies, chief among them the problem of “supernatural incompetence.” If IDT = DEI = TET, then God is indeed omnipotent and can create natural laws that make the evolution of all natural entities possible without further intervention. In that case, IDT, DEI, and TET are indistinguishable from each other and none add anything of use to the generally accepted methods and principles of empirical science. This means that nothing more need be said about them by scientists, and we can go on doing science (including evolutionary biology) the way we have been doing up until now.

However, if IDT is not DEI nor TET, then perforce God must not be omnipotent. That is, He cannot create a set of natural laws that can in the fullness of time produce the objects and processes we observe around us.

Therefore, it seems to me that there are only two logical positions to take on this subject:**

1) God is omnipotent and therefore created the universe with natural laws of sufficient power and subtlety to allow purely natural processes to produce all natural objects (and therefore IDT is unnecessary).

or

2) God is not omnipotent and therefore cannot create a universe in which natural laws are sufficient to produce all natural objects and processes. This means that God (who is, by definition, incompetent) must intervene at specific times and places to alter nature in direct contravention of His originally created (and incompletely effective) natural laws.

These two positions have obvious and devastating implications for theology as well:

If (1) is the case, then God is only relevent to nature during it creation. From then on, He does not participate in it in any material way (and therefore prayer is useless, as all intercession by God violates His original created order), or

If (2) is the case, then God has left incontrovertable evidence of both His existence and actions in the structure of nature itself, and therefore faith is no longer necessary (and both justification and salvation through faith are pointless).

--Allen

*It also seems that this version of deism is indistinguishable from what some ID theorists (including Michael Behe) are now referring to as "front-loaded" IDT (FLIDT). That is,

FLIDT = DEI = TET

all of which are irrelevent for and useless to science.

**Alert readers may notice that there is a third option: God is omnipotent, but chooses to create a universe in which His natural laws are insufficient to produce all natural objects and processes without his intervention. This strongly implies that God is either meddlesome or capricious (or both), conclusions that I suspect would not be palatable to most ID theorists, deists, or theistic evolutionists.