What #Putin is Doing and what the West is Not Doing At All

My newest post at Intellectual Takeout:

This weekend's Wall Street Journal featured an interesting article about Hungary, a former Soviet bloc country that fled to NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and is now moving closer to Putin's Russia. As the article mentions, it is one more example of the break up of the Cold War anti-Soviet alliance, and another diplomatic victory for Putin.

But more importantly, it returns us to the issue of why it is that the West is experiencing this long, slow breakup--and what Putin is doing right.

Here is what Putin is doing right and what the West is--not doing wrong--but not doing at all: First, he is providing his people with a transcendent meaning and purpose through an official religion, that of Christianity, while the West thinks it can keep cultural cohesion through meaningless secular liberal abstractions.

Read the rest here.

A big thinker at Big Think engages in Small Think about religion

One would think that at the Big Think they would know how to do it a little better than this. But this is always the thing with atheists (or skeptics or rationalists or whatever else they call themselves): they don't actually engage in rational thought or discourse; rather, they strike a rationalist pose.

I just want to know when we're going to see these great rational atheistic thoughts we're always being promised instead of the disappointingly vague and logically questionable pronouncements we keep getting.

Derek Beres, one of the resident Big Thinkers, in his "Is Religion the Problem?", writes about the role of the religious mindset in the recent Baton Rouge police shootings:

In many ways, religion is born out of this idea: the soul is what really matters; eschew the physical and focus on the moral prescriptions arising from your prophet (or the ‘voice’ inside your own head).

Well maybe some religions do this, but strangely enough, the most major major world religion, Christianity, is certainly not born out of this idea. Apparently Beres forgot that part about the resurrection of the body and the new Heaven and earth.

But somehow, in some vague sense never actually identified by Beres, the belief in an afterlife constitutes an "ideology" that has some bad influence on people:

... a body is necessary for consciousness to occur. While it is not only our brain producing it, without a body what we term ‘consciousness’ does not exist. Neuroscientists and researchers quibble over what that term actually defines. They do not argue about an ethereal version of it ‘out there’ invading what is ‘in here.’

How could he possibly know that a body is necessary for consciousness? Because all the consciousnesses he knows inhabit bodies? If there was a consciousness that existed outside a body, how could he know it? This reminds me of C.S. Lewis' dialog in which one of the characters asks another how a scientist could possibly know anything about what or whether anything existed outside of nature, given the fact that the only thing scientists study is nature. How can you pretend to know anything about something you, by definition, do not study?

There is also the problem that anyone who denies the existence of anything metaphysical has to have a physical account of consciousness. Well, good luck with that. We're still waiting for some clever materialist to come up with a purely physicalist account of something that is, by definition, not physical.

Don't hold your breath.

He says:

A metaphysical philosophy on what we are always ends in disappointment and, too often these days, violence. The meat and bones of our being is the reality of the planet we share.

Umhmm. Is there, like, any evidence that metaphysical systems are any more conducive of disappointment or violence than non-metaphysical systems? If so, does this evidence include Marxism and Nazism?

And I'm not exactly sure of what we're talking about when we start using expressions like the "meat and bones of our being" being the "reality of the planet." It's not a bad metaphor, but it's not exactly clear what it means. It sounds like some sort of attempt to talk about being (a metaphysical concept) in some physicalist way, but unfortunately, the thought is stillborn.

Scalia: Government religious neutrality not Constitutional

U. S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia voices an obvious truth one could discover by simply reading the language of the First Amendment. From the Associated Press:

METAIRIE, La. (AP) -- Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Saturday the idea of religious neutrality is not grounded in the country's constitutional traditions and that God has been good to the U.S. exactly because Americans honor him. 

Scalia was speaking at a Catholic high school in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, Louisiana. Scalia, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 is the court's longest serving justice. He has consistently been one of the court's ... more conservative members 

He told the audience at Archbishop Rummel High School that there is "no place" in the country's constitutional traditions for the idea that the state must be neutral between religion and its absence. 

"To tell you the truth there is no place for that in our constitutional tradition. Where did that come from?" he said. "To be sure, you can't favor one denomination over another but can't favor religion over non-religion?" 

He also said there is "nothing wrong" with the idea of presidents and others invoking God in speeches. He said God has been good to America because Americans have honored him.

Read more here.

In response, internet atheist P. Z. Myers, who moonlights as an amateur Constitutional scholar, says:

That’s right. I thought it was clear: the government doesn’t get to interfere in private matters of conscience. It’s a concept that really isn’t that hard to understand. There should be no federal bias in favor of Baptists over Catholics, or Christians over Muslims, or religious vs. non-religious — it’s just not their job. It’s worrisome that a Supreme Court justice thinks it is their job.

Sure. It's right there in the Constitution. It's in the subsection on Baptists, Catholics and Muslims. Let's see, let me find it ... Uh, I could have swore ... Hmmm.

We'll get right back to you on that.

Culturally illiterate New York Times unaware of most basic Christian belief

I remember hearing a few years ago that a skyscraper in downtown Singapore featured, in its Christmas display, a manger scene featuring Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the seven dwarfs. Now the nation's most prestigious newspaper has stepped in it about as badly.

This is utterly priceless. The New York Times printed an article on Israeli tourism which contained a reference to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, "marking the site where many Christians believe that Jesus is buried."

Huh?

The Times, apparently, is blissfully ignorant of the fact that the central belief of Christianity, a religion which boasts some 2.2 billion adherents worldwide and is intimately bound up in our own history and culture, is that Jesus was resurrected. Other than the cross itself, there is no more comprehensive symbol of Christian belief than the empty tomb.

It's sort of like not knowing that baseball involves hitting a ball with a bat or that milk comes from cows.

Here's Rod Dreher at the American Conservative on the Times' major gaffe:

I can understand someone living in Pakistan, or Sichuan province, not getting that all of Christianity, in its many versions throughout the ages, rests on the resurrection of Jesus. I don’t understand how an educated American, whatever his beliefs, can not know that. Yet that story got through several layers of editing at the Times before making it into print. It’s staggering.

As Dreher points out, it's one thing to disagree with this belief, but to simply be ignorant of it is inexcusable for the nation's most prestigious newspaper.

Read the rest here. HT: Rick Garrett at Mirror of Justice.

Bibles Booted from U.S. Navy Base Guest Rooms

Where is the outrage from the liberals who are always lecturing us about the evils of censorship?

The U.S. Navy will no longer allow Bibles and other religious materials in the guest rooms of Navy lodges, a decision that has infuriated some conservative groups, which recently learned about the new policy. 

The Navy’s decision came after the Freedom From Religion Foundation sent a letter questioning the constitutionality of religious literature in the Navy lodges’ 3,000 guest rooms.
The June 19 directive from the Navy Exchange Service Command, which runs the Navy’s 39 guest lodges in the U.S. and abroad, allows religious materials to be made available to guests. 

But it forbids religious items to be placed in guest rooms, aligning the command, known as NEXCOM, with U.S. Navy policy, said NEXCOM spokeswoman Kathleen Martin.

On Tuesday the American Family Association made the directive the subject of its latest “action alert,” asking members to call Navy officials to reverse the decision. The Chaplains Alliance for Religious Liberty has called on the Navy to do the same. 

But supporters of the Navy directive, said it rights a constitutional wrong, in that the Establishment Clause does not allow the U.S. government to promote or favor any particular religion.

read more


http://ift.tt/1cf7PcC

Kentucky 11th most religious U.S. State

A new Gallup Poll finds that Kentucky is the 11th most religious state. Mississippi is the most and Vermont the least religious. And just a glance at the statistics shows pretty clearly that most religious states are in the South and the least religious states are in the Northeast.

"Gallup classifies Americans as very religious," says the group's website, "if they say religion is an important part of their daily lives and that they attend religious services every week or almost every week."

In addition, the percentage of "highly religious" and "somewhat religious" is slightly higher than in previous years, which seems to militate against the idea of an increase in secularism.

Bureau for Better Atheists issues advisory on Jerry Coyne

Once again, we here at the Bureau for Better Atheists (BBA) are having to set aside our other important work (such as trying to find Richard Dawkins a competent barber) to deal with Jerry Coyne.

As we have mentioned before, the BBA is devoted to improving the quality of atheists by dealing with a problem that is reaching crisis proportions: the increasing intellectual deterioration of atheists. An increasing number of atheists are questioning basic historical facts and setting out in the apparently unfamiliar terrain of philosophy.

Our file on Coyne, a prominent evolutionary biologist, now occupies a whole cabinet. In fact, we are thinking of hiring a full-time staff member devoted solely to Coyniana. It is atheists like Coyne who make opposition to atheism that much more tedious and unchallenging.

Anyway, Coyne is now contesting the idea that religion had a prominent role in the rise and development of science. This is just one of the eccentric views being promulgated by modern atheists who either a) don't know the history of science; b) have issues with truth generally; or c) are functionally illiterate.

Coyne says:

All progress in science, whether ancient or modern, came from ignoring or rejecting the idea of divine intervention. Even if theories were inspired by thoughts of God, they were substantiated or disproven by tacitly assuming a godless universe—that is, by employing methodological naturalism. 

Ah, methodological naturalism. Does he mean the methodological naturalism that originated in the 12th century with Adelard of Bath, who believed that reason did not in any way conflict with Christian faith? That methodological naturalism? If you want to maintain the discredited theory of the inherent conflict between religion and science, it's probably not a good idea to use an idea developed by someone who completely disagreed with that theory.

Coyne continues:

Religion has of course also repressed the search for knowledge. Not only do we have the cases of Galileo and Bruno, but also the active discouragement of the use of reason by many church fathers, especially Martin Luther, who made statements like this: “Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.” And freethinkers like Spinoza were regularly persecuted by religion (Judaism in his case.)

Yes, and governments have repressed knowledge. Is government, then, inherently anti-science? And what about males? Most of those who have repressed science have been males. What is it about these males that makes them so anti-science? In fact, now that I think about it, human beings seem to be the culprits. Have you ever noticed how many of the people who have hampered the progress of science are human beings?

And since when is Martin Luther a "church father"? I don't know anyone, including Luther fans, who call him a "church father." "Protestant reformer" yes, but no one even remotely familiar with history calls Luther a "church father."

In addition, Coyne apparently forget (or never knew) that both Galileo and Bruno were Christians. And why is the Church how tried to hold Galileo to the standards of proof a bad guy? Galileo didn't have adequate proof of his theory (which wasn't completely correct anyway, since it presumed the circular orbit of planets, which Kepler had already shown to be false, among other things). The Church (which Galileo was a voluntarily member of) didn't allow Galileo to assert that his theory was true because he hadn't proved it. The Church had no problem with the propagation of Copernicus' theory as a possible explanation of the data and, in fact, most of the Church was accepting of some heliocentric view.

He goes on:

The major achievements of science, including relativity, evolution, and modern molecular biology, were achieved by non-theists.

I have only one thing to say: Gregor Mendel (Augustinian friar. Mendelian genetics named after. Salvaged evolutionary theory from sole reliance on natural selection. Check it out.)

I will be on "Pure Politics" tonight at 7:00 p.m.

I will be on CN2's "Pure Politics" tonight at 7:00 p.m. and again at 11:30 p.m. The panel discussion/debate is on the issue of religion and politics. Guests are me, State Sen. and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Whitney Westerfield, and Edwin Kagan, representing American Athiests.

The Thousand Faces of Christ: On the latest revisionist Jesus

Several years ago I was reading a book of quotations and came across a quote from Jesus, the attribution read, "Jesus, (if you can believe Luke)." Just for fun, I looked up a quote by Socrates. In that case the attribution simply read, "Socrates." It didn't say "Socrates (if you can believe Plato)."

The problem, of course, is that the historical standard employed by critics of the Bible is completely different from the standard they employ with any other book. When it comes to the gospel accounts, we all of a sudden want to abandon the criteria by which we judge the historicity of every other text in favor of a standard we don't apply to anything else.

In other words, the problem is not that the Biblical documents don't meet up to the regular documentary criteria (they do that just fine). The problem is that we want to judge them by a higher standard than anything else.

We see this just about every Easter, when Time Magazine or Newsweek (when there was one) features a cover article on "the historical Jesus" or "the real Jesus" or "Who was Jesus?" or "Who was the real historical Jesus" or countless other iterations of the same theme.

And what better way to determine whether Jesus existed than to go out and interview people who don't believe he did? Or those who think he did, but have their own pet theory about who he was--and whose theories pretty much contradict each other?

But scholars who think he did and think he was pretty much like the historical documents say he was sit by their university office phones like the old Maytag repairman: They never get a call.

Now there is a book out which does pretty much the same thing, this one by Islamic scholar Reza Aslan, author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Russ Douthat also takes note of the fact that Aslan's theory (and approach) is not exactly unprecedented:

The fact that Aslan’s take on Jesus is not original doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wrong. But it has the same problem that bedevils most of his competitors in the “real Jesus” industry. In the quest to make Jesus more comprehensible, it makes Christianity’s origins more mysterious. 

Part of the lure of the New Testament is the complexity of its central character — the mix of gentleness and zeal, strident moralism and extraordinary compassion, the down-to-earth and the supernatural. 

Most “real Jesus” efforts, though, assume that these complexities are accretions, to be whittled away to reach the historical core. Thus instead of a Jesus who contains multitudes, we get Jesus the nationalist or Jesus the apocalyptic prophet or Jesus the sage or Jesus the philosopher and so on down the list. 

There’s enough gospel material to make any of these portraits credible. But they also tend to be rather, well, boring, and to raise the question of how a pedestrian figure — one zealot among many, one mystic in a Mediterranean full of them — inspired a global faith.

It's so much easier to tame Christianity than deal with what it actually says.

But there is a better response to the constant stream of multitudinous and inconsistent Christs we are always being told existed instead of the one presented by the actual evidence (the New Testament) and it comes from G. K. Chesterton:

Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad—in various ways.

Which sort of goes back to something Hillaire Belloc once said: "Truth is one and error multiple."

Are science and religion incompatible? More stupid atheist tricks

It's so hard to be an atheist. It involves so terribly much faith that you have to believe with so awfully much fervor.

In his recent post being touted over at Project Reason, Sean Carroll, an atheist physicist, reiterates the fact that he does not take money from the Templeton Foundation because Templeton believes that science and religion can be reconciled. Why science and religion need to be "reconciled" (I'm not sure if this is Templeton's term or Carroll's) is a little mysterious.

Things only need be reconciled when they are at odds. But since science and religion are not at odds, they have no need to be reconciled.

What would we think if someone asked whether history and economics could be "reconciled?" Or mathematics and sociology? Or literature and physics?

Carroll asks questions like this because he is an atheist and he sees his scientific work through the lens of his scientific materialism. In fact, much of what you hear from the New Athiests (of which Carroll is one) is the product of this central equivocation between science and scientism. Atheists like Carroll think they are one and the same despite the fact that, well, they aren't.

In his post, he reiterates the same assertion he has made before:

Think of it this way. The kinds of questions I think about—origin of the universe, fundamental laws of physics, that kind of thing—for the most part have no direct impact on how ordinary people live their lives. No jet packs are forthcoming, as the saying goes. But there is one exception to this, so obvious that it goes unnoticed: belief in God. Due to the efforts of many smart people over the course of many years, scholars who are experts in the fundamental nature of reality have by a wide majority concluded that God does not exist. We have better explanations for how things work. The shift in perspective from theism to atheism is arguably the single most important bit of progress in fundamental ontology over the last 500 years. And it matters to people … a lot.

Did you get the argument here? A "wide majority" of "scholars" have "concluded" that "God does not exist." Seriously. This is what New Atheists consider a competent argument.

Do we really determine the answers to important questions like this by taking a head count? A question is settled by majority vote? A majority of whom? Contemporary scholars? 21st century scholars? Scholars over the last 100 years? The total number of scholars who have ever existed?

Who is he talking about? How does he know this? Is there a study that has shown this? Who did it include? When was it done? Who conducted it?

Carroll clearly doesn't know the first thing about how science and religion relate to one another. A link from this post takes us to one of his previous posts where he argues that because religions make miracle claims: "And science says: none of that is true. So there you go, incompatibility."

Huh? Where has "science" shown that, say, the Resurrection (one of the miracles he mentions) is not true? What study has shown this? Who conducted it and when was it conducted? What piece of evidence is there that militates against it?

The only reason atheists like Carroll aren't laughed out of civilized discourse is because so many people are philosophically naive--that and the mere utterance of the word "science" has an incantational effect.

If I were Templeton, I wouldn't worry about Carroll not taking my money for scholarship on this question. If this is the level of discourse at which he operates, it would be embarrassing to be associated with him at all.

Let the Nonsense Begin: Dawkins and Krauss hit the atheist crusade circuit

If your pomposity detector has been displaying high readings, there's a good reason:

Now that a movie is coming out starring the two ("The Unbelievers") we are apparently going to see a lot more of Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss, two atheist scientists on a mission to rid the world of religion.

Someone be sure to check the pulse of this movement in, oh, about 50 years when churches will still be standing and Dawkins and Krauss (and their movement) won't.

One of the more brazenly pompous claims they apparently make in the movie (at least they're making it as they make the rounds promoting it) is that one of the roles of science is "to get rid of myth and superstition." But as Thomist philosopher James Chastek points out, science is neither necessary nor sufficient to eliminate a myth--nor did science, as a matter of historical fact, as many scientific fundamentalists seem to think, play any necessary historical part in destroying myths.

Here's Chastek, responding to similar claim to that of Dawkins and Krauss:

But given that “destroying a creation myth” means “showing that the myth is not true”, why does one need a science to do this? We don’t need sciences to know that myths are, well, myths. Or is the claim that no one recognized that (the relevant) creation accounts were myths until science told us so? But then the claim is just false: we didn’t need the sciences to know that creation accounts are mythical. Millions of people could recognize creation myths as such before any of the modern sciences.

And ultimately, people like Dawkins and Krauss are not really opposed to myths, but propagators of a new one:

Is “science” the only thing that is allowed to satisfy the intellect now and give us an account of the way the world is? Quite the opposite seems to be the case – far from wanting to do away with myth it seems we’re more interested in advancing a scientific mythology. Science in the popular imagination is idealized (science cannot explain everything or solve all our problems now, but just give it time!); and only its successes are seen as integral to it (i.e. vaccinations, space travel, and computers are seen as the direct and proper work of science while Hiroshima, Tuskegee, Mustard gas, scientific eugenics and sterilization programs, Josef Mengele, climate change, industrial pollution, etc. are never seen as the necessary products of “science”). IOW, this is obviously not a scientific view of science but one that makes it into an exalted, inerrant messiah that will set everything right if we only give it our total devotion. Ultimately, it’s not that we want to destroy creation myths with science but that we want to replace an ancient creation myth with a modern one.

I'll be watching Dawkins and Krauss for amusement, but reading Chastek for actual, you know, wisdom. Read the rest here.

NEWSFLASH: Religion causes violence

In interviews promoting their new movie "The Unbelievers," scientists Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss assert that religious faith causes violence.

This made me think of all the violent things that religion has invented, such as the rack, the pillory, the strappado, waterboarding, the machine gun, grenades, mortors, bazookas, napalm, cluster bombs, torpedoes, carpet bombing, nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, drones ...

Oh, shoot. Hang on ... Whoops. Sorry. These things were all the products of science.

Nevermind.

Why people don't pull over for funeral processions anymore

I remember when I moved from California to rural Kentucky some 30 years ago. Not long after arriving, I was driving along a country road and all of a sudden everyone pulled over to the shoulder. Not knowing why, I just did it too. Soon a funeral procession passed by. "Oh wow," I thought in my still Californian brain. "That is so cool."

I had never seen anybody do this, but here in small town America, it still happens. Not so in many other places, as George Neumayr explains:

The British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge saw all this coming. When he visited America in the 20th century, he noticed the "extraordinary efforts made, linguistically and in every other way, to keep death out of sight and mind." He spent a month in Florida at Sunshine Haven, a retirement home where the residents were expected to behave like teenagers, "perfectly capable of disporting ourselves on the dance floor, the beach, or even in bed."

Read more here.

More evidence of crisis of mentally fragile atheists

We have reported before on this blog about the weakening mental fortitude of many contemporary atheists, who are apparently so weakly constituted that the have a mental breakdown when confronted with religion. Christians don't seem to be any the worse for the fact that they have to live in an increasingly secular culture, but atheists, on the other hand, seem to have become so psychologically tender (perhaps through intellectual inbreeding), that they cannot seem to handle the mere mention of religion.

Last we heard, an atheist group was suing the state of Kentucky for having mention of the word "God" in its Homeland Security law, claiming it caused them "mental pain and anguish."

The most recent case of athiests is that of an atheist at West Point who has resigned from the school because it was too religious there. Even though West Point does not mandate any kind of religious activities, Blake Page claims it does. But it appears that he just doesn't like the fact that so many of the students there were religious and disagreed with him. At least the story in the Lexington Herald-Leader doesn't mention anything much more than this.

Worse still the ... Foundation is calling Blake's act of running away from those mean ol' religious people who don't believe like he does an "act of sacrifice." Ironically, Page's "act of sacrifice" came "after he was notified he would not be commissioned in the Army because of a medical issue related to clinical depression."

"Act of sacrifice." Mmhmm.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: They just don't make atheists like they use to.

Does the Higgs Boson particle make God irrelevant?

In a July 9 article, atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss announced that, with the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle, humans "may have just taken a giant step toward replacing metaphysical speculation with empirically verifiable knowledge." It's a funny thing about scientific materialists: Whenever they announce the demise of philosophy, you discover very quickly that they are engaging in it in the very act of pronouncing it dead. Krauss is no different.

 Krauss, says Oxford mathematician and philosopher of science John Lennox:

Krauss has not taken that giant step himself, since his statement, far from being a statement of science, is another metaphysical speculation - a mixture of hubris and an inadequate concept of God.

Krauss has continuing trouble even figuring out the difference between science and metaphysics, as is evident from his recent book A Universe from Nothing, in which he confuses the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and the question "How did something come from nothing." In fact, as it transpires, he's completely confused about what the term "nothing" even means.

Apparently this confusion extends to a few other things. Says Lennox:

What does Krauss mean by "more relevant than God?" Relevant to what? Clearly the Higgs particle is more relevant than God to the question of how the universe works. But not to the question why there is a universe in which particle physics can be done. The internal combustion engine is arguably more relevant than Henry Ford to the question of how a car works, but not for why it exists in the first place. Confusing mechanism and/or law on the one hand and agency on the other, as Krauss does here, is a category mistake easily made by ignoring metaphysics. 

Read the rest here.

The "God particle" and the new Religion of Science

Our prayers have been answered. The "God particle" has been discovered. What The New York Times is calling the "Holy Grail" of physics has finally been found.

Sort of.

Scientists at the "Large Haldron Collider" announced that they had finally discovered the "Higgs Boson" particle, a particle that gives the particles that make up atoms their mass (One of the things about being a "God particle" is that you have to go to mass). 

"The God particle has been found," blared the headlines, although the fine print revealed that they only "may have" discovered it. They definitely discovered it, only they really didn't. The particle was found "probably": They had "gathered enough evidence" to show that it "looks like" a Higgs Boson. It was "newly discovered" but scientists "stopped just shy" of "claiming outright that it is the Higgs Boson itself."

They "believed" they "gathered enough evidence" to demonstrate that they had "probably" discovered a particle whose "characteristics match" what "could be" the Higgs Boson with "99 percent certainty." Or was that "99.99 percent" certainty? Or maybe "99.9936 percent" certainty?

We're not certain.

The only thing that is certain, we are told, is that in order to get "5 sigma level" certainty (that's the certainty you must have in order to say your certainly certain), one must have 99.99995 percent certainty. Otherwise, your left at the 4 sigma level, which is sort of like .

So here we have a bunch of scientists making this big announcement and they've only got 4 sigma level certainty? Are you kidding?! We all got excited some 4 sigma level nonsense? What is this? Geraldo Rivera opening up Al Capone's safe?

Well, at least it's better than the original Holy Grail, which they never found, meaning it had a certainly level of only 1 sigma.

This whole thing is just the most recent example of the media going into a swoon over the latest pronouncement of what they implicitly view as the equivalent of a religious declaration. The only question involved here is whether the announcement of the quasi-discovery of the Higgs Boson particle is like, say, a Papal bull (which, would be, what? a 4 sigma?) or an ex cathedra Papal directive--definitely a 5 sigma.

I will stop just shy of saying outright that white laboratory smocks are the modern equivalent of horse hair robes. I think I have gathered enough evidence that men in materialist mitres now tell us things the vast majority of us have no way of confirming beyond just trusting them. The characteristics of science look a lot like what many of the people who practice it call "superstition." Science is now practically indistinguishable from magic, and mathematicians are our new magicians.

And I say this with 99.9994 percent certainty.

More First Amendment nonsense

"The first amendment of the United States Constitution forbids state-sanctioned religion," says Robert Asher of the Huffington Post, "yet guarantees the right to its expression."

Uh, no. Sorry.

The First Amendment does not forbid state-sanctioned religion. It prevents the U. S. Congress from establishing one. Five states who ratified the Constitution with this language in it had established churches.

Just because people keep making this claim doesn't make it true.

Atheists with judgmentalism issues

One of the reasons celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins says he refuses to debate Christian apologist William Lane Craig is that Craig, according to Dawkins, is "a deplorable apologist for genocide" because of Craig's explanation of the Old Testament passages on the Hebrew invasion of Canaan.

These atheists are so judgmental anymore. You'd think they believed in some absolute, universal morality or something.

More thoughts on the Adam and Eve question

The responses are, as I anticipated, beginning to come in on my post on the controversy over Adam and Eve, which was spawned by New Atheist biologist Jerry Coyne's claim that "[T]he genetic data show unequivocally that humanity did not descend from a single pair that lived in the genus Homo."

There were several responses from Christian thinkers to this claim, but, as is becoming increasingly common, the most telling came from Catholic philosopher Ed Feser, someone who we have had multiple opportunities on this blog to cheer on. Feser is an Aristotelian Thomist, which just means that he subscribes to the version of Aristotelian philosophy articulated most comprehensively by the medieval philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. As I have said before, Thomas' thought is the only thing worthy to be called Christian philosophy and all other pretenders to that title are weak imitations.

In the present case, Feser has applied the traditional Aristotelian Thomist definition of a "human being," which consists simply of the belief that man is a rational animal. We can explain this by using the terms laid out by Porphyry, a 3rd century Neoplatonist philosopher, in this famous "Porphyrean Tree," a division of all substance.

According to Porphyry, who was simply riffing on what Aristotle had said a few centuries earlier, man, in the most general terms, is an "animal" in the sense that, along with the beasts, he is a sentient, living, material substance. An animal is a living material organism that has senses--unlike plants which are non-sentient living, material substances; and unlike rocks, which are non-living material substances; and unlike angels, which are non-material substances. A man is an animal in this sense, but he has a specific difference that marks him off from the animal (which in traditional logic is called the "specific difference"), which is the quality of rationality itself. This makes him the only being who is a rational sentient, living, material substance.

The Christian belief, based on the Scriptural revelation, is that the human race, consisting of these rational animals, began with two people: Adam and Eve. And we are all descended ultimately from this pair. Genesis says this and the Apostle Paul, whose epistles are an important part of the Divine Revelation, clearly assumes this. In addition, the disobedient actions of this pair caused a spiritual rupture between them and God, and this separated status is shared by all their descendants by virtue of their sharing in the same human nature.

This is the doctrine of original sin. And just as Adam represents the human race in rebelling against God, so Christ represents it on the cross in redeeming it. This, of course, is one of the reasons the doctrine is so important: man is redeemed in the same way he fell: according to a representational scheme: Adam represented man in the fall in the same way Christ represented man in the redemption. Paul states this pretty clearly in Romans. So if you believe Christ redeemed the human race in the act of crucifixion and resurrection, you shouldn't have any problem believing that Adam brought it down in the act of disobedience. They're sort of two sides of the same coin.

A number of scientists (including Christian ones) say that, over the course of the evolution of human beings, there was never just two humans: at the smallest bottleneck of the developmental chain, there were, at minimum, at least 10,000 individuals. Therefore, they say, we are not descended from one primordial pair.

Now there are undoubtedly numerous assumptions along the chain of reasoning that leads to this 10,000 individual estimate. And it is a little suspicious that others use other numbers, which would seem to indicate that this is, in some respect, and inexact science. And obviously there is the evolutionary assumption as well, and there are not a few Christians who won't go for that. But for purposes of addressing the question of whether there was an Adam and Eve whose descendants we are, it really doesn't matter. We can stipulate this for purposes of debate.

One of the interesting things about this debate is that, before Feser weighed in, a number of Christian thinkers, unarmed by the Thomistic distinctions, tried to deal with the implications of the genetic evidence, but, quite frankly, didn't do a very good job of it. Without a proper definition of human being, these people, well-intentioned as I'm sure they were, were in the position of either having to argue against the evidence of genetics on the one hand, or rejecting the traditional account of the Biblical Adam and Eve story on the other. The ones getting the press, of course, took the latter course.

Feser simply pointed out that the term "human being" is not merely a biological designation, but a metaphysical one as well. He is a rational animal--and the "rational" part of that is not a biological designation. Unfortunately, many of the evangelical rationalizations--like that of Fracis Collins--bought into the idea that man is only his biology.

If you don't understand what man is, then your going to have a heck of a time determining who the first one is.

Were Adam and Eve real? Another case of atheist scientists jumping the gun and failing to make important distinctions

When my youngest son was about eight, he would assault his 16 year old brother by simply rushing him, while my oldest son would calmly put out one arm, catching him by the head and just hold him him there as my youngest son's arms would just flail about in the air, not harming anybody. Undaunted, my eight year old son would simply repeat the same method of attack--getting the same ineffective result. But even though he never got anywhere by doing this, I admired his spunk. He is now 16 himself and trains in mixed martial arts and his technique has improved dramatically.

This is the image that came to mind seeing the most recent exchange between atheist biologist Jerry Coyne (the eight year-old in this saga) and Christian philosopher Edward Feser. Jerry rushes at Ed, all arms flailing, Ed holds hand out, stopping the charge, calmly pointing out to Jerry that his facts are wrong, his arguments are invalid, that he is completely missing the point, or that he has failed to make a crucial distinction, at which point Jerry, in seeming ignorance of the points Ed has made, just keeps repeating the same futile procedure over and over and over again.

But if you can't appreciate his logic (and he makes it very difficult), you at least gotta admire his spunk.

In the most recent episode, the issue is whether there could have been a literal Adam and Eve. It is a debate, Christianity Today magazine asserted, that constitutes "a groundbreaking science-and-Scripture dispute, a 21st-century equivalent of the once disturbing proof that the Earth orbits the sun." While it is not quite equivalent to the issue of whether Jesus actually rose from the dead, a literal claim without which there would literally be no Christianity, the Apostle Paul does clearly assume a literal Adam, making it a truth claim the disproof of which would seriously cripple the philosophical and theological integrity of Christianity, particularly the doctrine of original sin, which asserts that, in the words of the old New England Primer, "In Adam's fall, we fell all."

There are Christians, of course, who try to fudge on this issue, claiming that one could believe in a figurative Adam and Eve (i.e., that Paul was mistaken) and still be an orthodox Christian. Former head of the Human Genome Project Francis Collins and his colleague Karl Giberson attempt this position. But it's not a terribly convincing.

The Catholic Church has long taken the position that the origin of the human body--whether it comes from "pre-existent and living matter"--is not the material issue. One can take the position that the human body was the result of biological development as long as one did not deny that "souls are immediately created by God." Leo XII's statement on this issue in his encyclical Humani Generis also states that polygenism (that we are descended from multiple parents rather than one particular set) is not a belief that is reconcilable with orthodox Christianity. In addition, he said, such a belief would conflict with the belief in original sin.

Protestants are not limited by any particular theological authority other than their own personal interpretive inclinations, a fact that has resulted in a riot of diverse schools of thought on such issues, but the Catholic teaching is clear and unambiguous. We are descended from two original human parents. So the questioning of this dogma is important indeed.

Enter Coyne, who declared recently on his blog, "[T]he scientific evidence shows that Adam and Eve could not have existed, at least in the way they’re portrayed in the Bible."

And, lest his assertion was not clear, he added, "Unlike the case of Jesus’s virgin birth and resurrection, we can dismiss a physical Adam and Eve with near scientific certainty."

And, just in case there was still any doubt about what he meant, he concluded, "[T]he genetic data show unequivocally that humanity did not descend from a single pair that lived in the genus Homo."

Coyne tries to base his claim on genetic research that ironically derives in part from the person whose appointment to head the Human Genome Project he adamantly opposed on the grounds that he was an evangelical Christian: Francis Collins. Collins wrote, in a 2006 book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, that, as Christianity Today put it, "humans emerged from primate ancestors perhaps 100,000 years ago—long before the apparent Genesis time frame—and originated with a population that numbered something like 10,000, not two individuals."

Richard Ostling, writing in Christianity Today, recounts the position of Dennis R. Venema, a biology chairman at Trinity Western University and a fellow at Biologos, an organization with which Coyne has shown little but scorn because of their "accommodationist" (i.e., that science and religion are consistent approaches to truth):

Over the past decade, researchers have attempted to use the genetic diversity within modern humans to estimate primordial population sizes. According to a consensus drawn from three independent avenues of research, he states, the history of human ancestry involved a population "bottleneck" around 150,000 years ago—and from this tiny group of hominids came everyone living today. But the size of the group was far larger than a lonely couple: it consisted of several thousand individuals at minimum, say the geneticists.

So Coyne, armed with evidence uncovered in part by an evangelical Christian who only several years earlier he proclaimed could not be trusted on such issues--and flailing away, announces that there were no Adam and Eve. Coyne then goes on to catalog various evangelical rationalizations of the problem, all of which he finds wanting, at which point he does his end zone dance.

But it was all effective enough to convince John Farrell to write a piece in Forbes magazine where he unaccountably finds Coyne convincing on this issue, quotes him, and expands on Coyne's points (misstating the Eastern Orthodox view on original sin in the process), and challenging the Catholic Church to renounce its "silence" on the "challenge of genomics."

Apparently the continuous public witness of the Church over the course of centuries to the truth of the Aristotelian-Thomist position, which articulates a full view of man as a physical and spiritual creature that bears only partial resemblance to the being Farrell, Coyne and others discuss in their arguments, and making clear public statements which are easily available to anyone who is serious about wanting to know the Church's position are just not sufficient.

Despite this, Coyne accuses theists "of rationalizing, post facto, hopes and ideas that one pulls out of thin air."  Statements like this serve as atheist like a sort of spell to keep .

But just in case anyone needed to be reminded, Catholic philosopher Ed Feser enters the fray. Feser, who is fast becoming the go-to guy when it comes to defending the Ancient Faith against its less than intellectually impressive detractors (and who you can just imagine sighing once again and shaking his head), then pointed out a few uncomfortable facts to Jerry (and John), among which is that, in his post on this issue, Coyne didn't even bother taking into account the view of the Christian institution that has been around the longest, an institution that has made an implicit distinction between the concept of homo sapiens as a biological category and the concept of rational animals as a physical and theological category.

In other words, the biological condition of homo sapiens is a necessary condition for being a humans as we know them now, but it is not sufficient. The philosophical distinction of man as a "rational animal" (Aristotle's definition) is also necessary to the full definition of human being. Men are indeed homo sapiens, biologically speaking. But they are something far more than this: they are creatures who can apprehend abstract concepts in a way in which other animals do not even remotely approximate. He points in his response to an article by Kenneth W. Kemp ("Science, Theology, and Monogenesis"), which goes into gory detail about the Catholic position on this and why it is completely consistence with a bottleneck of however many thousand homo sapiens.

But Coyne, who apparently didn't actually read Feser's article but someone else's summary, does what he seems to do every time he has to deal with Feser: he fires wildly while running for cover. In this case, he criticizes Feser using an argument that Kemp's article, to which Feser had linked to, had already refuted--and then goes and hides behind Jason Rosenhouse. "I needn’t go over all the problems that Jason finds with this."

Yeah. Right.

It's hard work acting as second for someone who, every time he show up for the duel, runs off, but Rosenhouse, a mathematician who blogs at EvolutionBlog, holds forth manfully. But Rosenhouse seems to have no better ability to manage careful distinctions than Coyne.

He argues first that "the Bible does not teach anything remotely like what Feser is describing." Rosenhouse manages this criticism by assuming that Feser is somehow obligated to give Genesis a fundamentalist reading, which it is kind of hard for Feser to do since, like, he's a Catholic. As Feser himself pointed out, while it would be very convenient for atheists if all Christians took a fundamentalist position, they probably need to get used to the fact that all Christians are not fundamentalists, and that it would probably help their case (not to mention make for a more productive discussion) to actually address the arguments of Christians who, like Feser, don't match up with the stereotypes atheists are always invoking.

Rosenhouse then questions Feser's point that human being are not exhausted by their physical attributes, to which Rosenhouse responds, "we should note that Catholic theologians have not the slightest basis for saying that our nature is simply not exhausted by our physical attributes." Back to Feser:

Hear that? Not “a highly controversial basis.” Not “a basis that I, Jason Rosenhouse, find unconvincing.” No, not the slightest basis. Now, forget about my own arguments for the intellect’s immateriality (though Rosenhouse says nothing in response to them). A great many more important Catholic philosophers and theologians have also presented serious arguments for it, as have non-Catholic Christians and pagan thinkers in the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions. Secular writers like Karl Popper and David Chalmers have endorsed forms of dualism. Secular writers like Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, and Galen Strawson, while they do not embrace dualism, nevertheless reject physicalism. Yet others, like Thomas Nagel, Jerry Fodor, and Joseph Levine, have argued that there are at least serious difficulties facing physicalism which have yet to be answered. And many materialists who think these difficulties can be answered at least acknowledge that the difficulties are indeed serious ones raised by critics in good faith. Then there are secular non-dualists like Tyler Burge, John Searle, and William Lycan, who (as I have noted before) have expressed the opinion that the dominance of materialism in contemporary philosophy of mind owes less to the quality of the arguments in its favor than to ideological thinking.

But for Rosenhouse, it seems, none of these thinkers has the slightest basis for his views. It’s all just transparently feeble religious apologetics, apparently even with the many secularists among them. No doubt that’s because Rosenhouse read a materialist philosophy of mind book once back in college which he thinks “refuted” all the objections to materialism once and for all.

In other words, let's all pretend that these argument have never been made so we can go on arguing with our fundamentalist caricatures.

Finally, Rosenhouse says, "Intelligence and rationality appear to be things that come in degrees." He then goes on to list all the intelligent qualities animals have the men also possess, all of which are apparently supposed to add up to the qualities that men have that animals do not possess, namely, as Feser points out, "conceptual thought" that "can have a determinate, unambiguous content and a universality of reference that sensations, mental imagery, and material symbols cannot have even in principle."

Rosenhouse says that Feser's account "creates some very difficult theological problems." The problem is that none of the "theological problems" Rosenhouse identifies are actually theological problems. In fact, all they amount to is Rosenhouse saying that he doesn't understand why God would have done it that way. So saying you don't understand someone's motivations for doing something some kind of refutation of the fact that they did it?

"Also," Rosenhouse adds, "the idea of a Chosen People is itself theologically problematic. Among Jews, a very common understanding of the notion is that the Jews are unique only in their willingness to accept a covenant with God. Which is to say, it is the Jews who chose God and not the other way around." Wait, Rosenhouse was only just earlier seen arguing that Feser wasn't following the Biblical account, and now Rosenhouse is arguing this? One thing that comes through loud and clear in those accounts is that the covenant is completely unilateral in its initiation. Maybe Rosenhouse could explain how he derives Abraham's willingness out of the Biblical accounts which don't mention what Abraham thought about it at all.

Memo to New Atheists: Don't debate Feser. Go back to your caracatures. And theists? They don't need caricatures. They've got Rosenhouse and Coyne.