Came across this interesting blogpost via PZ Myers’ blog. It is about some interesting results from «Pew Research Forum on Religion and Public Life» which had a survey of the opinions of evangelical leaders attending a conference last year. Leaders from all over the world were included and there are some interesting cultural differences noted in the blogpost. You can read about that there, but the point I found most interesting and disappointingly unsurprising was that fact that the rejection of evolution was almost complete. Given the option of Evolution (but not excluding God), Intelligent Design and traditional creationism, 47% chose creationism, 41% chose ID and only 3% chose evolution. The error margins are usually a few percent. The number of evangelical leaders who said it is not “essential to follow the teachings of Christ in one’s personal and family life” was also 3%, so clearly the error margins are in that range. It is disappointing that so many evangelical, near all, reject a well established and well proven scientific theory. The author of the blogpost concludes:

Rejection of evolution is not simply a theological side issue in evangelical Christianity, but appears to be a defining feature.

There are other interesting things gathered from this survey as well, about their attitude towards atheists for instance. Interesting read:

Full post: Evangelicals, evolution and atheism: the 2011 Pew Foundation survey

I usually don’t think the fundies over at Answers in Genesis is worthy much attention, but this article by head crackpot Ken Ham titled The Emotional Age Issue caught my eye. It says for instance:

Increasingly, I’ve noticed that when the media write reports about us, they often don’t mention the scientific points we present in our rebuttal of evolution, but instead state something like this (these words appeared in our local newspaper):

The Creation Museum employs scientists of its own but has been criticized by the larger scientific community for positions it takes that conflict with mainstream scientific belief. For example, the museum contends the Earth is 6,000 years old, rather than about 4.5 billion. It also shows humans living at the same time as dinosaurs, which most scientists say never happened.

Why is the age of the earth such a big issue with secular scientists and the media? And why is it that after biblical creationists have written so many books and scientific peer-reviewed papers that contradict the supposed billions of years for the age of the earth/universe, and expose the fallible dating methods devised by man, secularists still scoff?

Well, here’s the bottom line: For secularists to even postulate the idea of evolution, they have to also postulate an incomprehensible amount of time (billions and billions of years) so that the universe and life might have enough time to evolve. Even with billions of years, though, evolution is impossible. Mathematically and scientifically. But secularists aggressively promote billions of years to make evolution a plausible idea.

This got to be the worst case of projection I have seen from that gang in a while. These people look at the world purely through their fundamentalist religion, and seemingly cannot conceive that an objective scientific approach can exist. And further, if such an objective approach should exists, surely it would confirm their beliefs? Since it doesn’t, it naturally cannot be objective, and thus has a faith based agenda against God. I.e. a plot instigated by the devil himself.

What they so completely fail to grasp is that science do not care for faith-based preconceptions based on ancient mythology. Science investigate the nature and build models upon what they find. If the data actually agreed with the 6000 year-old-earth view, we’d still have that view. But there is absolutely nothing in nature that supports such an age-estimate. On the contrary. It cannot be stressed enough how vast the pile of evidence against such a claim is, and how consistent our scientific theories and the data is with the old earth and old universe model. There is no doubt at all for anyone who look at it objectively. It is not just evolution. Geology, palaeontology, anthropology,  cosmology and probably more fields of science, I forget, all agree on these things. Most importantly geology and cosmology who are completely unrelated fields to biology and each other. It is not a huge conspiracy involving millions of scientists and nearly 200 years of scientific progress, it is the truth. Deal with it!

Religion and the supernatural is not within range of scientific investigation as there isn’t much about it that is possible to investigate, other than perhaps secondary effects like miracles which constantly and consistently fails to be confirmed. They are basically just claims that many people agree upon and are emotionally attached to. Well, that is fine, people are free to do that, and they should be, but seriously, what do they have to gain by insisting on a version of reality, that for one is not necessary in order to believe in a god, and secondly is highly inconsistent with the real world? They are shooting themselves in the foot when trying to object to reality based on dogmatic interpretation of ancient texts. These interpretations are a legacy from pre-scientific ages, and seemed reasonable enough then. They aren’t any more. Welcome to the 21st century, the progress of the 19th and 20th century is required reading. You seem to have missed that too.

Sam Harris has made an excellent albeit a bit short TED talk about science and moral questions:

He naturally got a lot of negative critique for this talk. He is not claiming that science can dictate morals exactly, what he is saying is that there are moral truths to be known.  The fact that science has no complete explanation for reality, does not prevent the existence of scientific truths, as does not the lack of a scientific model for morals prevent there from being any moral truths.

Sam Harris has posted a response to the critique here:
Moral confusion in the name of “science”

A talk by physicist Steven Weinberg. It is well worth the listen.

“Steven Weinberg, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he founded its Theory Group and holds the Josey Regental Chair of Science, was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with colleagues Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow for combining electromagnetism and the weak force into electroweak force. He has written several popular books including the prize-winning The First Three Minutes, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, and Dreams of a Final Theory.”

This story popped up both in my New Scientist and my Panda’s Thumb feeds today.

New Scientist: Christians battle each other over evolution
Panda’s Thumb: But it’s not about religion …

So basically, we have the Discovery Institute, the pseudo-scientific Seattle organization, promoting Intelligent Design, who has launched a new website, Faith+Evolution. There they ask: “Can you believe in God and evolution at the same time?”, to which question they answer no.

On the other side we have the BioLogos Foundation, who is a foundation saying the opposite, and thus trying to force science and faith together. They state: “The BioLogos Foundation promotes the search for truth in both the natural and spiritual realms seeking harmony between these different perspectives.”

The latter organization is headed up by the former head of the Human Genome Project, which is a great scientific project on its own. Nevertheless, I don’t really see how you can unify science and religion completely. You will always have to have a neutral zone in between two such opposing and contradicting approaches to reality and truth. However I can see how honest scientists who also happen to hold religious views would want to do this, but I fear it is doomed to fail nonetheless. I think the concluding comment on the New Scientist article says it well.

Watching the intellectual feud between the Discovery Institute and BioLogos is a bit like watching a race in which both competitors are running full speed in the opposite direction of the finish line. It’s a notable contest, but I don’t see how either is going to come out the winner.

Still I believe that BioLogos has a much better argument, and would easily counter any brute ignorance from the Discovery Institute. At least this time, the scientific community and the skeptics can sit back and enjoy the show

So, Michael Behe is still at it, 13 years after his book, Darwin’s Black Box, which has been a complete failure in proving Intelligent Design. Apparently a recent article in Science (or read the blog article) has caused Behe to write a letter in response, which Science did not wish to publish, naturally. Instead Behe posted it on his Amazon blog. He is apparently unhappy with the way his involvement in the Dover trial (Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District) is portrayed. He claim that  Travis did not understand what the points he was trying to make were. Well, I beg to differ. I think we know very well what the real point Behe and his minions are trying to make is. This was also covered in the Dover trial. It was shown that the underlying purpose of the Intelligent Design movement was to promote religion, ID is not science, it is just good old creationism in disguise, and not even a good disguise. The second paragraph of Behe’s letter reads:

Although some news reporters, lawyers, and parents are confused on the topic, “intelligent design” is not the opposite of “evolution”. As some biologists before Darwin theorized, organisms might have descended with modification and be related by common descent, but the process might have been guided by some form of intelligence or teleological driving force in nature. Darwin’s chief contribution was not the simple idea of common descent, but the hypothesis that evolution is driven completely by ateleological mechanisms, prominently including random variation and natural selection. Intelligent design has no proper argument with the bare idea of common descent; rather, it disputes the sufficiency of ateleological mechanisms to explain all facets of biology.

Well, ID may not be the opposite of evolution, that doesn’t even make sense. However ID is religion, and religion is not science. Evolution on the other hand is science. This significantly distance ID from evolution, and also rules it out, by US law, of being used in education! This was after all the whole purpose of the Dover trial! The fact that Behe does not want to give up his defence of superstition in his field of science, does not change the fact that ID is and will always be religion and superstition. He fully admits that it is a teleological view, and though the philosophical idea is not necessarily religious, it has been shown, in this court case, to be religious in the context of ID.

Now, the argument for ID is that of irreducible complexity. The idea that some feature (say the eye, though a bad example as this one has been debunked long ago) cannot function with less parts than the whole, thus cannot have evolved gradually. The whole irreducible complexity approach is non-scientific, it has the retrospective view that “this item is too complex and we cannot immediately see  how it evolved gradually, therefore it didn’t, thus goddidit”. However no such complex feature is proven to exist beyond any reasonable doubt. Nearly all examples of such complexity has been proven to be fully capable of evolving through natural processes. The new pet of Behe seems to be the human immune system, but the fact that we do not yet fully understand how it evolved, does in no way mean that it did not evolve.

Somehow Behe and his minions believe if they can just find one thing in nature that cannot be explained by the theory of evolution by natural selection or genetic drift or whatever other explanatory devices biologist may have, then there must be a designer (read God). The logic, in a scientific context, of such an approach to reality is just ridiculous. Evolution by natural selection is well proven, and even Behe acknowledges this. So isn’t it then more logical to assume, give such a powerful theory at hand, that if we have something which we cannot explain at first, the problem is most likely a matter of further investigation, rather an incentive to impose a deity? The important difference between the explanatory value of science versus religion is just that, science does not cop out when faced with something we at first do not understand and instead claim “goddidit”. That is exactly what religion does, and worse, it then becomes doctrine and is ruled absolute and truth. Now, Behe knows better than that I suspect, but he still has an absolute idea that he superimposes upon everything he does, he is specifically looking for a designer where no designer exist or even is needed. Honest Christians believe by faith, which is fine. I prefer evidence. But people like Behe are cowards and intellectually dishonest. They know the truth, or at least should, those who are well educated like Behe, but have an irrational need to superimpose their faith on their work, rendering it valueless. What a waste of time and resources.

It is just not science!

Related Article: Panda’s Thumb – Behe still not impressed