Michelangelo‘s Creation of Adam with a significant 21st-century alteration. Can you find it? Source: www.fotodiario2.it
That’s the question I’m asking after reading physicist Marcelo Gleiser’s post published last week at 13.7. Pointing to the problems with creationism and the fact that that belief in evolution decreases as church attendance increases, he asks, “Why do so many have trouble believing in evolution?”
But that question can be turned around: Why do so many have trouble believing in God? It’s a fair question, you know, and the answer is not obvious.
But one thing is: God, it seems, is slipping through our fingers. You can’t spend a day in the religion sector of the blogosphere without hearing about newly-minted atheists, deeply ambivalent leavers of church, apatheists who can’t bring themselves to care, and even de-baptisms. The ranks of unbelievers seem to increase every month.
QUIZ: Why do so many people have trouble believing in God?
1. Because science has proven that God is ontologically equivalent to the tooth fairy. Duh.
2. There is no trouble. The blogosphere is not the real world.
3. Because the self-appointed representatives of God who say hateful things or drive Bentleys are more conspicuous than religious people who don’t, and sensible people don’t want to be associated with those clowns in any way whatsoever.
4. Because it’s simpler to say that, good or bad, God is just a Feuerbachian projection of human nature. Christians like MLK and Dorothy Day notwithstanding, God is a head game that needs to be shut down, and the sooner the better.
5. Because your average person would rather be god herself. And, as Walker Percy observed, if there is anything more offensive than the suggestion of the existence of God, it is the existence of two gods.
6. Because Hobbes was right: life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Any God worth the name wouldn’t let things be this way.
7. Because even asking the God question adds to suffering. Everyone should follow Buddha’s lead and get on with problems — like suffering itself — that can actually be solved.
8. Because we are coming of age as a species. We’re not Bronze-Age goat herders anymore, sure, but old habits die hard. The letting-go of religion is as necessary as the letting-go of mama’s skirt, and more painful. So you can expect people to let go of God, and for some to make a lot of noise as they do.
9. Because the end of the world is near, and that’s when unbelief spikes.
10. Because Barth was right: God in Christ is the great question mark that is set against us. The sparks fly upward at the mere mention of God. This is a rule.
11. Because it’s a lot easier to worry about my mortgage and Georgia Tech’s miserable season than to get mired in all that God nonsense. Besides, science has pretty much disproved God, right? I mean, hasn’t it?
(Check one)
Pia Stern, The Beginning (The End), 2005
Dear Readers,
On the 18th of this month I will begin teaching at Agnes Scott College. I will have one introductory physics course-lab combination (electricity & magnetism) and one upper-level optics course. I’ve never taught optics before, so I get to learn some new stuff — exciting! I will also be exploring the possibility of teaching a science & religion course there during the summer. I’m looking forward to teaching again!
Because of this upcoming demand on my time, the frequency of posts here at psnt.net will be essentially zero over the coming months. I will continue to write at Religion Dispatches and the Huffington Post and will send out emails and tweets every time a new piece goes up. So if you’ve “liked” psnt.net on Facebook or if you’re on the mailing list or if you follow on Twitter, you’ll be informed (and if you haven’t and aren’t and don’t, and want to stay informed, please like or join or follow). I’ll keep the domain and email address. But I just can’t blog at three different websites. AND teach classes. AND meet the needs of my family. AND stay balanced.
This hurts because I love this little site. I will miss the community that has grown up around it. To Jack and Tom and Curtis and Barbara and Mike and Ruth and Todd and Brent and Steve and Andrew and Jessica and Phil and absolutely everyone else who contributed to the conversation: Thanks for your time and for sharing your thoughts. To those faithful who remained silent: Thanks for reading. To those who ventured over here from FreeThoughtBlogs just long enough to flame me: Thanks for your clichés and the white-hot intensity with which they were delivered.
I will miss the visual side of psnt.net, which IMO would not translate well to other sites. I could put up one of Pia‘s gorgeous images on HP, but it would be ruined by the hysterical WATCH banners and animated U-Verse ads. It may work on RD, however, which is as visually calm as magazine sites get (“just easy on the eye,” restless photographer and favorite deep guy Michael Bailey says). I’ll think about that.
Be that as it may, things are slowing down around here. This is not to say that there will be nothing new on psnt.net any more, ever, world without end, amen. But I have a busy time ahead. Some things must be (at least temporarily) shelved.
So, knowing how way leads on to way, but also that we so often arrive where we started, I sign off,
Paul
I’ve a new piece up today at the Huffington Post. It is the reworking of an essay I wrote a few years ago about Johannes Kepler and Intelligent Design. Here’s a teaser:
Kepler reminds us that religious people do not need to shrink from science and its naturalistic methods, because they more than others have a rich tradition in which to locate these things, a context that allows them to take science seriously but not too seriously, and a strong bulwark against the lull of materialism.
For a person of faith, ID is not just an unnecessary choice; it is a harmful one. It reduces God to a kind of holy tinkerer. It locates the divine in places of ignorance and obscurity. And this gives it a defensive and fearful spirit that is out of place in Christian faith and theology.
Here’s the article.
So many good things have been written this year about the sometimes-contentious, sometimes-mind-expanding, sometimes-hopeful relationship between science & religion. But there’s humor too, and the best funny thing I saw all year may be this strip. I found it at James McGrath’s Patheos blog, Exploring Our Matrix, but it has been featured by PZ Myers and has its origin (so far as I can tell) at reddit.
I couldn’t let the year end without sharing it with all Beloved Readers.
Happy New Year!
YOUNG-EARTH CREATIONISM: IT’S A DUCK
Detail of The Tree of Life‘s theatrical release poster. Image source: blu-ray.com
Mark Vernon has a new article up at the Guardian. In it, he says some really worthwhile things about Christian ethics and what makes it distinct. What caught my eye, though, was this passage about art and artists.
The greatest artists are not self-aggrandising but other-attending; they don’t use their imagination to pursue agendas but to open reality. The great test is whether the artist disappears in their art or whether they stamp themselves all over it. “The greatest art is ‘impersonal’,” Murdoch says, “because it shows us the world, our world and not another one, with a clarity which startles and delights us simply because we are not used to looking at the real world at all.”
Which reminded me of my recently-published top ten list. I placed Terrence Malick at the number one spot because he’s a world-class artist who, seemingly without strain, opened reality to us in 2011.
Just as the reclusive Malick vanished from the public eye years ago, so he does from The Tree of Life. This is, as Vernon says, the mark of artistic greatness. There no agenda, no argument, no axe to grind. Just an open door to a reality we are not used to looking at, the only real world there has ever been.
The Tree of Life is overtly Christian. What’s more, it’s seasonally appropriate. Which is to say: It is thoroughly incarnational, drawing us toward a place where the immanent and the transcendent meet. In the language of the film, it’s where nature and grace are continuous, where the whispered prayers of a terrified 12-year-old Texas boy meet creation itself. It’s as if the ends of the spectrum wrap around to meet one another at an unstable and seemingly remote point, nearly impossible to discern, nearly impossible to reach, and not possible to secure. But, miraculously, Malick secured it for us for 139 minutes. This is as close to Jesus Christ as movies get.
If you haven’t seen it, please do. It’s out on Blu-ray.
The billboard came before the song. This NYC photograph is from December 1969; “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” was released two years later. Image source: The Rock File
I’ve a new article up at Religion Dispatches. Here’s the lede:
This year has marked, I believe, the beginning of the end of the war between science and religion. Creationism cannot last. The New Atheists are now old. And between these camps the middle ground continues to expand.
Indeed, many folks have been hard at it, doing a new kind of peace work. Some have done it intentionally, some have not. Outliers, both atheist and religious hardliners, continue to wage battle but they look increasingly irrelevant.
Here are ten who, in small ways and large, have helped to spread seeds of peace on the blasted-out battleground of science and religion.
And here’s the article.
The Rev. Dr. Sir John Polkinghorne has some good things to say about science & religion. He also has more titles than you. Image source: University of St. Andrews
Last week Biologos released a short video called John Polkinghorne in a Nutshell. In it, our protagonist says something with utter clarity that I’ve been trying to say for years. It has to do with the relationship between two aspects of science: its limits and its success. Many see its successes; few see its limits; and fewer still see the connection between the two. What did Polkinghorne say? Here’s the golden sentence:
Science has achieved its great success by the limit of its ambition.
That’s it. It’s so simple. The success of science is because of its finite scope, not in spite of it. It’s not a unusual idea, really. There is rarely success without boundaries. By eliminating entire classes of questions, science can address its own with integrity. By disallowing certain kinds of evidence, science can focus on what matters to it. By insisting on reproducible, falsifiable, and continuous results, science can happily ignore everything that does not fit these categories.
For example, questions of meaning are right out; science eliminates all notions of purpose before it even gets going. So there should be little wonder that the world uncovered by science appears, of itself, pointless. By turning a deaf ear to the combined witness of hundreds of generations of religious believers, science can avoid the difficulties of theology. By saying “no” to all discontinuities, science can ignore claims of divine action in the world.
My point is not that the meaning of the world is self-evident, or that all religious believers are right, or that obvious miracles happen every day. I’m just saying that, even if it was and even if they were and even if they did, science qua science wouldn’t know it. It couldn’t know it. It just doesn’t go there. Scientists would know it because they’re people, not because science would tell them so.
Perhaps it takes someone like Polkinghorne, who has seen science from the outside as well as from the inside, to make this so clear. I for one am grateful. The Rev. Dr. Sir really is a refreshing contrast to those who consistently overinterpret and oversell science. May we all aspire to his breadth of vision.
Not to mention his clarity of expression.
Edward Hopper, Dauphinee House, 1932. It’s good to have a home, physical and otherwise. Image source: Museum Syndicate
Back in September, I wrote an article for Religion Dispatches about Richard Dawkins’ refusal to teach atheism — his own view — to kids. Of all the things out there with my name on it, it is the one that I regret the most (so far). It reads more like an entry in a pissing contest than a thoughtful response. This is my attempt at sorting things out.
The occasion for the unfortunate article was a New York Times profile of Dawkins. In that profile Michael Powell writes of the Oxford don,
He has toyed with opening his own state-sponsored school, though under the British system he would have to come up with matching money. But it would not be a school for atheists. The idea horrifies him. A child should skip down an idiosyncratic intellectual path. “I am almost pathologically afraid of indoctrinating children,” he says. “It would be a ‘Think for Yourself Academy.’”
I took Dawkins to task over this, writing,
Really, why not an atheist school? As Chris Mooney wrote over at Science Progress in response to the same Times profile: “Dawkins really, really, really thinks he’s right about things.” Assuming that’s the case, why not teach children the truth? I mean, if it’s true? Isn’t it good to know the truth, and isn’t it our duty to pass the truth on to our kids? Yes, but apparently the greatest virtue — that children should not be indoctrinated — now trumps even the truth. This seems somehow wrong to me, and very un-Dawkins.
This September exchange has been brought to mind by a couple of recent stories.
This week at Biologos, Ian Hutchinson has a piece up about scientism, which he defines as “the belief that science, modeled on the natural sciences, is the only source of real knowledge.” By its lights, any system of thought that is not scientific is right out. The more scientific things are — or appear to be — the better. Traces of scientism show up, in some form or another, just about everywhere: in academia, where even those in the humanities feel the need to employ scientific categories; in churches, where, on the left and on the right, the mantle of science cloaks ignorance; and in the world of science popularization, where over-interpretation and over-selling of science is a daily occurrence.
Meanwhile, at the Huffington Post, sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund discusses her work that shows that a sizable fraction of atheist scientists periodically take their children to church. There are a host of reasons for this, ranging from a desire for community to spousal influence, but the one that caught my eye is this: because of their identity as scientists, study participants “wish to expose their children to all sources of knowledge (including religion) and allow them to make their own, informed choices about a religious identity.”
This sounds a lot like Dawkins’ “Think for Yourself Academy” — “You are a free agent, so choose your own religion, or no religion. What is important is not the content of your choice, but the integrity of your act of choosing.”
This view has a lot to recommend it. It is rational. It seems simple, honest, straightforward. It appeals to common sense and one’s basic sense of fairness. It goes down easy in this age of individuality and free markets. And behind it lurks an existential urgency that appeals to me.
Yet this notion, that one can stand above the fray of competing worldviews and eliminate all but the best, strikes me as part and parcel of scientism: The scientific ideal of objectivity, brought to bear on global truth claims. And even scientism cannot escape the “worldview” label; as Hutchinson points out, scientism has its own history, biases, and values.
Two of its values are curiosity and exploration. And here the atheist taking his children to church and Dawkins’ Think for Yourself Academy are in synch with the kids’ inclinations. Children, it is often said, are natural-born artists and scientists. They are curious. They are inquisitive. They want to know. They create without being told to. And Dawkins is exactly right to value this tendency found in all children. I value it in my own children. And I work every day to keep it alive in myself.
Yet curiosity and exploration are not Christian virtues. I propose that faith, hope, and love are more important than curiosity. Without these in place curious exploration — as exhilarating as it is — has no place to come home to. It is always good to find out what’s under the next rock. It’s exciting to look behind doors we’ve been told not to open. But how do you make sense of what’s under the rock and behind the door? How do you interpret?
To those invested in scientism (what would you call them, “scientism-ists”?), raising children in a religious tradition is not good. Both Dawkins and a fellow quoted in Ecklund’s HuffPost piece openly conflate childrens’ religious instruction and indoctrination. That is a mistake. Raising children in the church is not the same as indoctrination.
It can be. Sadly, there are many children who are traumatized by such horrors as hell houses, religious hate-mongering, ultra-rigid theology, and that frightful and uniquely Catholic species of shame. But none of this is what I am talking about. I am talking about orienting children to see their lives as part of a larger story, and subsequently pushing them — sometimes quite hard — to think for themselves as they grow older.
I see this fear of indoctrination as an index of the emptiness of scientism. And the reason Dawkins won’t “impose” his atheism — a natural byproduct of his scientism, I think — is because there’s nothing there to impose, not really. There’s no “there” there at all. There’s no place to come home to, once the exploration and discovery are done for the day.
Spherical Cow, from Abstruse Goose via The Last Word on Nothing. Creative commons 3.0. You know, I thought I had just coined the phrase, “spherical Jesus.” But no.
UPDATED 12/7 I woke up this morning and realized this post, as it was, made no sense. So I dropped the Harold Camping business and added Jesus. This is Jesus season, after all, and Camping’s got enough to deal with these days.
It still may not make sense, but I’m not messing with it anymore.
If you’re a physicist, the joke is pretty funny. Here’s the Wikipedia version:
Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer “I have the solution, but it only works in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum.”
The point is, physicists — and other scientists — often idealize problems in order to make calculations possible. Most often this does not amount to evasion or, as the case of the spherical cow, to silliness. Instead, it serves to extract underlying realities that could not be discovered by dealing with the actual concrete problem.
You don’t have to look far to find even famous examples: Think of Galileo dropping stones from the tower in Pisa, which he probably didn’t really do, sorry. Tower of Pisa or no, however, he did find that bodies fall at the same rate regardless of weight.
Yet this is not what he witnessed. If you read Galileo’s description of such an experiment in his Two New Sciences, you find that Galileo says that heavier objects actually do land first. Not by much, only a few finger-widths, but there it is. Galileo’s physics — and all physics ever since — is not about what happens, but is about abstractions from what happens. What Galileo said is that all bodies fall at the same rate in the absence of air friction — an unrealized state of affairs (until 1971, at least).
This reliance on idealized conditions runs all through physics (and, to some degree, other sciences also). Physics is shot through with approximations. They are very often close approximations, but, like Galileo’s finger-widths, there they are. The clarity of the mathematics one encounters in books on cosmology or quantum mechanics is made possible by pushing some realities out of the way: in the case of cosmology it may be the clumping of galactic superclusters that is ignored; in quantum mechanics it may be the tiny gravitational attraction between an atomic nucleus and its attendant electrons.
The power of physics is located in the fact that these realities are not pushed aside in order to avoid truths about the world, but to expose them.
For whatever reason, our notions of the divine do not work this way. With theology, God in God’s self — and not just our idea of God — has to remain concrete or everything gets silly. In theology, simplification is almost always oversimplification.
Take Jesus, for example.
There is a wonderful term for the abstracted, idealized Jesus, the Jesus that is somehow more than human, somehow magic, somehow superpowered: Hovercraft Jesus. Hovercraft Jesus can fly! Hovercraft Jesus can see into the future! Hovercraft Jesus can read minds! Hovercraft Jesus can apply the Schrödinger equation to the entire universe and find a closed-form solution! In less than five minutes!
Hovercraft Jesus is found in many incarnations (harhar). In the Gospel of John we find the exemplar of this Jesus. In John, Jesus talks rationally form the cross: “Woman, here is your son. Here is your mother.” We find in John no cries of anguish, no expression of God’s abandoning him, just the calm, collected summary: “It is finished.” In popular theology Hovercraft Jesus shows up mostly in an emphasis on his miracles and his factual knowledge of the past and future, as in, “Jesus was thinking of you as he was hanging on the cross.” That kind of thing.
In theo-nerdspeak, this is called high Christology. Here at psnt.net we get the divine part of Jesus but at the end of the day we just can’t relate to it, sorry. But we are commanded to love God, and that means to love Jesus too. And I just can’t love Hovercraft Jesus. Hovercraft Jesus is Big Spherical Magic Jesus. Which makes for neat tricks and stoic suffering but who can love someone who feels no pain? Who is idealized, oversimplified, and chilled on the cross?
Here’s the clip-and-save Advent message: Jesus is not abstract. Jesus is God with us, and absolutely human. I think it’s a mistake to forget that. Jesus, if he is to be found at all, will always be found to be utterly concrete: here, now.
It is always a mistake to assume a spherical Jesus.
A big Thank You goes out to Alert Reader Keith Pierce, who pointed us to the cow cartoon. As for everyone else, keep on sending us interesting pieces when you find them; the Internets are huge, and we here at psnt.net are oh so tiny.
Lucky LaRue, Altoids That Bite, 2009. At the South Austin Popular Culture Center. This is the kind of weirdness we like. There are kinds not so likeable. Used with permission of the artist. Image source: redbubble.com
it hurts a bit that I’ve never been to weird Austin, Republic of Texas. Alas for me: Everyone I know who’s been there says it’s a fine weird town. But perhaps some in Austin should work to make it a bit less weird. Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for weirdness. I would even call myself pro-weird. But there is a class of weirdness that doesn’t belong anywhere, even in Austin: creationist weirdness.
Texas has hard a tough time with creationist forces, with teachers who want to “teach the controversy” where there is none; with a governor who denies evolution, calling it a theory that’s “out there”; with a state school board that tries to tell science publishers how science works. They’ve had their battles, and so far they’ve turned out well. In fact, they thought it was over: In August, the Texas Freedom Network declared “A Final Victory for Science” in light of the adoption of first-rate supplemental materials for science educators.
Now it appears that science education in Texas may be in trouble again. According to a post published Monday by the National Center for Science Education, “At its most recent meeting, the Texas state board of education considered a proposed schedule on which new science textbooks would be adopted in 2013, in time for classroom use in 2014.”
What does this mean? According to the TFN, it means Texas could soon be dragged “back into the textbook wars over evolution.”
The fear is warranted. Earlier this year, when the relatively small-scale process of choosing supplementary materials was being conducted, concerted efforts were made to “correct” the adopted materials by a creationist on the review panel. Happily, the effort was stymied and the citizens of Texas retained their hold on real science education.
Or at least they retained their hold on real science textbooks. Good textbooks are a necessary but not sufficient condition for successful education of any kind. Also required are teachers who are not afraid to teach. And that is a far more difficult problem, and more widespread.
According to a study published by Science in January, only 28% of all biology teachers consistently teach evolution, 13% consistently teach creationism (intelligent design), and 60% waffle around in the middle somewhere, consistently failing to present evolution as the fully-established scientific theory it is. Among the 60% are those who “teach the controversy,” fooling kids into thinking that what is not science, is science; that science and opinion are interchangeable; and that there is scientific disagreement about evolution, when in fact there is none.
Bad textbooks are sometimes a problem. Teachers who do not understand science or are themselves creationists or are simply afraid are a deeper problem. Where does all of this start?
I’ll tell you: In our churches. Many churches are responsible for perpetuating the lie that evolution is scientifically controversial; many are responsible for painting science as intrinsically godless; many actively work against science education. But many more sit by in silence, not asking questions about evolution, thinking it doesn’t matter or being afraid of the answers.
Now for a little good news: earlier this year, the John Templeton Foundation put nearly one million of its dollars into local churches, with the goal of bringing science inside the church by empowering parishioners — mostly science professionals — who have personally reconciled the claims of science and their religious commitments. These churchgoers will be leading classes on evolution in their churches, advising church staffs on how to incorporate science into curriculum at all levels of instruction, holding forums in churches on a range of scientific topics, and generally bringing the excitement of modern science to congregations everywhere.
Including, I presume, Texas. Here’s to all those in Austin and in less weird cities across the country who are working on legislatures, on school boards, on faculties, and yes, even in churches, to end the tiresome war between science and religion.
