The thing about Creationism

I wasn’t planning to write any posts at all that dealt specifically with Creationism head-on; there didn’t seem to be much point. That was until I ended up in a discussion on a blog, one which I had the sense to keep brief – these kinds of discussions can get very entrenched and end up nowhere fast.

There are some odd things about Creationism and “Intelligent Design” (ID). The most notable is the obsession with evolution and Charles Darwin. It’s useful at this point to remember what evolution is about: it simply says that through natural selection, species either adapt to a changing environment – or die out. The same process – natural selection – gives rise to new species, when a population is separated and the number of adaptations begin increases to a certain point. That’s a rough outline – there is a whole debate as to what actually constitutes a ’species’.

Adapatations are brought about by changes – mutations – in DNA: something that Darwin had no knowledge about, although he figured that there must be something that was passed onto the next generation.

It’s odd that Creationists (including the ID people) should spend much time on this theory – not only is it so well established in the literature that it would be akin to challenging the concept of gravity, but it’s the way in which they try to select examples by way of counter example.

The arguments tend to be one of the following: given biological example is so complicated that it must be designed/created; and then conclude that it indeed has been designed/created (‘irreducible complexity’ in the jargon). The other tact is to deny that random mutation within DNA is possible, or, if it is, it is very rare and only produces negatives consequences.

This latter example was one recently presented to me elsewhere; the first time I heard it, oddly enough, was by Islamic Creationists from Turkey. So even if I were to be convinced by this argument, I’m unsure with the Creator is Allah or Jehovah! I joke, but the point is serious: what evidence can be brought to bear to prove one way or another, given that their respective holy texts cancel each other out?

Both tactics essentially try to undermine evolution as a theory. It doesn’t work because it doesn’t disporve the theory; at best, if there were no mutations, as the Creationists claim, and if there were irreducible complexity, it would suggest that the theory of evolution doesn’t apply in those given particular cases. Mutations, for example, occur in bacteria (hence resistance to anti-biotics) and so on.

What would disprove the theory of evolution would be a ‘counter-factual’. Irreducible complexity purports to be such a counter-factual, but evolution says precisely that which is denied by the Creationist: however incredible it may seem, and whatever teh appearnace of design, that particular biological phenomena did come about by evolution, and not by divine intervention. Simply claiming something is designed based on appearance is far from proving that it has been designed.

A true counter-factual would be something that was demonstrably against something that evolution predicts. Evolution predicts that complex organisms arose from simple organisms. By definition, if you found a complex organism in a geological era when there should only be simple ones (however old you think it is and whatever the geologists say) would be the kind of thing. So, if you found a modern human burial in the Jurassic, or JBS Haldane’s rabbit in the Pre-Cambrian period; that would be perfect.

The logic of the arguments are often faulty. For example, having established in their minds that evolution doesn’t work, they conclude that there is 1) the appearance of design which means that 2) there is a designer. Evolution says the opposite, that the appearance of design doesn’t imply a designer, so you would need to supply evidence to prove that the appearance of design really does imply a designer. The next fault is that, for some reason, it only implies a single designer – again, at the expense of evidence. Why not a team of designers, given that Boeing 747s (complicated pieces of machinary) use hundreds of designers? We are not told why (without resorting to the holy text of choice).

Finally, saying that the variety of life on Earth was because of a Designer, or God, is not an answer but raises two other questions: how, and what created this Designer/God? These cannot be answered without recourse to holy text; the text in question may be right, but given that the experience of God is a personal, subjective experience rather than an out-there, objective, experience, it really does take us away from the science that we were trying to do answer the kind of scientific questions that evolution answers.

Whatever else may be said about Creationism and Intelligent Design, science it most certainly is not.

Further reading: Steve Poole on ‘Intelligent Design’

Jonathan Edwards loses his faith

One of the more prominant ‘born-again’ Christians of recent years, the Olympic gold medallist Jonathan Edwards, has now apparently lost his faith. He makes some interesting remarks:

When you think about it rationally, it does seem incredibly improbable that there is a God [...] I am not unhappy about the fact that there might not be a God [...] I don’t feel that my life has a big, gaping hole in it. In some ways I feel more human than I ever have. There is more reality in my existence than when I was full-on as a believer [...] I feel internally happier than at any time of my life, more content within my own skin. Maybe it is because I am not viewing the world through a specific set of spectacles.

Welcome to the dark side, Jonathan!

That Ring Thing

Yesterday, a 16-year old girl lost ‘her’ appeal to wear a silver ring in school to show her commitment to refraining from having sex until she’s married; and – as she also says in the video – to remain “sexually pure” until she’s married, whatever that may mean.

I used the word ‘her’ above, in inverted commas, advisedly becuase her father seems to figure largely in this: he is a pastor at their Church and is someone who is running the Silver Ring Thing campaign in their area, as well as being the “Parents Programme Director” for the national organisation.

The claim is that the ring, symbolising chastity, is ‘part’ of her faith, and that she should be able to express this the same way as Muslims (for example) wear headscarves.

Yet nowhere in the Bible does it instruct anyone to wear a ring – or anything else for that matter – as a commitment to chastity, and the movement – confined within the ‘evangelical’, or fundamentalist, denominations – is barely more than ten years old. There is nothing distinctively ‘Christian’ about wearing a ring in today’s world (if not in the past). The Koran, on the other hand, does talk about women dressing modestly (in chapters 31 and 33), from which the tradition of hajibs, niqabs and burkhas clearly descend. Even if we accept that marriage rings are a Christian tradition (and its not clear to me yet that we should), there certainly isn’t a respective Christian claim that can be made for so-called ‘chastity rings’, much less one that’s based on the strict reading of the Bible that the fundamentalist denominations usually insist upon. The courts were essentially right in this respect.

Yet the Playfoots make another, non-faith based claim that appears to confuse their argument. They are quick to make a general abstinence argument, and say that the wearing of this ring symbolises that commitment. For example, on her blog Lydia says that:

Over two years ago, I was concerned at the number of teenagers who were catching sexually transmitted diseases, getting pregnant and/or having abortions.

The Government’s Sex Education Programme is not working, and the pressure on young people to ‘give in’ to sex continues to increase. This is often because of the media’s focus on sex and the expectations of others.

This is distinctly not an argument based on her faith, but a political or education argument, one that should be irrelevant if it was merely a question of faith. If this is the point that she’s making, the courts were certainly right to dismiss the case: the ring is just a ring that contravenes the school’s dress code.

UK floods the judgement of God

The Sunday Telegraph revealed that the Bishop of Carlisle is under the impression that the judgement of ‘God’ was responsible for the flooding in Yorkshire and elsewhere last week as punishment for moral behaviour as well as environmental degradation. In particular, he is quoted as saying:

We are in serious moral trouble because every type of lifestyle is now regarded as legitimate

and

In the Bible, institutional power is referred to as ‘the beast’, which sets itself up to control people and their morals. Our government has been playing the role of God in saying that people are free to act as they want

and that:

The sexual orientation regulations [which give greater rights to gays] are part of a general scene of permissiveness. We are in a situation where we are liable for God’s judgment, which is intended to call us to repentance.

In trying to lessen the implied homophobic intent behind the comments of the Church of England Bishop, it was explained this evening on the BBC Radio 4’s PM program that the Bishop did not really mean what he appears to say, after all. Rather, he meant something a little more complicated, to do with human actions (of which moral actions are only part), which then affect the environment, which then causes global warming, and which finally may have caused the flooding. Quite why one needs ‘God’ in that chain of events was not really explained.

However, it can be questioned as to whether Bishop Dow did actually mean something as benign, only for it to be mangled by the Sunday Telegraph. He has, after all, expressed concerns in the past before on the way in which Government has apparently usurped the moral authority of his god in connection with legislation outlawing the discrimination against gays by Church-ran adoption agencies.

When the Bill outlawing discrimination against gays with respect to Church-ran adoption agencies was before Parliament, the Bishop, in his monthly dioscean notice of March this year he commented that:

Once God is removed from the scene, where ultimate moral authority should be located there is then a vacuum. Not surprisingly, the vacuum is then filled, frequently by an institution, in this case by the government [...] if the trend to ignore God persists, we will find many other situations where an institution takes to itself the role of ultimate moral authority and endeavours to enforce its moral judgement with law or rules, be it on a national scale or simply in the institution itself.

For the Bishop, the Government’s stance on the issue of Church-ran adoption agencies is a case in point of the way in which Government has usurped the moral authority of ‘God’.

It’s clear that the Bishop’s recent speech reported in the Sunday Telegraph follows a favourite theme about Government taking on the role of “ultimate moral authority”, to the point of citing the same example, that of gay lifestyles, as an example of “permissiveness”.

It would seem, then, that – despite the semantic gymnastics on Radio 4’s PM by the Church’s spokesman – the Sunday Telegraph was right in its intepretation of the Bishop’s remarks, and that he meant what he said: that the floods in Yorkshire and elsewhere are “God’s judgement” on our perceived moral failings.

The problem with ‘atheism’

Atheism is another of those problematic terms. There is, in fact, more than one type of atheist: at least five different variations have been delineated. These are:

Negative/weak atheism someone who to all intents and purposes doesn’t believe in a god, without necessarily going so far as to say that there is in fact no god.

Positive/strong atheism someone who simply affirms that there is no god as a statement of fact.

Explicit atheism somone who knowingly rejects any notion of god.

Implicit atheism someone who has not heard of a god, and cannot therefore decide whether belief in such an entity is reasonable or justifiable or worthwhile. Children especially are usually considered to be implicitly atheist as they have to be taught that there are such things as religious ideas and concepts of god.

militant atheism is a term one finds in the press; it describes any atheist – strong or weak – who argues vociferously against statements made by people of faith, and seeks confrontation with them. In the UK, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are the two best known examples.

religious atheism is how I choose to describe those religions, such as most schools of Buddhism (Theravadin, Zen, etc.) and the Advaita vedanta school of Hinduism.

An indication of the problem can be seen in the number of caveats and definitions. In particular, the idea that there are religious people who are themselves ‘atheist’ goes against intuitively what people would commonly take to be a feature of atheism – that is, its irreligiousness (if not anti-religiousness).

This latter common perception of what an atheist is (a view particularly in the US) is itself problematic, of course: a disbelief in something is now associated with a particular negative attitude. It is a situation made worse by the existence of ‘militant atheists’. It is this that gives atheism its increasingly sectarian and hostile nature, one which people such as myself would want to avoid: why should we define ourselves by something in which we do not believe?

Nevertheless, that there are indeed ‘religious atheists’ alerts us to a feature of atheism: that is that it is rooted in the Western and Islamic experience. The term ‘atheist’ has little meaning in China and India; it would not have had much meaning in the West more than 1500 years ago. It is defined against theism, which is at bottom a belief in a personal god of the Islamic and Judeo-Christian traditions. Atheism is defined by what it is not: it is not theism, perhaps because not being a theist was exceptionally rare in the Common Era up until three hundred years ago at the most. Atheism, by defining itself what it doesn’t believe in, rather than what it does, can be seen as ‘negative’ – it is the reason why the BHA sees humanism as ‘positive‘.

Finally, there is the point that the word ‘god’ is used too often as though it means the same thing to all people, or that there is an agreed definition. The responsible thing, when asked by someone if you believe in ‘god’, should be to ask what they mean by ‘god’. One of the traps that some atheists fall into is to define a god, and then say why they don’t believe in it. They may find that there are theists who would equally not believe in that particular definition of god.

Because atheism is related to a specific cultures and traditions, and in a specific time, and because it is sectarian, and increasingly seen as something hostile, I am personally reluctant these days to describe myself as an ‘atheist’.

On the other hand, insofar as atheism argues that it is encumbent upon theists – particularly those who are engaged in conversion – to prove their claims of the existence of a god, rather than for anyone to try and prove a negative and by proving that a given god does not exist, then in that sense I remain an atheist: this is a weak atheism that makes no claims to knowledge about the non-existence of god that one finds with ’strong’ or positive atheism, but one that says that it finds no reason to believe the claims for a particular god’s existence. It is not an atheism by which I would necessarily define my identity by, however.