Intelligent Design (ID) is in the news at World magazine, for getting a lot of criticism from Darwinists, who have enjoyed their monopoly on origin theories for so long they think it is a right. Unfortunately, even in this 200th anniversary of Darwin and the 150th anniversary of his book, the wheels are coming off the bandwagon. It is a bit like global warming, actually. If you will notice the hyperventilating used about Copenhagen--"last chance to save the planet from global warming!"--when in fact the data show that the last 9 years have been declining in temperature. What they really mean, is "last chance for me to get a powerful position in an intergovernmental organization."

So also Dawkins' books are all screaming about the victories of Darwin, when in fact, the last 10 years have seen a deconstruction of the very basis of the theory. The twin pillars of Darwinian orthodoxy--random mutation/variation and natural selection--have been shown to be false. Most mutations are directed by the genome, and natural selection is incapable of all but the crudest filtering. Even the twin observations for which this theory was developed--common descent and descent with modification--have been shown to be false with the genome project revealing how horizontal gene transfer completely destroys the "tree of life" that Darwin sketched in his notebook, make it into a "lawn of life" or a "jungle of life". Nothing in the past 30 years has made the Neo-Darwinian Theory any better, and most have made it worst.

Well, do we see any evidence that people are ready to ditch Darwin? Yes, actually, in the panic to make him a saint, and in the vitriol against ID.  This blog is not intending to flog Darwin, but an attempt to address a recurrent and major criticism of ID. Whenever there is a debate between an ID'r and a Darwinist, the claim is made that ID is "a creationist in a cheap tuxedo", that ID believes God miraculously made the species.

The ID'r protests in vain that his is not a theory of origins, only a theory of design. But you see, Darwin also claimed his was not a theory of origins, only a theory of non-design too. We are always attacked for the other's sins, and we always see our own sins most clearly in others. The weakest part of Darwin's theory then and now, which he readily admitted, was an inability to explain how life began from non-life, or the origin-of-life (OOL) problem. Theodosius Dobzhansky, said that evolution was a theory of how living things change that had nothing to say about the pre-biotic soup, and therefore OOL wasn't a part of the theory.

There was a jolt of hope when amino acids were made by Miller and Urey in 1952, but when no advance could be found despite countless efforts over the past 55 years, it has faded to ashes. So knowing how hard this question is, the Darwinist accuses the ID'r of papering it over with a miracle. And in fact, argues the Darwinist, there are countless more miracles every time an ID'r needs another species. Such a belief in miracles, says the Darwinist, makes an ID'r merely a theist zombie in disguise, plugging a fideistic, miracle-laden, un-scientific worldview. And that's why, says the Darwinist, all other "origin" explanations aren't science but merely religion in disguise, because they all contain miracles. You let one miracle in, and the next thing you know you will have rain-dances on Wall Street, and seances in the West Wing. (Gingerich fears snake-handling.) It just can't be allowed.

So that brings us to the question that this blog addresses. What is a miracle? How does God intervene (if He does at all)?  And just exactly how do those ID'r figure that the design was put into creation?

The debate has lots of players, so we need to label them all or we will get quite confused.

The Cast:

The Young Earth Creationist (YEC): Believes that God created the world ex nihilo about 6000 years ago, and appearances of age are deceptive. Science must be subservient to revelation.

The Old Earth Creationist (OEC): Believes that God created the world ex nihilo about 13.7 billion years ago, and appearances of age are real. Science and revelation must ultimately agree.

The Intelligent Design (ID): Believes that life and the universe show evidence of design, and that chance is an inadequate explanation for both. No comment on revelation, God or origins.

The Theistic Evolutionist (TE): Believes that God created the world 13.7 billion years ago, but has done few if any miracles since, allowing life to evolve according to the plan established at creation (front-loading) or by mysterious interventions which cannot be detected since. Revelation is subservient to science.

The Materialist, or Methodological Naturalist (MN): Believes that matter and space and energy is all there is and all there ever will be, and that God can neither act nor interfere in the cosmos. Law and chance rule the universe, and miracles don't exist.

The Darwinian Evolutionist (DE): Believes that MN is right, and furthermore, that all life is the product of random chance and natural selection acting over a long time.

Their History:

ID is defined in opposition to MN and by corollary, opposes DE. We note that it can contain YEC, OEC and TE as members, but in practice TE feel highly intimidated by ID.

DE ridicules YEC and OEC and ID, primarily by painting them as all variations on hidebound YEC, which one might say, is at least medieval if not patristic. Occasionally it tries to distance itself from MN, whenever it wants to pretend that it has no metaphysics and isn't a religion, but most of the time will religiously defend MN. (Wiker's book demonstrates that Darwin was an MN long before he became a DE, which tightens the relation between the two.)

YEC opposes OEC for not being orthodox, and MN/DE for being atheistic. More often than not, YEC opposes ID for being a-religious, for refusing to commit to the Biblical view of creation.

OEC opposes YEC for being non-scientific, and includes the majority of TE as well as quite a few ID. It opposes MN/DE for being atheistic.

MN as a self-conscious philosophy is a rather small minority of philosophers. It holds much greater sway over scientists, who are often unreflective MN, adopting it because it was part of the science curriculum. Usually this type of MN remains latent until an ethics issue arises, and erupts as they apply some sort of Darwinian or Utilitarian approach, such as can be seen in the stem-cell debates. MN includes all DE, as well as all Marxists, all Communists, most Socialists and Fascists, many Progressives, variable amounts of Libertarians and even a few Conservatives. So it is not a philosophy to be taken lightly. Nearly all atheists and agnostics have a form of MN.

TE. Poor, poor TE. TE opposes YEC strongly, and for the most part, welcomes OEC at Christian conferences while disowning them at scientific conferences. Given the recent animosity of DE against ID, TE has taken to disowning ID at scientific conferences as well. For TE is a bit of an oxymoron inasmuch as the word "Evolution" is owned by DE. So the first thing a TE will have to explain is why they are not DE. This explanation is more sociological than philosophical, since it comes down to behavior rather than theory, and usually involves either attending a church or praying. TE's founder might well be Asa Gray, a late nineteenth century anatomist, who supported Darwin's book, but claimed that all of evolution's advances were the result of God's direction. Darwin demurred, but was glad for an advocate and book-seller, and so began one of the longest love-hate relationships in history. The problem is that "Theistic" is incompatible with MN. So TE finds itself trying to pry DE from MN. Gray did not succeed on Darwin, and 150 years later the TE still have not succeeded, but they love the company. So they survive by becoming very fuzzy about MN, using it when in science, abusing it when in religion. (See Gingerich in the Worldmag link) And for the most part, DE will tolerate TE as long as they don't affiliate with ID and YEC.

Therefore one of the internecine squabbles between ID and TE is over the real significance of MN. This is why Paul Phillip Johnson's book, The Wedge of Truth, talked about MN being the real problem, and suggested a strategy of prying TE away from MN.

The Question:

Does ID presuppose a YEC or OEC position? And aren't both anti-MN? How then can ID claim to be science and not a religion?

The TE have an answer, thanks to Kant, that religion is in the realm of the mind, and science in the realm of matter, so they coexist nicely.

ID reply that this is nonsense, since religion posits a real, living Jesus who came down from heaven, was killed, resurrected and went back up to heaven. Likewise entropy, design, self, and consciousness are all scientific experiences that have little or nothing to do with matter, so that this distinction is completely artificial. And the only reason you TE's still do the Kant two-step, is so you can snag a dance with the DE/MN who control the scientific field and funding.

TE respond, but you ID'rs want miracles whenever you can't figure out the science. You're nothing but a bunch of wishy-washy God-of-the-gaps deists who didn't know that you've already lost that battle 150 years ago! 

So let's rephrase the question: as ID scientists who have torn down the Kantian wall between religion and science, how do we include miracles without destroying our science, or include chance without destroying our religion?

(to be continued...)

The worms are out of the can. Looks like the global warming scam is coming to an end. Australia was going to be the first country that invoked a carbon-cap bill as a brave pioneer for the climate summit in Copenhagen next week, but as it turns out, defeated the bill instead. This topic achieved Drudgereport's top billing, with headlines like UK's Telegraph, "It's all unravelling now". Michelle Malkin had a nice blog of links, so I will spare you all the news reports.

However there's a really nice PDF from Lord Monckton that you should read on the seismic scientific significance of the leaked emails. The point being that scientists believe a colleague's data because of his PhD bona fides, but if you ever catch him lying to you, nothing he says is now of any importance, and you may even retroactively "retract" his papers from your journal. Scientists employ a "one strike and you're out" rule for integrity. And the chain of emails has now undermined the integrity of not just East Anglia's gobal temperature data, but Jim Hansen's GISS data, and the NOAA data. The only ones left are two satellite data sets, including that of our own John Christy at MSFC/UAH.  With only these two data sets, the entire global warming picture has changed to one of cooling. Wow. How the mighty have fallen.

But I want to talk about something else that I alluded to in this blog. Why did Jim Hansen at NASA collude with Phil Jones in the UK? Why did Michael Mann or Susan Solomon go along? Why did the New Zealand weather office mangle their temperature data? What kind of virus was spreading throughout the climatology world that would cause all these scientists to sacrifice their integrity for the cause?

What did I predict about the end of global warming back in Sep 2007?

"Such will be the end of all "global warming" hysteria, not with a bang, but a whimper, not with noble speeches of contrition, but with rambling harangues full of dark conspiracies. Likewise the noble storming of the Bastille ended with the chaos of The Terror. When the scientific establishment has cashed in its objectivity for the easy money of the global warming research, there will be no stopping the bandwagon without a train wreck, without the loss of public support, without damaged reputations. I predict Hansen will not last two more years with NASA."

Some have pointed at greed, with Phil Jones netting $20 million in government grants. But I doubt if Susan Solomon or our NZ climate office got even a tenth as much. And given the cost to run a center, $2 million could disappear in salaries in a big hurry. All these people are essentially government bureaucrats, and their salaries, while generally over $100,000 including perks, are no where close to the $20 million they scammed from the government. Nor are they even close to the millions Al Gore scammed in his carbon credit business or for speaking fees and shakedown from energy company magnates. I mean Al really could be accused of greed, but scientists? It just doesn't compute. Given the scientific punishment for lying, why would you risk it?

And this is where I bring up the subject of religion. As I've said on a Sep 15 blog,

"global warming is a scientific theory that has taken on moral aspects. Read that interview with the Greenpeace president, watch Gore's movie, the truth is less important than the moral imperative of global warming. This is what happens when science drifts toward transcendence, it becomes dogmatic."

Or in July I had blogged how dogma affects the scientific enterprise:

"Feedback is why we polarize into opposing camps. Feedback is why we can't be objective. Feedback is why global warming is such a big topic in a frigid year. Feedback is why Science is doomed. Feedback is why the human race is damned. For there are many ancient theological terms for feedback--rebellion, sin, pride, conceit--and it was this feedback in that garden so long ago, that introduced the human race to this strange condition called original sin. What starts out as incompetence rapidly turns into malice. And so malice propagates from heaven to earth and from past to future. Perhaps, in some theological sense, eternity will have no incompetence, only malice."

Whence came this desire to turn global warming into a malicious religion? I blogged on this in Sep 2008.

First, atheism may have been a young man's comfort, but if you look at Socrates, the book of Job, and various documents from Sumeria, atheism was always viewed as a coward's religion, a scoundrel's refuge. Why? Because it's single and most important characteristic was to deny morality. (See also "Brother's Karamazov").
Second, a point which follows directly, any society which engages in immorality loses the ability to function. Morals are not between a man and his God alone, but are the glue that keeps society from fragmenting, and the force that defends it from enemies. Looked at through history, atheism is the swan song of a dying culture, be it Rome, Babylon, Assyria, or Egypt. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, so there are no testimonies from dead atheists.
Third, because atheism is so corrosive to morals, it creates a vacuum that something must fill. You are already finding many new religions striving to fill that vacuum, from global warming to feminism to gay pride to Internet porn. Thus atheism is uninheritable, and will always remain a young man's comfort and an old man's shame. Why? Because he has no children to carry the flame."

So we see the transition, from Christianity to Enlightenment to Atheism to PoMo polytheism to malicious anti-science power-plays. Just as Christianity was the birth of Science, so anti-trinitarian polytheism is the death of Science.

[Daniel Henninger at WSJ agrees. BBC says it isn't death, it's evolution of science.]

Behold, the twilight of the gods.

Bellarmine is blasted again by the pernicious propaganda about Galileo's persecution. Everyone wants to be Galileo, and nobody wants to be Bellarmine. But something the history books don't mention, is that from everything science knew at the time, Bellarmine was right and Galileo wrong.

[Nor do history books mention that Scopes lost his trial to teach biology for the very good reason that the textbook he was using was downright Nazi. Or that Helen Keller became a flaming communist after being saved by a Christian. There's a lot that history books clean up for the public, lest we pollute our minds with the truth.]

So if you go back and look at what Bellarmine said to Galileo, and what Galileo responded, my sympathies are all with Bellarmine.

Galileo was plugging this view that the Earth and all the planets were moving about a stationary Sun, which was, after all, the idea of a good Catholic churchman named Copernicus. Bellarmine had no beef with Copernicus, it might be true and it certainly simplified the calculation of the positions of the planets. The only problem was that Copernicus' predictions were worse than the traditional method. So why say something is "true" when it gives "false" results? Not until Kepler replaced the circles of Copernicus with ellipses did it start to improve, but Galileo didn't know that when he began to push geocentricism.

But if all Galileo had done was plug Copernicus, perhaps he would have been left alone because Bellarmine himself had no qualms about Copernicus. The problem was that he also said that the Earth was rotating. Well that's an entirely different problem, and leads to all sorts of questions. Such as "if the Earth has a radius of 4800 miles and rotates in 24 hours, then the surface of the Earth is travelling 1100 miles an hour" shouldn't we notice that? It's like, somewhere around Mach 1.5, wouldn't we get blown off? Or if I drop a rock, won't the Earth move a couple of feet before the rock hits the ground?

Galileo had answers to all these questions, but one answer was completely bogus. He said that the tides were a result of the Earth's rotation. All the Vatican Jesuits said the same thing: "No, the tides are caused by the Moon".  By the time Galileo had added that comets came between the Moon and the Earth, the Vatican astronomers had had enough. [Yes, I know I'm conflating 1616 with 1633, but this is a blog after all.]

"The guy is a meglomaniac crypto-atheist" they told Bellarmine. "try to get him to shut his trap before he feeds those Protestant heretics with his nonsense!"

[Why did so many Jesuits hate Galileo? One historian calls it the consequences of patronage, the political connections needed to get funding. Since there was such intense competition for funding, a sucessful scientist was assured of enemies. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.]

But Galileo was not happy being told to stuff it by Bellarmine. So he writes a book that consists of a 3-way dialogue, and puts the Pope's comments in the mouth of the character named "Simplicio", which roughly translates "simpleton". The manuscript is smuggled out of Italy to Holland where the printers there will publish any heretical or Protestant book, and the rest, as they say, is history.

But look, just because you predicted the housing bubble crash 5 years before it happened (and 4 years, and 3 years, and 2 years) doesn't make you an instant genius and candidate for Lou Dobbs position at CNN. Sometimes you can get lucky and be right. Sometimes you can be lucky and smart and think you are always right. Galileo seemed to be one of those guys. And if it weren't for a scurrilous work of historical fiction in the 1874 that attempted to blame the Catholic Church for every evil mankind has known, it is possible we wouldn't have heard about poor Galileo again.

Nevertheless, the myth goes on that Bellarmine was keeping the status quo for dogmatic reasons (rather than very good scientific ones), and that any time a rebel promotes wild-eyed views against the status-quo he must be right.

The twist on this story, is that the American Geophysical Union, which improbably includes the meteorology and the space physics communities as well, just canned a "global-warming denier" session. (Note the emotional bias, "I'm a skeptic, you're a denier.") The organizers are outraged, claiming that they are Galileo and the AGU is Bellarmine.

The irony is that I left the AGU ten years ago when they decided that they needed a statement to support Darwin and deny intelligent design, but unlike meteorology, no one in the AGU is a biologist. So why the sudden need to support Darwin? Clearly, the management was finding it politically useful to kowtow to some agency in DC. With that kind of political agenda, is it any wonder that they canned an anti-global-warming session on the eve of President Obama's visit to Copenhagen, or Senator Boxer's global cap-and-trade bill?

The even more ironic thing, is that today came the news that someone had hacked into the UK's Hadley research centre, which has become the global hub for global warming scenarios. They stole some 70MB of e-mails, and discovered that the science advisors there have been scheming to discredit critics and manipulating data for a decade in order to obtain funding.

So it would seem to me that the AGU/Hadley hacks are Galileo, and the critics are Bellarmine.

I have blogged before on the PostModern (PoMo) distinctives of this 21st century, but superficially, it would seem that 20th century Modernism is ascendant. That is, the atheism that spread with scientism and progressivism seems to be doing quite well in a recent spate of "angry atheist" books by Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, even the Darwin-celebration books all seem to point to a general flowering of 20th century atheism. How does this fit with the triumph of 21st century PoMo philosophy?

By changing the definitions.

Sometimes you can't trust labels, and nowadays atheism isn't what it used to be. And frankly, that's a good thing, because atheism has always been the last refuge of thieves, murderers, adulterers, and scoundrels. That's why it has been the most despised religion of the past 5 millennia by every culture that has a written history: Chinese, Mayan, Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman. If we could read the Indus River script, or the Mycenean Linear B I'm sure they would agree. There has never been any redeeming value in atheism.

Why? All the historical testimonies are in agreement: because it ruins morals.

So are all religions merely the codification of moral codes? To a large extant, it is a good thing or you and I wouldn't be here to talk about it.

But if all religions are man-made, then they are manifestly false, and atheism is the only rational alternative!

Well, I didn't say all. And even if they are man-made, that doesn't mean there isn't a moral order to the universe that all man-made religions are recognizing. That is to say, atheism makes the further claim that not only are all religions man-made, but the universe does not have a maker, or even a vague purpose to its existence.

But if it doesn't have a purpose, then nothing that happens can be considered "bad", as if it violated some basic law of the universe. If it happens, it happens. Period.

Now in the 20th century, all the brave atheists were willing to face this meaninglessness of atheism. In fact, they were proud of their unflinching gaze into the black hole of chaos. Jacques Monod, for example, concluded his 1970 book "Chance and Necessity" with these words:

...man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. Neither his destiny nor his duty have been written down. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.

But the one thing Monod and his friends could not face, the one thing they flinched at, was the fellow traveller who chose the darkness below:  Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, and Pol Pot. It is one thing to be brave for oneself, but to be responsible for another was a burden intolerable.

We are back to the reason why atheism has a derisory 5000-year track record--it is completely and utterly devoid of responsibility, which suits its complete and total selfishness, and which is why it is the refuge of scoundrels.

So what is a respectable atheist to do? How does one take the scientism and skepticism of the 20th century which rejects the concept of a higher order, and inject it with some civic-minded respectability?

By the creation of the Atheist God, or what I like to call, the Ungod.

Yes, I know it sounds like an oxymoron, but with a bit of retraining, you too can understand perfectly the new meaning of the words. By "atheist", the 21st century does not mean what Monod and the 20th century modernists meant when they made rationalism their god, for rationalism opened its arms to all the worst that Stalin and Hitler could bring. Rather, PoMo "atheism" means ABC, "anything but christian".

Thus my colleague described his brother as a self-declared "atheist Buddhist". Wiccans advertise themselves as atheists. There's "environmental atheist" and "feminist atheist" web sites, as well as "hindu atheist", you can Google just about any combination. Just for fun, you can peruse "christian atheist" web sites too, and see which parts of Christianity have been jettisoned to attach the label "atheist". In all these cases, the moral order of the universe has been kept, while the various specifics of miracles, divine beings, and/or divine revelation have been tossed. Morals without a moral-giver. Who then instructs on right and wrong? Us.

With a bit of spade work, you will recognize the 21st century atheists as being the heirs to the man-made religions of 5 centuries of literary spirituality. One chooses, as Monod says so clearly, the heavens, or more precisely, what populates the heavens above. After constructing a pantheon, one bows down to it, and more importantly, demands that others bow down to it as well.

Make no mistake, despite being a product of our own making, the Ungod has demands. In fact, these demands grow rather than diminish with time. Part of the reason for such elaborate rituals in paganism, is that they serve as limitations on the demands of the state religion. Suppose, for example, that the Ungod wants another wife (say, of the same sex), or another tax (say, on your illegal crop), why there will be noise and confusion and demands for rights and equality and all that, and in the end, there will be a longer list of things the Ungod needs. Since no man can limit the rapacious appetite of the Ungod, the next best thing is to slow it down. So one makes the expansion of demands require signatures, and votes, and TV panels, and pollsters. A veritable Broadway show of pomp and rituals. And perhaps, just perhaps if it is tedious enough, this will staunch the bleeding of the people.

So the Aztecs thought when they constructed their stepped pyramids to the Blue Hummingbird and their twice daily sacrifices. Yet year after year the demand for beating hearts continued, requiring slaves and unnecessary wars, rebellions and depopulated countrysides, until groaning under the intolerable burden, they embraced the swords of the liberating ghosts, the pale faces peering out of the steel helmets of the Spanish.

Like atheism, man-made religion has a voracious appetite.

Jonah Goldberg tries to understand the explanation for Eric Holder's decision to move the military trial of 9/11 mastermind KSM to a civilian court in New York. 

They want to claim that this is a fair trial but also an act of vengeance. The terrorists will be treated as if they might be innocent — key to a fair trial — but at the end of the day they'll get their comeuppance. If KSM & Co. get off on a technicality, don't worry, they'll still be locked up, but when they're convicted the White House will claim it was always a fair process. They'll get a fair trial from an impartial jury in New York, but it's "fitting" and "poetic justice" that the jury will be drawn from the community that was viciously attacked on 9/11. Fair but vengeful, honest but foreordained, instructive to the world but really just about the law.

So why do I have this vision of Eric Holder proudly holding up a beating heart in his hand? And why does it fill me with dread?

As I have blogged repeatedly, I think the Biblical Genesis account is scientifically accurate, and provides a very useful model to understand both archaeoanthropology and human nature (=not Greek). There are a number of guesses, however, that give both theologians and paleontology hiccups. For quick reference, here's a sketch of "Yet Another Creation Candidate" (YACC). The biblical exegesis is here, and the science is summarized below.

The Big Bang is taken as a background of Genesis 1:1. "Hovered over the waters" might be a reference to comets, and "formless and void" appears to describe proto-solar nebula, so that Gen 1:2 picks up about 5 billion years before the present. Another 4.9 billion years rush by in a hurry, and in Genesis 1:26 we arrive at 40,000 BC. (Some details of Gen 1:2--26) are given in the previous blog.)

So by Gen 1:26, we have Neanderthal humanoids roaming some regions on the planet, and God creates the first humans, which for nostalgic reasons, I like to call Cro-Magnons. These people are DNA-equivalent to modern man, but they do not talk. Because they do not talk, they do not handle abstract concepts, and while I may change my mind later, I would say this disqualifies them from having souls, despite being great artists. You will note that this is not the Greek  material/immaterial distinction. Cro-Magnons go out to populate the globe, and we refer to it as the Paleolithic and Mesolithic cultures.

Thirty thousand years go by in a flash, and then we get to Gen 2:7, where God epigenetically "tunes" a Cro-Magnon so that he can talk. Since he can talk, he gets a name, "Adam", and from this point on, everything in Genesis has a name. Adam's turf is called "Eden", and is on the bottom of the dried up Mediterranean, in a climate not unlike California's Central Valley. In other words: hot, dry and incredibly fertile if irrigated.

Why is it dry? Because something has blocked the 3-mile wide Gates of Gilbraltar, and such is the climate of the region, that more water evaporates from the Mediterranean than comes in from the Nile and the Danube. So several times in the ancient past, the Gates have closed, and geologists found thick salt deposits from the resulting evaporation.

Well it would seem that Adam's race stayed in this region, because by the time we get to Genesis 6 and Noah a mere 2000 years later, nearly all of civilization lay in this wide basin, and was drowned in an event where "the gates of the deep were opened", and the Atlantic poured in.

 Well why wouldn't Adam's race be as hardy as the Cro-Magnons and "fill the earth"? Possibly because a mini-ice age had enveloped Europe and ice-sheets were inhospitable in the North, and deserts on the East and South. A glacial dam might also account for the blocked Gates.

So after Noah and some domesticated animals escape the deluge, they spread out of their Middle East home in what paleontologists refer to as "The Neolithic Revolution", bringing language, technology, and DNA to Europe at a snail's pace of 1 km/year.

Okay, it sounds speculative, but I would encourage you to read some of the details before you make a snap judgement.  In one of my many debates on this subject, a colleague asks whether there is any evidence that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons couldn't talk, which is tricky because written language wasn't invented till a long time later. We stalemated on that one, but it would seem there should be evidence for a dry Mediterranean  about 10,000 years ago. I knew of none, which made him shake his head and suggest that my speculation was unfounded.

Well, a paper has just come out that provides some evidence. It seems that 12,800 years ago, a mini-ice age hit Europe. Glaciers, flash-frozen mammoths, the whole nine yards. After some sleuthing, the general consensus was that a vast lake in the USA, formed when a glacier had made a dam across the St Lawrence channel, had suddenly burst and flooded the North Atlantic with fresh water. Well fresh water floats on salt water, and the hot-water conveyer belt we call the Gulf Stream which keeps Britain warmer than it should, has the down-roller in the North Atlantic off of Iceland. All this fresh water stalled out the conveyer belt, the Gulf Stream stopped and in a matter of 3 months, lakes were freezing over in Ireland. It took some 1300 years for the Gulf Stream to restart, and so we had 1300 years of glacial advance in Europe.

All this would be great if it were 8,000 years ago, but it happened four millennia early for Eden. I'll bend my chronology a millennia if I have to, after all, that is one Adamic lifetime, but four millennia is a stretch. What a shame it the Younger Dryas doesn't fit the Bible.

Wait, but it did! There was a second cooling event at precisely 8200 years ago, and lots of speculation what caused it. Everyone is sure it was related to global ocean circulation, but no one has a burst dam to show for it.

However, there's more than one way to sabotage a conveyer belt. Robert Johnson wrote in 2002 that the salt water coming into the Mediterranean through the Gates, has a deep current of even saltier water going out. He believes it is this heavy, salty water that promotes the sinking of the down-roller side of the Gulf Stream. Therefore blocking this exiting water, will also shut off the conveyer and throw Europe into an ice age.

So it would appear that 8200 years ago, we had an ice age event, which I would take to be a blocking of the Gates of Gilbraltar by a glacial dam. This led to a change in climate in the Mediterranean, and a conditions for Eden. The event ended when the Gates were opened, and Eden was flooded some 2000 years later. The fly in this ointment is that the 6200BC event lasted only 300 years in the temperature records. But at this point in the theory, the significant thing is the timing of the breach, rather than the duration, because it lands right about where we needed Noah's flood to be.


And as for evidence for the lack of speech, my usual response (see the paper), is that the 1km/yr spread of the Indo-European language with the farming technology and with the same genes suggest a strong link between science, DNA and language. Furthermore, if the natives could talk, why wouldn't they learn about the technology rather than being overwhelmed at a 1km/yr pace for 3000 years? Still, the argument seemed a bit weak.

Science reported recent work on the "language gene" called FOXP2, which was  different in two places in chimpanzees and doesn't work the same way in humans. So they made those changes to the gene in human neurons growing in a Petri dish, and looked for differences. The figure above shows that there were lots of differences. Furthermore, it appears that Neanderthals had DNA in those two places that was human. Since we know that chimps don't talk, this is might be evidence that Neanderthals did. But in any case, now we have to await the Cro-Magnon genome sequencing to see whether FOXP2 is modified or identical to modern man. I'm predicting it is identical, because I think the Gen 2:7 change was "epigenetic" rather than a genetic change to FOXP2, but we'll have to wait and see.

So I won't say it is vindication of YACC, but it is evidence in the right direction.

I had blogged a while ago, about the Vatican astronomer who was seriously confused about extraterrestrial life.

Well evidently, I must not have been the only one concerned, because Pope Benedict XVI just held a Pontifical Academies conference on astrobiology, which Fr. Funes organized. It isn't the conference I would have organized, though I did know two of the invited speakers. Evidently the reigning paradigm is that Darwinian evolution is just so efficient that there must be life out there, so merely finding a giant gas planet in another solar system is reason to start humming the theme song to Star Trek.

As my earlier blog alluded, I'm of the opinion that life is both more common and more common. It doesn't just live on rocky planets around G-type stars, but populates all star systems that have a cometary cloud, be they blue giants or red dwarfs with or without planets. However, most of this life is manifestly common, the blue-green algae that make pond-scum and the viral bacteriophages that infect them. Somewhere in our galaxy there may exist an ocean full of trilobites, and perhaps, just a very weak perhaps, some reptiles. But it is highly unlikely that there are mammals anywhere else in the galaxy and a foregone conclusion there isn't another sentient primate.

How do I come to these conclusions? By studying the information content of evolutionary "steps" and the necessary planetary bootstrapping that permits their existence. The reason for the difficulty of higher life forms, is not their difficulty of information content, but the necessity of preparing a place for them. Should one be able to program into a computer model all the necessities of a self-sustaining biosphere and the processes that produce it, and given a black rock for a starting point, I would venture a wild guess that 4 billion years is the earliest scenario that would work, with many others taking 10's of billions of years longer.

Let's approach this from another viewpoint. Suppose the USA wanted to terraform Mars to make it useful as a resort community for retired presidents. How many missions would it take, and in what timescale would it be ready to start collecting tourist dollars? An Ares-V mission every month for 10 years? for 50 years?

Now suppose that NASA has discovered a really efficient solar-sail technology to get to Mars, only it can only transport 1000 kilograms (metric ton) every two years. How long would it take to terraform Mars, assuming that on the first trip we could land a few astronauts, a nuclear reactor and terrarium for growing food? 50 years? 100 years?

Now assume that NASA invented something even better to resupply Mars, a way to move 10 kilos every day, the Mars Advanced Transporter, only the 10 kilos has to be divided into separate 100 milligram packages, 100,000 packets a day. Could we imagine terraforming Mars with that? But this is essentially what comets provided for Earth. So if you can solve NASA's MAT puzzle, you are well on your way to understanding the 4 billion year delay terraforming of Earth.

I think the answer lies in sending the information, without the machinery. That is, we send the DNA via bacteriophages, with some useful cynaobacteria for provisions, and inject the DNA into Earth precursors to produce the next big step of evolution.

So the question that consumes Fr Funes, about whether extra-terrestrial intelligence exists, comes down to the teleology of multiply terraformed Earth's out there. In order to get Earth to where it is today, do we need backups? Only if you think you're going to fail to bootstrap Earth. I mean, do you boot two computers on your desk every morning for fear that one won't boot?

No, I didn't think so.  So why would there be any need for another planet in the galaxy with life on it? Perhaps as a staging ground for this cometary bootstrap process. So the question comes down to, how much staging does a terraforming require? Let me explain.

Suppose we needed to introduce trilobites to Earth in order to prevent our recently booted foraminifers from sequestering all the CO2 at the bottom of the ocean, destroying the oxygen atmosphere and killing off all the animals we had so carefully booted. Can we fit a trilobite in a 100 mg packet? No. And suppose we don't have any trilobite precursors on Earth whose DNA we could tweak with some horizontal gene transfer virus. What do we do then?

We would need to divide up the chromosome of trilobites into transportable packets, say, bacteriophages, and reassemble them on Earth. But what is the likelihood that they would reassemble, especially when diluted in the Earth's oceans? Not very good. But if we could deluge the Earth with enough DNA, perhaps it could be done. In that case, we need a staging ground for the DoS attack, and hence a planetesimal or comet just chock full of DNA, say, in living trilobites.

(Well if we can put trilobites on comets, why not transport them whole to Earth? Because the problems of high-speed impact, as well as hostile environments for lengthy interstellar transport, including the food problem.)

What we're talking about here, is the problem of the Cambrian explosion of lifeforms some 550 million years ago. After that point, we don't need to transfer whole organisms, we can just keep inserting genes into existing organisms and make them bigger. But the total lack of big critters in the Pre-Cambrian looks as if entire animals show up miraculously on Earth.

So there might be staging grounds for the Pre-Cambrian critters--planets where all the pieces have been developed for transport. This is why I don't rule out the extra-terrestrial discovery  some lower life forms, but would rule out the discovery of higher life forms.

Why wouldn't the same bootstrap process occurring at Earth also occur in distant solar systems? We alluded to the answer earlier, it is possible, of course, but it is like asking why couldn't there be two computers on your desktop booting up in the morning? Why not three or four? Because it would be redundant. If you know what you have to do on your computer, and are sure it is failsafe, you don't need and can't use several computers simultaneously. Far better to get a dual, or quad-core computer than two entire systems using up deskspace. Similarly, if the Earth is the place for Man, why would it be necessary to have two?

Let me be blunt. If the Earth is designed as a bootstrap world for the enjoyment of Man, then there is only need for multiple worlds if there is a fear that the bootstrap would fail. You know what I'm talking about. I'll bet you only began to back up your data after you had a major hard drive crash. But if you have never experienced such a data loss, you don't think redundancy is worth Limbaugh's "carbonite" no matter how often he flogs it. So if the Designer doesn't expect to fail, why the need for redundancy? (Maybe Fr Funes can explain that one.)

Having eliminated redundancy from the design, then we should look for necessity. If comets are the delivery vehicles, how would such a bootstrapped system be staged? Should we look for worlds full of dinosaurs, trilobites, or just pond-scum?   The romantic part of me hopes for "Lost Worlds" but the realist part of me expects pond-scum.

Maybe that's why they didn't invite me to the Pontifical Institute.

There's been a vigorous debate whether Hasan was a terrorist or just criminally insane. Some might say there is no difference, but to read the newspapers, the T-word is completely absent. Why?

Some have pointed out that "terrorism" goes against the American religion, known as "diversity" or "political correctness". The more cynical among us might say that the MSM is covering for Obama to continue the Bush tradition of denying any terrorist plot on our soil since 9/11.  The paranoid among us might see the MSM as colluding with Islam in their war against Christianity, perhaps even pointing to Saudi oil support of the MSM.

For the rest of us, what is all the flap about? Perhaps it is because a terrorist, like a suicide bomber (which Hasan clearly considered himself) lives by a different creed. The insane, we imagine, have lost touch with reality and are pitiable. But the apostate, the infidel, the heretic we assign to the lowest levels of hell. Humor me briefly, and imagine that Hasan was a Hindu extremist, a member of the group that invented suicide bombing in India. (Remember Rajiv Gandhi's end?) Would it have made any difference in the way newspapers reported his rampage?

I didn't think so. The problem is that newspapers don't understand religion.

I feel like a broken record, but it is important to understand the difference between a martyr and a suicide. Islam has intentionally polluted the well, recruiting disillusioned youth and convincing them that to die with a bomb strapped to their chest was the ideal way to pay back the world for its contempt. (Not that such satanic behavior is unique to Islam, witness the effect of Darwinism on teenagers.) The only thing more despicable than a suicide bomber, is the suicide trainer/recruiter. May they spend eternity entertaining demons.

Gilbert Keith was a sensitive chap, and in his youth struggled mightily with suicide. He knew that his Anglican faith held it to be a mortal sin, guaranteeing exclusion from Paradise. On the other hand, martyrdom achieved benefits in heaven all out of proportion to the cost. Yet both actions resulted in death. What was the difference? Here's what Chesterton wrote in his later, and wiser and more established years.

Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously. Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide; and take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. "He that will lose his life, the same shall save it," is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life.

Upon completion of his Walter Reed residency as a psychiatrist, all the residents gave presentations.  Hasan's was bizarre: 50 slides about jihad, ending with the quotation, “We love death more then (sic) you love life!".

Chesterton tells us exactly what Hasan meant.

So it comes as no surprise when Nidal Hasan wrote on his business card "SoA(SWF)", an acronym expanding to "Soldier of Allah (Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala), which translates "Glory to Him, the Exalted" and usually follows mention of Allah's name. But from his actions, we now know what he really meant: "Soldier of Abaddon, seeker of death." For Chesterton was indulging his alliteration when he wrote "Chinese courage", when he obviously meant "Oriental courage", "Muslim courage". Hasan could not rise above his Arabic roots, he could not understand the calling of the Galilean, who loved life so much he disdained death, even a shameful death on a tree.

For only through that martyr's death can we be free.

Science has posted an article on the origin of religion: its in the genes.

(Let's just play along with these genii who write for Science.)

"Let me understand you. You are saying that belief comes from a predisposition from the genes, like belief in evolutionary theory. That means evolution isn't true, right, you're just programmed to believe in evolution?"

"No? So religion can be in the genes and can also be true?"

"No? So being in the genes has nothing to do with something being true or not, only with belief?"

"Great. I'm think I'm getting it. So your belief that religious faith is determined by genetics is also something in your genes, and doesn't mean that this paper you just wrote is actually true, only that you have a faith in evolutionary explanations that you were born with."

"No? I'm afraid you've lost me again, can you explain?"

"So, some things are necessarily true, like your belief in the truth of this paper, whereas other things are evolutionary artifacts, like your appendix and religion?"

"Great, we're communicating again. Then how are those things that are necessarily true separated from those things that you merely want to be true, especially since your evolutionary past will have mixed them up considerably?"

"Oh I get it. Your faith in evolution is what makes you certain that religious faith is fake.  But how do you know for sure that the religious guy is the one who is wrong; how do you know that tomorrow you won't wake up religious and think that evolutionary faith is fake?"

"Data? But I thought you just said that beliefs were something you were born with?"

"Oh, belief in data. But isn't that also something you are born with? What if you were born not to believe your eyes, say, you were born blind. Then how would data convince you of anything, especially that your data contradicted what you were born believing?"

"Wait!  I am taking you seriously! This is Science after all, a very serious journal... "

Alas. The theory is reflexively incoherent. Now if it had said that belief in Darwinism was in the genes, at least it would have been reflexively coherent. Why is it that none of these materialist positions can ever be subjected to their own analysis? When Skinner was telling how everyone was programmed to react for rewards and that this explained religion, my one question to him would be, "Why are you telling me this Bif?"

The nice thing about religion is that it is reflexively coherent.

Why do people believe in God? Because He made them that way.

From a conversation on another blog about Genesis, Intelligent Design (ID), and theistic supporters of evolution (TE).

If the TEs really want a miracle-less Christianity, there is a whole body of modern theological literature they can quote to sustain them. And if they really are not embarrassed by miracles in the slightest, there is another whole body of literature to sustain them: the Patristics, the Scholastics, the Reformers, etc. I don't understand why they have such a hard time stating their position....

Some of you know some of these ASA-list guys, from Christian conferences and ASA [American Scientific Affiliation] meetings and so on. Any idea why they are so elusive? Are they hiding some big-time skepticism about miracles behind this vague language? Or is it that they simply don't know what they believe?

In my time at Wheaton College, I did work with a number of TE's on the ASA list. And while I too am puzzled by their thought processes, my general impression is that they have made an uneasy alliance between the anti-Christian world of science and their devout faith. There is no question that they despise liberals for their lack of faith, but there is also no question that they admire their atheist colleagues as doing commendable science. So I use a psychologist's explanation that their vagueness is a case of "cognitive dissonance", which they solve by avoiding clarity. Not because they are dissimulating, but because they really don't want to know themselves. I think it was Greg Bahnsen's PhD thesis that discussed how a man can deceive himself, believing A & !A by adding more layers. A & B, where B--> !A. Or if that is too obvious, then A, B, and C, where A-->B, B-->C and C-->!A. With enough buffer layers, one can be a very content contradiction. Hence the vague buffer layers of TE's.

One of the many subgoals of ID, then, is to clarify these implications.

Yet another reason to be hated.

I'd be interested in a critique of the views of a related Wheaton character, John Walton, whose new book "The Lost World of Genesis" is creating a stir.

This Wheaton Bible-dept tripe is one of a piece with TE-ASA muddle-headedness. In 2002 Wheaton had a course called "Origins" which brought together 3 depts--physics/astronomy, biology/evolution, and bible/walton--to talk about the origin of the universe. The concept was clever, but the implementation was stultifying. Walton wanted to say thatGenesis had nothing to say about the Big Bang, which the physicist said had nothing to do with evolution, which the biologist said had nothing to do with Genesis. So the point of the course was....there is no point.

Now believe me, if the TE-ASAs could find evolution in Genesis, they would be all over it like jam on bread, but the fact that everyone is so anxious to declare Kantian walls of separation should tip you off that there's a lot of cognitive dissonance going on.

I found Walton's material only slightly less annoying than the animated Powerpoint slides he insisted on using. One would think that Meredith Kline's work in the 70's had demonstrated how the Genesis account uses cultural understandings of Hittite covenants to frame its message of creation, rather than the other way around. It reminds me of the 30 year effort to claim that Noah's flood was derivative on Babylonian flood epics, when in fact all the data showed it was the other way around. So after many evangelical papers demonstrated the derivative nature of Babylonian accounts which finally silenced the critics, we have Walton claiming that the Genesis creation account is derivative on Babylonian (or as he would say, Mesopatamian) temple dedication rites.

And I would make the same sort of comment for Peter Enn's fixation that 2nd Temple eschatology was supposedly determinative of NT theology. Whenever we get an extra-biblical source that looks vaguely like the Bible, why then it is the Bible that must be the derivative!

Of course, when we get a scientific account of creation that looks vaguely like the Bible then it is the Bible that is....totally unrelated. It's all very tiresome. I look forward to the definitive review by the the tireless Jack Collins.

I am likely not the only one who would like to learn more about the papers that show that the Babylonian flood account is derivative of Noah's. Can you tell me where such arguments are made?

Good question, but I don't have my textbooks here, so I'll have to do some web searching. As I recall, the cogent arguments were made some 20 years ago, and most of the defenders of the "Noah is derivative of Babylon" have stopped making the claim, retired or died. One would think that if it were still a believable theory, it would be actively defended, so the silence is telling.

OK. I went over to OT Abstracts and put in "Noah flood" + "Gilgamesh", or "Babylonian" or "Mesopatamian". I found 5 hits on the first two, and 600 on the last. I didn't peruse all 600, so this is a rough cut from the first 100. I found 2 articles supporting Gilgamesh as original in 2004 and 1986. I found 6 articles supporting Bible as original, 1983, 1994, 1978, 1976, 2002, 2000.

So my impression of the fading of the Gilgamesh explanation is roughly correct, and corresponds to my Wheaton college Bible-class curricula impression circa 1980.

This survey does not include (simply because the abstract made no mention of a Gilgamesh), the many articles on the JEDP analysis of Noah, that makes its composition much later than Moses, and would potentially allow it to be influenced by it. After all, it is logically possible for Genesis to be a late redaction, yet reflect an oral tradition that predated Gilgamesh, so support for JEDP isn't necessarily support for a Gilgamesh influence.

Nonsense...

Well I am, as usual, ashamed to have written so hastily in such learned company. ... What I should have said, is that it is not that Genesis, as a document, preceded the cuneiform Gilgamesh, as a document, but that both are drawn from the living oral memory of a real actual flood that occurred in the Mesopatamian basin about 5000BC as determined from geology and paleontology. As a Christian, I believe that the Genesis document reflects more accurately, if not infinitely accurately, the actual events of Noah that later made it into the oral tradition of many of the world's "religions". (Just because a history is about origins doesn't automatically make it religious.)

I know that in many if not all Western institutions, a document and its contents are separately evaluated, with a reconstructed history to explain the divorce. But it is the subject of my attempted ThM thesis, that at least for some types of documents (say, titles and deeds), there can be no separation of document and content, if one is true, so is the other. And what distinguishes Genesis (as well as the other canonical books of the Bible) from, say, the Gilgamesh epic, is that it has the properties of a deed rather than a narrative because it is self-referential. (There's going to be a long chapter on speech-act theory etc, to put this claim in the appropriate jargon.) This then, is the critique of JEDP and similar documentary hypotheses: they can't be true, anymore than the title of your car can have a documentary origin and still be valid.

So given the existence of a real event, and a real oral history, the composition of Genesis as a polemic against the mythologizing of Gilgamesh is the point of the evangelical critique. That is to say, Genesis is not adapting Babylonian motifs, but defending the truth against Babylonian motifs. This is what I meant by saying cryptically that Gilgamesh is derivative of Genesis, inasmuch as Genesis is the infinitely true, and Gilgamesh the poor copy. It is this polemical aspect of Genesis that the evangelical literature supports.

[In a very similar relationship, science also reports the flood, but through a poor copy. What validates science, as ID [intelligent design] would claim, is design (and not MN [methodological naturalism]). And design is self-referential too. So the same criterion that ID develops for valid science has a direct analogy to Biblical/textual scholarship, which is why I find ID a far more productive hypothesis than simply biology. And BTW, just as many of the possible relationships between data/theory are highly improbable (random chance w/o design-->OOL [origin of life]), so also some of the possibilities for textual transmission are demonstrably improbable for all the same reasons.]

So thanks for clarifying my sloppy writing. Here is the link to the bibliographic list (which was constructed extremely crudely by flagging the words for Gilgamesh and Noah in the abstracts of a simple search, so please don't flog me for my slack criteria and obvious bias!)

* Fort Hood, TX. A policewoman directing traffic heard shots and tracked down the Muslim major who had shouted "Allahu Akbar" before killing 13 and wounding 31, by disabling him with 4 shots and taking a serious bullet wound to the stomach thigh in return.

In Pakistan last month, when 4 Taliban commandos took over a military base, they terrorized it for 18 hours before being overrun, shutting down the entire Pakistan army. In America, Major Hasan had 5 minutes of gory before a civilian woman took him down.

President Obama cautioned everyone not to jump to conclusions about motives. But sometimes actions speak a lot louder than words. A Muslim. Blogs about noble suicide bombers. Gives away his furniture that day. Shouts "Allahu Ahkbar". Opens fire.

Then who speaks for America? A civilian. A woman. Moved toward the battle. Dropped him while being wounded. Did not kill him.

Where else in the world could you see this happening? England? Denmark? France? Iraq? Pakistan? Iran? Massachusetts?

Thank God for Texas.

Since the Dover PA case in 2006, when a Judge Jones tossed out ID as not being science, we have been told that Darwinism is victorious, that Darwinism won. The good judge has gone on the lecture circuit, getting accolades and dollars for recycling the enthusiasm. We've got scientists regularly if not monotonously reporting how finally their research has finally proven Darwin right. We've even got politicians telling us how belief in evolution is essential for the US economy!

But there's this nagging doubt, if Darwin is just obviously right, why is everyone so eager to keep proving it? Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

Mike Behe returned from the Cold Spring Harbor Lab conference on evolution where his was the only poster on ID, bemused at the number of anti-ID papers that were delivered. I am reminded of the five stages of a scientific theory: preposterous nonsense; dangerous nonsense; irrelevant nonsense; inconsequential sense; and, absolutely fundamental as I've said all along. ID is moving between stage 2 and 3 at the moment.

Should this transition be inevitable as I predict, then what is the significance of Darwin? I mean, suppose Darwin was wrong after all, and all those accolades to his genius will be forgotten by fickle history, would it matter? After all is said and done, has Darwin made an impact on society that can't be so easily undone?

Yes. And it is pervasive. Let's look at the effect on several fields, and the necessary steps to undo the damage.

Biology.

When Trofim Lysenko decided that Lamarck was more Marxist than Darwin, convincing Stalin and directing Communist biology for 20 years, the West bemoaned the traitorous Russians. Typical of western comments is this one from Wikipedia:  Lysenko's work was officially discredited in the Soviet Union in 1964, leading to a renewed emphasis there to re-institute Mendelian genetics and orthodox science.  Today, however, there is a resurgence of Lamarckian biology, with admission that the West has acted as censorious as Lysenko in promoting Darwin. Alexander Vargas writes that the suicide of pioneering epigeneticist Paul Kammerer was instigated by allegations of fraud.All that is left is the rehabilitation of Lysenko.

 Yet so adamant were they against Lamarck that all research into epigenetics was essentially stopped, just as all research into astrobiology/panspermia was stopped, because it threatened the Darwinist paradigm. Perhaps more surprisingly, research into natural selection/mutation of bacteria was also stopped, simply because it was getting the wrong answer. Carl Woese and Nigel Goldenfeld write in Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews How the Microbial World Saved Evolution from the Scylla of Molecular Biology and the Charybdis of the Modern Synthesis. 

This is the story of how biology of the 20th century neglected and otherwise mishandled the study of what is arguably the most important problem in all of science: the nature of the evolutionary process. This problem has suffered the indignity of being dismissed as unimportant to a basic understanding of biology by molecular biology; it went effectively unrecognized by a microbiology still in the throes of trying to find itself; and it became the private domain of a quasi-scientific movement, who secreted it away in a morass of petty scholasticism, effectively disguising the fact that their primary concern with it was ideological, not scientific.

They write of four discoveries which were suppressed because they violated the Darwinist dogma:

1) All single-celled organisms are NOT descended from bacteria.

“All these organisms share the distinctive structural properties associated with the procaryotic cell . . . and we can therefore safely infer a common origin for the whole group in the remote evolutionary past." (1962)
This dogmatic approach to the essence of microbiology would shunt development away from the problem of the nature of cellular organization, which Stanier and van Niel had solved by fiat....Stanier and van Niel’s assertion that all bacteria were prokaryotes was an eminently testable hypothesis—the only problem being that neither the authors nor microbiologists in general perceived it that way.

2) Microbiology is NOT just chemistry inside a membrane--reductionism.

It is difficult to imagine that the discipline which defined biology in the last century—that taught us so much and provided such benefit to the ambient society—is fundamentally flawed. But that is the case. Molecular biology expressly established itself within the (classical) Newtonian worldview. As such, its perspective was fundamentally reductionist. In other words, all things were explainable, completely and solely, as the sum of their various parts—which also meant that they could (in principle) be predicted a priori...
It is one thing to hold a perspective in principle, another to apply it in detail. Thus, in the early decades of the 20th century, molecular biology’s fundamental reductionist perspective was innocuous—especially when there were many problems that could benefit from a (simple) reductionist approach. It was another thing altogether when molecular biology began reconceptualizing biology in an exclusively reductionist fashion. Then the inadequacies of reductionist metaphysics began to show. The major wrong turn in biology’s course was its conceptualization and subsequent handling of the problem of the gene. It would come to a point where the discipline had to choose between the obvious biology of the situation and the tenets of reductionism. Molecularists choose the latter, thereby taking off the table a major biological question....
This turn in the road (of applying reductionist metaphysics to the understanding of the biological world) would become a superhighway that dead-ended before it reached molecular biology’s ultimate goal, that of understanding the essence of “livingness” and directly answering the question of how molecules come to life.

3) The modern evolutionary synthesis model is NOT the actual evolutionary process.

We have seen that molecular biology, the dominant biological discipline of the time, did not even recognize the evolutionary process as a scientific problem. Given its overview (axiomatic assumptions), molecular biology took evolution simply as biological epiphenomenology, “historical accident”—which means that evolutionary considerations have no bearing whatsoever on any fundamental understanding of living systems...
The modern evolutionary synthesis should have been the 20th century’s evolutionary bastion, the forefront of research into the evolutionary process. No such luck!
The basic understanding of evolution, considered as a process, did not advance at all under its tutelage. The presumed fundamental explanation of the evolutionary process, “natural selection,” went unchanged and unchallenged from one end of the 20th century to the other. Was this because there was nothing more to understand about the nature of the evolutionary process? Hardly! Instead, the focus was not the study of the evolutionary process so much as the care and tending of the modern synthesis. Safeguarding an old concept, protecting “truths too fragile to bear translation” is scientific anathema.

4) Inherited (and improved) genes are NOT as fundamental to evolutionary processes as horizontal gene transfer.

Dogmatic thinking has prevailed all too often in our account, with disastrous consequences for the progress of the fields of microbiology, molecular biology, and the study of the evolutionary process. It led to the stagnant and scientifically invalid notion of the prokaryote; it led to the redefinition of the problem of the gene; and through a slavish adherence to the modern evolutionary synthesis, it led to a premature declaration of victory in the struggle to understand the evolutionary process.
Today, we know that horizontal gene transfer is a powerful evolutionary force in the microbial world, well-documented in the phylogenetic record, and one whose ecological significance is only beginning to be fully understood. Spurred on by advances in genomic technology, microbial ecology is presenting new insights into the workings of the biosphere, demanding a synthesis with the evolutionary process, and forcing evolutionary biology to pay attention. The power of horizontal gene transfer is so great that it is a major puzzle to understand why it would be that the eukaryotic world would turn its back on such a wonderful source of genetic novelty and innovation. The exciting answer, bursting through decades of dogmatic prejudice, is that it hasn’t. There are now compelling documentations of horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotes, not only in plants, protists, and fungi, but in animals (including mammals) as well. The evolutionary implications have not yet been worked out, but we are confident that a fully worked out theory of the evolutionary process is required in order to properly meet the challenges posed initially by microbiology.

To sum up the respected Carl Woese, we've lost a century of molecular biology because of Darwinist dogma. And that's just microbiology. We could include just about every subfield in biology which has been hamstrung by dogma. In the world of bad biology guides, Trofim was a piker.

Astrobiology

It is a small field, with a few sputterings from Arrhenius around the turn of the 20th century, and some sporadic support from meteoriticists in the early 1960's, followed by maverick Sir Fred Hoyle's spirited defense in the 1980's. I've blogged on this before, but the astounding thing to me is just how eagerly the scientific community concluded that the entire affair of life on comets was a huge fraud. One is reminded of the KGB's smear campaign of Pope Pius XII after his death, following Beria's dictum that people are more likely to believe false stories than true. So it was in meteoritics, and the "contaminated meteorite" paper went unchallenged, despite its clear fabrication and inability to explain the data it purported to deny. Even today, the conclusion, "contamination" remains unassailed, despite the discrediting of its origin, which can only be attributed to Darwinist dogmatic rejection of the implications of panspermia. This implicit Darwinism is echoed in the first and loudest objection to the discovery of life on comets, "But your data still doesn't explain where life originated!", which is to say, evolution is merely a sophisticated wrapper around an atheistic origin-of-life belief, and if an anti-theistic OOL is not asserted, the theory is unacceptable.

Education

This same implicit atheism has likewise afflicted education.There was a telling interview in Scientific American, where Berkeley psychologist Tania Lombrozo talked to SciAm's Steve Miller about the results of a survey on the beliefs of evolutionary theory. To her surprise, religious Christians were just as likely to believe evolution as non-religious, there wasn't a strong correlation between degree of rejection and degree of belief, rather it was the kind of belief. Theistic evolutionists tended to straddle the middle, being ardent evolutionist who nonetheless believed in God. Even more surprising, was the dashing of the stereotype that anti-evolutionists were ignorant, gullible people likely to believe in anything. In her words,

One thing that you don't find is a general propensity for people to have supernatural beliefs. So you might have thought that someone who rejects evolution in general might be more willing to accept supernatural ideas about everything, like the pyramids being created by supernatural forces or UFOs or astrology, for example, and you actually don't find a correlation between endorsing creationism or other kind of supernatural, counter human origins and those kinds of traditionally supernatural beliefs aren't associated with Christianity.

Then all that anti-science bashing about congressmen who don't accept evolution isn't actually true. But then you already knew that. Even more interesting is the admission that educators have a choice, to either teach the science or teach the belief. Here's the interchange:

Steve: Yeah, it was surprising to me when your data were presented. So what [does] that mean for, you know, education in the country? What should people be thinking about if they have a desire to have evolutionary theory be more accepted by more people?

Lombrozo: I think it has a couple of consequences. So, one of them is that any kind of educational intervention that increases people's understanding of evolutionary theory is not necessarily going to have a consequence to whether or not people accept evolution. I think that's surprising, but it also raises a lot of complicated ethical issues; whether or not it's even appropriate in the classroom for teachers to be trying to deliberately influence students' acceptance of evolution as opposed to whether or not they understand it. We normally think about the role of education as being one to communicate basic concepts, to communicate scientific theories, not to actually change whether or not people accept a particular theory that might conflict with their relative views. So I think it raises some complicated issues there.

Steve: So it may be justifiable to say, "Here's what we understand about evolution as a science. We don't care whether you accept it; we just want you to understand it."

Lombrozo: I think that's the way a lot of people think about education, and I think that's a way to sidestep some complicated ethical issues about whether or not it's appropriate to present ideas that could conflict with people's beliefs. On the other hand, people's policy making decisions, their medical decisions and a lot of other decisions might depend not only on whether or not they understand evolution, but on whether or not they accept it. So in some sense, I think the public has a lot at stake in whether or not people accept evolution; but I am not sure the best way to proceed given these kinds of findings about the dissociation between acceptance and belief.

The dilemma could not have been phrased more starkly. Do we teach the science, or do we teach the religion? What is the payoff of teaching the religion instead? As Tania describes elsewhere in this interview: a poor ability to understand the content of evolution. But when it comes to making medical (read: ethical) decisions, then the Darwinist religion is all-important.

If it is behaviour we are after, then by all means, teach religion, because that is what religion is for. But that raises the important question, "what exactly is Darwinist behaviour, and why is it both unscientific and unchristian? And what does it do to the ethics of those children who grow up to be scientists?" I think we already know the answers to these questions. This is the legacy Darwin has left for our children.

Philosophy

I would have liked to trace the influence of Darwin on philosophers such as Whitehead, Bergson, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and the rediscovered Hegel. In many of these cases, teleology is denied and the history of philosophy is reduced to method. The rediscovery of Hegel is fascinating, because Hegel began with a very fundamental teleology, but his modern proponents have substituted a Darwinist parody. Like the Marxist inversion of Hegel, this modern version is also an inversion, but more importantly, it removes the search for God from the list of approved investigations. Perhaps at a later time, we can explore the psychological appeal of Darwinism which has profoundly infected philosophy.

Theology

Theology likewise shows a deep influence from Darwin. Most obviously it is found in the writings of the apostate Teilhard de Chardin, or the existentialism of Paul Tillich and the rise of Open Theism, which combined with Gnosticism, is the unofficial theology of The Episcopal Church. So whether we look at Catholic Jesuits or Reformed Protestants or Episcopalian half-breeds, we find the influence of the God who evolves. Perhaps it isn't so surprising, since for the past 300 years, theology has been the younger sister to philosophy, tagging along with a me-too metaphysics.

Physics

But what is, at least to me, a truly surprising development is the effect of Darwin on physics. Physicists note with pride the dependence of the other sciences on physics, because physics is the ultimate reductionist science. But reductionism can't every achieve the satisfaction of purpose, of synthesis, of aesthetic delight. And so, in a perverse way, physics has relied on theology for its overall unity, which in the last few decades, has become the theology of evolution. Lee Smolin argues that to avoid the evidence that the creation was designed requires a belief in a Hegelian view of time (which itself owes a great deal to Darwin). Leonard Susskind objects strenuously, that we need only allow universes to evolve. (No, I'm not making that up. Evidently there's this place called the multiverse where baby universes are born and if they don't have the right stuff, they die.) Here's his actual words:

Darwin was not particularly interested in astronomy or physics, yet his impact on cosmology was enormous but in a way subconscious. In successfully explaining the origin of species, he eliminated superstition and set a new standard for what an explanation of nature should be like. As I wrote in my book The Black Hole War (Little Brown, 2008), Darwin’s masterstroke was to have “ejected God from the science of life”. True, Darwin was not the first scientist to cast out supernatural beliefs. Two centuries earlier, Newton — another great Cambridge scientist — had done so more than anyone before his own time... In other words, before Darwin, even the greatest physicists had little alternative to a supernatural explanation of the origin of life, and therefore of nature itself. It was the success of Darwinism that forced the issue and set the standard for future theories of origins, whether it be it of life or of the universe. Explanations must be based on the laws of physics, mathematics and probability — and not on the hand of God.

If you missed that bit of genuflection, here's his conclusion

Whether string theory with its huge landscape, and eternal inflation with its reproducing pockets of space [both=evolving universes], will prove to be correct is for the future to decide. What is true is that as of the present time, they provide the only natural explanation of the universe that lives up to the standard set by Darwin.

Recall that Darwin believed in an eternal, God-free cosmos, so he merely had to find an atheistic solution to the origin of life. Now that we know Darwin was wrong about the universe, Susskind merely has to find an atheist solution to the origin of the universe to fix the atheism. So if you bought that bridge from Darwin, have we ever got a deal for you! The important point to notice here, is the circularity of the logic. Since the universe is eternal, then life also does not need a creator; but once we know that the universe is not eternal, then since life didn't need a creator, neither does the universe. No other option, says Susskind, preserves our atheism intact.

Then when physicist Frank Tipler writes a book like "The Physics of Immortality", where he argues that religion is based on physical principles, he states that the final condition of the universe as described by physics must evolve because the theory of evolution is true. Once again, physics is turning to evolution for metaphysical confirmation of the nature of reality. It is perhaps no surprise, that Tipler's immortality seems to be a pseudo-scientific gloss on Tielhard de Chardin's.

Political Science

Despite vociferous denials, Richard Weikart's masterful "Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress" describes precisely how Darwin affected the 3rd Reich. Nor should we leave out Communism with its strident atheism and evangelical materialism. The real surprise comes from Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism", that charts the influence of Darwin on American politics. It is needless to remind one that the politics of the 20th century were dominated by Darwin. What is still unknown is his effect on the 21st century, though one thing is clear: Darwin has an advocate in President Obama.

Conclusions

Yes Darwin does matter, and as we saw with physics, his atheism lives on long after his cosmology is overturned. Or as we saw with education, his moral relativism lives on long after we stop teaching the science. Or as we saw with political science, his philosophy gets resurrected whenever a capricious leader covets greater power. These are a few of the reasons why the science must be thoroughly and completely discredited, so that all these efforts can be seen for the naked atheism they embody. That is the singular goal of ID, and its best justification. And that also explains the raw hatred towards ID.

A colleague alerted me to a recent published book entitled, Is Science Western in Origin? by Indian physicist, C.K. Raju. Not too surprisingly, he discovers otherwise (says the back cover)

On stock Western history, science originated among the Greeks, and then developed in post-renaissance Europe. This story was fabricated in three phases.
 * First, during the Crusades, scientific knowledge from across the world, in captured Arabic books, was given a theologically-correct origin by claiming it was all transmitted from the Greeks. The key cases of Euclid (geometry) and Claudius Ptolemy (astronomy)—both concocted figures—are used to illustrate this process.
 * Second, during the Inquisition, world scientific knowledge was again assigned a theologically-correct origin by claiming it was *not* transmitted from others, but was “independently rediscovered” by Europeans. The cases of Copernicus and Newton (calculus) illustrate this process of “revolution by rediscovery”.
 * Third, the appropriated knowledge was reinterpreted and aligned to post-Crusade theology. Colonial and racist historians exploited this, arguing that the (theologically) “correct” version of scientific knowledge (geometry, calculus, etc.) existed only in Europe. 
These processes of appropriation continue to this day.

Is it true that the West merely appropriated science from other cultures and "laundered" it to make it look Greek? Did the West steal everything that made it powerful? Did the West borrow Science or invent it?

There is more than bragging rights going on in this debate, for various groups have appropriated the rise of Science as proof of their sweeping claims. For example, John William Draper's 1874 "History of the Conflict between Religion and Science" and Andrew Dickson White's 1896 "A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom" coupled the rise of Science with growing atheist sentiment. Or during the 1920's the rise of Science was used to support a racist superiority of northern Europeans over southern, or Europe over Asia. More recently, the UN's IPCC has used the science of climate change as justification for a sweeping global power grab. So what is responsible for the rise of science and the transfer of power--luck or prowess?

This is the sort of question we used to ask 20 years ago, when Japan had all the innovative electronics, but the US had all the patents. Was there something about the US that made innovation possible but stifled implementation, or were US scientists just more creative but gullible? In a similar vein, was the success of Science in the West fundamentally a strategic, internal, and theoretical advantage (better genes, better religion), or merely a tactical, external, and practical advantage (higher income, longer life)?

Grouping the (non-exhaustive) responses into these two categories, we find the following answers:

Strategic:
  Genius theory: The West had more genii such as Newton, Huygens, Leibniz, Faraday, Maxwell, Heisenberg, Gödel, and Einstein.
  Christianity theory: The West had a superior metaphysical understanding of science.
  Racist theory: The West had better genes, more genii, etc.

Tactical:
  Stolen theory: The West were better copycats. (See above reference to Japanese electronics)
  Capitalism theory: The West had more leisure time because of superior economic environment.
  Health-care theory: The West had higher productivity because their wise had better health care. (Obama take note!)
   Accident theory: The West just had an improbable collection of lucky events.

Robert K. Merton, a sociologist at Columbia University (and thus by definition an anti-metaphysical advocate of naturalism), argued that it was external, practical factors that caused the West to succeed in his 1938 article, Science, Technology & Society in Seventeenth-Century England, principally the Protestant ethic (shades of Max Weber) that also inspired Capitalism. You might also compare this sort of analysis with that of Jared Diamond, whose 2005 "Guns, Germs and Steel" argued the same sort of external factors for the success of Western technology.

In contrast, Rodney Stark, a historian at Baylor University used the database of Chinese, Greek, Arabian and European science to argue that it was an internal, philosophical difference. The conclusion of his 2005 book, The Victory of Reason, was that Christianity provided the theoretical foundation that led to all the other practical benefits. The real credit for his thesis probably belongs to the late physicist-philosopher, Stanley Jaki, who argued in his 1990 Science and Creation, that it was the superior metaphysics of Christianity that could take Science out of the superstition that waylaid other cultures. (Jaki also credits Pierre Duhem and Alfred North Whitehead, who along with Nicolai Berdyaev, M. B. Foster, and R. G. Collingwood formulated this thesis decades earlier in opposition to the Merton theory.) This thesis was developed by Michael Bumbulis in a 1996 whitepaper. Eric Snow does a nice job summarizing the arguments in his 1997 review.

Then there are those who thread a course between the Merton accident and the Duhem miracle. John Mark Reynolds in his 2009 "When Athens Met Jerusalem" holds that it was the collision between Greek pagan thought and Christian elevated metaphysics that provided the explosive power of the Renaissance. Of course one should give the ancients their due, but which ones? C.K. Raju would argue that it was really Indian physics that collided with Christianity, and then the debate settles into a Merton/Diamond sort of conglomerate about all the accidents of history. So despite Reynolds attempt to diminish Christian arrogance or elevate Greek classicists, he cannot hold a middle ground. Either the miracle of Christian philosophy was the magic ingredient, or it was an accident of circumstance, which is to say, the conclusion is forgone in the assumptions.

Well as you might guess, Stark's conclusion nettles those who prefer a Draper-White conclusion, or a Raju sour-grapes response. One academic, Richard Carrier, prefers to take his objections on the road (rather than, say, an obscure academic journal). Here's his blog/YouTube dissent, pointing out that Stark has made some historical blunders in his book. (Though it would seem that Carrier's strawman arguments don't address the underlying work of Duhem-Jaki-Bumbulis-Snow.)

In addition to all these carefully reasoned arguments by Snow and Stark, I've been more and more convinced that it was not metaphysics per se, but theology that made the difference. That is, metaphysics is not an acquired taste, but an indoctrinated one. And the principal means of indoctrination is religious instruction. Thus it is not the metaphysics of Christianity that makes Christians different, but the theological content, the creeds, the confessions that make it unique. The metaphysics is, as it were, merely the intellectual dressing on the naked body of belief.

And what is that belief that led to the emergence of Science? The Trinity.

For the scylla and charybdis of science are transcendent monotheism and immanent polytheism. The first allows no rational causes to hold, the second holds to no rational effects. The intermediate belief of science as both permanent and peculiar, both global and local, is a tenuous and impossible place to stand unless there be a third thing, a tertium quid of equal immanence/transcendence, global/local, permanent/peculiar, which is only provided by Christianity.

The problem is what to do with Reason.

Let me simplify by lumping animism, Greek polytheism, and Zoroastrian dualism into the same bin as Hindu pantheism. They are all alike in having an immanent god(s), an absolute which is part of the same world that you and I inhabit. This god can be touched, can be changed, can be affected by our entreaties. It is not that this god is sometimes approachable, but that he cannot avoid being approachable. For him, the hard part is staying godlike and not devolving into sub-godlike behavior.

Okay, now what do we do with Reason? Is it approachable? Is it changeable? Can it respond to entreaties? Is it made from the same stuff as us? If this seems too abstract to follow, imagine Reason is a Math Theorem. Does a math theorem respond to special pleading?

Thus an immanent god might be rational one day, and irrational the next. Or even if he were rational 99% of the time, the one time you need absolute and total assurance, he would let you down.

Pantheism/polytheism cannot handle absolutes, and therefore cannot formulate laws.

Post hoc interpretations of history showing science to emerge from Christianity, while true, aren't really enough. At the very least, from a rhetorical perspective, it looks more like a turf battle. What would really decide the debate is not only saying "Christianity best explains science" but going further and saying "Christianity not only explains science, but qualitatively improves upon our modern idea of science in a way inseparable from Christianity."

This is because you want a "scientific explanation" for the evolution of science! If you were a Muslim, post hoc is more than sufficient explanation--Allah wills it so. And if you were a Hindu, then post hoc is the mind of maker. It is only that you are neither, but rather a scientist, that you want a positive metaphysical explanation for the origin of science. The difficulty is that the very desire is a consequence of Christianity, so in order to explain the spiritual roots of the fulfillment, it is necessary to explain the spiritual roots of the desire. But should the desire be denied, then so also the fulfillment.

So, to move the debate in that direction, here's my question: Given that Christianity provides grounds for expecting the world to be rationally formed, why should we then expect it to be humanly understandable?

You began by rejecting the polytheistic position, and positing Reason. Having made your foundation in the transcendent absolute of Reason, you then wonder how it can be immanent. How can it be that this cold and rational god of Math who lives in a Hilbert space of infinite dimensionality could stoop down to make sense in my finite 3-dimensional existence? This is the opposite problem confronted by Islam, that God, who is absolute, is not forced to "make sense" to me. Rationality is, after all, merely the projection of infinite Reason into a my small finite brain, and is therefore a subset of all that God is. All squares are rectangles, and all rectangles are parallel quadrilaterals, but not all parallel quadrilaterals are squares. To my square mind it might be impossible to explain rectangles not to mention the parallelograms of God.

Thus comes the need for the intermediate mediator, the immanent transcendence, the absolute peculiar, the global locality, the transfinite 3D set, the god-man bridge. But this third thing cannot be a mixture, it cannot be even a compound, it must be indivisibly both, a tertium quid. And that means the metaphysical world cannot be a one-dimensional polarity, a single axis between two extremes, but it has to have a second axis with a third point. There must be a metaphysical trinity for such an absolute not to collapse into one or the other extremes. This was the message I learned from Vladimir Lossky's book "In the Image and Likeness of God" where he spends considerable effort on the necessity of metaphysical trinities.

Only Christianity posited such a thing. Only Christianity permitted Science.

Plus, it is not only Christianity that posited a rationally created world. So did Plato and Virgil. What exactly is unique in Christianity's contribution? I suspect the first question may provide an answer to the second, but that's just a guess at this point.

One can stand at either end of a single-axis world and pine for the riches of the other. Plato's absolutes desired immanence, but all he could offer were the shadows on the cave wall. The Hindu promised the nirvana of the absolute, but could only offer the wheel of reincarnation, endlessly turning without arriving. For pining is not possessing.

Neither of these could offer what Christianity had, and that was the very real substance of the absolute God, the very real access of human mercy to the terrifying transcendence of absolute justice. Only Christianity had a Christ who was neither swallowed up in Reason nor subjected to human decay. This tension is what makes Science possible, and without it, Science rapidly turns into one or the other.

For illustration, global warming is a scientific theory that has taken on moral aspects. Read that interview with the Greenpeace president, watch Gore's movie, the truth is less important than the moral imperative of global warming. This is what happens when science drifts toward transcendence, it becomes dogmatic.

The opposite extreme is when science attempts to be practical, to be immanent without understanding the metaphysics. Denyse O'Leary's The Spiritual Brain shows how neuroscience attempts to draw conclusions without understanding the mind. The field becomes rife with recipes, or comical "just so" stories to replace the metaphysics. In the end, one makes up stories "what ain't so" to formulate a quasi-metaphysical explanation for behavior one wanted to rationalize in the first place.

Neither global warming nor evolutionary psychology are Science, but for opposite reasons; the first abuses reason for the sake of morality, the second for immorality. But I stress that this story of two sciences is not unique to the 21st century, but is precisely the sort of barrier Jaki identifies when he said that Chinese, Greek, and Arabic science were not able to make progress. They were not Trinitarian.

So to answer CK Raju's question, Science is as western as Trinitarian theology is western. And no, trinitarian theology was not appropriated,  it was revealed.

After my difficulties with academia ten years ago, many friends came to counsel me and offer advice. The most common was that I should be more flexible with my expertise, more conciliatory with my opposition, more secretive with my politics and especially with my religion. My answer had been the one Jesus gave on the Via Dolorosa, "For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?"

Now the twenty-year tenured veterans, the temperate teachers, the seasoned dry wood is feeling the heat. Marvin Olasky, WORLD editor and faculty member at UTAustin, writes about a fellow philosophy professor who was recently demoted for spear-heading a successful "Western Civilization" program that brought in millions of outside dollars and satisfied students. 

As word spread that WCAI had established a beachhead, professorial machine guns began to spew out a response. Pangle recalls that even though Koons included professors and guest lecturers who were clearly not conservative, "people perceived it as a really right-wing ideological program. [Some thought] we had an American triumphalist lesson we wanted to teach . . . that the West has all the good ideas, that we celebrate dead white males . . . that we have a prescribed canon of books."

When faculty pressure failed to kill the program, detractors turned to the "nuclear option", front-page op-ed rag formerly known as the New York Times.

Three days later a New York Times front-page story, headlined "Conservatives Try New Tack on Campus," prominently named UT's program as one "mostly financed by conservative organizations and donors, run by conservative professors." That triggered explosions of the sort I know well....Numerous UT professors emailed Diehl with complaints that right­wingers were hornswoggling him. Diehl summoned Koons and chewed him out, saying his claims that the program wasn't ideological were wrong because its funding came from conservative organizations. (This should not have surprised Diehl, because the checks went through his office.) Diehl said the departmental chairs did not trust Koons either.

The outcome was predictable, though because of tenure, Koons is still around at UTAustin. The same reserve that enabled the formation of the program I suppose, also kept him tight-lipped for an entire year, but after 12 months it was clear that WCAI was history, and he wrote this in a blog:

In retrospect, we overestimated the value of strong support from outsiders such as private donors, legislators, and policy groups, while we underestimated the determination of our internal opponents.
The main obstacle to our success was the idée fixe of unbridled faculty governance over the curriculum, which dominates at UT and elsewhere. In practice, that means the tyranny of the faculty majority.
Our program was rightly perceived as a threat to the monopoly of what I call the Uncurriculum, which prevails at UT and at most universities today. It is the absence of required courses and of any structure or order to liberal studies. The Uncurriculum dictates that students accumulate courses that meet a 'distribution' standard—a smattering of courses scattered among many categories. Even within majors, the trend has been to eliminate required sequences. . . .
The Uncurriculum free-for-all gives undergraduates only the illusion of choice. In reality, the Uncurriculum model is entwined with the interests of the professoriate. If there are no courses students are required to take, there are no courses that professors are required to teach.
Professors at research universities focus on the accumulation of prestige through publication, the indispensable means for acquiring tenure and increasing one's salary (through the leverage of outside offers). By allowing students to pick what they want to study, the Uncurriculum model eliminates a potentially great distraction from the quest for publications: the burden of teaching a required curriculum, unrelated to one's own narrow research agenda. . . .

Even in his criticism, Koons is showing marked restraint. He is saying, in essence, that his colleagues are lazy. But this does not explain or excuse their raw hatred. A lazy man does not work himself into a rage over the industriousness of others. Koons is picking the least offensive of their faults, he is shining the best light possible on the University, for the motive is far uglier than laziness, as the dean's emails attest; it is religious hatred, not envy that motivates the NYT slime job.

Whether we know or only suspect the motivation, the results are quantifiable and predictable. Koons writes:

Due to the Uncurriculum, the humanities are committing slow suicide. There has been a steady decline in liberal arts majors in the last thirty years (from over one-half to fewer than one-quarter of the total). However, the decline is slow enough to make little difference to tenured professors.

The very same conclusions were reached a decade ago by Victor Davis Hansen, entitled "Who Killed Homer?" But what was a disease affecting only the Classics then, has now infected the Humanities, and is making inroads on the Sciences. We are witnessing a slow-motion train wreck that is destroying America's Universities. The Classics were the canary, the Humanities are at the face, and the Sciences include every warm body up to the surface. The implosion is coming to higher education, and it will be as sudden as it is thorough.

For the entire value of an academic degree is based on attitude, on inflated stock, on ephemeral opinions. The day will come when the stock collapses, when a college diploma will be seen for the worthless piece of paper it has become, completely undeserving of its $100,000 - $200,000 price tag. The day is coming when students will refuse to attend the suffocating indoctrination of ivy-covered halls. The day has come when parents and students alike will find alternate ways to prepare themselves for the future and its vicissitudes.

What then will replace it, what will replace the indispensible "face-time" of the over-priced academy?

It is already here. The audio tapes of famous teachers lecturing about Euclid's theorems or Plato's Forms are already upon us. The YouTube videos are even more widespread. MIT lists the homework assignments for all its classes. Homework is graded by the world's most patient instructor--the electronic computer running an "expert system".

But if these are all so great, how come people aren't using them to replace the expensive schools?

Oh, but they are.

It's called homeschooling.

The homeschool we belong to (and yes, I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but the government required homeschoolers to be part of a bigger "covering") has math scholars that compete with the elite private school in town. It has quiz bowl teams that compete at a national level, individuals that beat out all competition to win spelling bees, history competitions, geography bees. One memorable year it had 7 National Merit finalists out of about 60 graduates, which is several sigma above the 1% chance probability, and even a sigma above the 12/600 national merit average of the best public school in town.

The explanation for this anomaly cannot be attributed to "motivated" parents, because many of the private school students have parents motivated to spend $20k-$30k/year. Nor can it be attributed to better education of the moms, because most of them have no advanced degrees, certainly not as credentialled as the public school teachers. Nor is it wealth, unless poverty is correlated with intelligence, nor race nor gender nor religious affiliation. The only thing accounting for this anomaly is the curricula itself.

This past year, our homeschool group graduated 75, swollen by students whose parents yanked them out of public school so they could have "homeschool" listed on their college application.

Yes, their day has come when homeschooling has become "hip".

And now I will let you in on the "next big thing", many of these parents have looked at the college choices for their child, and they've opted instead for a correspondence degree: a homeschool college. The very same criteria that caused them to do their secondary education at home is motivating them to do their collegiate experience the same way.

And why not? Alexander the Great didn't go to a University, he had Aristotle come to him. We would all be tutored if we could afford it; the University was only supposed to be a cheaper and more efficient method, not a superior one. What with the Internet and YouTube, we can all have Aristotle in digital reception on our 48" widescreen home theaters, we can have Einstein explaining relativity, Burke explaining politics, Madison explaining federal government. What exactly does that $50k/year obtain that the Internet doesn't--hangovers?

And that is what should be giving deans and vice presidents sleepless nights.

For colleges have become expensive indoctrination camps, where NSO (new student orientation) include faculty instruction to ignore parents and make use of the free condoms at the health center. Colleges demand co-ed dormitories, and would make all bathrooms co-ed too were it not for student revolt. As Koons relates above, professors teach only in their "specialty", on work they are already getting funded to study, causing education to be spotty and completely oriented toward faddish scholarship. Whether it be gender studies or global warming or international justice, there are no alternate views permitted, and the status quo is supported on an increasingly shrinking foundation.

For the day of judgement will surely come as sudden as the mortgage meltdown, when half of America's colleges and Universities will close their doors forever, and the other half will admit to being what they have in truth already become--federal government research institutes.

Yes, the day is coming when the indomitable American mother realizes that she must act to prevent her child from becoming the last in the class of world economies, when the future of America is no longer buoyed up by international faith in America, when foreigners occupy all the positions of prestige and power.

For I firmly believe that American academia will survive, but only through the fire of citizen revolt. And if I were a betting man, I would put my money on Internet curricula, take it out of higher education, and consider starting a consulting agency specializing in second careers for academics.

For the Uncurriculum becomes the Unversity.

Lori Kozlowski of the LA Times did an interview with Chris Mooney, the author of a recent book, "Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future". It seems that Chris Mooney thinks that your basic 20th century progressive like Hillary who believed that "The Jetsons" would be the destiny of America, are now a persecuted minority. Lori asked him about the opposition to vaccines, and here's what he said.

Since then, science has come in and we can't detect the correlation between a rise in autism diagnoses and use of childhood vaccines. And study after study has been done.
So, at some point you have to let go. But that hasn't happened. Instead, there's a conspiracy theory and people have appointed themselves as experts on this. And so it starts to take on the cast of kind of a more-left-leaning version of global warming and evolution where -- I'm sorry, but your anecdote doesn't beat the studies' evidence.
It is really unfortunate. It's not like people who think the moon landings are a hoax. Vaccine denial really is dangerous. The people who try to avoid vaccination, who believe this, are not stupid. They're not disadvantaged. They actually tend to be well-to-do, educated. So the distrust of science -- this is not something a better high school education would have saved them from.

Mooney doesn't seem to know where the distrust of science is coming from. Like limousine-liberals, they're pretty well off, they didn't have any kids with autism, so they don't understand where the antagonism is coming from.  Ginger Taylor, an irate mother writes the LATimes to tell him, concluding with,

Chris, when your own suggestion on how to fix the problem that you have defined is to lean more about the people who are resisting your message, not so that you might learn from them as to where you might have gone off the tracks, not even so that you might enter into a mutually respectful relationship with them where you are on the same level (what with you being "super smart", "highly educated" and "doing great stuff" while they are way behind you on some imaginary starting point), but so that you might condescend to where they are in order to manipulate them into believing what you want them to believe... can you see that you can't even see what the real problem is?
It is clear from this article that those you target, you do not consider your equals.

"Smart" is not the only virtue, and it may not even one of the most important virtues. Look back at the people who have done the most damage to humanity through out history. You will be hard pressed to find a dummy among them.

What Ginger is saying is what the movie Expelled is saying is what the townhalls are saying to our Congress--treat us with respect!

But why do ordinary American citizens, raised to revere the same liberties and freedoms as their compatriots, when given a science education turn into soup Nazis? What is the poison that makes them so manipulative, so arrogant, so willing to sacrifice other's lives for their own benefit?

The first of Ginger's commentators quoted John J. Simmins in a blog entitled:
The seven basic elements of the universe according to the scientific world: Time, Space, Matter, Energy, Power, Prestige, and Funding. Here's Simmins conclusion:

It works like this: You study frogs in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Nobody wants to fund the study of frogs. Why would they? So in the early 80’s you write your proposal to study the effect of the hole in the ozone layer on the frogs. The mid 80’s your try to figure out how to write a proposal on frogs and missile defense but give up. In the 90’s you write proposals on how frog pee can help certain forms of cancer. You partner with NIH on this because they are getting lots of funding, being the ‘hot’ agency. You both know that the results are useless from the get go but you do it anyway. In the late 90’s you write proposals on how frogs from South Dakota can be used to detect nerve gas as part of the Global War on Terrorism. You routinely reject papers to the Journal of Herpetology that claim that five lined skinks can detect nerve gas by their tails falling off. In the 2000’s you are awarded grants to study the decline of frog populations in the Black Hills due to global warming, despite the fact the frogs were there through the last dozen ice ages and that they’ve survived eight periods since the last ice age where the temperature was much warmer than now. You know that the frog population is declining because the government is leasing the land to cattle ranchers and the cows are crapping in the water but you don’t really care because you’re now just a few years away from retirement and you don’t want to work at Burger King.

Read the whole thing. I committed the unpardonable sin of reading it out loud while at work. But I just couldn't bottle it in until 5 pm. And if anything, this is an understatement of "how science works".

But how does this turn us all into "little Eichmanns" (as Ward Churchill, a former U Colorado professor famously opined about businessmen)?  The same way it turned him into one. The bible on the psychology of Nazi corruption was Hannah Arendt's 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she reported on his trial. The thing that surprised her, was his ordinariness, just an apparatchik doing his job.

(From the Wikipedia entry) During his imprisonment before his trial, the Israeli government sent no less than six psychologists to examine Eichmann. Not only did these doctors find no trace of mental illness, but they also found no evidence of abnormal personality whatsoever. One doctor remarked that his overall attitude towards other people, especially his family and friends, was "highly desirable", while another remarked that the only unusual trait Eichmann displayed was being more "normal" in his habits and speech than the average person. Arendt subtitled her book "The banality of evil".

This seemed so counter-intuitive that Arendt tried hard to analyze how good, decent human beings could get so deeply into an evil regime without recognizing it. Here's her analysis of how Eichmann was snared (from the Wikipedia entry):

• Eichmann stated himself in court that he had always tried to abide by Emmanuel Kant's categorical imperative (if everyone did what I do, would the world be a better place?)
• Eichmann's inability to think for himself was exemplified by his consistent use of "stock phrases and self-invented clichés."
• Eichmann constantly joined organizations in order to define himself, and had difficulties thinking for himself without doing so.
• Despite his claims, Eichmann was not, in fact, very intelligent.
• Bragging was the vice that was Eichmann's undoing.
• Upon seeing members of "respectable society" endorsing mass murder, and enthusiastically participating in the planning of the solution, Eichmann felt that his moral responsibility was relaxed.

Let's rephrase the findings in Arendt's book. (a) Eichmann rejected Judao-Christian morality in favor of some philosophical ethical system. (b) He was a "consensus-science" thinker, (c) a "consensus-science" member, (d) insecure; (e) and therefore arrogant, (f) subordinated ethics to "consensus-science".

Now go back and read Chris Mooney's interview. Read his comments about global warming, about evolution, about religious Americans. You will find all the same properties as Eichmann had, the same attitudes that drew Ginger Taylor's ire. (And, not surprisingly, also in Ward Churchill's accusations, which I have learned to receive as confessions.)  This is the thesis of Expelled. There is something about the system that does this to professors.

Now re-read Simmins humor piece. The scientist constantly subjugates the principles of science to prestige, to power, and to money. Surely we scientists are embarrassed to admit that we don't want to work at Burger King. Surely we need to find some fiction for why we are living well, and our plumber isn't. Surely we need to find a justification for why moms of autistic kids are hopping mad without implicating us.  And the solution is to build a wall to keep the mobs out, an ivory tower to retire to, all the while telling ourselves that like European nobility, we deserve all the benefits we are maniacally pursuing.

In other words, we become anti-Americans.

When did this metamorphosis begin? Read the first bullet of Arendt's analysis: the moment we adopt a "scientific" ethic. For religion isn't just an illusion that scientific elites must humor, religion isn't just a transitory condition before the State liberates us into a classless society, religion isn't just a barrier to a technological utopia, but Christianity is the only antidote to hubris, the only purgative for pride, the only cure for sin.

If the theme of Friedrich Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" is that the way of hubris leads to slavery, then the theme of Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" is that the way of Athens leads to hell.

I'm a little behind on my blogging here, with so many interesting stories to cover in the past few weeks, I've been storing them on my desktop. Today I'm cleaning house, and decided on some short blogs to clear them out.

One commentator read the lengthy comet-life debate, and asked about "Plasma-Cosmology" and the attempt to find alternatives to the Big Bang. Well, to begin with, Hannes Alfvén wasn't trying to start a new cosmology with his discussion of plasmas (ionized gas), he was trying to revive an old one. Like Sir Fred Hoyle who coined the pejorative "Big Bang" he was resisting the new-fangled fascination with cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and attempting to explain the data with the more atheist-friendly "steady-state" universe theory. He didn't succeed, in part because Alfvén never really had a comprehensive theory, merely an objection to the way astrophysicists ignore plasmas. And judging by the referee comments on my one and only astrophysics proposal, they still do.

So what are some of the cosmological consequences of ignoring plasmas? Here's my list of Alfvén-like objections:

 a) Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) is the process by which hydrogen, helium and a smattering of Lithium were made in the primordial explosion. Along with the CMB, it is the principal evidence for the BB. But the era in which plasmas dominate is treated as if it were a wet-chemistry experiment. There are no long-range forces, and no provision for plasma instabilities. Should such instabilities exist, it would shift the equilibrium away from deuterium-tritium, and possible explain how heavier atoms like lithium, beryllium and carbon were made in the "dark ages" when light could not penetrate the plasma. And should sufficient carbon/oxygen be made in the BBN, then it would form the baryonic "dark matter" that is presently unexplained, hiding it in black, boulder-sized comets. The paradox being that current BBN models underpredict the baryonic component of the universe (atoms) leaving theorists to postulate "exotic" forms of dark matter, such as MACHOs and WIMPs. All this may be solved by putting in the plasma physics where it belongs.

b) The engine at the center of astrophysical jets remains a mystery. From a physics viewpoint, it really is an engine, with unspecified potential energy going in , and kinetic energy coming out. Now a heat engine is a particular type of engine, taking the random incoherent motion of heat and tidying it up by having coherent motion coming out. In the case of a car, it is the coherent motion of the driveshaft, at much lower velocities than the hot exhaust molecules in the pistons. In the case of a gun or a rocket, the projectile has nearly the same velocity as the gas molecules. And in the case of a linear accelerator, the projectiles are at much higher velocities than the electrons travelling through the cables. In all of these cases, we can compare the energy in the projectile to the energy in the fuel, and calculate an efficiency. A gasoline engine is about 25% efficient, a gun about 2%, and a linear accelerator too small to calculate, <0.001%. So when an astrophysical object pumps enormous energy into a beam of accelerated particles with no obvious linear accelerator or powerplant nearby, we want to know how it does this magic that we cannot duplicate on Earth. The astrophysical answer has been "black holes", which is to say, "hidden under the rug". A better answer might be "plasmas".

c) And this brings up the whole notion of black holes. A Big Bang and a Black Hole are really the same object, theorists claim, the one going forward in time and the other backward. So if BB is a fiction, then probably so are BH. Several theorists have argued that we really don't need BH in our cosmology, that all the effects of a BH can be constructed out of a very hot, dense and magnetically constrained plasma, with radiation pressure holding the entire thing together. It's an intriguing concept, which may explain why jets are seen equally for young stellar objects, microquasars, neutron stars and galactic black hole candidates.

But if a plasma could simulate a black hole, could a plasma simulate a big bang? The authors don't say. Maybe Alfvén was once again, more right than he knew or deserved.

There is another connection between Big Bang and Black Holes, with some surprising results that suggest once again, we need to revisit the physics, for it would appear that perhaps there is one thing that black holes can't destroy, and big bangs can't create...

Information.