ChucKtheAtheisT has the distinction and the curse of wasting away his life in corporate America. And in case that I forget the KY when I go to work in the morning, I can be sure to be reminded of my subservience to such a bitch dominatrix.
The telephone on my desk is red. Of course I had an introductory period of time in which I could choose a color. Actually all were admonished to choose his or her favorite, happy color, but I generally ignore corporate requests like this on principle. Because ChucKtheAtheisT is a godless liberal naturalist, his ethics are clouded with the sort of moral relativism that allows him to redefine the word mandatory.
We all need to cheer up after all; and happy colors are sure to inspire us. But you can say that you didn’t get or didn’t read the memo for only so long. And one day I came into the lab and saw that my telephone was now a fluorescent/fire engine red. Funny though with the glare of the screaming red shell, I can’t see any of the dummy lights on damn thing to tell me if I’m on speaker or if I have a voice-mail message. So fuck me. I’m going to be happy if I like it or not.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Origin of Life: What's So Great About Water?
We have all heard the conventional wisdom that water is the essence of life. Organisms are made predominantly of water, so it seems rational that if we were to explain the origin of life on earth or speculate as to the likelihood of any given exoplanet having life, the presence of water here or there would seem like an essential component to life’s origin(s). Some astrobiologists, planetary scientists and astronomers have gone so far as to make claims that the discovery of water on another planet makes the presence of life inevitable there.
Nobel laureate and Harvard origin of life researcher Jack Szostak wrote a nice piece for a conference sponsored by the Templeton Foundation back in 2003. In it he questions the standard assumption that some have that the presence of water implies a strong probability that life would be present on a planet in which we find it.
But was water really ideal for the origin of life here or on any exoplanet? Szostak makes several points that are worth relating to those who are convinced that water is the miracle solvent for life’s chemistry and that the presence of water on any planet necessarily increases the probablility that life will be found there. “Stepping back from our parochial water-dominated viewpoint we can immediately see that water is really a noxious, toxic, corrosive and generally lethal environment for life.”
The chemical reactivity of water is damaging to genetic material. Hydrolytic reactions are not kind to biomolecules. Szostak gives the example of the effects of water on the nucleotide cytosine, which causes a spontaneous deamination (stripping away an amino group), and transforms the base to uracil. That’s a mutation, folks. Water breaks down sugars, and makes dehydration reactions necessary in order to polymerize proteins and nucleic acids. He elaborates, “Water restricts the domain of chemistry that is suitable for life to a very small fraction of the possibilities that might otherwise be open to exploitation by evolution.”
Life on our planet has evolved energetically costly repair mechanisms to protect genetic material. Complex cell membranes had to evolve to provide compartmental boundaries to maintain the integrity of biomolecules necessary for life’s chemistry. Metabolic intermediates are often unstable in water. Active sites of enzymes have in fact evolved to exclude water; a mutation in the genetic material that codes for the enzyme that allows water access in the active site often leads to the synthesis of undesirable side-products.
Also metabolic precursors need to stay soluble, but not diffuse across the plasma membrane.
Interestingly enough a universal mechanism to control cell diffusion of biomolecules that evolved was the use of phosphate esters in metabolic intermediates in spite of the fact that phosphate is the least abundant of the major elements of life, and in its reduced form is highly soluble in the presence of iron, so much of it disappeared during planetary differentiation with much of the remaining phosphorus precipitating into very insoluble salts (e.g. apatite).
Of course we know that water needs a narrow temperature range in order to remain stable. Ice crystal formation of freezing water destroys cellular membranes. In my own lab I use a -70C freezer to quickly freeze microbes, and have to use cryoprotectants like glycerol or milk to reduce ice crystal formation. Organisms have evolved elaborate strategies such as the synthesis of complex sugars like trehalose or peptides to bind and prevent crystallization.
Biochemistry relies on the production and especially the post-translational folding of proteins to shape them to do all sorts of regulatory jobs in the cell. The hydrogen bonding properties of water make it very difficult for proteins to maintain their critical three dimentional shape, because hydrogen bonding of water to unfolded proteins is more likely and inhibits intramolecular bonding necessary for folding. Szostak supposes that stable folded protein structures could be possible with simpler, shorter polymeric sequences (and easier to make) if water was not such a good hydrogen bond donor and acceptor.
The speculation that the presence of water is a necessary condition for the origin of life, or that the discovery of the presence of water makes it much more likely that life has originated on other planets may not…well, hold water.
Nobel laureate and Harvard origin of life researcher Jack Szostak wrote a nice piece for a conference sponsored by the Templeton Foundation back in 2003. In it he questions the standard assumption that some have that the presence of water implies a strong probability that life would be present on a planet in which we find it.
But was water really ideal for the origin of life here or on any exoplanet? Szostak makes several points that are worth relating to those who are convinced that water is the miracle solvent for life’s chemistry and that the presence of water on any planet necessarily increases the probablility that life will be found there. “Stepping back from our parochial water-dominated viewpoint we can immediately see that water is really a noxious, toxic, corrosive and generally lethal environment for life.”
The chemical reactivity of water is damaging to genetic material. Hydrolytic reactions are not kind to biomolecules. Szostak gives the example of the effects of water on the nucleotide cytosine, which causes a spontaneous deamination (stripping away an amino group), and transforms the base to uracil. That’s a mutation, folks. Water breaks down sugars, and makes dehydration reactions necessary in order to polymerize proteins and nucleic acids. He elaborates, “Water restricts the domain of chemistry that is suitable for life to a very small fraction of the possibilities that might otherwise be open to exploitation by evolution.”
Life on our planet has evolved energetically costly repair mechanisms to protect genetic material. Complex cell membranes had to evolve to provide compartmental boundaries to maintain the integrity of biomolecules necessary for life’s chemistry. Metabolic intermediates are often unstable in water. Active sites of enzymes have in fact evolved to exclude water; a mutation in the genetic material that codes for the enzyme that allows water access in the active site often leads to the synthesis of undesirable side-products.
Also metabolic precursors need to stay soluble, but not diffuse across the plasma membrane.
Interestingly enough a universal mechanism to control cell diffusion of biomolecules that evolved was the use of phosphate esters in metabolic intermediates in spite of the fact that phosphate is the least abundant of the major elements of life, and in its reduced form is highly soluble in the presence of iron, so much of it disappeared during planetary differentiation with much of the remaining phosphorus precipitating into very insoluble salts (e.g. apatite).
Of course we know that water needs a narrow temperature range in order to remain stable. Ice crystal formation of freezing water destroys cellular membranes. In my own lab I use a -70C freezer to quickly freeze microbes, and have to use cryoprotectants like glycerol or milk to reduce ice crystal formation. Organisms have evolved elaborate strategies such as the synthesis of complex sugars like trehalose or peptides to bind and prevent crystallization.
Biochemistry relies on the production and especially the post-translational folding of proteins to shape them to do all sorts of regulatory jobs in the cell. The hydrogen bonding properties of water make it very difficult for proteins to maintain their critical three dimentional shape, because hydrogen bonding of water to unfolded proteins is more likely and inhibits intramolecular bonding necessary for folding. Szostak supposes that stable folded protein structures could be possible with simpler, shorter polymeric sequences (and easier to make) if water was not such a good hydrogen bond donor and acceptor.
The speculation that the presence of water is a necessary condition for the origin of life, or that the discovery of the presence of water makes it much more likely that life has originated on other planets may not…well, hold water.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
The Homosexual Agenda
There’s something insidious that’s festering at the core of our society. It’s likely to take away all of our God-given rights in America and elsewhere. It’s the Homosexual Agenda. Our country is sliding to hell on a greased pole as we let those reprobates take over. They are trying to proselytize our children in the public schools in the guise of diversity and sensitivity training. It’s not about teaching tolerance, it’s about homosexual power. Before you go to sleep tonight, you had better look under your bed. Next to the demon that’s trying to convince you to masturbate, there’s probably also a homosexual that would just love to poison your mind. The LGBT community wants to create a culture of moral relativism and decadence. And you gay Christians had better watch out. If you think that God’s going to give you a pass because He’s supposed to be about love and forgiveness, you can forget about it.
If you’re wondering WTF ChucK the AtheisT is going on about, you well should. This is the nonsense that I heard (except for the masturbating demon), when I flipped on the Christian talk radio station, WYLL AM 1160 in Chicago last Saturday night. The program was called (and sponsored by) Americans for Truth (AFT), “a national organization devoted exclusively to exposing and countering the homosexual agenda (1).” Read on, but later you should check out these folks. This den of radical fundamentalists tries to cloak their intolerance and paranoia in the guise of patriotism, nationalism, and the hopeless desire to return to the bygone days of Christian supremacy. But I think there’s more. For me the AFT and their ilk are projecting their own motivations onto gays and lesbians. The AFT accuses the LGBTC of a grab for power and thirst for cultural privilege that they wish for themselves as the chosen people of God.
The guest that was interviewed for the show was Robert Gagnon of the Pittsburgh Theological seminary. I haven’t done the work to investigate if this “scholar” has any financial ties to the AFT (campaigning, writing, or lecturing for fee), but I did surf a little and found the website for his book, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (2). This was at the top of the Google search. So minimally if you were to look this character up, the first thing you’d find promotes his book.
He started by warning us that gay and lesbian Americans have infiltrated public schools with literature and teaching programs that are designed to normalize the gay lifestyle in our society in the guise of promoting diversity and tolerance. Gagnon is disgusted that the LGBTC provides children’s stories that promote the gay agenda, which he asserts is part of a growing mandatory curriculum in the public schools. Then he blasts moderate Christians like Warren Throckmorton, a psychologist at Grove City College, for advocating that the faith community should not discriminate against the LGBTC in the public sphere, and not try to derail attempts for at least a minimally humane recognition of civil unions. It’s easy to see where this is going. Gagnon blames moderated gay-friendly Christians like Throckmorton for contributing to the delinquency of minors and the discrimination of Christians.
Gay Christians are also targeted by Gagnon, because homosexuality is an abomination to God. If gay Christians persist in their sin, they will not inherit the Kingdom. This is somewhat in contradiction with the sort of apologetics that I’ve heard from my friend, Pastor Gregory Dickow, a mainstream Evangelical. Dickow avers that it is the belief in the atonement of Christ that results in salvation. People can accept biological evolution and be gay, and be no more of a sinner than the gossipy backbiters you might find at any local church. Sure Dickow believes that a transformation will eventually occur that will lead to conformity, but for him there is an acceptance of imperfection. Of course ChucK the AtheisT and I dare say most of you will have none of it, but you have to have sympathy for the confusion of Gay Christians, obviously not for their sexual orientation but their religious delusion. To be Christian and gay must be an incredible weight to bear. I think most atheists may hesitate to single them out
And saving the wacky bit for last, Gagnon makes a preposterous claim about some nonsense he calls “the scientific argument from disproportional harm.” He says that same-gender sexual behavior, like bestiality, incest, and polyamory, leads to an apparently exceptional amount of detrimental health and psychological effects. Of course there is not reference to any specific claim by anyone in the scientific community. Gagnon. His title at the Pittsburg Theological Seminary is “Associate Professor of New Testament.” I thought it was a typo, but I saw this title in a few places on his website. Apparently the seminary, a bastion of higher learning, has trouble knowing when to provide a noun with an article.
You’ve all probably heard of the Discovery Institute’s agenda and their Wedge Document (3). I submit to you that this is just another manifestation of fundamentalism thirsty for power. It’s so intellectually dishonest to resort to emotional manipulation to advance your agenda. You can appeal to the fear that your children will be brainwashed and your country will end up in ruin. If that doesn’t work at least you can keep Christians in line by threatening them with everlasting torture because of unrepentant homosexual sin in contradiction to what seemed to be the main message of Christianity, that the atonement of Christ pays the debt that your just god expects. No one, not even in the faith community, should have trouble seeing this sort of bull shit for what it is, a cynical grab for power and a return to Christian supremacy in America.
References:
1. Americans for Truth. http://www.americansfortruth.com/
2. Gagnon, R. 2002. The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics. Abington Press: Nashville.
3. Anonymous. The Wedge Document: Intelligent Design Exposed. http://libcom.org/library/wedge-document-intelligent-design-exposed
If you’re wondering WTF ChucK the AtheisT is going on about, you well should. This is the nonsense that I heard (except for the masturbating demon), when I flipped on the Christian talk radio station, WYLL AM 1160 in Chicago last Saturday night. The program was called (and sponsored by) Americans for Truth (AFT), “a national organization devoted exclusively to exposing and countering the homosexual agenda (1).” Read on, but later you should check out these folks. This den of radical fundamentalists tries to cloak their intolerance and paranoia in the guise of patriotism, nationalism, and the hopeless desire to return to the bygone days of Christian supremacy. But I think there’s more. For me the AFT and their ilk are projecting their own motivations onto gays and lesbians. The AFT accuses the LGBTC of a grab for power and thirst for cultural privilege that they wish for themselves as the chosen people of God.
The guest that was interviewed for the show was Robert Gagnon of the Pittsburgh Theological seminary. I haven’t done the work to investigate if this “scholar” has any financial ties to the AFT (campaigning, writing, or lecturing for fee), but I did surf a little and found the website for his book, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (2). This was at the top of the Google search. So minimally if you were to look this character up, the first thing you’d find promotes his book.
He started by warning us that gay and lesbian Americans have infiltrated public schools with literature and teaching programs that are designed to normalize the gay lifestyle in our society in the guise of promoting diversity and tolerance. Gagnon is disgusted that the LGBTC provides children’s stories that promote the gay agenda, which he asserts is part of a growing mandatory curriculum in the public schools. Then he blasts moderate Christians like Warren Throckmorton, a psychologist at Grove City College, for advocating that the faith community should not discriminate against the LGBTC in the public sphere, and not try to derail attempts for at least a minimally humane recognition of civil unions. It’s easy to see where this is going. Gagnon blames moderated gay-friendly Christians like Throckmorton for contributing to the delinquency of minors and the discrimination of Christians.
Gay Christians are also targeted by Gagnon, because homosexuality is an abomination to God. If gay Christians persist in their sin, they will not inherit the Kingdom. This is somewhat in contradiction with the sort of apologetics that I’ve heard from my friend, Pastor Gregory Dickow, a mainstream Evangelical. Dickow avers that it is the belief in the atonement of Christ that results in salvation. People can accept biological evolution and be gay, and be no more of a sinner than the gossipy backbiters you might find at any local church. Sure Dickow believes that a transformation will eventually occur that will lead to conformity, but for him there is an acceptance of imperfection. Of course ChucK the AtheisT and I dare say most of you will have none of it, but you have to have sympathy for the confusion of Gay Christians, obviously not for their sexual orientation but their religious delusion. To be Christian and gay must be an incredible weight to bear. I think most atheists may hesitate to single them out
And saving the wacky bit for last, Gagnon makes a preposterous claim about some nonsense he calls “the scientific argument from disproportional harm.” He says that same-gender sexual behavior, like bestiality, incest, and polyamory, leads to an apparently exceptional amount of detrimental health and psychological effects. Of course there is not reference to any specific claim by anyone in the scientific community. Gagnon. His title at the Pittsburg Theological Seminary is “Associate Professor of New Testament.” I thought it was a typo, but I saw this title in a few places on his website. Apparently the seminary, a bastion of higher learning, has trouble knowing when to provide a noun with an article.
You’ve all probably heard of the Discovery Institute’s agenda and their Wedge Document (3). I submit to you that this is just another manifestation of fundamentalism thirsty for power. It’s so intellectually dishonest to resort to emotional manipulation to advance your agenda. You can appeal to the fear that your children will be brainwashed and your country will end up in ruin. If that doesn’t work at least you can keep Christians in line by threatening them with everlasting torture because of unrepentant homosexual sin in contradiction to what seemed to be the main message of Christianity, that the atonement of Christ pays the debt that your just god expects. No one, not even in the faith community, should have trouble seeing this sort of bull shit for what it is, a cynical grab for power and a return to Christian supremacy in America.
References:
1. Americans for Truth. http://www.americansfortruth.com/
2. Gagnon, R. 2002. The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics. Abington Press: Nashville.
3. Anonymous. The Wedge Document: Intelligent Design Exposed. http://libcom.org/library/wedge-document-intelligent-design-exposed
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Believe in Nothing, Not Even Belief
“I’ve found that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing.” These words I’ve borrowed from be an unlikely source, Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen Buddhist monk.* Suzuki is making the point that your beliefs will get in the way of perceiving reality. If you try to accept the party line as is without personal investigation, you’ve applied a rationalization that is not your own, a self-serving forced explanation simply to legitimize your existence. Suzuki:
“But if you are always prepared for accepting everything we see as something appearing from nothing, knowing that there is some reason why a phenomenal existence of such and such form and color appears, then at that moment you will have perfect composure.”
This is not the desperate “everything happens for a reason” rationalization to which many cling that comes from a need to have some sort of cosmic validation, but the knowledge that there are genuine causal relationships that can be discovered in the world. We can learn, and we can accept what we find as is without a forced cosmic referent that is really a projection of our suffering, our need for personal consideration. If we put to rest the idea we expect to find a definable primal cause, we can gain our composure. There is literally nothing there. So in the words of Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) from Zombieland, we can “nut up or shut up.”
I’m not advocating that atheists should become Buddhists. That would be stupid. It was part of my post-Christian path that I later rejected. What’s interesting about Zen is that its adherents are very skeptical about accepting their own rationalizations; they reject ad-hoc explanations. They often chide each other for accepting untried beliefs. If you simply regurgitate Buddhist dogma for your master, he will likely slap you across the face.
But what is a belief? It implies that you are providing some explanation that is meant to give a primal causation that invariably cannot support itself. It is a faith that has no evidence. For religious folks this is a mechanism to cut off further inquiry, to allow their poor little minds to rest. Sure, in colloquial usage, a belief may be simply a reference to something with which you would like to be identified as in, “I believe that all men are created equal.” But that is not really what is predominantly meant when we profess a belief.
For an actualized materialist this of course makes no sense. If we don’t know why we are here, what might have happened before the Big Bang, we know that it’s illegitimate to paste in some ad-hoc nonsense simply to agree with our fearful and hopeful desire that someone be in charge and that everything must make sense. If there is something that can’t be explained, it really is okay to hold our judgment until more evidence comes to light. Our world will not come to an end, and we won’t end up with meaningless lives because we can’t explain every god damn thing. This really is the high road on which atheists can travel.
So I propose that we should eliminate the word belief from our vocabulary. If you catch yourself saying that you believe in something, your bullshitometer should be going off. This should be followed by sober doubt that you are just projecting your primal fears or trying to make a rationalization to agree with your stupid human tendency to try to tie all your other unsubstantiated suppositions into a pretty, palatable bow. There’s no room for belief in a material world. Nut up or shut up, folks.
* Suzuki, Shunryu. 1971. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Shambhala Publications: Boston p. 17. http://tiny.cc/a7r1a
“But if you are always prepared for accepting everything we see as something appearing from nothing, knowing that there is some reason why a phenomenal existence of such and such form and color appears, then at that moment you will have perfect composure.”
This is not the desperate “everything happens for a reason” rationalization to which many cling that comes from a need to have some sort of cosmic validation, but the knowledge that there are genuine causal relationships that can be discovered in the world. We can learn, and we can accept what we find as is without a forced cosmic referent that is really a projection of our suffering, our need for personal consideration. If we put to rest the idea we expect to find a definable primal cause, we can gain our composure. There is literally nothing there. So in the words of Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) from Zombieland, we can “nut up or shut up.”
I’m not advocating that atheists should become Buddhists. That would be stupid. It was part of my post-Christian path that I later rejected. What’s interesting about Zen is that its adherents are very skeptical about accepting their own rationalizations; they reject ad-hoc explanations. They often chide each other for accepting untried beliefs. If you simply regurgitate Buddhist dogma for your master, he will likely slap you across the face.
But what is a belief? It implies that you are providing some explanation that is meant to give a primal causation that invariably cannot support itself. It is a faith that has no evidence. For religious folks this is a mechanism to cut off further inquiry, to allow their poor little minds to rest. Sure, in colloquial usage, a belief may be simply a reference to something with which you would like to be identified as in, “I believe that all men are created equal.” But that is not really what is predominantly meant when we profess a belief.
For an actualized materialist this of course makes no sense. If we don’t know why we are here, what might have happened before the Big Bang, we know that it’s illegitimate to paste in some ad-hoc nonsense simply to agree with our fearful and hopeful desire that someone be in charge and that everything must make sense. If there is something that can’t be explained, it really is okay to hold our judgment until more evidence comes to light. Our world will not come to an end, and we won’t end up with meaningless lives because we can’t explain every god damn thing. This really is the high road on which atheists can travel.
So I propose that we should eliminate the word belief from our vocabulary. If you catch yourself saying that you believe in something, your bullshitometer should be going off. This should be followed by sober doubt that you are just projecting your primal fears or trying to make a rationalization to agree with your stupid human tendency to try to tie all your other unsubstantiated suppositions into a pretty, palatable bow. There’s no room for belief in a material world. Nut up or shut up, folks.
* Suzuki, Shunryu. 1971. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Shambhala Publications: Boston p. 17. http://tiny.cc/a7r1a
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Spiritual Atheism
I guess not all atheists are strict materialists, and I don't intend to alienate everyone that counts themselves among our ilk simply for advocating terms such as "spiritual." However, I'd like to share a cautionary tale. I was a Christian about 25 years ago, and it took me about 10 yrs after that to be able to wean myself from all woo-woo. Most notably I started practicing Zen Buddhism, because it allowed me to practice something, anything, that wasn't overtly religious, but yet allowed me to project my uncertaintly about spirituality into the cosmic void.
The Japanese form of Zen Buddhism per Dogen (13th Cent.) taught by Shunryu Suzuki seemed to provide a very agnostic view of the universe, and allowed me to have some sort of practice (whatever that exactly means). In the end, though, I realized that what I was doing was in fact trying to supplant one type of religion for another. More specifically I saw that I was indeed projecting my last shred of doubt and fear about the truth of atheism.
There is something to the conjecture of anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists that we seem to have evolved to think in religious terms, that we seem to be built to want to have experiences that allow us to take part in forces that we don't understand and assume to be part of ultimate causation. So we now have to ask ourselves whether or not the sort of awe of the universe that some have been advocating (sometimes called Einsteinian, because he seemed to endorse this) or the connectedness even atheists might feel to the grandeur of the cosmos is simply not the same sort of projection that I mentioned earlier. I still feel this awe as The Spiritual Atheist does at the complexity of life and magnificence of the workings of the universe, but is it real? Is there some woo-woo left in me as well?
Read about the Spiritual Atheist at http://www.spiritualatheist.co.uk/
The Japanese form of Zen Buddhism per Dogen (13th Cent.) taught by Shunryu Suzuki seemed to provide a very agnostic view of the universe, and allowed me to have some sort of practice (whatever that exactly means). In the end, though, I realized that what I was doing was in fact trying to supplant one type of religion for another. More specifically I saw that I was indeed projecting my last shred of doubt and fear about the truth of atheism.
There is something to the conjecture of anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists that we seem to have evolved to think in religious terms, that we seem to be built to want to have experiences that allow us to take part in forces that we don't understand and assume to be part of ultimate causation. So we now have to ask ourselves whether or not the sort of awe of the universe that some have been advocating (sometimes called Einsteinian, because he seemed to endorse this) or the connectedness even atheists might feel to the grandeur of the cosmos is simply not the same sort of projection that I mentioned earlier. I still feel this awe as The Spiritual Atheist does at the complexity of life and magnificence of the workings of the universe, but is it real? Is there some woo-woo left in me as well?
Read about the Spiritual Atheist at http://www.spiritualatheist.co.uk/
Saturday, May 29, 2010
DNA of Destruction
If any of you think that Chuck the Atheist must be wasting his time listening to Christian radio programs, I’d reply that on occasion there are some gems that I discover that make it all worthwhile. Case in point, my friend Pastor Gregory Dickow has some interesting beliefs that make me sit up and take notice from time to time. When asked by a listener on this radio show Ask the Pastor how could he reconcile the love of God with the wrath that god displayed in the Old Testament? Dickow replied that if God was kind to everyone it wouldn’t have saved the world. What he meant by this was that God was preparing the world for Jesus Christ. So the genocide that the Israelites committed to obtain the Holy Land was ordered by God to ensure the birth of Christ. The end justified the means.
The caller was still troubled by the fact that women and children, even animals, were periodically killed by God or the Israelites. Dickow tells us that there was DNA of destruction in the ancient world that God apparently felt must be removed. Saul didn’t completely destroy the Amalekites, and for years afterward that nation was a thorn in the side of David for many years. The DNA of destruction was so bad that by the time of Noah, God felt the need to wipe the whole slate clean. Evidently to eradicate evil DNA, all people including children needed to be destroyed.
But do not fear. After the New Testament dispensation, God brought Jesus into the world. Therefore God does not now judge societies in the same way as what we find in the Old Testament. He’s leaving his wrathful judgment for those who reject Jesus Christ, an eternity of damnation and suffering for those with half a brain and a skeptical disposition. It matters not one tiddle what sort of life you may have lead even if extremely moral by modern standards. Doesn’t that make you feel better about Christianity? Who else but God can set such an example of morality for us to follow?
The caller was still troubled by the fact that women and children, even animals, were periodically killed by God or the Israelites. Dickow tells us that there was DNA of destruction in the ancient world that God apparently felt must be removed. Saul didn’t completely destroy the Amalekites, and for years afterward that nation was a thorn in the side of David for many years. The DNA of destruction was so bad that by the time of Noah, God felt the need to wipe the whole slate clean. Evidently to eradicate evil DNA, all people including children needed to be destroyed.
But do not fear. After the New Testament dispensation, God brought Jesus into the world. Therefore God does not now judge societies in the same way as what we find in the Old Testament. He’s leaving his wrathful judgment for those who reject Jesus Christ, an eternity of damnation and suffering for those with half a brain and a skeptical disposition. It matters not one tiddle what sort of life you may have lead even if extremely moral by modern standards. Doesn’t that make you feel better about Christianity? Who else but God can set such an example of morality for us to follow?
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Strip Club Evangelist
My friend Gregory Dickow never ceases to surprise me with his responses to questions posed on his Ask the Pastor radio show. Dickow, an evangelical and fundamentalist Christian, has explained that Christians can believe in evolution and still be saved. He can’t imagine how Man has come from primordial slime, but isn’t doesn’t believe that these folks should be denied coming to the Lord. Homosexuals are welcome at Life Changer’s Church. Sure there is an expectation that once affected by the Holy Spirit, these folks will surely change their lifestyle. On more than one occasion I have heard Dickow explain that oral sex is permissible sexual behavior between a married couple. Whatever is pleasing to your willing spouse. I guess I’m down with that.
The last few days have supplied pungent atheist fodder. Today a man called (let’s call him Jake), and shared with the Pastor that he had been frequenting strip clubs. Jake claims to have saved souls along the way. He tells us he preaches the gospel to the strippers, and several of them have found the Lord, been saved, and quit their wicked occupations. It’s apparent the Jake is telling his story with conviction; he states that he believes that God has called him to his unique ministry.
“Who else,” Jake explains, “is going to preach the gospel to these women?” The only thing wrong, he relates, is that a friend of a fellow parishioner in his local congregation spotted him last Saturday night at Harold’s Hide-Away. Now he has to face admonitions from his fellow congregant that such behavior could cause…a scandal. Apparently Jake is a pillar of his local church.
What a misunderstanding! If she only knew that Jake’s heart was in the right place. “Oh, by the way,” Jake finishes. “Do you think I’m wrong?”
Of course Dickow once again didn’t disappoint. I thought for sure that he would tear Jake a new one. I’ve heard Dickow on numerous occasions zero in on suspect rationalizations of his callers. He very graciously thanks them for calling, and being so honest in their admissions, then proceeds to tell them that such a thing probably isn’t coming from the Holy Spirit. This time no other admonitions other than Jake should be careful of the demon lust. Dickow explains such ministry is possible, but more probably only for a short time. Fraught with difficulty such a ministry could be for any long-term stretch.
I should tell my wife that I should be atheism’s answer to Jake, and frequent strip clubs as well. I could also selflessly bring atheism to the broken world of titty bars. Don’t think the wife would go for it. I bet neither would Jake’s.
The last few days have supplied pungent atheist fodder. Today a man called (let’s call him Jake), and shared with the Pastor that he had been frequenting strip clubs. Jake claims to have saved souls along the way. He tells us he preaches the gospel to the strippers, and several of them have found the Lord, been saved, and quit their wicked occupations. It’s apparent the Jake is telling his story with conviction; he states that he believes that God has called him to his unique ministry.
“Who else,” Jake explains, “is going to preach the gospel to these women?” The only thing wrong, he relates, is that a friend of a fellow parishioner in his local congregation spotted him last Saturday night at Harold’s Hide-Away. Now he has to face admonitions from his fellow congregant that such behavior could cause…a scandal. Apparently Jake is a pillar of his local church.
What a misunderstanding! If she only knew that Jake’s heart was in the right place. “Oh, by the way,” Jake finishes. “Do you think I’m wrong?”
Of course Dickow once again didn’t disappoint. I thought for sure that he would tear Jake a new one. I’ve heard Dickow on numerous occasions zero in on suspect rationalizations of his callers. He very graciously thanks them for calling, and being so honest in their admissions, then proceeds to tell them that such a thing probably isn’t coming from the Holy Spirit. This time no other admonitions other than Jake should be careful of the demon lust. Dickow explains such ministry is possible, but more probably only for a short time. Fraught with difficulty such a ministry could be for any long-term stretch.
I should tell my wife that I should be atheism’s answer to Jake, and frequent strip clubs as well. I could also selflessly bring atheism to the broken world of titty bars. Don’t think the wife would go for it. I bet neither would Jake’s.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Chuck the Atheist Handily Dispatched on Ask the Pastor
Oh the shame! Sorry to have to report this to you good people, but yes indeed, Chuck the Atheist was handily dispatched this afternoon on my friend Gregory Dickow’s radio show, Ask the Pastor. Heard on the afternoon drive on Chicago’s WYLL AM 1160, Pastor Dickow fields questions of all sorts from all sorts of people, and most graciously welcomes atheist callers as well as the beloved of Jesus on his show. I believe that we hold each other in high regard; he’s a loving individual bent on helping save the world, and has called Chuck the Atheist a respectful friend to the show.
I never really try to engage him in any debate. It’s not what the show is really about, so says the Pastor. It’s his show, and I do my best to respect the boundaries that Dickow has set. I’ve listened to the show for a long time, and have felt his humanism demonstrated to some very screwed up people. The man does have saintly tendencies. I have to give him that. So if I’ve had any sort of strategy to engage this man it has been through reasonably worded questions that any atheist might ask. Sometimes I can get a subtle point across, I think, and perhaps sometimes not. The Pastor well uses our discussions as teachable points for his listeners, and certainly gets the last word in.
A good question that I’ve asked the Pastor is if Christians can still be Christians and maintain their salvation; yet accept the Theory of Evolution. He said that of course that’s possible. In the (true) Christian religion, if you accept the sacrifice of Christ as an atonement of your sins, it is that which saves you. It is not certain positions you have on abortion, or homosexuality, or acceptance of evolutionary theory. It was he that pointed out before I that many religious people, some scientists included accept evolution. So in that conversation, I felt that I had planted some good seeds in some Christians, who might not realize that at least they won’t be sliding to hell on a greased pole for accepting evolutionary theory…if they could just get beyond the manipulative, purposely deceitful rhetoric of the creationist literature and perhaps read the primary sources in the scientific literature.
But you also all probably know what creationists can be like. If evolution is true, god certainly would have let us know some way in the Bible. So today I didn’t fare too well; I think most of the listeners went away perhaps with the satisfaction that the Pastor got one over on good ole Chuck the Atheist. I originally called because I wanted to try to get him to concede that his comment to a previous caller that evolution is not a fact, but theory is a misconception of what is meant by scientists when they use this oft misunderstood language. Many of you know that theory has high status in science; it is not been yet disproved, often with multiple lines of evidence that presents a cohesive, complementary validation of itself. The Pastor wanted to shift the conversation from biological evolution to the credibility of Big Bang Theory. I didn’t have too much to say about that. I sort of stammered that it is what is accepted as the consensus of physicists, and really isn’t pertinent in to argument that Darwin himself put quite well, that there is a total lack of evidence for design in the natural world as explained by evolutionary theory. Dickow replied that it was more incredible to believe that something came from nothing like in the Big Bang. He felt that reasonable people should agree. As for evolution, he had the same argument from personal incredulity, that something as majestic as creation cab not be explained solely through naturalistic mechanisms. And of course he also cited the well-worn and tattered argument that you can’t accept evolution as scientific because there’s no way to wind back the clock and make observations of something that was purported to have happened millions, even billions of years ago. I got about one line in that evolution is an historical science, and the running narrative can be taken as a good explanation in spite of it not being along the strict lines of Popperian empiricism.
I have to give Dickow credit; he is an extremely good apologist for his faith. And although he may suspect that there is a bit more to evolutionary theory than which hard-line creationists give credit, he surely knows how to work over conversations with atheists into teachable moments for his listeners. He almost even convinced me of my own potential shame for my vacuous motivation to extol the veracity of atheism to a sick and hurting world. Paraphrasing Dickow:
“What good would the truth of evolution be to people? Even if there were millions of years between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, it still doesn’t get to the heart of the matter, that without Jesus, you are lost. I am all about helping people such that they might come to a realization that only through the belief of the sacrifice of Christ and his work of atonement for sins can they be saved. I don’t want anyone, including Chuck the Atheist to go to hell.”
But it’s all about planting seeds as the Pastor often says. Perhaps the one small concession that I was able to obtain today from Dickow was that one might possibly fit the theory of evolution between the inerrant lines of text in the Bible. He even said that he could meet me somewhere in the middle between the allegedly temporal adaptations that seem reasonable in man’s lineage and build more upon that if the evidence leads that way. He even said that he wouldn’t mind taking the time to be shown this. I’m not sure if he was really serious about that offer. I would definitely take him up on it, and could easily present enough compelling evidence that might take even a fundamentalist Christian a little further down the road of the acceptance of evolutionary theory.
I never really try to engage him in any debate. It’s not what the show is really about, so says the Pastor. It’s his show, and I do my best to respect the boundaries that Dickow has set. I’ve listened to the show for a long time, and have felt his humanism demonstrated to some very screwed up people. The man does have saintly tendencies. I have to give him that. So if I’ve had any sort of strategy to engage this man it has been through reasonably worded questions that any atheist might ask. Sometimes I can get a subtle point across, I think, and perhaps sometimes not. The Pastor well uses our discussions as teachable points for his listeners, and certainly gets the last word in.
A good question that I’ve asked the Pastor is if Christians can still be Christians and maintain their salvation; yet accept the Theory of Evolution. He said that of course that’s possible. In the (true) Christian religion, if you accept the sacrifice of Christ as an atonement of your sins, it is that which saves you. It is not certain positions you have on abortion, or homosexuality, or acceptance of evolutionary theory. It was he that pointed out before I that many religious people, some scientists included accept evolution. So in that conversation, I felt that I had planted some good seeds in some Christians, who might not realize that at least they won’t be sliding to hell on a greased pole for accepting evolutionary theory…if they could just get beyond the manipulative, purposely deceitful rhetoric of the creationist literature and perhaps read the primary sources in the scientific literature.
But you also all probably know what creationists can be like. If evolution is true, god certainly would have let us know some way in the Bible. So today I didn’t fare too well; I think most of the listeners went away perhaps with the satisfaction that the Pastor got one over on good ole Chuck the Atheist. I originally called because I wanted to try to get him to concede that his comment to a previous caller that evolution is not a fact, but theory is a misconception of what is meant by scientists when they use this oft misunderstood language. Many of you know that theory has high status in science; it is not been yet disproved, often with multiple lines of evidence that presents a cohesive, complementary validation of itself. The Pastor wanted to shift the conversation from biological evolution to the credibility of Big Bang Theory. I didn’t have too much to say about that. I sort of stammered that it is what is accepted as the consensus of physicists, and really isn’t pertinent in to argument that Darwin himself put quite well, that there is a total lack of evidence for design in the natural world as explained by evolutionary theory. Dickow replied that it was more incredible to believe that something came from nothing like in the Big Bang. He felt that reasonable people should agree. As for evolution, he had the same argument from personal incredulity, that something as majestic as creation cab not be explained solely through naturalistic mechanisms. And of course he also cited the well-worn and tattered argument that you can’t accept evolution as scientific because there’s no way to wind back the clock and make observations of something that was purported to have happened millions, even billions of years ago. I got about one line in that evolution is an historical science, and the running narrative can be taken as a good explanation in spite of it not being along the strict lines of Popperian empiricism.
I have to give Dickow credit; he is an extremely good apologist for his faith. And although he may suspect that there is a bit more to evolutionary theory than which hard-line creationists give credit, he surely knows how to work over conversations with atheists into teachable moments for his listeners. He almost even convinced me of my own potential shame for my vacuous motivation to extol the veracity of atheism to a sick and hurting world. Paraphrasing Dickow:
“What good would the truth of evolution be to people? Even if there were millions of years between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, it still doesn’t get to the heart of the matter, that without Jesus, you are lost. I am all about helping people such that they might come to a realization that only through the belief of the sacrifice of Christ and his work of atonement for sins can they be saved. I don’t want anyone, including Chuck the Atheist to go to hell.”
But it’s all about planting seeds as the Pastor often says. Perhaps the one small concession that I was able to obtain today from Dickow was that one might possibly fit the theory of evolution between the inerrant lines of text in the Bible. He even said that he could meet me somewhere in the middle between the allegedly temporal adaptations that seem reasonable in man’s lineage and build more upon that if the evidence leads that way. He even said that he wouldn’t mind taking the time to be shown this. I’m not sure if he was really serious about that offer. I would definitely take him up on it, and could easily present enough compelling evidence that might take even a fundamentalist Christian a little further down the road of the acceptance of evolutionary theory.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
My Friend the Pastor
As an atheist my wife thinks I’m absolutely nuts when I listen to religious broadcasting on the radio. I’m pretty sure she’s not worried that I will convert; I once told her that after I’ve learned what I’ve learned and know what I know that if she sees me crossing myself before dinner that my mind is probably going. But I do listen to a couple of Christian radio stations that air out of Chicago. Originally I liked to listen the political opinions (seemingly homophobic rants in the guise of the protection of the institution of marriage, incredibly cynical and suspicious vitriol directed against candidate and later President Obama) and opinions on evolution, which unless these people are total idiots they must be knowingly distorting the record of 150 years of scientific research. As a biologist and a progressive, I am somewhat concerned what our religious brethren are up to. But on the evening drive home from work, I ran into the sort of Christian that defies stereotype casting.
Gregory Dickow is the pastor of Life Changers International Church based in Hoffman Estates, IL. He has a daily broadcast Ask the Pastor that airs in the early evening. I have listened to this radio call-in show for over a year, and have participated in the show by asking questions on subjects like evolution, different rewards in heaven for Christians with differing levels of good works, and other subjects. Mr. Dickow is always very cordial to me in spite of my handle, Chuck the Atheist. He should know that I don’t go around introducing myself as such, but thought that would be a good way for the Pastor to remember who I was. I’m by no means a vicious, spitting atheist of the Dawkins or Hitchens type (although I highly respect these individuals for other reasons). I think that evolutionists and atheists can have interesting and enlightening conversations without too much vitriol. Gregory Dickow is one such Christian that does not make an atheist like me feel uncomfortable. I have to say that I am impressed by his more progressive stance that seeks to diminish the guilt that Christians might have about the normal contradictions in their lives in comparison to the ideal of a Christ-like existence. No sin is better or worse than an as Pastor Dickow relates, and the guilt that most Christians feel seemingly emanates more from other Christians who chastise them for their homosexuality or adultery while not seeing that their own vindictive, gossipy ways are just as much an affront to their god or religion.
Also interesting to me is that Gregory Dickow used to be a pastor with Maranatha Christian Ministries, which was a pretty fundamentalist Christian denomination from the 70’s and 80’s. This group was often the subject of suspicion from mainstream denominations and the press for its cohersive practices and close control over members dating lives and marriages. It wasn’t uncommon for ex-members to report that they were told implicitly or explicitly that their salvation was in jeopardy for leaving the church. MCM dissolved in the early 90’s. I have first-hand experience of this group from my early college years at SIU; I was a member of that church for a year and a half, and experienced some of the same things. I think that by path towards atheism was aided by my experience with Maranatha, although that was certainly not the only decisive factor. I suppose that makes me mildly suspicious of Gregory Dickow, but not overly so. I think he is a dynamic speaker, and has made a positive impact on his listeners. If anything he doesn’t seem horrified to speak with atheists or condemn anyone that doesn’t agree with him. A pretty interesting character.
One observation I would like to make of the many callers to which I have listened on Dickow's show. If you base your opinion of Christianity upon these people, I think you'll find that something obviously wrong is going on at least in terms of the theology that Dickow promotes and the resultant effect that you might expect (if such thing were true). Many of the callers, who's intelligence might be somewhat of a question, seem to know nothing of the Christianity that they are allegedly following. They constantly seek validation from Dickow, and want to make sure that their intolerance of their gay sons or daughters is justified, want to know that their disapproval of someone's sexual proclivities is scriptural, want to be absolved because they don't want to pay their tithes, want to know that it was the right thing to do waste 30 years in a sex-less, love-less marriage to adulterous, abusive spouses because they think that divorce is a sin. Sure you can look at these people as naive, child-like individuals, who the Pastor should take under his wing, but it seems to me to be more indicative of the fact that Christianity and religion in general has to be one of the most bankrupt pursuits that one can follow.
I have to say that Dickow conducts himself with a great deal of class in spite of the fact that most of his callers can't seem to come into a relationship with Christ as Dickow allegedly has, don't understand the fundamental point of Christianity-an atonement of sins through the sacrifice of Christ, or don't understand his more charitable attitude towards homosexuals, drug addicts, and adulterers. Seems like Dickow may be the only one in his sphere of influence that understands what his religion is all about. Oh wait, that's more indicative of ill mental health. No one understands the supernatural being, who's spirit is living in your body, that is the chief architect of your morality, whom promised you that you would live forever. Either no one can understand that the living god is inside this man, or it all a bunch of woo-woo.
Gregory Dickow is the pastor of Life Changers International Church based in Hoffman Estates, IL. He has a daily broadcast Ask the Pastor that airs in the early evening. I have listened to this radio call-in show for over a year, and have participated in the show by asking questions on subjects like evolution, different rewards in heaven for Christians with differing levels of good works, and other subjects. Mr. Dickow is always very cordial to me in spite of my handle, Chuck the Atheist. He should know that I don’t go around introducing myself as such, but thought that would be a good way for the Pastor to remember who I was. I’m by no means a vicious, spitting atheist of the Dawkins or Hitchens type (although I highly respect these individuals for other reasons). I think that evolutionists and atheists can have interesting and enlightening conversations without too much vitriol. Gregory Dickow is one such Christian that does not make an atheist like me feel uncomfortable. I have to say that I am impressed by his more progressive stance that seeks to diminish the guilt that Christians might have about the normal contradictions in their lives in comparison to the ideal of a Christ-like existence. No sin is better or worse than an as Pastor Dickow relates, and the guilt that most Christians feel seemingly emanates more from other Christians who chastise them for their homosexuality or adultery while not seeing that their own vindictive, gossipy ways are just as much an affront to their god or religion.
Also interesting to me is that Gregory Dickow used to be a pastor with Maranatha Christian Ministries, which was a pretty fundamentalist Christian denomination from the 70’s and 80’s. This group was often the subject of suspicion from mainstream denominations and the press for its cohersive practices and close control over members dating lives and marriages. It wasn’t uncommon for ex-members to report that they were told implicitly or explicitly that their salvation was in jeopardy for leaving the church. MCM dissolved in the early 90’s. I have first-hand experience of this group from my early college years at SIU; I was a member of that church for a year and a half, and experienced some of the same things. I think that by path towards atheism was aided by my experience with Maranatha, although that was certainly not the only decisive factor. I suppose that makes me mildly suspicious of Gregory Dickow, but not overly so. I think he is a dynamic speaker, and has made a positive impact on his listeners. If anything he doesn’t seem horrified to speak with atheists or condemn anyone that doesn’t agree with him. A pretty interesting character.
One observation I would like to make of the many callers to which I have listened on Dickow's show. If you base your opinion of Christianity upon these people, I think you'll find that something obviously wrong is going on at least in terms of the theology that Dickow promotes and the resultant effect that you might expect (if such thing were true). Many of the callers, who's intelligence might be somewhat of a question, seem to know nothing of the Christianity that they are allegedly following. They constantly seek validation from Dickow, and want to make sure that their intolerance of their gay sons or daughters is justified, want to know that their disapproval of someone's sexual proclivities is scriptural, want to be absolved because they don't want to pay their tithes, want to know that it was the right thing to do waste 30 years in a sex-less, love-less marriage to adulterous, abusive spouses because they think that divorce is a sin. Sure you can look at these people as naive, child-like individuals, who the Pastor should take under his wing, but it seems to me to be more indicative of the fact that Christianity and religion in general has to be one of the most bankrupt pursuits that one can follow.
I have to say that Dickow conducts himself with a great deal of class in spite of the fact that most of his callers can't seem to come into a relationship with Christ as Dickow allegedly has, don't understand the fundamental point of Christianity-an atonement of sins through the sacrifice of Christ, or don't understand his more charitable attitude towards homosexuals, drug addicts, and adulterers. Seems like Dickow may be the only one in his sphere of influence that understands what his religion is all about. Oh wait, that's more indicative of ill mental health. No one understands the supernatural being, who's spirit is living in your body, that is the chief architect of your morality, whom promised you that you would live forever. Either no one can understand that the living god is inside this man, or it all a bunch of woo-woo.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Quality Evolution Education Often and Early
My Evangelical Christian friend, Pastor Gregory Dickow, has often expounded the principle, “In the essential teachings, let there be unity, in the nonessential teachings, let there be liberty, and in all things, let there be charity.” For Dickow the essentials are that Christ died for your sins, and his blood was shed as a human sacrifice once and for all time to atone for all sins of humanity. Nonessentials are the points of sectarian disagreement (esp. the focus on petty subsequent sins after acceptance of Christ). Charity of course is love, the sort of love that should be exhibited by all Christians to all people, regardless of their sectarian differences. On his radio show, “Ask the Pastor” the other day I asked him where exactly the acceptance of evolution fit into this scheme, and if it was OK for Christians to come to such a conclusion.
Dickow answered that the acceptance of evolution does not award one a trip straight to hell on a greased pole. Because the only mortal sin that one can really have is the rejection of Christ, there might be many points of view that Christians can have that will not keep them out of heaven. I got the impression that he sort of expects believers to come around and eventually reject many of the perceived misconceptions that they might have as they “grow in Christ,” acceptance of evolution included. But as I hung up I thought that Dickow’s response seemed to represent a very interesting and satisfying admission coming from a biblical fundamentalist. I have listened to Christian radio quite a bit (more monitored it) to bear witness to the various machinations of the religious right, and in order to gain an understanding of what they tell each other in regards to the acceptance of evolutionary theory. Many of these folks spit God’s future vengeance on those that would even presume to give evolution a fair hearing, let alone accept it. For many you can’t be a Christian and accept evolution. But Dickow’s position is that Evangelical Christians can accept evolution, if tentatively, and not jeopardize their salvation. Wow. This man may be unique amongst fundamentalists, but many people listen to his radio show. I think he’s an influential man, if only regionally.
Dickow has often stated that the evidence of the historical Christ is incontrovertible, but also believes that adequate proof of evolution has not been established (“It’s only a theory, not fact”). I suspect that he has not spent the amount of time that would be required to review the comprehensive and multidisciplinary evidence for a rational person such as himself to come to the conclusion that evolution indeed has a factual basis. And like many creationists, the limited amount of time upon which he bases his seemingly certain conviction that evolution is “only theory, not fact” is spent on reviewing creationist literature. He may be specifically unaware of the deceit and duplicity exhibited by the Intelligent Design advocates that was exposed in a court of law in the Kitzmiller versus Dover case in 2005 (see Dawkins 2006 for a good account p. 157-160). For this reason many intelligent yet religious people will never critically review the best possible literature on the subject, that which is generated by the scientific community, which is readily available in our modern age of copious scientific information. I use Gregory Dickow as an example of the most rational Evangelical Christian that I know. So how can intelligent people reject evolution? What should be advocated to change that?
We all know that a staggering proportion of American populace does not accept evolution. But what can be done to change that such that evolution is finally seen for what it is, an actual process found in nature and the central unifying principle in biology? There’s a good review on the subject by Williams (2009). Williams cites a UK poll by a religious think tank that found that only 37% thought that evolution is a thoroughly established scientific theory, and 19% believe that it has little or no supporting evidence. He also cites Mazur (2008), whom posits that rejection of evolution is not a character flaw, but is a response to the social attachments developed early in life, and subsequent attachments to religious spouses, associates and friends. Many may secretly accept evolution or at least have enough savvy to realize that the religious right is certainly misrepresenting evolutionary theory, yet their social commitments may keep them from actively seeking out the scientific literature. Fear of rejection or ridicule by co-religionists are probably keeping many silent.
Williams quotes Duschl (2007), and states that the lack of acceptance of evolution stems from “the natural intuitive development of ‘creationist’ ideas as a very young child,” that the rejection of evolution comes from an “initial essentialist bias-that is, their initial tendency to believe that things have a true underlying nature (Williams quoting Duschl 2007).” Essentialist beliefs represent the sort of typological thinking (such as the creation of ‘kinds’ of organisms found in creation stories as in the bible) that was prevalent in the 19th century and a basis for early rejection of Darwinism (Mayr 2001). Williams also blames inadequate primary school education of evolutionary theory, the sloppy language that some scientists use that seems to imply design in the natural world (that creationists love to exploit), and even young science graduates inability to distinguish scientific theory, law, and fact. It’s no wonder that the general public confuses the difference between belief in a metaphysical position and acceptance of the factual basis of evolution. The answer as Williams correctly states would be to begin the education of evolutionary theory as early as possible in the public school curriculum. This very thing seems a very good possibility at least in England for this past November a bill was introduced into the British Parliament that will make the teaching of evolutionary theory compulsory in primary schools (Anonymous 2009).
The goal really is not to begrudge anyone their faith as long as science education is not impeded or waylaid by religious fundamentalism. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens suffer no fools and take no prisoners, and actively refute religious beliefs in order to change them. They would like to see religion neutered. If the goal is to break the nefarious hold that religion can have on society, then this is certainly a laudable position. At some point we would then bolster science education in the process. This seems to me a top-down strategy that, although satisfying to many atheistic ideologues, may not be particularly successful if a potentially more important and tangible goal of strengthening and advancing science education is desired. A more bottom-up strategy of early education would certainly diffuse some of the early misconceptions that children may develop. Williams and Dawkins (2006) claim that the targeting of youth by creationists even constitutes a form of intellectual child abuse, a charge that on the face of it seems pretty grave, but is difficult in my opinion to outright deny given some of the insidious tactics of ID crowd.
Evolution is taught to some degree in secondary schools, and at colleges and universities, and is widely promoted in museums and other institutions. But we have to admit that this influence has been insufficient as the high number of enemies of Darwinism in the U.S. attests to our failure to adequately defend and promote it. We must be careful, however, because early attempts in the courts to promote evolution education in the schools such as the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 lead to successful creationist strategies that stripped evolution from American textbooks and marginalized evolution education (Shermer 2006). On the other hand today such marginalization may not be quite as easy as modern texts are often written by experts and some are explicitly tackling the social milieu around creationism as in Evolution (Futuyma 2009).
Rationally convincing liberal Christian thinkers like the influential Gregory Dickow may help us gain some inroads into the hold that creationist dogma that Christian fundamentalists seem to have over many. Developing relationships with such individuals and getting them to realize and admit that evolutionary theory didn’t originate from the pit of hell is certainly a good start. Evolutionary theory is not responsible for Social Darwinism, all of social ills, or eugenics. The factual basis of evolution is in any case independent of its social implications. Liberal Christian thinkers may be reached if we take a more compassionate and reasoned approached. Only then can we diffuse the inevitable backlash that would come from advocating early childhood education of evolutionary theory.
References:
Anonymous. 2009. Evolution and history compulsory. BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8369172.stm
Duchl, RA, Schweingruber HA, and Shouse, AW. 2007. Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8. National Academies Press.
Futuyma, Douglas. Evolution. Sinauer Associates p. 609-633.
Dawkins, Richard. 2006. The God Delusion. Bantam Books.
Mayr, Ernst. 2001. What Evolution Is. Basic Books p. 74-75.
Mazur, A. 2008. Implausible Beliefs. Transaction Publishers p. 246.
Shermer, Michael. 2006. Why Darwin Matters. Henry Holt and Co.
Williams, James D. 2009. Belief versus acceptance: why people do not believe in evolution? BioEssays 31 pp. 1255-1262.
Dickow answered that the acceptance of evolution does not award one a trip straight to hell on a greased pole. Because the only mortal sin that one can really have is the rejection of Christ, there might be many points of view that Christians can have that will not keep them out of heaven. I got the impression that he sort of expects believers to come around and eventually reject many of the perceived misconceptions that they might have as they “grow in Christ,” acceptance of evolution included. But as I hung up I thought that Dickow’s response seemed to represent a very interesting and satisfying admission coming from a biblical fundamentalist. I have listened to Christian radio quite a bit (more monitored it) to bear witness to the various machinations of the religious right, and in order to gain an understanding of what they tell each other in regards to the acceptance of evolutionary theory. Many of these folks spit God’s future vengeance on those that would even presume to give evolution a fair hearing, let alone accept it. For many you can’t be a Christian and accept evolution. But Dickow’s position is that Evangelical Christians can accept evolution, if tentatively, and not jeopardize their salvation. Wow. This man may be unique amongst fundamentalists, but many people listen to his radio show. I think he’s an influential man, if only regionally.
Dickow has often stated that the evidence of the historical Christ is incontrovertible, but also believes that adequate proof of evolution has not been established (“It’s only a theory, not fact”). I suspect that he has not spent the amount of time that would be required to review the comprehensive and multidisciplinary evidence for a rational person such as himself to come to the conclusion that evolution indeed has a factual basis. And like many creationists, the limited amount of time upon which he bases his seemingly certain conviction that evolution is “only theory, not fact” is spent on reviewing creationist literature. He may be specifically unaware of the deceit and duplicity exhibited by the Intelligent Design advocates that was exposed in a court of law in the Kitzmiller versus Dover case in 2005 (see Dawkins 2006 for a good account p. 157-160). For this reason many intelligent yet religious people will never critically review the best possible literature on the subject, that which is generated by the scientific community, which is readily available in our modern age of copious scientific information. I use Gregory Dickow as an example of the most rational Evangelical Christian that I know. So how can intelligent people reject evolution? What should be advocated to change that?
We all know that a staggering proportion of American populace does not accept evolution. But what can be done to change that such that evolution is finally seen for what it is, an actual process found in nature and the central unifying principle in biology? There’s a good review on the subject by Williams (2009). Williams cites a UK poll by a religious think tank that found that only 37% thought that evolution is a thoroughly established scientific theory, and 19% believe that it has little or no supporting evidence. He also cites Mazur (2008), whom posits that rejection of evolution is not a character flaw, but is a response to the social attachments developed early in life, and subsequent attachments to religious spouses, associates and friends. Many may secretly accept evolution or at least have enough savvy to realize that the religious right is certainly misrepresenting evolutionary theory, yet their social commitments may keep them from actively seeking out the scientific literature. Fear of rejection or ridicule by co-religionists are probably keeping many silent.
Williams quotes Duschl (2007), and states that the lack of acceptance of evolution stems from “the natural intuitive development of ‘creationist’ ideas as a very young child,” that the rejection of evolution comes from an “initial essentialist bias-that is, their initial tendency to believe that things have a true underlying nature (Williams quoting Duschl 2007).” Essentialist beliefs represent the sort of typological thinking (such as the creation of ‘kinds’ of organisms found in creation stories as in the bible) that was prevalent in the 19th century and a basis for early rejection of Darwinism (Mayr 2001). Williams also blames inadequate primary school education of evolutionary theory, the sloppy language that some scientists use that seems to imply design in the natural world (that creationists love to exploit), and even young science graduates inability to distinguish scientific theory, law, and fact. It’s no wonder that the general public confuses the difference between belief in a metaphysical position and acceptance of the factual basis of evolution. The answer as Williams correctly states would be to begin the education of evolutionary theory as early as possible in the public school curriculum. This very thing seems a very good possibility at least in England for this past November a bill was introduced into the British Parliament that will make the teaching of evolutionary theory compulsory in primary schools (Anonymous 2009).
The goal really is not to begrudge anyone their faith as long as science education is not impeded or waylaid by religious fundamentalism. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens suffer no fools and take no prisoners, and actively refute religious beliefs in order to change them. They would like to see religion neutered. If the goal is to break the nefarious hold that religion can have on society, then this is certainly a laudable position. At some point we would then bolster science education in the process. This seems to me a top-down strategy that, although satisfying to many atheistic ideologues, may not be particularly successful if a potentially more important and tangible goal of strengthening and advancing science education is desired. A more bottom-up strategy of early education would certainly diffuse some of the early misconceptions that children may develop. Williams and Dawkins (2006) claim that the targeting of youth by creationists even constitutes a form of intellectual child abuse, a charge that on the face of it seems pretty grave, but is difficult in my opinion to outright deny given some of the insidious tactics of ID crowd.
Evolution is taught to some degree in secondary schools, and at colleges and universities, and is widely promoted in museums and other institutions. But we have to admit that this influence has been insufficient as the high number of enemies of Darwinism in the U.S. attests to our failure to adequately defend and promote it. We must be careful, however, because early attempts in the courts to promote evolution education in the schools such as the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 lead to successful creationist strategies that stripped evolution from American textbooks and marginalized evolution education (Shermer 2006). On the other hand today such marginalization may not be quite as easy as modern texts are often written by experts and some are explicitly tackling the social milieu around creationism as in Evolution (Futuyma 2009).
Rationally convincing liberal Christian thinkers like the influential Gregory Dickow may help us gain some inroads into the hold that creationist dogma that Christian fundamentalists seem to have over many. Developing relationships with such individuals and getting them to realize and admit that evolutionary theory didn’t originate from the pit of hell is certainly a good start. Evolutionary theory is not responsible for Social Darwinism, all of social ills, or eugenics. The factual basis of evolution is in any case independent of its social implications. Liberal Christian thinkers may be reached if we take a more compassionate and reasoned approached. Only then can we diffuse the inevitable backlash that would come from advocating early childhood education of evolutionary theory.
References:
Anonymous. 2009. Evolution and history compulsory. BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8369172.stm
Duchl, RA, Schweingruber HA, and Shouse, AW. 2007. Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8. National Academies Press.
Futuyma, Douglas. Evolution. Sinauer Associates p. 609-633.
Dawkins, Richard. 2006. The God Delusion. Bantam Books.
Mayr, Ernst. 2001. What Evolution Is. Basic Books p. 74-75.
Mazur, A. 2008. Implausible Beliefs. Transaction Publishers p. 246.
Shermer, Michael. 2006. Why Darwin Matters. Henry Holt and Co.
Williams, James D. 2009. Belief versus acceptance: why people do not believe in evolution? BioEssays 31 pp. 1255-1262.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Wickedness Causes Atheism
Chuck the Atheist often monitors Christian radio in the Chicago area. The two radio stations that I predominantly listen to are WYLL AM 1160 and WMBI FM 90.1. WMBI is the Chicago flagship of the Moody Bible Institute, an old institution from the early days of radio. Folks that can be heard on WMBI are evangelical and Young Earth Creationist. One of the programs on WMBI that can be heard each week day is Prime Time America, a show hosted by Greg Wheatley that starts during the afternoon drive. On the April 20th and 21st broadcast, Wheatley’s guest was James Spiegel, Professor of Philosophy at Taylor University. The topic was the nature of the New Atheism.
Spiegel’s has a new book out called, The Making of an Atheist, apparently the promotion of which was the primary reason to be interviewed. The book was published by Moody Press, a fact that I’m pretty sure was not disclosed during the broadcast. So what does make an atheist? Spiegel sums it up in one word, wickedness. Yes, atheists are apparently are people that exhibit immoral behavior. Further, it’s not really atheism that leads to wickedness, but it’s actually immorality that leads to atheism. Spiegel’s website (www.jimspiegel.com): “Atheism is not at all a consequence of intellectual doubts. These are mere symptoms of the root cause—moral rebellion. For the atheist, the missing ingredient is not evidence but obedience.”
Wheatley asks if there must be something immoral in the lives of the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Spiegel doesn’t answer the question (unfortunately, for I had tensed up in anticipation of some expected libelous remark), but states that Dawkins is the one whom is suffering under some kind of delusion, a reference to the title of Dawkin’s book, the God Delusion. For Spiegel it is immoral behavior on the New Atheists part, because of their inability to acknowledge what must be plain to everyone – that creation itself is evidence for god. So the fact that Richard Dawkins can give a cogent argument that is in favor of a materialistic explanation of the living world, the theory of evolution, is what is immoral. Try to make sense of that. Chuck the Atheist can’t. It must be because I, too, am wicked.
Wheatley then asks what is going on psychologically, intellectually, and morally with someone who doesn’t believe in god. Spiegel answers that there are two phases to the progression towards atheism, first, are the causes of atheism proper, and second, the obstinacy of atheists and what entrenches the unbeliever in the atheistic perspective. For causes of atheism, Spiegel cites the work of psychologist Paul Vitz, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at New York University. Spiegel states that Vitz’s research is hard to ignore. The modern era has provided us with many famous atheists that had a severe break with in the relationship with their fathers. Spiegel tells us that there’s an element of immorality, sinful activities, and vices. It is that which brings a person to atheism. But as you read a summary of his views in a short paper by Vitz on the same subject his examples only list Freud’s father, Jacob, as someone whom Freud regarded as a “sexual pervert.” (Vitz 2002).
I checked out what might be the quality of Spiegel’s source, and looked up Vitz’s list of selected publications. In addition to that already mentioned, I found that Vitz wrote a book, Faith of the Fatherless: the Psychology of Athiesm (Vitz 1999). So what exactly is the content of this “research that is hard to ignore?” Always on the prowl for digging up primary sources in the literature, Chuck the Atheist does not simply accept the secondary comments of those who probably either don’t know what they are talking about, or who want to obfuscate the veracity of their sources to validate their rhetorical apologetics. Vitz starts out with a bit of a disclaimer:
“I am well aware of the fact that there is good reason to give only limited acceptance to Freud's Oedipal theory…Since there is need for deeper understanding of atheism and since I don't know of any theoretical framework-except the Oedipal one - I am forced to sketch out a model of my own, or really to develop an undeveloped thesis of Freud.
I’m sure that contemporary psychologists feel a certain indebtedness to Freud. He was indeed a pioneer. But I don’t think that too much current psychological research hinges so much on the Oedipal conflict. Vitz tells us that Freud, Karl Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach, Madelyn Murray O’Hair were atheists who had bad relationships with their father, or who simply didn’t respect their fathers. Vitz states that other well known atheists such as Baron d’Holbach, Bertrand Russel, Neitzsche, Sartre and Camus all lost their fathers at an early age. Vitz:
“The psychology of how a dead or nonexistent father could lay an emotional base for atheism might not seem clear at first glance. But, after all, if one's own father is absent or so weak as to die, or so untrustworthy as to desert, then it is not hard to place the same attribute on your heavenly Father.
I’m not sure where exactly the immorality fits in. Remember that it was only Freud’s father that was cited as being immoral. The other atheists upon which Vitz commented had lost their fathers at an early age. This contradicts the thesis that Spiegel lays out in the WMBI broadcast. The alleged link between immorality and fatherlessness was not discussed by Vitz, whom concludes:
“Finally, there is also the early personal experience of suffering, of death, of evil, sometimes combined with anger at God for allowing it to happen. Any early anger at God for the loss of a father and the subsequent suffering is still another and different psychology of unbelief, but one closely related to that of the defective father.
So it comes down to more of a question of theodicy. How god could take away my father, make me live a life without a loving, present father? Because Christians liken their relationship to god as a matter of filial piety, some like Vitz surmise that Atheists that have lost their father’s can’t imagine god in a fatherly role. This makes sense in a superficial way, perhaps. But simply listing a survey of a few famous atheists and their alleged difficult or non-existent relationships with their fathers doesn’t seem like extremely solid research that is difficult to ignore. An honest approach would be a more exhaustive, random survey of atheists and the relationships they had with their fathers. At any rate Spiegel also apparently mischaracterizes Vitz’s hypothesis. No alleged link between immorality and fatherlessness was given on Wheatley’s broadcast. Christians often fall victim to the bait and switch of Christian apologists. But perhaps it doesn’t matter. Honest scholarship is unimportant if your audience doesn’t bother to check the sources. And often these the purveyors as well as the consumers wouldn’t know what research is if it was conducted exhaustively in front of their very noses. Honest scholarship is unimportant if your goal is to emotionally manipulate your followers. You’re just preaching to the choir anyway.
The second phase of the development of an atheist, Spiegel tells Wheatley, is the entrenchment in an atheistic world view that does not allow one to accept conflicting information. That sounds to Chuck the Atheist like psychological projection, doesn’t it? It’s the fundamentalist Christians, who cannot accept scientific evidence if it contradicts a literal interpretation of the Bible.
References:
Spiegel, J. S. 2010. The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief, Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers.
Vitz, P.C. 1999. Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism, Dallas, TX: Spence.
Vitz, P. C. 2002. The psychology of atheism. The Truth Journal, Leadership University. http://www.leaderu.com/truth/1truth12.html
Spiegel’s has a new book out called, The Making of an Atheist, apparently the promotion of which was the primary reason to be interviewed. The book was published by Moody Press, a fact that I’m pretty sure was not disclosed during the broadcast. So what does make an atheist? Spiegel sums it up in one word, wickedness. Yes, atheists are apparently are people that exhibit immoral behavior. Further, it’s not really atheism that leads to wickedness, but it’s actually immorality that leads to atheism. Spiegel’s website (www.jimspiegel.com): “Atheism is not at all a consequence of intellectual doubts. These are mere symptoms of the root cause—moral rebellion. For the atheist, the missing ingredient is not evidence but obedience.”
Wheatley asks if there must be something immoral in the lives of the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Spiegel doesn’t answer the question (unfortunately, for I had tensed up in anticipation of some expected libelous remark), but states that Dawkins is the one whom is suffering under some kind of delusion, a reference to the title of Dawkin’s book, the God Delusion. For Spiegel it is immoral behavior on the New Atheists part, because of their inability to acknowledge what must be plain to everyone – that creation itself is evidence for god. So the fact that Richard Dawkins can give a cogent argument that is in favor of a materialistic explanation of the living world, the theory of evolution, is what is immoral. Try to make sense of that. Chuck the Atheist can’t. It must be because I, too, am wicked.
Wheatley then asks what is going on psychologically, intellectually, and morally with someone who doesn’t believe in god. Spiegel answers that there are two phases to the progression towards atheism, first, are the causes of atheism proper, and second, the obstinacy of atheists and what entrenches the unbeliever in the atheistic perspective. For causes of atheism, Spiegel cites the work of psychologist Paul Vitz, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at New York University. Spiegel states that Vitz’s research is hard to ignore. The modern era has provided us with many famous atheists that had a severe break with in the relationship with their fathers. Spiegel tells us that there’s an element of immorality, sinful activities, and vices. It is that which brings a person to atheism. But as you read a summary of his views in a short paper by Vitz on the same subject his examples only list Freud’s father, Jacob, as someone whom Freud regarded as a “sexual pervert.” (Vitz 2002).
I checked out what might be the quality of Spiegel’s source, and looked up Vitz’s list of selected publications. In addition to that already mentioned, I found that Vitz wrote a book, Faith of the Fatherless: the Psychology of Athiesm (Vitz 1999). So what exactly is the content of this “research that is hard to ignore?” Always on the prowl for digging up primary sources in the literature, Chuck the Atheist does not simply accept the secondary comments of those who probably either don’t know what they are talking about, or who want to obfuscate the veracity of their sources to validate their rhetorical apologetics. Vitz starts out with a bit of a disclaimer:
“I am well aware of the fact that there is good reason to give only limited acceptance to Freud's Oedipal theory…Since there is need for deeper understanding of atheism and since I don't know of any theoretical framework-except the Oedipal one - I am forced to sketch out a model of my own, or really to develop an undeveloped thesis of Freud.
I’m sure that contemporary psychologists feel a certain indebtedness to Freud. He was indeed a pioneer. But I don’t think that too much current psychological research hinges so much on the Oedipal conflict. Vitz tells us that Freud, Karl Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach, Madelyn Murray O’Hair were atheists who had bad relationships with their father, or who simply didn’t respect their fathers. Vitz states that other well known atheists such as Baron d’Holbach, Bertrand Russel, Neitzsche, Sartre and Camus all lost their fathers at an early age. Vitz:
“The psychology of how a dead or nonexistent father could lay an emotional base for atheism might not seem clear at first glance. But, after all, if one's own father is absent or so weak as to die, or so untrustworthy as to desert, then it is not hard to place the same attribute on your heavenly Father.
I’m not sure where exactly the immorality fits in. Remember that it was only Freud’s father that was cited as being immoral. The other atheists upon which Vitz commented had lost their fathers at an early age. This contradicts the thesis that Spiegel lays out in the WMBI broadcast. The alleged link between immorality and fatherlessness was not discussed by Vitz, whom concludes:
“Finally, there is also the early personal experience of suffering, of death, of evil, sometimes combined with anger at God for allowing it to happen. Any early anger at God for the loss of a father and the subsequent suffering is still another and different psychology of unbelief, but one closely related to that of the defective father.
So it comes down to more of a question of theodicy. How god could take away my father, make me live a life without a loving, present father? Because Christians liken their relationship to god as a matter of filial piety, some like Vitz surmise that Atheists that have lost their father’s can’t imagine god in a fatherly role. This makes sense in a superficial way, perhaps. But simply listing a survey of a few famous atheists and their alleged difficult or non-existent relationships with their fathers doesn’t seem like extremely solid research that is difficult to ignore. An honest approach would be a more exhaustive, random survey of atheists and the relationships they had with their fathers. At any rate Spiegel also apparently mischaracterizes Vitz’s hypothesis. No alleged link between immorality and fatherlessness was given on Wheatley’s broadcast. Christians often fall victim to the bait and switch of Christian apologists. But perhaps it doesn’t matter. Honest scholarship is unimportant if your audience doesn’t bother to check the sources. And often these the purveyors as well as the consumers wouldn’t know what research is if it was conducted exhaustively in front of their very noses. Honest scholarship is unimportant if your goal is to emotionally manipulate your followers. You’re just preaching to the choir anyway.
The second phase of the development of an atheist, Spiegel tells Wheatley, is the entrenchment in an atheistic world view that does not allow one to accept conflicting information. That sounds to Chuck the Atheist like psychological projection, doesn’t it? It’s the fundamentalist Christians, who cannot accept scientific evidence if it contradicts a literal interpretation of the Bible.
References:
Spiegel, J. S. 2010. The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief, Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers.
Vitz, P.C. 1999. Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism, Dallas, TX: Spence.
Vitz, P. C. 2002. The psychology of atheism. The Truth Journal, Leadership University. http://www.leaderu.com/truth/1truth12.html
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Atheists Just Don't Get It
A while back I watched a You-Tube video of Richard Dawkins,* whom was interviewed by Sir Jonathan Miller. Miller has never been on my radar screen, but is quite a character with a very interesting history. He started as a physician, and then went on to produce numerous BBC television programs in the ‘60s through the ‘80s. Some were satirical comedy shows, but he also produced operas and Shakespeare plays. Also in the ‘70s, Miller held a research fellowship in the history of medicine at University College, London, and in 1985 was a Research Fellow in Neuropsychology at Sussex University. More recently he has written and presented programs on atheism, being one of our own. Quite the polymath.
I was very impressed with Miller’s questions, and his ability to frame the discussion about atheism in current popular culture. He asked Dawkins is arguing against the notion of supernatural design so important? Dawkins replied that theists can’t argue that their views are not amenable to scientific examination. When someone has the notion of a designer, it’s a hypothesis just like any other. He or she is advancing a scientific hypothesis, but it’s one in universe in which supernatural works are being performed.
Miller plays the ‘devil’s’ advocate for the theists, and ask Dawkins how he would respond to those who say that their faith in the supernatural “belongs to a domain of entities in which direct information is irrelevant.” Dawkins has no truck with this position. Personal revelation that can’t be shared by anyone else sounds like mental delusion.
Then Miller framed a question that I don’t think has been expressed anywhere in the literature in any cogent way, but I think reflects the smug mindset of many religionists. Miller asks why they, who take the leap of faith to explain their universe, invoke their faith, “not as a weakness on their part, but…some sort of virtue that atheists lack, a particular willingness that indicates some form of spiritual generosity that we don’t have?”
Dawkins replies, “Now we are talking about someone who is a very sophisticated animal than the run-of-the-mill creationist…not those people really would think that there’s some sort of supernatural intervention in the world…, because then they would have to concede that the existence of God is a scientific question after all. The domain in which It works [operations of the natural world?] seems to be strangely detached from the world domain they internally and privately have to the exclusion of others.”
There is a sense that the religious believe that acceptance of authority over their personal lives by, and the transference of responsibility of creative power to a supernatural deity has a deeply affective beauty that atheists can not appreciate. Believers subsequently take for granted the alternative majesty of secular interpretations. Miller called it “a lack of talent generosity.” Dawkins added that it’s almost like an instance “such as one might not know what it’s like to fall in love. Like someone is sort of deficient in some way.” Perhaps it simply is a gnostic viewpoint that atheists just aren’t getting the same revelation to which the pious have access. Too bad atheists are incapable of experiencing God’s love, but can they appreciate the creative power found in nature?
Evolutionists and perhaps atheists do experience an awe of all existence in the natural world akin to what a mystic might feel, but Dawkins warns the fanatic not conflate this with the mysticism of the religious. That would be a dishonest use of the concept of being religious.
Oh well. Dishonesty was never really a problem, I suppose. Any time you give up the locus of your own control to a delusion that you’re in league with the King of the Universe, I suppose you’re bound to do just about anything.
* Jonathan Miller interviews Richard Dawkins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TMnySUTokA&feature=related
I was very impressed with Miller’s questions, and his ability to frame the discussion about atheism in current popular culture. He asked Dawkins is arguing against the notion of supernatural design so important? Dawkins replied that theists can’t argue that their views are not amenable to scientific examination. When someone has the notion of a designer, it’s a hypothesis just like any other. He or she is advancing a scientific hypothesis, but it’s one in universe in which supernatural works are being performed.
Miller plays the ‘devil’s’ advocate for the theists, and ask Dawkins how he would respond to those who say that their faith in the supernatural “belongs to a domain of entities in which direct information is irrelevant.” Dawkins has no truck with this position. Personal revelation that can’t be shared by anyone else sounds like mental delusion.
Then Miller framed a question that I don’t think has been expressed anywhere in the literature in any cogent way, but I think reflects the smug mindset of many religionists. Miller asks why they, who take the leap of faith to explain their universe, invoke their faith, “not as a weakness on their part, but…some sort of virtue that atheists lack, a particular willingness that indicates some form of spiritual generosity that we don’t have?”
Dawkins replies, “Now we are talking about someone who is a very sophisticated animal than the run-of-the-mill creationist…not those people really would think that there’s some sort of supernatural intervention in the world…, because then they would have to concede that the existence of God is a scientific question after all. The domain in which It works [operations of the natural world?] seems to be strangely detached from the world domain they internally and privately have to the exclusion of others.”
There is a sense that the religious believe that acceptance of authority over their personal lives by, and the transference of responsibility of creative power to a supernatural deity has a deeply affective beauty that atheists can not appreciate. Believers subsequently take for granted the alternative majesty of secular interpretations. Miller called it “a lack of talent generosity.” Dawkins added that it’s almost like an instance “such as one might not know what it’s like to fall in love. Like someone is sort of deficient in some way.” Perhaps it simply is a gnostic viewpoint that atheists just aren’t getting the same revelation to which the pious have access. Too bad atheists are incapable of experiencing God’s love, but can they appreciate the creative power found in nature?
Evolutionists and perhaps atheists do experience an awe of all existence in the natural world akin to what a mystic might feel, but Dawkins warns the fanatic not conflate this with the mysticism of the religious. That would be a dishonest use of the concept of being religious.
Oh well. Dishonesty was never really a problem, I suppose. Any time you give up the locus of your own control to a delusion that you’re in league with the King of the Universe, I suppose you’re bound to do just about anything.
* Jonathan Miller interviews Richard Dawkins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TMnySUTokA&feature=related
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Digin' fer Dollars
Chuck the Atheist writes some fiction once in a while. Sit back, relax, and read about Sam and his Paw:
Me and Paw were heading over to see Bill th’undertaker. He was the last one to touch my maw before he closed the casket, right before she got put in the ground. I kept a little yeller picture of her in the top pocket of my overalls. She was real pretty. Had red hair like me and freckles. I got more pictures, home in a shoe box. Helps me remember what she looked like.
I was looking at maw’s picture, and didn’t see the dog. It ran right out in front of us. BAM! Paw’s truck almost blew up! The breaks weren’t too good, so Paw had to shift quick into second. I thought the engine was gonna bust its mount, it was so loud. Even so, what came next I heard real good.
Paw hit the dog. It sounded like a side of beef being slammed onto a steel table, like the one in the butcher’s shop. What scared me, though, was the sound of something skidding across the truck bed behind me, and slamming into the back of the cab. The pine box and planks, Paw had tied down good, but the shovels got free. One of ‘em made a nice size spider crack in the back window.
I jumped out of the truck, and ran over to the side of the road, where the dog was. It was dead all right. Was all twisted up. One set o’ legs went one way and one th’other. I picked up a stick, and poked it in the head. Blood started comin’ out its nose. I looked up at Paw. He just stood there with his thumbs tucked into the pockets of his britches, looking at the dog, and shaking his head.
“Damn,” he said. “Bet that was a good huntin’ dog. Might be Ben Wheeler’s.”
Paw liked dogs. Always petted ‘em when he saw one. Even the neighbor’s shepherd dog. We had a collie dog once, ‘fore I was born. Kept the coyotes from killin’ the stock. But it got old, and ran off. I looked back at the dead dog, and I threw up in my mouth a little bit. Was all I could do to keep it down. The dog looked real still, real dead.
I hadn’t seen anything like that since my baby sister Liza fell out of her high chair. I don’t know where Paw was when it happened. Outside somewhere, I s’pose. We didn’t have a maw. She died having Liza. I was the only one in the kitchen with the baby. I should’a done something, but I just froze up. Watched the chair go right over. ‘Course I was only six at the time, but I remember like it was yesterday. She laid on the floor with her head facing the other way. She shook a little, and coughed. After that she didn’t move no more. When I got down off my chair, I could see a little puddle of blood on the floor next to her mouth. She must’a hit the floor real hard. I touched her face, and it felt soft and warm. Liza didn’t like to be touched. Was the only time I could recall doin’ it. Then Paw come runnin’ in. He shoved me away, and I fell down. He picked up Liza, and ran out of the house. Left me lyin’ there.
I stood up, and gave the dog one last poke in the rear end. Paw said there was nothing to do but call Sheriff Tidwell. Have somebody come pick it up. Didn’t want some little kid to come up and start foolin’ with it.
Like I said, we was on our way, over to pick up Bill, th’undertaker. His funeral parlor was just off the town circle. I should have been in school that day, but they sent me home. I shoved Joe Roberts on the ground at recess, and made fun of him.
Joe’s hair was always greasy, like he slicked it back with lard or something. Bet he don’t take a bath but once a month. If you were downwind, ‘fore long you would start to smell his daddy’s barnyard, a mixture of pig shit, green hay, and sour milk. Make you sick standing next to him. He came up and stood by me at recess. I took one whiff, and shoved him away. He fell down like one o’ them babies do, when their mammas try to make ‘em walk for themselves. Then when he was picking himself up, I saw he had come to school with two different shoes on. He had one of his Paw’s old boots on his left foot, one ‘o his on the right. It was too big for him, and was all wore out. Silliest thing I ever saw.
I said, “Joe Roberts, you look like a damn fool.” Right then Mrs. Porter ran up, grabbed me by the hair, and drug me down to the principal’s office.
Mrs. Porter tapped on the door to Principal Wallace’s office like she didn’t really want him to hear her. But he heard, and told her to come on in. She closed the door behind her. It seemed like a long time ‘fore she came out. She held the door open for me to go in.
He was just sitting there, scratching on a piece of paper with a quill pen by the light of a little green lamp on his desk. Only light in the place. The barber cut his hair real short with one’a them buzz clippers. He’d been a sergeant in the U.S. Army, fightin’ the Germans. Can’t call him “Sir.” Says he works for a living. Seemed like I sat there for and hour, ‘fore he looked at me up over the top of his spect’cles. He asked what I done, and I told him. He just sat there and stared at me, chewin’ on his tabacca like it taste bad. Then he puckered up like he was gonna spit it in my face. But he turned his head, and spit into the steel bucket behind his desk.
“D’you realize Ms. Roberts’s up in the hospital?” He asked. And I shook my head. He said that she was s’posed to have a baby, but both of ‘em might not make it. It was a bad thing I’d done to Joe at a time like this. He told me to go home and tell my paw. And I better not come back tomorrow, ‘less I can stop bullying folks.
Paw was there, about to go over to help Bill, th’undertaker. Paw lost his job in Shreveport right after Maw died. Bill gave him steady work digging graves. Called it “Diggin’ fer dollars.” All folks die ‘ventually, and if they’re from around here, Bill gets hold of ‘em. I told Paw what I done, and he got real mad. The muscles und’neath his cheeks flared in and out, and that big vein on his neck swole up. I thought for sure he was gonna make me go get a switch. I just looked at my shoes. They were old and wore out. Least I only had one kind on.
When I looked back up at Paw, his face had changed completely. He looked like he had a headache, and he shut his eyes. It was like he was trying to remember how something sounded, and couldn’t hear it too good. Like it was far off. Then his shoulders sagged a little, like somebody was lettin’ th’air out of him. He just turned around, and stomped off towards the barn.
‘Fore long he came back with two shovels, and tossed one of ‘em toward me. I caught it, and got a sliver. Shot up into the heel of my hand. It hurt real bad. I didn’t want him to toss the other one, so I walked up, and took it out of his hands. I threw the shovels in back of the pickup truck next to a small, pine box that I hadn’t noticed before. Paw came up, and tied up everything good.
“Get in. Yer comin’ with me to help,” he told me. And right then I knew I was gonna help Paw dig a grave. When I got into the truck, Paw said that the Roberts’ baby died at the hospital when its mamma was havin’ it. Now we had to go and help Bill give it a decent burial.
It felt like I had swallowed a big, fat apple, whole. It stuck in my throat, then slowly worked its way to my stomach, and just sat there. I thought about Liza, and what I had done to Joe that day. He’s gonna feel real bad, and his folks’ll probably start treatin’ him different, too. I looked at my sliver hand. It started to burn like wildfire, and was turnin’ purple. Paw started up the truck to back out. When he turned around to see what was behind him, he saw me biting at the sliver. Trying to take care of matters ‘fore he noticed. He put it in neutral and stopped.
“Let’s see,” he said, and got hold of my wrist. He turned over my hand to get a look, and rubbed his thumb gentle-like over the sliver. The hard swirls on his thumb felt like cat’s tongue. Then Paw started gnawin’ on it like the neighbor’s shepherd dog. It’d nip at ya, and gnaw on ya with little bites. Knew just what it’d take to make ya bleed. A hot wave shot to my head. Felt like I was an asphalt road, standing in the noonday sun. Paw got the sliver right away. He was good at gettin’ at slivers.
I can still remember Paw before my baby sister died. He used to hum a tune to make Liza go to sleep. She was always ornery, like she knowed she didn’t have a maw. I used hug Paw g’night after he got her to sleep, but now I don’t. He don’t hug back no more.
After we hit that dog, we got to Bill’s Funeral Home. It was off the town circle. The buildin’ was gray and ugly, and shaped like a piece o’ pie. Made out of cinderblocks. The gov’ment sold ‘em cheap to folks during the war. A lot of Elk City’s buildings were made out of ‘em. Most folks painted ‘em. Tried to make ‘em presentable, but not Bill. He didn’t have a sign or nothin’. Paw said it seemed that folks knew where to find him. In the window and the door there was dark, wine colored curtains. We walked though the door, and Bill was on us right away.
“Samuel. Come to help yer paw?” he said, and stuck out that sweaty, cold fish of a hand. I looked at it for a second, then shook it after Paw cuffed the back of my head. Bill pumped my hand up and down. Made me nervous. He smelled like f’maldehyde, and when you shook his hand, he didn’t want to let go. He was old and bald, and the way he hung his head made him look like he had no neck.
“Yessir,” I told him. This set Bill to nodding. A wolf with razor sharp teeth, fixing to pounce on ya when yer not looking. He’d eat the hearts out’a dead folks sometimes when their kin wouldn’t pay him for his services. A spit thread zinged out of his mouth, and he said we gotta stop, and pick up the baby. It was at the hospital, and it was time to go git it. They had filled it up with balmin fluid. Yes, it was a shame. The mother didn’t get enough iron or somethin’ or ‘nother. Died just as it was comin’ out her, a baby girl. Only lived for a second.
I was havin’ trouble standing still, so Paw pointed at a chair, and told me to go sit down. I went over and sat in the fancy parlor chair. It had a red, furry cushion, and was by the door to the chapel. Their voices were shushes now, which made me start thinking about the dead people in the back. If they weren’t dead yet, Bill’d hit ‘em with a hammer.
I looked into the chapel, where Bill had the funeral services. They had Liza up in there when she died. There were pews like in church, except they were painted white, and didn’t have the pockets in the back for the hymnbooks. The carpet was blood red with swirls of green like teardrops. All ‘round the altar was wire skeletons that were supposed to hold the flowers for the dead. And there was a podium, so Bill could say a few words. I only recall him sayin, “Remember them” at Liza’s funeral. He was talking about Maw and Liza. Aunt Ida told me to shush when I said I don’t remember Maw, and made me button up my collar agin.
Paw was there, but he didn’t say nothing. Just sat there, and stared off. Looked like he had a stomachache. When folks would come up and say that they were sorry, he would just look up at ‘em. Just fer a second, then he’d look down agin. He didn’t say nothin’ to nobody the whole day. Got me scared, and I cried. Aunt Ida was crying, too, and grabbed hold of me. Hugged me so tight, I couldn’t breathe. She always smelled like talcum powder and moth balls.
‘Round the altar, and pulled back with gold ropes, there was a silky purple curtain. The way the light shined made it looked like brewing storm clouds. They had a curtain just like that at the picture show in the city. After the movie the curtains would close. And now you’re dead...The End. Before we left Paw called the sheriff, and told him about the dog we left by the side of the road.
At the hospital Bill got out, and said it’d only take a few minutes. Then he stuck his head back in. I thought he was gonna grab me, but he reached behind the seat. He pulled out a big, black suitcase. He musta put it there at the funeral home, when I wasn’t looking. I could see a little piece of blanket stickin’ out. It had a sky blue bear and a shooting star on it. Liza had a blanket like that. Found it in the root cellar a couple of years ago. It was wrapped around one’a her baby dolls. I got it up in my closet now. Helps me remember.
Bill walked up to the front door of the hospital. Sort of glided along. He had long legs, and took long steps. One foot would go forward, his body would catch up. Then the other foot’d go out. Somebody opened the door for him, and Bill tipped his hat. Paw and I sat in the truck what seemed like forever. I started to think about Bill putting that dead baby of the Roberts’s in the suitcase. Liza was too big for it, and I wondered how they got her out of the hospital without folks seeing. She had died there, too. Paw said that Bill took a suitcase when he had to pick up a baby at the hospital. Happened more’n you might think. Said folks would get all shaken up, if they saw a little coffin leaving the hospital.
‘Ventually Bill came out. I could tell that the suitcase got heavier. It made him walk slower, and I could see a little piece of his tongue comin’ out his mouth as he puffed along. His other arm stuck out, so’s he could keep his balance. On the way to the cemetery I couldn’t sit back in the seat.
The digging took a while. Paw started out with one o’ them zig-zag rulers. He unfolded it, and measured the distance between the graves on either side of where we were gonna dig the hole. Then he took a hammer, and nailed four stakes in the ground. Made a square. He looped some twine around one of the stakes, and pulled it tight as he went from one stake to th’other. He took a shovel, and sliced up the ground underneath the twine. As he did, he pried up the grass. He worked all around inside the twine ‘till there was a black dirt square. Then he pulled up the stakes and the twine.
I looked over at the truck. Bill had the tailgate door open. The pine box was pulled out on top of it. The suitcase was on the ground next to Bill, open. He had the baby in his arms. Held it like Aunt Ida made me hold Liza. He put it gentle-like into the coffin. Looked like he was talking to it. He reached inside the box, and tuck something in. Then he reached back in, and did something else. He looked a little sad and tired.
I looked back over at Paw, who was clear down to his waist. He was starting to struggle a little ‘round in the hole. He stopped digging, hopped up on the edge of the hole, and swung his legs out.
“There,” he said. “You’re gonna have to finish the rest.”
I walked up to the hole and looked down. Paw done nice work. The walls of the hole were smooth and straight all the way to the bottom. I jumped in the hole, and stole a look at Bill, who was hammering nails into the lid of the coffin. Paw said somethin’ about how the babies are the hardest to bury. You have to dig just as deep, but the hole is a lot smaller than those for growed up folks are.
After I had dug another foot or so, Paw said that was enough. I smoothed the walls of the hole so they were straight. I grabbed a handful of dirt. It smelled good, sort of rich and musty. The chunks of it fell apart as I rubbed it between my hands. I wondered what it’d be like to be all covered up with dirt, dead in a hole. We’ll be putting Joe’s baby sister in this very hole, I thought. Liza got put in a hole, prob’ly just like this one. Maw was here, too. Now they’re at the other end of the cemetery. Paw and me visit them on Christmas if it hasn’t snowed. They don’t have head stones. Just a plaque in the ground. There’s a couple of spots there for me and Paw.
I slid down on my rear end at the bottom of the hole, and looked up. All I could see was the bluest blue sky through the square of the hole. Looked like a picture. A big, fluffy, white cloud went by. Then two heads popped out. They blocked the light, and I couldn’t see their faces. By the shape of the heads, though, I could tell it was Paw and Bill.
The Paw head said, “What you doing, boy? Come on out’a that hole.” He got down on his knees, and pulled me up.
I looked around, and saw the coffin, some rope, and two planks. Bill and Paw put the planks over the hole, laid the rope across, and rested the coffin on the planks. We all stood back, and looked at our work. Bill took a wreath of flowers from one of the gravestones nearby, and laid it on top of the coffin. It looked good.
Paw picked up the shovels, and gave me one. Then he put his arm around my neck, and we walked back toward the truck. I looked back. Bill was standing there with a Bible in his hand, and just nodded.
When we got to the truck, I saw the Roberts coming down the road. Their truck was in worse shape than Paw’s. It swayed from side to side, and blew smoke out its tailpipe. It came to a stop, and Joe Roberts got out. He helped his maw out the truck. He looked older somehow. His maw was moving real slow, and he helped her walk until his paw came up and took over. When they walked by us, they stopped. Paw put his hand on Mr. Roberts shoulder.
“Ephraim, Helen, I’m shore sorry.” he said, and then, “If there’s anything I kin do.” Joe Roberts was standing next to me, but I couldn’t look at him. I was shamed of myself fer what I done to him. We all walked together, and joined Bill at the grave. He said his piece.
When Bill finished, him and Paw lowered the coffin down to the bottom of the hole. Bill bent over, picked up a handful of dirt, and tossed it down on top of the coffin. As we went back to the trucks, us young’uns walked ahead of everybody.
“Did Principal Wallace give you a lickin’?” Joe asked, and wiped his snotty nose on his shirtsleeve. I just put my head down, and shook it. “That’s good,” he said. I looked over at him, and he smiled a little. Just wanted somebody to be friends, and play with him is all. After the Roberts drove off, me and Paw filled up the hole.
When we got home, it was almost dark. I got out the box from my closet. I spread out Liza’s blanket, and laid out the yeller pictures. There was one o’ Maw holdin’ me when I was a baby. She looked real happy. There was Paw and Maw on their wedding day. Paw was smiling. Looked like they were having a good ol’ time. And then there was one with a big waterfall. You could see people standin’ next to it. I bet it was the biggest one on this earth. Something to see.
Paw came in, and sat down on the floor next to me. He told me stories of when him and Maw first got married. On their honeymoon, they went to Niagra Falls. Maw thought it was the prettiest thing she ever saw.
Diggin' fer Dollars
I was looking at maw’s picture, and didn’t see the dog. It ran right out in front of us. BAM! Paw’s truck almost blew up! The breaks weren’t too good, so Paw had to shift quick into second. I thought the engine was gonna bust its mount, it was so loud. Even so, what came next I heard real good.
Paw hit the dog. It sounded like a side of beef being slammed onto a steel table, like the one in the butcher’s shop. What scared me, though, was the sound of something skidding across the truck bed behind me, and slamming into the back of the cab. The pine box and planks, Paw had tied down good, but the shovels got free. One of ‘em made a nice size spider crack in the back window.
I jumped out of the truck, and ran over to the side of the road, where the dog was. It was dead all right. Was all twisted up. One set o’ legs went one way and one th’other. I picked up a stick, and poked it in the head. Blood started comin’ out its nose. I looked up at Paw. He just stood there with his thumbs tucked into the pockets of his britches, looking at the dog, and shaking his head.
“Damn,” he said. “Bet that was a good huntin’ dog. Might be Ben Wheeler’s.”
Paw liked dogs. Always petted ‘em when he saw one. Even the neighbor’s shepherd dog. We had a collie dog once, ‘fore I was born. Kept the coyotes from killin’ the stock. But it got old, and ran off. I looked back at the dead dog, and I threw up in my mouth a little bit. Was all I could do to keep it down. The dog looked real still, real dead.
I hadn’t seen anything like that since my baby sister Liza fell out of her high chair. I don’t know where Paw was when it happened. Outside somewhere, I s’pose. We didn’t have a maw. She died having Liza. I was the only one in the kitchen with the baby. I should’a done something, but I just froze up. Watched the chair go right over. ‘Course I was only six at the time, but I remember like it was yesterday. She laid on the floor with her head facing the other way. She shook a little, and coughed. After that she didn’t move no more. When I got down off my chair, I could see a little puddle of blood on the floor next to her mouth. She must’a hit the floor real hard. I touched her face, and it felt soft and warm. Liza didn’t like to be touched. Was the only time I could recall doin’ it. Then Paw come runnin’ in. He shoved me away, and I fell down. He picked up Liza, and ran out of the house. Left me lyin’ there.
I stood up, and gave the dog one last poke in the rear end. Paw said there was nothing to do but call Sheriff Tidwell. Have somebody come pick it up. Didn’t want some little kid to come up and start foolin’ with it.
Like I said, we was on our way, over to pick up Bill, th’undertaker. His funeral parlor was just off the town circle. I should have been in school that day, but they sent me home. I shoved Joe Roberts on the ground at recess, and made fun of him.
Joe’s hair was always greasy, like he slicked it back with lard or something. Bet he don’t take a bath but once a month. If you were downwind, ‘fore long you would start to smell his daddy’s barnyard, a mixture of pig shit, green hay, and sour milk. Make you sick standing next to him. He came up and stood by me at recess. I took one whiff, and shoved him away. He fell down like one o’ them babies do, when their mammas try to make ‘em walk for themselves. Then when he was picking himself up, I saw he had come to school with two different shoes on. He had one of his Paw’s old boots on his left foot, one ‘o his on the right. It was too big for him, and was all wore out. Silliest thing I ever saw.
I said, “Joe Roberts, you look like a damn fool.” Right then Mrs. Porter ran up, grabbed me by the hair, and drug me down to the principal’s office.
Mrs. Porter tapped on the door to Principal Wallace’s office like she didn’t really want him to hear her. But he heard, and told her to come on in. She closed the door behind her. It seemed like a long time ‘fore she came out. She held the door open for me to go in.
He was just sitting there, scratching on a piece of paper with a quill pen by the light of a little green lamp on his desk. Only light in the place. The barber cut his hair real short with one’a them buzz clippers. He’d been a sergeant in the U.S. Army, fightin’ the Germans. Can’t call him “Sir.” Says he works for a living. Seemed like I sat there for and hour, ‘fore he looked at me up over the top of his spect’cles. He asked what I done, and I told him. He just sat there and stared at me, chewin’ on his tabacca like it taste bad. Then he puckered up like he was gonna spit it in my face. But he turned his head, and spit into the steel bucket behind his desk.
“D’you realize Ms. Roberts’s up in the hospital?” He asked. And I shook my head. He said that she was s’posed to have a baby, but both of ‘em might not make it. It was a bad thing I’d done to Joe at a time like this. He told me to go home and tell my paw. And I better not come back tomorrow, ‘less I can stop bullying folks.
Paw was there, about to go over to help Bill, th’undertaker. Paw lost his job in Shreveport right after Maw died. Bill gave him steady work digging graves. Called it “Diggin’ fer dollars.” All folks die ‘ventually, and if they’re from around here, Bill gets hold of ‘em. I told Paw what I done, and he got real mad. The muscles und’neath his cheeks flared in and out, and that big vein on his neck swole up. I thought for sure he was gonna make me go get a switch. I just looked at my shoes. They were old and wore out. Least I only had one kind on.
When I looked back up at Paw, his face had changed completely. He looked like he had a headache, and he shut his eyes. It was like he was trying to remember how something sounded, and couldn’t hear it too good. Like it was far off. Then his shoulders sagged a little, like somebody was lettin’ th’air out of him. He just turned around, and stomped off towards the barn.
‘Fore long he came back with two shovels, and tossed one of ‘em toward me. I caught it, and got a sliver. Shot up into the heel of my hand. It hurt real bad. I didn’t want him to toss the other one, so I walked up, and took it out of his hands. I threw the shovels in back of the pickup truck next to a small, pine box that I hadn’t noticed before. Paw came up, and tied up everything good.
“Get in. Yer comin’ with me to help,” he told me. And right then I knew I was gonna help Paw dig a grave. When I got into the truck, Paw said that the Roberts’ baby died at the hospital when its mamma was havin’ it. Now we had to go and help Bill give it a decent burial.
It felt like I had swallowed a big, fat apple, whole. It stuck in my throat, then slowly worked its way to my stomach, and just sat there. I thought about Liza, and what I had done to Joe that day. He’s gonna feel real bad, and his folks’ll probably start treatin’ him different, too. I looked at my sliver hand. It started to burn like wildfire, and was turnin’ purple. Paw started up the truck to back out. When he turned around to see what was behind him, he saw me biting at the sliver. Trying to take care of matters ‘fore he noticed. He put it in neutral and stopped.
“Let’s see,” he said, and got hold of my wrist. He turned over my hand to get a look, and rubbed his thumb gentle-like over the sliver. The hard swirls on his thumb felt like cat’s tongue. Then Paw started gnawin’ on it like the neighbor’s shepherd dog. It’d nip at ya, and gnaw on ya with little bites. Knew just what it’d take to make ya bleed. A hot wave shot to my head. Felt like I was an asphalt road, standing in the noonday sun. Paw got the sliver right away. He was good at gettin’ at slivers.
I can still remember Paw before my baby sister died. He used to hum a tune to make Liza go to sleep. She was always ornery, like she knowed she didn’t have a maw. I used hug Paw g’night after he got her to sleep, but now I don’t. He don’t hug back no more.
After we hit that dog, we got to Bill’s Funeral Home. It was off the town circle. The buildin’ was gray and ugly, and shaped like a piece o’ pie. Made out of cinderblocks. The gov’ment sold ‘em cheap to folks during the war. A lot of Elk City’s buildings were made out of ‘em. Most folks painted ‘em. Tried to make ‘em presentable, but not Bill. He didn’t have a sign or nothin’. Paw said it seemed that folks knew where to find him. In the window and the door there was dark, wine colored curtains. We walked though the door, and Bill was on us right away.
“Samuel. Come to help yer paw?” he said, and stuck out that sweaty, cold fish of a hand. I looked at it for a second, then shook it after Paw cuffed the back of my head. Bill pumped my hand up and down. Made me nervous. He smelled like f’maldehyde, and when you shook his hand, he didn’t want to let go. He was old and bald, and the way he hung his head made him look like he had no neck.
“Yessir,” I told him. This set Bill to nodding. A wolf with razor sharp teeth, fixing to pounce on ya when yer not looking. He’d eat the hearts out’a dead folks sometimes when their kin wouldn’t pay him for his services. A spit thread zinged out of his mouth, and he said we gotta stop, and pick up the baby. It was at the hospital, and it was time to go git it. They had filled it up with balmin fluid. Yes, it was a shame. The mother didn’t get enough iron or somethin’ or ‘nother. Died just as it was comin’ out her, a baby girl. Only lived for a second.
I was havin’ trouble standing still, so Paw pointed at a chair, and told me to go sit down. I went over and sat in the fancy parlor chair. It had a red, furry cushion, and was by the door to the chapel. Their voices were shushes now, which made me start thinking about the dead people in the back. If they weren’t dead yet, Bill’d hit ‘em with a hammer.
I looked into the chapel, where Bill had the funeral services. They had Liza up in there when she died. There were pews like in church, except they were painted white, and didn’t have the pockets in the back for the hymnbooks. The carpet was blood red with swirls of green like teardrops. All ‘round the altar was wire skeletons that were supposed to hold the flowers for the dead. And there was a podium, so Bill could say a few words. I only recall him sayin, “Remember them” at Liza’s funeral. He was talking about Maw and Liza. Aunt Ida told me to shush when I said I don’t remember Maw, and made me button up my collar agin.
Paw was there, but he didn’t say nothing. Just sat there, and stared off. Looked like he had a stomachache. When folks would come up and say that they were sorry, he would just look up at ‘em. Just fer a second, then he’d look down agin. He didn’t say nothin’ to nobody the whole day. Got me scared, and I cried. Aunt Ida was crying, too, and grabbed hold of me. Hugged me so tight, I couldn’t breathe. She always smelled like talcum powder and moth balls.
‘Round the altar, and pulled back with gold ropes, there was a silky purple curtain. The way the light shined made it looked like brewing storm clouds. They had a curtain just like that at the picture show in the city. After the movie the curtains would close. And now you’re dead...The End. Before we left Paw called the sheriff, and told him about the dog we left by the side of the road.
At the hospital Bill got out, and said it’d only take a few minutes. Then he stuck his head back in. I thought he was gonna grab me, but he reached behind the seat. He pulled out a big, black suitcase. He musta put it there at the funeral home, when I wasn’t looking. I could see a little piece of blanket stickin’ out. It had a sky blue bear and a shooting star on it. Liza had a blanket like that. Found it in the root cellar a couple of years ago. It was wrapped around one’a her baby dolls. I got it up in my closet now. Helps me remember.
Bill walked up to the front door of the hospital. Sort of glided along. He had long legs, and took long steps. One foot would go forward, his body would catch up. Then the other foot’d go out. Somebody opened the door for him, and Bill tipped his hat. Paw and I sat in the truck what seemed like forever. I started to think about Bill putting that dead baby of the Roberts’s in the suitcase. Liza was too big for it, and I wondered how they got her out of the hospital without folks seeing. She had died there, too. Paw said that Bill took a suitcase when he had to pick up a baby at the hospital. Happened more’n you might think. Said folks would get all shaken up, if they saw a little coffin leaving the hospital.
‘Ventually Bill came out. I could tell that the suitcase got heavier. It made him walk slower, and I could see a little piece of his tongue comin’ out his mouth as he puffed along. His other arm stuck out, so’s he could keep his balance. On the way to the cemetery I couldn’t sit back in the seat.
The digging took a while. Paw started out with one o’ them zig-zag rulers. He unfolded it, and measured the distance between the graves on either side of where we were gonna dig the hole. Then he took a hammer, and nailed four stakes in the ground. Made a square. He looped some twine around one of the stakes, and pulled it tight as he went from one stake to th’other. He took a shovel, and sliced up the ground underneath the twine. As he did, he pried up the grass. He worked all around inside the twine ‘till there was a black dirt square. Then he pulled up the stakes and the twine.
I looked over at the truck. Bill had the tailgate door open. The pine box was pulled out on top of it. The suitcase was on the ground next to Bill, open. He had the baby in his arms. Held it like Aunt Ida made me hold Liza. He put it gentle-like into the coffin. Looked like he was talking to it. He reached inside the box, and tuck something in. Then he reached back in, and did something else. He looked a little sad and tired.
I looked back over at Paw, who was clear down to his waist. He was starting to struggle a little ‘round in the hole. He stopped digging, hopped up on the edge of the hole, and swung his legs out.
“There,” he said. “You’re gonna have to finish the rest.”
I walked up to the hole and looked down. Paw done nice work. The walls of the hole were smooth and straight all the way to the bottom. I jumped in the hole, and stole a look at Bill, who was hammering nails into the lid of the coffin. Paw said somethin’ about how the babies are the hardest to bury. You have to dig just as deep, but the hole is a lot smaller than those for growed up folks are.
After I had dug another foot or so, Paw said that was enough. I smoothed the walls of the hole so they were straight. I grabbed a handful of dirt. It smelled good, sort of rich and musty. The chunks of it fell apart as I rubbed it between my hands. I wondered what it’d be like to be all covered up with dirt, dead in a hole. We’ll be putting Joe’s baby sister in this very hole, I thought. Liza got put in a hole, prob’ly just like this one. Maw was here, too. Now they’re at the other end of the cemetery. Paw and me visit them on Christmas if it hasn’t snowed. They don’t have head stones. Just a plaque in the ground. There’s a couple of spots there for me and Paw.
I slid down on my rear end at the bottom of the hole, and looked up. All I could see was the bluest blue sky through the square of the hole. Looked like a picture. A big, fluffy, white cloud went by. Then two heads popped out. They blocked the light, and I couldn’t see their faces. By the shape of the heads, though, I could tell it was Paw and Bill.
The Paw head said, “What you doing, boy? Come on out’a that hole.” He got down on his knees, and pulled me up.
I looked around, and saw the coffin, some rope, and two planks. Bill and Paw put the planks over the hole, laid the rope across, and rested the coffin on the planks. We all stood back, and looked at our work. Bill took a wreath of flowers from one of the gravestones nearby, and laid it on top of the coffin. It looked good.
Paw picked up the shovels, and gave me one. Then he put his arm around my neck, and we walked back toward the truck. I looked back. Bill was standing there with a Bible in his hand, and just nodded.
When we got to the truck, I saw the Roberts coming down the road. Their truck was in worse shape than Paw’s. It swayed from side to side, and blew smoke out its tailpipe. It came to a stop, and Joe Roberts got out. He helped his maw out the truck. He looked older somehow. His maw was moving real slow, and he helped her walk until his paw came up and took over. When they walked by us, they stopped. Paw put his hand on Mr. Roberts shoulder.
“Ephraim, Helen, I’m shore sorry.” he said, and then, “If there’s anything I kin do.” Joe Roberts was standing next to me, but I couldn’t look at him. I was shamed of myself fer what I done to him. We all walked together, and joined Bill at the grave. He said his piece.
When Bill finished, him and Paw lowered the coffin down to the bottom of the hole. Bill bent over, picked up a handful of dirt, and tossed it down on top of the coffin. As we went back to the trucks, us young’uns walked ahead of everybody.
“Did Principal Wallace give you a lickin’?” Joe asked, and wiped his snotty nose on his shirtsleeve. I just put my head down, and shook it. “That’s good,” he said. I looked over at him, and he smiled a little. Just wanted somebody to be friends, and play with him is all. After the Roberts drove off, me and Paw filled up the hole.
When we got home, it was almost dark. I got out the box from my closet. I spread out Liza’s blanket, and laid out the yeller pictures. There was one o’ Maw holdin’ me when I was a baby. She looked real happy. There was Paw and Maw on their wedding day. Paw was smiling. Looked like they were having a good ol’ time. And then there was one with a big waterfall. You could see people standin’ next to it. I bet it was the biggest one on this earth. Something to see.
Paw came in, and sat down on the floor next to me. He told me stories of when him and Maw first got married. On their honeymoon, they went to Niagra Falls. Maw thought it was the prettiest thing she ever saw.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Evolution and ET: Have other Intelligent Life Forms Evolved?
Chuck the Atheist is a biologist and loves to talk about evolution. Dobzhanski tells us that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Sometimes I find the culture wars over evolution and creationism rather tedious, but I'll discuss this or any other topic if anyone dares bother comment. What's perhaps more interesting are the debates amongst evolutionary theorists. Contrary to a great deal of popular belief there is no controversy about the fact of evolution among biologists of the consensus opinion. What I find more facinating is discussions within the community about evolution. Also because I'm a disciple of the skeptic Michael Shermer, there's nothing I like better than a critical conceptual analysis of new ways to explain phenomena in the natural world. Sometimes scientists wax as nonsensical as those that have a delusion of cosmic imperatives. So let's stick it to the man.
There’s nothing like a good sparring match among evolutionists. The skeptic Michael Shermer in his Nov. 2009 column in Scientific American comments that the likelihood of extraterrestrials with intelligence that are also humanoid is very small, perhaps only one other in the universe. Richard Dawkins disagrees, and reminds Shermer that Cambridge paleontologist S. C. Morris thinks that intelligent aliens would be “in effect bipedal primates” and Harvard University biologist Ed Wilson thinks that dinosaurs could have evolved into a humanoid type if the Alvarez impact never occurred. Shermer spars back, “If something like a smart, technological, bipedal humanoid has a certain level of inevitability because of how evolution unfolds, then it would have happened more than once here.” Shermer goes on to quote Ernst Mayr (2001), “Nothing demonstrates the improbablility of the origin of high intelligence better than the millions of phyletic lineages that failed to achieve it.” But then Dawkins responds that the universe is so big, and has so many inhabitable planets (presumably e.g. something like the Drake Equation), there must be more than a few humanoid civilizations.
I don’t know exactly where to begin. There is something wrong here on so many levels. The first is the hypothetical, “a certain level of inevitability because how evolution unfolds…” I’m not so sure that there is anything inevitable in evolution. I know that Shermer gave this as a “let’s just assume if,” and probably doesn’t really accept this, but it sounds like Dawkins takes the bait. But we should know that any allegedly directional evolutionary trends “sooner or later either change direction or even reverse themselves (Mayr 2001).” If we see any trends at all it is just along the lines of what we know from evo-devo or Steven Jay Gould (2002), what we really see are the constraints of previous phylogenic histories that gave rise to developmental regulation in ontogeny.
But Morris and Wilson want to go beyond that and bemuse themselves that there may be some essential or directional push to become humanoid as if intelligence precludes that you must be bipedal, even a primate? I thought that orthogenesis was thoroughly refuted by the Modern Synthesis at least fifty years ago as again Mayr (2001) reminds us. There are no types. Being human is an endpoint in our lineage; that is all. There’s a certain logic to the assumption that an intelligent technologically advanced creature would have appendages that can manipulate objects with precision as in the grip afforded by the human opposable thumb. But bipedalism and opposability aren’t inevitable. I could understand why some might try work in some kind of directionality to evolution if one can’t divorce their biology from their theology, but let’s not even go there.
Extreme forms of this argument can be found in articles like that written by the planetary scientist Nancy Kiang in the April 2008 issue of Scientific American. Come let’s speculate on what plants would look like on other planets. Plants? We might as well ask what kind of vertebrate, what kind of tetrapod, what kind of reptile or amphibian, what kind of humanoid might we find? Did we forget of all the fits and starts and reverses that evolution took that resulted in terrestrial plants on Earth? Lynn Margulis reminds us (1998) that if it wasn’t for symbiotic fungi, there wouldn’t be any bloody plants. Plants aren’t inevitable, aren’t a type with an essence of autotrophism.
OK so it’s inevitable that there might be many intelligent life forms out there even if they’re not human? Even the skeptic Shermer concedes to this; Dawkins tries to remind us that the size of the universe might make it so. I just think that there is a certain simplicity here that seems to neglect how we really might begin to be able to calculate such a probability. We are constantly reminded that we really can’t do such a thing, but then we leap to the assumption that will be in favor of plenty of aliens to populate our potentially real Star Trek universe. There’s just an eerie resemblance to the simplistic argument for intelligent design…something like, “Creation is so complex, it must have been designed supernaturally.” If we oversimplify we end up with argument like that. Even if we can’t really calculate such a thing, I’d like to clarify at least what we need to consider before we even make such assumptions.
Even if you expect from a very similar basic imput of pre-biotic chemicals, life may have a certain probability, we are still at level of our prokaryotes. The expectation that complex multicellular life, then even human life, has some sort of probabilistic inevitability needs to be analyzed more than just superficially and in the context of the history of evolutionary theory.
Stereoscopic vision and opposable thumbs were probably adaptations to an arboreal life. Bipedalism may have been adaptation for locomotion for such a tree-loving creature after its environment started changing from forest to savannah. The human mind might be the result of emergent properties of the existing nervous system of hominids that were coapted to exploit an ever changing and complicated social landscape. Did we obtain these things through a directed process that inevitably resulted in a primate and a genus like Homo? Or do environments mold organisms into reoccurring, recognizable shapes that makes it likely that aliens would be recognizable to us as humanoid or even just multicellular? Just how inevitable are all these transitions?
The answer might lie in what I would call Critical Contingency Factors (CCFs) in the natural history of our planet. CCFs inform us how we think about the historical and contingent nature of biological evolution, and might allow us to begin to give more respect to what kind of evidence we would need to even begin to speculate about the frequency of life, even intelligent life on other planets.
Symbiotic Theory and Coevoltution. Symbiosis is two or more organisms that create an association sometimes intimately and permanently. Lynn Sagan (Margolis) in her historic paper on symbiosis demonstrated that the speculations of scientists as early as the late 19th century ( e.g. Schimper, 1883) had foundation, namely that some eukaryotic cellular organelles started out as prokaryotes, which associated with other prokaryotes and early eukaryotes to form the first unicellular animal and plant cells. For plants their precursors, algae, had to symbiotically associate with cyanobacteria (became chloroplasts) in order to photosynthesize. Before that critical event this organism already had another symbiont, the purple bacteria (became mitochondria), which made it possible to produce much energy in an atmosphere that was becoming ever more oxygenated (2 billion yrs. BP). Margolis developed her theory of symbiogenesis over the course of the next twenty years before the consensus caught up with her. By the time she published Symbiotic Planet (1998), she had the advantage of providing many, many examples beyond mitochondria and plastids of symbiotic associations that affected speciation events, changed lineages, creating even new genera. The point is that all of these events are completely unpredictable and contingent. Even the first eukaryotes are the product of both strict Darwinian evolution and symbiogenesis. The caveat here is that once the symbionts established a permanent relationship, subsequent change required natural selection per Darwin as Ernst Mayr reminded us in the forward to Margolis’ book. As for coevolution many organisms have evolved to keep in step with, to outcompete, and have arms races with other organisms that may not even be in the same domain, kingdom, phylum, etc. There’s no predicting what future associations organisms may have that affect their subsequent evolution.
Catastrophism. There have been as many as five previous global mass extinctions of life, not to mention the inevitably more numerous regional cataclysms (Gould 2002). It was just such events that remind us of the contingent nature of our natural history, and the affect that such events might inevitably have on the course of the evolution that ultimately created the diversity of life on Earth that man has been given the privilege to witness over the last 200,000 years. There is no way to predict what the future evolutionary path of any taxon could be after such events. New habitats open up if a major clade goes extinct. Unoccupied niches mean the potential of new adaptive zones. It is often stated that there never would have been the Age of Mammals if it hadn’t been for the extinction of the dinosaurs, which the consensus of the scientific community is
Emergence. It has often been remarked that the sort of intelligent cognition that humans have may be an emergent property of the evolution of our nervous system. All throughout the history of evolution at different turning points that beget perhaps a new genus, family, order, or class, biological systems that operate far out of equilibrium (as in Kaufmann 1993) make a biological-organizational leap to a new state of equilibrium upon which natural selection can shape further. Such events may mark the genesis of new adaptive radiations. Other examples might include:
1. Hypercyles of RNA that learn to replicate at first with first fidelity and then selectively evolve until some cycles approach the edge of thermodynamic equilibrium until a final snap into place, which marks a new metabolic efficiency that also just happens to inadvertently include a cellular membrane…the origin of life.
2. Genetic regulation in single cell eukarotes that at first aggregate as individuals, then reorganize the sort of phenotypic expression that allows for a division of labor amongst colonies…the birth of multicellularity…achieved perhaps by the push or pull of duplicated genes that maintain the old phenotypic expression as well as affect ontogeny in different ways as they mutate.
3. Genetic regulation in small, allopatric populations that as inbreeding continues, a loosening of the genotype occurs such that new pleiotropic regulatory networks are formed…typical speciation events at the micro/macroevolutionary divide.
All these scenarios start at the point of already having prokaryotic life, except for CCF Emergence #1. There are numerous more CCFs that precede the evolution of the first cell. I won’t go into those here but is interesting to mention that we can bring into the argument the same factors that creationists discuss, scenarios in which the conditions that allowed life to exist in our universe are very improbable. “Old Earth” creationist Hugh Ross in his book The Creator and the Cosmos (2001) discusses the many factors that reduce the possibility of ET life: large planets close enough, but not so far away that act as cosmic vacuum cleaners (e.g. Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system), and reduce the likelihood of asteroid and comet impacts on potentially habitable planets; our one moon allows a relatively reasonable wobble to our planet’s rotation; a habitable planet is one that is in the sweet spot in its solar system; the solar system has to be in a sweet spot in its galaxy; and many other points.
Many milestones in the evolution of life may have been the result of contigent, emergent properties that lead to new levels of biological organization. None of these turning points in our natural history were inevitable or predictable. Multicellular life may be very, very rare in the universe. We must be wary of any attempts to argue that there are inevitable progressions in evolution or some essence that is humanoid that MUST naturally occur on this or any other planet.
References
Gould, S. J. (2002). The Stucture of Evolutionary Theory. Belknap Press, Cambridge.
Kaufmann, S.A. (1993). The Origins of Order. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Kiang, N.Y. (Apr. 2008). “The color of plants on other worlds.” Sci. Am.
Margolis, L. (1998). Symbiotic Planet. Basic Books, New York.
Mayr, E. (2001). What evolution is. Basic Books, New York.
Ross, Hugh (2001). Creator and the cosmos. Navpress, Baltimore.
Schimper AFW (1883). "Über die Entwicklung der Chlorophyllkörner und Farbkörper". Bot. Zeitung 41: 105–14, 121–31, 137–46, 153–62.
Sagan (Margolis), L. (1967). "On the origin of mitosing cells". J Theor Bio. 14 (3): 255–274
Shermer, M. (Nov. 2009). Will ET look like us? Sci. Am. p. 36.
There’s nothing like a good sparring match among evolutionists. The skeptic Michael Shermer in his Nov. 2009 column in Scientific American comments that the likelihood of extraterrestrials with intelligence that are also humanoid is very small, perhaps only one other in the universe. Richard Dawkins disagrees, and reminds Shermer that Cambridge paleontologist S. C. Morris thinks that intelligent aliens would be “in effect bipedal primates” and Harvard University biologist Ed Wilson thinks that dinosaurs could have evolved into a humanoid type if the Alvarez impact never occurred. Shermer spars back, “If something like a smart, technological, bipedal humanoid has a certain level of inevitability because of how evolution unfolds, then it would have happened more than once here.” Shermer goes on to quote Ernst Mayr (2001), “Nothing demonstrates the improbablility of the origin of high intelligence better than the millions of phyletic lineages that failed to achieve it.” But then Dawkins responds that the universe is so big, and has so many inhabitable planets (presumably e.g. something like the Drake Equation), there must be more than a few humanoid civilizations.
I don’t know exactly where to begin. There is something wrong here on so many levels. The first is the hypothetical, “a certain level of inevitability because how evolution unfolds…” I’m not so sure that there is anything inevitable in evolution. I know that Shermer gave this as a “let’s just assume if,” and probably doesn’t really accept this, but it sounds like Dawkins takes the bait. But we should know that any allegedly directional evolutionary trends “sooner or later either change direction or even reverse themselves (Mayr 2001).” If we see any trends at all it is just along the lines of what we know from evo-devo or Steven Jay Gould (2002), what we really see are the constraints of previous phylogenic histories that gave rise to developmental regulation in ontogeny.
But Morris and Wilson want to go beyond that and bemuse themselves that there may be some essential or directional push to become humanoid as if intelligence precludes that you must be bipedal, even a primate? I thought that orthogenesis was thoroughly refuted by the Modern Synthesis at least fifty years ago as again Mayr (2001) reminds us. There are no types. Being human is an endpoint in our lineage; that is all. There’s a certain logic to the assumption that an intelligent technologically advanced creature would have appendages that can manipulate objects with precision as in the grip afforded by the human opposable thumb. But bipedalism and opposability aren’t inevitable. I could understand why some might try work in some kind of directionality to evolution if one can’t divorce their biology from their theology, but let’s not even go there.
Extreme forms of this argument can be found in articles like that written by the planetary scientist Nancy Kiang in the April 2008 issue of Scientific American. Come let’s speculate on what plants would look like on other planets. Plants? We might as well ask what kind of vertebrate, what kind of tetrapod, what kind of reptile or amphibian, what kind of humanoid might we find? Did we forget of all the fits and starts and reverses that evolution took that resulted in terrestrial plants on Earth? Lynn Margulis reminds us (1998) that if it wasn’t for symbiotic fungi, there wouldn’t be any bloody plants. Plants aren’t inevitable, aren’t a type with an essence of autotrophism.
OK so it’s inevitable that there might be many intelligent life forms out there even if they’re not human? Even the skeptic Shermer concedes to this; Dawkins tries to remind us that the size of the universe might make it so. I just think that there is a certain simplicity here that seems to neglect how we really might begin to be able to calculate such a probability. We are constantly reminded that we really can’t do such a thing, but then we leap to the assumption that will be in favor of plenty of aliens to populate our potentially real Star Trek universe. There’s just an eerie resemblance to the simplistic argument for intelligent design…something like, “Creation is so complex, it must have been designed supernaturally.” If we oversimplify we end up with argument like that. Even if we can’t really calculate such a thing, I’d like to clarify at least what we need to consider before we even make such assumptions.
Even if you expect from a very similar basic imput of pre-biotic chemicals, life may have a certain probability, we are still at level of our prokaryotes. The expectation that complex multicellular life, then even human life, has some sort of probabilistic inevitability needs to be analyzed more than just superficially and in the context of the history of evolutionary theory.
Stereoscopic vision and opposable thumbs were probably adaptations to an arboreal life. Bipedalism may have been adaptation for locomotion for such a tree-loving creature after its environment started changing from forest to savannah. The human mind might be the result of emergent properties of the existing nervous system of hominids that were coapted to exploit an ever changing and complicated social landscape. Did we obtain these things through a directed process that inevitably resulted in a primate and a genus like Homo? Or do environments mold organisms into reoccurring, recognizable shapes that makes it likely that aliens would be recognizable to us as humanoid or even just multicellular? Just how inevitable are all these transitions?
The answer might lie in what I would call Critical Contingency Factors (CCFs) in the natural history of our planet. CCFs inform us how we think about the historical and contingent nature of biological evolution, and might allow us to begin to give more respect to what kind of evidence we would need to even begin to speculate about the frequency of life, even intelligent life on other planets.
Symbiotic Theory and Coevoltution. Symbiosis is two or more organisms that create an association sometimes intimately and permanently. Lynn Sagan (Margolis) in her historic paper on symbiosis demonstrated that the speculations of scientists as early as the late 19th century ( e.g. Schimper, 1883) had foundation, namely that some eukaryotic cellular organelles started out as prokaryotes, which associated with other prokaryotes and early eukaryotes to form the first unicellular animal and plant cells. For plants their precursors, algae, had to symbiotically associate with cyanobacteria (became chloroplasts) in order to photosynthesize. Before that critical event this organism already had another symbiont, the purple bacteria (became mitochondria), which made it possible to produce much energy in an atmosphere that was becoming ever more oxygenated (2 billion yrs. BP). Margolis developed her theory of symbiogenesis over the course of the next twenty years before the consensus caught up with her. By the time she published Symbiotic Planet (1998), she had the advantage of providing many, many examples beyond mitochondria and plastids of symbiotic associations that affected speciation events, changed lineages, creating even new genera. The point is that all of these events are completely unpredictable and contingent. Even the first eukaryotes are the product of both strict Darwinian evolution and symbiogenesis. The caveat here is that once the symbionts established a permanent relationship, subsequent change required natural selection per Darwin as Ernst Mayr reminded us in the forward to Margolis’ book. As for coevolution many organisms have evolved to keep in step with, to outcompete, and have arms races with other organisms that may not even be in the same domain, kingdom, phylum, etc. There’s no predicting what future associations organisms may have that affect their subsequent evolution.
Catastrophism. There have been as many as five previous global mass extinctions of life, not to mention the inevitably more numerous regional cataclysms (Gould 2002). It was just such events that remind us of the contingent nature of our natural history, and the affect that such events might inevitably have on the course of the evolution that ultimately created the diversity of life on Earth that man has been given the privilege to witness over the last 200,000 years. There is no way to predict what the future evolutionary path of any taxon could be after such events. New habitats open up if a major clade goes extinct. Unoccupied niches mean the potential of new adaptive zones. It is often stated that there never would have been the Age of Mammals if it hadn’t been for the extinction of the dinosaurs, which the consensus of the scientific community is
Emergence. It has often been remarked that the sort of intelligent cognition that humans have may be an emergent property of the evolution of our nervous system. All throughout the history of evolution at different turning points that beget perhaps a new genus, family, order, or class, biological systems that operate far out of equilibrium (as in Kaufmann 1993) make a biological-organizational leap to a new state of equilibrium upon which natural selection can shape further. Such events may mark the genesis of new adaptive radiations. Other examples might include:
1. Hypercyles of RNA that learn to replicate at first with first fidelity and then selectively evolve until some cycles approach the edge of thermodynamic equilibrium until a final snap into place, which marks a new metabolic efficiency that also just happens to inadvertently include a cellular membrane…the origin of life.
2. Genetic regulation in single cell eukarotes that at first aggregate as individuals, then reorganize the sort of phenotypic expression that allows for a division of labor amongst colonies…the birth of multicellularity…achieved perhaps by the push or pull of duplicated genes that maintain the old phenotypic expression as well as affect ontogeny in different ways as they mutate.
3. Genetic regulation in small, allopatric populations that as inbreeding continues, a loosening of the genotype occurs such that new pleiotropic regulatory networks are formed…typical speciation events at the micro/macroevolutionary divide.
All these scenarios start at the point of already having prokaryotic life, except for CCF Emergence #1. There are numerous more CCFs that precede the evolution of the first cell. I won’t go into those here but is interesting to mention that we can bring into the argument the same factors that creationists discuss, scenarios in which the conditions that allowed life to exist in our universe are very improbable. “Old Earth” creationist Hugh Ross in his book The Creator and the Cosmos (2001) discusses the many factors that reduce the possibility of ET life: large planets close enough, but not so far away that act as cosmic vacuum cleaners (e.g. Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system), and reduce the likelihood of asteroid and comet impacts on potentially habitable planets; our one moon allows a relatively reasonable wobble to our planet’s rotation; a habitable planet is one that is in the sweet spot in its solar system; the solar system has to be in a sweet spot in its galaxy; and many other points.
Many milestones in the evolution of life may have been the result of contigent, emergent properties that lead to new levels of biological organization. None of these turning points in our natural history were inevitable or predictable. Multicellular life may be very, very rare in the universe. We must be wary of any attempts to argue that there are inevitable progressions in evolution or some essence that is humanoid that MUST naturally occur on this or any other planet.
References
Gould, S. J. (2002). The Stucture of Evolutionary Theory. Belknap Press, Cambridge.
Kaufmann, S.A. (1993). The Origins of Order. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Kiang, N.Y. (Apr. 2008). “The color of plants on other worlds.” Sci. Am.
Margolis, L. (1998). Symbiotic Planet. Basic Books, New York.
Mayr, E. (2001). What evolution is. Basic Books, New York.
Ross, Hugh (2001). Creator and the cosmos. Navpress, Baltimore.
Schimper AFW (1883). "Über die Entwicklung der Chlorophyllkörner und Farbkörper". Bot. Zeitung 41: 105–14, 121–31, 137–46, 153–62.
Sagan (Margolis), L. (1967). "On the origin of mitosing cells". J Theor Bio. 14 (3): 255–274
Shermer, M. (Nov. 2009). Will ET look like us? Sci. Am. p. 36.
Friday, April 9, 2010
On my way to Spain
Chuck the Atheist is taking it on the road tomorrow. I'm going to Spain on biz. I'll have a day to sightsee, and apparently am going to visit a monastery. You heard it right...Chuck the Atheist is going to hang out in the cloister. Fear not, I'm going just to dig the cool scenery. No one get's inside Chuck the Atheist's head, but the scientific literature. I'm going to Barcelona. I was there last April and visited La Sangrata Familia, which is a 19th Cent. cathedral designed by Antonio Gaudi. It was pretty cool. Parts of it looked like melting ice cream, or like maybe it was designed by someone from Ape City (Planet of the Apes ref.). Wierd thing, though, is that it still isn't finished. They've been building it for over a 100 years. That's crazy.
This time I'll be at Montserrat a 12th Cent. monastery. Just a little part of it is that old, apparently. It's been built up over the years, and has some quite modern sections. The monastery is on the side of a mountain. If I can figure out how to work my new camera, I'll post some pics.
This time I'll be at Montserrat a 12th Cent. monastery. Just a little part of it is that old, apparently. It's been built up over the years, and has some quite modern sections. The monastery is on the side of a mountain. If I can figure out how to work my new camera, I'll post some pics.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Hello good people. Welcome to Chuck the Atheist's place. I really enjoy discussions about a variety of topics: biological evolution, the origin of life, history, and anthropology (philosophy and religion). If you have a question about any of these subjects, I will do my best to respond in a thoughtful and respectful way.
For the first post, I would like to make sure that everyone knows where I stand in terms of my belief system. Really as an atheist I feel that I do not have one. Sure I accept evolutionary theory, but acceptance is a bit different than believing in something. As a biologist whom has surveyed the literature covering biological evolution, I realize that the evidence makes what one believes about evolution completely irrelevant. Such evidence is compelling, comprehensive, and concilient. Saying that one does not believe in evolution is like trying to hold out in your skepticism of gravity, helocentricity, or the spherical shape of the Earth. So belief is an outmoded concept, an Iron Age artifact. There's nothing wrong with holding judgement about something until there is enough evidence to develop an informed opinion.
To be sure there is nothing in science that can disprove the existence of god, if you hold that belief. I use evolutionary theory just as an example to punctuate what I think is a very good way to frame or explain human thought in terms of the concepts of belief or faith. For faith by definition does not attempt to consider evidence. At any rate, welcome. Sit down, take your shoes off, and let's chat.
For the first post, I would like to make sure that everyone knows where I stand in terms of my belief system. Really as an atheist I feel that I do not have one. Sure I accept evolutionary theory, but acceptance is a bit different than believing in something. As a biologist whom has surveyed the literature covering biological evolution, I realize that the evidence makes what one believes about evolution completely irrelevant. Such evidence is compelling, comprehensive, and concilient. Saying that one does not believe in evolution is like trying to hold out in your skepticism of gravity, helocentricity, or the spherical shape of the Earth. So belief is an outmoded concept, an Iron Age artifact. There's nothing wrong with holding judgement about something until there is enough evidence to develop an informed opinion.
To be sure there is nothing in science that can disprove the existence of god, if you hold that belief. I use evolutionary theory just as an example to punctuate what I think is a very good way to frame or explain human thought in terms of the concepts of belief or faith. For faith by definition does not attempt to consider evidence. At any rate, welcome. Sit down, take your shoes off, and let's chat.
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