It’s not only socialists and Muslims who get trotted out when the masses need to be scared into voting Republican. Here’s Elizabeth Dole’s latest ad for her North Carolina Senate race. Via.

Note that, via Balloon Juice, Dole’s opponent Kay Hagan is a Sunday School teacher. What would Dole say if an actual atheist were running?

Q: Why is fundamentalist Christianity better than string theory?

A: Because it makes testable predictions.

Here is a prediction, from none other than Sarah Palin: God will intervene on Election Day.

In an interview posted online Wednesday, Sarah Palin told Dr. James Dobson of “Focus on the Family” that she is confident God will do “the right thing for America” on Nov. 4.

Dobson asked the vice presidential hopeful if she is concerned about John McCain’s sagging poll numbers, but Palin stressed that she was “not discouraged at all.”

“To me, it motivates us, makes us work that much harder,” she told the influential Christian leader, whose radio show reaches millions of listeners daily. “And it also strengthens my faith because I know at the end of the day putting this in God’s hands, the right thing for America will be done, at the end of the day on Nov. 4.”

…

She also thanked her supporters — including Dobson, who said he and his wife were asking “for God’s intervention” on election day — for their prayers of support.

“It is that intercession that is so needed,” she said. “And so greatly appreciated. And I can feel it too, Dr. Dobson. I can feel the power of prayer, and that strength that is provided through our prayer warriors across this nation. And I so appreciate it.”

Admittedly, not a very good testable prediction. I doubt that we’ll see wholesale conversion to atheism on November 5th if Obama wins. More likely, we will be told that this is just an exceptionally subtle part of God’s plan. It’s like predicting supersymmetry at the LHC!

I went on a brief trip to Ireland and England a couple of weeks ago. You know what they couldn’t stop talking about? Sarah Palin. And religious Americans more generally. This pretty much sums up why:

I understand that later on in the interview, Tracy claims that the bit in the Gospels about loving your neighbors was “probably inserted by Communists,” and she raised her eyebrows so high that her eyeballs popped completely out of her head.

So the Origins Conference sponsored by the Skeptics Society was held last Saturday, and a good time was had by all. Or, at least, a good time was had by most. Or, maybe the right thing to say was that a good time was had much of the time by many of the people.

More specifically: the morning session, devoted to science, was fun. The evening entertainment, by Mr. Deity and his crew, was fantastic. In between, there was some debate/discussion on science vs. religion. Ken Miller is a biologist who believes strongly that science should be taught in science classrooms — he was an important witness in the Dover trial — and who happens also to be a Catholic. He gave an apologia for his belief that was frustrating and ultimately (if you ask me) wrong-headed, but at least qualified as reasonable academic discussion. He was followed by Nancey Murphy, a theologian who was much worse; she defended her belief in the efficacy of prayer by relating an anecdote in which she prayed to God to get a job, and the phone immediately rang with a job offer. (I am not, as Dave Barry says, making this up.) And Michael Shermer and Vic Stenger represented the atheist side, although both talks were also frustrating in their own ways.

But all of that just fades into the background when put into the same room as the sheer unadulterated looniness of the remaining speaker, Hugh Ross. Despite warnings, I didn’t really know anything about the guy before the conference began. The taxonomy of crackpots is not especially interesting to me; there are too many of them, and I’d rather engage with the best arguments for positions I disagree with than spend time mocking the worst arguments (although I’m not above a bit of mockery now and then).

So I was unprepared. For those of you fortunate enough to be blissfully unaware of Ross’s special brand of lunacy, feel free to stop reading now if you so choose. For the rest of you: man, this guy is nuts. And he’s not even the most nuts it’s possible to be — he’s an “old-earth” creationist, willing to accept that the universe is 14 billion years old and that the conventional scientific interpretation of the fossil record is generally right. Still: totally nuts.

Ross’ talk took two tacks. First, he explained to us how the Bible predicted that: (1) the universe started from an initial singularity; (2) it is now expanding; and (3) it is cooling down at it expands. The evidence for these remarkable claims? A long list of Bible verses! Well, not the verses themselves. Just the citations. So we couldn’t really tell what the verses themselves said. Except for poor Ken Miller, who was trying to salvage some last shred of dignity for his side of the debate, and had the perspicacity to look up one of the verses on his iPhone. (Praise be to technology!) I’m not sure which verse it was, but that’s okay, because they all say precisely the same thing. Here is Isaiah 45:12, in the New International Version:

It is I who made the earth
and created mankind upon it.
My own hands stretched out the heavens;
I marshaled their starry hosts.

What’s that? You don’t see the bold prediction of Hubble’s Law, practically ready for peer review? It’s right there, in the bit about “stretched out the heavens.” To the mind of a non-crazy person, this is a poetic way of expressing the fact that the dome of the sky reaches from one horizon to the other. To Hugh Ross, though, it’s a straightforward scientific prediction of the expansion of the universe.

Here is Ross in person, going through some of these same arguments:

(Yes, that video is embedded from “GodTube.com.”)

His second tack was to explain how our universe is finely-tuned for the existence of life. We’ve all heard this kind of claim, from real scientists as well as crackpots. But Ross and his clan take it to grotesque extremes, as detailed in the website for his Reasons to Believe ministry. Where, by the way, they don’t believe the LHC will destroy the world! Rather, it will “provide even new reasons to trust the validity of Scripture.” It would be nice if they would tell us what those reasons are ahead of time. Does Scripture predict low-energy supersymmetry? Large extra dimensions?

According to Reasons to Believe, the chance of life arising on a planet within the observable universe is only 1 in 10²⁸² — or it would have been, if it weren’t for divine miracles. (Don’t tell them about there are 10⁵⁰⁰ vacua in string theory, it would ruin everything.) They get this number by writing down a long list of criteria that are purportedly necessary for the existence of life (“star’s space velocity relative to Local Standard of Rest”; “molybdenum quantity in crust”; “mass distribution of Oort Cloud objects”), then they assign probabilities to each, and cheerfully multiply them together. To the non-crackpot eye, most have little if any connection to the existence of life, and let’s not even mention that many of these are highly non-independent quantities. (You cannot calculate the fraction of “Sean Carroll”s in the world by multiplying the fraction of “Sean”s by the fraction of “Carroll’s. As good Irish names, they are strongly correlated.) It’s the worst kind of flim-flam, because it tries to cover the stench of nonsense by squirting liberal doses of scientific-smelling perfume. If someone didn’t know anything about the science, and already believed in an active God who made the universe just for us, they could come away convinced that modern science had vindicated all of their beliefs. And that’s not something any of us should sit still for.

There is a reason why all this is worth rehashing, as distasteful as it may be and as feeble as the arguments are. Namely: there is no reason whatsoever to invite such a person to speak at a conference that aspires to any degree of seriousness. You can invite religious speakers, and you can have a debate on the existence of God; all that is fine, so long as it is clearly labeled and not presented as science. But there’s never any reason to invite crackpots. The crackpot mindset has no legitimate interest in an open-minded discussion, held in good faith; their game is to take any set of facts or arguments and twist them to fit their pre-determined conclusions. It’s the opposite of the academic ideal. And it’s an insult to religious believers to have their point of view represented by crackpots.

Which, if you want to be excessively conspiratorial, might have been the point. Perhaps the conference organizers wanted to ridicule belief in God by having it defended by Hugh Ross, or perhaps they wanted to energize the skeptical base by exposing them to some of the horrors that are really out there. Still, it was inappropriate. If we non-believers are confident in our positions, we should engage with the most intelligent and open-minded exemplars of the other side. Shooting fish in a barrel is not a sport that holds anyone’s attention for very long.

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy constitutes one of the finest reading experiences for children I’ve ever seen. I read them as an adult, on the advice of a literary colleague, and fell under their spell immediately. They are fantasy books, for sure, but with a strong rational and anti-authority philosophy. And although I don’t think of them as purely anti-religious, if your religion is one with an authoritarian streak then …

In a brief article in The Guardian, Pullman takes on those who would seek to ban his books from library shelves. He points to the futility of such bans, the inevitable increased readership of banned works, and the utterly moronic reasons that some give for requesting bans. But he saves his real vitriol for religion. Pullman’s basic take on religion

My basic objection to religion is not that it isn’t true; I like plenty of things that aren’t true. It’s that religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

isn’t precisely the same as my own, since I do disagree with religion because it is false. I also like plenty of things that aren’t true – the works of David Foster Wallace are a timely example – but the things I like that aren’t true don’t claim to be true. But I certainly also agree with the things that drive Pullman nuts

In fact, when it comes to banning books, religion is the worst reason of the lot. Religion, uncontaminated by power, can be the source of a great deal of private solace, artistic inspiration, and moral wisdom. But when it gets its hands on the levers of political or social authority, it goes rotten very quickly indeed. The rank stench of oppression wafts from every authoritarian church, chapel, temple, mosque, or synagogue – from every place of worship where the priests have the power to meddle in the social and intellectual lives of their flocks, from every presidential palace or prime ministerial office where civil leaders have to pander to religious ones.

Well put!

On the theory that it is good to mention events before they happen, so that interested parties might actually choose to attend, check out the upcoming Skeptics Society conference: Origins: the Big Questions. It will be at Caltech, and will take just one day, Saturday October 4, with a pre-conference dinner the previous night, Friday the 3rd. The day’s events are divided into two parts. In the morning you get a bunch of talks on the origins of big things — I’ll be talking on the origin of time, Leonard Susskind on the origin of the laws of physics, Paul Davies on the origin of the universe, Donald Prothero on the origin of life, and Christof Koch on the origin of consciousness.

Then in the afternoon they change gears, and start talking about science and religion. Names involved include Stuart Kauffman, Kenneth Miller, Nancey Murphy, Michael Shermer, Philip Clayton, Vic Stenger, and Hugo Ross. It’s this part of the event that has stirred up a tiny bit of controversy, as it is co-sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, famous appliers of lipstick to the pig that is the interface between science and religion. It’s legitimate to wonder why the Skeptics Society is getting mixed up with Templeton at all, and it’s been discussed a bit in our beloved blogosphere: see Bad Astronomy, Pharyngula, and Richard Dawkins.

I am on the record as saying that scientists should be extremely leery of accepting money from organizations with any sort of religious orientation, and Templeton in particular. (Happily, in this case the speakers aren’t getting any money at all, so at least that temptation wasn’t part of the calculation.) But it’s by no means a cut-and-dried issue, as we’ve seen in discussions of the Foundational Questions Institute.

Personally, I prefer not to have the chocolate of my science mixed up with the peanut butter of somebody else’s religion, and certainly not without clear labeling — peanut allergies can be pretty severe. But if someone wants to explicitly put on a peanut butter cup conference, that’s fine, and I don’t have any problem with participating. The problem with the Templeton Foundation is not that they coerce scientists into repudiating their beliefs through the promise of piles of cash; it’s that, by providing easy money to promote certain kinds of discussions, those discussions begin to seem more prominent and important than they really are. Perhaps, without any Templeton funding, the Origins conference would have devoted much less time to the science-and-religion questions, leaving much more time for interesting science discussions. This would have given outsiders a more accurate view of the role that religion plays in current scientific work on these foundational questions: to wit, none whatsoever.

The Templeton Foundation has every right to exist, and sponsor conferences. And there is undoubtedly a danger among atheists that they get caught up in a “holier than thou” competition — “I’m so atheist that I won’t even talk to people if they believe in God!” Which gets a little silly. I don’t think there’s anything explicitly wrong with the Origins conference; the Templeton-sponsored part is clearly labeled and set off from the rest, and it might end up being interesting. (Also, the conference concludes with Mr. Deity — how awesome is that?) Michael Shermer’s own take is here. But I look forward to a day when discussions of deep questions concerning the origin of the universe and of life can take place without the concept of God ever arising.

Occasionally we arrogant fundamentalist atheists are accused of picking on a simplistic, straw-man picture of God — some old man in the sky, Who meddles clumsily in our earthly affairs — rather than a more philosophically sophisticated view of the divine. Just to remind everyone, the unsophisticated version is alive and well, and has big plans for our upcoming elections. Here is an email being passed around among evangelicals. (Via.)

Dear friends:

Barack Hussein Obama has taken the nation by storm. From obscurity, with zero executive experience, or much of any kind, he has vaulted into the position of Presidential frontrunner. It is stunning. On the surface, it appears attributable only to his eloquent oratory and his race. But an invisible factor may be a strong spiritual force behind him, causing some people to actually swoon in his presence.

I have been very concerned that he has publicly said that he does not believe Jesus is the only way to heaven. This makes both the Bible and Jesus a liar, and it means that Christ has died in vain. A person cannot be a true Christian who believes that there are other ways of forgiveness, salvation, and eternal life with God. Only Jesus has paid the price for that.

Therefore, there is, indeed, another spirit involved. And this spirit has come into our national life like a flood. Last week at Obama’s acceptance speech, that spirit exalted itself in front of a Greek temple-like stage, and to a huge audience like in a Roman arena. Omama was portrayed as god-like. His voice thundered as a god’s voice.

At the end, Democratic sympathizer Pastor Joel Hunter gave the benediction and shockingly invited everyone to close the prayer to their own (false) gods. This was surely an abomination, but it was compatible with Obama’s expressed theology, and Hunter’s leftist leanings.

God was not pleased.

And God says, “When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the LORD shall lift up a standard against him” (Isaiah 59:19).

Enter Governor Sarah Palin. With incredible timing, the very next day, Sarah Palin also appeared out of nowhere. Her shocking selection as John McCain’s running mate stunned the world and suddenly took all the wind out of Obama’s sails.

We quickly learned that Sarah is a born-again, Spirit-filled Christian, attends church, and has been a ministry worker.

Sarah is that standard God has raised up to stop the flood. She has the anointing. You can tell by how the dogs are already viciously attacking her. But they will not be successful. She knows the One she serves and will not be intimidated.

Back in the 1980s, I sensed that Israel’s little-known Benjamin Netanyahu was chosen by God for an important end-time role. I still believe that. I now have that same sense about Sarah Palin.

Today I did some checking and discovered that both her first and last names are biblical words, one in Hebrew the other in Greek:

Sarah. Wife of Abraham and mother of Isaac. In Hebrew, Sarah means “noble woman” (Strong’s 8283).

Palin. In Greek, the word means “renewal.” (Strong’s 3825).

A friend said he believes that Sarah Palin is a Deborah. Of Deborah, Smith’s Bible Dictionary says, “A prophetess who judged Israel…. She was not so much a judge as one gifted with prophetic command…. and by virtue of her inspiration ‘a mother in Israel.’”

Only God knows the future and how she may be used by Him, but may this noble woman serve to bring renewal in the land, and inspiration.

Jim

The author, Jim Bramlett, was formerly an associate of Pat Robertson, and more recently has been kept busy recording angels singing.

(The BSD Daemon didn’t appear in the original email; that was my addition.)

Currently reporting from a tiny, hip hotel at an undisclosed location on the West Coast. Of the various ways in which this establishment brands itself as edgy and unconventional, there is no standard-issue Gideon Bible tucked in a drawer somewhere in each room. Instead, one is presented with a small laminated Spiritual Menu — a list of texts that can be fetched up to your room by a quick call to the front desk. Options include:

• Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation
• Book of Mormon
• Buddhist Bible
• KJV Gift and Award Bible: Revised Edition, King James Version
• The Koran
• New American Bible
• Tao Te Ching
• The Torah: The Five Books of Moses, Standard Edition
• Book on Scientology

Probably, like me, you are wondering why there aren’t any options available for atheists. (Tedious explanatory note, since this is the internet: I am not really serious. Therefore, please to not respond with a lecture on why, when faced with a “Spiritual Menu,” the proper response for an atheist is simply to fast.) I mean, there have to be more of us than Scientologists, right? Although perhaps not among people who matter.

On the other hand, it’s not clear what would constitute an appropriate choice, as atheists have never been very big on sacred texts. I can think of a few possibilities. Something like The God Delusion wouldn’t be right, regardless of its various warts and charms, as it’s essentially reactive in nature — talking about why one shouldn’t believe in God, rather than celebrating or elaborating how to live as a cheerful materialist. Something like On the Origin of Species or Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems would be interesting choices, although they are too specialized to really fit the bill. You could make a very good case for a modern post-Enlightenment book like Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, as a serious (if not especially systematic) attempt to figure out how we should deal with a contingent world free of any guidance from outside.

But I would probably vote for Lucretius‘s De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). As good empiricists, we should recognize that a classic text doesn’t have to get everything right, as our understanding continues to be revised and improved. So why not go for a true classic? Writing in the first century BCE, Lucretius (a Roman admirer of the Greek philosopher Epicurus) took materialism seriously, and thought deeply about the place of human beings in a world governed by the laws of nature. He advocated skepticism, dismissed the idea that life continued after death in any form, preached personal responsibility, and thought hard about science, especially the role of atoms and statistical mechanics. (Slightly ahead of his time.) And the book itself comes in the form of an occasionally-inscrutable poem, originally in Latin. Which adds a certain gravitas, if you know what I mean.

And, verily, those tortures said to be
In Acheron, the deep, they all are ours
Here in this life. No Tantalus, benumbed
With baseless terror, as the fables tell,
Fears the huge boulder hanging in the air:
But, rather, in life an empty dread of Gods
Urges mortality, and each one fears
Such fall of fortune as may chance to him.

It’s far from a perfect book — when it comes to sexuality, in particular, Lucretius stumbles a bit. But I’ll take it over any of the Spiritual Menu offerings, any day.

Shall we take up a collection to leave copies of Lucretius in hotel rooms around the world?

PZ Myers has gone and gotten himself embroiled in another one of those imbroglios. For those of you who don’t trouble to read any other blogs, the story began with the report of a student in Florida who smuggled a Communion wafer — the Body of Christ, to Catholics — out of Mass. This led to something of an overreaction on the part of some local believers, who referred to the stunt as a “hate crime,” and the student even received death threats. (You remember the part of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says “Blessed are those who exterminate those who insult Me,” right?)

PZ was roused to indignation by the incident, and wrote a provocative post in which he volunteered to do grievous harm to Communion wafers, if he could just get his hands on any.

Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage … but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I’ll send you my home address.

But the thing that took the whole mess to another level was the intervention of Bill Donohue, whose Catholic League represents the very most lunatic fringe of the Church. Donohue, who specializes in being outraged, contacted the administration at the University of Minnesota, as well as the state legislature. Later deciding that this level of dudgeon wasn’t quite high enough, Donohue soon after upped the ante, prompting a delegate to the Republican National Convention to demand additional security, as the delegates felt physically threatened by PZ and his assembled hordes. (The Republican convention will be held in the Twin Cities, about 150 miles away from PZ’s university in Morris, Minnesota.)

There is a lot of craziness here. People are sending death threats and attacking someone’s employment because of hypothetical (not even actual) violence to a wafer. Even for someone who is a literal believer in transubstantiation, threatening violence against someone who mocks your beliefs doesn’t seem like a very Christian attitude. Donohue and his friends are acting like buffoons, giving free ammunition to people who think that all religious believers are nutjobs. But it gets him on TV, so he’s unlikely to desist.

However.

We should hold our friends to a much higher standards than we hold our adversaries. There is no way in which PZ is comparable to the folks sending him death threats. I completely agree with him on the substantive question — it’s just a cracker. It doesn’t turn into anyone’s body, and there’s nothing different about a “consecrated” wafer than an unconsecrated one — the laws of physics have something to say about that.

But I thought his original post was severely misguided. (more…)

Here is a Q&A interview with me in the LA Times, to which I link only reluctantly, as somehow they managed to take a picture that makes me look like I’m wearing a bad toupee. And a halo! So that’s a mixed bag.

The interview was spurred by the recent Scientific American article on the arrow of time, and most of the questions are pretty straightforward queries about entropy and cosmology. But at the end we veer into matters theological:

Does God exist in a multiverse?

I don’t want to give advice to people about their religious beliefs, but I do think that it’s not smart to bet against the power of science to figure out the natural world. It used to be, a thousand years ago, that if you wanted to explain why the moon moved through the sky, you needed to invoke God.

And then Galileo and Newton came along and realized that there was conservation of momentum, so things tend to keep moving.

Nowadays people say, “Well, you certainly can’t explain the creation of the universe without invoking God,” and I want to say, “Don’t bet against it.”

I’m not really surprised that people bring up God when asking about cosmology; the subjects are related, like it or not. But I really do want to separate out the science from the religion, so in the context of an interview about physics I’m reluctant to talk about the existence of God, and I haven’t really perfected an answer when the subject comes up.

Anyone who reads the blog might be surprised to hear that I don’t want to give people advice about their religious beliefs — I do it all the time! But context is crucial. This is our blog, and we write about whatever we’re interested in, and nobody is forced to read it. Likewise, if I’m invited to speak or write specifically about the subject of religion, I’m happy to be perfectly honest about my views. But in a context where the explicit subject is supposed to be science, I would rather not bring up God at all; not because I’m reluctant to say what I believe, but because it gives a false impression of how scientists actually think about science. God just doesn’t come up in the everyday activities of a working cosmologist.

This was the second recent incident when I was prodded into talking about atheism when I would have liked to have stuck with physics. At my talk in St. Louis in front of the American Astronomical Society, I was introduced by John Huchra, the incoming AAS president. He had stumbled across “Why (Almost All) Cosmologists Are Atheists,” and insisted that I tell everyone why. So I gave a version of the above argument, presumably in an equally clumsy fashion: whether or not you choose to be religious, it’s a bad idea to base your belief on natural theology (reasoning towards God from evidence in the physical universe), as science has a way of swooping in and explaining things that had previously been judged inexplicable by purely natural means.

And I think that’s very true, but I think something stronger as well: that claims about God can be separated into two classes — (1) those that are meaningless, and (2) those that can be judged by standard criteria for evaluating scientific claims, and come up wanting. But it’s an argument I just don’t want to force on an audience that came for some science. After all, there are plenty of claims that I think are true, but I don’t feel an urgent need to insist on every single one of them in every imaginable venue.

For example: with the acquisition of a reliable low-post presence in the form of Elton Brand, the Sixers will be challenging for the Eastern Conference title this year and for the foreseeable future. Undoubtedly true, and an important fact about the universe that everyone should really appreciate, but not something I’ll be bringing up at my next physics seminar.

The struggle to definitively prove or disprove the existence of atheists has puzzled philosophers for centuries. Some have proposed the cosmological argument — “many cosmologists seem to be atheists” — while others have fallen back on the argument from design — “without atheists, who would believers have to argue against?”

But the Catholic Encyclopedia seems unconvinced by these arguments:

The most trenchant form which atheism could take would be the positive and dogmatic denial existence of any spiritual and extra-mundane First Cause. This is sometimes known as dogmatic, or positive theoretic, atheism; though it may be doubted whether such a system has ever been, or could ever possibly be seriously maintained. Certainly Bacon and Dr. Arnold voice the common judgment of thinking men when they express a doubt as to the existence of an atheist belonging to such a school. Still, there are certain advanced phases of materialistic philosophy that, perhaps, should rightly be included under this head. Materialism, which professes to find in matter its own cause and explanation, may go farther, and positively exclude the existence of any spiritual cause. That such a dogmatic assertion is both unreasonable and illogical needs no demonstration, for it is an inference not warranted by the facts nor justified by the laws of thought.

You have to admire the confidence — the fact that “dogmatic atheism” is “both unreasonable and illogical needs no demonstration,” and let’s leave it at that. It’s a little bit different from the tack they take in another entry:

Formal dogmatic Atheism is self-refuting, and has never de facto won the reasoned assent of any considerable number of men.

The Encyclopedia does not dirty its hands by explaining the nature of this self-refutation, any more than it explained the previously-noted unreasonability and illogic. I like it! It’s kind of like arguing on the internet.