Whatever Happened to Christian Environmentalism?

It still exists. Good luck finding it.

Christian environmentalists today are largely obscured by the loud cacophany of Christian Republicans who worship Donald Trump and his overt hatred of the Earth. Here are a couple of Christian environmentalists who stand out against the polluted tide of toxic religion:

Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners, who has stood for decades as a voice of Christian conscience.

Katharine Hayhoe is a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, who believes that Christians should take global climate change very very seriously.

 

There are others, but you won’t hear about them. If you do a Google search for Christian environmentalism, one of the first hits on your search will be an article from the Christian Broadcasting Network, Pat Robertson’s platform, one of the major sites for the extreme fundamentalist Republican gospel. They report on one Christian pastor who holds services and wants to “defend God’s creation.” They do not have any arguments to show that he is wrong. But they dismiss all Christian environmentalism with this statement at the end: “the new wave of Christian environmentalists are "God's Greens...waging holy war on behalf of an embattled creation. But, critics ask, is this a truly divine cause -- or the devil's work?” By critics, they mean themselves. A 2017 article in Christianity Today gave loyalty to Donald Trump as one of the main reasons that evangelical Christians have stopped supporting environmentalism. The Cornwall Alliance, a group that sounds British, is actually an American evangelical Christian anti-environmental organization; they call environmentalism “the Green Dragon” which must be slayed.

Things have changed a lot since Loren Wilkinson wrote Earthkeeping in the 90’s. I reviewed it back when it first came out, for the American Scientific Affiliation. I have recently looked at the book again. Wilkinson recently retired from the Faculty of Regent College, a Christian institution in Vancouver, an institute and a city that American evangelicals consider ungodly.

Wilkinson said some things that would get him lynched by American evangelicals today. Good thing that he is Canadian, I guess. Among his assertions were the following:

• We need to have fewer kids, because of the Earth’s population explosion. Evangelicals, in contrast, often champion the Quiverfull approach: God said in Genesis 1 that Adam and Eve should have as many kids as possible and “fill the Earth.” They ignore the fact that we have already filled the Earth and that it is now time for us to do something else. God also told Adam and Eve to make clothes for themselves out of animal skins. Does this commandment also apply to us?
• Christians should honor God’s gift of the Earth by honoring the minerals of the Earth, by recycling them, giving them new life, instead of wasting them. God’s natural world recycles everything; so should we.
• If in fact Earth operates as an integrated system (the Gaia Hypothesis of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis), Wilkinson considered this to be evidence of God. In contrast, most evangelicals consider Gaia to be paganism.
• The Creator gave independence to creation, and it therefore has its own rights. God never said or intended for the creation to be raw materials for humans to plunder. The Fall of Adam (which evangelicals blame on Eve, and on women in general) created a division between each person and all others, humankind and the Earth, and even divisions within each person—a division Jesus wants to heal.
• Noah’s Ark was a very clear example of God wanting to save at least part of his creation from the destruction of the Flood which God intended as a punishment for human sin. God might have said, I don’t care, Noah, if you don’t like all these species; I command you to give them refuge. The Ark was in complete contradiction to the Tower of Babel, which was the symbol of mankind glorifying itself.
• Humans have dominion over the Earth, but Biblical dominion means for the dominator to bless the dominated. How can this be? A good king is supposed to bless the people, just as Jesus, whom Christians consider to be the ruler of the universe, blesses us. He even went so far as to say that humans should be saviors of Creation just as Jesus is the savior of humans.
• We humans are meant to be stewards of creation, not conquerors. There is no single way that a steward should take care of whatever is in his or her charge. For example, to be stewards of creation does not mean that every bit of natural landscape must be kept intact. Human existence would then be impossible. But it does mean that humans should try as hard as possible to take care of the Creation, and think of creative ways of doing so. In contrast, evangelicals are by and large satisfied with us destroying the Creation.
• Wilkinson said that Christians must study ecology so that they know how to be effective stewards. Not only that, but Christians should participate in protests to save the Earth.

One can always hope that Christians such as Wallis and Hayhoe can turn the tide within the evangelical community. But I, for one, am not anticipating that this will happen soon, within my lifetime, or ever.

George Washington Carver and the Scientific Method

This essay and the previous also appeared in my science blog [http://honest-ab.blogspot.com/]. However, I will have a third essay about George Washington Carver that is unique to this blog.

I have recently posted a video on this topic.

At the height of his fame, it was nearly impossible to criticize George Washington Carver (see previous essay). He was famous for his personal dedication to using science as a way of helping non-scientists to improve their economic conditions and open their eyes to the beauty and wonder of the world. During the Depression, when his fame was worldwide (even Mahatma Gandhi corresponded with him), people wanted to hear a story of a man—a really and truly good man—who rose up from slavery to fame.

But he did receive some criticism. When I first read about this, I was shocked, but I then understood the reason for it. An editorial in the New York Times claimed that Carver did not follow the standards of good scientific research. This viewpoint was quickly shouted down by Carver’s admirers. But the critic had a point.

Nearly every active scientist in the world is part of a community, in which each scientist builds on the work of others, so that no scientist has to labor in isolation to discover new truths. For at least a century before Carver, all scientists cited, sometimes at great length, the work of those who came before. The reason was quite practical: by citing the work of others, no scientist has to bear the complete burden of credibility. A scientist could show that, because his work agreed with the known facts of science, it was likely to be true. Even revolutionary scientific insights had to do this. Darwin’s Origin of Species had extensive citations, showing that his truly new insight into science agreed with the known facts of geology and biology.

Carver practiced a form of theistic science that is almost unknown today. He would go into his laboratory (which he called “God’s Little Workshop”) and open his mind to a contemplation of God. He felt that God led him to discover truths that God had secretly put into the natural world and that it was Carver’s privilege to reveal. While many scientists today have this feeling, with Carver it was so strong that he did not read the work of other scientists—he considered his discoveries to come directly from God—nor did he even take notes on his work. Not surprisingly, when any company showed interest in one of Carver’s inventions, they could not invest in it because Carver had no written records that the invention actually worked. And when Carver died, no one knew how to make them. His knowledge died with him.

Incidentally, Carver’s theistic approach also greatly contrasted with that of modern “creation scientists.” Carver entered his laboratory with an open mind for discovery, while modern creationists do their work (usually just recycling the work of other scientists) with the express purpose of demonstrating a specific religious doctrine, such as proving that the universe is young or that evolution is impossible.

I admit this characteristic of Carver’s scientific work. I do not believe that scientists, in general, should work this way. But I revere Carver anyway, for other reasons explained above and in the previous essay. The scientific community is large and diverse enough to include unconventional geniuses like George Washington Carver.

John Muir's Spirituality

This is a short entry to bring back to our remembrance the kind of spirituality that John Muir had. His spirituality would not be well-defined enough to satisfy modern creationists. Yet these same creationists seem to care nothing at all about what they consider to be God’s creation. It is the people that these creationists hate that truly love the Creation.

I quote from Wikipedia: In a letter to his fond friend Emily Pelton, dated 23 May 1865, he wrote, “I never tried to abandon creeds or code of civilization; they went away of their own accord... without leaving any consciousness of loss.” Elsewhere in his writings, he described the conventional image of a Creator, “as purely a manufactured article as any puppet of a half-penny theater.”

Muir remained, though, a deeply religious man, writing, “We all flow from one fountain—Soul. All are expressions of one love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.”

The Walk of Faith

One day recently, during my winter break, I went hiking on Turkey Mountain. As you may have read in previous essays, it is not a mountain and it has no turkeys. But it does have a lot of natural history: it is a palimpsest of geological time, ecological time, and human effects. And often when I go walking on the trails, I receive many insights that my perception of the natural world stimulates within my mind. Or, if you prefer, insights from God. I cannot know which of these two sources of insight is true.

But on this day, I had very little such experience. I did get a couple of ideas, which I duly noted in my notepad (on my cell phone). But the hike was mostly just annoying. Oh, it was a couple of hours of good exercise, which is never a bad thing. But it was mostly a time of being annoyed at the constant stream of loud airplanes overhead—not commercial planes, but pilots who get their enjoyment by flying over other people’s houses and creating noise—and other hikers who let their dogs run loose, and smelling the sewer plant. The most annoying part was when I got a phone call from the credit union telling me that they had made a mistake and I had to drive back in to their office to sign some more papers. I finished my hike well exercised, and appreciative of the beauty of winter branches, and even of buds swelling in anticipation of spring, but not spiritually renewed.

But it was a walk of faith. Sometimes when I have taken this hike, I have received numerous important insights into what I needed to write. This is faith: I believe that, whenever I hike on these trails, I might receive important insights. It doesn’t always happen, but I am always ready for it to happen. Actually, this insight was one that I received when on the otherwise annoying hike, so I guess it was worth it.

A Creation Story from the Yoruba People

When I teach evolution, I have a brief section about evolution and creation. It is a science course and I do not spend a lot of time on this. One of the things I do in this course is to introduce the students to versions of creation from outside Christianity, such as the new Native American creationism espoused by Vine Deloria Jr. and the Muslim creationism of Harun Yahya. But this semester, I had two students from Africa. One of them told me about the creation stories of her people, the Yoruba. I would like to present the account that she gave to us, the ÌTÀN ÌSÈDÁ ÃYÉ.

“In the beginning of the world, there was nothing except a ball of water. And Olódùmãrè (the Almighty) sent Õdùduwà to Òbìrí Ãyé (the round Earth) to plant the earth. Õdùduwà left heaven with a horn full of sand and a chicken. He poured (planted) the sand on the surface of water, so that he can step on a ground. He then placed the chicken on the ground. The chicken helped spread the sand all over. The areas where the chicken was able to reach are the land we have today. Õdùduwà saw to it that the surface of the earth was covered part land and water so that there is a form. And several years passed by………………..

“Meanwhile, Sokoti (the blacksmith of heaven) has been assigned to mold every form of creature he could imagine to fill the formed earth. Sokoti used his artistic ability to mold different kinds of creatures with different colors and skins. Unfortunately, Sokoti was a drunkard. This made it hard for him to get his job done right. One day in his drunken state, he molded different forms of creatures and sent them to earth without a quality test of assurance. These creatures were the monkeys, baboons, chimps, and gorillas.

“On one of his sober days, Sokoti framed out a fine creature and made different forms it in various colors and diversity with sand, clay, and mud. Some he fashioned them with large breasts, and left some bare. He created them such that they were like a puzzle that could fit into each other. These creatures were the most perfect of all he had made. He sent them into the world and they were called Eniyan (humans).

“After few years, there was conflict between the apes and humans. They couldn’t live together in harmony. The apes were rejected and ignored by humans. They decided to end this conflict by consulting with each other. They chose a representative who will go to Olódùmãrè on their behalf. Olódùmãrè gave instructions that they should congregate at the mountain in three days time, where he would prepare a potion of oil in a giant basin. They are to rub their skin with this oil to become human. The apes were so excited that they drank, danced and forgot what day it was. By the time they remembered, the oil had almost dried up. They managed to rub their faces, hands, and feet with the remaining oil but it wasn’t enough. Some rub their butts and chests against the basin, but still not enough. This is why apes have faces, hands, butts, and feet that are almost bare.”

This story illustrates two things. First, it shows that there are many creation accounts. Christian creationists assume that disproving evolution would prove their version of Christianity. Second, it shows how a supposed harmony between creation and evolution can be forced, no matter what kind of creationism it is. It can be Christian creationism, as when generations of religious scientists have tried to harmonize Genesis and geology. But it can also be done with the Yoruba account. As my student explained, the primordial Earth was mostly water (the continents arose later); this is the Òbìrí Ãyé of the legend. The adiye chicken could have been a tyrannosaur or an archaeopteryx. It took time for Sokoti to perfect the design of the human, just as it took evolution a long time to produce us. Sokoti used different materials, such as sand or clay, of different textures and colors to produce different species, and different human races, just as evolution has produced diversity. And Sokoti, like sexual selection, produced genders of humans who fit together like puzzle pieces. See? The Yoruba legend fits together with modern science!

Attempts to reconcile religion and science, from Augustine to Francis Collins in the western world, and all over the world, is an exercise in creativity rather than a discovery of truth.

I appreciate the contribution that my student made to our class, and I think no one in the class (except the other Yoruba student) had experienced anything like it.

Bible Faith and Bible Understanding

This fall, I administered a questionnaire (as per guidelines of our Institutional Research Board) to my classes. I have tabulated the results from my evolution class. I work at a small regional university in the jewel at the middle of the buckle of the Bible belt. This year, I kept two groups of questionnaires separate: those who accept the Bible as a, or the, holy book, and those who do not.

You probably expect that the class had a lot of creationists. But, when you think about it, you realize that this is unlikely to be the case, since the class is an elective and creationists tend to stay away from it. Even within this class, I have noticed that one student who expressed a distaste for the subject (maybe he thought it would be an easy A) signs his name on the attendance sheet and leaves (and seems to think I don’t notice). Not only does this suggest that he does not want to deal with the evidence, but he is being dishonest by taking credit for attending a class when he was not there after the first minute. On the other hand, I have had some very smart and honest creationists in the class over the years. Still, one should not be surprised at the makeup of the class. Of those who accept the Bible as holy, about 75 percent are theistic evolutionists (who believe God created the world through the process of evolution). Only one respondent identified him or herself as a young-earth creationist. Of the non-believers, three of five said evolution was responsible for the world being the way it is. My class is hardly polarized at the extremes; most people are somewhere in the middle.

First, those who consider the Bible to be a, or the, holy text. Eighty-two percent said that they know a lot about the Bible, and 45 percent said they had read the entire Bible at least once. Sounds like these people should know their religion, at least. However, they did not do so well on the general questions about Biblical knowledge. These questions included:

• Who David was, or who Abram was
• How many tribes of Israel there were, or how many plagues of Egypt there were
• About how many books are in the Bible
• That the prophets of the Old Testament called for the rich to stop oppressing the poor
• That the Old Testament prohibits eating shellfish

I also included, in the general Bible questions, a couple that should have been very easy to answer: about whether the Catholic and Protestant Bibles have the same books, and whether the Bible was originally written in English. This last questions sounds really strange, and in fact all respondents knew the Bible was not originally written in English, but there is a church right outside of town that considers the King James Bible to be the inspired Bible—not the earlier versions.

I also asked some specific questions that are very interesting and relevant to modern issues.

• The Old Testament commands agricultural land be left fallow every seven years, a practice known as the “Sabbath of the fields.” That is, the Old Testament commands sustainable agriculture.
• The Old Testament commands that all debts be forgiven and all land returned to its original owners every fifty years (a practice known as Jubilee). If this command were really carried out, it would mean the collapse of the capitalist system. Can you imagine Bank of America doing this? Not only will they not forgive debts, but they make sneaky policy changes to trick customers into having even more debt. Thanks, Moses.
• The Old Testament permitted slavery and it actually says, regarding the slave-owner, “The slave is his money.” Guess what: the Confederates (who still fly their flags proudly in Oklahoma) believed that black slaves were not people, but property. Thanks, Abraham Lincoln.
• Most religious people consider abortion to be murder. Inconveniently, the Old Testament says that if a man injures a woman such that it causes a miscarriage, this is not treated as a murder but as what we would call a misdemeanor, requiring monetary restitution.
• The Old Testament specifies certain rights that foreigners residing within Israel have; it does not prohibit foreigners from living in Israel.

Second, the students who do not consider the Bible to be a holy text. Two-thirds of them said they know a lot about the Bible. And 38 percent of them said they had read the Bible at least once. Some of these, at least, were raised in a religious tradition and then left it.

This chart summarizes the differences between the Bible-believers and the non-believers, first in terms of general knowledge then knowledge of the specific questions.

Percent correct responses
Topic	Believers	Non-believers
General knowledge: mean	60%	61%
General knowledge: range	31-87%	40-88%
Sabbath of the fields	83%	100%
Jubilee	27%	56%
OT permits slavery	58%	67%
Killing a fetus is not murder	36%	57%
OT does not prohibit aliens	36%	28%

These results indicate that (if these students represent the general population) the non-believers know just as much about the Bible as the believers do. In fact, when it comes to Bible passages that are relevant to modern issues such as agriculture, economics, slavery, abortion, and refugees, the non-believers know more about the Bible than the believers do, sometimes by a wide margin.

The tentative conclusions I draw are the following:

• Believers believe the Bible but are no more likely to know what it says than non-believers, in terms of general Biblical knowledge that is not directly relevant to modern issues.
• Believers know less than non-believers about those parts of the Bible that address modern issues. This may be because their preachers actually feed them misinformation, proclaiming that the Bible champions capitalism and prohibits aliens from living in God’s land (which many of them consider to be the United States). That is, I suspect that preachers have actively led their followers to believe more wrong things about the Bible than do non-believers. Conversely, non-believers are more likely to know things about the Bible that are embarrassing to modern believers.

My main recommendation, from these responses, is this. If you base your political and scientific opinions upon the Bible, you should read it first.

I also posted this essay on my evolution blog.

What is Faith?

Okay, so this doesn’t sound like a science essay. But I assure you it does fit in with science. I want to share a story that I heard on Krista Tippett’s On Being, an NPR show, on September 24 of this year. I retell this story from memory, since I do not have time to listen to the whole podcast over again, but you can hear it atthis link.

Dr. Guy Consolmagno is the current Vatican Astronomer, at the Vatican Observatory, and Dr. George Coyne is the recently retired astronomer. Now, whoa. You may not have known there even was a Vatican Observatory. Wasn’t this the church that condemned Galileo for believing the Earth was not the center of the universe, and burned Giordano Bruno at the stake? Well, it took a while for the Vatican to catch up with science, but in 1891 Pope Leo XIII founded the Catholic church decided to pursue it.

Dr. Coyne told a story of speaking at a convention of astronomers one time. He was wearing his priestly vestments. Then someone in the audience asked him, “Father,” not Dr. Coyne or George, “What does it feel like to go to work each day with the realization that you already know all of the answers?” Coyne’s response was swift and sure. He tore off his robe (I assume he was clothed underneath, and not in Mormon magical undergarments) and let everyone know that faith is not about knowing the answers, but about the assurance that the universe can be, as each day and year passes, better and better understood: our efforts at research will be rewarded. Even if we never understand it fully.

That is a way of describing the fundamental faith that all scientists have. And it is a leap of faith: there is no logical reason to believe that our brains, which evolved to maximize the fitness of genes and individuals, should have any way of understanding the universe. We evolved intelligence because it gave us a better ability to survive and to form associations with or to dominate other human beings. It evolved as a tool for evolutionary success, in the pursuit of which rationalization was just as good as reason. What our minds tell us need not be true, except in the matter of telling us where the edge of the cliff, or the next meal, is; it can be total fantasy, and natural selection favors it, so long as it allows us to form associations and to dominate others. I consider it an astonishing thing that our brains just happen to be suited for understanding the universe also. Even though very few people can actually understand dark energy or superstrings, at least we can understand the reasoning.

Keep the faith, brethren. We can understand the world, despite the political and religious and economic forces of hatred and unreason that try to keep us from doing so.

I also posed this essay on my evolution blog.

Intelligent Design, as Explained by Sock Puppets

The 104th  Annual Technical Meeting of the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences has just concluded, and with it my term as president. I am now the Immediate Past President. The president for 2016-2017 will be Terry Conley, a dean at Cameron University. The new president elect, who will become president in 2018, is Adam Ryburn of Oklahoma City University. During Adam’s term I will devolve from being Immediate Past President to being Le Président Ancienne, and then after that I will be Le Président Vieux.

The OAS Technical meetings are an excellent venue to connect with our fellow scientists from around the state. It is also an excellent place for students to present their first research results in a non-threatening environment. Our passion at OAS is to nurture an ongoing culture of science in Oklahoma.

But I need to comment on a student presentation in the Science Communication and Education section. The two students, from Oral Roberts University, gave a presentation that was clearly not research. It was a scripted presentation that was very similar to one given by the science dean at ORU (who was a co-author on this presentation) back in 2012, only this time it was incomprehensible. Perhaps this was because it was redacted from a longer version. But unlike the dean’s presentation back in 2012, this presentation had sock puppets. Well, a PowerPoint slide of sock puppets.

The sock puppets told us that there is an “invisible hand” behind everything in the universe. Evidence? None was presented. Perhaps the sock puppets, and their friend the Pastafarian Flying Spaghetti Monster, are all the evidence you need.

Next, without visible connection to what had come before, the presenters claimed that engineering can come to the rescue to help solve the alienation between social sciences and natural sciences (and they showed a cartoon to this effect). Once again, they did not explain how engineering was supposed to do this.

Then they claimed that the cosmos was obviously designed. Evidence? The evidence was that water says “drink me” and woman says “love me.” (No, really. You can’t make something like this up.) So it was obvious to the presenters, and they assumed it should also be to us, that the purpose of water is to be drunk by humans and maybe other animals. Presumably evaporative cooling of animals and leaves, and erosion of sediments, are not part of water’s purpose. And, of course, the purpose of a woman is to be loved. Does this refer to carnal love by a man? If they were referring to spiritual love, they would have said people say “love me.” But the statement (which they were quoting from a book I had never heard of) gave it a specific gender. Maybe this is not what they meant, but they (and whoever wrote the script) were incredibly naïve to think that their listeners would not make the inference of carnal love (presumably within holy matrimony).

Then they explained the part of the presentation that, in the interest of time, they had to omit. In their presentations to audiences, they present the evidence for evolution and the evidence against evolution and allow the listeners to choose. As anyone who has read this blog or any legitimate books about “creation vs. evolution” must know, it is dishonest to polarize all viewpoints into these two extremes.

But it gets worse. If the presenters were deeply convinced that evolution is utterly evil and creationism utterly true, as appeared to be the case, then they could not possibly present an unbiased assessment of evolution, any more than an atheist can present an unbiased assessment of religion. I could only imagine that they presented something such as “Evolution says that you get ahead by using and subduing other people, survival of the fittest, red in tooth and claw, while creation says you should love other people.” What is a person to think when offered such a choice? If that really is what evolution is about, even I would reject it. (Interestingly, this was merely hours before the Paris terrorist attacks, for which ISIS took credit, and carried out in the name of religion.) I brought this point up during the brief question/answer period afterward. (There was no time for questions, but I was the next presenter and gave up some of my own time for it.) All the students said was that they really tried to present a fair version of evolution.

The presenters also indicated, as nearly as I could understand, that the funding they had received required some kind of assessment at how effective their presentation had been. They presented the results of audience feedback from previous presentations. The audiences had overwhelmingly liked their presentation.

Now, suppose that they had, at this time, conducted a survey of their presentation with our group. They did not, but had they done so, they might have gotten a more positive response than they might otherwise have simply because they told us that previous audiences had liked it. This is almost a textbook definition of bias. That would be like me telling my students, before semester evaluations, “All my other classes for the last 17 years have loved me,” implying, “so if you don’t there’s something wrong with you.” (I don’t do this.)

I asked the presenters who the audiences were who gave them their positive evaluations. They claimed they had given presentations at two previous scientific meetings, and that the other presentations had been to church groups and Bible studies. To me this indicated that the vast majority of their sample was from carefully-selected religious groups. I very much doubt they gave their presentation to any Unitarians, or to mainline denominations (including the twenty-first century Catholic Church) which have, for the most part, made their peace with evolutionary science. If they separated out their presentations to science meetings from the others, would the results have been so positive? Well, I can tell you that if I were them and the feedback from scientists had been positive, I would certainly have said so, and with pride. I doubt that they held this information back due to modesty.

This project was sponsored by Biologos, which claims to defend an evolutionary interpretation of God’s creation. Unlike organizations such as the Discovery Institute, Biologos does not appear to be simply a front for Intelligent Design, which is by no stretch of the imagination evolutionary. ID (as it is known) is top-down, in which a Great Engineer in the Sky designed the world, while evolution is bottom-up. However, Oral Roberts University apparently convinced Biologos to give them a grant in order to promote ID. I very much doubt that Biologos likes the creation/evolution polarization that ORU appears to promote. This presentation would have been better if it were merely old-fashioned ID. As it was, it was merely confusing.

My presentation, following theirs, was about Lee Smolin’s idea of fecund universes, that is, the natural selection of universes. I have written about this previously. I think it offers a truly clever example of natural selection at work on things other than organisms. Ideas, music, technologies (in general, memes) evolve, and do so by natural selection. Computer programmers often use evolutionary computing to design things from the bottom up rather than the top down. Why not universes? The difference between my presentation and the one preceding it was that I admitted there was no evidence, since this universe (sample size = 1) is the only one we know about. The ID proponents never admit that there is no evidence for their beliefs.

OAS encourages student research. But the ORU presentation sounded very much like student indoctrination, the recital of a script that sounded suspiciously like what the ORU science dean had presented before, than research.

I posted this essay also on my evolution blog.

The Armageddon Mindset

According to a 1999 poll, which is the most recent data I could find, 40 percent of Americans believe the world will end in a battle of Armageddon. About 45 percent of these people believe that the Antichrist is on the Earth now, and that Armageddon will happen during their lifetimes. This means that 18 percent of Americans believe that there is no future to the world past the end of their lifetimes. This is a large enough segment of the population that it is politically important, especially within the Republican Party.

Two things are impossible if you really believe that the world is ending soon. First, it is impossible to take any serious action about any environmental issue. We environmentalists can explain all day long that environmental destruction, particularly global warming, will prove disastrous to people in the future—in fact, in the near future. People who believe there is no future find such concerns literally incomprehensible. They may, in principle, assert that God is the Creator and we have no right to destroy the creation, but they simply cannot convince themselves of this, no matter how hard they try.

Second, it is impossible to take any serious action about fiscal responsibility. People with the Armageddon mindset overwhelmingly want the government to spend less money. But the reason is not in order for the government to have a sustainable future—since there will be no future—but in order to not have to pay taxes. Evidence for this is that these people call for unlimited spending on defense, which just might hurry up the Armageddon that they anticipate. They talk about the future of their children—a future they believe will not exist on Earth—and may try hard to believe it, but they cannot convince themselves of this, no matter how hard they try.

The Armageddon mindset is totally incompatible with any kind of scientific thought. This website is about ecology and evolution, about the effects of evolution on humans and the relationship between humans and the global ecosystem. The Armageddon mindset cannot be touched by reason or evidence, or perhaps even by direct experience. The only thing that scientists or scientifically-minded citizens can do is to write off the Armageddon folks and not even try to talk with them. Unfortunately, they are a major political force.

What should thoughtful people do about this, if anything? Please post your responses in the comment box below if your browser shows it; otherwise send comments to abutilongr@gmail.com. I hope you can enlighten me with some uplifting thoughts. This essay will appear soon on my website.

Darwin, Science, and Bias

Scientists take great precautions against bias. Scientists, like all humans, have a tendency to see what they expect to see rather than what is really there. But scientists are very careful to design research and experiments in such a way as to exclude bias. For example, in testing drugs, the patients who receive the placebo (“sugarpill”), which does not contain the drug, are not told that the pill is a placebo, otherwise they would assume it will not work and they will report themselves as still being sick. But scientists go further and make sure the assistants who actually administer the placebo do not know that it is a placebo, lest the attitude of the assistant influence the patient’s attitude as well. The placebo usually has a bitter chemical in it, or even a mild sedative, so that the patient will believe that it is the real drug. A large amount of the design and expense of scientific research is to avoid bias.

Charles Darwin had to deal with bias also. His evolutionary theory gave nature, rather than God, the creative role. It is the ideal theory for someone who wants God out of the picture. Was Darwin such a person? Well, not at first; his wife Emma was a moderate creationist, and Charles was sensitive to her opinions, as you might guess. But after their daughter Annie died at a tragically young age, both Charles and Emma were devastated. This deepened Emma’s dependence upon Christianity but pushed Charles into agnosticism. This was years before Charles wrote the Origin of Species.

So Charles must have been biased against creationism and in favor of a theory that would make God irrelevant. But he worked very, very hard to make sure that his bias did not influence his scientific judgment. He spent years gathering information about the variability of traits in populations, and about natural selection, as well as about fossils, biogeography, and other evidences of evolution. The Origin of Species is full of numerous lines of reasoning, each with its own evidences, which lead to an undeniable conclusion. That is, he spent years amassing evidence that would prevent his bias from influencing his results. This is the mark of a true scientist.

Creationists are just the opposite. They hate evolution, and will grab at any shred of information that they can twist into evidence to support their view. They even bring together so-called evidences that contradict one another. For example, they present information that they claim proves the Flood of Noah, then they present information that they claim shows gaps in the fossil record. But if there was a flood, there could be no order in the fossil record in which gaps might appear!

Charles Darwin is an exemplar of the heroic scientist who disciplines him or herself to pursue the truth even when bias presses upon the scientist from his or her personal experience.

This essay also appeared in my evolution blog.