Biblical deconstruction I: In exordium

Here begins a new series on the Bible. One might ask: if I don’t follow or believe in the Bible, why would I do this? Well, for the same reason others have devoted much time and effort to debunking religion for hundreds of years. Because it is still so pervasive and influential, even here in modern America, in fact, especially in modern America. The Bible, as much and probably more so than the Koran (since the Bible is older), has been the central cause of more human suffering and misery than I care to contemplate. God himself, if he existed, would be on the hook for at least 2.476 million people, not counting the flood, first-born Egyptians killed, etc. Thousands of his followers have millions more on their hands, from the Crusades, to Native Americans, to Africans dying from not having access to condoms (thanks to the Catholic church), to the Salem Witch Trials, to … it goes on.

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Fight over science education bill in Louisiana

Thanks to Robert Luhn, with the National Center for Science Education, for passing along this news piece about high school student Zack Kopplin’s efforts to help repeal the Louisiana Science Education Act, which allows teachers to use

supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner, as permitted by the city, parish, or other local public school board.

The bill, which was supported and signed by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal with the additional support, as this story notes, of some religious outfits, most notably, the Discovery Institute, an intelligent design advocate. According to the article:

Lining up to promote the bill were a coalition of religious organizations and Seattle’s pro-Intelligent Design think tank, the Discovery Institute. According to the Louisiana Science Coalition, Discovery fellows helped write the bill and arranged for testimony in its favor in the legislature. The bill itself plays directly into Discovery’s strategy, freeing local schools to “use supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner.”

Opponents of the bill, like Kopplin and LSU science professor Kevin Carman, say the bill leaves open the possibility that anti-evolution materials could be taught in the classroom. A portion of the bill’s text says that

This Section shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion

Nonetheless, the Discovery Institute’s involvement in the bill suggests highly that Louisiana’s pro-creationism base, indeed, wants to try to slip intelligent design into the classroom where it doesn’t belong.

The bill also says school board officials seek to

create and foster an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.

The problem with this part is that there is no need to have any “objective discussion” that may throw evolution into a questionable light just because it’s a scientific theory. Scientific theories are very different than other definitions of the word “theory.” There is no discussion within the scientific community about the validity of evolution being the engine by which complex and diversified life formed on this planet. Evolution is on as firm scientific footing as gravity. So much so that if the ID crowd wants to throw evolution into question, it must also be willing to question gravity as well since both are technically scientific theories.

As Carman said in the following video,

Evolution is an integral to the understanding of biology as atoms are to the understanding of chemistry.

And here is Carman’s recent speech:

More battles over textbook curriculum

Article first published as More battles over textbook curriculum on Blogcritics.

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In step with the Texas Board of Education’s attempts — and successes — in seeking to alter educational curriculum to give materials a more conservative bent, the state of Florida recently approved to utilize a marine science textbook that included a section that opponents say contains the language of creationism and intelligent design.

Life on an Ocean Planet

The textbook, “Life on an Ocean Planet,” was either approved for use as a whole or it was only later voted that the sidebar section containing the inaccurate and specious arguments be redacted. This article from the St. Petersburg Times quotes a Florida Department of Education spokeswoman as saying the book was adopted with the provision in place to remove the two pages in question. But according to a statement from the Florida Citizens for Science,

Information we have about the committee vote indicates that they voted to approve the textbook overall, and then a second vote was called for to remove the sidebar. That second vote failed but a compromise was reached to ‘fix’ the sidebar. … Further muddying of the waters comes from there being two versions of the textbook: an electronic one on CD and a print one. It’s unclear whether the votes pertain to both versions or just one since it looks like the committee only reviewed the electronic one.

So, what’s in this two page sidebar? The section called “Questions About the Origin and Development of Life” gives lip service to the idea that some questions — for instance, that life might have developed by unnatural forces before evolution got going — deserve our attention. Florida Citizens for Science Jonathan Smith pulled out a few problem areas he found within the section, which were submitted to the St. Petersburg Times’ education blog:

Skeptics [Read: creationists or anti-evolutionists] observe that general evolution doesn’t adequately explain how a complex structure, such as the eye, could come to exist through infrequent random mutations. Such structures consist of multiple integrated components … a subcomponent has no survival advantage by itself, it would not be passed along by natural selection. There’s no survival advantage unless all the components exist at once, yet no random mutation process would produce all the required components at the same time. Transitional forms for some specialized characteristics would be expected to have a survival disadvantage, say skeptics.  An example is the bat wing ….

Smith then commented: “This is a standard creationist trope, well known to be wrong.”

Yes, wrong being the key word.

And about the eye and bat wing: Richard Dawkins has already answered the argument from irreducible complexity, and even Darwin, speaking from the mid-19th century, astoundingly anticipated that some folks would attempt to dash his theory of evolution by bringing to bear the argument that various organs, like the eye, could not possibly be irreducibly complex.

But in The God Delusion and The Blind Watchmaker Dawkins explained the usefulness of partial eyesight or partial wing matter. For, as he argues, surely part of a wing is better than no wing. At least with part of a wing, a bat can temper the blow of a fall from the sky. So as with the eye. My eyesight, for instance, is quite poor, but without the invention of glasses, I would prefer my current level of poor sight to outright blindness. Further, our eyes can function on less complex levels without some of their parts, as in the case of cataract surgery and the removal of the natural lens. So it is with bat wings. Take away a bone or two, and the bat may not be able to fly perfectly, but again, the wing wouldn’t cease to be completely useless. Thus, arguments from irreducible complexity break down, and the Florida board of education was quite right to redact this section from the marine science textbook because it gives some measure of weight to theories that have long since been dealt with and discarded.

For further reading, here’s an interesting look at Darwin came to scientifically develop his theory of evolution by natural selection and his personal journey to accept it in light of what he formerly believed about God and creation.

Our not-so-unique planet

I was just watching an episode of “The Universe,” a History Channel series in which the narrator asked:

How common might Earth-like planets be in the universe? Even if only 1 percent of all stars were circled by a planet like our own, that would still mean there are billions of other earths waiting to be discovered.

And according to this article and Alan Boss, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution and author of the book “The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets,” he indicated:

There may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy.

And to quote the article:

Boss said that if any of the billions of Earth-like worlds he believes exist in the Milky Way have liquid water, they are likely to be home to some type of life.

“Now that’s not saying that they’re all going to be crawling with intelligent human beings or even dinosaurs,” he said.

“But I would suspect that the great majority of them at least will have some sort of primitive life, like bacteria or some of the multicellular creatures that populated our Earth for the first 3 billion years of its existence.”

So, notwithstanding basic organisms, what about intelligent life?

Other scientists are taking another approach: an analysis that suggests there could be hundreds, even thousands, of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland constructed a computer model to create a synthetic galaxy with billions of stars and planets. They then studied how life evolved under various conditions in this virtual world, using a supercomputer to crunch the results.

In a paper published recently in the International Journal of Astrobiology, the researchers concluded that based on what they saw, at least 361 intelligent civilizations have emerged in the Milky Way since its creation, and as many as 38,000 may have formed.

That’s just in our own galaxy. The picture to the right shows 10,000 more.

As I’ve said before, the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe would seemingly create huge problems for young Earth (Actually, astronomy and astrophysics has already disproved young Earth theories) creationist theories about how life began here and, indeed, about existence in general, since the book of Genesis seems to indicate that there is only one planet on which life exists and its at the center of, well, everything that’s relevant.

The following blogger and other apologists suggest that the discovery of life on other planets would not shoot holes in the creation theory.

The discovery of alien life would not disprove Christianity anymore than it would prove evolution. In his book Darwin’s Black Box, Bio-Chemist Michael Behe astutely pointed out that understanding how something works or exists now does not prove we know how that came to be the way it is. Applying that to this discussion, it is reasonable to say that even if evolutionary scientists announce the presence of alien life in a far corner of the cosmos, this does not prove that evolution was the means by which it got there. God could just as well have supernaturally created that life apart from earth according to his divine will. So Christians need not fear any negative implications regarding how their Creationist position might be affected by the discovery of alien life. They must simply be ready to say that God can choose to create life where he chooses. — astuteness.wordpress.com

I should note that this writer cites Michael Behe, whose own theories on irreducible complexity have long since been debunked by Richard Dawkins and others and even by his own university.

This apologist site attempts to clarify matters for us, suggesting that any extraterrestrial life that exists cannot be intelligent because the only intelligent beings God created were animals, man and angels (Of course, since the word “animals” includes both multi-and single-celled organisms, they may or may not be “intelligent.”) But looking outside of pages written in Bronze-age Palestine, what are the chances that no intelligent life exists anywhere in the universe? Given the number of possible galaxies (not to mention the number of possible Earths inside those galaxies), the chances would be infinitesimally small. And this question only assumes that intelligent life needs Earth-like conditions to exist. In fact, no rule says that intelligent life absolutely needs human conditions (oxygen, ideal climates) to exist. Who’s to say that a civilization can’t exist given a totally different set of parameters? So, take “infinitesimal” and multiply it by two, and that’s more like the actual chance that intelligent life doesn’t exist somewhere else.

As per its biblical charter, the same site says that the future of the universe is “forever linked to God’s timetable for mankind and the Earth.” And what bearing does this plan have on any potential life elsewhere?

If God had created intelligent life on other worlds, it is hard to imagine that their lives would be calibrated by the failures of Earth’s inhabitants. It seems unlikely and unfair that their distant planets would be destroyed by God because of His plan for Earth [If so, I guess that would make them doomed to eternal fire by proxy]. The implication of Scripture is that there are no other intelligent beings besides man, animals, and the angels.

It’s also hard to imagine that adults in Africa, who may have never heard about Jesus, will go to hell simply because of their ignorance of scripture, so we don’t have to look beyond our atmosphere for instances of unfairness. But these types of arguments are really the only way apologists can right the ship: to subvert what we know about the universe and to claim that any theory (evolution, the big bang, gravity!, etc.) doesn’t square with scripture and should, thus, be discarded. And when things don’t make any sense at all (For instance, the problem of extreme suffering and/or the fall of man under the auspices of an omnibenevolent, omnipotent god who knew about the whole tragic scenario before he set it in motion)? Just tout our lowly ignorance versus God’s omniscience.