I apologise: though I sometimes do edit text after publication, this time publication happened by accident. I must have pressed by mistake the appropriate key sequence, and there, suddenly, it was. There are a number of differences between this and the one thus so unexpectedly published to the web!
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Many, if not most, religions claim to be founded on revelation, a concept which harbours so many problems that it is astounding that some people still think it can be used unproblematically. Drive through the countryside anywhere in North America, but especially in the United States, and you are bound to come upon a large billboard containing some minatory word from the Christian scriptures: “The wages of sin is death!”, “Prepare to meet thy God!”, “Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life!”, and others of that ilk. I have never bothered to take pictures of them. They are execrable excrescences and a blot on the landscape, but they reflect an odd tendency that people have of taking texts written by men (and perhaps, very occasionally, women) and investing them with ultimate significance, by supposing that they come from a god or other supernatural source. The Qu’ran is supposed to come from God via the angel Gabriel, or Jibreel, but a more confused pastiche of texts from different identifiable sources would be hard to find. The claim is, of course, spurious, and is based, not on examination of the text or the validation of its source, but on the alleged claim of a man who could not possibly have written it. There is absolutely no reason for thinking that the Qu’ran as we have it (in its various versions and recensions) is the work of a man named Muhammad. Muhammad is as loosely related to the text attributed to him as is Jesus to the works he is supposed to have done, or the words he is imagined to have said.
The question never seems to be asked as to the proof that these words, and just these words, constitute a revelation from God. Richard Harries (now Baron Harries of Pentregarth), former bishop of Oxford (1987-2006), widely reputed to be a liberal theologian, states in his book about “Christianity and Judaism in the Shadow of the Holocaust” (the subtitle), After the Evil, states clearly, and remarkably, that
it is dangerous to talk of history being a continuing source of revelation, if new revelation is meant. [100]
On the other hand, he says, there is no reason not to think
of history as drawing out implications which lie latent in the New Testament. This was certainly what happened in the nineteenth century when Christians began to see that slavery was incompatible with the deeper truths of the New Testament. [Ibid.]
And then he goes on to say that
[s]imilarly in our time Christians have begun to realize that the traditional subjugated status of women is incompatible with a life of equality in Christ. [Ibid.]
However, if this is the case, we have to ask ourselves how we know that this is something latent in the scriptures, and is not being brought to the scriptures based on later understandings of what constitutes equality or compatibility with deeper truths. In what sense can a philo-semitic attitude, or repugnance at the idea of owning human beings, or acceptance of women as fully equal with men, be thought to be a part of revelation, if it takes social and moral change to enable us to recognise these “truths” as latent in scripture, when antisemitism and slavery and misogyny were believed, for thousands of years, to be, not only compatible with, but required by, revelation?
That slavery, to take but one example, was fully compatible with the Christian scriptures is evident from the parables of Jesus, in which slaves make a regular appearance, and the gospel Jesus never once raises a question about their status or the justice of treating people as property. Indeed, some of the parables evince an entirely contrary attitude, as when Jesus speaks of the justified anger of an owner at a slave’s failure to manage his owner’s property with diligence and industry. Such failure deserves punishment; and Jesus compares this to the individual’s relationship to God, who will justly punish those who are not ever mindful and watchful and about the Lord’s business. This trope, of the human being as the slave of God is then further developed by Paul, and is given as a reason why slaves, even if they might, should not seek their freedom; for just as their owners are slaves of Christ, they themselves are free in Christ.
As Graham Shaw says, in his book, The Cost of Authority, an unflinching study of the rhetoric of authority in Paul’s letters and the gospel of Mark:
The institution [of slavery] itself is unchallenged, and exploitation of the slave facilitated. Far from finding freedom in his new religion, he has acquired a more exacting and all-seeing Master. All the grand christological claims of release and reconciliation end in practice by reconciling slaves to their lot and conniving at their exploitation. [135]
It is vital to see this, for it makes a nonsense of Harries’ claim of the incompatibility of slavery with the supposedly “deeper truths” of the New Testament. Not only is slavery compatible with the New Testament; the position of slaves is in fact reinforced by the trick of believing that believers are slaves of Christ, and therefore that it makes no difference whether — socially – we are slave or free, for we are all, without exception, slaves.
But still, the question remains: How could it be shown that a text has its source in some divine, transcendent or supernatural source? Lots of people take the Bible, whether in its Jewish or many Christian forms, as the word of God. Some people will qualify this by saying that it is the word of God in the words of men, and some even claim that the Bible tells a story in which God progressively reveals himself to us, through the development of thought about God which can be discerned in the course of the scriptures (supposing that they can be arranged in roughly chronological order). So, for example, Exodus 20, where the famous Ten Commandments are to be found, tells us that the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of those who “hate me” (God speaking!). It is not altogether clear what this means, but it is evident in other places in the Bible that God may punish other people for sins committed by another. Thus, David is punished for his seduction of Bathsheba and the murder of her husband, by losing the first child born to them. Job’s tribulations begin with the slaughter of his children, and Job wonders what he has done to deserve such trials and tribulations. Yet in Ezekiel 18.20 we read:
The soul that sinneth, it shall die: the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him. [Revised Version]
Each person is responsible for himself alone. So, we have two entirely different ideas about sin (misdoing) and guilt. The later idea of individual responsibility is in conflict with the earlier idea of a kind of communal, inherited responsibility.
We can see this as some sort of moral advance, if we like, but it is hard to square this with the idea of revelation. But if it is brought under the rubric of revelation, then why should Harries think it is dangerous to think of progress in revelation beyond the point at which the canon of scripture was closed? Surely, if the kinds of development that can be traced in the scriptures suggest a process of ethical progress in history, what reason could be given for bringing that process to an end, arbitrarily, by assuming that a particular collection of written texts have a special status that can never be superceded? If these human works — the word of God in the words of men — contain the word of God, then why cannot other works be accorded a similar status? And if we attribute revelatory status to those other works, what distinguishes those works from others in such a way as to mark them out as works in which God’s word is revealed? These questions form an endless regress, as you can see.
So the problem reduces to the question as to what distinguishes a work of divine or supernatural or transcendent revelation from one that is merely human? As Jerry Coyne continues his progress through the Bible — the last I heard he was reading Judges — it becomes patently obvious that some of the things in the Bible are not only very human, but even tediously so. (Here are a few of his latest LOLz from the Bible, with a Ceiling Cat version of similar laws.) For all the sanctity that has been ascribed to them, it is hard to see sanitary regulations about covering up one’s body waste as an appropriate subject for divine revelation. Some people have said, in response to those who have asked why, if the Bible is truly revelation, God did not reveal more about the scientific nature of life and the world, that revelation does not deal in facts but in those things that pertain to living a meaningful and moral life. But some of the things that Jerry has been digging up from the scriptures are, if anything, of no interest at all insofar as answering questions about the good life go, and if the Bible can deal with things that seem to us so trivial, would it not have made more sense for God to have gone into greater detail about things which would have made life a lot better, by teaching human beings about disease and its cure, and at least about aspects of science relevant to technologies that would have lightened their burdens?
Of course, the immediate reply to this is that revelation is not about this kind of thing. Revelation, in the end, it might be claimed, is more closely tied to the human experience of the transcendent and of redemption than that. The point of religion and divine revelation is to enable people to deal with some central aspects of the human condition: the experience of guilt and condemnation, the experience of alienation, the experience of purposelessness and remedies for these common human experiences. Thus, revelation might be claimed to be not unreasonably thought to be a message from God if it helps to resolve these experiences of inner conflict and provides experiences of peace, comfort and confidence in the face of the vagaries of life. This is the kind of thing recently argued by the commenter Antonio in some previous posts on this subject.
This of course does not put an end to the matter. There are a number of responses that we can make. For one thing, these experiences are common human experiences, and many of them take quite acceptable, even routine, secular forms. The sense of guilt or shame we have as a consequence of doing certain things which are harmful to others or embarrassing to ourselves, is a perfectly explicable outcome of social conditioning, and there are methods of getting beyond these obstacles to a full and enjoyable life without appealing to another realm of reality which is thought to give meaning to this one. People who are involved in twelve-step programmes, though such programmes are often based on belief in a Higher Power, are given methods for dealing with the harm they may have done in their lives because of their addiction, obsession, failure to manage anger, or other personal failing. To acknowledge failure to oneself, to acknowledge one’s failure to those who have been harmed, and to make restitution for that harm: these are all ways of dealing with psycho-social problems that often lie at the root of healing religious experiences of being loved and accepted. Indeed, this is a technique that is commonly used by those engaged in pastoral care. To be a caring, nonjudgemental presence is normative both for psychiatry as well as for spiritual/pastoral care. Thus the ”higher power” is very often another person who is prepared to help at times when the person is afraid of falling back into old familiar destructive patterns of living.
I know parents whose son found refuge in a pentecostal church which enabled him to turn around a life marred by drug use and failure. And while it is perfectly understandable why devotion to an imagined being who not only sees and knows everything you have done, but is also accepting of failure and forgiving, can be helpful in dealing with problems created by carelessness, social alienation and anger, there is no obvious reason for attributing the happy outcome to anything more than the friendly and accepting community that gathers together to celebrate the influence of this imagined being in their lives. Nothing in the experience or in the practices of the community, or in any of its beliefs, or the texts to which it lends credence, point in themselves to anything beyond human beings, human words, or humanly devised ritual in the context of which conflicted human beings may occasionally find relief.
I suspect that nothing in the practices and conventions of such groups cannot be explained in purely this-worldly terms, even when they most pretend divine. Indeed, the deep and fallible nature of the human beings who participate in these communities should be enough to convince us that nothing more than human is involved. Indeed, the fact that members of those groups which at the same time slander humanity, and hold human values in contempt, prove so often to be such defective human beings themselves, should convince anyone that there is no point at which they or their community touches a supposedly transcendent or divine realm which is a corrective to the evils of this one.
This becomes quite clear in testimony such as that of Hilary Mantel, the author of Wolf Hall, which won the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 2009, and who has just published its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, the second of a trilogy of historical novels about Thomas Cromwell and the English Reformation, who said, in an interview with Anita Singh of The Telegraph, that she thinks
that nowadays the Catholic Church is not an institution for respectable people.
Though educated in a convent school, she says she is one of nature’s Protestants, and of the paedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church she said:
The fact that it could happen, the extent of the denial, the cover-up, the hypocrisy, the cruelty… When I was a child I wondered why priests and nuns were not nicer people. I thought that they were amongst the worst people I knew.
Why were they not nicer people? Because they are human beings in possession of the truth — or so they think. So they don’t need to be particularly sensitive to other human beings, especially if those others are adversaries of the truth they think they know. Thus, Catholics seem to have no problem contemplating the miseries of those who are dying or suffering from incurable degenerative conditions, and say, without evident concern, that they should not be given a choice about the way that they will die. I can only consider such people with contempt. They do the same thing with women, whose reasons for abortion are never enough to satisfy their mindless prohibitions issued in the name of their God. And the very same thing is said to gay and lesbian people, whose desires are deemed unnatural and to act on them seriously disordered, without any concern that they are consigning them to lives either of unsatisfied and frustrated desire, or else of sordid, dirty secrets that dare not be brought into the light of day — “the love that dare not speak its name.” And these things they base on the fact that they have found a refuge from their own sense of guilt and unfulfillable longing, a refuge, sadly, that so often becomes a cloak under which the works of darkness proceed undeterred.
Eric,
Beautifully put, as always. Thank you.
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Of course, the real trouble with revelation is that you have one person yelling at the top of his lungs that he knows what god wants, and another person yelling at the top of his lungs that the other fellow is wrong because god told him something completely different.
And each would gladly kill the other fellow in service of his revelation.
Revelation: the exercise of presenting the appearance of such enormous certainty and authority that everyone becomes intimidated or hypnotized against questioning the assertion, regardless of what it may be. A problem very similar to holding texts sacred, as has already been covered.
John K. Of course, you are right to say that the idea of revelation is the other side of calling things sacred. But there is a sense in which we may speak of the uncanny, the awesome, the uplifting, etc., and think of such things or places as sacred, and yet not think that they are a source of revelation. That, I suppose, was my earlier point about the way that texts must originally have been, for those who first encountered written speech, awe inspiring. The next step, of course, is to think of text as in some sense related to strange experiences of trance and altered states of consciousness, as, in some sense, conveyed from on high. That’s where the idea of revelation comes in. The fact that it is impossible to establish, of any particular text, that it is reliably revealed, is something which those who hold their holy texts to be conveyed from their god very seldom consider. Ask someone how they know that the Bible is the revealed word of god and they will respond by some combination of (i) verses in the Bible which make this claim, (ii) the antiquity of the scriptures, and the testimony of generations of believers, or (iii) the authority of the church, sect, particular interpretation. It is almost always simply obvious to people that their sacred text means what they take it to mean, whether it could have had that meaning when it was written, or has meant that historically, or can be supported by the history of transmission or scholarship concerning the text. It is bizarre, when you stop to think about it, that this kind of authority is given to a text which no one has any compelling reason to believe comes from their god. The variety of interpretations alone should be enough to show that it could not have such authority.
[Revelationists may claim that:] “The point of religion and divine revelation is to enable people to deal with some central aspects of the human condition..”
Getting enough to eat is a fairly central aspect of my human condition. Where are the Scriptural instructions on crop rotation and selective breeding for high-yield grains?
I believe in revelation for two reasons: 1) The historical Jesus. 2) The large number of people (Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, and Jews) who believe in life after death. Concerning # 2, there are many who think believing in life after death is irrational. However, these people tend to be unintelligent about the mind-body problem, ignorant of the argument for God’s existence, and irrational about the meaning of life. It is as if everybody believes. I have no criticism to make of people who don’t believe. Faith is both a decision and a gift from God. I am only summoning everyone to believe, and I am giving my reasons.
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David Roemer: 1) Too simplistic, and hugely open to debate. 2) Wishful thinking – whether there is life after death or not is not based on a vote.
Eric – excellent post, well argued.
I don’t believe revelation actually has any hold on the ordinary religionist. Take David Roemer as a prime example. He actually tries to rationalize why he puts faith in revelation with other external reasons, reason which are obviously fallacious (appeal to authority/popularity). Revelation is not central to the theist’s lack of thought processing, neither is belief. There is nothing within the religionist that makes them believe, it’s all outside pressure through indoctrination and socialization. A person is helpless to such pressure unless they have a spark of curiosity or doubt within them.
@David Roemer
Not to mention the large number of people who thought the earth was flat, the sun revolved around the earth, killing rat catching cats and gathering together in large groups mumbling incantations in buildings erected with slave labour was a remedy to the black death, slicing bits from the sexual organs of children is a religious right and not child abuse, the mood landings were a staged in a Hollywood studio and Obama is a secret Muslim with a sharia agenda which includes death camps for xtians.
That’s what the world looks like when populated by delusional fools whose ethics and morals are informed by fairly tales and not innate decency and rational inquiry.
Take a step back and actually listen to the nonsense that you emit rather than mindlessly droning on and on.
I’m embarrassed for you and you should have the common decency to be embarrassed for yourself.
David, I wonder if you have really explored all the evidence for the (supposed?) existence of Jesus. Certainly, the gospel Jesus never existed, for he is a figure of myth, not of history. There may have been, for all we know, a man who actually sparked off the Christian movement, but, as the birth of other religions shows, this would not have been necessary. It is quite possible to create such figures out of whole cloth. What troubles me more than the question of the historicity of Jesus is the claim that the myths which surround this figure, whether historical or not, are still relevant to life today. Since Christians have been put in what amounts to an intellectual pressure cooker, and have been forced, sequentially, to justify their beliefs on grounds which must be continually adapted and reinterpreted, it now makes little sense to suggest that there is anything at the heart of Christianity besides the continued attempt to make the supposedly historical figure of Jesus relevant today. It’s a losing battle, since, culturally, formerly Christian cultures have now escaped from the boundaries defined by Christian orthodoxy, and now have no more debt to pay to their Christian heritage. I agree with Steve, you should be embarrassed for yourself, given the facts of the disintegration of Christian consensus over the last four centuries or so.
@David Roemer
I am confused by your statement. Do you mean that subjective experiences of other people contain ‘truth’ because of ‘facts’ like the historical Jesus and the popularity of the idea of life after death? If so I would point out that many subjective ‘revelations’ contradict each other.
If you are arguing that ‘revelations’ are objective, then they can, in principle, be tested. If so I would point out that many ‘objective revelations’ contradict each other. How can this be?
If the ‘facts’ you mention have led to your own personal ‘revelation’, then no argument of mine is likely to shake your convictions. But then your personal ‘revelation’ is unlikely to convince me.
David, the many different versions of life after death on offer refute the notion that the idea is rational. Jews Christians and Muslims are variations on a theme derived from Zoroastrianism probably. Hindus and some Buddhists believe in Reincarnatiion but there are a number of different interpretations as to what it is that is reincarnated.
@DiscoveredJ
As I said, belief in life after death is a gift from God. In reason, you can see the truth of what you believe. If I judge that something is objectively true, and you don’t agree, I can say your judgment is poor. In faith, you know something is true because God is telling you. There is nothing “objective” about being united with the transcendent reality people in the west call God after we die.
@David Roemer
Your judgement can only produce subjective truth. No matter how strong and compelling your belief (or faith) it is still a subjective truth. That my judgement differs from yours is an indication that we are talking about subjective truths, or opinions. Lots of people have many different opinions about life after death.
Objective truth is independent of the mind. It is supported by facts that can be demonstrated to be true to anyone. Judgement between opinions is not involved.
@DiscoveredJ
Your theory is that there is such a thing as “objective truth.” There are no facts supporting this theory. It is just a bright idea. It is not “objectively true” that evolution occurred over 3.5 billion years. What is “objectively true” is that fossils exist. Evolution is a theory that scientists invented. So many facts support this theory that rational people judge it to be true.
@David Roemer
I think you are confused. Evolution (organisms change over time) is an objective fact. There is so much evidence supporting the fact of evolution that no rational person would not accept it.
The Theory of Evolution is an explanation of the fact of evolution. Like all scientific theories the Theory of Evolution is provisionally true and subject to falsification. Although details within that theory will continue to be refined for a long time to come, it is unlikely now that the main thrust of Theory of Evolution will be falsified,
Life after death is a theory. Lots of people like the idea(s). But there are no facts underpinning that theory other than peoples’ wishes or faiths (faiths here being beliefs held in the absence of facts).
@DiscoveredJ
No, I just wasn’t clear enough. Humans observe fossils, and ask where they came from. Very intelligent people invented the theory that life evolved over a period of 3.5 billion years. Marshaling the evidence, rational people judge the theory to be true. You are ignoring the steps the human mind takes. You want to call “fossils” objective facts and the “3.5 billion years” objective facts.
You can’t reason with the unreasonable.
@David Roemer
And not very intelligent people deny the masses of interlocking, consistent evidence supporting the theory of evolution.
Evolution is a theory in the scientific use of the word theory in the same sense that the explanation for gravity is a theory (I won’t use the word “law” as you appear to be incapable of or unwilling to understand the meaning of commonly used words in this context, not that this stops you from injecting your ignorant, uniformed opinions into the conversation). I would invite you to step out of a 10th story window if you think that our understanding of gravity is not based on “objective facts” in exactly the same way that we understand evolution.
There is some combination of malevolence and ignorance at work when someone plays masterbatory word games in lieu of understanding.
@steve oberski
Creationists are irrational. Newton’s law of gravity, as I understand it, is an observation. Humans measure the gravitational force between two objects with a torsion balance. The second law of motion (F = ma) is a theory. Rational people judge the theory to be true. Likewise, the theory of relativity is a theory judged to be true by rational people.
The only theory that attempts to explain evolution is intelligent design or creationism. Rational people judge this theory to be false because there is no evidence supporting it. The theory of natural selection acting on innovations is supported by the evidence and judged to be true by rational people. However, the theory only explains adaptation, not common descent.
@David Roemer
You are in error.
@DiscoveredJ
I can supply you with many quotes from mainstream biologists that prove this. Can you find any quote in a textbook, scholarly work, or peer-reviewed artilcle that says this: “ID advocates are wrong to say life is too complex and 3.5 billion years is too short an amount of time to explain common descent. We know enough about the innovations natural selection acts upon to understand common descent.”
David, here, from Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True:
It is simply absurd of you to suggest otherwise.
@DiscoveredJ
He’s not even wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
@David Roemer
You are 150+ years late to the debate. Darwin pointed out that homology could be the result of the descent of all mammals from a common ancestor, so read On the Origin of Species. He advocated an ‘old earth’ before the idea became established in geology because he knew that descent with modification would need sufficient time to occur.This idea is discussed in ‘Evolution – a biological and palaeontological approach’ an Open University text book published by Addison Wesley. There are chapters discussing common descent in ‘Evolution – an introduction’ by Stearns and Hoekstra, a text book published by Oxford University Press. Richard Dawkins ‘The Ancestors Tale’ is a more human orientated explanation of our own common descent from the beginnings of life. It is also worth reading ‘Evolution vs Creationism’ by Eugenie C. Scott where the evolution and creationism controversy is examined from various angles. These are all books I have on my own bookshelves.
And yes I have read about Intelligent Design. Its arguments do not hold up to scrutiny and I question the motivation of people who cling to the ideas in the absence of any evidence.
@DiscoveredJ
I take it that no one can find a quote saying that natural selection explains common descent, not just the adaptation. There are many quotes saying intelligent design is irrational because it is. This is not the same as saying natural selection explains the complexity of life.
You are confused because Protestants and atheists both think evolution is evidence for the existence of God. This is why Protestants promote ID. This is why atheists hate ID and don’t want to admit the limited applicability of the theory of natural selection. This confuses amateur biologists.
Not enough is known about the innovations natural selection acts upon to understand how a mammal evolved from a bacteria in 1,00,000,000,000,000,000 seconds. According to Prof. James Shapiro of the University of Chicago, the old paradigm for innovations was random mutations. The new paradigm is genetic engineering. I put the time for evolution in seconds because there are 67 zeros in 52!, which is the number of ways of arranging a deck of cards.
The primary structure of a protein contains hundreds of amino acids. The model that Gerhart and Krischner (The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma) use to understand the evolution of a protein is the English sonnet. They calculated how long it would take a computer to generate an sonnet by the random selection of letters. Do you know how many zeros there are in 20 to the 600th power?
There is no rational theory at all for the Big Bang. There is only conjecture for the origin of life. And, natural selection only explains adaptation. Wake up. Stop being so gullible.
@David Roemer
Gosh, you read those books I mentioned very quickly! Perhaps too quickly to notice that they tackled the very point you raise.
I’m sorry, but the proponents of Intelligent Design have a political goal – search for ‘the Wedge Strategy’ on the internet. A later part of that strategy was to conduct proper scientific research to support their political aims – which they have been unable to do. The remainder is arm waving about big numbers and the impossibility of creating complex devices by natural selection – which would only be true if they didn’t misrepresent the Theory of Evolution. I believe that they are just trying to sucker the ignorant for political purposes.
But then you knew all this because you read ‘Evolution vs Creationism’ by Eugenie C. Scott, didn’t you? Because you followed up with the thousands of text books and hundreds of thousands of scientific peer reviewed papers available, didn’t you?
@DiscoveredJoys
I’m sure all those books you cited just say that ID is wrong. I agree that it is. What I am saying is that natural selection only explains adaptation, not common descent. I explain this with quotes from biologists on my YouTube video titled, “The Truth About Evolution and Religion.”
Very seldom, David, do I ban people from commenting on this site. However, you have to argue in good faith. I gave you a quote from Jerry Coyne about common ancestory (=common descent). Both the fossil evidence and DNA sequencing demonstrate that common descent is a fact. None of the evidence shows that descent from common ancestry is not the case. Adaptation [viz. natural selection] explains common descent. What more do you need?
Now, you get the chance to make a reasonable case. All the evidence points to common descent, none of it points in any other way. Show us the evidence that defeats contemporary consensus in biology, and perhaps you can stay in the argument. But don’t — just don’t — simply refer to a youtube video made by you with “quotes” from modern biologists. The oldest trick in the book. We need genuine evidence, not a house of cards.
As for your “argument” in comment #26. What are you suggesting? What do you know about biology? Have you actually studied the evidence, or are you like a conspiracy theorist, picking out things that suit your purpose and deliberately ignoring the rest? This is very tiresome. Make an argument, or quit.
Dear Eric,
Jerry Coyne’s quote has no bearing on what I am saying. Let me try again to explain in an entirely different way. Michael Behe and Jerry Coyne are both professors of biology at major universities. They do not disagree about evolutionary biology. What they disagree about is the theory of intelligent design. I agree with Jerry Coyne that there is no evidence supporting ID. MIchael Behe is consciously or unconsciously trying to promote religion.
However, Gerry Coyne has mislead you and DiscoverJoy about evolutionary biology. You both don’t even understand the statement: Natural selection only explains adaptation, not common descent. You think this statement is equivalent to advocating ID. You don’t realize that it is mainstream biology. Ask Jerry Coyne.
@David Roemer
I know I understand the meaning of what you say, and I’m reasonably certain Eric does too. I just think you are wrong.
From your website it appears that you think the Second Law of Thermodynamics prevents common descent. Yet you acknowledge adaptation happens – since this sometimes includes duplication of genetic material, increasing complexity, then that ought to fall foul of the Second Law of Thermodynamics too.
But clearly adaptation and common descent has happened, and continues to happen. I don’t for a moment doubt the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I just think you are ill-informed about how it applies (for it surely does) to living organisms.
@DiscoveredJoy
Are you saying that Jerry Coyne thinks I am wrong? I don’t think so. There was nothing in the quote Eric offered that I disagreed with.
I’m trying to get the American Journal of Physics to retract its absurd article titled “Entropy and evolution.” Evolution does not violate the second law for two reasons: 1) The second law only applies to non-interacting particles. 2) It only applies to closed systems.
In terms of understanding evolution, evolution is a closed system. The fact that energy from the sun enters the system is irrelevant because the sun heats things up and makes thing less complex. For example, heat causes ice to melt. The idea that evolution doesn’t violate the second law because of the sun is incredibly stupid.
What makes the AJP article especially absurd is that it actually calculates the entropy of evolution using the Boltzmann constant to prove the second law isn’t violated. The equation is nonsense. A biological system does not have a temperature nor an entropy.
David, you are denying common descent, Coyne is affirming it. Your statements are in direct conflict with Coyne’s affirmation. This is getting silly.
Religion causes conflict, conflict causes anxiety, and anxiety can inhibit people from reading and thinking intelligently. I never said that giraffes did not descend from bacteria. I’m saying biologists don’t understand how this could have happened in only 1,00000000000000000 seconds (17 zeros). Jerry Coyne, Michael Behe, Kenneth Miller, James Shapiro all have PhDs in biology and all understand that natural selection only explains adaptation. It does not explain common descent. The following is an excerpt from a review I posted on Amazon.com of Biology’s First Law by McShae and Brandon:
Atheists, creationists, and advocates of intelligent design are responsible for the misinformation that natural selection is intended to be an explanation for the complexity of life. The author of the following quote has a Ph.D. in linguistics, not biology. Pinker is Steve Pinker (Ph.D. in linguistics), and Bloom is Paul Bloom (Ph.D. in psychology). Notice that Charles Darwin (Ph.D. in biology) doesn’t think natural selection explains the complexity of the human eye:
“They [Pinker and Bloom] particularly emphasized that language is incredibly complex, as Chomsky had been saying for decades. Indeed, it was the enormous complexity of language that made is hard to imagine not merely how it had evolved but that it had evolved at all.
“But, continued Pinker and Bloom, complexity is not a problem for evolution. Consider the eye. The little organ is composed of many specialized parts, each delicately calibrated to perform its role in conjunction with the others. It includes the cornea,…Even Darwin said that it was hard to imagine how the eye could have evolved.
“And yet, he explained, it did evolve, and the only possible way is through natural selection—the inestimable back-and-forth of random genetic mutation with small effects…Over the eons, those small changes accreted and eventually resulted in the eye as we know it.” (Christine Kenneally, The First Word: Search for the Origins of Language, pp. 59–60)
McShae and Brandon state the limitations of natural selection explicitly:
“The history of life presents three great sources of wonder. One is adaptation, the marvelous fit between organism and environment. The other two are diversity and complexity, the huge variety of living forms today and the enormous complexity of their internal structure. Natural selection explains adaptation. But what explains diversity and complexity?” (location 78, Kindle)
David is simply bonkers.
David, not really interested in your unprofessional review of a book you did not understand. It is not true that the theory of natural selection plus DNA does not explain common descent. And forget the seconds with so many zeros. Concentrate on the theory, and explain why it does not explain common descent.
This is just false:
I should elucidate, David, since you seem ready to misready anything that is written. Jerry Coyne and Francis Collins would not agree with your statement. Behe and Shapiro might. Behe is hopelessly outclassed, and, I assume, so is Shapiro. Here is Coyne’s take on Shapiro for your edification:
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/jim-shapiro-continues-his-misguided-attack-on-neo-darwinism/
Jerry Coyne quotes Shapiro as follows:
“The first problem with selection as the source of diversity is that selection by humans, the subject of Darwin’s opening chapter, modifies existing traits but does not produce new traits or new species. Dogs may vary widely as a result of selective breeding, but they always remain dogs.”
This is Coyne’s comment about this quote:
“Given the fossil evidence of transitional forms—showing that fish became amphibians, amphibians became reptiles, reptiles became mammals as well as birds, even-toed terrestrial mammals became whales, and early primates became humans (please, cladists, keep your objections to yourself!)—such a statement is simply embarrassing, and is identical to ones you’ll see in the creationist literature. Shapiro should know better.”
Coyne goes on to say:
“This is all deeply misguided, and I suspect that Shapiro simply doesn’t understand natural selection. He certainly hasn’t proposed an alternative theory that explains all the adaptations we see in nature, and merely ascribes them in some nebulous way to the self-tinkering of the genome. But none of the mechanisms he adduces (save horizontal gene transfer, which is really just a big mutation, since that sort of transfer need not automatically be adaptive) can replace natural selection.”
Nowhere in his diatribe does Jerry Coyne say that natural selection explains the complexity of life. Coyne is angry with Shapiro because Shapiro is saying things that help creationists and advocates of intelligent design.
Shapiro thinks genetic engineering is going to replace random mutations as the cause of innovations. Coyne doesn’t think much of this idea. Coyne may be right. This doesn’t prove there is any fundamental disagreement between Shapiro and Coyne about the limitations of natural selection.
@Egbert
A protein is like an English sonnet because it is made up of hundreds of amino acids and there are 20 amino acids. How long will it take a computer to generate a sonnet with the random generation of words and letters? There are 17 zeros in the age of the earth in seconds. There are 67 zeros in 52!. The idea that natural selection acting on random mutations produced a giraffe from a bacterium is absurd.
The only theory that explains this is creationism or ID. The trouble with these theories is that there is no evidence for them. Scientists do not yet understand what caused the Big Bang, the origin of life, and evolution. Natural selection acting on random mutations just explains adaptation. Of course, there is no hard line between adaptation and common descent.
I’m not getting sucked into your crazy world, David.
@David Roemer
An extract from page 3 of ‘Why Evolution is True’ by Jerry A Coyne:
I’m sure Jerry is well able to look after himself, but he doesn’t say what you choose to think he says.
@Egbert
That may well be, but the simpler explanation is that anyone who trots out the 2nd law of thermodynamics when trying to refute evolution is a moron.
@DiscoveredJoy
There is nothing in that paragraph which says natural selection explains the complexity of life. The following quote is NOT from advocates of intelligent design or a creationists. They are professors of biology at Duke University:
“The history of life presents three great sources of wonder. One is adaptation, the marvelous fit between organism and environment. The other two are diversity and complexity, the huge variety of living forms today and the enormous complexity of their internal structure. Natural selection explains adaptation. But what explains diversity and complexity?” (Daniel W. McShae and Robert N. Brandon, Biology’s First Law: The Tendency for Diversity and Complexity to Increase in Evolutionary Systems,location 78, Kindle)
@David Roemer
You are in error, again. Heredity, variation and natural selection does explain what we see and explains the mechanism. Perhaps you should read Jerry’s book?
McShae and Brandon’s “Zero-Force Evolutionary Law” is a statement about the patterns of diversity and complexity observed in nature. It doesn’t appear to propose a mechanism for the production of those patterns.
For your information there is also this direct quote:
My emphasis. Clearly their ‘law’ does not replace natural selection, it merely establishes a ‘tendency’ running beneath it.
@DiscoveredJoy
What do you mean by the word “explain” when you say, “Heredity, variation and natural selection does explain what we see and explains the mechanism.”
What we see is adaptation and common descent. Common descent involves much more complexity than adaptation, but there is no hard line to be drawn between the two. We see that bacteria evolved into animals in a hundred thousand trillion seconds.
When animals have nothing to do they go to sleep. Human beings ask questions. They want to understand the cause of things and the relationship between things. They want to understand the mechanism of biological processes such as evolution.
You may be satisfied with the theory that natural selection acting upon innovations explains common descent. But is Coyne, Shapiro, Behe, and all the other PhDs in biology satisfied with this explanation? I am saying they are not. They all feel that not enough is known about innovations to understand common descent.
I consider this to be another quote proving this. Notice that Dawkins speaks of “adaptive evolution.” He does not say natural selection explains the complexity of life. He does not say natural selection explains common descent:
“By the time Darwin came to publish On the Origin of Species in 1859, he had amassed enough evidence to propel evolution itself, though still not natural selection, a long way towards the status of fact. Indeed, it was this elevation from hypothesis towards fact that occupied Darwin for most of his great book. The elevation has continued until, today, there is no longer any doubt in any serious mind, and scientists speak, at least informally, of the fact of evolution. All reputable biologists go on to agree that natural selection is one of its most important driving forces, although —as some biologists insist more than others—not the only one. Even if it is not the only one, I have yet to meet a serious biologist who can point to an alternative to natural selection as a driving force of adaptive evolution—evolution towards positive improvement.” (Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, p. 18)
David, David….(1) You don’t seem to know anything about natural selection. (2) You are wrong if you think that Jerry Coyne does not claim common descent. (3) You seem deliberately to confuse the issue, whether because your reading comprehension skills are defective, or because you want deliberately to muddy the waters.
Take this, for example:
If you think that this could happen in one generation, of course this is absurd. But it didn’t take one generation. It took billions of years (and your stupid repetition of the age of the earth in seconds — and I haven’t checked to see if it’s true, so don’t bother suggesting I do — is just a big red herring) before bacterias evolved, through all sorts of intermediate stages, into giraffes. This is not only not absurd. It is true. If you continue to play this trolling game, then I am going to put David Roemer, the New Evangelist, on the chopping block.
Oh, and since something else of yours just rolled in, let’s add this admonition. Giving a quote which is only part of an argument, which does not happen to include reference to common descent, from a book in which common descent is assumed (as it is in Dawkins), is not an argument. It’s called quote mining or cherry picking. Take your pick, but don’t play the game again.
@Eric,
3.5 billion years is only 100,000 trillion seconds (17 zeros). There are 67 zeros is 52 X 51X 50…. A very weak measure of the complexity of life is the primary structure of a protein. It has hundreds of amino acids, of which there are 20, and each amino acid has to be in exactly the right location.
“By comparison, if we question how long it would take a high-speed computer to write randomly a specific Shakespearean sonnet, we are asking that all the letters of the words of the sonnet will come up simultaneously in the correct order. It is an impossible task, even if all the computers in the world today had been working from the time of the big bang to the present. Even to compose the phrase, “To be or not to be,” letter by letter, would take a typical computer millions of years.” (Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart, The Plausiblity of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma, page 32)
David. First of all, the number of seconds in 3.5 billion years is irrelevant to the question of common descent.
Second, whether computers could compose a Shakespeare sonnet or not is also irrelevant. Natural selection is a process of random mutation and non-random selection by environment, so all you have demonstrated so far is that you do not understand the neo-Darwinian synthesis.
@David Roemer
My post #41.
Let me ask you a question: if (as you assert) heredity, variation and selection do not explain common descent, what does? What alternative mechanism do you propose? What proof do you have?
@DiscoveredJoy
There is none. It is an unsolved scientific question. According to James Shapiro, there is a new paradigm for evolutionary biology in the 21st century: genetic engineering instead of random mutations.
Intelligent design and creationism are bright ideas, but there is no evidence supporting these theories.
@David Roemer
My post #41. The neo-Darwinian synthesis works for me, and more to the point, almost all evolutionary biologists (despite your mis-reading of some well known professors). Against all this background you offer… “it’s a mystery”? Not even some reason why the neo-Darwinian synthesis fails apart from your lack of comprehension?
I think you will have to come up with something better to win people over. At the moment you have nothing.
David, you have to argue here in good faith. Ignoring everyone and simply repeating quotations misunderstood and a claiming a minority position as a new paradigm, is not doing so. Either pay attention and try to learn or I’ll put you on a watch list, and all your comments will have to go through moderation. It’s frustrating having nonsense pretending to be otherwise. So, buck up or ship out.
@David Roemer
So… you think that most evolutionary biologists are atheists, but they think there is evidence that god exists. You are a Catholic (like your quotee Michael Behe who believes in ID) but because you think that the universe is unintelligible this is evidence that god doesn’t exist.
That’s screwy.
For for it to make sense all the atheist evolutionary biologists would have to be irrational and dishonest.
That’s screwy.
Finally you suggest that Eric and I don’t understand evolutionary biology because of their dishonesty. You think I have been misled even though I have studied Biology at school and Genetics (amongst other science subjects) at University – there was no secret Evolutionary Lie Society or Decoder Ring. Even though I have picked up fossils in my own garden (Devil’s Toenails), picked up ammonites and belemnites on the south coast of the UK, broken out fossils of plants from lumps of coal. broken lumps of shale to display fossils of plants from the Jurassic Coast of the UK, and walked through the fossilised forest near Lulworth. Even though I now live within walking distance of the quarry where the first identifiable Precambrian fossil was found. That’s an awful lot of evidence and education to have to fit into a lie. Especially when a single whistleblower could earn a Nobel prize for exposing the alleged lie.
Unless, of course you think I am lying too. That’s paranoia.
DiscoveredJoys, I have deleted the last two of Roemer’s comments, and have put him in the queue for moderation. That leaves your comment hanging there, but, as you say, “That’s paranoia,” and if he’s going to be paranoid, I’ll give him something to be paranoid about. He clearly knows next to nothing, and it is a waste of time to continue to encourage him. When he makes a reasonable comment — if he still wishes to — I will let it in.
Definitely the right decision, Eric.
Eric.
Fine by me. I’m always ready to consider a paradigm change, but it has to start with something real.