BlackPhi Webitorial Ramblings

Comment & Opinion From A Christian's Perspective

Intelligent Design & Falsifiability - Posted 27th January, 2006

Another go at science vs religion on UK TV this week: a BBC2 Horizon programme titled A War on Science which looked at Intelligent Design, with particular reference to the recent court-case in Dover, Pennsylvania.

Intelligent Design (ID) is a newish assault on Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, and is heavily backed by some christian groups in the US because it claims to prove the existence of a Designer, ie God. ID is not the first such attack on evolution by any means, but it is different in that it claims to be a purely scientific criticism. This would make it immune to US legal restrictions on teaching religious views in science lessons; thus religious activists who can get a majority on a school board could insist that ID be taught as an alternative to evolution. This happened in the small town of Dover in western Pennsylvania.

There is an obvious question for the UK of whether the government's new proposals for 'Trust Schools' would allow similar problems here. There is a depressing tendency for issues that arise in the US, as part of the ongoing cultural battle between church and state, conservative and liberal, to cross the Atlantic and be seen by evangelical groups here as being about faithfulness to the Bible. Harry Potter springs to mind.

Evolution by natural selection is a keystone of modern biological science. If ID were true there would be a scientific revolution; if untrue then scientific method itself is being attacked. Many scientists who have long considered Creationist arguments to not be worth addressing have come to believe that this threat is real and needs dealing with.

The Horizon programme did a fair job of presenting the key arguments of Intelligent Design: the main one being that some biological systems are so complex that they could not have happened by chance and so interdependent that they could not have developed by adapting simpler systems - they are said to have "irreducible complexity". This is important because it means that ID is in principle falsifiable - which is an important requirement for any scientific theory. But this is also ID's achilles heel: if a biological system which is claimed to be irreducibly complex can be shown to occur naturally in a simpler version, then the theory is disproved.

Horizon found a biologist who could do precisely that. There is a biological motor that drives the flagellum (like a cross between a whip and a propellor) in several species of bacteria, which is widely used as an example of irreducible complexity. A simpler version of the key components of that motor has recently been found performing a different function in many types of bacteria. Thus if ID is really a scientific theory it has been disproved, and if its proponents continue to promote it they are doing so for religious not scientific reasons. That, in effect, is what the judge found in the Dover school case; although by then the parents had already voted the ID activists off the school board and restored the curriculum themselves. Horizon failed to mention this, presumably because the new board members were also churchgoers, a fact which would have confused the church vs science picture the programme was trying to paint.

During the 1980's and 90's the Roman Catholic church finally got around to admitting that it had been wrong about Galileo. When Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and others started saying that the earth goes around the sun, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they were attacked by both Roman Catholic and Protestant church leaders for going against the 'clear teaching' of the Bible. Four hundred years later millions of Christians happily believe in both the Bible and the theory of gravity - realising that the problem was one of properly understanding the Bible passages in question. Darwin's theory is only about 150 years old, so it might take some time before it is accepted in the same way.

In effect, Intelligent Design is just another version of the old God of the gaps argument. My take on ID is that God is much, much bigger than that. Just as discoveries in astronomy help us to begin to recognise how wonderful God's creation is in space, so, I believe, we will continue to recognise yet more of God's awesome power as we start to grasp how He is at work in time. Biologists may talk about chance as the driving force behind evolution; physicists and mathematicians recognise that "chance" is generally a term used when the real cause is not known or understood. Christians know, even if they cannot really understand, the One who is the first cause, and through whom space and time were created.

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Richard Dawkins & "The Root of All Evil?" - Posted 20th January, 2006

As a Christian who believes in the Bible, I find it irritating, and slightly depressing, when religious people construct their own towering monolith of human wisdom and prejudice, paste onto it verses ripped out of the Bible, and then try to force it down people's throats as the authoritative word of God.

As someone who trained as a scientist (although I'd have to admit to being an engineer these days), I find it irritating, and slightly depressing, when scientific people construct their own towering monolith of rationalist dogma and prejudice, paste onto it chunks of logical positivism and scientific philosophy, and then try to force it down people's throats as the authoritative word of science.

UK television's Channel 4 has given well-known biologist Richard Dawkins a platform of two prime-time slots to present his views on religion, entitled The Root of All Evil?. The individual program titles were The God Delusion and The Virus of Faith, which gives a fair idea of where Dawkins was coming from.

Channel 4 tries hard to be creative in its religious programming, and I generally have a lot of respect for the results. These two programs, however, were really very poor. Religious extremists were presented as typical of their faith - for example a Christian in favour of murdering doctors who carry out abortions and a Moslem convert from Judaism who wanted to wipe Israel off the map. All the interviewees presenting faith positions had their words edited and glossed to distort, misrepresent and ridicule their views. An example of that was Richard Harries, the Anglican Bishop of Oxford, who was allowed to say that he believed some passages in the Bible carry more weight than others (my words, I cannot remember exactly how he phrased it), but then faded out as he started to say why, to be replaced by Dawkins misrepresenting him as saying that you can just pick and choose what you want to believe. In addition, Dawkins uses heavily loaded phrases for comparisons: a charismatic church service is compared to a Nuremberg rally; US evangelicals are compared to the Taliban; and Sunday schools, and their equivalents, are called "child abuse".

Richard Dawkins has been called an evangelical atheist, but I very much doubt whether any evangelical church leader would be allowed to use his methods on British TV. Dawkins claims to be promoting rational truth and scientific method, yet his presentation is just as dogmatic, just as manipulative, and just as irrational as the worst of those he attacks. He uses examples of extremist religious attitudes and atrocities to justify atheism, whilst ignoring extremist atheist leaders such as Stalin and Pol Pot. In short these programs were nothing more than crude propaganda.

The sad thing is that it would be good to have programs seriously presenting the philosophies behind modern scientific method. Science is so poorly understood, but all Dawkins does is promote the false view that science is equivalent to atheism. Similarly, it would be useful to have a proper presentation of what atheists believe, if only to counteract some of the nonsense put out by religious pundits, such as the claim that atheists have no basis for identifying right and wrong (to be fair, most of the Damaris CultureWatch website that the link points to is very good indeed).

Richard Dawkins is a well known figure, but if Channel 4 wanted to shed light, rather than just being controversial, they would have done better to get one of the current generation of media-friendly biologists: in so many ways Dawkins is a representative of a bygone age.

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Luna Lovegood Auditions - Posted 14th January, 2006

There has been excitement amongst young Harry Potter fans this week at the news that there are auditions taking place for the role of Luna Lovegood in the next HP movie: Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix.

Fans' bulletin boards have been full of comments bewailing the age and nationality restrictions on applicants, or giving reasons why particular girls feel they are ideal for the role (including several with brown hair saying why they think that brown is the best hair colour for Luna - even though her hair is dirty blonde in the books).

There is one comment that has comes up a few times which I do hope is wrong though. That is that the part is bound to be given to someone who is pretty and looks like an actress - usually said by someone who believes she herself isn't and doesn't. The characteristic of Luna in the books is that she looks unappealing and she generally behaves in an unappealing way, yet, when the chips are down, she proves herself a true and loyal friend.

It is a repeated theme of the Harry Potter series that you cannot judge people by appearance or position; even their actions can be ambivalent. It is the choices people make, particularly under pressure, which define whether they are fundamentally good or bad. A pretty Luna Lovegood would undermine that message and, I think, is very unlikely to happen.

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Selwyn Hughes goes to Glory - Posted 13th January, 2006

I was sad to get a letter this week telling me that Selwyn Hughes, founder of Crusade for World Revival and author of Every Day with Jesus, died peacefully on Monday afternoon. Not sad for him, really - I think he has more than earned a rest - more for those who won't now get the benefit of his teaching and his wisdom. There is a short summary of his life on the CWR website, including how he started EDWJ:

In 1965 he initiated a series of short daily Bible-reading guides, written on blank postcards, for the benefit of friends and church members. Demand rapidly exceeded supply and soon these guides became a bimonthly publication. Now Every Day with Jesus is read daily by nearly a million people in 130 countries around the world. Remarkably, he personally wrote every issue of Every Day with Jesus, only occasionally assisted by other writers.

I heard Selwyn teaching on one of CWR's training days, back in the 80's, and since at Waverley Abbey House - their conference and training centre. Linda, my wife, has been on a counselling course that he ran, and has used the EDWJ daily notes for as long as I have known her. The great thing about his teaching, for me, was that it was always filled with care and compassion. I'm glad that he was able to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of CWR, and EDWJ, at Waverley Abbey before he went.

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Some Random Ramblings - Posted 11th January, 2006

This week's first posting was supposed to be about what's been happening in church meetings during 2005, for those who were not able to be there. The result was rather more insubstantial than I am really happy with, so I think I need to seek a second opinion.

Why is it hard to pray in bed? Maybe it's only me who finds it so, but it strikes me that occasional bouts of insomnia would be a lot more productive spent in praying for the church and the world. Oh well, at least it gives me a chance to catch up on the website.

Speaking of which - never trust claims made about the wonders of new technologies. I don't suppose you're that daft anyway, but I am feeling frustrated at the moment by a website technology called CSS. This is supposed to make it easy to adjust the layout of webpages, without big code changes. It should be easy to, say, move a navigation bar from the top of the page to the left hand side. Yeah, sure.

At the time of writing Israeli PM Ariel Sharon is in the news, critically ill after a stroke. Meanwhile, in the US, evangelical embarrassment Pat Robertson (an old-fashioned televangelist, of the type that probably lies behind the difficulty Christian organisations have getting broadcasting slots in the UK) is causing a stir by suggesting that Sharon's illness is God's judgement for pulling out of Gaza. Is God so inefficient that he couldn't intervene a few months ago, before the pullout? Then again, maybe the stroke is a judgement for Sharon's alleged war-crimes against Palestinians? Or maybe it is because Sharon is an old, overweight man who has been working very hard under a huge amount of stress. I wonder which is most likely?

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Disasters & the Archbishop of Canterbury - Posted 4th January, 2006

Twelve miners dead in the US, with their families given false hope by some accident of "misinformation", and at least thirteen dead, many of them children, in southern Germany. 2006 looks to be continuing where 2005 left off.

I thought Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, gave a really thoughtful, and challenging, New Year's message at the weekend, addressing questions raised by such disasters:

"When disasters and tragedies come on us thick and fast – and this last year has seen so many horrors of suffering, natural and man-made – it’s painful to accept that we can’t just do something straight away to set it all right. So we need to see that the one thing anyone can do is to try and close the gap, to let others know that they’re not on their own."

"Part of the Christmas message is not that God solves all our problems at a single stroke, but that through Jesus he is completely alongside us and has enough resources to see us through whatever happens. The Bible reminds us too that when one part of a body is in pain it’s the whole person who feels it."

"Whether it’s our neighbours on the streets of Deptford or our neighbours in Pakistan or India or Sri Lanka or Central Africa, what we can all do is to try and close the gap that little bit further: to let people know that they’re not suffering alone. We still have to look for the big solutions, the long-term aid and support, the problem-solving plans. But let’s start with what anyone can do, anywhere; never mind the success, simply act and speak as if people were worth taking seriously.."

He was speaking from the 999 Club, a drop-in centre in Deptford, London. In theory the video of his message is available at the BBC website, although at the time of writing I couldn't get it to play.

Dr Williams is often criticised for not giving simplistic, media-friendly answers to reporters. I thought this message showed how people could respond in a simple practical way to troubles, without pretending that there are any simplistic answers to the problems of life. I hope Christians and others in West Virginia and southern Bavaria are able to be there for those people who are so cruelly bereaved; for the rest of us I guess the most practical response at the moment is to pray.

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