Marginal Utility

by Ken Houghton

UPDATE: I see Tom embedded the video. (It really was a year or two in blogsphere time.) So I'm just going to repeat his link to the text here.)

So, several hours later (probably a year or two in blogsphere time), I finally find the actual text of the speech described below. And the "not only wrong but divisive" come very early in a very long speech* that continues as:

1. Obama makes clear his long-term relationship with Rev. Wright**:
   

   In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:
   
   "People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters....And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about...memories that all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild."
   
   That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.
   
   And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

   
   
2. He follows immediately by affirming his relationship with the Reverend
   

   I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
   
   These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

   
   
3. He gives the speech I was hoping for, and that was only hinted at in the NYT article:
   

   But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.
   
   The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American....
   
   [W]e do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
   
   Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.
   
   Legalized discrimination...meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.
   
   A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

   
   
4. And puts it into a context:
   

   What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.
   
   But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn't make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations....Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.

   
   
5. Where I might wish he had cited white examples—G-d knows there are enough of them—he stays the course of discussing Black churches:
   

   And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.*** That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.
   
   In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community.

The rest is a run-of-the-mill speech, with a large dosage of "a pox on both houses" and closing with the Obligatory Anecdote. But it was in its essence the same speech he gave on the 14th, not a repudiation of the man who has been central to his life for those twenty years.

*William Jefferson Clinton haters: if and when this man is inaugurated, go back to expecting 90+ minute States of the Union, as if that were a bad thing.
**Note to Tom: this is how I "professed to know" their relationship
***Most of the extant research shows, in fact, that whites go to Church for social networking reasons, while black church attendees are there to worship: different reasons lead to different structures.

Labels: 2008, ObamaNation, Politics, Religion

by Ken Houghton

via Susan.

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell - The City of Dis!

Take the Dante Inferno Hell Test

Could have guessed that from having gone to see The Golden Compass on Saturday night—at least as contextualised by Christianity Today, which seems to have the strange delusion that C. S. Lewis presented a worthwhile template for fiction instead of self-righteous delusion. (h/t Brad DeLong)

Labels: Brad DeLong, literature, movies, Religion

by Ken Houghton

It's bad politics to acknowledge genocide, because Turkey is going to get angry, but it's great for the President to award a Congressional Gold Medal—the highest honour given to a civilian in the United States—to the Dalai Lama since that will only irritate China?

(To be pre-emptively clear, I have no problem with either act, though the irony of the man most similar to Nixon in his ways giving an award to a Tibetan should not be lost.)

(Edited to add appropriate, comparable FTD links.)

Labels: Politics, Religion, Republican Party

by Anonymous

My little corner of the world has been abuzz with the visit of the Dalai Lama. In typical local fashion, there has been much pomp and circumstance, all pulled off with the requisite quota of birkenstocks* and small-town unprofessionalism. Little stuff, mostly, like the K-9 dog, detailed to sniff out bombs prior to the Dalai Lama's arrival, that barked to be let out of the back of the truck. One would think K-9 dogs would be better trained than the average household dog, but evidently not.

At any rate, I was part of a group of 30 onlookers (well, 15 onlookers + 15 police officers/secret service types) who happened to be in front of the museum when the Dalai Lama arrived, with motorcade, his own full security detail, and retinue. The University President, his wife, and various other local dignitaries were there to greet him.

As is evidently the custom, a dedicated scarf-distributor unrolled a white scarf and handed it to a dignitary. The Dalai Lama would take the scarf from the dignitary, hold it up to his forehead, bless it, then give it back to the recipient. This went on through three or four dignitaries, at which point the Dalai Lama ... sneezed.

Which led me to ponder one of the more important questions of the universe, and the inspiration for the post title**: What do you say when the Dalai Lama sneezes? I mean, isn't "bless you" a tad presumptuous?

Aren't you glad I stopped in? (Don't answer that.)

* The Dalai Lama, however, doesn't wear birkenstocks. He wears old-man shoes. Bass walkers, in a brown-ish red carefully chosen to clash with his robes.
**Extra points to me for resisting the obvious and by now tired joke, "Hello, Dalai," for the post title.

Labels: just life, Religion

by Tom Bozzo

I have a post up at Total Drek on our own Freedom From Religion Foundation's efforts to keep (not necessarily religious) advertising out of Madison schoolkids' backpacks.

Labels: free riders, Madison, Religion

by Tom Bozzo

Brad DeLong points to Adam Kotsko, who not only liked Stanley Fish's "Atheism and Evidence," but indeed lamented that the Times Select paywall keeps it from a broader audience. So let me expand on my previous reaction to Fish.

Fish criticizes Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins for their confidence that natural explanations will be found for currently not-well-understood phenomena of human behavior and consciousness. He invokes Francis S. Collins to name a scientist who would

argue that physical processes cannot account for the universal presence of moral impulses like altruism, “the truly selfless giving of oneself to others” with no expectation of a reward. How can there be a naturalistic [i.e., evolutionary] explanation of that?

Fish, let alone Collins, shouldn't need an economist to answer, "easy." Behaviors that don't seem to maximize individual fitness but may improve the population fitness aren't a problem for evolutionary explanations. (Elaboration of this concept, I gather, is Dawkins's major contribution to evolutionary theory.) Taking the politically charged subject of human behavior out of the picture, evolutionary accounts explain how, for instance, the gene that causes sickle-cell anemia can persist in populations at high risk for malaria despite the fatal consequences for individuals who get two copies of it.

(If I wanted to be snarky, I would say that writers inclined to lofty phraseology like "the universal presence of moral impulses like altruism" should read more anti-"death tax" polemics. I'd also wonder why Kotsko's postmodern allergy to overarching meta-narratives isn't aggravated by such questionable assertions of universality in human motivation.)

What Fish's argument really does is lays down a bet against future achivement of science:

Of course one conclusion that could be drawn [from hitherto limited progress in obtaining naturalistic explanations of human behavior] is that the research will not pan out because moral intuitions will not be reducible to physical processes. That may be why so few of the facts are in.

It's not good when you're trying to make the case that others are making logical leaps to leap to a conclusion that purportedly limited progress in a relatively new field of scientific research implies a problem beyond naturalistic explanation. Fish may offer the argument in the (not totally unreasonable) expectation that there will remain uncertainty over the physical processes that might be responsible for "moral intuitions" for the remainder of his life and thus that he won't be around to suggest that this explanation for the limitations of present knowledge is facially foolish.

Younger folks might not want to risk too much of their wealth on the anti-materialist position, for there's already evidence suggesting that behavior not totally unlike "moral intuitions" are in fact emergent properties of physical processes. For example, many people who are more-or-less miserable find themselves not as miserable while taking SSRIs. This suggests that "misery" is, at least in part, a property that's mediated by the chemical reactions SSRIs interfere with. A non-materialistic alternative explanation would seem to imply that SSRIs have some mystical effect on the "soul" or "spirit" despite being the products of scientific research that makes no appeal to mysticism, not to mention being manufactured in non-magical labs by secular corporations.

Yet this is likely a pillar of Kotsko's affection for Fish's essay, since Kotsko dislikes "reductionism." It is Kotsko's own business if he finds the set of all explanations from the in-principle effable world inadequate. But labeling "naturalism" in this sense as "reductionism" of the bad sort does some violence to much-less-innocent forms of reductionism, such as reducing people to reified utility functions and enacting policies that are sensitive to the assumptions one places on H. Economicus. (Cf. Waldmann's Wager.)

Kotsko starts quoting Fish in what is little more than a "past performance is no guarantee of future results" argument:

[Fish:] A very strong assertion is made – we will “undoubtedly discover lawful connections between our states of consciousness [and] our modes of conduct” – but no evidence is offered in support of it; and indeed the absence of evidence becomes a reason for confidence in its eventual emergence.

I'm inclined to call this as the first of a couple of flagrant fouls, insofar as I don't think this fairly characterizes the basis for confidence in future scientific progress. First, there is plenty of evidence of "lawful connections" between natural processes and "states of consciousness" and/or "modes of conduct" (q.q.v.) which frankly are obvious enough that it's inappropriate to criticize the Harrises and Dawkinses for not reciting them. Second, it takes something like willful blindness to suggest that science doesn't have an excellent track record in developing naturalistic explanations for natural processes. Third, also on the obvious side, the toolkit available to would-be students of the brain-ethics link has been rapidly expanding — think of the prospects for a computational biology research program based on 1980s technology. Last, the system under consideration is rilly rilly complex and it stands to reason that such "facts" as may be teased out of naturalistic explanations will take time to develop.

Kotsko also quotes what, to me, is Fish at his most infuriating:

[Fish:] [Dawkins says there] are “good Darwinian reasons for individuals to be altruistic, generous or ‘moral’ towards each other.”

So there's the answer to the "how can there be a naturalistic explanation" question.

[Fish, continuing directly:] Exactly! They are good Darwinian reasons; remove the natural selection hypothesis from the structure of thought and they will be seen not as reasons, but as absurdities. I “believe in evolution,” Dawkins declares, “because the evidence supports it”; but the evidence is evidence only because he is seeing with Darwin-directed eyes. The evidence at once supports his faith and is evidence by virtue of it. [Emphasis added.]

That's flagrant foul #2. Note the demotion of "natural selection" to a "hypothesis" as opposed to a natural mechanism that can be demonstrated empirically in the wild and/or simulated in a variety of lab-type settings (not least, the human body). The Darwinian explanation is that the behavior makes the group better off despite (maybe) having cost to some individuals, which frankly doesn't sound facially absurd under, say, a Divine Selection Hypothesis where "good works" facilitate more pleasant after-lives. (An economist might argue that it's not necessarily true that altruism necessarily is "costly" to the individual; at a minimum, I would argue specifically that it narrows the real scope of source-of-moral-behavior conundrums.) More to the point, Dawkins makes no claims that obviously can't be explained in terms of neuron interconnections and brain chemistry.

Fish carries this idea of circular reinforcement of belief systems to the point of gross misrepresentation:

The reasoning is circular, but not viciously so. The process is entirely familiar and entirely ordinary; a conviction (of the existence of God or the existence of natural selection or the greatness of a piece of literature) generates speculation and questions, and the resulting answers act as confirmation of the conviction that has generated them.

Even if you believe that the exsistences of God and of natural selection are "convictions" of equal stature — I doubt you'd get buy-in from either the theist or the atheist directions — the claim that answering "speculation and questions" necessarily reinforces the foundational convictions is just so much bullshit. Kotsko (presumably with Kuhn and/or Feyerabend in mind) criticizes falsificationism as the "Newtonian mechanics" of the philosophy of science, suggesting that scientists should better represent how the process of science really works. But science does not tell us that Newtonian mechanics are useless. Neither Kuhn nor Feyerabend is correctly read as demonstrating that scientific theories are inherently self-reinforcing. The actual dynamics might not be "maverick researcher proves the establishment wrong to universal acclaim," but convictions leading to scientific theories that ultimately explain stuff badly aren't renowned for their social-Darwinistic fitness. Falsification doesn't have to be the whole story to be a useful concept.

Part of the problem seems to be that Fish and Kotsko go at least a bit off the anti-empirical deep end. This is especially evident in Kotsko's claim that "[t]heological claims are also falsifiable within any given theological community -- it's not as if people can just say any old thing and be accepted." [Emphasis added.] Since theological claims aren't empirical, it could be argued that he really means something other than "falsifiable." To swipe a thought from Robert Waldmann, theological "facts" may be derived in logically correct ways from theological axioms, but since those facts not only are non-empirical, but often claimed not to be subject to empirical validation (i.e., they constitute "articles of faith" independent of empiricism). This renders them something other than testable theories in the scientific usage.
Kotsko makes a valid point that it's wrong to treat theological dogma as immutable.

[D]ogma does change over time. If everything was unequivocally "set" for all time in some indisputable set of revealed propositions, then the history of Christianity, with its many controversies and many moments of genuine uncertainty as to which side would win, would literally make no sense at all.

But this, too, undermines another contention of Fish's:

[Fish:] Asking that religious faith consider itself falsified by empirical evidence is as foolish as asking that natural selection tremble before the assertion of deity and design. Falsification, if it occurs, always occurs from the inside.

At best, this depends on what you mean by "religious faith." Looking at a document such as the 1950 encyclical Humanae Generis (a Ground Zero for religion-science interactions), it's clear enough that a core of Catholic faith is put beyond the reach of empirical falsification. But it would seem to demand evidence that there isn't pressure on aspects of religious faith from emprical science. It seems beyond credulity that the processes by which many religions dropped (or diminished) tenets that the solar system is geocentric, that mental illnesses are not caused by demonic possession, or that the creation of the universe was according to the accounts in Genesis were generated "from the inside."

Ultimately, Fish warns that his own beliefs can't be inferred from his arguments and he may think the entire preceding argument is total bullshit and he won't say. ("Despite what some commentators assumed, I am not taking a position on the issues raised by the three books; readers of this and the previous column have learned nothing about my own religious views, or even if I have any.") So maybe the whole exercise has been an extended masturbation or devil's advocacy session; Fish isn't telling. My guess is left as an exercise for the reader.

Labels: Atheism, Evolution, Philosophy, Religion

by Tom Bozzo

Much (*) shorter Stanley Fish (behind the Times Select wall for the betterment of society):

If I elide the fundamental differences between science and religion, I can show that prominent atheist scientists (and one, uh, lovable lush) reason just as circularly as the religious!

(*) If I needed 10,000 words written about nothing, Fish would be the first guy I'd call. Boy, that guy can blather.

Labels: Atheism, Religion, Science, Tortured Logic

by Tom Bozzo

A couple of commenters to Kim's post suggest that only the GSS question regarding the heliocentric solar system (*) is testing a matter of settled scientific fact, and that the evolution and origin-of-the-universe questions really are measuring the degree of controversy over the issues.

Comments here and at Pharyngula suggest that, if anything, the Big Bang question (did the universe begin with a "huge explosion?") is more problematic in the translation of scientific theory into the GSS questionnaire. I can't see how the segment of the population that could argue whether "explosion" is an appropriate metaphor for the event at the beginning of the universe from a position of knowledge of the bleeding edge of cosmology would end up being a material fraction of the GSS sample, and Kim reasonably suggests that there's no reason to believe that confusion over the wording would be confounded with respondents' religions.

Evolution is another matter, as there is no serious scientific controversy at all. (**)

Still, the GSS data do beg some interesting questions. One concerns the result that college education leads to a much higher (though not exactly impressive) rate of belief in evolution overall, but conspicuously not for fundamentalist Christians. My inference-at-a-glance (***) is that the sample sizes are large enough to reject the hypothesis that fundamentalists with some college education exhibit the same attitude shift as is seen for other denominations, so the result looks to be "real." PZ Myers observes:

on [evolution], they are completely refractory to education. What isn't in the data is whether that is because that group maintains its beliefs by sending their young off to bible "colleges" which reinforce erroneous ideas, or whether it's because people who start off as fundies and get a college education then stop being fundies.

The GSS data actually show that fundamentalists are a larger fraction of the total respondents (31%) than the respondents reporting some college education (22%). So there may be evidence for the latter of PZ's possibilities — otherwise, the implication is that fundamentalists select into higher education at dramatically lower rates than the general population (about 27% vs. 37%, a big difference).

As for the behavior of the college-educated fundamentalists, an additional mechanism for the result is that fundamentalist students "learn" the correct answers in order to pass their secular science classes, and just don't update their personal beliefs accordingly. Some of this must be going on, at least insofar as I'd be very surprised if most college-educated fundamentalists, like most of the rest of the college-educated, passed through public university systems. At least in principle, the GSS survey could be augmented to determine whether this is true (though it's not like I'm holding my breath).

What evidence of conservative Christian youth faking their way through school on a large scale would do for the pretensions of academic culture warriors such as David Horowitz and Dinesh D'Souza is left as an exercise for the reader. (****)

One anonymous commenter makes some interesting remarks about the direction of causality between politics and religion, and suggests that group loyalties largely determine the positions. I don't know that this explains the differential education effects across denominations, though. I also think this commenter is wrong to imply that the Christian denominations share the same faith, especially in ways relevant to these questions; in particular, belief (and associated indoctrination) in the literal truth of the Bible is a pretty big interdenominational difference.

This commenter also notes that liberals and atheists may harbor beliefs based on bad science, citing genetically modified foods "fear mongering" and selective rejection of economics or social science "facts." Another commenter contends that science itself creates doubt on "myriad" subjects "from weight loss to how best to build airplanes." I call intellectual fouls.

It isn't anything like a core tenet of American liberalism that GMOs will kill us all dead, or even that anything resembling core results of economics that a supermajority of liberals would reject just because we don't like them (see Robert Waldmann's fine post on the not-so-simple economics of redistribution [via DeLong] for a few reasons why).

Weight loss is conceptually simple (expend more calories than you eat) — the "physics diet" — but difficult in practice because people who want to lose weight have myriad reasons for it, and react in myriad ways to different programs; there's also a lot of pseudoscience in this area.

"How best to build airplanes" led me to a WTF moment, since science makes no claims that imply that one aircraft design or another is "optimal." Perhaps the commenter is referring to controversies over how wings really work, in which case the commenter seems to be confusing the initial poking at the hornet's nest of a seemingly-settled issue with an ultimate aim of better resolving our understanding of things. (*****)


(*) Indeed, the term "solar system" wouldn't make much sense if the sun weren't at its center.

(**) Regular readers will know that we don't think "intelligent design" creationism is a scientific theory around these parts.

(***) One standard deviation for the number of expressions of disbelief in evolution for fundamentalists who have been to college is about six responses, which implies that it's unlikely the true rate of disbelief in evolution is much less than about 60%.

(****) Trick question! They're totally shameless, so it would have no effect on them at all. But it would be one for the "not even trying to resolve the contradictions" file.

(*****) This is not to say that scientific theorizing does, or even can, remove all doubt on any subject. Cf. Feyerabend, etc. We note that the factoid that a theory explains phenomenon X with precision Y is commonly abused.

Labels: public opinion research, Religion, Science

by Anonymous

The latest General Social Survey has been released, and it contains a new module on Americans' beliefs about science. Other sociobloggers have offered glimpses at these data, and in particular the two questions on heliocentrism. Omar gives simple frequencies, Jeremy breaks them down by gender, race, political identification, and education.

I was curious about how the numbers stack up by that other hot-button issue, religion, so I did a bit of Friday-afternoon playing myself. (Gee, I know how to have fun...)

In each graph, the wording of the question is at the top. The religious categories are based on self-reported religion, combined with a NORC-coded variable on the degree of fundamentalism of the respondent's denomination. For each of the "outcome" questions, I've combined the "don't know" and "no answer" respondents, but there are very few of the latter (i.e., <5). Click on each picture for a bigger view, I hope.

Without further ado (and with relatively little commentary), here are the responses to the two questions on heliocentrism, in concatenated form:


Here are responses to a question on the Big Bang:


And here are responses to a question on the origin of man:


Fundamentalists' beliefs about evolution don't seem to vary all much by education. Here are data from the same question, but limited to respondents with at least some college. (Caution: Ns get quite small for the smaller religious categories.)


I know one can't make causal claims from these data about the college "effect" or lack thereof. Nonetheless, I still find all this rather depressing, in a professorial angst, "it's all selection effects and we have no impact" sort of way.

Update: After I posted this, it occurred to me that I should look at a less religiously charged scientific knowledge question, e.g., on the experimental method. The question asks how best to test a new drug: with or without a control group. (This is explained in the question.) Ns are the same as in the other graphs.

Total: 79% w/control, 16% without, 4% DK
Fund prot: 76% w/control
Mod prot: 81%
Lib prot: 84%
Catholics: 75%
Jews/lib others: 82%
None: 85%

So, Fundamental Protestants are a bit below the other groups on this form of scientific knowledge, too, but the difference is less extreme.

Labels: public opinion research, Religion, Science

by Tom Bozzo

I confess that my exposure to the Orson Scott Card oeuvre to date has been limited to the discussion in Thomas Disch's The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of. It seems that I'm just as well off trying to keep up with a supermajority of the Hugo Award Best Novel nominees, though.

Following Wonkette, via Ken, I was amused to see Card's The Memory of Earth described on the famously left-biased Wikipedia as a "fictionalization of the Book of Mormon." The first question coming to mind was how do you fictionalize the already-fictional? (Sorry, any LDS pals out there.) Indeed, among seven theories of the origins of the Book of Mormon listed in the Wikipedia entry as of this evening (see time stamp on post), exactly none is "Joseph Smith made it up." It's almost as if there were a Conservapedia take-over of our left-biased repository of the Webiverse's knowledge.

As for Wonkette, it's a mystery as to whether Ms. Cox is responsible for the Card reference, or the Wonk (so we undertand) using Wonkette's avatar. No matter. Just see how real Bible-thumpers responded to Mitt's efforts to work his way out of his debate non-denial of evilution (h/t TPM) to see what the poor, if ever so handsome, guy's chances are in Crazy Base World.

Labels: Brother Orson, Conservapedia, Religion, sf

by Tom Bozzo

As an addition to this blog's ongoing coverage of the evolution "debate," let's consider for a moment John McCain's reaction to being asked whether he believes in evolution, and the subsequent responses of other Republican presidential contenders. Go see it here in the media format of your choice (as long as your choice is QuickTime or Windows Media) then c'mon back.

Much as I might like to let this speak for itself, the nature of the medium puts us 'twixt Onan and Narcissus (*) — so here are a few words whether in order or not.

McCain's response seemed to follow a longer pause in the first viewing this morning than in the second this afternoon. Still, hard as it is to read minds, an interior monologue seems to play across McCain's face in the moment between the question and his response. I believe that must have gone something like:

Oh, shit, I want to evade this. But if I do, there goes what's left of the Straight Talk Express into Crazy Base World and so I might as well take my medicine and say Yes.

In case you hadn't gone and looked, the moderator asked for hands in disagreement with McCain, and got 'em from Brownback, Tancredo, and Huckabee. (**) Brownback's disbelief in evolution is notable as Brownback's credentials in the anti-abortion movement stem from his archconservative Catholicism. As such, Brownback's stance is not terribly principled, theologically, in light of the Catholic church's development, since the mid-20th century, of a fairly sensible view that (once you plow through lots of tedious Papalese) the behavior of the material world is what it is. Discoveries regarding the material world's dynamics don't have any theological consequences of note as drawing such would be effing the ineffable "purposeful divine providence" or something like that.

As the National Catholic Reporter article (previous link) mentioned, that's not enough for the likes of Michael Behe (Catholic embarrassment to his department), who is linked via the Discovery [sic] Institute to the publication of a notorious ID-friendly NYT op-ed by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna (**). While Brownback could be an archconservative Catholic of the sort who believes that the Church let Galileo off easy back in 1633, is "building a bridge to the 16th century" much of a 21st century campaign slogan?

Similar thoughts from my intermittently-blogging friend and actual scientist Dr. Corndog, who offers additional discussions regarding evolution, our possible neo-pre-enlightenment future, and pie.

Cross-posted to Total Drek.


(*) If only I had come up with that.

(**) Though given the attitudes regarding evolution in Crazy Base World, having only three out of ten raise their hands might be a positive sign. On the other hand, audiences for a debate this early in the cycle are likely to lean towards elite opinion makers who might not be keen on overtly anti-science candidates.

(***) Where I'll be flying later this month to talk some sense into him, should he for some reason attend the Conference on Postal and Delivery Economics.

Labels: Creationism, Religion, Republicans

by Ken Houghton

Continuing in the tradition of Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber, PZ Myers at Pharyngula, and Zeno at Halfway There, I must confess to a "misspent" youth that included Bible reading:

Labels: Quizzes, Religion