The arguments of Creationists and intelligent designers and other opponents of evolution seem to be evolving. Legally and culturally, at least, the creationist argument was shot down decades ago. More recently, that’s been the case for intelligent design theory, too. So now the fight continues, although the language is starting to change again. Now, it’s not about creation. It’s not even about design. It’s about attacking the “strengths and weaknesses” of Darwinian theory. And it might just work.

Starting this summer, the state education board will determine the curriculum for the next decade and decide whether the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution should be taught. The benign-sounding phrase, some argue, is a reasonable effort at balance. But critics say it is a new strategy taking shape across the nation to undermine the teaching of evolution, a way for students to hear religious objections under the heading of scientific discourse.

Already, legislators in a half-dozen states - Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri and South Carolina - have tried to require that classrooms be open to “views about the scientific strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian theory,” according to a petition from the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based strategic center of the intelligent design movement.

What do you think? The evolutionists will say it’s just more creationism in sheep’s clothing, but this line of argument - investigating the veracity of evolutionary theory - might just work. It’s got all the skepticism and love of free inquiry that good science needs. And it has nothing to do with alternative theories, like intelligent design. Oh, I know many of you will protest, and that’s okay. We allow dissent at WMB!

Ever heard of the Implicit Association Test (IAT)?  It’s a kind of test devised to tell ourselves things about ourselves that we might not know.  Like giving ourselves an X-Ray.  From Project Implicit: “It is well known that people don’t always ’speak their minds’, and it is suspected that people don’t always ‘know their minds’. Understanding such divergences is important to scientific psychology.”  Which is why the IAT was developed.

You can take a whole variety of IATs at this site, like the Religion IAT, or the Gender/Career IAT.  Or you can take the Presidential IAT, to see which candidate you really prefer.  Even if you think you know whom you prefer.

Albert Einstein — the physicist who would probably be chagrined to learn that both atheists and creationists use his words to defend their belief systems — wrote a little-known 1954 letter labeling the Bible “pretty childish.” Now, in the words of The New York Times, the letter has “poured gasoline on the culture wars between science and religion.”

Experts estimated the letter would go for no more than $15,000, but it went for $404,000 at a Thursday auction by Bloomsbury in London. Put in perspective, the paper in which Einstein and Michele Besso posit a calculation that later became a bedrock of the General Theory of Relativity went for $398,500, the Times says.

“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish,” Einstein wrote in the letter, which had been privately owned and known to only a few devoted Einstein scholars. Underscoring, again, the volatility of the roiling science-versus-religion debate, it reopens—and, some hope, nails shut—Einstein’s personal views that most now recognize as too tepid to construe a defense of organized religion or creationism and too strong to back atheism. “A little known letter written by him, however, may help to settle the argument—or at least provoke further controversy about his views,” The Guardian says.

For years, his reams of quips and aphorisms on God and religion have provided fodder to antitheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins on one side and the Discovery Institute on the other, all trying to invoke Einstein as an expert witness. But the letter—with its hardest-hitting punch in the above quotation—strikes a greater blow for the no-God camp.

Einstein’s enigmatic views on religion and God have spawned rigorous debate over where the scientist nonpareil actually stood on everything from the historicity of Jesus (authentic, he said, minus miracles and the Resurrection) to how an all-loving, omnipotent God and theodicy could coexist (irreconcilably, he said).

Born into a non-practicing Jewish family, Einstein nonetheless embraced Judaism until, as a teenager, he began turning to a brand of deism close to Spinoza’s quasi-pantheism. He famously wrote: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” He said he “believe[d] in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” Fanatical atheists, he wrote in another letter, “are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against traditional religion as the ‘opium of the masses’—cannot hear the music of the spheres.”

In his eponymous Einstein biography, Walter Isaacson quotes the Nobel laureate: “I’m not an atheist. I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds.” It’s these “continual references to God,” the Times says, that have “led some wishful thinkers to try to put him in the camp of some kind of believer or even, not long ago, to paint him as an advocate of intelligent design.” The letter doesn’t help creationists much, but the wishful thinking and willful misrepresenting of Einstein’s views on God are on the other side as well—and with the same fanaticism. This could be why, as the Times also reports, one of the letter’s top bidders was none other than Richard Dawkins.

Skeptic features a cogent debate about climate change with these two great essays that seem rather reasonable in their presentation: “The Climate of Belief” (which argues that we just don’t have the science to confirm that humans have caused global warming) versus “How We Know Global Warming is Real” (which argues exactly what it says).

The Templeton Foundation has a series on “The Big Questions,” where big minds weigh in on what they think the answers are.  Their current Big Question is a good one for us to discuss: “Does science make belief in God obsolete?”  Here’s a short list of the answers, if only partially:

A Harvard psychologist says, “Yes, if by…”

The Archbishop of Vienna says, “No, and yes.”

A Nobel Laureate in physics says, “Absolutely not!”

A Pakistani physicist says, “Not necessarily.”

A philosopher says, “Of course not.”

A Stanford professor of neurology with a very cool beard says, “No.”

A well-known and lovable atheist author says, “No, but it should.”

An Anglican priest says, “No.”

Another notorious atheist author says, rather unsurprisingly, “Yes.”

A Harvard medical professor says, “No, not at all.”

The publisher of Skeptic magazine says, “It depends.”

A Brown biology professor says, “Of course not.”

A man who’s into biocomplexity and informatics says, “No, but only if…”

Download every one of their answers in very readable form right here.  In an age where people refuse to answer questions with any kind of earnestness, projects like these are appreciated.

Ah, behold the new Malcolm Gladwell piece at The New Yorker - “In the Air.”  It’s about a company called Intellectual Ventures (I.V.), which is exactly what it sounds like.  It’s a group of really smart people - physicists, surgeons, computer men, et al. - who do nothing but come up with ideas, with solutions, with inventions.

The original expectation was that I.V. would file a hundred patents a year. Currently, it’s filing five hundred a year. It has a backlog of three thousand ideas. Wood said that he once attended a two-day invention session presided over by Jung, and after the first day the group went out to dinner. “So Edward took his people out, plus me,” Wood said. “And the eight of us sat down at a table and the attorney said, ‘Do you mind if I record the evening?’ And we all said no, of course not. We sat there. It was a long dinner. I thought we were lightly chewing the rag. But the next day the attorney comes up with eight single-spaced pages flagging thirty-six different inventions from dinner. Dinner.”

Gladwell also talks about multiples, or the idea that the same thing can be invented at the same time by two different people in two different places.  It happened with steam power, with the telephone, with the microchip.  How does this happen?  Gladwell says, Maybe the ideas are out there, waiting to be discovered at a certain time and certain place.  The ingredients are there for all the same people.  We just have to cook them.  Fascinating, and so well-written.

As a hyper-theoretical extension of my earlier post, which touched on natural law, Professor Stuart Kauffman (with a shared appointment between biological sciences and physics and astronomy) sounds like he wants a revolution. Now, be careful. What you are about to read is as neopagan as it gets.

We need a place for our spirituality, and a Creator God is one such place. I hold that it is we who have invented God, to serve as our most powerful symbol. It is our choice how wisely to use our own symbol to orient our lives and our civilizations. I believe we can reinvent the sacred. We can invent a global ethic, in a shared space, safe to all of us, with one view of God as the natural creativity in the universe.

He says, in his lengthy essay, “Breaking the Galilean Spell” (as in Galileo, not the Man from Galilee), he says something that premodernists (like some of us) can agree with: “[O]ur secular modern society suffers at least four injuries, which split our humanity down the center.” They are:

1. “[T]he artificial division between science and the humanities.”
2. “[T]he reductionistic scientific worldview.”
3. “[T]hat agnostic and atheist ’secular humanists’ have been quietly taught that spirituality is foolish or, at best, questionable.”
4. “[T]hat all of us, whether we are secular or of faith, lack a global ethic.”

So, we have a very intelligent man, who understands much of the problem, and his solution is way, way, way off.

The New Scientist, to celebrate the total victory of materialistic ideology, presents their special Evolution Issue, with this feature article: “Evolution: 24 Myths and Misconceptions.” 

Darwin presented compelling evidence for evolution in On the Origin and, since his time, the case has become overwhelming. Countless fossil discoveries allow us to trace the evolution of today’s organisms from earlier forms. DNA sequencing has confirmed beyond any doubt that all living creatures share a common origin. Innumerable examples of evolution in action can be seen all around us, from the pollution-matching pepper moth to fast-changing viruses such as HIV and H5N1 bird flu. Evolution is as firmly established a scientific fact as the roundness of the Earth.

I’m not sure how “the case has become overwhelming” fits with “has confirmed beyond any doubt” and “scientific fact,” but hey, I’m not a scientist.  I don’t understand their complicated reasoning.  For example, when I say, “I’m pretty sure I love you,” I don’t mean “I definitely, beyond any doubt, love you.”  Just one more example of how Materialists say, “The evidence is pretty clear that evolution is true,” and then turn around and say to Non-Materialists: “We are absolutely right, and you are absolutely wrong.”  “Pretty clear” and “absolutely clear” are not the same thing, and that difference belies the real problem with materialism: it has no concept of Truth or Fact.  Here are some of my favorites “myths and misconceptions” from the article:

It doesn’t matter if people do not understand evolution

Creationism provides a coherent alternative to evolution

Evolution must be wrong because the Bible is inerrant

Evolution cannot be disproved so is not science

Evolution is an entirely random process

Read them all here, and the Truth will set you free!

More and more these days, scientists, researchers, philosophers, everyone is trying to explain and understand morality.  Every few weeks, the Times has some science article explaining morality as just one more evolutionary development or some such.  This article in Prospect Magazine is a nice synthesis of all this research, mentioning reasons why red state and blue state voters might be different.

[One researcher] suggests that it is no coincidence that rural areas of the US, where communities are more bound together and interdependent, tend to be more conservative and religious, while urban dwellers tend to be more secular and liberal, with a focus on “individualising” ethics […] Viewed this way, the faultlines in the ongoing culture wars begin to come into focus, and the geographical distribution of red and blue states in the 2004 presidential election starts to make more sense.

The piece also suggests that those who are more sensitive to “disgust” are more likely to see more issues as moral issues and that those people tend to be more conservative.  Take the Moral Sense Test here.  Explore your own morality here.

Most things I read in the Times doesn’t scare me.  And my beliefs give me a certain confidence that, no matter what gets printed in the Times, my quarterback is really quite superior to the other team’s quarterback.  Nevertheless, this article kind of freaked me out.  The long and short is, two scientists are trying to stop a bunch of other scientists from smashing protons together in their collider.  Because the proton smashing could create a tiny black hole.  That would grow.  And eat the earth.  And what makes it all so scary is that a judge is going to decide whether or not the experiment can go forward.

The new worries are about black holes, which, according to some variants of string theory, could appear at the collider. That possibility, though a long shot, has been widely ballyhooed in many papers and popular articles in the last few years, but would they be dangerous?

According to a paper by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking in 1974, they would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat. No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate.

In other words, yes, they could be dangerous.  I don’t like hearing this, mainly because I’m building a picket fence around my house, and I just planted a lot of expensive azaleas and two maple trees.  I don’t want my plants, or my family, to get sucked into a black hole.  But perhaps we’ll all get sucked into the hole, and then we’ll all come out the other side, all of us and all our shrubs, and none of us will even notice what happened.  That would be ideal, I think.