Sunspots 400

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Science:  He Lives points out that science is not only compatible with Christianity, but with atheism, Buddhism, etc.

 

The Arts: Wired begins a weekly post on "stunning architecture" with a photo of a 3-dimensional (what else?) building that looks 2-dimensional.

Politics: (or something) Columnist DeWayne Wickham reminds us that school children, lots of them, have been killed in other places than Newton, Mass.

 

Computing: Gizmo's Freeware reviews free substitutes for Microsoft Office.

Gizmo's Freeware also describes free music writing software.

Gizmo also has a link to a site that will tell you what cookies a web page wants to put in your computer.

 

Image source (public domain)

C. S. Lewis on the ultimate meaning of things

Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, “Why is there a universe?” “Why does it go on as it does?” “Has it any meaning?” would remain just as they were? C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco, 2001, p. 23.

Kepler's world view

Johannes Kepler was one of the greatest scientists of all time. He rose from humble beginnings, and had a hard time getting financial support throughout his career, but, probably more than any other person, even Galileo, was responsible for our current view of the arrangement of the solar system. I recently read Tycho and Kepler - The Unlikely Partnership That Forever Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens, by Kitty Ferguson. (New York: Walker and Company, 2002.) It was a longish book, with a lot of history, but I found it well worth the reading.

The first part of the book was mostly about Tycho Brahe. I won't add much to the one-sentence (if that much) that he gets in science courses, namely "he made very accurate observations of the movement of the planets, which were useful in overthrowing the geocentric view of the solar system," or something like that. I will say that Ferguson makes clear that these accurate observations were obtained purposefully, and that Brahe had to develop his own astronomical instruments in order to get them. She also discusses the difficulty of getting along with Brahe, who became, at least in his own mind, an astronomer equal in status to the rulers of his day. Kepler eventually became an employee, or associate, of Brahe's. (Kepler, unlike Brahe, was not born to a fortune, and his status, and where his support was coming from, were often unclear.)

Ferguson indicates clearly that Kepler's view of the solar system, and the universe at large, as a divinely ordered system, which was there to be understood, became the driving force behind his life's work. The one-phrase summary of Kepler's work is something like "he developed three laws of planetary motion." That is true, as far as it goes, and that alone would have been enough to assure him of scientific immortality, but Kepler did more.

Kepler has been called, with justification, "the world's first astro-physicist."

His story, Somnium, has been called the first work of science fiction ever written.

The Wikipedia article on Kepler, and Ferguson, agree that he was a pioneer in the science of optics, introducing the use of diagrams of light rays. Ferguson (292) also says that he discovered that the image on the retina is upside down and backwards. He was the first to believe that the intensity of light varies inversely as the square of the distance from the source.

Ferguson says that he was probably the first to incorporate logarithms into his astronomical tables. He almost discovered that gravity was a force. He didn't get so far as applying the inverse square relationship to gravity, as Newton came to do.

When Kepler was dying, a pastor asked him the basis of his hope for salvation. He responded, "Solely on the merit of our Savior Jesus Christ, in whom is found all refuge, solace, and salvation." (p. 356 of Ferguson)

He wrote his own epitaph, which said:

I measured the heavens, Now the earth's shadows I measure,

Skybound, my mind. Earthbound, my body rests. (p. 357)

In his most important book, he included this prayer:
It now remains that at last, with my eyes and hands removed from the tablet of demonstrations and lifted up towards the heavens, I should pray, devout and supplicating, to the Father of lights: O Thou Who dost by the light of nature promote in us the desire for the light of grace, that by its means Thou mayest transport us into the light of glory, I give thanks to Thee, O Lord Creator, Who hast delighted me with Thy makings and in the works of Thy hands have I exulted. Behold! now, I have completed the work of my profession, having employed as much power of mind as Thou didst give to me; to the men who are going to read those demonstrations I have made manifest the glory of Thy works, as much of its infinity as the narrows of my intellect could apprehend. My mind has been given over to philosophizing most correctly: if there is anything unworthy of Thy designs brought forth by me—a worm born and nourished in a wallowing place of sins—breathe into me also that which Thou dost wish men to know, that I may make the correction: If I have been allured into rashness by the wonderful beauty of Thy works, or if I have loved my own glory among men, while I am advancing in the work destined for Thy glory, be gentle and merciful and pardon me; and finally deign graciously to effect that these demonstrations give way to Thy glory and the salvation of souls and nowhere be an obstacle to that. Same prayer as above, from Harmonies of the World, by Johannes Kepler, tr. Charles Glenn Wallis [1939], at sacred-texts.com, which, as best I can determine, is copyright-free. The emphasis is in the original.This is from the end of the ninth section, or chapter, of Kepler's book.

Thanks for reading. Especially if you are a scientist, pray Kepler's prayer.

An example of scripture where concordism doesn't fit

Psalm 119:89 Forever, O Lord, your word
is firmly fixed in the heavens.
90 Your faithfulness endures to all generations;
you have established the earth, and it stands fast. (ESV. See here for ESV copyright information. See here for the Blueletter Bible's display of how other versions treat verse 90.)

(See yesterday's post for a discussion of concordism.)

Few people would say that this passage means that the earth doesn't rotate on its axis, or revolve about the sun, or that the sun itself doesn't move as the galaxy rotates, in spite of the literal interpretation of verse 90, which seems to say all of those things. Presumably, the Psalmist wrote in accord with the science of the time, which didn't know as much about astronomy as we think we know now. The passage is poetic, not scientific, and it still speaks to us about God's sustaining power. God established the earth, and preserves it, wherever it may go through space.

Thanks for reading.

Sunspots 236

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Science:
The Boston Globe has assembled a fabulous array of photos of Mars, close-up.

Microbial Art is a web site devoted to presenting art from microbial growth.

Sports:
The Associated Press reports on a statistical study that indicates that major college men's basketball referees tend to act in ways that keep the scores close. And, yes, they do favor the home team.

Christianity:
A relatively short, but important, post, entitled "Clarifying Concepts in the Creation-Evolution Dialogue." I would say that this is must reading for Christians interested in science and in origins. God willing, I will post on this article later.


Image source (public domain)

Jerry Coyne's essay: Are Science and Religion really compatible? 2, reaction

A previous post considered an essay by Jerry Coyne, who argued that science and religion are incompatible.

I have found two interesting reactions to that essay. I am sure that there are and will be more such. Edge published responses by several people, most agreeing with Coyne, but not all. The responders included Karl Giberson and Kenneth R. Miller, authors of the books that Coyne was reviewing in his essay. David Heddle, of He Lives, analyzed Coyne's claims logically. So has Siris.

In any serious argument, the first thing that ought to be done is to define terms. (It often isn't done, unfortunately, but it ought to be.)

Coyne deserves credit here. He has defined some of his terms. He defines theism thus: ". . . the concept of a transcendent and eternal god who nonetheless engages the world directly and pays special attention to the real object of divine creation, Homo sapiens." In so doing, he explicitly excludes some of the most "liberal" "Christian" theology as pantheism, not theism, or Christianity. I agree with Coyne -- A christian should believe the ideas he includes in that sentence.

Coyne also defines creationism, by saying that "all" creationists believe:
1) in God.
2) ". . . that God miraculously intervened in the development of life, either creating every species from scratch or intruding from time to time in an otherwise Darwinian process."
3) that humans did not evolve from apes, but were specially created.
4) ". . . they all adhere to a particular argument called "irreducible complexity." This is the idea that some species, or some features of some species, are too complex to have evolved in a Darwinian manner, and must therefore have been designed by God. Blood clotting in vertebrates, for example, is a complex sequence of enzyme reactions, involving twenty proteins that interact to produce the final clot." (This is a central belief of the Intelligent Design movement.)

Here, we begin to see some problems with Coyne's definition. Most obviously, Coyne is reviewing two books, one by Kenneth R. Miller, who is, according to Coyne, a creationist, and, hence, trying to do the impossible, namely combine science and belief in God. Coyne explains how Miller rejects item 4 in Coyne's own list of what makes one a creationist. He also says that Karl Giberson, who wrote the other book Coyne is reviewing, writes that ID is both bad science and bad theology. In the same essay where he writes that "all" creationists share four traits, he also writes:
In fact, they exhibit at least three of the four distinguishing traits of creationists: belief in God, the intervention of God in nature, and a special role for God in the evolution of humans. They may even show the fourth trait, a belief in irreducible complexity, by proposing that a soul could not have evolved, but was inserted by God.

So, Coyne's definition of a creationist does not hold up, as he has undercut it in his own essay. The authors he is reviewing don't necessarily accept irreducible complexity, one of his four criteria for characterizing creationists, but only "may" show it, and that only in their belief in the origin of the soul.

It is also true that some believers, including Billy Graham, are willing to at least entertain the possibility that what separated humans from pre-human ancestors was not the creation of human bodies and minds and souls, but the special creation of a soul within a pre-existing type of pre-human creature. So the third part of Coyne's definition may not hold up, either. There those, possibly including Giberson and Miller, who would say that God miraculously created the universe with laws and emergent properties that allowed living things to evolve, perhaps even allowed life to originate, without special miraculous activity during those events. Thus, point two is not necessarily true of all those Coyne says are creationists, either.

Even if Coyne hasn't defined creationist as carefully as he might have, or has lumped gap theorists with various kinds of theistic evolutionists, IDers, and young earth creationists, and others, it is possible that his main idea has merit. Is it possible for a scientist to be a believer, or the reverse? He doesn't think so:
It would appear, then, that one cannot be coherently religious and scientific at the same time. That alleged synthesis requires that with one part of your brain you accept only those things that are tested and supported by agreed-upon evidence, logic, and reason, while with the other part of your brain you accept things that are unsupportable or even falsified.

I have noticed a gap in Coyne's definitions. He hasn't defined science. The quote above comes as close to such a definition as he gets.

There's another idea in Coyne's essay that needs some discussion. He writes:
"In a common error, Giberson confuses the strategic materialism of science with an absolute commitment to a philosophy of materialism."

By this, he means that ruling out supernatural explanations works for science, but, he implies, this pragmatic methodology doesn't necessarily imply that there is no such thing as the supernatural. Maybe not. I suspect that Coyne, although he says that there could be evidence that would persuade him of the supernatural, would finally reject it. At least one prominent evolutionary biologist has explicitly said that he would do so:
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen. "Billions and Billions of Demons," By Richard C. Lewontin. New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, vol 44, pp. 28+

Perhaps Coyne really doesn't have "an absolute commitment to a philosophy of materialism." I wonder. But Lewontin has, and I don't think he is alone. Richard Dawkins seems to have such a commitment, too. The link in the previous sentence is to the Wikipedia article on him, which says that he is an atheist, and a militant one. Antony Flew has accused him of such an absolute commitment.

If you start by ruling out, say, that air has weight, you are not going to publish articles and books that claim that it does. If you start by believing that there are no supernatural realities, it is very unlikely that you are going to write and speak as if you do. (The converse is also true, of course.) Hebrews 11:3 tells us that we understand how things were made by faith. Genesis 1:1 doesn't tell us when, how, why, or where things started. But it does tell us that there was a Who who started them. I have a commitment to a philosophy of supernaturalism. I admit it. Does that make me a bad scientist, or mean that I really can't be a scientist? I don't think so. I don't think Lewontin's unshakable commitment to materialism makes him a bad scientist, either. But Lewontin, Dawkins, or Coyne are probably not very reliable guides through the difficult waters of the interface between science and religion. (As an aside, Dawkins has recently reviewed Coyne's latest book.)

Thanks for reading. I will probably summarize the criticism of Coyne by He Lives, and discuss the responses by Giberson and Miller, in a subsequent post.

The third post is here.

Jerry Coyne's essay: Are science and religion really compatible?

I have tried to live my life in the belief that it is possible to be a committed scientist and a committed Christian. I won't elaborate on that much, but I hope that this blog has reflected that belief for the past four years plus. (See here, here, and here for posts setting forth some of my beliefs on the interaction between science and Christianity.)

Jerry Coyne, of the University of Chicago, and a prominent evolutionary biologist, has written an important and thought-provoking review of two recent books that have tried to do what I have described, that is, to reconcile science and Christianity, namely Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, by Karl Giberson and Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul, by Kenneth R. Miller.

Coyne has a lot of interesting and important things to say in this essay. He classifies Intelligent Design as both unscientific and as a form of creationism. He criticizes liberal theology, which he calls barely distinguishable from pantheism, and seems to have at least some understanding of, shall we say, more conservative religious belief. He recognizes Giberson's and Miller's sincerity and integrity. He favors their criticism of Young-Earth Creationism. But, he concludes,

"Attempts to reconcile God and evolution keep rolling off the intellectual assembly line. It never stops, because the reconciliation never works." and:

"It would appear, then, that one cannot be coherently religious and scientific at the same time."

Ouch. If I were as eloquent as Coyne, I would respond here, giving reasons why he is wrong, at considerable length, and with great eloquence. I'm not so eloquent. I will just say that the Bible teaches that one of the ways in which God reveals Himself to us humans, besides the "more religious" ways, is through nature, which gives us at least a partly religious motive for studying nature. It is also true that many of the greatest scientists who ever lived were Christians, or adherents of some sort of belief in things that can't be studied by science. Johannes Kepler is an example of a great scientist of the past who was a Christian. Francis Collins is an example of an important scientist of today who is. Although he was not a believer in a personal God, no less than Einstein was a deist, or close to it. So I believe Coyne is wrong. There are, and have been, scientists who were religious, and reconciliation between science and religion is possible.

See here and here for two more of my previous posts on this subject.

God willing, I will be posting again about this essay by Coyne, and presenting some criticisms of it, including reactions by Giberson and Miller. These criticisms will attempt to prove that Coyne is wrong.

Thanks for reading.

The second and third parts of this series have now been posted.

Hugh Ross puts his faith on the line

In his book, Creation as Science: A Testable Model Approach to End the Creation/Evolution Wars (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2006), Hugh Ross says that he tells audiences that he "would let go of my Christian Faith" if he discovered that it did not have a factual foundation. This usually shocks most of his listeners, but, says Ross, a faith based on falsehood is not a faith worth keeping. As he points out, Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15 and elsewhere, went to considerable length to show that Christianity does have a factual foundation. Ross is the founder of Reasons to Believe.

In a previous post, I quoted David Snoke, author of A Biblical Case for an Old Earth (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), as saying almost exactly the same thing.

Thanks for reading.

A Biblical Case for an Old Earth, by David Snoke, part 9

I have posted several times on David Snoke's A Biblical Case for an Old Earth (Grand Rapids, Mi: Baker Books, 2006). The most recent post is here.

Having considered the main arguments for young-earth creationism, and seriously weakened or demolished them, using the Bible itself, Snoke considers the question of the relationship between science and Christianity. Although he does not mention Ian Barbour (and perhaps is unaware of him) Barbour has been the most prominent voice arguing for Integration of science and Christianity. (As opposed to supposing that they are necessarily in conflict, or that they have nothing to say to each other.) Snoke uses the term, Concordist science. For what it's worth, I agree whole-heartedly. Scientific facts are one part of God's revelation to us, and, although not as important as the Bible, or, especially as God's revelation in Jesus Christ, the different ways in which God has revealed Himself to us should agree, or at least work together, provided, of course, that we understand them well enough.

So why do some Christians, who take the Bible seriously, take the position that science and Biblical revelation are opposed?

Many Christians seem to be afraid to make any predictions based on the Bible that could be falsified, for fear that people will reject all of Christianity if it is attached to a particular scientific theory. This, in my experience, lies at the root of much of the objection to concordantist science. Many Christians want to seal off their Christian belief from any possible contradiction with science, so that it is an impregnable fortress against all attack.
I call this basic mind-set of so many Christians, both conservative and liberal, the "two-worlds" view. . . . This view says, in essence, that science and real-world experience lie in one world and that the Bible and theology lie in another world, completely distinct from the first. The two worlds do not contradict each other because they cannot; no overlap exists so one world does not have implications in the other. The Bible has authority in matters of faith, but not at all in matters of science, because faith and science have nothing to say about each other. . . . This two-worlds mind-set reflects an essentially defensive posture. Having survived a long tradition of attack on Christianity in the name of science, many Christians assume that if the two worlds did overlap, then science would surely contradict Christian faith. Even if science does not presently appear to contradict our faith, the possibility always exists that it will. (pp. 117-8)

Well, says Snoke, so what if there is that possibility? He goes on to make a strong statement:
We must face the facts: if the Bible is wrong, utterly wrong, about the history of our origins, then we should dump it. We cannot avoid this risky aspect of our faith. If we protect the Bible by attacking modern science, or if we protect it by making it speak only about matters of morality and personal faith, we have cut it off from the real world and made it far less than it claims to be. (p. 121)

Wow! But I think he is exactly right about that.

Thanks for reading. Read Snoke.