I thought I’d reblog the following post from Andy Lawrence. I think it will be of interest to readers here because it relates to a very important issue. If you would like to read the full article please follow the link to Andy’s original post…
Yesterday I saw a Twitter link to a New York Times article about an astronomer suing the University of Kentucky, claiming he was rejected as a job applicant because of his religious faith. This piqued my interest. When I got there I found it was someone I know reasonably well on a professional level – Martin Gaskell. Martin graduated from the Edinburgh astrophysics degree the year before me – 1975 – and is a well known AGN researcher. He is an i … Read More
via The e-Astronomer
This entry was posted on December 21, 2010 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
In the Dark 
December 21, 2010 at 8:19 pm
I regard intelligent design as rubbish, and I’m an evangelical Christian. There is no doubt that the earth and universe are ancient, and this fact does not clash with Genesis’ six days (six Yom in the Hebrew, as in Yom Kippur), for Yom has the same ambiguity as the English ‘day’ in being capable of meaning ‘era’ (eg the era/day of steam power). So there is certainly *time* for evolution. As to whether the neo-Darwinian synthesis of genetics plus natural selection explains everything, we simply do not know today. See ‘epigenetics’ on Wikipedia for some (entirely scientific) suggestions that further principles are involved.
Regarding the court case, tricky. Glad I’m not the judge.
December 21, 2010 at 10:37 pm
Anton – I have to say I’m always amazed how easily the Bible seems to be reconciled with the modern scientific view of life and the universe, but how rarely it seems to predict it. I would be far more impressed if the Bible had ever been used as a tool for scientific research. It has ,after all, been around much longer.
There is a common (and not dissimilar) suggestion that “let there be light” in Genesis is consistent with the radiation dominated early universe of the Big Bang. (Type some of those words into Google for a grand tour of 1990s HTML web design)
In the 1960s did you ever go to a seminar on the steady state theory with the King James Version tucked under your arm arguing for the Big Bang – perhaps you did?
Bringing it into the present, there is an implication above that modern evolutionary theory is incomplete – does the Bible give modern researchers any clues as to possible research avenues they could explore? One thing I do feel very confident about is that if/when we do understand origin of life etc that there will be a Biblical verse lurking that can (and will) be reconciled with it.
December 22, 2010 at 12:07 am
“I have to say I’m always amazed how easily the Bible seems to be reconciled with the modern scientific view of life and the universe, but how rarely it seems to predict it.”
Indeed, and that’s because the Bible is not a science textbook (except incidentally) but is rather a salvation textbook.
Bear in mind that out of about 100 very distinct human cultures, science emerged from the Christian one. Coincidence? I don’t think, so, although I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out the connection.
I was 12 (and an atheist) when the 1960s ended, so I never did what you suggest (and the King James Bible is now out of date because the English language has changed – not many people will get right the meaning of “Suffer little children” today). But there is one question I can answer nowadays that I couldn’t answer when I was a a secular physicist – Why are the laws of physics beautiful? I believe that they were ordained by a creator who is into beauty.
As you imply, the notion of a start to creation in the Big Bang matches Genesis, whereas Steady State better matches the buddhist view.
You could have given me a harder time by asking about Adam and Eve…
December 22, 2010 at 11:30 am
Regarding science coming out of Christian culture, I think you have to look at a great many reasons as to why science developed so much more in Europe than elsewhere. Start with Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel: it’s mainly geography. Then follow the geopolitics of the Ancient Greeks who really kickstarted it. Then the development of a Europe-spanning Roman Empire which ultimately acted as a channel for a small Jewish millenarian sect to rise to prominence and enabled a pan-European intellectual culture of a sort to develop through the Catholic church. Then Islamic culture which for centuries enabled the retainment of Greek knowledge while Europe fell into a dark mainly non-literary age, as well as the development of much new science and mathematics (that’s not to say there weren’t developments in the Christian world, e.g. people like William of Ockham, just far fewer). Then the fortuitous circumstances of the Renaissance, with a trade-fuelled boom and wealthy and competing benefactors coinciding with the sudden transfer of a lot of Greek and Islamic knowledge to the west after the fall of Constantinople. Then a period of religious reformation sparking free thought, and then all this development leading to a technological mastery which allowed Europe to become pre-eminent. That’s a long and complicated story, parts of the development of science facilitated by Christianity, parts hampered by it and you can take your pick about which factors were most important.
December 22, 2010 at 11:53 am
Phil: I regard these as factors going to explain why science arose in Western rather than Eastern Europe, where the Orthodox church held sway. I’ll set out why I believe that Christianity was central in a response to Phillip’s post of 0945 on 22/12, below. It is, incidentally, Eastern Orthodox culture that kept Greek knowledge far more than Islam did. Unlike the West, Constantinople never went through a Dark Age and it spoke the same language. Even at the mediaeval height of the papacy travellers from Rome to Constantinople were awed by the place.
December 22, 2010 at 3:18 pm
Phil: Some of the factors you mention are certainly relevant to *technology*. I live in Shropshire, and the south-east of the county is where the Industrial Revolution began, at Coalbrookdale and Ironbridge. I have just renewed my annual pass to the museums there, which are fascinating; last year was the 300th anniversary of Abraham Darby III’s great innovation of using coked coal in a blast furnace (for making iron), rather than charcoal obtained by letting wood smoulder under a blanket of soil – which had been a limiting factor. (Attempts to use coal that had not been coked, ie heated so as to drive off impurities, led to uselessly weak iron.) At least 5 things came together there to kick off modern industry: iron ore, a coal seam, limestone for slag to leach out impurities, a major river for transport of ore and goods (and to power the blast bellows), and know-how. Probably the financial system also had to be of a certain sort. Then… blast-off!
December 22, 2010 at 1:37 am
“I was 12 (and an atheist) when the 1960s ended, so I never did what you suggest”
yes, but do you think someone could have? You do seem to be saying that they could.
If there is genuine information about the nature of the Universe to be gleaned from this book (however incidental) it almost seems a shame to be using it only as a textbook for salvation. By all means, use it for that too – I just think you could win a few Nobel prizes on the side as well.
December 22, 2010 at 11:01 am
Had I been a Christian and a cosmologist in the 1960s then I would not have gone into a scientific seminar saying that the Bible settles the Steady State vs Big Bang dispute, simply because others at the seminar would not have regarded this as a strong argument. The point of debate is to sway others. I, however, do regard it as a strong argument.
Are you Steve Jones the geneticist who gave the Reith Lectures 20 years ago and followed it up with the TV series In The Blood? If so then you are one of my intellectual heroes for the clarity of your exposition to the layman of genetics and its outworkings in the human world.
December 22, 2010 at 12:30 pm
“Are you Steve Jones the geneticist who gave the Reith Lectures 20 years ago”
No, sorry. I was 12 (and an atheist) 20 years ago!
But I agree he’s great. I read his book “In the Blood” when it came out. I didn’t see the tv series. There is quote in it that I remember 10 years later about science and religion. Something like “the battle between science and religion is like the battle between a lion and a shark – they will always win on their own territory and lose on the other’s”.
I found that pretty unconvincing then and now. But I think you will find Steve Jones (geneticist) is very much in the “science has nothing to say about religion” camp.
Regards
Steve
ps Anton – I was privileged to have been one of your intellectual heroes – if only for a few brief hours! All the best 🙂
December 22, 2010 at 1:13 pm
Steve: I share your view that science and religion are not totally disjoint. Miracles comprise the obvious clash.
December 22, 2010 at 2:11 pm
Miracles are the easiest of them all. Why can’t you just say they are nonsense in the same way you say ID and 6000 year old earth is?
The more important question is – what would you lose by doing so? I would just like to understand how believing that someone thousands of years ago actually walked on water then turned it into wine is important to you in any way.
It just seems so easy to get around and as I understand it there are many scientifically literate religious Christians who do just that.
December 22, 2010 at 2:39 pm
Well Steve, I can’t say that miracles are nonsense because I don’t believe that. I find the Bible reliable in many areas of my life that I could not have figured out for myself, and I don’t intend to start picking and choosing now. (Also, although I have not witnessed one myself, enough people I trust have.) Last summer I gave a sermon on this subject in the congregation I am part of, and I can send it to you via Peter by email if you are interested.
December 22, 2010 at 3:48 pm
..”neither can the existence of a teapot orbiting Sirius.”
At last I understand the ending of 2001! Thank you Phillip!
December 22, 2010 at 10:46 am
Phillip: I think it is not banal. People like Dawkins have been asserting that the neo-Darwinian synthesis necessarily explains all of biology and fills in all of the gaps merely on the grounds that they can’t see any other mechanism at work and that it is obvously capable of explaining a great deal. I call the claim that it explains *everything* biological an example of faith. And epigenetics already suggests otherwise.
December 22, 2010 at 12:35 pm
Phillip,
The ancient Greeks effectively invented mathematics (certainly the concept of formal proof), and they made considerable advances in scientific *observation* of natural phenomena. What they didn’t develop was the notion of designed interventionist experiment, to see what would happen; or its theoretical analogue, the gedank-experiment. It is the interplay between practice and theory that characterises science-as-we-understand-it. (Astrophysics remains perforce something of a throwback to ancient Greece in this respect!) All that arose in a Christian cultural milieu.
I believe this is no coincidence, as follows. The Judaeo-Christian claim is that a God who is into order created the world, and that humans are in his ‘image’, ie have things in common with him (that animals don’t have). The Bible majors on the fact that those things-in-common mean we can have relationship with God, but it also means that we can at least partially comprehend the order that he put into the world he created. Scientific law is a manifestation of that order. In contrast the Buddhist view is monist – all differentiation is illusion. If you really believe that, you will never be motivated to look systematically for order in the apparently chaotic ways of nature.
Galileo’s work was not done in isolation, but was the great culmination of a particular stream of thought, nicely set out for the intelligent layman in James Hannam’s book “God’s philosophers: How the medieval world laid the foundations of modern science”.
So science required a commitment to the Judaeo-Christian worldview, which mediaeval and Renaissance culture certainly had. It did not, however, require any personal commitment to love or obey God, and you correctly point out that this culture was often unloving and disobedient to God’s call in the New Testament. In which regard, would you please reconsider using the phrase “the church” synonymously with the Roman Catholic Church, as you presently do? The Eastern Orthodox, at least, do not appreciate it.
Anton
PS More to come
December 22, 2010 at 1:10 pm
“Epigenetics seems, to me, a red herring (no, not one resulting from a mutation) in this context. So, environmental factors exert an influence on organisms. What else is new? OK, the mechanism is interesting and involves genes, but it is not some fundamentally new paradigm which destroys the foundations of Darwinism.”
The point is that environmental factors exert an influence directly ON GENES. Yes, that is revolutionary – although how significant it is in practice remains unclear.
December 22, 2010 at 2:17 pm
Phillip:
The key to the six Yom of creation in Genesis 1 is the oft-neglected second phrase of the Bible, “and the earth [having been created], was without form, and void.” That means: Unstructured and unpopulated. In the first three Yom God imposes structure by differentiating light from dark, then above (sky) from below (sea), then land from sea. Then come three yom in which God fills the emptiness, populating the heavens with stars, the sky and sea with birds and fish, and the land with animals and humans. These are the points that the writer of Genesis wishes to make.
Any ancient rabbi would have been well aware that Yom could not mean “day, in the 24-hour sense defined by the sun” before the sun had been set in place. So the meaning of Yom as ‘era’ in the Genesis account was available as soon as the account had been written; it was not necessary to wait for modern science to clarify the ambiguity. And some of the Hebrew poetry in the Old Testament is suggestive that the mountains (and therefore the earth) are far, far older than man.
Adam, Eve and the Flood? Regarding Adam, how might you write the account of evovlution in one phrase using the language and concepts available 4000 years ago? “God created man from the dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7) fits pretty well in my view. I take God blowing into Adam’s nostrils the “Neshamah/breath of life” in this passage not as some kind of Frankenstein animation but a spiritual miracle; this is what made some kind of hominid into a human being with higher faculties. The account of Eve’s creation I take to be material fact (and miracle), ie here I agree with the fundamentalists. The point is to establish the relation between man and woman. (Incidentally there would have been plenty of non-human but physically similar hominids around at that time.) Miracles are the great irreconcilable between science and scripture, and I do believe they happen occasionally when God has higher priorities than keeping order via his laws of science.
I believe that a thick layer of silt that is suggestive of (and consistent with) the Flood has been found in Mesopotamia – from which the first humans had not migrated at that stage according to Genesis. I am not yet decided whether the Flood was local (in which case, why bother preserving animals, which presumably *had* spread globally?) or global (in which case a lot of scientific timing would be wrong). Doing the water accountancy in the global scenario is perfectly possible if you consider a short-term catastrophist global cooling event that simply blankets much of the earth, beyond the Noah’s Ark area, with snow.
Finally, too many of my fundamentalist brethren assert that the creation of animals “after their own kind” is incompatible with macroevolution, ie speciation. They are taking this phrase (from Genesis) to mean that animals never change in morphology down the generations, but it can perfectly well refer merely to the passage from one generation to the next, ie male lions mate with female lions not female giraffes, and the resulting progeny are lions not hybrids. Nothing is said about whether a creature 10,000 generations down the line might be so different from its ancestor as to comprise a species distinct from it.
Anton
PS And some more difficult questions for you:
Why is there anything, not nothing?
Why are the laws of physics beautiful?
Why are the laws of physics such as to permit biology?
December 22, 2010 at 2:24 pm
Phillip: All I am saying is that epigenetics has demonstrated that the neo-Darwinian synthesis does not give a complete account of evolutionary mechanisms. I am not saying more than that, and if fundamentalists are, please take it up with them not me. I might even agree with you!
December 22, 2010 at 2:48 pm
At a guess Phillp, to demonstrate that those who assert the neo-Darwinian synthesis is all you need are capable of error. I am not claiming that you will find epigenetics in scripture if you run some of those strange Bible Code software routines!
December 22, 2010 at 3:05 pm
You are assuming that the Yom do not overlap. But I have shown that they are eras, not 24-hour days.
You know exactly why I am motivated to advocate Genesis. But why are you so motivated to knock it over?
December 22, 2010 at 3:40 pm
Phillip: your reply to “Why are the laws of physics such as to permit biology?” is that this question “can be answered by the anthropic principle”. In other words, you are saying that if things were otherwise then we wouldn’t be here to ask the question.
I don’t find this satisfactory at all. Consider a gedank-experiment in which I travel to a universe where I don’t know the laws of physics, but in which I observe carbon-based life forms that exhibit obviously intelligent behaviour. Why are the laws of physics in *that* universe such as to permit biology? And if you can’t answer that, why is the situation conceptually different in our universe just because we observe ourselves, rather than other life forms?
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I’m sure that most people, confronted with a blackboard after a quantum-mechanics lecture, wouldn’t say that the laws of physics are beautiful.”
Is beauty really subjective? There is a beauty in some landscapes, or the night sky, that requires no education to see. There is a beauty in Bach’s music that requires no education to see, but a little knowledge of music helps you get more out of it. Keep going down this line… there is a beauty in relativity theory which requires a great deal of pure-mathematical education to perceive, but there is unanimity among people having that education that GR is beautiful.
“I think that we evolved to enjoy things beneficial to our survival”
There is survival value in perceiving lions in savannah alright – but in perceiving beauty in equations? Pull the other one!
December 22, 2010 at 4:22 pm
Phillip,
I regard myself as having “got a life” when I became a Christian. (I enjoyed being part of The Sherlock Holmes Society of London but it did not provide the meaning of life.)
You are lumping all relgions together, but their sacred writings reveal them to have many (and deep) incompatibilities. Surely you have to proceed on a faith by faith basis? As for war – the two greatest wars in history had no religious motive, and most wars are fuelled by plunder, jealousy and nationalism/racism – reasons that have nothing to do with religion.
In any greater detail can speak only for my own religion. The New Testament says that the church will be persecuted by the world for its faith (2 Tim 3:12, John 15:18-20), it will be peaceful, it will be a small minority (Matt 22:14), it will not be rigidly hierarchical. In mediaeval Europe you can find small bands of people who fit this description – the Lollards in England and the Waldensians in northern Italy, for instance. Who persecuted them? The Roman Catholic Church! So, by scripture’s own criteria, these people *were* the church, whereas Catholicism had mutated to become “the world” and paid merely lip service to the scriptures. There were other such groups but they largely fall beneath the radar of conventional church historians who recognise only politicised hierarchies (or Rome’s word for it is taken that they were heretics).
Anton
December 22, 2010 at 4:48 pm
Chemtrail is good, but even more implausible is that the US government did 9/11. I know one or two people who believe that claim, and my first argument against is that, given the scale of the conspiracy that would have been necessary, it could never have been kept secret. Also, in a controlled demolition a skyscraper is demolished from the bottom upwards, the floors concertina-ing when they reach ground level, whereas the Twin Towers collapsed from where the aircraft went in.
December 23, 2010 at 8:38 pm
Re chemtrails, is it true that many decades ago parts of the western USA were found to be lacking in some vital trace element and it was released from the air? I seem to recall reading something like that.
You can see chemtrails at most air shows, when dye is released into the exhaust stream of jets to produce coloured smoke. I reckon that’s about the lot though.
January 20, 2011 at 1:00 pm
Update on this story: the University of Kentucky has settled out of court, and will pay $125,000 compensation whilst admitting “no wrongdoing”.
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/44822