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Dispatch From the Metanexus Conference

Heather Wax — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:15:12 +0000

Tom Oord, a professor of theology and philosophy at Northwest Nazarene University, praises Karl Giberson’s talk on celebrity scientists “who make anemic spiritual or anti-religious pronouncements and yet the public regards their words as highly significant—despite the lack of thoughtful study these scientists have done on the great theological and religious ideas of history.”
In an exchange on Facebook, Oord adds:

Giberson also strongly criticized those who think that the general theory of evolution and Christianity are essentially incompatible. I join him in this criticism. Contrary to some creation scientists, I find no negative moral consequences to believing both that God is Creator and that the general theory of evolution is true.

Another Dispatch From the Darwin Festival

Heather Wax — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:45:43 +0000

Richard Dawkins has posted the follow-up to Daniel Dennett’s first report from the Darwin Festival, in which he heavily criticizes a session on evolution and theology. (Philip Clayton, Wentzel van Huyssteen, and John Brooke have since responded.) In the second installment, Dennett shares his impressions of another session he attended, this one on the evolution of religion.
Here’s what Dennett wrote:

The second Templeton-sponsored session (at the Cambridge Darwin Festival) was more presentable. On the evolution of religion, it featured clear, fact-filled presentations by Pascal Boyer and Harvey Whitehouse, a typical David Sloan Wilson advertisement for his multi-level selection approach, and an even more typical meandering and personal harangue from Michael Ruse. The session was chaired, urbanely and without any contentful intervention, by Fraser Watt, our evolutionary christologist. (I wonder: should “christology” be capitalized? Ian McEwan asked me if there was, perhaps, a field of X-ray christology. I’ve been having fun fantasizing about how that might revolutionize science and open up a path for the Crick and Watson of theology!)
I learned something at the session. Boyer presented a persuasive case that the “packaging” of the stew of separable and largely independent items as “religion” is itself ideology generated by the institutions, a sort of advertising that has the effect of turning religions into “brands” in competition. Whitehouse gave a fascinating short account of the Kivung cargo cult in a remote part of Papua New Guinea that he studied as an anthropologist, living with them for several years. A problem: the Kivung cult has the curious belief that their gods (departed ancestors) will return, transformed into white men, and bearing high technology and plenty for all. This does present a challenge for a lone white anthropologist coming to live with them for awhile, camera gear in hand, and wishing to be as unobtrusive as possible. Wilson offered very interesting data from a new study by his group on a large cohort of American teenagers, half Pentecostals and half Episcopalians (in other words, maximally conservative and maximally liberal), finding that on many different scales of self-assessment, these young people are so different that they would look to a biologist like “different species.” Ruse declared that while he is an atheist, he wishes that those wanting to explain religion wouldn’t start with the assumption that religious beliefs are false. He doesn’t seem to appreciate the role of the null hypothesis or the presumption of innocence in trials. We also learned tidbits about his life and his preference—as an atheist—for the Calvinist God.”

Dispatch From the Darwin Festival

Heather Wax — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:47:12 +0000

Jerry Coyne has posted philosopher Daniel Dennett’s report on a session about evolution and religion from the Darwin Festival currently taking place at Cambridge University.
Here’s what Dennett wrote:

I am attending and participating in the big Cambridge University Darwin Week bash, and I noticed that one of the two concurrent sessions the first day was on evolution and theology, and was ‘supported by the Templeton Foundation’ (though the list of Festival Donors and Sponsors does not include any mention of Templeton). I dragged myself away from a promising session on speciation, and attended. Good thing I did. It was wonderfully awful. We heard about the Big Questions, a phrase used often, and it was opined that the new atheists naively endorse the proposition that “There are no meaningful questions that science cannot answer.” Richard Dawkins’ wonderful sentence about how nasty the God of the Old Testament is was read with relish by Philip Clayton, Professor at Claremont School of Theology in California, and the point apparently was to illustrate just how philistine these atheists were—though I noticed that he didn’t say he disagreed with Richard’s evaluation of Yahweh. We were left to surmise, I guess, that it was tacky of Richard to draw attention to these embarrassing blemishes in an otherwise august tradition worthy of tremendous respect. The larger point was the complaint that the atheists have a “dismissive attitude toward the Big Questions” and Dawkins, in particular, didn’t consult theologians. (H. Allen Orr, they were singing your song.) Clayton astonished me by listing God’s attributes: according to his handsomely naturalistic theology, God is not omnipotent, not even supernatural, and . . . . in short Clayton is an atheist who won’t admit it.
Read the rest of the report.

Dispatch From Venice

Heather Wax — Tue, 26 May 2009 14:08:00 +0000

FROM KARL GIBERSON: Greetings from Venice, Italy, where the second installment of the Venice Summer School on Science and Religion is about to get started. This year’s program features presentations by evolutionary palaeobiologist Simon Conway Morris, philosopher of science Michael Ruse, zoologist Frans de Waal, Archbishop Józef Życiński, and me. The topic is “Evolution and Human Uniqueness.”
About 30 academics from around the world have gathered to spend the rest of this week interacting with each other and the program leaders. The key question on the table will be whether science offers any indication that human beings are more than quantitatively different from other species. We know that our chemical composition is identical, our physical construction almost identical, and our nervous system very similar to other species. Are we then best understood, in the words of Desmond Morris, as “naked apes”? Or is there something unique about us? Does theology, with its mysterious affirmation that we are made “in the image of God,” provide the only arguments that we are truly unique? Or are there hints from science that something truly unique “emerged” in natural history, providing us with our distinctive human natures?
Support for participants at the weeklong seminar is provided by the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, a venerable academic center that has hosted various academic, political, and intellectual gatherings since the time of Napoleon; support for the speakers and creation of the program is provided by the Templeton Foundation.

Dispatch from London

Heather Wax — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:59:00 +0000

FROM KARL GIBERSON: I have been hanging out with philosophers this week at the Thomas More Institute in London. The occasion is a conference in honor of Mariano Artigas (pictured here), my co-author for the book Oracles of Science. Artigas was a much-loved scholar and priest, mentor to many students, and the author of many other books, including the acclaimed Galileo in Rome. He was 68 when he passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2006, and he received his first copy of Oracles of Science from Oxford University Press as he lay dying in the hospital.
The conference, titled “Metaphysics, Ontology and the Science-Religion Debate” is, as the name suggests, a ponderous examination of some of the deeper philosophical questions about how to relate science and religion. The topics, coupled with my jet lag, have made it challenging in various ways.
What is very clear from the emphasis at this conference is the growing sense that science is facing something of a crisis. The journalist and author Dr. James Le Fanu gave a great talk about the large number of scientific accomplishments of the last 50 years that simply cannot be repeated (essentially making the same case that John Horgan makes in The End of Science). Fanu contrasted that with the present work on genomes and how little we really understand about what we are discovering there. Science, in his view, has over-promised and under-delivered and now is having to hide its failures. Thus, we see the aggressive tone of polemicists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett as they try to defend science as an all-powerful enterprise.
Steve Fuller, a sociologist who testified at Dover on behalf of the “intelligent design” movement, took me to task for equating ID and creationism in my remarks. He thinks the ID folk are in a long-standing philosophical tradition challenging the naturalism of science. I tend to see ID, however, as a secularized and repackaged set of anti-evolutionary arguments that the creationists were using decades ago and that William Paley was using before Darwin ever set foot on the Beagle.

Dispatch From the AAA Annual Meeting

Heather Wax — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 12:01:00 +0000

FROM BARBARA KING, PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY AT THE COLLEGE OF WILLIAM & MARY: Along with thousands of other anthropologists, I was in San Francisco this past weekend for the American Anthropological Association conference. These annual meetings are always an edge-of-chaos experience of chimpanzee-style fission-fusion reunions, intense talk punctuated by debates and collegial provocations, and visits to the ever-popular exhibits room (where I bought, this year, not only books but also merchandise like a bumper sticker that says “Honk if you understand punctuated equilibria!”)
My own session occurred Saturday morning. Organized by Michael Winkelman of Arizona State University and Carol Weingarten of the University of Pennsylvania, it was called “Religion in Evolutionary Perspective.”
Dwight Read of UCLA kicked things off by focusing on humans’ tendency to assign agency to beings in our world, including nonmaterial beings. He asked whether the kind of neural apparatus that underwrites this tendency could possibly exist in the absence of the development of some sort of religious thought—and answered with a “no.” While chimpanzees, Read said, have an understanding of causal connections, what’s different with hominid ancestors is that our schema allowed not just outcomes but consciously desired outcomes. Humans, in other words, invoke schema (“if I do x, y will result”) for consistently linking to certain outcomes over and over again, and sometimes do so by incorporating “unseen agents” into their calculus.
Interestingly enough, I found myself speaking after Read, who had wedded himself heavily to mental representations and evolved cognitive structures. At the start of my talk, I noted two papers published last month in our alpha-tier science journals (one in Science, the other in Nature) that converged on a central role for agency-detecting cognitive capacities in the evolution of religion. This focus on thought and cognition seems to be all the rage, but I wished to offer a different vision, a return to an anthropological perspective rooted in emotional ritual. I discussed the evidence in prehistory for emotional relationality and for symbolic ritual oriented toward the supernatural—and, of course, also for belongingness, the concept at the heart of my Evolving God book. Plainly said, I think that reducing religion to cognitive agency-detection misses an awful lot, primarily about how we evolved to co-create meaning through cognitive empathy (and even through a failure of cognitive empathy at times) with those around us.
Feeling this way, I took splendid enjoyment in the next paper. Weingarten and James Chisholm of the University of Western Australia described what it means for “Durkheim to meet Bowlby”—that is, for a focus on “exultation and joy, an overabundance of forces, on effervescence” in religion to meet a focus on attachment. Chisholm (who presented the paper) rooted their points in really deep evolutionary time, pegging the origins of the attachment process to 350 million years ago. For reptiles and nonsocial mammals, attachment is to territory (a specific location in space); for most social mammals, attachment is to the flock or herd. And for humans, attachment is to the cooperative social group. In other words, home for us is the cooperative social group. The origins of religion, then, may in part be traced to the human capacity for attachment—first to the mother, then to other emotionally close individuals, then to groups, then to leaders, then to religious leaders, and eventually to God.
I have a lot more to learn about bringing together Durkheim and Bowlby—in 15 minutes, each of us speakers could only whet others’ appetites. Chisholm and Weingarten’s search for phylogenetic precursors to complex human behaviors was carried forward in a novel way by Winkelman, who spoke next. Winkelman sees the displays of chimpanzees as rituals; in fact, the phylogenetic origin of human shamanism is, for him, in ape display behavior. What bridges the gap from ape displays to human religiosity? Altered states of consciousness. Compared to chimpanzees, “humans evolved to more efficiently process psychedelic drugs.” (Comparative primatology meets the ‘60s?!) Winkelman links some spiritual experiences to extreme neural activation (through dance and even long-distance running as much as through drugs). With co-author John Baker of Moorpark College, he has a new book called Supernatural as Natural that elaborates on these views.
Kathleen Gibson of the University of Texas had the daunting job of trying to tie these wildly divergent papers together, and proved more than up to the job. She was fair and gently provocative. (Thanks to Gibson, I realize I can sound too warm and fuzzy about religion, sometimes, when I mean to focus on evolved violence and failed belongingness as much as on harmony and empathy.) Her spirited support of developmental models was particularly effective in countering what I, too, see as an unwarranted love affair with specific innate modules in the expression of human behavior. In Gibson’s words (or at worst a close paraphrase), “the transformation of rearing”—that is, how a human or an ape is raised by parents or caretakers—can “change brain function.” The social, the emotional, and the cognitive thus come together. A great and fit ending to this set of papers!

Dispatch From the Saving Darwin Tour

Heather Wax — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:26:00 +0000

FROM KARL GIBERSON: This morning I had my coffee in Penn Station, watching New Yorkers—who seem very nice—and listening to Coldplay on the speakers overhead, which is also very nice. I came to New York yesterday on the train for a special evening at The Harvard Club devoted to my book Saving Darwin, which argues that there is room for God within the grand narrative of evolution. The organizers brought Michael Shermer, the author of many books and the founding editor of Skeptic magazine, to interview me in front of an audience of 120 or so New York media people. Shermer doesn’t think there is room for God within the grand narrative of evolution, or anywhere else for that matter.
Shermer was expected to be a bit aggressive with the interview. After all, he edits a magazine dedicated to proving that sensible people shouldn’t believe things without adequate evidence, and my belief in God was certainly in that category. I wasn’t sure what to expect from a guy who hangs out with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who had been at the previous event at the Harvard Club. But Shermer was delightful. He had read Saving Darwin carefully and prodded me on the difficult points—divine action and the nature of consciousness in particular.
He asked good questions—a mix of philosophical and personal issues. Why do I believe in God? (Because I always have, and nobody has convinced me I should stop.) But what are the reasons to believe in God? (It makes a richer worldview and grounds the goodness of the world in something other than mere titillation.) So you believe in God for emotional reasons? (Yes, but not merely emotional reasons.)
I was especially flattered when Shermer encouraged the audience to read my brief narrative of cosmic history near the end of the book, a passage that he described as the “equal of anything that Carl Sagan had written.” Shermer is an outstanding writer and a compliment like this was deeply appreciated. Over dinner later, we talked about writing. Like me, he loves to write and is always happy when the research is done and he can get down to writing. I mentioned that Ed Larson felt the opposite; he told me once that he loves the research but finds the actual writing tedious—hardly what one would expect from a Pulitzer Prize winner.
When I got up this morning, I checked the Amazon ranking of Saving Darwin to see if the audience members had all hurried home and order copies. The overnight improvement in the ranking indicated that one copy had sold.

Dispatch From Chautauqua

Heather Wax — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:02:00 +0000

FROM BARBARA KING: My second day at Chautauqua was both exhausting and exhilarating. Edward Larson kicked things off with a talk about the history of teaching evolution in the United States, “from Dayton to Dover.”
Larson identified three more-or-less chronologically-ordered phases, in terms of which was the dominant strategy: attempts to remove evolution from the classroom altogether; programs designed to balance instruction so that both evolution and creationism are represented; and the “evolution is just a theory” movement, where intelligent-design advocates and others insist that evolutionary theory is debatable and needs evaluation against alternatives.
Particularly intriguing to me was Larson’s explanation of a seismic shift that came in 1961 (the second phase). Until then, even the most prominent figures who challenged the teaching of human evolution in public schools—like William Jennings Bryan of the famed 1925 Scopes Trail in Dayton, Tennessee—did not embrace biblical literalism. Only when Virgina Tech engineering professor Henry Morris published The Genesis Flood in 1961 did “a scientific-sounding” reply to evolution become available. Here was a turning point, with Morris a “Moses leading the faithful into a promised land where science proves religion,” said Larson—except, as Larson was quick to explain, the science was so drastically flawed as not to be science at all. The Earth is not 6,000 years old, and dinosaurs and early humans had not co-existed, as Morris claimed.
Yet, I learned, the Morris text is now in its 42nd printing! It’s a powerhouse influence on some significant number of Americans still today. This fact reminds us that though a lot of high-profile court cases turn on questions of teaching intelligent design, an army of young-earth creationists is out there too, fighting from a biblical-literalist position against the chance for public high school students to learn genuine science.
Larson concluded his talk with these words: “If history is any guide, dark clouds remain on the horizon” for the teaching of evolution in American public high schools.
In the wake of that chilling prediction, I sought relaxation and immersion in beauty, and found it in a midday organ concert. It, together with last night’s Brahms symphony by the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, brought special pleasure to my visit. The science and religion of Chautauqua is infused with music.
In the afternoon, I gave a talk myself, based on my book Evolving God. As a biological anthropologist, I look for deep roots in apes and in human ancestors of what (later in human evolution) became religion. During the lecture and in the vigorous half-hour question-and-answer session that followed, I enjoyed talking with Chautauquans about empathy, compassion, and violence in great apes and humans, and about the earliest prehistoric rituals (e.g., burial ceremonies) of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens that may give us clues to humans’ seeking of the sacred.
An honor followed the talk: I was interviewed for a podcast by the Rev. Dr. Joan Brown Campbell. (The interview should be up on Chautauqua’s Web site next week.) For decades, Campbell has been a formidable global presence in the fight against poverty and injustice. She’s also, I have now discovered, a warm and purely fun person to spend time with.
Tonight’s agenda is simple: ice cream! And I fly home tomorrow.

Dispatch From Chautauqua

Heather Wax — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:42:00 +0000

FROM BARBARA KING: Greetings from the shores of Lake Chautauqua in southwestern New York, where I’m at Chautauqua Institution for part of “Darwin and Linnaeus” week. Today was my first day in residence, and as I see it, the theme was the importance of, and wonder in, all creatures of our Earth, from the perspectives of religion and science both.
In the 9 a.m. chill, people gathered in Chautauqua’s amphitheatre for a morning religious service. Right near the start came these words: “We need today, more than ever, a common language, a common intention to communicate and listen across differences in worldviews, cultures, classes, religions, and species.”
To communicate and listen across species! I felt at home with this net cast wide into the natural world. This week’s visiting pastor, Bruce Sanguin from the Canadian Memorial United Church and Center for Peace in Vancouver, British Columbia, took this idea further in a sermon that focused on the Pentecost story in ecological and evolutionary perspective. In a reversal of what happens with the Tower of Babel, the Pentecost story tells of visitors from farflung cultures who had come to Jerusalem and were able miraculously to understand each other’s native language.
The allegory is powerful, for if seen in an evolutionary light it can urge us to think about how we relate with other species who communicate differently than we do. Sanguin says all of us must “fall back in love” with our planet, and work for its healing, because the current ecological crisis is “the fundamental challenge facing human beings today.” Of course, he speaks from within the Christian tradition, but I heard his call as one that goes out to all people, at a time when our species seems to speak “only the dialect of domination.” This needs to change, as Sanguin put it, “for our children, and for the children of all species.”
The urgency facing us, the need to get into gear and take concrete steps to save the habitat, is often framed in terms of the need to save mammals (great apes, elephants, dolphins, whales, pandas) and birds. As a biological anthropologist who has studied primates, I sometimes promote this focus myself. But the morning’s embrace was in no way so limited, and by the time the afternoon rolled around, it had broadened further in a startlingly specific way.
The department of religion’s guest speaker today was science writer Carl Zimmer. Zimmer brought the clarity of his journalism to the task of discussing Darwin, Linnaeus, and microbes to a good-sized audience. His compare-and-contrast discussion of Linnaeus and Darwin was useful. For instance, with his new system for classifying the world’s plants and animals, Linnaeus felt he was revealing the order of God; by contrast, Darwin, with his grasping of the concept of common ancestry, offered a specific way to understand why species are grouped as they are.
Zimmer’s skills in communicating science were most evident when he told tales of microbes, those single-celled organisms that have accounted for seven-eighths of the timeline of life on Earth. Following the thesis of his new book Microcosm, Zimmer discussed a creature most of us give no second thought to, unless we eat a bad cheeseburger: E. coli. These micro-organisms are wildly successful and key to our ecosystems’ health: They recycle nutrients, pull pollutants out of the wetlands, produce oxygen, anchor the food chain, and for that matter anchor our “internal jungle,” our digestive system. Scientists, through lab experiments, observe them evolve generation by generation and in so doing, come to better understand the workings of evolution and genomic change.
To start the day with Sanguin’s sacred species and end it with Zimmer’s evolved species made for a resonant mix. In each case, the emphasis is off humans, but with an underlying urge to understand our own species better.

Dispatch From the Saving Darwin Tour

Heather Wax — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:24:00 +0000

FROM KARL GIBERSON: Since I teach at a Christian college, I don’t spend a lot of time hanging out with atheists and agnostics. Most of the ones I know personally—Ron Numbers, E.O. Wilson, Michael Ruse, Dan Dennett—are delightful, interesting people that I would be happy to have dinner with; in fact I have had dinner with Numbers and Ruse. But these guys, of course, are the elite of the nonbelievers and, for whatever reason, seem cool-headed, civil, and committed to respectful discourse.
I have always wondered what the more rank-and-file atheists are like. Well, after reading the responses to my interview on Salon.com, I know. They are rude, and seem every bit as narrow and intolerant as fundamentalist Christians. Just as I worry that fundamentalists want to take over the country and impose their way of thinking on the rest of us, I would worry if this crew took over. They seem completely opposed to pluralism and resentful that I have written a book suggesting that Darwinians and Christians might be able to get along. (Incidentally, Ruse has written a similar book, Can a Darwinian be a Christian?, that I prefer to my own on this topic.)