Tête-à-Tête-Tête

We’d all be dead.

Oh no! Wait! This is terrible news. I guess now that we’re all dead, biologists will never explain how our feet evolved the ability to stick to gravity!

But, seriously, folks… It’s pretty obvious that the line of reasoning that the producers of Expelled mangle so badly is the “fine tuning” argument, and for my money it’s the most convincing argument in favor of purposeful creation of the universe. Other current arguments favoring that notion or a similar one are propped up by assertions of fact that are untested at best and false (and often intentionally deceitful) at worst.

At least for those proponents of an intelligently created universe who have figured out the shape of Earth’s orbit, the main premises of the argument from “fine tuning” are generally correct (or close to correct). Life, as we know it, could not exist in a universe where certain physical properties were different, within a rather small tolerance.  This is factual.

As a matter of fact, I would not even object to the introduction of this limited concept of “intelligent design” if both the argument and its weaknesses were discussed briefly and fairly in physics classes in the public schools! Lest I seem overgenerous - I don’t find the “fine tuning” argument a compelling reason to suspect that the universe was intelligently created. Rationally speaking, it is sufficient only to make the possibility of intelligent creation a feasible, if untestable and scientifically and philosophically unsatisfying, alternative among a number of considered possibilities. But it at least has the advantage of not being predicated primarily on false or untested ideas!

Of course, what the folks at the Discovery Institute would like more than anything is for the government to teach their whole religion*: the whole mish-mash of religious “intelligent design theory” including biological “irreducible complexity”, their sad misapprehensions about the various independent lines of evidence proving universal common ancestry**, red herrings about the roles of non-Darwinian factors in evolution, and arguments from ignorance about the physical sciences involved in non-biological natural history. That is, of course, unacceptable. It is very underhanded for these folks to try and use understandable uncertainty about the pre-big-bang origin of the universe, or the pre-biotic history  of earth as a foot in the door for their whole bin of rubbish. It’s also very arrogant for them to presume that their religion is so good that it must to be snuck into the lives of kids whose parents and churches aren’t already teaching it to them. And, it’s very ham-fisted of them to hire Ben Stein to whine insufferably about how their poor innocent “theory” is just being unfairly squelched by that nasty, authoritarian, almost fascist scientific community.

My own viewpoint on religion, generally speaking, has changed a lot in the last few years. I’m much more tolerant, accepting, and in some cases even encouraging of religious devotion than I was just a few years ago. Sure, a lot of things still anger me. Too much of religion is a presumptious wolf dressed in the sheep’s clothing of humility.  But I’m not hostile to religion per se, and I carry a certain amount of respect for many of the attitudes and impulses that religious people share and are motivated by.  It is in a spirit of constructive criticism that I offer this advice:

Eventually, people of faith are going to have to figure out that their beliefs are not enhanced by ridiculous efforts to co-opt the government to evangelize them, nor are they advanced by associating them with dishonest pseudo-science. You have faith - if it is valuable to you, then let it stand on its own merit.  If God is real to you, there is no need for you to try to make Him more real through quixotic efforts at subverting the scientific method in a vain effort at proving Him.  Real science is a beautiful, if messy, endeavor, and if you believe that God is the reason behind this wonderful universe that science studies, a proper understanding of how that universe works can only serve to give more credit to Him.  Granted, to seek that proper understanding through the scientific method means that one has to be open to the possibility that the evidence will undermine some of your favorite religious notions about how the world works and that there may be some friction between the evidence and some of your religious conceptions.  In the end, you are responsible for deciding how to resolve that friction.  If you resolve it in favor of your religious conceptions, all that anyone can ask is that you be honest about that, not try to disguise your beliefs as science and try to sneak them into our kid’s schoolroom.

To be fair, many religious people have already have figured that out. When the majority follows suit, one huge front of the culture wars will be closed, and both sides will be able to claim a very nice victory.

*Not the whole religion, of course.  Just the part about creationism.  Or more if they can figure out a ploy to get it in there - like Bible “history” classes, for instance.

** Two notes here, actually - first is a technical quibble: the word “universal” here is used very loosely.  That is a complex issue, but for practical purposes in a lay level discussion, “universal” fits near enough. Every organism on earth is a biological cousin or closer relative of every other organism, including both me and every member of the colony of bacteria that gave me food poisoning one time and gave me the dry heaves for a week.  They were my cousins.

The second note is that I unfairly use “universal common ancestry” as shorthand for “evolution”.  Evolution is a whole lot more than that, but, since there are snippets here and there that creationists have no motive to deny, I use another term.  I don’t want to be accused of unfairly representing what it is that creationists deny.