Science and Creationism
I agree with all the arguments in Brian Bolton’s excellent article “The Continuing Assault on Science by Creationist Group Reasons to Believe” (September/October 2020), but I’m very unhappy when he uses “Christian faith” synonymously for the “word-for-word understanding of the Bible,” especially the book of Genesis.
Bolton correctly notes that there are self-contradictory sections in Genesis—and there is a simple explanation for that. The text of Genesis 1:1–2:4 is younger than Genesis 2:5 but was put intentionally at the very beginning of the Bible because of its beauty (actually it is a poem!) and figurative language for the genesis of time (night and day, sun and moon) and space (ocean, land, and living things therein).
A central statement of Genesis 1 is that the world is a good one (repeated after each day). Genesis 1—like Star Wars episodes I–III—is also an essay about “Where does the evil come from?” and answers it simply with “Not from God.” Genesis assigns it in chapter 3 to the freewill of men.
Thus, for me and—as far as I know—for the great majority of European Christians, there is absolutely no problem with evolution, because Christian faith is not identical with the literal understanding of Genesis (and the Bible, too)!
Greeting and best wishes from a longtime subscriber of Skeptical Inquirer.
Gerhard Hubmer
Marchtrenk, Austria
Brian Bolton replies:
Thanks to Gerhard Hubmer for his complimentary letter and the opportunity to clarify the issue of scriptural inerrancy and Christian creationism. I don’t think my article equated “Christian faith” with the “word-for-word understanding of the Bible.” In fact, Catholics and mainline Protestants reject the fundamentalist premise of biblical literalism and accept the fact of human evolution. But creationists regard the Bible as God’s inerrant or perfect word.
Specifically, Reasons to Believe asserts that the Hebrew word for day includes the possibility of long periods of time, thus justifying their old-earth interpretation.
The young-earth advocates, Answers in Genesis, use Bible chronologies to support their claim of a 9,000-year-old cosmos. Intelligent design creationists evolved from a literalist Christian framework (based on the writings of Philip Johnson) to a godless exposition in the Dover federal court trial.
I think it is accurate to say that the Christian divide concerning human evolution aligns with the parallel separation on the subject of scriptural inerrancy. Both creationism and biblical literalism express a desire for absolute answers to life’s major questions.
Brain Bolton’s summation of creationist rationalizations concerning science is spot on. Unfortunately, it seems highly unlikely that this mindset will ever change. After decades of teaching college science and in retirement as volunteer in the public program at Lowell Observatory, I venture these observations. Roughly one-third of humanity seems hard-wired to deep-rooted convictions that an all-knowing god created everything and, most importantly, with purpose. No amount of reasoning or evidence to the contrary will change that belief, due to fear that our existence would otherwise be without value or meaning. In contrast, another third of people seem to be born with or amenable to critical thinking, which eventually leads them to either reject religion completely or at least become agnostic about it. The remaining people fall somewhere in the middle, either accepting religious practice for cultural or traditional reasons, without deep-rooted conviction, or they are neither curious nor concerned about the issue at all. These groupings, of course, are not absolute but a graded spectrum.
Not surprisingly, the most extreme examples of literal creationism I encountered have centered around biological evolution, the antiquity of the earth, and the cosmic big bang. The notion that we evolved through primate ancestors seems particularly egregious to most fundamentalists and somehow demeaning to the god in whose image we are supposedly created. Even to people who accept so-called “macro” evolution, only divine interference can explain mankind. Probably the most inane example of belief in biblical literalism is the following: While showing a man the moon through a telescope, I pointed out that the prominent crater Copernicus is a relatively young 800,000 years old. “How do you know that?” the man asked rather indignantly. “Through radiometric dating of soil samples returned by Apollo astronauts,” I answered. He replied that he did not believe that, because according to the Bible, God created everything less than 10,000 years ago. When I asked what caused the lunar craters, he said that they are God’s fingerprints when he made the moon from clay!
Klaus Brasch
Flagstaff, Arizona
Bolton’s article on the assault on science is right on the money. Evolution has the distinction of being probably the only scientific theory that is provably correct. The proof premises can be stated:
* Mutations occur with every reproduction (which is why, except for identical siblings, no two people who have ever lived are exactly alike).
* Some mutations are beneficial for survival and reproduction (which should be obvious).
Because the theory of evolution relies on these two premises and on nothing else and both of these premises are demonstrably correct, the theory of evolution is necessarily correct also.
It is conclusively demonstrated by genetic analysis that everything that has ever lived on this planet is descended from one primordial organism that lived about four billion years ago (see Douglas L. Theobald’s “A Formal Test of the Theory of Universal Common Descent,” Nature, vol. 465, May 13, 2010, p. 219. Extended discussion can be found at www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc).
Given these facts, anyone who denies evolution is simply displaying monumental and culpable ignorance.
The Bible is fiction. Because it is provable that a proposition can contain no information unless there exists a means of refuting it, it is provable that no information can exist about any god. Thus, every reference to a god in the Bible (or in anything else) is unverifiable.
Robert A. Saunders
Rohnert Park, California
Brian Bolton’s article on Reasons to Believeapparently suggests that people can know “the mind of God” from merely human attempts of others to understand and write down perceptions and accounts of the superhuman. This is pride! Instead of trying to understand the mind of God from examining the universe that most perfectly represents it, they compare scientific explanations to their interpretation of poetic descriptions by persons far removed in language and culture from themselves and pass judgment on them as inconsistent. Comparing relativity and quantum theory, scientists are more humble and allow that both seem to be true and it is our understanding that is incomplete. Reasons to Believeapparently does not have a suspicion that their understanding might be incomplete.
Suford Lewis
Natick, Massachusetts
Intellectual Humility
Lilienfeld et al.’s article on intellectual humility (September/October 2020) was interesting. But when reading it, it struck me that the entire article could be summarized by the first tenet of Bertrand Russell’s Liberal Decalogue: “Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.”
David W. Ball
Highland Heights, Ohio
CFI Investigations Group
The news article on the CFI Investigations Group (September/October 2020) mentions the experiment performed in 2018 at the Salton Sea “to demonstrate the curvature of the earth to a group of flat-earthers” that appeared in detail in an earlier issue. It brings to mind an experiment done in 1870 by Alfred Russel Wallace, the lesser known cotheorist of evolution through natural selection, in response to a challenge from flat-earthers to prove the curvature of a body of water—sort of the opposite of what the CFIIG did but with a wager involved.
Wallace drove three stakes into a canal some distance apart, all the same height above the water, and with a telescope clearly showed that the middle stake appeared higher than the other two. Sadly, for Wallace, he never did get the reward, and the only positive thing that happened, if it could be called positive, was that he lost a lot of credibility from the scientific community for engaging in such an effort. In contrast, the CFIIG seems to have gained credibility from the skeptical community.
Frank Archer
Delta, British Columbia, Canada
Coincidences
My act of reading Tony Pasquarello’s “What Are the Chances?” actually produced several examples of his “coincidence plus” events.
I read it in September (my birth month), on the thirteenth (an article on superstition about thirteen was in the same issue), a Sunday (a day when my neighbors think I should be in church).
I am now fifty years old, and the article starts on page 50.
My father was born on December 13, 1942 (12/13/42), and I read the article during the twelve o’clock hour. There’s thirteen again, and Douglas Adams fans know the cosmic significance of “42.” I might have been reading it at 12:13—there’s no way to tell.
And, the previous day, I explained roughly the same thesis to someone, in the context of billions of virus-infected cells making seemingly unlikely mutations almost certain.
I’m tempted to look up the dimensions of the Great Pyramid, just to see how many C+ events related to my day’s reading I can find there. Maybe I’ll write some prophecies …
Scott Bates
Mobile, Alabama
Your readers might be interested to know that Paul Kammerer, the neo-Lamarckian who is the “hero” of Arthur Koestler’s Case of the Midwife Toad, wrote a monograph on coincidences—“Das Gesetz der Serie” (1919)—arguing that “coincidences” followed a wave-like pattern reflecting a fundamental law of the universe; the book influenced Jung’s thinking. It has never been translated into English, but the full text in German is available online. Koestler, as many of your readers will know, had a contrarian streak, was sympathetic to paranormal concepts, and took Kammerer’s “law of seriality” just as seriously as he took his ideas about evolution.
Arthur M. Shapiro
Davis, California
The State of Our Nation
Kendrick Frazier should read his own magazine before he writes any more screeds such as “The State of Our Nation” in the September/October 2020 issue of Skeptical Inquirer. It was long on emotion and short on facts. The United States does have leadership in the COVID-19 pandemic, including Dr. Fauci, key advisor to President Donald Trump, whom Frazier himself recommends in the same issue. Frazier simply doesn’t like Trump and chooses to ignore Trump’s accomplishments. From the facile talking points he parrots, Frazier obviously only watches liberal news media that confirm his own biases. What different leadership would Frazier prefer? Perhaps Nancy Pelosi belittling Trump’s warnings about the pandemic in January as being a distraction from her bogus impeachment. Or Joe Biden calling Trump’s travel restrictions “hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering.”
John Clinger
Bella Vista, Arizona
Your magazine claims to be free from politics, yet I received my issue in the mail, turned to page 4, and Editor Kendrick Frazier is ranting about the president and his cronies. Is that not taking a political stance? I could care less about Frazier’s opinions and would rather not read them.
To bolster his point, he brings up Dr. Fauci. In his Quoteworthy piece (“Dr. Fauci on Antiscience Bias: ‘It’s Amazing the Denial There Is,’” p. 9), Fauci states that science isn’t always correct. Yet Frazier rails against those who question an aspect of science that is far from complete. (Not to mention one doesn’t have to do much research to find a boatload of articles questioning Fauci’s accuracy and motives.)
I just wish I could pick up a magazine in which I could read facts rather than hiding behind an editorial to advance one’s agenda!
Dave DeVenzio
Mars, Pennsylvania
Kendrick Frazier responds:
We received several other letters in this vein, including at least one canceling his subscription. I acknowledge them and the strong emotions behind them. We are in divisive times. We at SI have spent four-plus decades exposing and excoriating pseudoscience (and antiscience) from every source imaginable, even recently from some Nobel laureate scientists, but when we point out that it is now coming from our president, that is “politics.” I can do no better than echo our colleagues at the distinguished journal Science. In regard to similar complaints that they should just “stick to science,” Science’s editor-in-chief, H. Holden Thorp (October 16, 2020), responded, “We are sticking to science, but more importantly, we are sticking up for science.”
Cognitive Biases?
The article: “Magic in the House of Rain” by Matthew J. Sharps, et al. (September/October 2020) seemed to miss several points in articles about “intellectual humility” and “skepticism and pseudoexperiments” in the same issue. Most glaring was the bold type statement: “About one third of modern adults, people who get to vote, thought these two dust specks were alien starships or something unknown but similar.”
The authors considered a study population consisting of twenty-one male and seventy-six female recruits from the psychology department of a California university to be representative of the modern American voting adult population. The assumptive arguments purporting to validate such consideration leave much to be questioned. Even more troubling is the implied negative judgment about one-third of the American people who get to vote. Such assumptions and statements suggest hubris and a conscious attempt to denigrate the voting population in general.
Jack Chowning
Mannford, Oklahoma
Matthew J. Sharps replies:
The article was in no way an attempt to “denigrate the voting population in general.” Voting and the electorate were not the topics of this article in any way.
As we stated, the population from which this sample was drawn is an extremely multicultural one from an area of great economic diversity. Articulation agreements of the university result in additional academic diversity, further supporting some generalization of this sample to the population at large. Admittedly, this population is younger on average than the general population. With this limitation, we stand by the statement that this work resulted in a reasonably valid sampling of the current American population, within obvious limits and to the degree resources permitted. The experimental and statistical methods were standard for a study of this type. We stand by the conclusions of this research, within the obvious limits of the scope and domain to which it was confined and intended.
African Witchcraft Beliefs
As an anthropologist with considerable African experience and a long interest in witchcraft beliefs, I must take issue with two main points in Leo Igwe’s news and comment article in the July/August issue (pp. 5–6). The functionalist explanations of witchcraft beliefs as a “socially stabilizing mechanism” are not and never have been “dominant” in social science. In normal times, fear of suspicions of witchcraft do indeed oblige people to mind their social manners—and this function applies universally. But witchcraft in Africa (as worldwide) has always been recognized as profoundly evil and really dangerous, especially in times of social stress when mob-generated witch hunts were and are deadly. The best accounts of African witch hunts are by anthropologists.
And in such times, when fears of witchcraft displace principles of reason, the best course for the agent of change is to work within the belief system; for example, to persuade both accused and accusers that the witchcraft power has been nullified—the way a “witch doctor” works. Persuading people that such beliefs are false, mere “superstition,” requires long and patient systemic education, again within their principles of cause and effect. The dilemma is illustrated in Monica Wilson’s classic 1940s account of persuading a Pondo schoolteacher that typhus is carried by a louse—but then being stymied by his question, “But who sent that louse? Why did it bite that man, and not another?”
Phillips Stevens, Jr., PhD
Associate Professor
of Anthropology Emeritus
University at Buffalo,
SUNY
Buffalo, New York
First Drugs?
I much appreciated Harriet Hall’s informative article on the origins of drugs, but I would like to take issue with the statement “People have been self-medicating with medicinal plants for at least 60,000 years … . The first users must have been either incredibly brave or incredibly foolhardy.” If you have ever seen a dog eat greens to cure indigestion or a cat eat catnip to improve its mood, you have had a clue to the fact that almost all animals self-medicate with plants. People have a common ancestor with chimpanzees, who use medicinal plants regularly. It is almost certain that no bravery or foolhardiness was involved: the first humans just kept doing what their ancestors had been doing for eons.
John Greene
Penticton, British Columbia,
Canada
Harriet Hall replies:
Whether animals actually self-medicate is a controversial question. There could be other explanations for the behaviors we observe. Dogs have long been thought to eat grass to induce vomiting, but grass-eating is followed by vomiting in only 25 percent of cases. And cats enjoy the effects of catnip but not because their mood needs improving. Early humans who followed the practices of their primate ancestors made two assumptions: that the plants were therapeutic and that they would be equally safe and effective in a different species. Neither assumption is warranted. And humans have tried to self-medicate with many plant remedies that were never used by any other animal. Whether a human ancestor or today’s purchaser of the latest “miracle” herbal product, someone had to be the first to try a remedy that had never been properly tested. They had no evidence that it was safe or effective, and in my opinion that makes them either brave or foolhardy (or both).
Thirteenth Floor Superstitions
Regarding Stuart Vyse’s column about superstitions about the thirteenth floor (September/October 2020), my father was an architect and designed many high-rise buildings during his career. I was with him in one of his designs as a youngster and noticed the building had no thirteenth floor. I didn’t think he was superstitious and asked him why. He told me that, first of all, it is up to the customer—that is, the building developer—but that people will pay more for higher numbered floors. Often when pricing new condo units with the same floor plan, there would be a base price for the bottom units and an increment for each numerically higher floor. That gave an extra increment in price to the fourteenth and higher floor units.
Mark Rognstad
Kailua, Hawaii
Vyse’s article reminds me of the fact that President Ronald Wilson Reagan’s California address was 666 St. Cloud Road. It caused such controversy that they had to rename it to 668 St. Cloud Road. Of note was the number of letters in his name: Ronald Wilson Reagan, six letters in each name for 666.
David W. Tuthill
Dallas, Texas
Reber Book on Consciousness
I haven’t read Reber’s book The First Minds, so I’m going on the details of Peter Kassan’s review (September/October 2020).
It’s worthy to note that Kassan makes much of Reber’s extending the notion of consciousness to single cell organisms. But Daniel Dennett has being putting forward a similar view for years, even going so far as to grant a simple thermostat a minimal element of intentionality, for which he has received much mockery. I accept that the details of Reber’s argument are different, being based on biological structure so that unlike Dennett he doubts the possibility of machine consciousness. But the parallels should be noted.
Good issue of a good magazine.
David Michael Sherwood
Fliwick, England
United
Kingdom
The idea that microbes have sentience is radical to say the least, and I am sure the great majority of biologists would disagree completely. Microbes are programmed by their DNA to move, sense their environment, and respond accordingly, sometimes including some built-in flexibility. But to suggest anything like a mind or the idea that there is something “mental” about being a bacterium is totally unfounded and farfetched in the extreme. To conclude that this book is a worthwhile contribution to the literature on consciousness strikes me as absurd. As an animal behaviorist, I hold that anything approaching consciousness is to be found only in the animal kingdom and only in a small fraction of that huge assemblage. Sea squirts, worms, sponges, spiders, and even fish and frogs are almost certainly not conscious of their existence as individuals and have no sentient sense of self.
David Zeigler
Wimberley, Texas
Y2K Precautions
I object to Benjamin Radford employing double quotes when referring to the Y2K bug (July/August 2020), as the quotes suggest that this issue was not necessarily real or important. It was not “all over nothing” and to a great extent we, in IT, knew what would happen if it was not addressed by computer systems in use by financial organizations such as banks, savings and loans, insurance companies, and perhaps other organizations. We knew because we had seen such problems in the past, in both application code and system support code, as date routines failed or dates were set incorrectly. Now whether other industries (such as utilities) would have had problems if they had not addressed Y2K, I cannot say, as I have no knowledge or expertise in those areas.
For financial institutions, fixing the Y2K bug ahead of time was not unnecessary. We knew to some extent what kinds of problems the banks and insurance companies would have. It might not have been Armageddon, but it would have been a disruption in financial activities for several days, maybe weeks.
Joe Dalessandro
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Correction on Pauling
In his letter to us on “The Nobel Disease” (September/October 2020, p. 61), Alan Harris correctly wrote, regarding Linus Pauling, “the year was 1962, when he had just won his second Nobel, the Peace Prize.” That was incorrectly changed to say he won two Nobel Peace Prizes. Pauling’s first Nobel Prize was in chemistry.