Hoosier science

Michael Shermer:

Imagine this account being taught in public school science classes in America: Around 75 million years ago Xenu, the ruler of a Galactic Confederation of 76 planets, transported billions of his people in spaceships to a planet named Teegeeack (Earth). There they were placed near volcanoes and killed by exploding hydrogen bombs, after which their souls, or “thetans,” remained to inhabit the bodies of future earthlings, causing humans today great spiritual harm and unhappiness that may be remedied through psychological techniques involving a process called auditing and a device called an E-meter. This creation myth, formerly privy only to members who had achieved Operating Thetan Level III (OT III) through auditing, is now well known via the Internet and a widely-viewed 2005 episode of the animated sitcom television series South Park.

The absurdity of teaching religious origin stories in a science class could not be more poignant... (continues)

 But that's just what some legislators in Indiana are proposing to do. In science classes! Shermer: "knowledge that requires the imprimatur of legislation is not science." But what do they know?


Humans really don't have a clue sometimes.

theistic evolution?

Michael Shermer and Jerry Coyne had a little spat recently, Coyne calling Shermer an "accommodationist" for suggesting that theists who admit the provisional facts of science ought to not be badgered by atheists.  I sided with Shermer, as in general I side with the defenders of so-called theistic evolution. Putting a god behind the big bang may be gratuitous and non-explanatory but it's not obviously wrong, so long as scientific details aren't bent over backwards to fit (say) the narrative structure of Genesis.


And that's just what some theistic evolutionists and young earth creationists have done. They are Shermer's target here.  We saw Julia Sweeney saying, so sweetly, that the scientific evidence was stronger for her than her old unexamined religious pseudo-evidence. Shermer's making the same point here, less sweetly. He gives no quarter to those who attempt the logical absurdity of trying to squeeze the round peg of science into the square hole of religion. 





Shermer says this is not intended as a sacrilege of the poetic beauty of Genesis; rather, it is a mere extension of what the creationists have already done to Genesis in their insistence that it be read not as mythic saga but as scientific prose. If Genesis were written in the language of modern science, it would read something like this. Stephen Jay Gould, wherever he isn't, would approve. (That's what he meant about keeping religious and scientific magisteria apart.) But Jerry Coyne still calls him a sell-out. I'm still with Mike, and Julia, and Pearl too.

Matthew Chapman

Matthew Chapman, author of Trials of the Monkey, is an atheist (but not a "new" one), a lineal descendant of Charles Darwin, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, a respectful observer of life in Dayton, Tennessee, and a respecter of the humanity of those fellow humans who happen to believe in a divine universal creation. He believes atheists and religious believers should be able to coexist (his answer to the question posed over at the other blog this morning.) Evolution is "everybody's story," but not everybody warms thankfully to it as the spiritual core of our common narrative. Darwin's boy thinks that may be okay.

Here he is at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, in 2001. (btw: I was on the program that year too, plugging my then-new William James book. Wish I'd got his autograph!)