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Thanks to Mighty Ponygirl for the tip-off on what might be the funniest email exchange I’ve read in awhile. The story is simple. A scientist named Richard Lenski publishes a paper about E. coli evolution that’s been demonstrated in a laboratory. If you haven’t heard the story, it’s pretty simple---by forcing the bacteria to live under inhospitable conditions, Lenski was able to coax them into evolving an ability to survive by absorbing citrate. For some buttfuck stupid reason, the morons at Conservapedia thought that they could somehow look over the no doubt thick, impenetrable data gathered in the lab and prove that the scientists just made shit up in order to make the godbags of America look stupid. Or not even that. I get the impression from the email exchange that Conservapedia editor Andy Schlafly (who wants you to know he has lots of letters after his name) thought that merely asking for the data would scare Lenski so badly that he’d crap his pants and then immediately admit he made the whole thing up as part of the secular humanist conspiracy of god hate.
Please post the data supporting your remarkable claims so that we can review it, and note where in the data you find justification for your conclusions.
I will post your reply, or lack of reply, on http://www.conservapedia.com . Thank you.
Much to his dismay, the scientist did not actually buckle, because he didn’t actually make it up to make godbags look stupid. And why should he? Even if your goal is making godbags look stupid---and I suspect that Lenski is motivated more by his love of his work in biology---you don’t have to work hard, since they do it all on their own. Lenski replied by noting that the data is not, contrary to Schlafly’s insinuations, being concealed from the public. Because, you know, it’s science.
I suggest you might want to read our paper itself, which is available for download at most university libraries and is also posted as publication #180 on my website. Here’s a brief summary that addresses your three points.
Schafly, in true wingnut fashion, was not going to be deterred from his belief that Lenski is hoodwinking the public by something as simple as facts. If facts were enough to deter wingnuts, then wingnuttery would die in a time period that would put the brevity of the lifespan of E. coli to shame.
This is my second request for your data underlying your recent paper, “Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli,” published in PNAS (June 10, 2008) and reported in New Scientist ("Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in lab,” June 9, 2008).
He then puts up a bunch of links to documents containing the data. No, really. And then, triumphantly writes:
Your work was taxpayer-funded, and PNAS represents that its authors will make underlying data available. I’d like to review the data myself and ensure availability for others, including experts and my students. Others have expressed interest in access to the data in addition to myself, and your website seems well-suited for public release of these data.
Lenski is used to working with E. coli, and subsequently is used to dealing with beings of much greater intellectual capacity than editors of Conservapedia. With that in mind, I think we can forgive him his impatient reply.
First, it seems that reading might not be your strongest suit given your initial letter, which showed that you had not read our paper, and given subsequent conversations with your followers, in which you wrote that you still had not bothered to read our paper. You wrote: “I did skim Lenski’s paper …” If you have not even read the original paper, how do you have any basis of understanding from which to question, much less criticize, the data that are presented therein?
Because Schlafly has a B.S.E. and a J.D. after his name, and doesn’t need to do something like read a paper to know what’s in it, or that he could prove it wrong by wiping his E. coli laden ass with the paper he refuses to read.
Second, your capacity to misinterpret and/or misrepresent facts is plain in the third request in your first letter, where you said: “In addition, there is skepticism that 3 new and useful proteins appeared in the colony around generation 20,000.” That statement was followed by a link to a news article from NewScientist that briefly reported on our work. I assumed you had simply misunderstood that article, because there is not even a mention of proteins anywhere in the news article. As I replied, “We make no such claim anywhere in our paper, nor do I think it is correct. Proteins do not ‘appear out of the blue’, in any case.” So where did your confused assertion come from?....
As further evidence of your inability to keep even a few simple facts straight, you later wrote the following: “It [my reply] did clarify that his claims are not as strong as some evolutionists have insisted.” But no competent biologist would, after reading our paper with any care, insist (or even suggest) that “3 new and useful proteins appeared in the colony around generation 20,000” or any similar nonsense. It is only in your letter, and in your acolyte’s confused interpretation of our paper, that I have ever seen such a claim. Am I or the reporter for NewScientist somehow responsible for the confusion that reflects your own laziness and apparent inability to distinguish between a scientific paper, a news article, and a confused summary posted by an acolyte on your own website?
Rule #1 of Wingnutteria; Once a belief is established, from pregnancy pacts to protein counts, new information that contradicts the belief cannot be admitted, acknowledged, or even looked at for fear it will make you blind.
Third, it is apparent to me, and many others who have followed this exchange and your on-line discussions of how to proceed, that you are not acting in good faith in requests for data. From the posted discussion on your web site, it is obvious that you lack any expertise in the relevant fields. Several of your acolytes have pointed this out to you, and that your motives are unclear or questionable at best, but you and your cronies dismissed their concerns as rants and even expelled some of them from posting on your website. [Ed.: citation omitted due to spam filter] Several also pointed out that I had very quickly and straightforwardly responded that the methods and data supporting the evolution of the citrate-utilization capacity are already provided in our paper.
Oh, I think we all know that he sincerely believed that Lenski would roll over and find Jesus the second some two-bit moron challenged him. But let me leave you with the post scripts Lenski wrote, which are a thing of beauty not to be missed.
P.S. Did you know that your own bowels harbor something like a billion (1,000,000,000) E. coli at this very moment? So remember to wash your hands after going to the toilet, as I hope your mother taught you. Simple calculations imply that there are something like 10^20 = 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 E. coli alive on our planet at any moment. Even if they divide just once per day, and given a typical mutation rate of 10^-9 or 10^-10 per base-pair per generation, then pretty much every possible double mutation would occur every day or so. That’s a lot of opportunity for evolution.
P.P.S. I hope that some readers might get a chuckle out of this story. The same Sunday (15 June 2008) that you and some of your acolytes were posting and promoting scurrilous attacks on me and our research (wasn’t that a bit disrespectful of the Sabbath?), I was in a church attending a wedding. And do you know what Old Testament lesson was read? It was Genesis 1:27-28, in which God created Man and Woman. It’s a very simple and lovely story, and I did not ask any questions, storm out, or demand the evidence that it happened as written at a time when science did not yet exist. I was there in the realm of spirituality and mutual respect, not confusing a house of religion for a science class or laboratory. And it was a beautiful wedding, too.
P.P.P.S. You may be unable to understand, or unwilling to accept, that evolution occurs. And yet, life evolves! [ ]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_pur_si_muove] From the content on your website, it is clear that you, like many others, view God as the Creator of the Universe. I respect that view. I find it baffling, however, that someone can worship God as the all-mighty Creator while, at the same time, denying even the possibility (not to mention the overwhelming evidence) that God’s Creation involved evolution. It is as though a person thinks that God must have the same limitations when it comes to creation as a person who is unable to understand, or even attempt to understand, the world in which we live. Isn’t that view insulting to God?
P.P.P.P.S. I noticed that you say that one of your favorite articles on your website is the one on “Deceit.” That article begins as follows: “Deceit is the deliberate distortion or denial of the truth with an intent to trick or fool another. Christianity and Judaism teach that deceit is wrong. For example, the Old Testament says, ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.’” You really should think more carefully about what that commandment means before you go around bearing false witness against others.
One of my crazy ideas that I’ll never get around to is to make Conservapedia the most comprehensive and in-depth database for musicals.
It’s not hard to get more than you ask for when you have no idea what you’re asking for.
Awesome, but it’s a bit like attacking a diamond with a marshmallow: ignorance is resilient.
I just wonder what Schlafley thinks the raw data look like.
His PPPS, about limiting God to a human’s worldview, is an argument that I have long thought would gain traction, but never did. I grew up in a conservative, Calvinist community, and as a kid, I never understood why people around me thought that the world had to have been created in six, twenty-four hour days. Couldn’t a day, to God, be a thousand years, or a trillion years? Why was God limited by the Roman calendar, which obviously came about after the creation story? It’s even in the Bible somewhere, that “a day to God is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day.”
I would never want to believe in a God that I could completely understand, compartmentalize, and use as argumentation for comparatively petty bullshit. Wingnuts who do that are wholly without imagination as well as any kind of faith.
It gets better!
In Lenski 2nd response he references information about Conservapedia that had been cataloged by LRationalwiki
In posting the entirety of Lenski’s reply Schlfley censored out the link to Rationalwiki.
Schlafley intentionally withheld information....
People were “strongly warned” when they asked about that.
In posting the entirety of Lenski’s reply Schlfley censored out the link to Rationalwiki.
Schlafley intentionally withheld information....
Yes, but you don’t see liberal scientific blogs mentioning Conservapedia either. That’s because they’re afraid of it.
Well, okay, so they do. But my point still stands.
Well, okay, so they do and they laugh at it. Endlessly. But it is a nervous laughter, as befits atheist scientists who know where they will end up after they die.
The Bible, beyitchs!
The best part about Lenski’s extremely well done experiments is that it is relatively simple, very well controlled, and essentially an open-and-shut case. If Schlafly knew any biology whatsoever he likely could understand some of the basics of Lenski’s approach. He understands none of it, and didn’t even try. Quelle Suprise!
I would never want to believe in a God that I could completely understand, compartmentalize, and use as argumentation for comparatively petty bullshit.
All of humanity’s earliest gods were understandable to their believers in mundane terms, played specific roles that corresponded to anthropocentric requirements, and were intimately involved in the most petty political struggles imaginable, from tribalism right down to individual relationships.
Saying “my god is so much more sophisticated than their god” is supposed to demonstrate one’s religious superiority, but underneath the surface, it is inherently disrespectful of the human motivations that inspired the invention of religion.
Not that I mind. I enjoy the irony.
played specific roles that corresponded to anthropocentric requirements
This is actually far less true than you learn in your 4th grade Language Arts unit on Greek mythology. All our ideas about God X = The God Of Fish Tacos, etc, are cobblings-together of translations of (generally) Roman records, and the Romans of course were huge fans of seeing all other gods as versions of their gods, all crystalized at a certain point in the history of that particular religion. And then of course all of that is ultra-simplified so that it’s easy to cover on a quiz taken by 9 year olds.
If you look at actual religions as opposed to the versions of them you study in elementary school, most of the gods either don’t correspond directly to a specific nature-based thing or transcend said jurisdiction more often than not. This is especially true when you look at religions that still exist.
Well put, and irrelevant to anything I said.
The Greek gods are already rather far removed from the earliest gods. But they are probably old enough that my statement holds true. If not, then show me one of these gods who performed a function that was not centered on the mundane desires of the local culture.
I first saw this at PZ Myers. Very entertaining. If you search on his blog you can find a couple other posts on it. PZ was the guy who was kicked out of a screening of the creationist idiocy that is Expelled.
Is this dude related to Phyllis Schlafly? Perhaps Schlaflys evolved an ability to survive in hostile environments by absorbing stupidity, which they then expel from the waste orifice known as the mouth.
“If not, then show me one of these gods who performed a function that was not centered on the mundane desires of the local culture.”
Hera - She probably started out as a goddess of wives/mothers, but the turn toward “Zeus Gone Wild” stories pretty much devolved her into a toe-tapping shrew; yet she still hangs on because she is the queen of Olympus. Effectively she’s still around because her husband is a bad-ass, not because she has any real role - she’s just the angry bitch fuming in the corner.
Take it from a geek, it’s a well known human predisposition to have a hostile “Don’t Confuse Me With The Facts” mentality…
But, well...some people have quite the ‘tude, don’t they? And a great deal of audacity to match.
Is this dude related to Phyllis Schlafly?
He’s her son.
The odd thing is, as horrible as Phyllis Schlafly’s politics are, she’s smart as hell; the fundraising structures she built during the 70s were essential to the Conservative movement’s rise to power in the 80s. It’s really a good thing for the world that her son is so much less effective than she was.
Hera - She probably started out as a goddess of wives/mothers,
But this is my point. The early Hera is a guardian particularly of Argos, has influence over pregnancy, and embodies aspects of the earlier Potnia Theron goddess whose intervention was vital to hunters. She is readily understandable, having recognizable functions that serve the interests of humans in that place and time.
If gods that people can “completely understand, compartmentalize, and use as argumentation for comparatively petty bullshit” were not worthwhile, then religion never would have begun, and measures of relative divine superiority would not now be a regular feature of blog comments. I know, I know, that’s amusing to no one else but me.
What I thought was the best, the snarkiest part of Lenski’s reply, which took me a few readings to appreciate, was this:
But perhaps because you did not bother even to read our paper, or perhaps because you aren’t very bright, you seem not to understand that we have the actual, living bacteria that exhibit the properties reported in our paper, including both the ancestral strain used to start this long-term experiment and its evolved citrate-using descendants. In other words, it’s not that we claim to have glimpsed “a unicorn in the garden” - we have a whole population of them living in my lab! [ ]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unicorn_in_the_Garden] And lest you accuse me further of fraud, I do not literally mean that we have unicorns in the lab. Rather, I am making a literary allusion. [ ]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allusion]
It’s nasty and supercilious, and entirely justified, perfectly proportional to Schlafly’s monumentally ignorant arrogance. If you’re going to make a quip about a unicorn, you have to spell it out, with links, lest the idiot mistake humorous allusion for argument, since it’s already clear that he can’t distinguish myth from evidence.
“I grew up in a conservative, Calvinist community, and as a kid, I never understood why people around me thought that the world had to have been created in six, twenty-four hour days. Couldn’t a day, to God, be a thousand years, or a trillion years? Why was God limited by the Roman calendar, which obviously came about after the creation story?”
Basically, when evolution was a relatively new idea, there were debates among religious conservatives about wether things might look that way, and today’s young earth creationists are the thological successors of the “no” position in those debates. I think they used some kind of slippery slope argument, along the lines of “if you accept that anything in the Bible might be not literally true, you’ll soon end up with no clear beliefs at all”.
All religion started off as an attempt to negotiate with the weather.
That’s like saying religion is being stuck in the early stages of grief, between denial and bargaining. Okay, maybe.
I think the best part is where Lenski offers to provide Schlafly with proper samples of both the ancestral and evolved strains IF he can prove that he has the expertise and resources to properly take custody of the samples, and then proceeds to spelll out the protocols of the materials transfer. It’s kind of a highly technical section, but it clearly spells out how ill prepared Schlafly is to do any kind of original research. It’s really a good takedown of his ignorant request for materials that he could not even handle safely, much less do meaninful research on.
Shorter Andy Schlafly (with homage to George Carlin, RIP, and apologies for any forum-rules violations):
Hey! E Coli is what makes up shit! As a big dude on Conservitardimedia, I know shit!, I make up shit, shit is what I do bestest.
Not only that, I knew Jack Shit!. Jack Shit was a friend of mine!
And you, Mr. Scientist-guy, are NO Jack Shit!
I don’t know why Andy Schlafly would need to see the data, when the kerning so obviously shows the whole thing was faked just to make conservatives look bad.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is no real Andy Schlafly, and that even his side was made up by the secular humanist marxist islamist fascists communists. Liberals are so afraid of the truth, they will stop at nothing to discredit conservative religious Americans.
I have to go now because there are some black helicopters circling my house…
PUMAs Forever!!!
If not, then show me one of these gods who performed a function that was not centered on the mundane desires of the local culture.
Even the Christian god is ridiculously obsessed with humanity, a strange thing to be in such a vast universe, with his heaven and salvation and sending his only son. And who gets prayed to for lottery tickets, sports events, etc.
Reading the talk page on the Conservapedia article is an education of the dunderheadedness of the evolution deniers. Despite the rather elegant takedown that Schlafly has received from Lenski, he’s still claiming that Lenski is withholding evidence. While, ironically, Schlafly deleted quite a bit of the discussion from the talk page that served as background for Lenski’s letter. (Schlafly provides a link to an archive that contains some of the deleted material, but doesn’t explain why it was deleted in the first place.)
If he had any sense, Schlafly would just shut up from this point on about this issue, but that isn’t going to happen. I give him credit for posting a mostly complete copy of Lenski’s reply, although one of the links (apparently to Rational Wiki) was censored. I predict this page in Conservapedia will disappear in about 6 months or so, though.
“Conservapedia editor Andy Schlafly (who wants you to know he has lots of letters after his name)”
But, O most lamentable man!--of wit
You never had an atom, and of letters
You have three letters only!--they spell Ass!--Rostand writes about this guy . . .
Alli, I think I can shed some light on that position. Most of the conservative Christians I know do not have a problem with the “thousand years are like a day” quote. The problem is that much of the theology of conservative Christians is based on the Garden of Eden myth being literal truth. The sin in the Garden of Eden caused Adam and Eve (and all their children, including us) to be damned for eternity. Jesus came to save us from that sin. But the Original Sin (the sin that babies are born with) we all inherited from Adam and Eveis absolutely essential because, without it, there could conceivably be someone, somewhere, who has lived a perfectly good life and doesn’t need Jesus and won’t go to hell. This is impossible, because you cannot go to heaven without being a Christian, but why would you need Jesus if you hadn’t sinned? Therefore, the sin MUST be a priori and imbedded at birth, and therefore the Adam and Eve story is called to justify.
Thus, Adam and Eve could have existed 10,000 years ago or 100,000,000,000 years ago, but they MUST have existed, and been created, not evolved, or else the Original Sin story does not work. (Created, not evolved, because species do not evolve two new members of a species that then go on to be parents of all members of that new species - species evolve as a group.)
Also, another - similar - problem with evolution is that humans are supposed to be fundamentally different from animals, a qualitative difference that no animal could approach. I actually had a Christian science teacher who had managed to marry this view to evolution - he literally taught that God “checks back” on earth every million years or so and bestows souls on any new species that have evolved the intelligence to handle them. Currently, that was just humans, but he predicted that dolphins would be next. But, again, this all falls down if you believe that Jesus/Christianity is the only way to get into heaven. And that pesky Jesus quote about, “No one comes to the Father except through me” would indicate that Buddhists are going to hell, no matter how good a lief they’ve lived.
I wonder if Schlafly thinks that posting that somehow makes C-pedia look good. It does make them look slightly less dishonest than they otherwise might, but somehow the intended effect of nasty-arrogant-scientist versus the truth-seekers really doesn’t come through.
As far as the “literal day,” I once saw footage of the execrable Ken Ham, he of the Creation Museum which is putting my beautiful home state of Kentucky to shame, drilling into the minds of a nave full of innocent children that “when does day mean day?” He claimed to be having a discussion with some other theologian about the creation myth, which the other theologian was claiming to be metaphorical, and then about some other part of the Bible, in which that other theologian was claiming the days were actual, literal days. I doubt every word of this story, because it’s just so perfectly tailored to his point:
His argument was that we can’t pick and choose which parts of the Bible are literal, and which are metaphorical. He has chosen to interpret the Bible wholly literally.
I have chosen to interpret it as wholly metaphorical. The message does not suffer for it.
P.S.: The footage in question was used in PBS’s four-part series on Evolution that they showed back in 2001-2002.
I have chosen to interpret it as wholly metaphorical. The message does not suffer for it.
Falconer, I left Christianity because I don’t really find a message beneath the metaphor. I’ve never had a conversation with someone who has managed to find a message under the metaphor. Would you mind telling me what message you’ve found? I dislike the sin/salvation, heaven/hell dichotomy.
Is the message that you need Christianity for some reason? Or that you need Jesus? Or just that God loves you and be a good person? And if it’s the latter, why do you stay with Christianity instead of changing to another religion (that’s what I did).
Ok, this post sounds sort of aggressive and I’m really not trying to come off that way. Just curious. My favorite nonfiction author, Robert Price, believes like you do (all metaphor, good message), but I’ve never had the chance to ask him why. And he does cherry-pick Buddhist material to add into his worldview, which seems to work very well for him and I respect that.
“And that pesky Jesus quote about, “No one comes to the Father except through me” would indicate that Buddhists are going to hell, no matter how good a lief they’ve lived.”
...and a logical extrapolation of that statement would mean that every human who died before Jesus is screwed.
“Oh, I’m, sorry! You never had a chance to know about Jesus, but the rules are the rules. Off to Hell with you...”
...and a logical extrapolation of that statement would mean that every human who died before Jesus is screwed.
Yeah, hence Dante’s annoyance that he wouldn’t be able to meet his favorite author (Virgil) in heaven.
Of course, the Jewish patriarchs are excused on the basis that they supposedly got sent to limbo and Jesus went there to claim them after he died, but there’s no clear-cut verse in the Bible that states that, IMO, and I think it’s just a nifty piece of rationalization…
dude, this is totally fucking hi-larious. These people are so silly!!
“The early Hera is a guardian particularly of Argos, has influence over pregnancy, and embodies aspects of the earlier Potnia Theron goddess whose intervention was vital to hunters.”
Yup: you also have to bear in mind that a lot of the versions of the myths passed down to us are via literature, much of which (like Ovid’s Metamorphoses) was satirical. (Hence why Augustus Caesar told Ovid to go f**k off to to the boondocks of Dacia, which was like exiling a New York socialite to Idaho: Ovid was thoroughly miserable there.) The literature survived, but the liturgy didn’t.
Situation is even worse with Celtic mythology; we don’t even have the Celtic creation myth(s), because the Druidic liturgy was only transmitted orally.
Saying “my god is so much more sophisticated than their god” is supposed to demonstrate one’s religious superiority, but underneath the surface, it is inherently disrespectful of the human motivations that inspired the invention of religion.
Grammar, you do realize your argument only works if you work from the assumption that God doesn’t exist, right?
If you work from a theistic POV, the explanation is that God described things to us as we could understand them at the time. When you’re trying to explain the Big Bang to a bunch of illiterate sheepherders living in the desert, you’re going to fall back on, “Okay, look, you understand what a day is, right? Well, let’s say it took me 6 days to get everything moving until it got to the point that you now see.”
Our understanding of God’s sophistication increases as our own sophistication increases, because we understand more and more how far beyond our understanding it all is as we learn more about the universe.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan, I don’t know as much as I’d like about Celtic mythology (I’m working my way through the pantheons and I haven’t gotten there), but you definitely see something similar with the Norse mythology. A lot of it was destroyed by the Christian missionaries and it’s tragic how much was lost.
Grammar, I don’t disagree with your (apparent) statement that all gods serve some kind of physical/temporal purpose, so much as it seems like a tautology. I’m not sure what a god which didn’t have a physical/temporal purpose would look like. If a god doesn’t DO something, like create the world, or cause rainstorms, or protect people, or embody the planet (like the abstract Gaia), or so on, how would we describe such a god?
To put another way: How would I describe myself? I might say that I am a software engineer. But that doesn’t mean I was created out of fiction because a software engineer was required by society. I existed prior to being a software engineer, but software engineering is something I DO. I could be, I suppose, lazy and unemployed, but there are gods like that too. So I’m not sure how you describe a god without talking about appearance, temperament, and job description - just like humans, animals, and everything else.
Does that make sense? Probably not, I haven’t had caffeine today.
BTW, a question for our ignorant friend Andy Schlafly:
Without evolution, how do you explain MRSA?…
Couldn’t a day, to God, be a thousand years, or a trillion years?
I probably bring this up in every evolution/creation thread, but the word in the Vulgate for “day” can technically be used for a 24-hour day, but it’s hardly ever used that way - so much so that most Latin professors I’ve had will insist that we translate dies as “a period of time,” and that period of time could span years, or even entire eras of history depending on the context.
If the authors intended to say “one day, one movement of the sun, no more, no less, because God is just that fast,” I’m sure they would have said it.
Our understanding of God’s sophistication increases as our own sophistication increases, because we understand more and more how far beyond our understanding it all is as we learn more about the universe.
This seems like a self-justifying argument that allows believers to glide over the fact that their interpretation of their religious texts has been shown to be wrong.
better yet, why are there animal cancer-causing viruses that have genes that look like broken copies of genes belonging to the animal? In effect, some ancient virus infected the animal, scooped up a copy of one of its genes, and became a whole new virus. The VIRUS evolved…
(oncogene evolution)
All the Schlaflys in the Phyllis line are full of E. coli. (The other Schlaflys are full of Saccharomyces cereviseae, brewer’s yeast, as they make an excellent microbrew.)
I thought all of the Schlaflys were full of coprolites…
Grammar, you do realize your argument only works if you work from the assumption that God doesn’t exist, right?
If you work from a theistic POV, the explanation is that God described things to us as we could understand them at the time. When you’re trying to explain the Big Bang to a bunch of illiterate sheepherders living in the desert, you’re going to fall back on, “Okay, look, you understand what a day is, right? Well, let’s say it took me 6 days to get everything moving until it got to the point that you now see.”
I’m not sure what you’re getting at, sorry. All I’m saying is that the earliest gods were anthropocentric, understandable, and thoroughly petty. When modern people demand that gods must be better than that, and especially when they assert that such gods are not even worth having, they disrespect the first humans who developed religion, and mock the original basis for religion itself. I’m not sure whether you’re agreeing or disagreeing with that, or just changing the subject somewhat.
Taking the existence of deity as a given for a moment, there are gaps in the reasoning you’ve outlined here (familiar to me as an former Christian). The supposedly simplistic thinking of Bronze Age humans is given as an excuse for the relative simplicity of their deities, such as El and later Yahweh. If we take for granted that these people were just too stupid to understand stellar formation and biological evolution, then this excuses why the omniscient El did not explain or even mention those topics. But it doesn’t explain his tribalism, his preferential treatment of “his” people, or his commands to murder and enslave the children of other gods, to name a few of his petty political interferences. These things make no sense if El is omniscient and transcendent, the one true God; there would be certain standards of behavior to which he would not stoop, and all people are “his” people. The hypothesis does not explain the data. But there is no contradiction if El is a local god who has no hidden sophistication.
I don’t believe that these people were too stupid, anyway. I can explain stellar formation and biological evolution to a modern eight-year-old, not in terms that will allow that child to work in a lab tomorrow, but certainly in enough detail to give her a much more accurate and useful picture of her origin than Genesis. Your argument is put forward by people who believe that Genesis need not be perfectly accurate, but should hint at our place in the universe and our relationship to God. Well, how much more meaningful would be an eight-year-old’s confused grasp of evolution than an adult’s recitation of Genesis, and at no sacrifice of accuracy, quite the opposite. How much more powerful that explanation would be today, if the ancients’ sacred texts roughly predicted the scientific findings of the last two centuries. We’d at least have to take seriously the possibility that they were visited by supernatural or advanced alien beings, and this atheist’s chances of having a meaningful relationship with God would be much improved. So I think the “simple people, simple gods” excuse falls flat here, too. There’s no reason the gods’ words couldn’t have been simple and accurate. But they aren’t. This is inexplicable from the assumption that there is an omniscient God who has been revealing himself to us.
Grammar, I don’t disagree with your (apparent) statement that all gods serve some kind of physical/temporal purpose, so much as it seems like a tautology. I’m not sure what a god which didn’t have a physical/temporal purpose would look like. If a god doesn’t DO something, like create the world, or cause rainstorms, or protect people, or embody the planet (like the abstract Gaia), or so on, how would we describe such a god?
“All gods do something” wasn’t what I meant. Modern people who want a god who doesn’t get his hands dirty are usually still looking for a god who creates the universe, at minimum. That deistic creator isn’t necessarily anthropocentric, as the universe does a lot more than house humans. But this god is a fairly modern invention. I was speaking of the earliest gods, and their actions are invariably anthropocentric; when they create the world they tend to create humans very soon after.
I was speaking of the earliest gods, and their actions are invariably anthropocentric; when they create the world they tend to create humans very soon after.
Actually, this is not true. many very early mythologies do not consider that the gods created humans at all - sometimes humans are some sort of accidentally by-product of the gods (such as when one god wars with another god and the shattered sparks fall to the earth and become humans) and other times humans exist separately from the gods with completely separate explanations (if any, which sometimes there aren’t) for the creation of humans.
I tend to agree with Opoponax that you seem to be relying purely on Greek mythology for this viewpoint. There are quite a fewer other (and in many cases, older) mythologies out that that you are terribly incorrect about in your sweeping “invariably” statements.
In Hebrew the word used for day is “yom,” which I’ve never seen translated as anything but “day” as in 24 hours. Not that it couldn’t still be taken metaphorically.
@ Faye
(Or humans emerge from the armpit of a frost giant before the gods even exist...)
Schlafly has a B.S.E.
If the dude has Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy that would certainly explain his difficulty with science.
Faye, my “invariably anthropocentric” statement is sweeping, and I stand by it. But I immediately afterward said that “when they create the world they tend to create humans very soon after.” That’s a generalization and of course it has exceptions. Don’t accuse me of certainty I don’t claim.
So there are examples where humans and gods both emerge from a mythic realm, for instance. These gods aren’t creating humans for humans’ sakes. And yet these same gods, who ought to have little interest in humans as they didn’t even bother to create them, are responsive to prayer and sacrifice, performing tricks and wonders for their mortal brethren. And when they fail to respond, instead letting the floods or droughts ravage the land, even their choice to ignore the humans is calculated; they are angry with us for some reason. It’s still all about us.
I tend to agree with Opoponax that you seem to be relying purely on Greek mythology for this viewpoint.
I’m not using Greek myths at all. As I said, they’re too young to demonstrate this trend clearly.
Picking a fight with a microbiologist over an experiment on bacteria has to be just about the dumbest challenge I’ve ever heard.
This is inexplicable from the assumption that there is an omniscient God who has been revealing himself to us.
Only if you’ve decided that the only possible deity is the Christian one, and once you show the narratives in the Christian (and Jewish) Bible aren’t possible, you’ve completely disproven that there can be any kind of deity.
Where did I say that (a) I was discussing the Christian God or (b) that Genesis is in any way, shape or form accurate?
I think that there is a Divine and that it has communicated to many people in many ways, but that we keep fucking up the transmission and deciding that the things the Divine is telling us only apply to us and our clan, but not to those other people. Even when the Divine comes down and flat-out says things like, “All men are brothers,” we manage to weasel a way that It didn’t really mean it and carve out loopholes for ourselves.
And yet these same gods, who ought to have little interest in humans as they didn’t even bother to create them, are responsive to prayer and sacrifice, performing tricks and wonders for their mortal brethren.
Once again, your background in mythology seems spotty. There are many myths, particularly very early ones, where the gods are completely unaware of the existence of humans, because th e humans are like insects to them. They don’t even HEAR the prayers, let alone respond to them; in many cases, they don’t even notice time passing on the earth because they live on such a different plane of existence.
And when they fail to respond, instead letting the floods or droughts ravage the land, even their choice to ignore the humans is calculated; they are angry with us for some reason. It’s still all about us.
This is also wrong. Many myths explain floods, etc. as being one god fighting another (lightening on the sea is the sky god striking the sea god, for example). The gods aren’t angry with humans, in this case - they are totally oblivious to the effect of their powers on the humans, because they don’t care about humans. Ergo, it’s NOT all about us.
I don’t know for sure that you’re using Greek mythology (you aren’t pointing out any examples, just broad statements), but your statements so far fit Greek mythology much better than, say, a lot of early American Indian mythology.
Where did I say that (a) I was discussing the Christian God
When you said “a bunch of illiterate sheepherders living in the desert” and “let’s say it took me 6 days”. That’s the West Semitic origin myth.
or (b) that Genesis is in any way, shape or form accurate?
I don’t see that you did. Why do you think I’m asking you to defend its accuracy?
This is inexplicable from the assumption that there is an omniscient God who has been revealing himself to us.
Only if you’ve decided that the only possible deity is the Christian one, and once you show the narratives in the Christian (and Jewish) Bible aren’t possible, you’ve completely disproven that there can be any kind of deity.
The same reasoning applies equally well to any god and any origin myth. Not one of them approaches accuracy to any degree suggesting inspiration from an all-knowing (or even much-knowing) deity.
I think that there is a Divine
That’s nice.
Once again, your background in mythology seems spotty. There are many myths, particularly very early ones, where the gods are completely unaware of the existence of humans, because th e humans are like insects to them. They don’t even HEAR the prayers, let alone respond to them; in many cases, they don’t even notice time passing on the earth because they live on such a different plane of existence.
Spotty, sure. I’m not a scholar. Tell me, who are these early gods who hear no prayers? Which cultures recognized them? I’m interested.
God, this made me laugh so much. I really don’t see why some people are so reluctant to accept facts--facts which don’t even need to affect their lives. Accept evolution exists. Get on with it. Oy.
I followed this on Pharygula. Totally pathetic but not a real shocker. Unfortunately. I did enjoy the email exchanges, too. 
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2: And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4: And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5: And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
6: And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7: And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8: And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
Actually it’s better translated “and it was evening and it was morning, first day.” (etc)
That’s how I usually have read it, too, but King James was the first thing that came up in Google, so we get King James.
My point, and my only point, is that however you translate dies in Latin, it’s pretty clear in Genesis we’re talking your basic evening and morning, 24ish hours, day, not some 10,000 year time frame. And the Bible wasn’t written in Latin. So I guess that’s two points.
The same reasoning applies equally well to any god and any origin myth. Not one of them approaches accuracy to any degree suggesting inspiration from an all-knowing (or even much-knowing) deity.
Well, there’s your problem right there: why are you demanding scientific accuracy from the Divine? Religion and science have virtually nothing to do with one another as any halfway sensible religious person would tell you.
The problem isn’t religious belief per se. It’s the people who insist that science must conform to their religious beliefs which, to paraphrase Elvis Costello, is like dancing to explain architecture. You can’t use religion to explain science any more than you can use science to explain religion. Unless there’s a mathematical equation I’m unaware of that explains how karma works?
Well, there’s your problem right there: why are you demanding scientific accuracy from the Divine?
I do have an expectation that if a deity exists, especially a single creator deity that is interested in human moral behavior, the sort of being that would merit a description like The Divine, then it is interested in imparting truth to us instead of lies.
Why am I looking for accuracy, for a description of the world as it actually is, from this deity? This is a hilarious question. You are implying that I am expecting something from religion that is unfair to expect. But people have been turning to religions for at least tens of thousands of years, asking “why are we humans here in this world? How did this come to be?” It was a fair question for thousands of years, until I asked it. Now it’s unfair, and I’m demanding something that religion was never intended to provide? Bullshit. That’s a cop-out.
An earlier knowledge of our evolutionary origins would have saved countless lives and prevented untold suffering, just as it did when that knowledge was finally incorporated into medicine at the turn of the previous century. The Divine could have acted to inform us of this earlier, and we could have put into practice that knowledge that “all men [and beasts] are brothers.” Diseases could have been eliminated, innocent children need not have died from contagion. The Divine either doesn’t care, or doesn’t exist.
You can’t use religion to explain science any more than you can use science to explain religion.
That’s a one-way street. Religion can’t explain science because religion is arbitrary, made up bullshit. Science explaining religion? The task is already underway, and much insight has been gained lately. Pascal Boyer’s recent work is elucidating; check it out.
Unless there’s a mathematical equation I’m unaware of that explains how karma works?
Try 0=0. More seriously, demonstrate that there is such a thing as karma and then we’ll talk about how it works.
Not to nitpick, but...Lenski didn’t “coax” the bacteria into evolving the capability to utilize citrate. The researchers set up a stable set of environmental conditions over a long period of time, and observed what happened. Coaxing the bacteria to evolve would imply that the researchers held some sort of influence or manipulative power over the evolutionary events that took place, but they didn’t. They only manipulated of the environment.
This isn’t in direct reference to this posting, but I’ve realized that not only do many opponents of evolution not fully understand it, but the same is true of many proponents as well. The general public (and that certainly includes a majority of the media and science journalists) often unknowingly describe evolutionary processes incorrectly, even if they “believe” in it or are trying to make an argument to support evolutionary theory.
In fact, the majority of the public lacks basic skills in understanding and describing scientific experiments or research findings, period. We need to improve scientific literacy in this country...but I get so frustrated when I remember that we live in a nation that more often than not, buys into this false dichotomy of science vs. religion.
Jessica: right on.
Faye, since Falconer doesn’t seem to be responding to your request, I’ll throw out my own personal “metaphor-is-the-message” understanding, which is, as you guessed of Falconer’s, basically the idea that things would be a lot nicer if we’d all just be nice to each other and treat each other like we’d like to be treated. FOR ONCE.
Is the message that you need Christianity for some reason? Or that you need Jesus? Or just that God loves you and be a good person? And if it’s the latter, why do you stay with Christianity instead of changing to another religion (that’s what I did).
I don’t think Christianity in particular is needed; when Jesus says “I am the way,” I like to think that he means something more along the lines of “I’m trying to set a good example, even if I do occasionally get cheesed off at moneylenders in the temple or whatever” rather than “You need to make a big show of how much you like me if you want eternal skydaddy rewards” sort of thing.
In fairness, I more or less have left Christianity (after twelve years of Catholic school, regular attendance at various protestant services (mostly Presbyterian), and about a year’s worth of really, really wanting to be a nun so that my whole job was to help people out--a dream I discarded after deciding that evangelism was sort of disrespectful to other people’s beliefs), other than occasional appearances at church services to please my parents, who don’t mind if I don’t go but are awfully happy if I do when I’m in town. I do find the structure and routine of Catholic mass soothing, but don’t take communion and don’t buy into most of their beliefs anymore. I often describe myself as “culturally Catholic” since that’s my background but I don’t practice Catholicism any more at all.
Is it bad manners for my whole first post to be All About Me? Sorry, everybody else. Faye, maybe that is sort of helpful? I’m happy to try to clarify if all that up there doesn’t make sense.
Is it bad manners for my whole first post to be All About Me? Sorry, everybody else.
Nah. Welcome, peggy! Stick around.
Not to nitpick, but...Lenski didn’t “coax” the bacteria into evolving the capability to utilize citrate. The researchers set up a stable set of environmental conditions over a long period of time, and observed what happened. Coaxing the bacteria to evolve would imply that the researchers held some sort of influence or manipulative power over the evolutionary events that took place, but they didn’t. They only manipulated of the environment.
Another way of putting it: mutations allowing the metabolism of citrate could just as well have arisen in a citrate-free environment. The experimenters provided a citrate-rich environment because such mutations would be more easily noticed there.
Peggy, that was extremely helpful, thank you.
Don’t leave me hanging, Faye! You got me all interested in early gods who were not prayed to…
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One of my crazy ideas that I’ll never get around to is to make Conservapedia the most comprehensive and in-depth database for musicals.