HuffPo has started a “Science” section of its website, which looks to be a good thing (they’re long had a “religion” section), but I’m wary. So is Carl Zimmer, who posted this on Google Plus:
Arianna Huffington unveiled a new science section for the Huffington Post this morning. This could be a very good thing (but only if they leave behind their nonsense of the past).
Zimmer has a longer discussion of the science section at his website, The Loom.
Well, maybe this could be a good thing, though a casual inspection reveals that it had worrying tabloid-like qualities despite the presence of some solid reporting (as on the dubious connection between vaccines and autism). I was amused, and a bit dismayed, to see a column by Uncle Karl Giberson (whom I’m going to de-avuncularize if he keeps writing stuff like this), extolling the same “science-religion peacemakers” that I discussed in an earlier post. Actually, this is a bit nepotistic since one of the “peacemakers” extolled in that article was Giberson himself.
What does Giberson write about in his column in the science section? Not science. It’s about “The top peacemaker in the science-religion wars: John Polkinghorne“. Polkinghorne was a physicist who became an Anglican priest, a big accommodationist, and eventually, an inevitably, won the Templeton Prize. I’ve read his stuff, and it’s the same old Sophisticated Theologian® garbage.
Giberson not only seconds Polkinghorne’s peacemaker prize, but gives the man a Lifetime Achievement award:
I hope that Wallace continues his annual list but I would like to add an additional category: The Lifetime Achievement Award for making peace between science and religion. And for 2011, that award should go to John Polkinghorne, who has emerged in recent years as arguably the most significant Christian since C.S. Lewis.
That alone should put you off your feed, but Karl sums it up:
Polkinghorne, now in his 80s, admits that faith is complex and filled with paradox. But so is science he notes, as quantum mechanics has shown so clearly. His own faith acknowledges the legitimacy of doubt and he understands why some cannot believe. But for him, it all fits together in a way that he sometimes describes as “too good to be true.” His Christian belief ties everything together. “I have never thought,” he told us, that “the universe was a tale told by an idiot.”
Actually, the universe isn’t a tale told by an idiot, it’s just something that happened. There’s no genius or idiot behind it at all. But if there is a God behind it, yes, he did do some idiotic things, like making 99.9% of species go extinct, and giving human males a prostate gland prone to swelling in middle age. Or allowing the talking snake to corrupt us all so that we have to grovel our whole lives to regain favor with God.
I will be writing on Polkinghorne in the future, but for the flavor of the man’s accommodationism, just see Anthony Grayling’s review of Polkinghorne’s latest book, or see Eric MacDonald’s analysis here. Polkinghorne is no hero: he’s just a garden-variety accommodationist who has science cred and uses big words. Any one of us with two neurons to rub together could pull a Sokal and do the same thing.
I invite readers who peruse the PuffHo science section to keep me updated about the pieces that appear there. And Karl, if you’re gonna be in the science section, could you deep-six the Jesus stuff and stick to the science?
*****
Uncle Karl has partly (but not completely) redeemed himself by just publishing a book (coauthored with Randall Stephens) that is reviewed in Sunday’s NYT Book Review: The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age. As reviewer Molly Worthen note, the book “condemns the current state of evangelical intellectual life,” and adds:
Why would anyone heed ersatz “experts” over trained authorities far more qualified to comment on the origins of life or the worldview of the founding fathers? Drawing on case studies of evangelical gurus, Stephens and Giberson argue that intellectual authority works differently in the “parallel culture” of evangelicalism. In this world of prophecy conferences and home-schooling curriculums, a dash of charisma, a media empire and a firm stance on the right side of the line between “us” and “them” matter more than a fancy degree.
To the evangelical experts profiled in this book, the chief purpose of science or historical research is not to expand human understanding, but to elucidate God’s will. That doesn’t require academic scholarship — just a “common sense” reading of the Bible and a knack for finding evidence in today’s headlines rather than in the record of the past: “America’s worrisome slide into immorality, liberalism and unbelief was caused by the widespread acceptance of evolution and its pernicious influence in areas like education, law, sexual mores, politics and so on,” in the authors’ paraphrase of creationist logic. Similarly, amateur Christian historians “have pressed history into the service of politics and religion,” twisting facts to support their feelings that the country has veered from its biblical moorings.
And C. S. Lewis, Uncle Karl’s hero, makes a brief appearance in the review:
For all evangelicals’ supposed disdain for secular academia, it is telling that their favorite guru is not an undereducated quack, but a thinker that “The Anointed” mentions only in passing: C. S. Lewis. American evangelicals adore Lewis because he was an Oxford don who defended the faith in a plummy English accent, thus proving that one could be a respected intellectual and a Christian too.
I don’t understand the admiration that Christian scholars bear for Lewis. He was a second-rate apologist. One example: in Mere Christianity, he gives evidence for God in the form of the “moral law”: humans’ intuitive grasp of right and wrong. Even at the time, before we had primate studies showing what look like rudiments of morality in our relatives, we still knew of the secular tradition of morality beginning with the Greeks. And Lewis’s famous “liar, lunatic, or Lord” argument for the divinity of Jesus hardly exhausts all the possibilities.
Lewis a “sophisticated theologian”? Naaw. Oxford does not equal sophisticated when it comes to theology.
h/t: Jon, Tom
“I don’t understand the admiration that Christian scholars bear for Lewis. ”
Me neither. I tried to read that book when I was still in the “questioning” phase; I didn’t make it very far through the book. To me, what condemns religion the most is not so much their outrageous claims, but the disastrous reasoning they use to justify their claims. Lewis’ defense is based on idiocy.
I’d put money on Russell’s plummy English accent against Lewis’s any day!
/@
True but it’s more than enough to be getting on with. Enough would be “liar or lunatic.”
I’ve never understood why Lewis’ trilemma was supposed to be so clever — why can’t Jesus have been crazy or a fraud? The argument is just apologetics, and only “works” if you already think the first two options are inconceivable.
Exactly – it’s just apologetics. Lewis takes the Gospel records at face value and makes a big deal of Jesus’s claim to forgive sins and builds his trilemma from there. But if you’re taking the Gospels at face value, why not simply point to the part where it says he resurrected and ascended? Because it wouldn’t sound so clever, that’s why.
But this “liar, lunatic, Lord, legend, or lie” is close to exhausting the possibilities.
Despite the apparent redundancy, “liar” and “lie” are different possibilities. Both “lie” and “legend” account for the the likelihood that this Jesus character likely didn’t exist. For him to be a “liar”, he must have existed.
There are at least 6 possiblities.
Jesus, myth, misattribution, or mistake.
The respectfully insolent scienceblogger Orac is I think rightfully skeptical that a science section in HuffPo will be a “good thing.” More likely it will have a few good articles mixed with the usual pseudoscientific drek — in hopes that its readers won’t be able to tell the difference. The so-called “Health” section is rife with homeopaths, anti-vaxxers, energy healers, and Choprawoo.
Before they bring in a new science editor they should have him or her battle the health editor. Reality is supposed to fit together.
All of this seems the transparently self-serving tactic of not triggering people’s defensive behaviors and pandering to their silly ideas and behaviors/beliefs to sell them something — books, articles, web clicks, etc.
Basically telling people what’s soothes them to scam them. It is said a con artist will never tell you something you might disagree with.
“Polkinghorne, now in his 80s, admits that faith is complex and filled with paradox.” aka lies.
“he did do some idiotic things, like … giving human males a prostate gland prone to swelling in middle age.”
Actually the problem is not that it swells – the swelling, BPH, is by definition benign – but that the urethra goes through the middle of it. I propose an alternate route (and for the vasa deferentia, instead of their preposterous loop in front of the pubis and right over the bladder) here, discussed here.
Let God know!
Intelligent Redesign!
I have a review of Polkinghorne’s book Serious Talk at http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/serious.htm
It is an astonishingly bad book.
From the review, ‘. As a scientist, Polkinghorne would be repelled by ad hoc explanations designed simply to patch over holes created by other ad hoc explanations. As a theologian however, these are his stock in trade.’
It’s not only the unfaithful who think little of C.S. Lewis. I once told a friend of mine, the poet C. H. Sisson, who was a believer of a very odd kind, how much I’d disliked ‘Surprised by Joy’, which, out of a misplaced sense of duty, I had read. ‘Yes,’ said Sisson. ‘No surprise. No joy.’
Lewis is like Santa.
His fiction is great fun for kiddies, but turgid garbage for adults.
“Naaw. Oxford does not equal sophisticated when it comes to theology.”
R. Joseph, the self-named “New Oxonian”, brings that tradition of stupidity, but appealing to the naive, nicely up to the present.
Sorry, unable to resist saying that. I wonder if C.S. Lewis was as dishonest when it came to dealing with critics?
If C.S. Lewis was a “second-rate apologist”, then I have to ask, which apologists were/are first-rate? Has there EVER been a first-rate apologist for religion?
Naw — the first-rate ones always deconvert early on.
This may be useful:
“Ideologies also tempt those who reject them. Ideology, when stripped by time or partisanship of its political and economic connections, becomes a moralizing form of explanation for mass killing, one that comfortably separates the people who explain from the people who kill.
It is convenient to see the perpetrator just as someone who holds the wrong idea and is therefore different for that reason. It is reassuring to ignore the importance of economics and the complications of politics, factors that might in fact be common to historical perpetrators and those who later contemplate their actions. It is far more inviting, at least today in the West, to identify with the victims than to understand the historical setting that they shared with perpetrators and bystanders in the bloodlands.”
Snyder, Timothy (2010-10-12). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (p. 399). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.
“we still knew of the secular tradition of morality beginning with the Greeks”
That secular humans and apes have concepts of morality does not invalidate Lewis’ argument, which (from memory) was: how can there be absolute moral truths if there is no transcendent moral authority? The Greeks’ moral concepts were not identical to ours, since they tolerated slavery.
“The Greeks’ moral concepts were not identical to ours, since they tolerated slavery.”
The Christians’ and Muslims’ moral concepts were not identical to ours, since they tolerated slavery.
Of course, “were”, not “are” (I hope!)
Please keep in mind that PuffHo works by the same business model as Gawker and the Register: trolling for ad clicks. Posting outrageous bullshit to get people to link to it.