For instance, today the Associated Press brings us the superficially-reassuring, damning-with-faint-praise news that the major-party candidates to be the next governor of Illinois “mostly accept evolution.” Well, that’s mostly great news for fans of science! At least until you dig into the details and find out what “mostly accept” comprises:

Adam Andrzejewski:

Yes. As a practicing Catholic, I believe that God created Darwin. Let others debate the details.

Is this what practicing Catholics believe? “On the 2,034,077th day, God created Darwin”? I’m also not sure whether “let others debate the details” is a good attitude to have in a leader. I’m learning toward yes.

Bill Brady:

I accept the theory of creation, as I was taught, and believe the world has continued to evolve since.

Well, if he was taught the theory of creation, it would be pretty unreasonable of us to expect him to re-evaluate it.

Kirk Dillard:

Science seems to support evolution but there is no doubt that I have seen the hand of God at work in my travels and everyday life.

Here we have the first yes but. Yes, science seems to support evolution, but those of us who are intimately acquanted with god’s hand know better!

Andy McKenna:

Yes, but I also believe that the process of evolution has been guided by the creative power of God.

“Yes, I believe in evolution, but also I don’t. Can you just put down that I ‘mostly accept’ it?”

Dan Proft:

The current political class in Springfield make me question the veracity of natural selection. That aside, I do not believe there needs to be a divide between religious belief and the scientific method. … The evidence seems to me fairly clear that, as Pope John Paul II wrote, human beings have a ‘common ancestry of life’ from which we have evolved.

He’s making a joke, get it? See, among Illinois politicians, traits that are deleterious to survival and reproduction (e.g. Blagojevich hair) are actually becoming more prevalent over time! Is that not what he meant? OK, well, as long as he believes in keeping religion and science separate. He does, right?

Jim Ryan:

Evolution is a reasonable theory. Regardless of the extent of its truth, I believe that God was ultimately responsible for our creation and infused human beings with a soul.

“I don’t want to take a stand on whether it’s true, but I suppose it’s reasonable. Can you just put down that I ‘mostly accept’ it?”

Bob Schillerstrom:

I accept the theory of evolution. There is compelling scientific evidence to show that evolution does occur. I also believe science and religion answer life’s questions in complementary ways.

Science gives true answers, and religion gives false answers. Thus, they’re complementary. Is that not what he meant?

Dan Hynes:

I accept the theory of evolution.

I’d vote for this guy if I didn’t believe that voting is an irrational act.

Pat Quinn:

I believe that the scientific theory of evolution is the best explanation we have for the origin and diversity of species on Earth. As a Catholic, I do not see any discrepancy between my acceptance of widely held scientific principles and my faith in God as the prime mover of the universe.”

“I mostly accept evolution, but I’m a Catholic. Can you put in the article that I’m a Catholic? I don’t want people thinking I’m not a Catholic!”

–

I don’t know about you, but I’m already excited for future installments like ‘California Senate candidates mostly accept Calvinism’ and ‘New York City mayoral candidates mostly believe in gravity’ and ‘Obama appointees mostly believe in paying their taxes‘!

Fearful that people might use this as occasion to, you know, disbelieve in the Bible, creative Bible-believers have created the Message-Incident Principle:

That is, instead of confusing or distracting the biblical writers and their readers with modern scientific concepts, God descended to their level and employed the science-of-the-day.

[...]

Therefore, passages in the Bible referring to the physical world feature both a Message of Faith and an incidental ancient science. According to this interpretive principle, biblical inerrancy rests in the Divine Theology, and not in statements referring to nature.

Of course! God didn’t want to confuse people! If everyone believes in a firmament, then God made a firmament. If everyone believes in human parthenogenesis, then that’s how God rolls!

And, being omniscient, god must have foreseen that the science-loving denizens of the 21st century would easily distinguish between the parts of the Bible that count as “Divine Theology” and the parts that count as “Cave-People Folk Science.” It’s just common sense:

In the case of Phil 2, the 3-tier ancient astronomy is “alongside” the “more important” Message of Faith that Jesus is Lord over the entire universe. Amen!

Thanks, god, for not confusing anyone!

1. Observation is not a reliable way of gathering data:

Putting modern scientific ideas into [the Bible] distorts the meaning of the text, which is clearly about God’s faithful and caring relation to the world, not the details of how that world came to be.

See, even though the very first chapter gives a somewhat explicit description of, well, how the world came to be, that’s “clearly” not what the book’s about, and “clearly” you’re supposed to ignore that part. (Many of the other parts are “clearly” 100% true, of course. Which parts? I can’t believe you’d even ask such an impertinent question! Clearly you have no future as a BioLogos Scientist.)

2. Only test some of your hypotheses:

What we learn from science cannot threaten our belief in God as the creator. If God created the universe in a Big Bang 15 billion years ago, guided its development with elegant mathematical laws so that eventually there would be big-brained mammals exploring things such as beauty, morality and truth, then let us celebrate that idea, not reject it.

Can what we learn from science threaten our beliefs in human parthenogenesis, resurrection, non-conservation of bread and fish, and spontaneous heaven-ascension?

The article doesn’t say, but based on my experiences with BioLogos, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that “clearly” it cannot. Praise Jesus science!

To be honest, I had some professional interest as well, as I’ve been thinking about organizing a book signing for Your Religion Is False, and I wanted to see how it was done. However, my plan has always been more on the “card table on a street corner” scale than the “auditorium in the Seattle Art Museum” scale, and much of what I learned tonight doesn’t really apply. (Especially since I’m not particularly confident in my ability to get C-SPAN to show up at my book party.)

The book, in case I didn’t mention it already, is Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell, which I was sort of hoping was going to have something to do with Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. (After sitting through the presentation, I’m mostly sure the two are unrelated.)

We started off with a video featuring Ben Stein, which I later learned was an excerpt from his autobiographical film No Intelligence Allowed. “Steve,” he asked, “what qualifies you to question the scientific theories of a man so genius that he’s buried right next to Isaac Newton?” (I think the question was sarcastic, but with Ben Stein it’s always hard to tell.) “This debate won’t be settled by numbers,” Meyer responded, “but with computerized animations.”

At this point I am having trouble reading my notes, but the point raised was either “science can’t solve the mystery of the origin of life,” “screwing can’t be the story of wing of Kate,” or “scary carrot where mystical long plate.” Probably the third.

After making fun of T.H. Huxley for not understanding the complexity of a cell, Meyer started playing with Snap Lock beads, which are supposed to demonstrate some sort of thing about DNA and/or proteins. (Curiously, if you search for “snap lock beads” on Amazon, Meyer’s book is the third result, making me suspect that the beads are more integral to his argument than I realized.)

After this, Meyer showed us a super-elaborate computer animation of gene expression. Although he didn’t explicitly say so, it was obvious that such a computer animation was the creative output of an intelligent designer, implicitly bolstering his main point.

Next we discussed the “DNA Enigma“, which (if you click on it) is apparently the Discovery Institute’s website. You see, if you have a computer, and you want it to do something different, you have to download new code. And the same is true for life.

This computer analogy was to appear repeatedly throughout the evening, as was the Bill Gates quote “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.” (I wanted to ask Meyer what the DNA equivalent of Clippy was, but I didn’t get a chance.)

Somewhere around now, Meyer made an awful joke about Calvinism, which the audience just ate up. (It wasn’t a lightbulb joke. I’m thinking that maybe it involved total depravity, but only because I know a lot of jokes that do. I also know a lot of jokes about things that are black and white and red all over and can’t turn around in an elevator, but it definitely wasn’t one of those.)

Next we learned about the principle of “invoking causes now in operation.” You see, if you were to find ash all over the bottom of Mt. St. Helens, it would be more plausible to attribute it to a volcanic eruption than to an earthquake, simply because we have experience with volcanoes producing ash, but not with earthquakes doing so.

Similarly (and here’s where the magic happens), if we were to find “computer code” in the DNA of a cell, it would be more plausible to attribute it to Mountain-Dew-swilling nerds than to Charles Darwin, simply because we have experience with caffeinated losers writing code. (He left out the “God is a caffeinated loser. QED” slide, probably because of time contraints.)

There were further parallels. DNA uses design patterns and unit testing and a Model-view-controller architecture. So-called “Junk DNA” can be seen as a sort of operating system, albeit one with spectacularly-lousy driver support. And as soon as we go to the library and check out some more books on computers and learn more programming concepts, we’re going to draw up even more bad analogies.

We ended with a message to those who’d dismiss ID as the argument from ignorance: you’re wrong. It’s actually the argument from strength.

To sum up, Meyer’s argument is as follows:

(1) According to Bill Gates, DNA is like a computer program.
(2) Because I am unfamiliar with the field known as genetic programming, every computer program I’ve ever heard of has had a developer.
(3) Charles Darwin once used the principle of Inference To The Best Explanation.
(4) Even though Darwin was a wicked, wicked man, I’m going to use that same principle to refute him. It will be, you know, irony.
(5) I say that intelligent design is the best explanation for the computer-program-like-ness of DNA.
(6) Therefore, by Darwin’s own reasoning, intelligent design must be true.
(7) Please buy my book.

Finally there was an exceptionally boring question and answer period, which mostly consisted of people referencing parts of the books they’d particularly enjoyed and wondering aloud why those parts hadn’t been incorporated into the brief presentation. As I hadn’t read the book, I was unable to participate.

The only interesting question came from a woman who asked what Francis Collins thought of the book. Despite his prominent opposition to intelligent design, it was decided that he might enjoy the chapter explaining the uncanny parallels between triunely-frozen waterfalls and computer code.

Bruce Chapman followed this with a moderately-thrilling appeal for donations, at which point I left and checked Amazon, where I discovered that Meyer was creaming me in sales rank. You could do something about that, you know…

But you’re not alone in your struggle. The BioLogos foundation is there with you every step of the way (and when you see one set of footprints, that’s where they were carrying you).

Today, for instance, they’re offering “Three Ways to View the Fossil Record [that aren't incompatible with your religious faith, even though (if you want to get technical) the fossil record isn't compatible with your religious faith].”

1. God created each species “individually from nothing” as time proceeded. (Note: not actually compatible with fossil record.)
2. God created species in “bursts” over time. (Note: not actually compatible with fossil record.)
3. Evolutionary biology is the proper explanation for the history and diversity of species, but god has been continually doing the work behind the scenes. So, for instance, he’s always choosing which genetic material crosses over during meiosis, and he helps ducks decide which other ducks to rape, and he helps misdirect mooses he doesn’t want reproducing into having sex with horses instead.

Although the third theory is (vacuously) compatible with the fossil record, it presumes a level of perversity on the part of god that’s really more compatible with the jealous, kinky Old Testament god, not the effeminate, hippie New Testament god.

Accordingly, New-Testament-believing Christians might be better served by a fourth way of viewing the fossil record:

4. Your religion is false.

This explanation does have the drawback of not being exactly “compatible” with the Christian faith. But this is almost surely outweighed by its virtue of being the correct explanation.

Make sure to come back next time, when we discuss “Five (Incorrect) Ways To Explain The Existence of Suffering”!

As with ALL LIBERAL ideologies, miscegenation is totally inconsistent with Natural Law: the species are improved through in-breeding, natural selection and mutation. Only the strong survive. Cross-breeding Whites with species lower on the evolutionary scale diminishes the White gene-pool while increasing the number of physiologically, psychologically and behaviorally deprived mongrels.

Unfortunately for his disgusting gloating, the cited passage demonstrates misunderstandings of evolutionary theory on par with the ones that Klinghoffer and friends routinely propound. Shall we count the ways?

1. “Natural Law” has nothing whatsoever to do with “miscegenation” — it mainly promotes Chopric practices like Transcendental Meditation and Yogic Flying

2. Inbreeding does not typically improve a species, unless you consider having only two toes (like Cletus) an improvement.

3. Lots of the “non-strong” survive. In fact, in today’s Web 2.0 economy, the Super Crunchers and the AJAX programmers are totally outsurviving the strong, most of whom work at soon-to-be-defunct government-owned automobile manufacturers.

4. There is no such thing as “lower on the evolutionary scale.” In fact, there is no such thing as an “evolutionary scale.” There is an evolutionary tree, which I am surprised that the Discovery Institute has not tried to deface; however, its different levels refer not to different species but to different granularities of species-grouping. Species can be closer on the evolutionary tree. They can be farther. They cannot be higher or lower.

None of this stops Klinghoffer from his demented accusations:

No, he doesn’t cite Darwin by name in the part of his book that’s readable online — the first 6 of 12 chapters. But do you get the general drift?

Yes, we get the general drift. The general drift is that a white-supremacist jackass who doesn’t understand evolutionary theory in the slightest (but who haphazardly and illogically appropriated some of its concepts to buttress his terrible pre-existing racist theories) went on a shooting spree. And also that there is apparently no depth that Klinghoffer, as part of his tireless crusade to impugn any science that contradicts the superstitious beliefs bequeathed to him by his cavemen ancestors, will not stoop to in order to promote his nonsense.

That’s the “drift” you had in mind, right?

[Maybe] God imprints a certain kind of religious preference, one of numerous possible imprints, on each person.

This theory has a number of virtues. For instance, it’s non-falsifiable. And also it allows Klinghoffer to take shots at the god gene theory, which casts doubt on his twin dogmas of “god is true” and “evolution is false.”

However, off the top of my head I can come up with a number of alternative, non-supernatural explanations for his friend’s conversion:

• Attracted by Jewish love of Chinese food
• Shared history of interest in Communism
• Asian obsession with Woody Allen
• Want to get into movie industry but creeped out by Scientologists

I know what you’re thinking: none of these theories explain Klinghoffer’s second stylized fact, which is that Marvin Olasky converted from Judaism to Atheism to Christianity. I guess maybe Klinghoffer’s theory that god “imprinted” Olasky with a preference to be atheist for a while could explain this. But why would god do such micro-meddling?

Maybe God makes us this way to keep humanity safely divided into discrete peoples and nations. The Tower of Babel story, which comes shortly after, shows the danger of a world state with a world-spanning ideology. We would abuse its power, tyrannizing each other.

To keep us “safely divided”! That makes perfect sense! Good plan, god!

This is great for us, however, as we get to read his “yes, we were lying about the tooth fairy, and also we were lying about the easter bunny, and also we were lying about santa claus, but Jesus is totally different and here’s why!” essay.

He makes the following points:

1. Some of the data underlying evolutionary biology is “historical” in nature. Some of the arguments for Christianity are also “historical” in nature. This makes belief in Christianity just as data-driven as belief in evolutionary biology!

2. “There are some theologians who I consider just as brilliant as some scientists!”

3. Not only has Jesus never been “falsified,” there are plenty of good reasons to think he exists. For instance, check out the New Testament book Romans, which (unlike The Da Vinci Code) is too packed with “sincere emotion and veneration” to be fiction.

4. If you don’t read every pro-Jesus book with “the open mindset that is supposed to be the trademark of any scientist,” you’ve committed an “unforgiveable sin.”

Now, unlike his granddaughter, I am not a 6-year-old girl, and so it’s hard to say which of his arguments she will find compelling. I’m guessing she’ll reject the first, as even little girls understand that — while studying history helps us understand evolutionary biology — there is also genetic, anatomical, geographical, biochemical, epidemiological, and current biological evidence. I’m also guessing that she’ll reject the second, as little girls tend to put more weight on the opinions of J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer than the opinions of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth. Along similar lines, the Baby-sitters Club books are packed with “sincere emotion and veneration” yet are clearly fiction, making me suspect she’ll reject his third argument. And although his granddaughter sounds pretty smart, a number of the books he propounds still seem above her reading level, making it tough to condemn her for not reading them.

However, although he didn’t mention it in his article, he’s also got a fifth argument in his pocket:

5. If you don’t believe in Jesus, then after you die you’re going to get thrown into a Lake of Fire and tortured forever. It’s worse than anything you can imagine. Remember how bad you felt that day at school when all the other girls were making fun of you? Remember how much it hurt when you fell on the playground and broke your arm? Remember when you had the flu and you kept throwing up everything we fed you and we had to take you to the hospital where they stuck a tube in your arm so you wouldn’t get dehydrated? Remember how sad you were when your dog Pepper died? This is so much worse than all those combined, and if you don’t believe in Jesus you’ll feel it all day, every day, forever and ever.

And I’m pretty sure that this one is the kind of argument that resonates with six-year-olds.

Today’s essay is all about how Angels and Demons (38% fresh, “too often wavers between implausible and ridiculous”) is “great storytelling” and a “very human picture of characters who are motivated by faith and committed to struggling with ‘demons,’ both in others and within themselves.”

I am sure that the movie would be entertaining enough to watch on an airplane; nonetheless, I find it hard to believe that a Tom Hanks movie could present a “very human picture” of anything (except maybe for “what it’s like to fall in love with a mermaid” or “how fantasy role-playing games can destroy your life.”

The really exciting part of the essay, of course, is where Pasha takes another brave stab at arguing for the compatibility of science and religion:

A Christian friend of mine once asked how I reconciled the story of Adam and Eve in the Qur’an with the scientific consensus on evolution. I smiled and said to him that I didn’t bother. It’s like comparing apples and musical notes. The scientific theory and the scriptural story serve totally different purposes. Science is about how. Religion is about why.

Of course! HOW vs. WHY! Why didn’t I think of that? Anyone can play this game:

Man Less Hairy Than Apes
HOW: Evolution.
WHY: God also less hairy than apes.

Lights in the Sky
HOW: Nuclear Fusion.
WHY: To mark seasons and days and years.

Women Different from Men

HOW: Chromosomes.
WHY: Women intended as “helpers”.

Snakes Crawl on Belly

HOW: Evolutionary pressures possibly related to burrowing underground.
WHY: Punishment for apple-related trickery

Childbirth Painful

HOW: Large baby passing through small birth canal.
WHY: Punishment for falling prey to apple-related trickery.

Farming Difficult

HOW: Distorting effects of Agricultural Subsidies.
WHY: Punishment for listening to wife.

I could continue, but I think you get the point. Science is helpless to provide valuable moral lessons about god’s hirsuteness, telling time, women’s proper place, and supernatural justifications for life’s difficulties. All praise religion! (And buy Pasha’s book about Mohammed and his seven-year-old bride!)

After his best-selling The Language of God came out three years ago, Collins began receiving thousands of e-mails — primarily from other Evangelicals — asking questions about how to reconcile scriptural teachings with scientific evidence. “Many of these Christians have been taught that evolution is wrong,” Collins explains. “They go to college and get exposed to data, and then they’re thrust into personal crises of great intensity. If the church was wrong about the origins of life, was it wrong about everything?

You’d like to think a “scientist” would conclude, “yeah, probably.” I mean, if I were to show up at a scientific conference and present my several-hundred-page “Grand Theory of Everything,” and if the first few chapters were filled with obvious falsehoods, you’d hope that the other scientists would laugh me off the stage, tell me to take a long walk off a short pier, or tar and feather me. And you’d certainly hope that they wouldn’t run off to their little science lairs and try to come up with harebrained justifications as to why the rest of my theory was probably still true.

Which is why, although I have great respect for the Human Genome Project (a scientific achievement on par with the Alan Parsons Project), I find myself wondering just how rigorous it was. And looking at Collins’s BioLogos website isn’t doing much to reassure me.

Here, for instance, is how he sums up his answer to “Question 11: Is there room in BioLogos to believe in miracles?”

This response provides a simple answer to the question of miracles, namely that BioLogos does not in any way remove the logical possibility of miracles. However, for the universe to behave in an apparently ordered fashion, such events must be rare. BioLogos is thus compatible with many faiths that have miraculous events at the center of their doctrine. Finally, although a scientific explanation does in fact take away a phenomenon’s miraculous status, it does not establish that God was not involved in the process.

In other words,

• The fact that the laws of science are regular and predictable seems to leave no room for miracles; however, there could still be miracles as long as they didn’t happen very often.
• Also, even though any given “miracle” may have a perfectly natural scientific explanation, god may have been involved somehow.

I am not sure what the word is for “let’s add an element to our theory that makes it more complicated and doesn’t actually explain anything, but that makes our theory more palatable to the superstitious,” but I’m pretty sure it’s not “science.”

Still, I’ll keep checking the BioLogos site, because I want to see what their answer is to “Question 39: This whole website is just a gigantic prank, isn’t it?”