So the Origins Conference sponsored by the Skeptics Society was held last Saturday, and a good time was had by all. Or, at least, a good time was had by most. Or, maybe the right thing to say was that a good time was had much of the time by many of the people.
More specifically: the morning session, devoted to science, was fun. The evening entertainment, by Mr. Deity and his crew, was fantastic. In between, there was some debate/discussion on science vs. religion. Ken Miller is a biologist who believes strongly that science should be taught in science classrooms — he was an important witness in the Dover trial — and who happens also to be a Catholic. He gave an apologia for his belief that was frustrating and ultimately (if you ask me) wrong-headed, but at least qualified as reasonable academic discussion. He was followed by Nancey Murphy, a theologian who was much worse; she defended her belief in the efficacy of prayer by relating an anecdote in which she prayed to God to get a job, and the phone immediately rang with a job offer. (I am not, as Dave Barry says, making this up.) And Michael Shermer and Vic Stenger represented the atheist side, although both talks were also frustrating in their own ways.
But all of that just fades into the background when put into the same room as the sheer unadulterated looniness of the remaining speaker, Hugh Ross. Despite warnings, I didn’t really know anything about the guy before the conference began. The taxonomy of crackpots is not especially interesting to me; there are too many of them, and I’d rather engage with the best arguments for positions I disagree with than spend time mocking the worst arguments (although I’m not above a bit of mockery now and then).
So I was unprepared. For those of you fortunate enough to be blissfully unaware of Ross’s special brand of lunacy, feel free to stop reading now if you so choose. For the rest of you: man, this guy is nuts. And he’s not even the most nuts it’s possible to be — he’s an “old-earth” creationist, willing to accept that the universe is 14 billion years old and that the conventional scientific interpretation of the fossil record is generally right. Still: totally nuts.
Ross’ talk took two tacks. First, he explained to us how the Bible predicted that: (1) the universe started from an initial singularity; (2) it is now expanding; and (3) it is cooling down at it expands. The evidence for these remarkable claims? A long list of Bible verses! Well, not the verses themselves. Just the citations. So we couldn’t really tell what the verses themselves said. Except for poor Ken Miller, who was trying to salvage some last shred of dignity for his side of the debate, and had the perspicacity to look up one of the verses on his iPhone. (Praise be to technology!) I’m not sure which verse it was, but that’s okay, because they all say precisely the same thing. Here is Isaiah 45:12, in the New International Version:
It is I who made the earth
and created mankind upon it.
My own hands stretched out the heavens;
I marshaled their starry hosts.
What’s that? You don’t see the bold prediction of Hubble’s Law, practically ready for peer review? It’s right there, in the bit about “stretched out the heavens.” To the mind of a non-crazy person, this is a poetic way of expressing the fact that the dome of the sky reaches from one horizon to the other. To Hugh Ross, though, it’s a straightforward scientific prediction of the expansion of the universe.
Here is Ross in person, going through some of these same arguments:
(Yes, that video is embedded from “GodTube.com.”)
His second tack was to explain how our universe is finely-tuned for the existence of life. We’ve all heard this kind of claim, from real scientists as well as crackpots. But Ross and his clan take it to grotesque extremes, as detailed in the website for his Reasons to Believe ministry. Where, by the way, they don’t believe the LHC will destroy the world! Rather, it will “provide even new reasons to trust the validity of Scripture.” It would be nice if they would tell us what those reasons are ahead of time. Does Scripture predict low-energy supersymmetry? Large extra dimensions?
According to Reasons to Believe, the chance of life arising on a planet within the observable universe is only 1 in 10282 — or it would have been, if it weren’t for divine miracles. (Don’t tell them about there are 10500 vacua in string theory, it would ruin everything.) They get this number by writing down a long list of criteria that are purportedly necessary for the existence of life (“star’s space velocity relative to Local Standard of Rest”; “molybdenum quantity in crust”; “mass distribution of Oort Cloud objects”), then they assign probabilities to each, and cheerfully multiply them together. To the non-crackpot eye, most have little if any connection to the existence of life, and let’s not even mention that many of these are highly non-independent quantities. (You cannot calculate the fraction of “Sean Carroll”s in the world by multiplying the fraction of “Sean”s by the fraction of “Carroll’s. As good Irish names, they are strongly correlated.) It’s the worst kind of flim-flam, because it tries to cover the stench of nonsense by squirting liberal doses of scientific-smelling perfume. If someone didn’t know anything about the science, and already believed in an active God who made the universe just for us, they could come away convinced that modern science had vindicated all of their beliefs. And that’s not something any of us should sit still for.
There is a reason why all this is worth rehashing, as distasteful as it may be and as feeble as the arguments are. Namely: there is no reason whatsoever to invite such a person to speak at a conference that aspires to any degree of seriousness. You can invite religious speakers, and you can have a debate on the existence of God; all that is fine, so long as it is clearly labeled and not presented as science. But there’s never any reason to invite crackpots. The crackpot mindset has no legitimate interest in an open-minded discussion, held in good faith; their game is to take any set of facts or arguments and twist them to fit their pre-determined conclusions. It’s the opposite of the academic ideal. And it’s an insult to religious believers to have their point of view represented by crackpots.
Which, if you want to be excessively conspiratorial, might have been the point. Perhaps the conference organizers wanted to ridicule belief in God by having it defended by Hugh Ross, or perhaps they wanted to energize the skeptical base by exposing them to some of the horrors that are really out there. Still, it was inappropriate. If we non-believers are confident in our positions, we should engage with the most intelligent and open-minded exemplars of the other side. Shooting fish in a barrel is not a sport that holds anyone’s attention for very long.
Thank you Sean for such a reasonable post, a change from the ‘shooting fish in a barrel’ rant that we often hear.
Garth
I’m curious – what was Ken Miller apologetic about?
Catholics accept evolution, accept physics-based explanations of the universe, have their own astronomy labs, etc…
The new pope is a bit of an old school loon (which is an utter tragedy), but the dogma itself is still science friendly.
If you view the very belief in a deity as something a scientist *must* de facto be apologetic for, your view rapidly spins into the realm of intolerance – which I highly doubt is the case, and hence why I’m asking.
Man I wish I’d been there with my Sony VX2000. This could have made for a great video….
🙂
Hugh Ross is an interesting case because he holds a PhD in astronomy from the University of Toronto. That shows the power of belief. Ross knows what the universe is like and is coming up with any connection no matter how ridiculous to tie astronomy to the Bible and make it all work out. Because he wants so strongly to believe in the literal truth of the bible. But when it comes down to it, non-believers are a very small minority. Even among scientists. What people in academia don’t often realize is that they are in an insulated world. Most scientists that work in corporations or in the national labs are not non-believers. To the contrary- you would be surprised to find out how many scientists are strong believers and even religious fanatics. I think Ross represents a minority view too, Ken Miller is more of a mainstream position.
Before I go into flamebait territory, let me make it clear that I agree with Sean 100%.
That said, now let me try to make the argument that there is an important place for people like Hugh Ross in our nation, at the current moment in our history.
You may not be surprised to hear that Christian culture has a lot of built-in skepticism towards science, evolution and cosmology in particular. I would argue that Ross, crackpot that he is, is a necessary evil in that he acts as a sort of gateway drug to scientific thought. His arguments help a certain type of christian get out of their dogmatic worldview and accept the possibility that their holy book *may* actually allow for some of the current scientific consensus. It’s certainly the spectrum I followed from my evangelical “don’t make a monkey out of me” childhood into a rational, passionate about science adulthood. I’m not sure I would have gotten here without Ross’s particular form of argument.
That said, the Origins Conference is absolutely not the forum for someone like Ross. But the more people like him that infect the culture of christianity, the better for all of us, says I.
David McMahon, that might be true in America, but it’s certainly not true here in Europe. A religious scientist here is in an extreme minority.
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Not arguing for one side or the other.
Many great thinkers were thought of as crackpots in their own times.
Maybe they should stop putting lipstick on the pig (to borrow a popular phrase) for the conferences though, that might be nicer.
Hmmm. That verse from Isaiah is clearly in the past tense (“I who made the Earth / and created mankind upon it”), so according to Hugh Ross, the expansion of the Universe should have stopped.
An apt choice of phrase, considering that Genesis 1:6 describes the sky as a dome made of beaten metal sheets (raqiya, translated as “firmament”), in line with Near Eastern thinking when the P document was written. No doubt Hugh Ross will tell us that raqiya really refers to the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric. Surely he’d be willing to incur the wrath of the Young-Earth Creationists who need the “waters above the firmament” for their “vapor canopy” idea!
To RationalZen:
Just the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
—Carl Sagan
Several years back I went to a talk by Hugh Ross at some fundamentalist church in Monrovia, ten miles east of Pasadena. I found the whole thing unutterably sad. The questions from the audience made it clear that these people were desperate to have the literal truth of their Bible authenticated with the cultural seal of approval given by Modern Science. I thought that Ross was most reprehensibly living off these people’s naive needs.
I found Miller somewhat hypocritical too. He tried to make the case that he could accept a notion
of God that existed entirely outside/beyond nature and was therefore not subject to examination or disproof by scientific methods. Yet he then happily endorsed religions whose cornerstone is some kind of “revealed truth”. So he would suspend the distinction between God and nature for a couple of shepherds that existed a few thousand years ago, so that God could briefly communicate “his word”, but after that, the wall comes down again. Really, not a whole lot more sensible than Mr Ross (who has mailed me his books before, so I was informed and skipped out beforehand!)
The science talks were good indeed, although I found Koch’s assertions about consciousness being something “more” or “beyond” a little sketchy.
Thanks for an entertaining piece! It is always fun to see “crackpots” outed, and discover the polar netherlands of personal opinion (from my perspective, of course!). I have come to suppose that it is, perhaps, the rare person who is comfortable in a bicameral mind vis a vis science and religion. I do not “need” science to “prove” religion, nor do I try to limit or manipulate science through religion (thinking of religion as a set of beliefs, not the organized practice of dogmatic ritual). This is similar to the postulations in a collection of writings edited by Ken Wilber in “Quantum Questions” so long ago.
If science can advance, develop, indeed evolve through direct observation and experiment, I find no irony in the advancement and evolution of religion. That there have been/are “fixed” points or fundamental foundations of either, whereupon we have taken the next step, seems only logical for human-kind. Is it just me, or does it seem there are those who expect religion to be fully developed/fully “morphed” (with all questions and issues answered)? Taking inflexible positions, on either side of the asile, can limit the horizons of our knowledge (or beliefs and faith). Science might have “established” the age of the universe at about 14.5 Billion years, but I choose to include the descriptive of “observable universe” and remain open to both the possibility of a “big bounce” (implying possibly infinite iterations of big bang type event) and that there may be other (infinite or not) “unobservable” universe(s)(particularly given the limiting state of development in our measurement tools/instruments/theory).
I do not find that any aspect of science either “proves” or “disproves” a “creator” (spoiler alert! in case it has not become obvious…I choose to believe in God through my faith). Then again, as I said earlier, I am not out to marry the domain of science and the domain of religion. I am so convinced they rightly do not impinge (or should not impinge) each on the other.
I am consumed with a burning desire to know “how” things work, “how” things came to be, “how” to predict the outcome of events, etc., perhaps just because I am “wired” that way or learned my passion from my environment. I am also consumed, in a sort of parallel desire to know what all the science we could ever evolve or accumulate will never be able to answer for me. “Why?”
Good luck with your crackpots, wherever you find them!
If “Sean” and “Carroll” are good Irish names, what are some examples of bad Irish names?
There were several large numbers bandied about regarding the probabilities of us even being here. My recollection is a bit fuzzy so if anyone attended please feel free to clarify. Dr. Donald Prothero spoke of the origins of life and and he mentioned that the chemical probability of leading to homo sapiens was something like 10^4100000. I also remember something about Susskind saying the vacua was now 10^1000. Somebody please set me straight!
The second half of the conference on god and science was IMHO pointless and lead to the forgone conclusion of religious folks being nut cases. It suffered from what I will call an “Abrahamic bias” in that the discussion was focused in particular on Christian theology. It would have been most interesting to get other religious points of view from either the Dharmic and/or the Taoist traditions. They both have a very different take on matters and the discussion would have been far more productive since many of the points of contention simply don’t exist.
Hi Big Vlad, yes I am sure that is true. I am referring to the United States in particular.
hatcher,
“Apologia” is a theological term, coming from Greek, meaning “to speak in defense of”. In a theological context it’s not usually interpreted to mean “apologizing for”, with an implication of regret or embarrassment. Rather, it is explaining one’s justifications for belief.
Ross stood there and gave a formal presentation? I’m sorry, I thought I read in the scheduled events that Ross was just going to debate Vic Stenger, which is why I minimized the effect of his presence. I just assumed the debate would be a side show where Stenger mopped up the floor with Ross in just another science vs. religion debate. If I had known he was going to stand up and give a formal presentation I would have had different feelings about it.
Hi Brad, I don’t know if Miller is really hypocritical so much as trying to do something that really can’t be done. Miller has a much more rational view than Ross, but he is still trying to fit the Bible with the science he knows. The bottom line is that trying to fit the Bible together with science is trying to put a square peg in a round hole. In my view the only tenable view of Christianity that fits in with science is to state you believe God exists and take the Bible as a moral/ethical guide. And,the Bible is allegorical with regard to things such as creation and other scientific matters.
THAT BEING SAID, I think a categorical statement that God does not exist is as irrational as creationism. I think “non-believers” can defend being agnostic but atheism in my opinion is as much of a religion as right-wing Christian fundamentalism. Its based on belief and nothing more.
Sean’s blog is one long ad hominem attack. He attacks the man and his beliefs (Christian) more than he attacks his arguments. So instead of logical argumentation, Sean’s blog article contains “crazy, unadulterated looniness, nonsense, crackpot (times 7), lunacy, this guy is nuts, totally nuts.” I must say, Sean does not provide much in the way of logical rigor.
Even Sean’s paltry two counter points fail. Consider Ross’s estimate of the 1 in 10282 chance of life arising on a planet within the observable universe. Sean claims that Ross’ estimate does not include correlation effects among the factors. But Hugh did include an estimate of dependency factors; look at the bottom his table.
Next, Sean throws out string theory’s 10500 vacua as a counter to fine-tuning arguments, as if each of those vacua actually, physically exist somewhere.
My guess is that Sean’s blog entry is merely a reaction to the effectiveness of Hugh Ross’s presentation at the conference. I have received independent reports that Ross’s message was well received. Hugh Ross is a competent scientist and the Reasons to Believe organization is an avid promoter of good science in all disciplines.
Reasons to Believe is an ally of science and should not be summarily opposed just because they are a Christian organization. Many participants in these blog discussions have expressed concern that the Christian faith opposes science. Here we have a group of Christian scientists who avidly support science and they are irresponsibly attacked. Why is that?
Otis
John McCain? ;^}
When Dr. Prothero was tossing out numbers regarding the probability of homo sapiens existing, was he talking about specifically homo sapiens or just complex life in general? These are two very different questions.
I think the existence of homo sapiens specifically has no real relevance to anything. If that is what he is talking about, a better question to consider is the likelihood of complex life in general. My guess is that if you looked at that question then the probability of complex life evolving somewhere in the universe at some given time has to be actually pretty high. Given the laws of chemistry the universe is endowed with I would say its a virtual certainty. All you need is a complex organism capable of processing information, doesn’t need to be homo sapiens. We could also say well cats are extremely unlikely to have formed, so the universe must have been purposefully tweaked to create cats.
Talking about the “cosmic landscape” or any other speculation about how many variations on the universe there are or could have been has no relevance to the question. We don’t know, scienfically, if there is any cosmic landscape at all or whether any different kind of universe could have formed at this point. All we know scientifically is that there is the one universe we find ourselves in and can observe and the fundamental constants and strengths of different forces are what they are. You have to start there and ask how likely is it that complex life formed in the universe, rather than saying, well the charge on the electron could have varied by some value and life would not have formed, now isn’t that amazing! Honestly I’ve never thought that kind of argument held much weight so I haven’t been impressed by pleas by people like Paul Davies that its just so remarkable we live in a universe that can support life.
Patently untrue. No organization that requires all of science to be in 100% harmony with a religious text written thousands of years ago by a bunch of nomads has the right to be called an ally. What they practice is the antithesis of science, no matter how much they attempt to dress it up.
The only difference between RtB and ICR or AiG is the lengths to which they will go to harmonize the “inerrant, inspired, infallible Word of God” with science. They all still declare that under no circumstances can the Bible be wrong, no matter what science tells us about the Universe.
You know, this crowd rivals only the bush administration in terms of lack of diplomatic skills. This argument may be tiresome for you, but the fact is that Hugh Ross is preaching science to the unconverted in far, far more effective terms than any of you.
Congratulations to Sean on all points! All extremely well said, brilliantly observed and thoroughly entertaining. I couldn’t agree more with every word of this exceptional post.