Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 173

What’s wrong with a popular theory of the evolution of religion

Casey Luskin reflects on Yuval Noah Harari’s thesis that religion evolved through stages because humans needed it in order to co-operate in larger groups: But it’s not that simple:

For the most part, monotheism did not “develop”; In most known instances (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, for example), it began as — and is certainly treated as — a “revelation from above.” This also seems to have been true of the short-lived monotheistic religion of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten (1352–1336 BC). “Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten and defied tradition by establishing a new religion that believed that there is but one god; the sun god Aten.” – Discovering Egypt.

Generally, monotheism is favorable to a high level of organization, including complex theologies that don’t just morph a lot but are only changed with much deliberation or controversy. But did that state of affairs evolve so as to foster “cohesive unity,” as Harari suggests? Hard to say. Religion — especially propositional religion, like the monotheisms — can foster either unity or disunity. Monotheism has not been a force for unity in Northern Ireland or the Middle East.

But what makes the problem even more complex is that not all disunity is bad. Many social reformers who were motivated by religion created considerable disunity in their lifetimes (William Wilberforce and Martin Luther King come to mind) but they are honored today for the changes they brought about.

Denyse O’Leary, “Religion is far too complex to have a single evolution story” at Mind Matters News (August 2, 2021)

Takehome: We can certainly find support for Harari’s thesis about the evolution of religion — but we can find support for many other theses as well.

You may also wish to read: is free will a dangerous myth? The denial of free will is a much more dangerous myth (Michael Egnor takes issue with Harari on the issue of free will.)

and

Can plants be as smart as animals? Seeking to thrive and grow, plants communicate extensively, without a mind or a brain

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One day, a longtime agnostic suddenly realized that Darwinism couldn’t be true

As Jonathan Witt tells it:

“I realized I had been conned,” he said. “I felt there was something dishonest about the huge claims made by Darwinism compared with the negligible evidence to support the thesis.”

He was so alarmed by this conclusion that he felt impelled to write a book as a sort of warning call to humanity: “Beware! You have been fooled!” …

Jonathan Witt, “In a New Book, Longtime Agnostic Dumps Darwin” at Evolution News and Science Today (August 2, 2021)

The author is U Durham humanities prof Neil Thomas and the book is Taking Leave of Darwin (Discovery Institute, 2021)

Critics of intelligent design will have a hard time maligning Thomas as a “creationist in a cheap tuxedo.” He isn’t religious and is a longtime member of the British Rationalist Association, a group known for religious skepticism.

The book traces the evolution debate across millennia, with Darwin and Darwinism emphasized as a crucial pivot point in the story. The author details key objections raised early on against Darwin’s theory and shows that those objections have been explained away, but never really rebutted.

Jonathan Witt, “In a New Book, Longtime Agnostic Dumps Darwin” at Evolution News and Science Today (August 2, 2021)

It’s not clear to me, (yer news hack,) why an atheist or agnostic must be a Darwinist anyway. Design in nature can be understood in a variety of ways, theistic or non-theistic. It is there but it doesn’t come with a label.

Darwinism has certainly been used to promote atheism (cf Richard Dawkins) but that does not force everyone who doubts or disbelieves in conventional religions to be a Darwinist. Design in nature is easy for many traditions other than Darwinism to account for but that in itself is not a recommendation of one tradition over another.

Anyway, the book has some interesting and thoughtful endorsements.

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Steven Weinberg on atheism, evolution, and such

Readers may recall that Nobelist Steven Weinberg, an outspoken atheist, died recently. A reader sends this interseting clip from 2004 in which he spells out his views on “evolution, George Bush, religion in America versus Europe, the utility of belief irrespective of whether it’s true or not, the response to science within Muslim countries, and whether or not Stephen liked God and religion in a personal sense. There is also a discussion of evolution and it’s implications for humanity.” He is discussing matters with British writer and director Jonathan Miller (1934–2019).

Steven Weinberg 1933–2021 Weinberg: “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

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Sabine Hossenfelder argues that the multiverse is “no better than God”

It’s not just theists who have problems with the multiverse. Sabine Hossenfelder explains her reservations.

The Big Conversation is a video series from Unbelievable? featuring world-class thinkers across the religious and non-religious community. Exploring science, faith, philosophy and what it means to be human. The Big Conversation is produced by Premier in partnership with John Templeton Foundation.

Luke Barnes, “The Multiverse is no better than God” at The Big Conversation (July 31, 2021)

Here’s the full version, with over 2700 comments:

Many physicists have pointed out the extraordinary ‘fine tuning’ of the physical laws of the universe that have allowed life to develop within the cosmos.

Luke Barnes believes it gives evidence for a designer behind the cosmos, whereas Sabine Hossenfelder disagrees, questioning whether we can even speak of ‘fine tuning’ as a phenomenon.

Luke Barnes, “The fine tuning of the Universe: Was the cosmos made for us?” at The Big Conversation (July 31, 2021)

See also: Sabine Hossenfelder: Is math real? Hossenfelder: The physicists who believe in this argue that unobservable universes are real because they are in their math. But just because you have math for something doesn’t mean it’s real. You can just assume it’s real, but this is unnecessary to describe what we observe and therefore unscientific.

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Water on Mars? It is more likely clay, many now think

David F. Coppedge has the story:

The paper in Geophysical Research Letters by I.B. Smith et al., “A Solid Interpretation of Bright Radar Reflectors Under the Mars South Polar Ice” (GRL, 15 July 2021, DOI: 10.1029/2021GL093618) says that clay is a sufficient material to account for the observations. The water interpretation is problematic, because “the amount of dissolved salt and heat required to maintain liquid water at this location is difficult to reconcile with what we know about Mars.”

Clays, not water, are likely source of Mars ‘lakes’ (NASA). This press release from NASA points to another time when hydrobioscopy led planetary scientists astray. Remember the streaks on some crater slopes that were interpreted as flows of water leaking out from the subsurface? Notice the tendency to jump to biological conclusions; the first sentence in the article is, “Where there’s water, there’s life.”

David F. Coppedge, “Water on the Planetary Science Brain” at Creation-Evolution Headlines (July 30, 2021)

The colored dots represent sites where bright radar reflections have been spotted by ESA’s Mars Express orbiter at Mars’ south polar cap. Such reflections were previously interpreted as subsurface liquid water, but their prevalence and proximity to the frigid surface suggest they may be something else.
Credits: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech

Disappointing, of course. The paper is closed access but Coppedge points to this NASA story for more info:

Three studies published in the past month have cast doubt on the premise of subsurface lakes below the Martian south pole. Where there’s water, there’s life. That’s the case on Earth, at least, and also why scientists remain tantalized by any evidence suggesting there’s liquid water on cold, dry Mars. The Red Planet is a difficult place to look for liquid water: While water ice is plentiful, any water warm enough to be liquid on the surface would last for only a few moments before turning into vapor in Mars’ wispy air.

Hence the interest generated in 2018, when a team led by Roberto Orosei of Italy’s Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica announced they had found evidence of subsurface lakes deep below the ice cap at Mars’ south pole. The evidence they cited came from a radar instrument aboard the ESA (European Space Agency) Mars Express orbiter.

Isaac Smith of Toronto’s York University bundled up while working in a lab, freezing smectite clays with liquid nitrogen to test how they respond to radar signals. The results have challenged the hypothesis that subsurface lakes can be found at Mars’ south pole. Credits: York University/Craig Rezza Radar signals, which can penetrate rock and ice, change as they’re reflected off different materials. In this case, they produced especially bright signals beneath the polar cap that could be interpreted as liquid water. The possibility of a potentially habitable environment for microbes was exciting.

But after taking a closer look at the data, along with experiments in a cold laboratory here on Earth, some scientists now think clays, not water, might be creating the signals. In the past month, a trio of new papers have unraveled the mystery – and may have dried up the lakes hypothesis.

Andrew Good and Karen Fox, “Clays, Not Water, Are Likely Source of Mars ‘Lakes’” at Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (July 29, 2021)

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Oldest known archaea microbes found at 3.42 billion years ago?

Archaea: “Consistent with their status as a third form of life, archaea exhibit certain characteristics of bacteria, certain characteristics of eukaryotes, and some characteristics unique to themselves. They also span a broad range of biological properties, and many of them are specifically adapted to extreme environmental conditions.” — ScienceDirect

At Science:

Subsurface habitats on Earth host an extensive extant biosphere and likely provided one of Earth’s earliest microbial habitats. Although the site of life’s emergence continues to be debated, evidence of early life provides insights into its early evolution and metabolic affinity. Here, we present the discovery of exceptionally well-preserved, ~3.42-billion-year-old putative filamentous microfossils that inhabited a paleo-subseafloor hydrothermal vein system of the Barberton greenstone belt in South Africa. The filaments colonized the walls of conduits created by low-temperature hydrothermal fluid. Combined with their morphological and chemical characteristics as investigated over a range of scales, they can be considered the oldest methanogens and/or methanotrophs that thrived in an ultramafic volcanic substrate.

Cellular remains in a ~3.42-billion-year-old subseafloor hydrothermal environment By Barbara Cavalazzi, Et Al Science Advances14 Jul 2021 : EABF3963 Oldest microfossils with methane-based metabolism in a subsurface environment expand the frontiers of early Earth habitability.

Life seems to have got started as soon as the planet cooled.

The more we learn, the more interesting it becomes:

The newly identified fossil threads have a carbon-based shell. That shell is different structurally from the preserved interior, suggesting a cell envelope enclosing the cells’ insides, the authors write. And the team found relatively high nickel concentrations in the filaments. The concentrations were similar to levels found in modern methane-makers, suggesting the fossils’ metal may come from nickel-containing enzymes in the microbes.

Carolyn Wilke, “3.42-billion-year-old fossil threads may be the oldest known archaea microbes” at ScienceNews (July 26, 2021)

It’s interesting to note that we didn’t even know archaea existed until Carl Woese and coworkers discovered them in 1977.

Curiously, unlike bacteria, Archaea do not cause disease in humans.

And, since we are here anyway, Woese was not a Darwinist.

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Attempts to explain away religion don’t explain anything

Yuval Noah Harari is next up to the plate:

I’ve been reviewing the bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, and as is the case with so many other aspects of the book, when it comes to the origin of religion, Yuval Noah Harari tells the standard evolutionary story. According to this story, religion began as a form of animism among small bands of hunters and gatherers and then proceeded to polytheism and finally monotheism as group size grew with the first agricultural civilizations. At each stage, he argues, religion evolved in order to provide the glue that gave the group the cohesive unity it needed (at its given size) to cooperate and survive.

Casey Luskin, “Reviewing Sapiens: Getting the Origin of Religion Backwards” at Evolution News and Science Today

Harari’s 2015 book rehashes some very old claims. there. We actually don’t know that it works the way he says and efforts to evolve a theory of religion are falling on hard times:

Recently there was a spat over a 2019 article in Nature. The article, titled “Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history,” was just retracted. It proposed that societies produce beliefs in “moralizing gods” in order to “facilitate cooperation among strangers in large-scale societies.” The article purported to survey 414 societies, and claimed to find an “association between moralizing gods and social complexity” where “moralizing gods follow — rather than precede — large increases in social complexity.” As lead author Harvey Whitehouse put it in New Scientist, the study assessed “whether religion has helped societies grow and flourish,” and basically found the answer was no: “Instead of helping foster cooperation as societies expanded, Big Gods appeared only after a society had passed a threshold in complexity corresponding to a population of around a million people.” Their study was retracted after a new paper found that their dataset was too limited. When a proper dataset was used, “the reported finding is reversed: moralizing gods precede increases in social complexity.” It seems, therefore, that belief in a just and moral God helps drive success and growth in a society.

Casey Luskin, “Reviewing Sapiens: Getting the Origin of Religion Backwards” at Evolution News and Science Today

The oldest type of religion was probably a form of naturalism. Non-naturalist religions are better accounted for by revelation.

See also: If naturalism can explain religion, why does it get so many basic facts wrong?

Evolutionary conundrum: is religion a useful, useless, or harmful adaptation?

Imagine a world of religions that naturalism might indeed be able to explain

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Sabine Hossenfelder: Is math real?

It is a deeper question than some might suppose:

The idea has more recently been given a modern formulation by Max Tegmark who called it the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis.

Tegmark’s hypothesis is actually more, shall we say, grandiose. He doesn’t just claim that actually reality is math but that all math is real. Not just the math that we use in the theories that describe our observations, but all of it. The exponential function, Mandelbrot sets, the number 18, they’re all real as you and I. If you believe Tegmark.

But should you believe Tegmark? Well, as we have seen earlier, the justification we have for calling some mathematical structures real is that they describe what we observe. This means we have no rationale for talking about the reality of mathematics that does not describe what we observe, therefore the mathematical universe hypothesis isn’t scientific. This is generally the case for all types of the multiverse. The physicists who believe in this argue that unobservable universes are real because they are in their math. But just because you have math for something doesn’t mean it’s real. You can just assume it’s real, but this is unnecessary to describe what we observe and therefore unscientific.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “Are we made of math? Is math real?[article title]” at BackRe(Action)

There is mathematics to prove that the universe is shaped like a leprechaun’s hat.

All that said, a bigger question looms. We are able to understand mathematics but why are we? Something is missing from a discussion of whether math is real apart from that.

See also: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

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At Mind Matters News: Dualism is the best option for understanding the mind and the brain

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor reflects on the fact that theories that attempt to show that the mind does not really exist clearly don’t work and never did:

Just about any shallow science writer can tell you what is wrong with dualism, citing Descartes. But, in reality, the world we live in is inherently dual. There is classical physics and then there is quantum physics. There is material matter and energy and then there is immaterial information. just for example. Claiming they are all the same sort of thing is certainly a stretch.

News, “Dualism is the best option for understanding the mind and the brain” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor reviews the mind-brain theories for East Meets West: Theology Unleashed. He thinks dualism makes the best sense of the evidence.

Here are transcripts and notes for the first thirty minutes:

How we can know mental states are real? Mental states are always “about” something; physical states are not “about” anything. Michael Egnor argues that doing science as a physicalist (a materialist) is like driving a car with the parking brake on; it’s a major impediment to science.

Why neurosurgeon Mike Egnor stopped being a materialist atheist. He found that materialism is just not working out in science. Most propositions in basic science are based on mathematics and mathematics is not a material thing.

and

How science points to meaning in life. The earliest philosopher of science, Aristotle, pioneered a way of understanding it. Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor talks about the four causes of the events in our world, from the material to the mind.

You may also wish to read: Why the universe itself can’t be the most fundamental thing. Atheist biology professor Jerry Coyne is mistaken in dismissing my observation that proofs of God’s existence follow the same logical structure as any other scientific theory. (Michael Egnor)

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When “following the science” meant joining the Nazis

This is not an argument “ad Hitlerum”; merely a statement of fact.

And it is an important fact to keep in mind:

I’m still reeling at the stupidity of whoever at Scientific American decided to give a green light to publishing an article, “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy,” by Allison Hopper. The absurdity of tarring critics of Darwinism with racism boggles the mind — given how Darwin’s own legacy, down to today’s Alt-Right, is so tied up with racial pseudo-science, viciously denigrating Africans, African-Americans, and others. See, “On Evolution and Racism, Scientific American Goes to War Against the Truth.”

As a reminder of that historical reality, Evolution News has been republishing some of our past ample coverage on the theme. However, this had escaped me when it was first published: an essay at Tablet by Ohio State bioethicist Ashley K. Fernandes asking, “Why Did So Many Doctors Become Nazis?” Perhaps more so today than ever, there is a tendency to sanctify the medical profession, with the white coat serving as an icon of wisdom, compassion, and morality. But history offers a warning. 

David Klinghoffer, “Following the Science, Doctors Joined the Nazis “In Droves”” at Evolution News and Science Today (July 28, 2021)

One possible explanation: The people at Scientific American were so full of themselves that they assumed that the only outcome of publishing a vicious and stupid article would be outrage at creationists.

The reality is that it finally gave all kinds of people — not just creationists — a chance to talk about Darwin’s white supremacy beliefs, something we had never been able to do before (because of the united elite bellowing that “Darwin opposed slavery!”). And then there is the role Darwinism played in Nazi dogma… They won’t be hearing the last of this any time soon.

But they put it on the table. We couldn’t have.

See also: At PJ Media: A response to religious claims made in Scientific American’s “denial of evolution is white supremacy” piece Bolyard: “I’m not here to debate the hows and whys of creationism. I’ll point you to Answers in Genesis for that. But I want to point out a couple of shameless strawmen in Hopper’s piece that discredit everything else she writes in this piece.” Of course. Hopper was almost certainly making it up as she went along, trusting that few readers had spent much time on the relevant literature.

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