Prominent conservatives beginning to abandon Palin

It is worth noting that Parker is not alone. Other prominent conservative pundits are also questioning Palin's qualifications. These include David Brooks, David Frum, and George Will. The disastrous interview with Katie Couric seems to have started a lot of grumbling among conservatives, although there are still many who believe that she can do no wrong. And now Ed Schultz is reporting the following:

McCain Camp insiders say Palin "clueless"
Capitol Hill sources are telling me that senior McCain people are more than concerned about Palin. The campaign has held a mock debate and a mock press conference; both are being described as "disastrous." One senior McCain aide was quoted as saying, "What are we going to do?" The McCain people want to move this first debate to some later, undetermined date, possibly never. People on the inside are saying the Alaska Governor is "clueless."

Will Palin continue on the ticket, or will McCain be forced to dump her? I can't see how he can dump her, given the huge revolt that would cause from his newfound evangelical supporters.

Keeping the Faith

My Christian friends tell me, often accusingly, that I do not want to believe in God. As an atheist, my first instinct is to say that belief is not a matter of choice. One cannot just choose to believe something for which there is no real evidence. For example, I cannot choose to believe that I have a billion dollars in my checking account. That would be a pleasant thought, but I would get into trouble if I actually believed it and tried to live as if it were true.

I am no longer satisfied with that first instinct. Belief is more complex than just having evidence to back up beliefs. The fact is that most of our beliefs are acts of faith. I believe that there is no atmosphere on the moon, but I have never been to the moon to check that out. I believe in the existence of molecules and that water molecules consist of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom, but I do not have never seen, heard, or touched a molecule. It is easy to see that people lose consciousness with brain trauma, so I believe that they lose it permanently when the brain dies. I have no proof of that, however. Finally, I believe that there are no gods, but I certainly don't have any way to prove that negative claim.

So how do I keep faith in science, but not in God? I have made a choice to believe in science and a choice not to believe in God. What drives those choices? In Breaking the Spell, Daniel Dennett goes into great detail about such choices in his chapter entitled "Belief in Belief". He points out that most of us probably believe in Einstein's famous equation E=MC², but most of us haven't the faintest idea of the mathematical proof or even how to go about justifying such a belief. But there is an important difference between faith in science and faith in God. Faith in science does not require elaborate effort to maintain. We do not pray to science to help us believe in it, nor do we go through elaborate rituals of bowing, kneeling, and standing in the service of that belief. Perhaps that is because we know how to verify our scientific faith to our satisfaction, but there is no satisfactory method of testing faith in God's existence.

Belief in a religious doctrine is expensive. It requires a great deal of time and effort. Faith maintainers cannot devote that time to other activities that might please or benefit them. It intrudes on their lives and the lives of those around them. It often requires them to give up some of their hard-earned wealth and to sacrifice for the benefit of others. Why go through all of that? I probably don't need to explain why. Faith has many benefits. It provides one with social approval, and it promotes cooperative social behavior. Churches usually engage in charitable services to the community, and they help people cope with their daily difficulties. Sometimes strong religious faith can even cure illness. So there is a return on the investment. There is a strong motivation to maintain religious faith, just as there are benefits to be received from maintaining faith in science.

So why don't I just choose to believe in God? That would allow me to reap the same benefits that so many of my relatives, friends, and acquaintances reap. Perhaps it has something to do with never feeling all that comfortable in crowds. In my case, though, I think there is something else other than mere standoffishness or love of iconoclasm that drives me to shun that choice. It has to do with the self-consciousness of the effort. If I could choose to believe in God, then I could choose to believe in anything. That is, I could choose to believe I was a billionaire. I could go through elaborate rituals to make myself believe that my bank statement was somehow mistaken or an effort by the bank to steal my wealth. But knowing that I could cheat my belief system in that way would undermine and cheapen all of that enormous amount of faith I have built up in everything else I believe about the world. If I could believe just anything I wanted to, then I would lose confidence in all my beliefs. To put it in Dennett's terms, I would no longer believe in belief.

Playing Two-God Monte with Christian Apologists

There can be no doubt that the Christian God has anthropomorphic qualities. The Old Testament Jehovah was more of a human caricature in that he seemed less than omnipotent, prone to anger and revenge, an advocate of tribalism, and too much like some kind of ancient patriarchal potentate. The New Testament version had a much softer image, but he still behaves largely like a person. He has emotions, thoughts, and goals. He loves humans and orders them to behave in ways that benefit human relations. He takes an interest in sexual behavior, just as any human would, and he is moved by praise from humans and pity for their plight.

Christians have a problem with charges of anthropomorphism, because it makes their god look more like the cartoonish creation that some would argue characterized the pagan gods of ancient mythologies. Those gods were too obviously made up out of whole cloth by primitive people who needed to explain natural forces in terms of human-like agencies. We no longer tend to think of natural forces as the result of imaginary beings that we can influence with gifts of wealth and devotion. So God has been cleansed of many of the old anthropomorphic traits. A modern Christian might use a male pronoun for God, but most seem to reject the idea that he is anything like a male in the conventional sense. In more recent times, a picture of God has emerged in liberal theology that is more of an essence--a Ground of Being--than a person. So allegations of anthropomorphism by skeptics are quite often countered by descriptions of God's essential ineffability--his immanence in and transcendence of our physical reality. A kind of First Cause that is beyond our comprehension or understanding.

The stripping from God of all anthropomorphic traits leaves us with a God that cannot really be argued against. It is hard to argue with the abstraction of an essence that is alleged to permeate everything and whose behavior and motives are beyond our understanding. Do you believe in the existence of things that are beyond your awareness? I don't know. There are certainly things that I will never be aware of, but what could a "thing" be that is beyond comprehension? This is the Shield--the belief that cannot be denied.

But do any of the believers stop praying because God's motives are unfathomable? Do they abandon religious morality because God maybe didn't literally appear as a burning bush and hand some stone tablets to Moses? Not usually. They still attend church and sing along with the choir. They still pray for forgiveness and praise the Lord as if God were subject to human feelings. You can't love an abstraction, and religion isn't much use if it has nothing to offer. So God switches right back to the anthropomorphic entity that serves the needs of those who worship him. You don't worship a First Cause. You worship a being that can be influenced by worship.

This oscillation between anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic deities is something that I have experienced many times in my lifetime of debating with Christians and others of faith over the nature of religious belief. It is a pretty good defense mechanism for a largely untenable belief. The God-as-essence version is the shield that defends the more vulnerable God-as-person version. The former wraps around the latter when it comes under attack, but the latter emerges to serve the believer's real needs when the former has warded off the attackers.

Daniel Dennett: Breaking the Spell

I am currently working my way through Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. If you are a Christian, you will likely have the same reaction to it that Leon Wiesletier, a book critic for the New York Times, does. I have to say that the book that Wiesleter read seems completely different from the one that I am reading. Most of Dennett's book has little to do with Christianity or Christian concepts of God. Rather, it is a study of the phenomenon of religion, and it is based on research that he undertook in support of philosophy classes that he teaches. Unlike Dawkins, in his well-known book The God Delusion, Dennett does not confine himself to an attack on Christian views of God. What has surprised me is that I think Dennett has done a far better job than Dawkins at exploring the evolutionary bases for religion in the human species. Dawkins is the evolutionary biologist, but Dennett seems the more thoughtful and objective evolutionary thinker. Perhaps it is because Dennett is not really engaged in a polemic. That is, while he makes the occasional polemic remark, he is for the most part concerned with just trying to understand what it is about religion that makes it so ubiquitous in human society.

The thing about Dennett's book is that he constantly asks the Latin question "Cui bono?" (To whom is the benefit?). This is the essence of evolutionary thinking, because evolution is design by what Dennett calls "free floating rationales". That is, there is no intentional designer with a rationale. There is just a free-floating benefit to replicators that happen to be lucky enough to be in the right place when the conditions are right. Religion is an expensive form of behavior. It requires people to devote large amounts of their time to maintain and promulgate it. Vast resources are expended to defend various competing religious doctrines. Quite often it leads to strife and warfare, causing members of the species to die off prematurely. So why would it have emerged as such a common form of behavior in human society? To answer the question, Dennett takes the view that there must be some payoff somewhere to make religion such a species-wide phenomenon. What do people get in exchange for all that effort to "keep the faith"?

There is no simple answer to this question, because evolution is always messy. There are usually many factors that come into play to support specific behaviors. Evolution is a "substrateless" phenomenon in that it always requires 3 ingredients: 1) Replication (a copying process), 2) Variation (mutation), and 3) Competition (natural selection). It is not just about DNA and genetics. There may be no single gene that causes humans to be religious, but there is likely a complex of genes that favor the creation and replication of religious "memes" in human society. For example, we are all programmed to believe in and obey authoritative sources of information. Children in particular benefit from this programming, because it favors their survival to take advantage of the experience of more mature members of the species. Ancestor worship is a form of authoritarianism, and ancestor worship seems to form to basis of many religious myths, e.g. the Gilgamesh epic. So these are the kinds of issues that Dennett analyzes and critiques in his very detailed analysis of the ubiquity of religion. I highly recommend this book, but only for people who have the stomache for provocative thinking. Dennett never tries to hide his atheist bias, but he also allows for the possibility that atheism may not be the best answer to our survival as a species.

Maliki endorses Obama's withdrawal plan

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has endorsed Barack Obama's call for a withdrawal of US troops within 16 months. This is a stunning slap in the face to Bush and McCain's 100-year stay, permanent US bases, and siphoning off of Iraqi oil revenues to pay for our stupidity. The war will end up costing us a trillion dollars, and we get nothing but a sinking economy, loss of national prestige, and the need to send even more troops to our neglected, failing effort in Afghanistan. They will be keeping their oil revenues along with the billions that we sent them in aid and promptly lost track of. We get to keep our gas-guzzling SUVs, which will also help to rebuild the Iraqi economy.

Yet Another Gap Filled in the Fossil Record

It is a requirement of science that its discoveries be continually verifiable and verified. Even the obvious must be constantly checked as if some new discovery could overturn or modify what is already known beyond any reasonable doubt. So this latest discovery of transitional fossils in flatfish does not shock or surprise any scientist. It was predictable that such fossils might exist, although it was possible that none did or would ever be discovered. Not every animal or intermediate stage in evolution is recorded in the fossil record, only those whose deaths happen to have been preserved by the sedimentation process.

In this case, the lack of intermediate fossils to demonstrates the evolution of eye migration in flatfish had long been taken as one of those unfilled gaps in the fossil record. It is precisely the existence of such gaps (although they are fully expected and compatible with evolution theory) that is constantly trotted out by anti-evolutionists as a kind of "proof" that evolution cannot explain everything in nature. Yet the existence of such gaps also provides an opportunity. No evolutionist expects there to have been any historical gaps in real history, only in the imperfect recordings of that history by the fossilization process.

The fossil record leaves us with a kind of lengthy movie of the history of life on this planet, but a movie with many missing frames. So we see that "movie" as a kind of sped-up old-time film, a silent movie where the scenes and characters jump around. Yet the time-edited film itself stands as proof that real actors once played before that camera.

Bacteria make major evolutionary shift

Since evolution takes place across generations, it is usually difficult to observe it actually happening. This New Scientist article is an excellent example of speciation, although it occurs at the microscopic level. Because bacteria reproduce and die at a much faster rate than humans, scientists can observe major shifts in their genome when they occur. In this case, E Coli is distinguished from other bacteria in terms of its inability to use citrate. Biologist Richard Lenski has now shown that bacteria can evolve into a new species under observation in the laboratory. As the article states, "Lenski's experiment is also yet another poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists."