Thinking Christian

Richard Dawkins is famously trying to convince the world that it’s abusive to raise children in a religious tradition–any religious tradition. It’s an ironically unscientific opinion, not just unsupported but actually contradicted by research. Mike Gene points to yet another instance of that:

Spirituality — defined as an inner belief system — accounted for eight to 17 per cent of the average child’s sense of happiness, the study showed.
By contrast, money, the marital status of parents and the child’s gender didn’t even register one per cent.
“It’s a whopping big effect…”

[From Calgary Herald, Finding out what makes kids happy]

This adds to an ongoing store of articles on spirituality and life outcomes. Please see that page for perspectives on interpreting such research.

Inside Higher Ed has a “Quick Take” today on PZ Myers jumping in uninvited on a conference call last week. Scroll down the page for the paragraph beginning:

A tightly managed conference call with Ben Stein and producers of the upcoming documentary “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” became the scene of yet another clash between proponents of intelligent design and defenders of evolutionary theory….

It’s a well balanced summary of the event. “Tightly managed” could have all kinds of connotations. The call was set up so that all participants would be muted except the interviewees and the moderator. Questions were taken by email. As one of very many participants on the call, I took it to mean that the interviewees would be permitted to speak without dozens of interruptions coming after each sentence. It would have been nothing but noise were it not “tightly managed.”

The report closes by calling Ben Stein’s academic qualifications into question. No surprise there–he’s calling academia into question.

Blogspotted by Panda’s Thumb! I’m so excited! What more could a blogger ask?

Here’s what they said:

Today we sat in on a conference call with the Expelled frauds. PZ has his story up, and others will probably follow. However, some people, including the producers of Expelled, have already taken to accuse us of crashing their call, much like the lies about PZ crashing the Expelled screening.This is false. We got an explicit invitation yesterday from Expelled‘s media relations firm to participate, note to whom the invitation is addressed.

Seriously, now: I didn’t accuse anybody of sneaking in to listen. As far as I know the film’s producers wanted them to be there. But the call was designed for attendees to be muted, to let the interviewees and the moderator speak. Questions were taken by email. There were a lot of people on the call and it would have been impossible to proceed any other way.

P.Z. Myers crashed the call by interrupting. Not by listening, but by speaking. And he knows it. I could get nasty with PT for calling me a liar, when the facts are so clearly and obviously otherwise. But I’ll leave it at this, for now.

Comments will be closed on this post, mostly for reasons stated like those stated here, and also because they’re not such a fun group to play with. Experience with my previous post showed that some of that crowd are just not very observant of the discussion policies here.

Update 8:45 pm: regarding accusations from Panda’s Thumb that this is a lie, please see here.

At this moment there is a telephone conference call underway with Ben Stein and the producers of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. It is an invitation-only conference. The call was interrupted by someone representing himself as P.Z. Myers, a Minnesota scientist and strident opponent of religion and of Intelligent Design. This person broke in and interrupted the call and accused the movie-makers of lying. This was about 40 minutes into a 60 minute conference. Others on the call included producers Mark Mathis, Logan Craft, and Walt Ruloff.

Just last week Myers also tried to crash an invitation-only screening of the film in Minneapolis. He claims he went to an open RSVP website to get himself signed up to come. That claim is undermined in that the screening was quite clearly by invitation, “RSVP” means “please respond to this invitation,” and he knew he was not invited.

He has apparently just now done it again.

But clearly the ruckus he and others have raised is far off the real point, which is the content of the film.

Expelled producer Mark Mathis said near the end:

“If this debate were really just about scientific ideas–when was the last time you heard about people getting together to have a passionate exchange about gravity or entropy? But you do get it with this one. The biggest part of this argument is about a worldview. If you acknowledge that design can be discovered scientifically, then the whole worldview of atheism crashes down around you. So they defend evolution with incredible vigor. And on the flip side, people ask, “Why is this being suppressed? Why do they have such a stranglehold on the science departments?”

“Even just now on the phone P.Z. went to the Holocaust footage and misrepresented what has been said about it–which we just explained again a few moments before on this phone call….

“But the core content of the film is that there are scientists being persecuted, and it needs to stop.”

I have not seen the film, but I have noticed, as the producers and Ben Stein noted, that all the controversy in the blogosphere has been over peripheral issues: who got invited into a showing, for example. The complaints haven’t been about the substance. It’s not that ID antagonists have not had opportunity to see it. Richard Dawkins was admitted to the same showing that P.Z. Myers was excluded from. (The producers maintain that they knew he was entering, by the way.) Last week in Nashville, they say, they took initiative to call ID antagonist Michael Shermer and ask him to attend a screening.

This, by the way, demonstrates it wasn’t some kind of paranoia that led them to exclude P.Z. Myers. Frankly, in view of the way Myers speaks about his opponents on his blog, I would be inclined not to invite him in to a private discussion too. That same angry tone was evident in the person on the phone just now. It makes perfectly good sense that they would have admitted Dawkins and not Myers–for Dawkins, for all his anti-religious rhetoric, at least maintains a much more courteous tone.

Paul Lauer, the moderator, handled it graciously in my opinion, given that the call had been crashed. I wonder how the caller got on the conference with voice capabilities–everyone else on the call except the moderator and interviewees was muted (press questions were taken by email).

I’m more interested now than ever to see the film.

Note on comments, added at 6:05 pm. I’ve already deleted one obscenity posted here. This is not Pharyngula, and this blog has discussion standards. This is the weekend, and I do not intend to babysit commenters. I’m going to close comments intermittently as needed when I’m not available to keep an eye on it. I’ll close them completely if needed.

See also Barry Carey on this topic.

Albert Mohler on Is Belief in God Just a Natural Phenomenon?

Barry Carey on Jesus Without the New Testament

Rather technical but helpful for those who do this kind of thing: State of the Debate: Rowe, Wykstra, and Plantinga on the Evidential Argument From Evil (Hat Tip to Johnny-Dee)

An “aesthetic argument for evolution”–I hope it’s obvious to you, just by looking at it that this is self-contradictory. When arguing from some fact to a worldview, one ought to be pointing toward a worldview that can accommodate the fact.

Richard Dawkins apparently takes an aesthetic argument as valid, yet as reported by Matt and Dana Higgins, he almost simultaneously supplies the material for his own refutation. They report from a lecture he gave in Austin,

[Dawkins says] “Evolution is more elegant than creationism.” In terms of evolution vs. creationism/intelligent design, he primarily argued from a point of aesthetics. His highly complex theories are preferable to the plain statement: “God did it.” Like saying that a couture dress is prettier than a dress made out of the living room curtains. Fans of “Gone With the Wind” may prefer the curtains. A matter of preference….

Later in the same talk he reportedly said,

Since there is no God and no moral reality, there is no morality that should be held by all persons at all times…. In “The God Delusion,” he strongly argues that morality evolves and changes with society (”the moral zeitgeist”).

So: apparently there is a strong enough argument for aesthetic realism/objectivity that we ought to take it as evidence on which to base our whole worldview. “Evolution is more elegant” is an objective fact, not a subjective opinion. But there is no moral reality. “Child abuse is wrong” is a subjective belief, not an objective fact. (Dawkins happens to agree with that subjective opinion, but that doesn’t make it objective in his mind.)

Does anybody see something being turned upside down there?

Ironically, this showed up (via Uncommon Descent) just minutes after I wrote this.

For those of us who have debated whether morality is objective, this blog post takes it to another level: beauty is objective, too. One reader, responding to Gene Veith’s post on Aesthetics & American Idol, writes,

“Learning to subjectively like what is objectively good at first bounced off of my 3am quick-read blog-scan. But then I realized that this exact thing happened to me and I shall anecdote-ize it thus:

“When first I approached Milton’s Paradise Lost I knew that I ’should’ treasure it as a sublime and beautiful epic of written art. But i could only (at first) force myself to appreciate it from the outside, like looking at an utterly alien thing that all others considered beautiful. You look at it sideways, squint a bit, trying to see what they see… but it is unutterably alien. Perhaps you see an angle here or there that has a symmetrical form that is pleasing, a curve here, a line there… but the whole is so beyond your current vantage point that the beauty is lost by your own unelevated perspective.

“Then, after forcing yourself to merely ‘mentally ascribe’ the designation of beauty to the form, you slowly achieve the ability to connect the slivers of recognizable traits of beauty that you CAN see from your current state.

“This is achieved in literature by reading more…. “

More at Apprehending Beauty — Cranach: The Blog of Veith

Something amazing happened yesterday. The controversy around Premise Media’s upcoming movie Ben Stein’s EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed became the hottest topic in the blogosphere. According to BlogPulse, a service of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, the issue held the number one slot throughout the day on Monday, March 24th (http://www.blogpulse.com). There were also over 800 results on Technorati (www.technorati.com).

“It is amazing to see the reaction of PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins and their cohorts when one of them is simply expelled from a movie. Yet these men applaud when professors throughout the nation are fired from their jobs and permanently excluded from their profession for mentioning Intelligent Design,” said producer Mark Mathis. Mathis was at the event that has raised this controversy.

[From EXPELLED Controversy Top Issue in Blogosphere]

Nothing unexpected here. Last September I wrote:

Come next winter the Intelligent Design debate is going to have a bomb ignited under it. The film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, featuring Ben Stein, is set for release in February. If the film comes anywhere near the level of the interview Rob Crowther did with producer Walt Ruloff, it’s going to hit our culture hard.

The release date was pushed back, but the interest level is about what we all should have expected. And reactions by P.Z. Myers and Richard Dawkins are about what we should have foreseen as well.

This talk on Views of Truth was given on March 9 to the Chapel at Kingsmill. I regret that I had no control over the recording method–the microphone was far from the front of the room, so there’s room noise. It’s still audible and listen-able in spite of that, though.

Click To Play:

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They thought they had Jesus figured out, and they also thought they had him under control. Not so:

He [Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor] entered his headquarters again and said to Jesus, “Where are you from?” But Jesus gave him no answer. So Pilate said to him, “You will not speak to me? Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you?” Jesus answered him, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above. Therefore he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin.” (John 19:9-11)

Pilate thought he had authority, and that only by his command would Jesus fate be determined. But the authority lay elsewhere. A few hours earlier Jesus had held back a follower who had tried to use force on his behalf:

Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?” (Matthew 26:52-54)

The power lay not with Pilate, nor with the religious leaders or the crowd who pushed the governor to execute Jesus. The power lay with God, who had the whole circumstance planned out and prophesied long before.

There is yet another irony of which I was reminded at church this morning. It’s in Luke 24:13-34. Jesus, just risen from the dead, is talking with two people about the events of the weekend. They do not recognize him immediately in his resurrection body. So he asks them what’s been going on. They reply,

“Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?” And he said to them, “What things?”

It reminds me of a story, probably true, of two English gentleman having a dispute over some topic. One of them suggested they settle it by consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica. The second one pulled it off the shelf, read the entry, and said, “Well, according to this, apparently you’re right.” And the first one said, “Yes, well, that’s what I thought I wrote there.”

Jesus must have been enjoying a similar kind of playful smile inside when he said, “What things?” They thought he was the one person who didn’t know what happened; he was the one who really did know! Read the rest of the story, though, and you’ll see that he didn’t move into gloating over his knowledge as our encyclopedia author. He taught them instead, in a way that connected deeply with their hearts.

The lesson again is not to try to outwit or outpower God. We are on his turf and meet him only on his terms–terms that are good and loving, for our life and freedom, and sometimes even with a sense of humor besides!