Daily Archives: April 13, 2022

Photo: Stephen Meyer, via En Arche Foundation.

Stephen Meyer, writing atThe American Mind, highlights an important lesson about the consequences of dismissing what he calls, in the title ofhis recent book, the God Hypothesis. Hes responding to an essay by Andrew Klavan that notes the connection between tyranny and atheism. The most tyrannical societies have also been the most atheistic, and the most likely to point to science as a justification on both counts.

From, Gods Footprints:

Klavans insight about the relationship between dystopias and atheism (or scientific materialism) is also perceptive. The fictional dystopias ofBrave New World,TheGiver,The Matrix and I would add, C. S. LewissThat Hideous Strength invariably depict future states where men and women are treated as purely material entities devoid of moral impulse and spiritual longing. In such dystopian societies, a reductionist and materialistic concept of human beings ensures that something important love, freedom, human rights, justice, dignity, faith is always horrifically omitted or suppressed by those in control.

The totalitarian dystopias of the20thcentury replicated this pattern, but in real life. National Socialism and Soviet Marxism both cited science as a justification for their materialistic ideologies and utopian visions but succeeded only in creating hell on Earth and, indeed, in perpetrating genocide. All of this supports Klavans other key contention: We need not abandon the scientific knowledge of modernity, but we must subjugate it to the needs of our humanity rather than allow its fleshless, sexless, motherless materialism to turn us into itself.

The insight is timely, given the two-year anniversary of lockdowns that weve recently observed. During that time, some states and countries were far more tyrannical than others. The worst offenders claimed to be simply following the science. What made the difference? No doubt, how secular the culture of the place is played a role. Secularism tends to see experts as deities to be unquestioningly venerated. The God Hypothesis has consequences beyond science or faith.

Coincidentally, I was listening today to radio host Dennis Prager who suggests a related question to pose to friends and family. Prager asks, What have we learned from the past two years? That would actually be a great subject for a book. He was referring to the widespread dystopia that was imposed with the coming of COVID: the masks, the lockdowns, the isolation, the riots, denying children access to school, the apartheid for the unvaccinated. Focused on the virus to the exclusion of all else, political and other leaders listened to the medical experts. But few leaders or experts considered what the broader consequences, for what Klavan terms the needs of our humanity, might be.

The nightmare goes on in some places,like China. In the United States, for the moment there is a backing away from the most damaging and tyrannical aspects of the COVID response. Institutions, including churches and synagogues, that acted with a heavy hand now have retreated, with no public apology or any acknowledgment that they might have been seriously misguided. Humans hate to say they were wrong.

A moral that Prager draws from this is that experts should be limited in the scope of what were interested in hearing from them. Share medical or other knowledge with us, please, but keep your advice what practically to do with that knowledge to yourself. Expertise, like atheism, shades all too readily into tyranny.

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Stephen Meyer: Totalitarian Dystopias and the God Hypothesis - Discovery Institute

I know youre never meant to talk religion, but the census is making me do it. We had to fill it out, on account of being on a visit to Ireland last Sunday night, in a hotel with the fam an atheist, an undecided, a havent-a-clue, a secular Jew, and myself, a Catholic by birth. I chant Om at yoga, but couldnt find a box for that. Instead we all ticked the no-religion box. That this box topped the list felt significant.

Obviously, for millions of people everywhere, the freedom to practice your religion is a basic right, to be honoured, protected and respected for anyone who wants to do so. That goes without saying, but Im saying it anyway.

But for those of us who dont, for all kinds of reasons that are nobody elses business, its refreshing to be acknowledged, rather than regarded by the census demographers as some kind of defective add-on at the end. Not being aligned to a religion does not necessarily make you an atheist the Guardian Soulmates dating site, before it was rendered obsolete by Tinder, used to have a handy spiritual but not religious box; the idea of definitively declaring that there is not a god seems as unknowable as definitively declaring that there is one. Whatever. This column is too short to get stuck in. All we know is that we dont know.

Meanwhile, back on earth, the head chaplain at Harvard University, elected last year by thirty other Harvard chaplains of various denominations, is an atheist humanist - Greg Epstein, author of Good Without God: What A Billion Non-Religious People Do Believe. Despite some initial hand-wringing, turns out that this atheist humanist - who supports humans directly rather than filtering human relationships via a deity - is doing a great job.

The unforgettable character of Elizabeth Zott, the scientist created by author Bonnie Garmus in her believe-the-hype new novel Lessons in Chemistry, declares her atheism on American national television in 1961. Why, she asks with impeccable logic, cant her science-based belief system be respected the same as the story-based belief system of a religious person? Why indeed.

Now, finally, in 2022 Ireland, to not believe has been given the same validation as to believe. Great. But should to believe / to not believe be anyones business but your own? Why the continuing Irish link between church and state? Why is religion still embedded in state schools?

By all means, practice your religion in your home, your place of worship, your community but state schools are for everyone, and not everyone practices the same religion, or practices any religion at all. Is it fair and equal for one religion in Irelands case, Catholicism to be served up as part of the school curriculum, to be baked into the school day? For those who want it, let it be an optional add-on, an after-school thing. Religious indoctrination of any kind has no place in state institutions. Isnt this obvious by now?

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Suzanne Harrington: It's refreshing that no religion is acknowledged on the census - Irish Examiner

So it has come to this. I am in jail. There are no ifs and buts about it. I am in jail. Not the ordinary jail in which criminals are usually held. No. It is the condemned cell. The cell I can leave only to drink the cup of hemlock allotted to me. Maybe they will have the courtesy of bringing the full cup to the cell, saving me the effort to walk to the execution place. Gods might know how this execution business works; I honestly do not know.

What I do know is that today, just today, I was condemned to death for being an atheist. Atheism is a crime. I suppose it has always been on the statute books but has never been used, well not in my lifetime. Why do they think I am an atheist? According to the prosecution it is because I dont go along with the general belief that all the light and heat provided by the sun comes from a chariot driven across the sky by the god Apollo.

I proposed another explanation in which gods played no role whatsoever. I tried to explain it in the Assembly. Actually, I did not even say that this was my explanation. I only said that this was a possible explanation. I said that to provide that much light and heat something must be burning up there, perhaps a stone that burns and burns and keeps on burning. Yes, it must be a big stone that can never be consumed.

How big? they asked.

It must be very big, I told them. Perhaps as big as the Peloponnesus.

If its that big, why does it appear to be so small? they demanded.

Simple. It appears to be small because it is far away.

How far?

Not as far as the stars, I thought. The stars really look tiny. Maybe half the distance, I suggested. All this, I told them, is not a theory. It is just a hypothesis, an inspired guess.

I know I am not the first one to face such accusations, nor even the first one to have this kind of show trial. Phidias had his before mine. Phidias was put in jail for misappropriating public funds. Phidias, misappropriating funds! Quite ridiculous. I have never seen a more honest man than Phidias. His only interest was Art. His magnificent golden statue of Zeus at Olympia will, for ever, be the supreme witness to Athenian art and to the genius of Phidias. It will show, yes, for ever the greatness of Pericles Athens.

I have no doubt about it that Phidias prosecution, like mine, was part of a political campaign aimed at Pericles friends. These people want to bring down Pericles and democracy with it. These are the rich, stupid uneducated crowd who live in elegant villas outside the city. They dont like public works unless all the money spent on them goes straight into their pocket. They want a society with absolute licence to make money. They want to bring down Pericles. They brought me down because I am a friend of Pericles.

I dont think my condemnation has got anything to do with atheism. It is just politics. I dont know how to fight them. I am not a politician. But Pericles will know, he will surely know what to do. Alas, it will be too late for me. I heard often that Hades is a bad place. Full of twittering ghosts, fluttering and swooping here and there in the twilight like swifts at evening. How do we know all that? Is it just a fable? Has anyone ever come back from Hades? Where is the evidence? The old ferryman will take me over and I shall soon know more than I ever wanted to know about Hades.

By the way, there was one good thing that came out of this spectacle. I had an opportunity to present my theory, not the burning stone piece that was never intended for mass consumption but my panta rei. I think it is a good theory. To express it in simple terms I would say that there is everything in everything. For example, I claim that there are human nails and hair in bread. It must be so! How would otherwise turn the bread we eat into nail and hair? It is all there but in a quantity too small to notice.

I did actually perform an experiment to prove my point. My students loved it! I had two big pots of paint, one white, the other one black. Then I poured a small amount of black paint into the white pot. Obviously it created some black streaks in the white paint. Then I took a wooden spoon and started to stir the paint in the previously pure white pot. Soon the black streaks disappeared. The paint became white, pure white, exclusively white. So what did I prove? We all knew that there was some black paint in the white pot, but it could no longer be seen. So this shows that such things could always happen. However hard we try, we cannot observe everything we would like to observe. If the thing we want to observe is there in too small an amount, it is not observable. Thats all there is to it.

Now to a new experiment! Can a condemned man sleep on the night before his execution? I shall now close my eyes and try my best. Come, dreams come. I hear the birds singing. Am I still awake? I hear some man-made noise! A key in the lock? The door opens. Who is it? I hear chink, chink, then the jailers voice: Thank you, Sir and a familiar voice dismissing the jailer. It is Pericles, Pericles in person!

The rest is history. Pericles arranged everything. He bribed the jailer, hired a chariot to take Anaxagoras to the port, hired a boat to take him to a waiting ship. The ship landed in Ionia, in Lampsacus, where Anaxagoras founded a School of Philosophy and lived happily up to the ripe old age of 72.

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The trial of Anaxagoras: a soliloquy - TheArticle

On June 26, 2000, the physician Francis Collins, then the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, stepped up to the podium in the East Room of the White House in front of President Bill Clinton, high-ranking U.S. officials, and foreign dignitaries. A team of more than a thousand scientists, led by Collins, had just assembled a first draft of the three billion letters in the human genome. Clinton called this a stunning and humbling achievement, rivalling Galileos. Collins told the audience, We have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God. By 2003, he would bring the Human Genome Project, one of the largest scientific collaborations in history, to a successful completion, nearly half a billion dollars under budget and two years ahead of schedule.

Collins, an evangelical Christian, would later describe sequencing the human genome as both a stunning scientific achievement and an occasion of worship. But, as a young man, he considered himself an atheist. Collins grew up on a farm in Virginias Shenandoah Valley. As Peter Boyer wrote in this magazine, in 2010, he and his three brothers milked cows and shucked corn; Collins was homeschooled until the sixth grade. His parents, who often hosted musicians on their property, were sort of hippies before there were hippies, according to the singer Linda Williams. They werent particularly religious; when Collins was sent to church to learn choir music, he recalls being told, You should be respectful of what theyre doing, even if the stuff theyre talking about doesnt make a lot of sense.

While a medical student at the University of North Carolina, Collins saw religion comfort patients in physical and existential pain. When an elderly woman with an incurable heart condition asked him what he believed, he found himself at a loss. With time, the question began to feel overwhelming, urgent, and unavoidable. Even as Collins held on to the idea that science could untangle the mechanics of life, he read C. S. Lewis and consulted his first wifes pastor. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that faith, more than science, could help illuminate morality and existence. One day, while hiking in the Cascades, he saw a waterfall frozen in three parts and took it as a sign of the Holy Trinity. In the decades that followed, he argued that science and religion could exist alongside each other. In 2006, he published The Language of God, a best-selling book that presents evidence that, in his view, justifies faith. In it, Collins argues that faith is rational, that it can help answer lifes deepest questions, and that the challenges of the twenty-first century require a harmony between science and religion, not just a ceasefire. He then founded BioLogos, an organization that supports the view that God created all things through the instrument of evolution.

In July, 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Collins to lead the National Institutes of Health, the largest supporter of biomedical-research in the world. Collins was by then a renowned geneticist who had helped to discover key genes behind cystic fibrosis, Type 2 diabetes, Huntingtons disease, neurofibromatosis, and other conditions. Still, he faced high-profile opposition from within the scientific community. The prominent Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, who has been an outspoken proponent of atheism, called Collins an advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs. In an Op-Ed in the Times, the public intellectual Sam Harris, another prominent atheist, argued that few things make thinking like a scientist more difficult than religion, and expressed concern that Collinss views would undermine efforts to understand the human mind. One can only hope that these convictions will not affect his judgment at the institutes of health, Harris wrote. The U.S. Senate appeared not to share these concerns: it confirmed him with a unanimous vote.

In his twelve years as the director of the N.I.H.the longest that anyone has held the position in half a centuryCollins oversaw twenty-seven institutes, forty-six thousand employees and contractors, and a budget that grew to forty-two billion dollars. He became the only Presidentially appointed N.I.H. director to serve in more than one Administration, let alone three; he helped to secure budget increases of more than forty per cent, using them to fund a slew of new programs and initiatives related to, among other things, brain health, addiction research, and the development of COVID-19 therapies and vaccines.

In an era of historic polarization, Collins is the rare influential scientist who has managed to win and keep the trust of elected officials across the political spectrum. After Donald Trumps election, in 2016, Collins was certain that hed be replaced. But a group of Republican lawmakers sent Trump a letter calling Collins the right person, at the right time, to continue to lead the worlds premier biomedical research agency. Each of the signatories was deeply conservative: they all supported gun rights, abortion restrictions, and the repeal of Obamacare. When Joe Biden was elected, in 2020, Collins again prepared to step down. But the nation was in the throes of a deadly and divisive pandemic, and, when Biden asked him to stay, he agreed.

Collins, who is seventy-one, finally handed in his resignation late last year. He returned to his own laboratory research, and, in February, accepted an interim position as the acting science adviser to President Biden. In my conversations with him, I sensed that his personal mission is broader than either of these two roles. If we are going to build a future for ourselves, it has to be based upon a shared agreement that there are standards for knowledge, he told me. You can be wrong about things, in which case knowledge needs to evolve. But there is such a thing as knowledge.

During the pandemic, Collins has struggled with a painful paradox: science is more effective and necessary than ever, and also less trusted. Researchers revealed how a novel pathogen spreads, evolves, and kills; they used its genome to create lifesaving vaccines in less than a year. At the same time, politicians and media figures, especially on the right, have undermined pandemic recommendations, maligned public-health leaders, and sown doubt about vaccines. Tucker Carlson, the host of one of the most-watched cable-news shows in America, recently told his viewers that there had been a complete failure of public-health leadership. He went on, These people dont take it upon themselves to know the data and to say it truthfully, so instead they have inculcated this culture of severe fear. Tens of millions of people, disproportionately in rural and conservative communities, have chosen not to get immunized against a virus that has killed almost a million Americans. In surveys, only around a third of respondents say that they have high levels of trust in the N.I.H. and the Food and Drug Administration; eight in ten say that Republicans and Democrats disagree on basic facts. When the history is written of the worst pandemic in a century, the scientific response will be seen as a shining light in the midst of a dark time, Collins told me. But science is caught up in a much larger disillusionment with the traditional foundations of how we decide whats true.

Collins rose to prominence as a scientist in a different era, when Christian conservatives were denouncing scientists for research using embryonic stem cells. He worked on both sides of the cultural divide, and, during his tenure, he helped to enable many of our recent scientific successes. But the divideand the task of bridging it that he considers his duty nowis only getting bigger.

In May, 2021, after helping to lead the federal pandemic response for more than a year, during which he woke up most mornings at four-thirty, Collins escaped for a weekend to a rented barn in Loudoun County, Virginia. He brought his guitar and a Bible that he has had for decades; horses and goats kept him company. Collins gazed out at the blue sky and rolling hills. He wrote, prayed, and ultimately decided to leave his post as the director of the N.I.H. Collins told me that he prays not to ask God to change his circumstances, but to ask God what he himself should do.

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His choice turned on three considerations. The first was political: if he couldnt commit to staying on through Bidens term, it was only fair to give the President a chance to nominate and confirm a new director before the midterm elections. The second was institutionalCollins believes that organizations benefit from new leadership and fresh ideas. And the third was a social obligation: he wanted to help repair the publics fraying confidence in science. I looked in the mirror and thought, If I have any credibility as a scientist, a Christian, a nonpolitical person, I want to spend it trying to get us to a better place, he said.

After Collins stepped down, I travelled to the sprawling N.I.H. campus in Bethesda, Maryland, to meet with him. It was a frigid day in January, and Collins arrived a few minutes late, having walked across campus after meeting with Anthony Fauci, another leading pandemic figure who, like Collins, has faced vicious attacks on the Internet and in the media. Collins, who stands well over six feet, wore scientist chic: dark blazer, gray jeans, black mask, and Chelsea boots. We met not in Building 1, the home of the N.I.H. director, but in Building 50, where Collinss genetics lab is situated. He welcomed me to his small, spartan, and mostly empty new office: bookshelves without books, walls without diplomas, a solitary mahogany desk.

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Faith, Science, and Francis Collins - The New Yorker