Expelled Exposed or Science Restricted

Apr15

I have not seen Ben Stein’s new documentary Exposed, a purported expose of the stifling of scientific inquiry in the area of intelligent design and evolutionary theory. I do not know if the movie is skewed or deceptive or specious in its arguments. I am not a scientist. I probably would not know if the scientific material in the movie was accurate or not.

However, as far as I understand, the movie is not primarily a scientific argument; it is rather an attempt to tell the stories of certain academics who feel that they have been discriminated against, denied promotion and tenure, and yes, persecuted because of the subject matter that they have chosen to study or to write about, namely the area of research known as “intelligent design.” In this article in Scientific American Michael Schermer, author of Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design, argues that Mr. Stein’s film is indeed inaccurate propaganda. Perhaps so, although I reserve judgement, knowing what I know already about academic politics and the misuse of power in academic settings.

Be that as it may, Mr. Shermer goes on to make a fallacious argument of his own that goes to the heart of the debate between proponents of intelligent design and Darwinian evolutionists:

When will people learn that Darwinian naturalism has nothing whatsoever to do with religious supernaturalism? By the very definitions of the words it is not possible for supernatural processes to be understood by a method designed strictly for analyzing natural causes. Unless God reaches into our world through natural and detectable means, he remains wholly outside the realm of science.

The last part of Mr. Schermer’s paragraph states exactly what I think the students of intelligent design are saying: that “God (or someone) reaches into our world through natural and detectable means,” that we can observe the effects of design by some intelligence in the phenomena of the universe. Schermer uses a restrictive definition of “science” to conclude that scientists who are interested in studying the possibilities of intelligent design cannot really be scientists. According to Schermer’s definition, science equals naturalism, natural causes within a closed system, and if my scientific observations point to a supernatural cause or explanation for any process or subject of study, then I am no longer doing science. Schermer spends half of his article saying that intelligent design proponents and theorists are not really discriminated against in academia, and then he ends by saying that of course, they are and should be walled outside the realm of science because what they’re studying isn’t really science.

It’s as if you said there was a poltergeist in your house, and I said that there couldn’t be a poltergeist because I don’t believe in poltergeists. (I don’t.) And then you invite me over to study for myself the effects of the presence of the supposed poltergeist, but I refuse to look because poltergeists don’t exist and if I came over to study your ghostly phenomena you would have to admit to me, in advance, that it was not a poltergeist at all or else I won’t even look. And I won’t look at any evidence that indicates that you might actually have a ghost in your house because it’s not scientific to study ghosts. And anyone else who studies your poltergeist-like incidents isn’t doing science either, no matter how much use he makes of the scientific method.

Isn’t this attitude rather ostrich-like? What if the universe really is a designed universe, created by an Intelligent Designer who lives outside our closed system of natural causes? Science certainly cannot define and study such a Supernatural Designer, but scientists can and always have felt qualified and able to study the (created) universe itself to find out how things work and how they became what they are today. Perhaps Darwinian evolution and natural selection are sufficient and complete scientific explanations for the world as we observe it. Or maybe some scientists are onto something when they posit that Darwinism doesn’t explain the facts we observe in the natural world and that some events and observations require a supernatural explanation, or a natural cause that we have not yet discovered. (Super-intelligent aliens from another planet, maybe? That explanation for the appearance of design in the universe has the advantage for the atheist of not requiring him to admit to the existence of God, but then there’s the age-old question of who created the super-intelligent aliens.)

O.K., so scientists can’t explain supernatural, outside of the closed system of natural law, events, but can scientists not say that the explanations we have don’t explain things very well and that the observations that they make may indicate that a supernatural explanation is in order? If not, then the scientist risks being blind and deaf and in denial. What if the Truth really is supernatural? If it looks like a poltergeist, walks like a poltergeist, and no other natural explanation exists, then maybe, just maybe it’s a poltergeist, whether I want to believe it or not.

I’ve said nothing here that proves the arguments of intelligent design proponents, nor have I refuted the Darwinists. As I said in the beginning, I’m not scientifically qualified to do so. I’ve only said that IF the evidence indicates that a naturalistic closed system cannot contain or explain the observations that a scientist makes, perhaps he ought to maintain a healthy skepticism and admit to the possibility of the supernatural.

Hat tip to Josh Sowin at Fire and Knowledge for the link to Mr. Schermer’s article.

Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer

Apr14

Vampire Love by Libby Gruner, an essay at Literary Mama on the sources for the popularity of Stephanie Meyer’s series:

Vampire stories are, of course, perfect for teenagers. Vampires stay out all night, scare the respectable citizens, take crazy risks, and live, seemingly, forever. And they’re both sexy and dangerous. Their feasting is intimate, and it’s transformative: the first time matters. Vampire stories come and go, but they’ve been particularly popular among teenagers, it seems to me, during the age of AIDS: they titillate with their suggestion of a sweet fatality borne in the blood, but they also — in the Twilight series especially — carry a strong message of abstinence.”

I read Twilight, New Moon and Eclipse last month, one after the other, like candy, in the course of two or three days. Two of my daughters had the books, purchased with their own money, and I read them mostly to see what the fuss was about. Just like candy, I found them fairly harmless, but not terribly nutritious. Eldest Daughter read the first book in the series, Twilight, and found it to be repetitive and somewhat emotionally overwrought. I couldn’t disagree with her assessment, but it didn’t bother me as much as it did her. I just kept reading, eager to find out how Bella and her vampire boy friend would resolve their essential, life-threatening dilemma: how do you love someone who’s seriously tempted to kill you and drink your blood every time he gets close to you? Or if you’re Edward the Reformed Vampire who’s made a promise not to drink human blood, even though he needs blood to survive and craves human blood, how do you have an intimate relationship with the love of your life without killing her?

There are, of course, other difficulties and plot predicaments: bad, unreformed vampires, werewolves in the second book, Bella’s own clumsiness and stubbornness, Edward’s rectitude and his family of good, but tempted, vampires, a sort of Vampire Capital of the World where the vampires are bloodthirsty and not afraid to show it., other guys who provoke Edward’s jealousy. Still, it all comes down to: how are Edward and Bella going to get together and survive the encounter?

Recommended, cautiously, for those young ladies who realize that these books are fantasy, not reality, and that they’re essentially light reading, not models for male/female relationships.

Unwind by Neal Shusterman

Apr13

I put Unwind on my list of Dystopian Novels with Pro-Life Themes along with The Declaration by Gemma Malley and Children of Men by P.D. James. I had only read a synopsis of the novel but it sounded as if it might belong on that list.

Now I think it’s a little more, and a little less, complicated, than the title to such a list would imply. The author, Neal Shusterman, tries to straddle the line between “pro-life” and “pro-choice” arguments all the way through the novel to very end. Toward the end of the story, one of the characters preaches to an audience of Unwinds, teenagers slated for death by dismemberment for the benefit of those in need of an organ transplant:

“I don’t know what happens to our consciousness when we’re unwound. I don’t even know when that consciousness starts. But I do know this. We have a right to our lives! We have a right to choose what happens to our bodies! We deserve a world where both those things are possible—and it’s our job to help make that world.”

Those words echo both sides of the abortion debate quite faithfully.

The world that Shusterman creates is a compelling one. To end the Heartland War between the Life Army and the Choice Brigade, the Bill of Life is conceived and signed. It says that “human life may not be touched from the moment of conception until a child reaches the age of thirteen. However, between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, a parent may choose to retroactively ‘abort’ a child . . . on the condition that the child’s life doesn’t ‘technically’ end. The process by which a child is both terminated and yet kept alive is called ‘unwinding.'” You can see the possibilities in such a set up: possibilities for exploring both pro-life and pro-choice arguments and weaknesses. And Shusterman does explore. He raises questions such as:

What happens to unwanted babies when no abortions are allowed? (I think his scenario in this case is rather weak and unlikely since the sort of thing he portrays didn’t happen much before abortion was legal in the first place.)

Is it better to die or to be “donated” in pieces to those who are in need of new body parts?

What is a soul, and when does a human become a living soul?

What happens to that soul or consciousness or life when you die?

What if you don’t die but rather your organs, even your brain, could live on in other bodies? Then, what happens to You? Are you really still alive?

Is every person truly valuable? What about fetuses? What about criminals and delinquents? Are you still valuable even if no one assigns value to you, if no one loves you?

Is suicide terrorism ever justified?

The answers to these questions in the novel are ambiguous, and the reader can read a lot of his own prejudices into the story and find support for whatever point of view he brings to the reading in the first place. Or one can take the novel’s questions as food for thought and come away with some awareness of or even appreciation for “the other side” of the abortion debate.

I came away with a renewed commitment to life and the sacredness of life at all stages from conception to death. But I did catch a glimpse of what fears the pro-choice people are harboring and of what a chasm there is between the worldview of a pro-life activist and that of an abortion defender.

And I did think Mr. Shusterman should be commended for writing a fine story.

Animal or Angel?

Apr13

Christianity for Modern Pagans, ch. 4: The Paradox of Greatness and Wretchedness.

Shakespeare: “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.” Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

Pascal: “Man is neither angel nor beast .. . Man must not be allowed to believe that he is equal either to animals or to angels, nor to be unaware of either, but he must know both.”
“This is why life is neither a tragedy nor a comedy but a tragicomedy.”

In the commentary portion, Kreeft goes on to list some of the philosophical movements, both before and since the time of Pascal, that have erred on either the side of animalism or angelism.

Animalism: Marxism, Behaviorism, Freudianism, Darwinism, and Deweyan Pragmatism. (I would add Psychology and Psychiatry in general which assume that all of our problems can be traced to physical/chemical causes.)

Angelism: Platonism, Gnosticism, Pantheism, and New Age Spiritualism.

Shakespeare, of course, genius that he was, wrote both tragedies and comedies and a few plays that are ambiguously considered to be tragicomedies. The wheat and the tares grow together in this world, and no one can separate the two until the harvest. The ending is hope or despair, heaven or hell, life everlasting or death everdying, and the ending determines the nature of the play. Even if sad, tragic, horrible things happen, if the culmination is a wedding, The Marriage Feast of the Lamb, then the play was a comedy all along. And even if we laugh and grab for the gusto, if the end is death and despair, the play is a tragedy, no matter how many grave-diggers’ jest we insert along the way.

So should a writer or a playwright show only the depths of evil and the hopelessness and sin of which man is capable and to which he is prone? Is this the work of a Christian novelist or poet, to bring the reader into the deepest darkness so that he might begin to look for a light? For some writers, the rather paradoxical illumination of human wretchedness might be the calling. Others are called to articulate and write hope in a dying world. Some, the greatest of writers and communicators, can do both.

NPM: Pantoum

Apr13

Pipsqueak at The Common Room writes about a kind of poem called a “pantoum.”

I’m not sure I really get it, but today’s assignment for National Poetry Month is to try to write a pantoum. I’ll add to this post if any of my urchins or I are at all successful in the endeavor.

Poetry activity for today: Write a pantoum.
Poet of the day: Aileen Fisher, not because she wrote pantoums, but because I have her book, Cricket in a Thicket on my shelf just waiting to be explored with the urchins.

Read about Aileen Fisher and an example of one of her poems, Open House.

Baylor Woes

Apr12

WORLD magazine has an article in the most recent issue about Baylor University and Dr. Stephen Prickett, a Victorian scholar and professor at Baylor whose contract to teach and to direct Baylor’s Armstrong Browning Library has mysteriously not been renewed for the next year. I say “mysteriously,” because, of course, no one is allowed to discuss personnel matters in public for the protection of those who are being denied tenure or denied a contract renewal. Of course.

As it turns out, I have a bit of inside information, not about the non-renewal of Dr. Prickett’s contract, but rather about the kind of professor that Baylor University is losing when it loses the services of Dr. Prickett. Eldest Daughter took a class with Dr. Prickett and sat in on a graduate seminar that he taught last year. She could tell you about his scholarship and about his interest in doing adventurous and new things to make Baylor an exciting place to study. She could tell you about the production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that was staged last spring in the Armstrong Browning Library and about how much fun it was and how much she learned. And Eldest Daughter wouldn’t know as much about this item, but according to the article in WORLD, Dr. Prickett “helped to build a number of world-class collections, making Baylor a destination for Victorian studies scholarship.”

The politics at Baylor are complicated, more complicated than the one page that WORLD magazine was able to devote to the controversy, more complicated than I’m probably aware either. The chairman of the English department is quoted as saying, “There are differences of opinion about how 2012 ought to be implemented.” An understatement, to be sure.

Vision 2012 is a plan initiated several years ago (in 2000) with a dual purpose: to make Baylor into a first-class, or tier one as some call it, research and teaching university AND to retain and deepen its commitment to distinctively Christian scholarship in every academic department. Some see these goals as conflicting; others would prefer to rewrite both goals and change them into something more traditionally Baylor-ish. Some professors feel threatened by the emphasis on rigorous scholarship; others would prefer that “Christian” part of university’s heritage and focus remain subtle and unspoken. Many alumni, who wield quite a bit of power because of their financial contributions to Baylor, just want the school to be an old-style sorority/fraternity school where they can send their pampered, upper middle class and rich offspring to be finished in the Baylor tradition and not challenged too much, academically speaking.

Differences of opinion indeed.

I am still praying that Baylor will “maintain a culture that fosters a conversation about great ideas and the issues that confront humanity and how a Christian world-view interprets and affects them both” and will “assume a unique leadership position in higher education by adding new faculty, facilities and programs, all while retaining and remaining grounded in our strong Christian mission.” (quotes from the Baylor 2012 website) I think it would be a shame for Baylor to lose or reinterpret out of existence the Baylor 2012 Vision.

It looks as if it will be a bumpy road, and it’s too bad if Dr. Prickett was one of the casualties of the infighting that has become the road to 2012 at Baylor.

NPM: Poetry for Fun

Apr12

I Do, I Will, I Have by Ogden Nash

How wise I am to have instructed the butler to instruct the first footman
to instruct the second footman to instruct the doorman to order my
carriage;
I am about to volunteer a definition of marriage.
Just as I know that there are two Hagens, Walter and Copen,
I know that marriage is a legal and religious alliance entered into by a
man who can’t sleep with the window shut and a woman who can’t
sleep with the window open.
Moreover, just as I am unsure of the difference between flora and fauna
and flotsam and jetsam,
I am quite sure that marriage is the alliance of two people one of whom
never remembers birthdays and the other never forgetsam,
And he refuses to believe there is a leak in the water pipe or the gas pipe
and she is convinced she is about to asphyxiate or drown,
And she says Quick get up and get my hairbrushes off the windowsill,
it’s raining in, and he replies Oh they’re all right, it’s only raining
straight down.
That is why marriage is so much more interesting than divorce,
Because it’s the only known example of the happy meeting of the
immovable object and the irresistible force.
So I hope husbands and wives will continue to debate and combat over
everything debatable and combatable,
Because I believe a little incompatibility is the spice of life, particulary if
he has income and she is pattable.

Poetry should be fun. What’s your favorite humorous poem?

Poet of the Day: Ogden Nash
Poetry activity for today: Write a poem, or a few lines of poetry, on the sidewalk or the driveway with chalk. See who comes by and stops to read. Note: You can only do this activity if it doesn’t rain. If April showers, wait until tomorrow.

Thanks, Julie: Reading Suggestions for a Thirteen Year Old Boy

Apr11

Julie at Happy Catholic referred her readers over here in answer to a question she received via email:

I’m needing some suggestions for books for my 13-year-old son. He’s gone through Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, and now all of Tolkien. He really needs to get out of the fantasy genre and I’m not exactly willing to trust his English teacher on choices. I’ve found some of her suggestions contain language and situations that I don’t approve. I’m sure there must be other parents out there with the same problem.

My son is an advanced reader, but not an enthusiastic one. I did have him read Night by Elie Wiesel and he was quite moved by it. Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Julie got lots of good comments on her post, lots of good suggestions. And I said there that I thought the mom was right to question some of the choices that the schoolteacher might send home. A lot of young adult fiction is heavily concentrated around the themes of teen romance, sex, and youthful rebellion, perhaps because the writers or the publishers think those are the only subjects teens are interested in reading about. I’m not saying that authors shouldn’t deal with those and other sensitive themes in their young adult novels, but you know your child better than anyone. And you should know what he or she is ready to read in terms of “adult” content and what your family can tolerate or approve of in terms of worldview.

I also suggested that the mom in the email consider some nonfiction, a few good books about a subject her son is already interested in, anything from cars to sports to electronics to music. The nonfiction would “balance out” all the fantasy, and guys actually tend to like nonfiction. Lady teachers and moms, on the other hand, tend to think it doesn’t count as real reading if it’s nonfiction or if it’s a magazine. So, here are a few nonfiction and fiction suggestions for a thirteen year old boy. Links are to reviews here at Semicolon.

Fiction:
The Declaration by Gemma Malley. Dystopian sci-fi.

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart. Mystery/adventure.

Isle of Swords by Thomas Wayne Batson. Pirate adventure.

Cracker: The Best Dog in Vietnam by Cynthia Kadohata. If he likes dog stories that include war also . . .

Code Talker by Joseph Bruchac. Navajo code talkers (radio operators) during WW II.

Code Orange by Caroline Cooney. Excellent adventure about a boy who almost inadvertently starts a smallpox epidemic in NYC.

Heat by Mike Lupica. Baseball fiction.

Leepike Ridge by N.D. Wilson. Action adventure in the tradition of Tom Sawyer.

Nonfiction: This list is a little tricky because as I indicated, it all depends on what the boy’s interests are. But here are a few possibilities.

An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 by Jim Murphy.

Long Way Gone by Ismael Beah. A boy soldier in Sierra Leone. It’s violent and disturbing, but if he read and appreciated Night . . .

The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay. For the mechanically minded.

More suggestions from my readers for a 14 year old male friend of mine.

Any more ideas?

Tamar by Mal Peet

Apr11

I discovered that Grandfather’s world was full of mirages and mazes, of mirrors and misleading signs. He was fascinated by riddles and codes and conundrums and labyrinths, by the origin of place names, by grammar, by slang, by jokes —although he never laughed at them— by anything that might mean something else. He lived in a world that was slippery, changeable, fluid . . . ” p. 111

Tamar by Mal Peet is a story about spies and undercover espionage and the underground during World War II. It’s the story of a man who became so enmeshed in his world of subterfuge and code and disguises that he could no longer trust anyone or even function in a straight forward and honest manner.

What a scary, insecure sort of world to inhabit! And, to some extent, it is the world we live in. We live inside a cosmic joke, and if there is no central, unchanging, organizing Principle or Answer—if this world is completely “slippery, changeable, fluid”— the joke is not really very funny. There is no Standard from which to deviate, no center.

But with God at the center, the joke becomes at least bittersweet. We are promised a happy ending, and all of the riddles, conundrums, mazes and codes make sense because there truly is an answer, not just endless, chaotic, meaningless, perpetual change. We may not find all the answers or decode all the messages, but we are assured that the answers do exist, that all will be revealed in God’s time. And in the meantime, we can enjoy the Joke.

Tamar isn’t really about all these spiritual questions or about God or meaning in life. It’s a story about a family dealing with the aftermath of horrific events that happened during World War II but continued to shape the family and their relationships up through today. The sins of the fathers, or grandfather, are visited upon the third generation.
Nevertheless, the book made me think about change and deception and mirage and reality. So, I share those thoughts and recommend Mal Peet’s Tamar to anyone who has an interest in family dynamics and family secrets, the after effects of war, and the mysteries of ethics and forgiveness and repentance.

Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

NPM: Cat Poems

Apr11

Christopher Smart was born on this day in 1722. Here’s an excerpt from his Jubilate Agno, an excerpt celebrating the glory of God and of His creation, The Cat.

T. S. Eliot wasn’t born on this day, but he did write a wonderful book of cat poems, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, the basis for the Broadway musical Cats. Read Macavity, The Mystery Cat from that book and musical.

Poet of the Day: Christopher Smart
Poetry activity for today: Write a poem about your favorite animal or pet. Begin with the words of Mr. Smart, “For I will consider . . .”