I debunk transphobia so you don't have to...

So, what I have below is an exchange I had on another social media platform with a transphobe that I found intetesting as they managed in just a few short paragraphs to run through the full gamut of transphobic tropes, giving me an excellent opportunity to address them all in one comment. Since it was so exhaustive, I decided to make it a full post.

Basically, your biological sex is indeed determined by what's ‘between your legs’.

No, it's not, and that's one of the big problems with you transphobes: almost none of you understand the biological definition of sex. (You don't understand gender, either, but I'll get to that...) Many biologists talk about "3G sex", which is genes, gonads, and genitals. Typically, people of the female sex have the XX genotype, ovaries, and a vagina, while people of the male sex have the XY genotype, testes, and a penis. However, somewhere between 1% and 3% of the population has a mismatch between these characteristics for a variety of reasons. Generally, biology recognizes the ability to create gametes (eggs or sperm) as the most crucial of the three, but most transphobes are more obsessed with one of the other two. There are people with penises who have ovaries and people with vaginas who have testes, and of course, chromosome makeup can be all over the place with women who are XY, men who are XX, not to mention other chromosome combinations like XXY, XYY, XXX, XXXY, etc. I didn't even get to the SRY gene, which is far more important than chromosomes.

Your supposed ‘Gender’, which used to be used as a synonym for biological sex, is a compete fiction that is nothing but a Social Construct that has no basis in fact, anymore than it does in language.

No, "gender" was originally a linguistic term, and the English language doesn't have gender, unlike a number of other languages, like Spanish, which has two genders, German, which has three genders, and Kinyarwanda, which has sixteen genders. Of course, the concept of "gender" was later extended to the classification not just of nouns but of people, but once again, many cultures have more than two genders, including ancient Israelites, who had nine "genders" that they recognized. Many cultures in the world have three or four genders that are recognized, and while you can certainly call genders a "social construct" that doesn't make them any less real. I mean *money* is a social construct, so are you going to throw your paycheck in the trash? Probably not, I'm guessing.

It is a misguided attempt to align the spectrum of personality and behaviour with the biological sexes. As stated, it is both misguided, and irrelevant.

Well, you can tell that to all the people in the world who consider themselves to have gender and see how it goes. There are thousands of "women" right here in the United States who, unbeknownst to them, have the XY genotype, and are therefore by some estimations "male", so tell them they have to use the men's restroom and participate in men's sports and see how they take it.

No-one can possibly ‘feel’ like something else. They have no actual basis upon which to make such a determination. At best they can only claim to feel like what *they think* it's like to be the other; and that's fine.

Funny thing is, by that same logic, I as a cisgender person can't tell what it "feels like" to be my own gender, since I've never experienced anything else, and the same can be said of you. All that I know is that transgender people almost always feel a sense of relief at transitioning, whether that may be wearing different clothing, taking hormones that align with their gender, or having surgery. (The regret rate for gender-affirming surgery among transgender people is lower than 1%, which is almost unheard of for surgical procedures. Knee replacement has a regret rate somewhere around 25%, for instance.) I think the fact that these people feel happier living as the gender they believe they are is pretty good evidence that they actually know what they are.

They can dress and act and live like they think a member of the opposite sex dresses, acts, and lives; but they aren't that. They are just cos playing by wearing a woman or man suit.

Yes, another fan favorite of the transphobes, "cosplaying as a woman/man". Yet nobody can explain who is being harmed if that's really all that it is! Transgender women aren't attacking cisgender women in restrooms. Transgender women aren't dominating cisgender women in sports. (Also, so many transphobes ignore transgender men for some reason, some of whom are doing quite well in men's sports, and would cause a commotion if they were forced into a women's restroom, but whatever.) In short, these attacks on transgender people are completely baseless. I've been interacting with transphobes like you online for years now, patiently letting you make your case, and without fail, it never holds water. There's no real understanding of biology, sociology, medical technology, or psychology, all of which are fields of science that in consensus agree with transgender people and not the transphobes. You're against this harmless, powerless, small portion of society for reasons that make no logical sense and deny science at the same time.

A bullshit free society

I recently came across the following statement in an online discussion on the topic of religion:

"I secretly dream for all religions to be eradicated so that one day we will be able to construct a bullshit free society and be able to do scientific research without being interrupted. [Religious groups] oppress, brainwash, burn for millennia, [and then say] 'We're a religion of peace now.' "

My response to this person was to take the "bullshit" sign and point it right back at his statement, following up with this explanation of how I think the world—and history—really work with regards to this issue:

What do Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism have in common? Each one, along with most other religions, is now and has always been "a religion of peace". Oppression, brainwashing, and "burning" (whatever that is supposed to be) aren't religious practices, but political practices. Religions don't do those things unless they become powerful enough that they have become political forces. When you have an institution such as the "Holy Roman Empire" as an example, it tends to be ruled by people thirsting for power rather than goodness. People of faith want to trust their spiritual leaders, but the more political clout your church/mosque/temple has, the more likely it is to attract the wrong sort of leadership. Jesus knew:

[Jesus] told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.” -Matt. 13:31-32

As skeptics have pointed out, mustard seeds don't become trees. So what is Jesus talking about? You'll find in Jesus' parables, birds are usually symbolic of evil, and I believe this story is suggesting that Jesus fully expected the church He started would be host to evil men who would use it for their own interests.

Does that mean that if religion can be a tool in the hands of evil men, we should then toss it out? Right before the parable of the mustard seed, Jesus tells another that I think is closely related:

Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.

“The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’

“‘An enemy did this,’ he replied.

“The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’

“‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them.’” -Matt. 13:24-29 (my emphasis)

In other words, churches—just like all institutions—will have some "bad seeds", but that doesn't mean you toss the good for the sake of the bad.

We actually can know that removing religion from society isn't the solution because it's been tried before, in places such as Russia. The USSR under Stalin was strongly anti-religious. This of course led to "a bullshit free society..."

Stalin created a cult of personality in the Soviet Union around both himself and Lenin...towns, villages and cities were renamed after the Soviet leader and the Stalin Prize and Stalin Peace Prize were named in his honor. He accepted grandiloquent titles..., and helped rewrite Soviet history to provide himself a more significant role in the revolution. At the same time, according to Nikita Khrushchev, he insisted that he be remembered for "the extraordinary modesty characteristic of truly great people."

...freedom "to do scientific research without being interrupted."

Science in the Soviet Union was under strict ideological control by Stalin and his government, along with art and literature. There was significant progress in "ideologically safe" domains, owing to the free Soviet education system and state-financed research. However, the most notable legacy during Stalin's time was his public endorsement of the Agronomist Trofim Lysenko who rejected Mendelian genetics as "bourgeois pseudosciences" and instead supported Hybridization theories that caused widespread agricultural destruction and major setbacks in Soviet knowledge in biology. Although many scientists opposed his views, those who publicly came out were imprisoned and denounced.

...and of course, these enlightened atheists didn't "oppress, brainwash, burn..."

Researchers before the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union attempting to count the number of people killed under Stalin's regime produced estimates ranging from 3 to 60 million.

(The above excerpts are from the Wikipedia article Joseph Stalin.)

Does that mean atheism is evil? Of course not; it means that using political means to force ideology on people—regardless of the ideology—will be unsavory, to put it lightly. It also doesn't mean that communism is a bad thing, mostly because Stalin and the leaders who followed in his office were not practicing communism. In fact, as I wrote some time ago, communism and Christianity have more in common than either is likely to admit.

The point that I am trying to make with all of this in a nutshell is that it's power that corrupts people, not religious ideology. If the day comes when (as many atheists have been suggesting for centuries to be right around the corner) religion is somehow eradicated from the earth by the cleansing light of reason, does anybody really think that there will be no more hatred, stupidity, or violence? I've got to say, even as a Christian, I find myself doubting that would be the case if the whole world were uniformly Christian.

Little things mean a lot

A lot of my ideas for things to write about come to me when I'm in the shower for some reason. Most of the time it's random, but occasionally, it actually has to do with the act of showering. There I was scrubbing away at my stomach and chest and thinking about something I read in an article somewhere about how essentially our bodies are a horrid mess of bacteria from our navel to our knees because that's where our intestines are, and they are the storehouse for some of the most powerful bacteria we have.

Actually, I think about this a lot, but suddenly I made a connection to another article I had read. You see, while it's true that there's a lot of bacteria in our intestines, we really have a lot of bacteria overall, and in fact I had read that scientists are now saying that the human body contains more bacteria cells than human cells. That's something to think about. Really, historically we've thought of bacteria as some sort of invader of the human body when in reality, we're living in a symbiotic relationship, for the most part.

And they are really a part of us. One researcher came to the conclusion that some people suffering from obesity are really having a hard time dealing with what are profoundly hungry bacteria that keep sending out hormonal messages to the brain, saying "FEED ME!" How else do you suppose our lives are affected by these microscopic life forms?

Then the thought took off, and I made the connection with another article I'd recently read, which is saying that biologists are starting to rethink the validity of Lamarckism. Lamarckism is the idea that things that an organism does in its lifetime has an effect on its offspring in a way that carries on through generations, sort of like a variety of fables about how a particular animal did some action, and that's why hippos have wrinkly skin, or rats have smooth tails. For some time, biologists had pooh-poohed the concept of Lamarckism, saying that it was our genes that define us. What if they're only "sort of" right?

Think of those hungry bacteria causing obesity. Maybe scientists are looking at the genes of obese people looking for a genetic marker for obesity, and they just can't find it...but it turns out they were looking in the wrong place? Perhaps it's not the genes of the humans that causes obesity, but the genes of the bacteria they carry.

If this were so, could there be more to it than that? No article this time (not that it matters, as I'm giving no references), but I have noticed, like several people, that married couples seem to sometimes look very much alike. As they grow together in marriage, sometimes they look more and more like each other over time. Could this be the result of bacteria affecting other physiological changes? When you sleep together in the same bed, when you're sharing bodily fluids, when you eat together, you're sharing your bacteria. Could that be molding us? Or on the other hand, when people talk about having "chemistry", could they sometimes mean that they sense that they have compatible bacteria?

This is all quite theoretical, of course, and I'm combining thoughts from a number of disciplines about which I only know the slightest surface ideas. Yet think of the implications if this is true, and it may very well be. In the debate between nature and nurture, between behavior patterns being learned and inborn, what if there is a sort of third option? I've said before that I don't believe that sexual orientation is in a person's genetic makeup, yet I wouldn't suggest that it is a chosen path, either. Could it be possible that sexual orientation is acquired as one acquires a cold? Certainly not so simply, and not something that I even think one would "cure" through antibiotics, as I do think it has been shown to have something to do with the structure of the brain, but it certainly the brain structures could be caused by physiological influences that we as yet know nothing about.

What makes us act and look the way we do? Our science fiction authors tell fantastical stories about people being controlled by alien beings, but what if we're already under the control of non-human life forms? If so, should we be creeped out by something that after all is completely natural?

Repeat, repeat, the sounding joy...

Strange how hard it's been to write lately. I don't know if it's that inner editor that always tells you that what you're writing isn't good enough or what, but something seems to have slowed me down.

I've made a few attempts, and some of them pretty good efforts. I had a column by Anna Quindlen making the standard comparison between same-sex marriage and miscegenation laws, which I went on at length about why I feel the comparison works in some ways, but not in most. (Actually, that was one of the times I had a real-life editor questioning the worth of the writing: a friend was looking over my shoulder as I wrote, commenting that if I published what I wrote, many would label me as both homophobic and racist, not that I worry too much about being controversial.) I had a blog meme that I wasn't tagged with, but considered running with it anyway just because it was interesting. I keep mulling over ideas for topics that I've hinted at writing about, but have been afraid of my inadequacy of treating properly. I wrote a half-hearted essay on why, despite the fact that I like Christmas, I have a strong dislike of Christmas carols. I was even attempting to put together a dissection of the comic book Watchmen before the movie comes out, and it was going pretty well, but I started to realize it was a bigger undertaking than I'd anticipated. I may still finish it, who knows?

I was going to finally put something together this week about how I felt vindicated once again due to the fact that I had come across another "professional" writer who was expressing sentiments that I had ranted on at length in the past. Sharon Begley writes (as published in this week's issue of Newsweek) that scientists don't like to change their minds, despite the fact that science is by its nature supposed to be ever-changing. Didn't I write that? Yeah, I did. I realized, though, that there's something ironic in writing such a piece. Not the first one, that was good; I mean writing a follow up piece in which I rehash old ideas and say, "See? I'm totally right!" The whole point (well, a major point) of the column is that people, even scientists, like to be right, and therefore will sometimes have a tendency to belabor old ideas, whether they have merit or not. What's the point in bragging about my own views and showing myself party to the same personality flaws as the scientists I'm criticising? Yes, I have those same flaws--it's human nature after all--but why not just admit it and move on, rather than indulge in non-self-aware irony?

Actually, the final paragraph of Begley's piece has a wonderful bit of irony. A psychologist whose pet theory was that people like to be able to change their minds ended up changing his mind about it! So he changed his mind and decided it was better to not change one's mind. Funny. And cute, as it turned out to lead him to propose to his girlfriend. He was happier making his relationship a more committed one. Maybe science can tell us something about abstract concepts like love after all?

But hey, I was talking about me, wasn't I? I think one of the hardest things for me as a writer is the idea that what I write might not be original. In college, in the middle of an otherwise very fun creative writing class, I wrote a story about a person writing a diary chronicling the collapse of his mental abilities. Upon sharing it with the class, my heart sunk when a classmate said, "This reminds me of Flowers for Algernon." I realized that I had essentially (without meaning to) written essentially a highly inferior version of that classic novel. I hate it when that happens, and unfortunately, it's not a particularly uncommon occurrence. Actually, there's an episode of South Park in which a running joke is that everything one particular character thinks to do is compared as, "Oh, yeah, that's just like that episode of The Simpsons!" The character gets annoyed, but at the end of the episode, somebody points out that after being around for nearly 20 years, doesn't it just make sense that The Simpsons have covered just about every conceivable topic?

The Bible says that "There is nothing new under the sun." (Eccl. 1:9) I think there's real truth to this. As I wrote before, I don't think the Internet is so much a new thing, but a different way of presenting much of the same old stuff the world has had since time out of mind. I have a strong desire to be original, yet I always suspect that I'm unable to write a single thing that has not been written about before. Many of the topics I cover (including this one) have probably been debated back and forth for centuries. How can a single individual manage to struggle to rise above thousands of years of written history and the competing voices of over six billion individuals?

It's funny, though, because when I put it that way, it sounds like a stronger bit of ambition than I in any way intend. I've never aspired to greatness; at least, not for fame and fortune, but only to be the best I can be personally. I don't want to be leader of the free world, but I do want to be an adequate leader of my family. I don't expect to ever win a Pulitzer Prize, but I would like to someday write a book that people will find entertaining. I'm not a great philosopher, but I'd like the things that I write about to be thought-provoking. Are any of these things possible for me?

Can a paragraph end without a question? Maybe.

Still every bit of ambition can potentially be quite daunting. We never really live up to our harshest critics, whoever they may be; of course they often are ourselves. There is a certain sense in which it doesn't matter, both from a pessimistic side and an optimistic side. As a pessimist, I might say, well, I am just one of six billion people, and a lot of them probably have much more interesting things to say, if they wished to say it, and so many more of them are sufficiently like me that my personal experience has nothing to say to them that they don't already know in their own hearts and minds. On the optimistic side, I can realize that with my voice being lost in a sea of voices, failure to truly stand out will simply make me fade into the background, but any moment of excellence that happens to sneak into my writing by accident at least has a chance to be recognized, simply because it's out there. Who cares if my writing makes no difference? To paraphrase the punch line of a Dilbert strip I saw years ago, it's not like we have a limited supply of ones and zeroes.

I suppose what we do have is a limited supply of time, and potentially, I am wasting plenty of mine. How many hours of my life do you suppose I've poured into writing that nobody will ever read? If I'm going to invest that time, I need good reason to think it does have meaning on some level. I think it does.

We all have our personal opinions, and as was said, we like to think that we're right. Am I going to corner some stranger on the street and force-feed them my opinions on current affairs? No, but isn't there some part of human nature that wants to, in a sense, stand up in a public place and say, "Hey, these are my views, and they matter!"? Hopefully, we're also consumed with the desire to follow up with, "...and what do you think about that?" earnestly looking for an honest answer with an open mind. No, the Internet isn't entirely new, but it's a medium by which such interaction can take place in a much easier fashion than ever before. Self-expression? Interchange of ideas? Why should I shy away from such an opportunity? I need to write, and if you needed to read and made it this far, thanks for your indulgence.

Add It Up

Today, another rant about a Newsweek column; this time, it's not Anna Quindlen, but the topic is definitely strongly related to feminism.

Sharon Begley, Newsweek's science columnist takes a moment to speak up on a subject near and dear to my own heart: sexism and stereotypes about learning ability. ("Math is Hard, Barbie Said") See, just in case you're not aware of it, American girls have a hard time with math, generally finding it too challenging for them, and thus we find that there is a clear gender gap in ability and achievement in this area. The thing is, though, it's all (as they say) in their minds.

I love parenthetical statements, don't you? (Okay, maybe it's just me.) "As they say" is really the operative phrase here. The fact is, while girls in America and Japan have consistently lagged behind men in mathematical ability, that gap has been far narrower in communist nations where supposedly they take a more liberal view of the ability and worth of the individual, regardless of gender. It would seem--and to many of us, there's no surprise to this--that girls do badly in math because society has told them that they will have this failing.

The result, according to Begley is something more than simply a self-fulfilling prophecy of "Tell somebody they can't do something, and they probably won't be able to do it," but actually an emotional response. Tell a girl she can't do something, and even if she doesn't believe you, the fact that you gave her discouragement will cause a distracting emotional reaction. How well are you going to be able to focus on factoring a polynomial when half your brain is screaming out to you, "How DARE they say that!"

This fact is very personal to me for two reasons. One of them is that despite that my degree is in mathematics and I know I tend to be very good at it, there was a time around fifth and sixth grade when I struggled with math. I had a couple of math teachers who, instead of encouraging me to do better, essentially took time and effort to embarrass me and tell me I was a failure. I never considered the fact until just now what a boon it was for me to have a seventh-grade math teacher who was completely incompetent. I've always wondered how a guy like that ended up teaching math when he obviously had no skill in the subject, but in retrospect, I wonder if it helped stroke my ego to recognize that my own ability was better than the teacher. (This was the first of many teachers that I had the habit of viciously correcting on a daily basis, pointing out his errors at every opportunity, which came frequently. On the same note, it was probably oddly useful for his ego that he clearly just didn't care.) I realized long before seventh grade that mathematics was the method of understanding reality on a basic, foundational level, and seeing it taught with such ineptitude goaded me into always being the best I could be.

But I was lucky. As a boy, when I showed ability in math and science, society approved and egged me on to greater achievement. The second thing that's always bothered me about this topic, and this one even more so and more repeatedly at every chance it had to come into my mind, was the fact that my sister did not go into a college major in math or science. Sure, all things being equal she might still have chosen the path she did, and I'm not aware of any regrets on her part; she's been very successful in the things she's set her hand to as far as I am aware. What irks me is that I do feel she was shorted in the area of praise for her abilities. I became the math major in college, I was the one that people actually called a "math genius" repeatedly in high school. (Note that when you go to a small-town high school, and then graduate to a large university, you tend to find that most areas where you were considered excellent are now areas in which you are merely average; I don't claim to be anything special today.) Nobody ever called my sister a "math genius", but I always suspected that she was far superior to me.

Once when visiting home from college, I was rummaging through some papers in my mother's house, and came across some standardized test scores. A test taken sometime towards the end of elementary school revealed that while I was above average in my mathematical aptitude, my sister was truly the cream of the crop. Yes, my sister was the real "math genius", but where did that genius go? Fast forward from elementary and rewind from college to the beginning of my senior year. This is the time that you start looking at your grades and test scores and pick what schools you want to look into. The school guidance counselor called me into his office and informed me of what was supposed to be great news. I knew my SAT scores were good, but apparently, in my small rural county of Northern California, I had set the record of highest-ever SAT score. I might have reveled in that announcement if it weren't for the very following sentence with came before the first had a chance to sink in.

"And the person who previously held the record was your big sister!" I was told with a big grin. How about that, Brucker? Consider the irony! Oh, I did.

"Uh... Was my sister informed when she had set the record in the first place?" I asked. "This is the first I've heard of it."

The smile disappeared. "Um, well, I guess not."

"Why the hell not?!" I responded through gritted teeth, and I got up and left. I was always somewhat aware of the problem, but that day, it hit home in a special way. Friends come and go, but my sister will always have a special place in my heart, and I couldn't forgive the injustice done to her or to all our sisters everywhere. As I said, I get the impression that my sister was satisfied with the academic course her life took her on, but I can't help but feel that nonetheless she was robbed of a full set of options.

Thus comes the real problem, the larger problem as I see it. Sexism and racism aren't just bad, but hurtful things that cause often nearly irreparable harm. Our society is closing down gaps all over the place, but will the wounds of the past ever be healed? Within a few months, it appears we will likely have our first black President, but will a single black President make up for centuries of slavery and oppression? When the day comes that a woman is placed in the Oval Office, will that make up for all the years they were treated as slaves in attitude, if not in name?

Prejudice says, "We're not going to allow you to be equal." When pressed, it says, "Okay, you can have the right to be equal, but you will never really be equal." Eventually, after centuries of beating down the oppressed, be they members of a race, gender, or other social group, the members of the oppressive group ask the oppressed group, "Why are you so bitter about all that stuff? It's in the past!" There is a tendency to miss the fact that the fight against oppression is an uphill battle, and even when the playing field is leveled, it's hard to shed the weight of the past.

When Begley points out that the very fact of being told that you can't do something impedes the brain from doing it, she points out that it doesn't have to be personal. A girl doesn't have to be told that she is incompetent in mathematics, she need only be told that historically, women have underachieved in comparison to men, and the discomfort that sets up in her mind is sufficient to impede her thought processes. This is the sort of thing that goes beyond self-worth, and turns into an evaluation of the worth of the group to which one belongs. We tell people that they are inferior for long enough, and some of them believe it; among those who have the determination to not believe it, more than a few will still be burdened by the injustice of the sentiment.

You don't have to be a member of an overtly downtrodden group to experience this for yourself. Think about the situation we have here in America with respect to the learning of foreign languages. There's a joke I've heard a few times that goes like this: "A person who speaks two languages is called bilingual; a person who speaks three languages is called trilingual. What do you call someone who speaks one language? An American." Why is it that Americans have such a hard time learning foreign languages, but so many Europeans and Asians seem to typically speak three or four languages? I know Americans in general won't accept the argument that these people are somehow intellectually superior to us. I personally believe that we as Americans don't learn foreign languages because we've decided it's just too hard. This is not something indicative of any subset of the culture of the United States, but seems to pervade us in general. We either believe that we just can't do it, or we think we might be able to, yet we look around and note that few people are doing it and get discouraged. This isn't even the result of anyone acting prejudicial towards Americans, but merely a culture that has shifted into a sort of self-prejudice. Imagine if it were a matter of prejudice; instead of simply struggling through your language classes worrying about how difficult it is to conjugate verbs and learn the gender of nouns, you also have to keep thinking about how everyone's expecting you to fail.

But here's where my cynicism cuts in and takes over again. Begley points out that things are getting better for women, and they are beginning to be accepted more often as the intellectual equals of men, but will equality--true equality--be realized in our lifetime, if ever? If we as Americans can slip into a feeling of hopelessness over our inability to acquire languages without any sort of external oppression, how can people who have been actively pushed into a state of hopelessness rise above it? Perhaps asking such questions is largely adding fuel to the fire, but it needs to be said anyway.

I don't believe that we escape the evils of the past by simply trying to forget that they ever happened. We escape from them by actively fighting to overcome them. As a father of two daughters, there's a significant battlefront of this culture war located within my own household. It's a hard responsibility that's been given to my wife and me to see to it that our daughters are never told that they are any less capable of anything simply because of their gender. Really, that's the only thing we can do: try our best to raise up a new generation better than the past. Do we do this by never mentioning the sins of past generations towards their mothers and grandmothers, or by entreating them to actively strive to overcome the vestiges of that shameful past? I don't know the answer to that. Maybe it would take a woman to figure it out?

The masters of science fiction

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Arthur C. Clarke

I think I've finally figured out the problem with science. That is to say, I think I know what the real issue is with the public perception of science, and what it is about it that makes the average layman surprisingly loath to trust it. Let's face it; every day we're going to open the newspaper and find another story along the lines of some school board refusing to teach evolution, and the more "enlightened" among us will shake their heads and mumble something along the lines of, "Are we living in the dark ages or something?" Well, I've decided that in the end, the problem surprisingly lies with science itself, and the manner in which science by its very nature generates its own bad press.

I don't remember what it was that was simmering somewhere on the back-burners of my mind the other day as I was perusing some essays by Isaac Asimov, but maybe it will come back to me, as it had become a thought suddenly boiled over when I hit a particular sentence in one of his essays. Just in case you're not familiar with Asimov--and actually, you're probably not as familiar as you think you are even if you do know something about him--he's probably best known as a science fiction writer, but also carried on his resume a number of works of fiction in the genres of mystery and fantasy, as well as a certain amount of writing on science fact, history, and Biblical commentary. Asimov was probably my favorite author as a child, and I'd always wanted to write as well as he did, but never thought it likely. Turns out my wish may have come true: while his storytelling is superb, his essays are pretty crappy. I am in good company after all.

It's probably actually not his essay writing overall, but this particular subset. I picked up a copy of Magic: The final fantasy collection, which is a gathering together of all Asimov's "fantasy stories that have never before appeared in book form." Truth be told, even the fiction is not quite as good as his sci-fi works elsewhere, but the section of essays dissecting the nature of the fantasy genre seem to really fall short. Maybe it's just me. Actually, one of the hard things in evaluating the fiction is that not too much of it falls into the standard sort of format that one thinks of as "fantasy"; one story, a mystery involving Batman, actually has no supernatural element to it at all, so go figure.

What does all of this have to do with science, though? Well, as Asimov works his way through essay after essay of reflection on the subject of magic, faeries, mythical creatures and dashing knights riding off to slay dragons, he ends up--as a firm believer in science, and an author with a strong preference for science fiction over fantasy--taking many of these thematic concepts and relating them back to scientific principles. Science fiction and fantasy both generally involve the use of extraordinary means of meeting the protagonist's ends, but there tends to be a divergence in the nature of the means that is sometimes hard to describe precisely due to the fact that, as Clarke has said, technology can sometimes appear to be magical. Asimov points out that the real difference is that technology is something that always comes with limits, but magic much less so.

An excellent example is to think about the worlds of "Star Trek" vs. "Harry Potter". Both involve fictional means of teleportation, but there are few similarities in the workings of each. In the Trek world, teleportation is made possible through the employment of technology that requires a very large amount of energy and powerful supercomputers. Those attempting to teleport with these devices need to program these powerful computers with the particular coordinates of departure and arrival, the subjects of teleportation cannot be in motion, the teleportation device must be fully-powered and within a certain distance, and (for some unstated reason that has never made much sense to me) the operator of the device needs to know the number of people being teleported. In Potter's world on the other hand, all one needs to teleport is to be a wizard who really wants to go to a location in mind. I'm sure there are Potter fans who would take issue with such a simplification of the process, but really, I've simplified the process from both worlds.

So who is the winner? Maybe it seems like Potter is, as he needs no power source or help from a computer, has no limits on distance of travel, and can disappear at will in mid-stride while running from the hot pursuit of Voldemort. Not so, however. There are, and will always be, people who have a preference for the theoretically possible over the fantastic. After all, what good is Potter-style teleportation to "muggles" like you and me? Computers and technology, on the other hand, make amazing strides daily, and who knows? While physicists haven't yet invented the warp drive, it has been suspected that the principles of relativity actually do allow for travel faster than light speed if we could find a way to manipulate the space-time continuum. Sci-fi has a lot of big "ifs", but they're not the ridiculous imaginings of magic and fantasy, at least.

That sort of thinking is actually the smaller part of the problem of science: it's sort of a killjoy. On page 143 of "Magic", Asimov points out that the old fairy tale staple of "seven-league boots" are something for which science can't really produce an analogue. Seven-league boots are magical pieces of footwear that allow the wearer to move seven leagues (21 miles) in a single step. Asimov points out that such boots would cause the wearer to, at the pace of a brisk walk, achieve escape velocity and therefore be launched into space in a stride or two. Sheesh, Asimov, you're no fun. I'm not personally a big fan of the fantasy genre, but I think it's clear enough that we're meant to understand that magic boots, by the very fact of their being magic, don't have to concern the wearer with mundane factors such as escape velocity and wind resistance (I'm sure someone could give some very good reason why travelling at escape velocity with no protective gear would cause air friction enough to vaporize you, or at least severely chap your skin). Asimov is only trying to point out that science, unlike magic, has limits, but really the depressing thing about science is that really on the whole, science is all about telling us repeatedly that we are limited.

One of the best-known limits in science is the speed of light, but it's odd that it's so well-known. That is to say, it's not that people know what the speed of light is (I can seldom remember it off the top of my head), but they know it exists, and the one thing they really know about relativity theory is that things in the real world can't go faster than light. What does this really do for the layman, though? What possible purpose does it serve the non-physicist to know that the universe has a speed limit, especially since not a one of us will likely ever travel so much as 0.01% of that limit? It only reminds us that we do not have unlimited ability, and while this is true, it adds nothing to the human condition to know it to be so. Science doesn't care, nor should it, as it exists in a world of facts and not fantasy or feelings.

I've written before that science is not in the business of making people feel good or have a sense of self-worth, and that's why it makes for a lousy religion. "But wait," most readers will object, "science isn't a religion!" No, it's not. The bigger part of the problem of science is that despite that fact that it isn't a religion, there are an awful lot of people who treat it like one. Something else that I know I have written about many, many times is the fact that the world is full of skeptics who are more than happy to puff out their chests and declare, "We don't need God and religion to give us the answers, for science has all the answers we need!" But whatever you may feel about religion, the second part of that sentence is dreadfully wrong: science doesn't have answers, it only has theories. Wait! I'm probably not saying what you think I'm saying...

My imagination makes it hard to write this, as I know with almost every sentence I write, there is someone out there who will be reading this and saying, "What an idiot!" Maybe, but can you wait until I've had my say? I know there are a lot of creationists that love the catch phrase, "Evolution is just a theory," and of course, they're missing that in the realm of science, that word tends to mean something deeper than they give it credit. Granted. What I'm saying is that even giving it all the credit it truly deserves, it's still not the end-all and be-all of truth, because science is not a religion in very important ways that are actually its strength, but unfortunately its lesser-known strength.

The Asimov essay that boiled over that thought was one titled "Giants in the Earth", an essay on why he thinks so many cultures (including the Bible) have had myths concerning giants and other fantastic larger-than-life creatures. He gives a number of theories about why people would imagine giants, mainly focusing on people of lesser technology who marveled at achievements of more advanced societies such as the massive walls of Mycenae and the pyramids of Egypt and, not being able to fathom technology that could move such massive stones, imagine the employment of giant men or sorcerers for the purpose. In general, this is not an unreasonable theory, but I do have some issues with it, the main one being the assumption that every single example of stories about giants surely could not have simply been the result of actual, living giants. After all, Goliath was only said to be nine feet tall, and while that sounds pretty fantastical, I fail to see why there could not exist a man of that stature, or at least near that stature helped with a dash of exaggeration or rounding off to the nearest cubit. I think I may have made this exact analogy in a former piece of writing, but if a person who had never been to China or known anything about it ran into Yao Ming, he might be tempted to tell friends that China was a land populated with giants, and he would be sort of right, since there are at least a few of them.

Now, just shortly after denying that tales of mythical giants had anything to do with actual giants, and denying that tales of dragons could have anything to do with actual oversized lizards such as dinosaurs or who knows what, Asimov makes this startling statement:

"The elephant bird, or aepyornis, of Madagascar still survived in medieval times. It weighed half a ton and was the largest bird that ever existed. It must surely have been the inspiration for the flying bird-monster, the 'roc,' that we find in the Sinbad tales of The Arabian Nights."

"Surely"? Maybe Asimov had some backing for this statement, but from what I see here, it seems to be pure speculation. Why does one need to go to Madagascar to find such a large bird when fairly large birds such as ostriches and crowned eagles exist on the African mainland? The apparent assertion of a matter of speculation as bare fact is what disturbed me, and surprised me from Asimov as a supposed man of science.

Maybe it's a particular problem of Asimov's, being a writer of sci-fi and mystery, that he feels a need to see to it that loose ends are tied up into a neat little bundle. Fiction does that quite often, especially in the mystery genre. We expect when we close the book after reading the last page that even if the ending is not a happy one, we at least will have had everything explained to us, and everything will be understood. Religion (which atheists will gladly relegate to fictional status) also tends toward this sort of resolution. It tends to try to answer as many of the key philosophical questions of life as it can, and then blankets anything that wasn't covered with some panacea such as, "Well, God is working all things to the good, and He will triumph in the end." Everybody likes a happy ending.

Science may like to define limits, but has no end in itself, and never completely ties up all the loose ends. This is the true strength and power of science, but it's not a savory one. Those so-called skeptics who claim that science has all the answers are missing the true point of science: that it has no answers, only a better class of questions. The real problem of science is that people are looking for final answers, and science's disciples are more than happy to claim that they have them, despite the fact that they are (unintentionally, granted) misleading people with such a claim.

It is the nature of science's never-ending quest to question reality that what are today's scientific truths will be tomorrow's scientific misconceptions. We had nine planets, but then we only had eight. We were descended from homo erectus, but then we weren't. The smallest indivisible units in the universe were atoms, but then they were found to be made of protons, neutrons and electrons, which were later found to be made of quarks, which in turn are made of...what? To the average person, all of this sort of stuff looks like indecision: can't science make up its mind? I thought you said science had the answers? To the non-technical mind, the answers that science give look like so much magical hocus-pocus, and when Rowling tells us in book seven that wands only properly work for their true owners, yet book four is full of magicians getting along just fine with borrowed and/or stolen wands, we start to think it may all be a bunch of crap.

Science is suffering from bad press, and it's not bad press from those fools who do things like ban the teaching of evolution in schools, but from those people who say things like, "Science has given us the answer, and the answer is evolution." Such an attitude falls prey to those who object, "What happened to us being evolved from homo erectus?" or "Why do you think it is that Piltdown Man turned out to just be a hoax?" If "evolution is the answer", then like dogmatic religious zealots, the disciples of the religion of science will demand that asking more questions is inappropriate, never realizing that like Pharisees berating Christ for healing on the Sabbath, they're elevating tradition over deeper, more fundamental truths. Yes, science embraces evolutionary theory, among other theories, and as a "theory" it's actually something deeper and more well-established than just an idea of how the world might happen to work, but just as Christianity holds as an underlying tenet that "Love thy neighbor" is more important than any rules about how you run your church, science holds to an underlying tenet that above all, we must keep asking questions of our universe.

Evolutionary theory is a better theory than its detractors give it credit, and I expect it to be a part of science for quite some time, despite the fact that simpler concepts, like the number of planets we have, lasted for much shorter time than evolution has already enjoyed. But it is the nature of science that all theories are potentially only here for today, waiting for the time that they will be replaced by a better theory and discarded. The real failure of our educational system is not a failing to convince everyone that evolution or any other theory is true; after all, the greatest scientists have always been the ones who were willing to be the first to discard the failed theories of the past. No, the real failure is not teaching our children that the real strength of science and greatness of scientists was not in their determined acceptance of the status quo, but in the very willingness to go against it. Mendeleyev wasn't the first person to think of the concept of the periodic table of elements (a crude approach to modern understanding of the behavior of subatomic particles before anyone had even thought of subatomic particles), but he was one of the first people to be willing to keep pushing and questioning until scientists decided to take it seriously.

Yes, the problem with science is that we haughtily insist that people accept it as it is, forgetting that the state of science is always evolving. Religion is the one that often strives to be right without being questioned. Science? It only strives to be a little less wrong than it was yesterday, and there's nothing wrong with that.

The book of numbers

I remember many years ago, a couple of people came knocking at my door. I seem to recall they were Jehovah's Witnesses, but I may be remembering wrong; it's not important.

"Do you know what the most popular book in history is?" they asked me, their way of starting up a conversation. This is the sort of conversation I enjoy greatly; not the theological conversation, which I also enjoy and of course they were aiming towards, but the conversation of interesting but ultimately pointless trivia.

"That's an easy one," I replied, "The Bible of course. Now here's a stumper for you: what's number two?" See how I did the very thing that so often annoys me (probably most people, actually)? I took their train of thought and switched it off to a different track so they had no idea where we were going. Next stop: Trivialand.

Actually, the funny thing about pointless trivia is that often enough, it's not even so vital that it's true, which, in thinking about the story lately, I realized that I may have been incorrectly parroting back what I had been told. I'm fond of asking the trivia question: "What's the only animal with four knees?" This confuses people, who mostly don't notice that most quadrupeds don't have knees on their front legs. The answer is supposedly "elephants", but I not only don't know if this is true, but I don't know if even elephants truly have four knees. I don't think they do, actually.

...and I'm going on a tangent again, and from a tangent off of a story about going off on tangents, at that! So, back to my first tangent, the one I gave the poor confused representatives of the Watchtower Society: I had been told repeatedly in college that the #2 book--whether it was supposed to be in popularity or influence or what, I do not know--was Euclid's Elements, an ancient textbook on the fundamentals of mathematics. Wikipedia says it is "second only to the Bible in the number of editions published", which may be the basis for its supposed #2 slot.

I definitely think there's something very significant in the fact that a math textbook holds such a vital place in world history. The average person may find mathematics a very dull subject, but it has been said, and I believe quite truly that "Mathematics is the only true universal language." Some people find it strange for a Christian to say such things, but I believe that even God cannot subvert some of the basic principles of mathematics. As Galileo said, "Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe."

Numbers interest me deeply. They have a power in them that people do not realize. I've worked for years as a computer programmer, not because I love computers, but because there's something in me that greatly distrusts computers, and wants to know as much about them as I can. Understand HTML, JavaScript, PHP, ASP, etc., and you understand how the web works. Understand mathematics, and you understand how reality works.

People shy away from understanding numbers and how they interrelate, but they don't realize the vulnerability it gives them. As a someone who has also worked as a statistician, I also understand that. Another famous quote is "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." People who control the numbers can have power over those who don't understand the numbers. Even my father, who was not good at math, understood the principle. He once told me, "I noticed there was a brand of soup in the local supermarket that nobody wanted to buy at 25¢. The managers of the store took away the 25¢ sign and put one up that said '4 for $1', and they couldn't keep the stuff in stock!" Lack of a basic understanding of mathematics clearly leaves one wandering in the wilderness of confused ideas. And manipulation of statistics can be even worse than this sort of amateurish manipulation of simple fractions.

Statistics is a "science" of mathematics that involves sometimes a process of incredibly complicated calculations and delicate statements of degrees of confidence that are actually quite precise and accurate. But most people don't operate on that level, and don't want to operate on that level, so statistics tends to come at people with a simple pecentage, or a cutesy chart; a method that tends to simplify things to the point of meaninglessness.

Case in point: a friend elsewhere on the web posted a link to an article suggesting that statistics show gun ownership decreases the rate of "hot" burglary, i.e. burglary that happens while the residents are in the house. Here's the article. Can you spot the problem with this? In the first paragraph, we are told, "In studies involving interviews of felons, one of the reasons the majority of burglars..." Now a citation is given, so the original study may show more, but here we are told about "studies" which may mean anything. When I was in high school, I was fond of bolstering my arguments in research papers by interviewing classmates and citing useful responses. There's no good reason to assume that's what's going on here, yet there's not really any reason to assume something better. As far as the numbers go, "one of the reasons the majority" is worded so nebulously I'm not even sure it's safe to say that 50% of the interviewed felons feel this is important. Of course on top of that, we also don't know if this claim holds true in real life. Some felons (and which ones? I assume these are felons who were caught; who knows if those who got away with their crimes have the same feelings?) may claim that they behave this way, but how do we know how they act in real-life situations?

Here's where the numbers come in, right? The numbers were compared to Britain and the Netherlands in the second paragraph. Questions here that occur to me are: How do we know that theses are reasonable comparisons at all? What are the actual levels of gun ownership in those countries versus the U.S.? Do criminals know the statistics before they approach a house to burglarize it? What was the computation used to come up with the number of 450,000, and assuming this is a reasonable computation, what's the current number? I mean, is this 450,000 "hot" burglaries that would have still ocurred, but would not have been "hot", or brand-new burglaries that simply wouldn't have happened? Are we talking about doubling the number of burglaries, or increasing by 50%? (For that matter, do you know that those aren't the same thing?) That last statistic of 30% is tossed in with no comparison to the other two countries, so what's the significance?

The most important question to ask, however, is whether guns are really the deciding factor behind these numbers. Another article my friend linked to pointed out that in Britain, many people are getting high-tech security systems for their homes, making it a necessity that burglars need to strike while someome is home. Many years ago, I remember hearing that the proliferation of "The Club" device for securing one's car was causing a rise in carjackings. Does that mean security systems are bad? I don't know much about the Netherlands other than the fact that drug use is much higher there. Could that have something to do with crime rates? Look, the conclusion that the article is trying to support may actually be true, but the numbers and info given are largely meaningless. How many people realize that, though? People love to say, look, I've got statistics! I am right! But who knows what numbers really mean, and who knows when numbers are misleading, whether intentionally or accidentally?

Our whole world is made of numbers. Numbers to count items, numbers to measure time and distance, numbers to represent complicated concepts. They're simultaneously the most abstract concepts of our minds and the most fundamental building blocks of concrete reality. They're powerful, they're meaningful, and they're there whether you try to understand them or not. Ignore their power at your own peril.

The book of genesis?

I realized something this morning that for some reason struck me as funny. Skeptics of Christianity have often pointed out (quite rightly, mind you) that despite the fact that the world is full of people who claim to be Christians, it's surprisingly uncommon to find a Christian who has actually taken the time to read the Bible. How many of them know the Ten Commandments, which they claim to highly esteem? (Hey here's some fun a non-believer can have with an ignorant believer: convince them that there's something strange in the Ten Commandments. Remember, though, you've got to make it believable, so something like "Thou shalt not touch the flesh of the swine" or "Thou shalt not lie with man as with women." Your best chance is to lift a verse from elsewhere in the Bible and pretend it's in Exodus 20. Fun for you, hopefully educational for them.)

Let me be clear that I am not saying, as some have, that it's the "atheist Bible", but I was thinking about Darwin's Origin of Species, and wondered: how many people who believe in evolution have read that book?

Of course, the position that Origin of Species holds in the world of evolutionary science is not analogous in many ways to the position of the Bible. Really, the Bible is supposed to be the definitive book on Christianity, and while one can know a lot about Christianity and even be a Christian without ever having opened the book once, every book that there is on Christianity is in some way going to refer back to it. Origin of Species, on the other hand, while a book that was there in the beginning of evolutionary thinking, is far from required reading. Any reference work discussing evolution need not even give a simple nod to Darwin, but can formulate its own opinions on the meaning of fossil evidence and the like.

Still, a principle is there, hidden beneath the question of how many evolutionists have actually read Darwin's work. Just as one might wonder what sort of a Christian a non-Bible reading self-proclaimed Christian might be, isn't it fair to wonder about a believer in evolution who has never read a word on the subject, be it written by Darwin or not? I would say such a person has true "blind faith" in evolutionary theory, and even those who believe in evolution from a position of fuller knowledge ought to be worried by this sort of belief. Sure, most Christians can't name all Ten Commandments; how many people who would profess to believe in evolution can even define the word "evolution"? You might be surprised. (Try yourself: whatever you think the word means from a biological standpoint, jot it down, then check your answer against Dictionary.com or something. You might be surprised! Wait, didn't I just write that?)

Now, I myself have not read the book, but I'd like to. I'd also like to encourage others to do so. While not a "holy book", Origin of Species is a book that probably ranks up there with the scriptures of various religions in importance. Just as my fellow Christians are often found saying "How can you reject the Bible when you've never read it?" I ask how they can reject Darwin without reading his work. Even if you're convinced it's 100% crap, all the more reason to open it up and see what's inside: to know what sort of crap it is and let people know. As a believer in many of the concepts of evolution (creationists, make sure you completed the dictionary exercise above before criticizing me for my position) I do have expectations as to what I will find in Darwin when I get around to him: a man with great powers of observation, keen insight, and a touch of laxity in his scientific methods. Very thought-provoking, I'm sure.

I hope it's not the first time I've urged this when it comes to this subject, as well as many others: both skepticism and faith have their place in obtaining full understanding, and one should not blindly accept nor reject any significant piece of information that comes one's way. Just as I tell people they should read about Christianity from the source and judge for themselves, so I believe that they should read about evolution in the same way.

Once I do manage to get around to it, I'm sure I'll be more than happy to share my views on it far beyond what anyone cares to listen, just like everything else.

A plague of frogs

I came across an interesting article in the newspaper this weekend. It was in the comics section, actually, as one of the local papers carries a section in the middle of the comics that's like a miniature newspaper for kids; you've probably seen them before.

Apparently, various species of frogs are going extinct at an alarming (to whom?) rate. According to the article, "Experts believe half of all frog species are now facing extinction." The culprits? Well, there are actually a number of factors, but apparently most of them tie in to global warming in some manner. The conclusion of the piece was essentially that it is our job as caretakers of the earth to do what we can to stop this massive frog genocide.

This reminded me of a question I've often pondered in one form or another. Let me give a disclaimer that I'm all for doing what we can to avoid damaging the environment. Frogs, along with so many other animals, are really great, and I think it's good to have them around for various reasons. But the question...well, it's really two questions, and the issue of how they interrelate.

#1 - Is there something inherently wrong with driving a species of animal to extinction?
#2 - Is it our responsibility to keep such a thing from happening?

See, while the disclaimers I give above hold, it seems to me that the answer to neither of these questions is self-evident. I examine here the specific case of frogs, since it was what drove me to question these assumptions again.

Suppose frogs simply disappeared from the face of the earth. There's nothing inherently great about frogs per se. One of the most vital items that is actually pointed out in the article is that frogs eat insects. Get rid of the frogs, and the insect population gets out of control. Now, aside from the fact that frogs obviously are eating insects that share their ecosystem, and if they died due to loss of a viable ecosystem, the insects probably are not to far behind, there are various problems with this still. Similar to the assumption that losing frogs is inherently bad is the assumption that gaining insects is inherently bad. How can we really place a value on one species over another?

Of course, the net effect goes beyond that. The bigger picture is that when a piece is taken out of the puzzle, well, it's sort of like the ecosystem is akin to a game like Jenga: if you pull out a piece, it may lead to a total collapse of the system. Insects grow out of control, and those animals that subsisted mainly on a diet of frogs will start to dwindle. The impact of the loss of the frogs has a ripple effect on everything around. But is this wrong? Nature has a tendency to restore that balance eventually. While in the short-term, chaos may reign, eventually either something else will eat the insects or the food supply of the insects will run short. Probably both.

Look, the dinosaurs died out, right? Science tells us that 65 million years ago, the dominant life form on the face of the earth went away. This was after existing as an order of life for 160 million years. During those millions of years, I don't know the numbers, but it is my understanding that wave after wave of species of dinosaur came to be extinct, only to be replaced by later generations of dinosaurs. Of course, once the last of the dinosaurs were gone (either completely wiped from existence or evolving into birds as some suspect), the world kept on going fine without them. Sure, I'd miss frogs because I have lived with them, but I somehow don't miss dinosaurs, mammoths, or dodos. Dinosaurs were definitely not wiped out by humans; dodos definitely were. Mammoths? Humans hunted them, but the final cause of their extinction is unknown. Does the manner of extinction make for more or less of a tragedy, and why?

Anyway, what I'm driving at is that whether or not a species may be dying out due to our own actions or due to natural changes beyond our control, in the end, species simply die. We can't say with complete accuracy when, but it seems to me that it's fair to say from an evolutionary standpoint that eventually every species existing today will cease to exist. For many, it will take millions of years, but for some others, I imagine they will die out within the next month or so, many due to no action on the part of humans. That's just nature.

Maybe you might want to argue that if we know or at least highly suspect that the imminent extinction of a species is due to our own poor choices, we might have a responsibility to clean up our own mess. I'd buy that from an emotional standpoint, but really, it's not much more than an emotional argument, is it?

Okay, let's talk penguins one more time. In the movie Happy Feet, (no major spoilers here, but maybe minor ones) the main character is a penguin who eventually realizes that part of the reason he and his fellow penguins can't find enough food is that there are these strange alien creatures (humans) that are eating all of the fish. He eventually decides that the best thing to do is try to communicate with the aliens, and convince them that the best thing to do is share the fish with everyone. The idea is sweet and all, but there's a built-in assumption that I don't buy: that penguins (and perhaps by extension other animals) are somehow morally superior to humans. While certainly any penguin being aware of the fact that they are contending against humankind for the fish supply would not like the idea of giving up all the fish to the humans, does anyone really think that out of the options of sharing the fish with humans or eating all the fish themselves, any penguin would choose the former? We're not morally inferior, we're technologically superior. Whether or not the power of our technology requires a moral temper to it is a matter of opinion. If you don't think so, then explain why humans hunt whales? Obviously someone feels that we owe no moral debt to our harpoonally-challenged sea dwelling cousins.

This is the hard part of relative morality, but to be honest, absolute morality has problems here too, in that it's fair to assume there will always be moral dilemmas that are not clearly covered by a given moral code. There are few religions or philosophical world-views that will tell you what to do about the frogs. Even Buddhists--who no doubt would advocate avoiding any actions that would harm frogs, penguins, whales, or elephants--do not to my knowledge address the issue of what to do for a frog that dies of natural causes. Really, not even the newspaper has a definitive answer. If only we could ask the frogs, what do you suppose they would say?

Does a hairless ape have the Buddha nature?

I spend a lot of time thinking about things that atheists say about the world and how so often it doesn't seem to make sense to me. Case in point, something that I love to bring up is the question of how evolutionary theory (that is, of the sort that claims humans evolved from "lower life forms", that's the interesting stuff, right?) is often claimed to have solid basis in scientific fact, and yet, I've never heard of any specific evidence. Those who truly understand science realize that science never "proves" anything anyway, and that's an apparent weakness and yet in many ways truly the strength of science that at its core, science is eternally skeptical.

Not so theists, obviously. A common claim made by theists is the concept that the existence of God is simply self-evident. The mere fact that atheists exist would seem to be a compelling counter-argument, but my fellow theists insist. Usually, the claim is the if one simply looks at the world around us, sees how amazing it is, one cannot reasonably reject the concept of an all-powerful creator. Okay, if you really think so.

Something always seems wrong with it to me, but it's hard to put a finger on specifics. Then I remembered a fascinating little observation I've heard a few theistic anti-evolutionists make: Ever seen a dog say grace before digging into a bowlful of chow? Of course not, dogs don't have religion, nor do any other animals, and clearly, that's what sets us apart and makes us superior.

I find that to be a much more interesting and perhaps far more astute observation, although it may not be so clear what conclusions we can draw from the fact. I realize that I have repeatedly talked on this blog about how we really are not well served in comparing humans to animals, yet I think it is a wellspring of philosophical, sociological and biological insight to note anything that does actually clearly delineate us from the rest of the living creatures in the world. We're not the only animals to use tools, build structures, or even use language, so while those things fail to fully set us apart, the fact that we are somehow fundamentally religious is striking. Even atheists are likely to occasionally ponder the possibility that God exists, even if they easily reject it out of hand. Does this really make us somehow superior, however?

While an atheist might say no out of sense of surety that theology is a waste of brain power, it occurs to me that theists themselves are implicitly putting forth a very good argument that something is wrong somewhere. Maybe you personally disagree, but I have never doubted that many animals are thinking, feeling beings. Our favorite pets, dogs and cats, seem to be very able to observe the world around them and evaluate what is going on. Their thought processes may be somewhat more simplistic, but I don't believe they are completely unable to abstract from sense data. When I was growing up, I had a dog. Surely that dog could have looked up into the night sky and seen the stars twinkling away across the galaxy. Surely that dog could have looked at the natural world about him and seen the beauty of nature. Yet all of these things that are supposed to inspire us as humans to realize that there is something greater than us in the world simply fail to elicit such a response in animals. Why is that?

Think about it: If the existence of God is supposed to be self-evident by simply looking at the world around us, so much so that in order to deny God's existence one would supposedly have to fool oneself into denying it, then why do we not see any evidence of Godly reverence among other species? Is it lack of intelligence? I don't think so. It's an oddity that one has to be intelligent before one can be fooled. Ever try to play a practical joke on a dog? It doesn't work. Either you fail completely, or you're successful in a mere mechanical way while the dog has no idea what's going on. Who fooled the animals of the world into ignoring God?

Really, in my mind there are only two possibilities. Either claims that the existence of God is self-evident are fundamentally flawed, or the fact that animals are non-religious shows us that we as humans are inferior. If you can look at the stars in the sky and "see God", not in a supernatural way, but in a mundane sense of it being simply self-evident, then you're deluded. Our ability as highly intellectually evolved creatures to imagine infinite possibilities from the limited information we gather with our senses has caused a glitch: the imagining of God.

That's not to say that God does not exist. Don't mistake me, I'm still a theist. The problem here is a short-circuiting of reason, but that doesn't automatically imply that the conclusion is wrong, just logically flawed. If I believe that every time I wash my car, it will rain within 24 hours, it may in fact be true, but that doesn't imply causality, only that I have poor timing in washing my car. I think God exists, but not because the world is so beautiful.

It may be that there is something supernatural to it, like God opening the eyes of a person in the Bible and letting them see the realm of the spirit for a moment. Even then, however, one cannot say it's self-evident, as divine intervention is needed. Is a special kind of sight that which has set us apart from the animals? If so, it may not be given to all, and we cannot say that an atheist is fooling themselves for not seeing what we see; for better or worse, they simply aren't experiencing that same glitch.

Why is the sky blue? (It has nothing to do with wavelengths.)

"In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."

"Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what a star is made of."

-Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis

I'm sure what I have to say here is a reiteration of what others have said hundreds of times if I cared to search through literature and what passes for it on the Internet, but perhaps it stands to be said once again anyway. There are a lot of people in the world these days who, whether they would state it this way or not, put science in the place of faith. I think this is a grave mistake, and a way of closing oneself off from truly glorious possibilities of experience in this life (not to mention the next) by being closed-minded.

Let me make something very clear, though. It is often such self-professed skeptics who hurl the accusation of closed-mindedness at those who do have faith. Hypocrisy? No, actually, because they can often be right. You see, the very point I wish to make here is that science and faith are not opposing sides such that one must choose one or the other, but two separate things that can and should coexist in harmony. Among those of us who have faith as a major aspect of our lives, there are more than a few who have taken a position wherein they have done the opposite of the skeptics, and put faith in the place of science. Given that faith tends to be a thing more rigid than science in general, a person in such a mindset might rightfully be said to be more closed-minded than a person of the opposing camp.

It came as a bit of a surprise to me, and it may to you, to find out that C.S. Lewis, arguably the most prominent Christian apologist of the 20th century, was a believer in evolution. Modern evangelicals love Lewis, but hate evolutionary theory; how many know of his views on this matter?

The thing is, recently I finally had a chance to read some of Lewis' science fiction. (I've been well-acquainted with his "Chronicles of Narnia" since I was about six. Prince Caspian is a book I fondly remember as being the first novel I managed to read within a 24-hour period, back when I was seven years old and I had just discovered that The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe was only the first book in a series of seven!) Perhaps not as deeply engaging and enchanting as his Narnia books, but still a pretty good read, Lewis had written a trilogy of books involving space travel and aliens. The thing that seems odd about them is the manner in which the main character of the stories discusses with sentient beings on other planets his attempt to grasp what forces of nature might have caused them to evolve into the forms that they have come to be, while at the same time, it is quite clear that this protagonist is a devoted Christian in the midst of a very Christian story. The power of Lewis' interplanetary theology drips from every page of the tale, and is a strong, positive message. Yet I suspect that if these stories were to be written today, no Christian publishing house would touch them for the science that doesn't fit in with the popular evangelical world-view.

It's a shame. No really, I mean that not in the "Oh, it's too bad," sense, but in the real sense of meaning that I'm embarrassed for fellow Christians who might miss a good message for the sake of fighting a world-view that need not be the enemy of the faith we live. After all, who can doubt the fervor and intensity of Lewis' faith? Yet he maintained that faith while being quite comfortable accepting the science of the 20th century right alongside his faith. Is it so impossible that Christians could do the same?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to advocate that we all embrace evolutionary theory. It has its merits, but the strength of science is in the allowance of skepticism. By all means, doubt evolution, question it! But don't reject it out-of-hand as though it were blasphemous just because you can't fit it easily into your world-view. And I give the same message to those whose religion has become science, whether you realize it or not. There are a lot of scientists who feel that the natural world is pointing to the idea of a higher power: science and religion can and do mix freely.

What is it that has failed in our culture that so many of us can't see this? I think it is a lack of understanding of the basic questions we ask in order to understand the universe. I thought I had shared this allegory with you before, and if you've heard it excuse me, but it's one of my favorites: There once was a community of mice who all lived inside of a piano. Every day, as the mice went about their business, beautiful music floated down from above them and filled their world. The mice had come to believe that there was a being who was larger and more intelligent than them who lived outside of the piano, and this person, the Great Musicmaker, made the music because of a love of beauty. Some mice decided one day to go and try to find the Great Musicmaker, so they climbed up the insides of the piano to see what they would see. Eventually, they came to a large cavern filled with strings and hammers. As they stood there wondering what they were seeing, the music began playing. They were shocked at what they saw, and they returned immediately to the rest of the mice. Once back, they reported, "There is no Great Musicmaker, only hammers striking strings!"

What's the point of this story? The point of this story, and all that I am writing here is that the question of HOW things come to be is a separate one from WHY things come to be. When the mice looked on the hammers and strings, they understood the HOW, and were somehow blinded to the WHY. Likewise, in our world, many people examine the world and find "There is no God, only space-time and matter and forces, and all can be explained by gravity and chemistry and quantum forces." I've said it many times; yes, all can be explained by those things, but only the HOW of those things.

But there is an extension to this allegory that perhaps fits to the modern world. Suppose the mice chose to continue to believe in the Great Musicmaker? Really, they would be right to do so, wouldn't they? Where they would be wrong is if they denounced those mice who claimed that the strings and hammers existed, and said that is was wrong to believe in the existence of strings and hammers. That would be putting so much emphasis on the WHY that there was no room for the HOW.

It is my belief that everything that exists, exists for a reason. It is also my belief that this reason is twofold: one aspect is WHY the thing exists, and one aspect is HOW it came to exist. Those two aspects may be and probably are strongly intertwined, so I see no reason why either one should be divorced completely from the picture.

Good grief!

I recently came across some material on another site trying to point out the old argument that there can't be a loving, omniscient, omnipotent God and suffering at the same time. It's an old argument that many far wiser heads than I will ever be have argued from either side, so I won't delve into the full argument, mostly to save space. (I dip into it in a later post anyway...)

The thing is, I remember discussing the topic a long time ago with an avowed agnostic. It was interesting to me at that time that the discussion turned to that topic, because at first, we had been discussing the idea of miracles. He referenced an argument from David Hume which I remember differently (and the given link seems to tell it the way I remember), but took his word for it. His version of the argument was as such:

A: A "miracle" is an event that defies the laws of nature.
B: An event that defies the laws of nature cannot be explained by science.
C: One cannot say with certainty that any event is impossible to be explained by science, only that with our current knowledge of scientific principles, we cannot understand it.
D: Therefore, rather than accepting an event as being a "miracle", it is more rational to assume it is simply something that future developments in science will explain to us.

Now, if you accept the definition of "miracle", which is reasonable enough for most people's purposes (although there's a bit more to "miracles" than that), then I think this argument, which was presented to me in less sloppy fashion than I have presented here, holds water pretty well. I admitted to the agnostic that he had a very good point, and as I think I have said in this blog as well, I don't doubt that science will one day explain everything, or at least has no limits to what it could potentially explain.

But the discussion went forward and evolved, as online discussions do, and it turned to what he presented as proof that God (as per the Bible, at least) does not exist. This argument was the argument from my first paragraph here. Now while his form of the argument was better than most I have heard, and he had managed to plug up most of the logical holes that exist in such arguments, I seem to recall two problems with his conclusions. One was very metaphysical, and I won't go into it here. The other was, to my delight, one that I presented in the same form as his previous argument. So many of these arguments for and against God are double-edged swords, and in the end, those who make them feel that they've closed the case, while at the same time, those on the other side remain utterly unconvinced. Oh well.

My argument? Well, the problem, as most people who argue for God to be able to coexist with suffering claim, is that it seems quite possible that good cannot exist without evil. Pleasure cannot exist without suffering. In order to make the world a truly wonderful place, God must allow some to suffer, and it may be beyond our comprehension why. A personal example from my own life was that I dated this woman for a while in college, but the relationship didn't go well. We broke up, and it was painful for both of us. Why should I have suffered that painful relationship and subsequent breakup? Well, I happen to know for a fact that if it were not for that failed relationship, and certain events that happened in the fallout from it, I would never have met the woman who became my wife. At the time I was suffering, I didn't know where it would lead, but it led somewhere good in the end.

That's a small example, but many Christians have heard of a more interesting one from the Holocaust. Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch woman whose family hid Jews in their house during the Nazi occupation, eventually ended up in a prison camp infested with fleas. She and her sister, who were in the same barracks, had smuggled in a Bible and were holding regular prayer meetings. Corrie was appalled on the night when her sister insisted that they should thank God for the fleas the barracks were infested with.

The fleas! This was too much. "Betsie, there's no way even God can make me grateful for a flea."

"Give thanks in all circumstances," she quoted [from 1Thess5]. "It doesn't say, 'in pleasant circumstances.' Fleas are part of this place where God has put us."

And so we stood between tiers of bunks and gave thanks for fleas. But this time I was sure Betsie was wrong.

Later, Betsie made an interesting discovery.

"You're looking extraordinarily pleased with yourself," I told her.

"You know, we've never understood why we had so much freedom in the big room," she said. "Well--I've found out."

That afternoon, she said, there'd been confusion in her knitting group about sock sizes and they'd asked the supervisor to come and settle it.

"But she wouldn't. She wouldn't step through the door and neither would the guards. And you know why?"

Betsie could not keep the triumph from her voice: "Because of the fleas! That's what she said, 'That place is crawling with fleas!' "

My mind rushed back to our first hour in this place. I remembered Betsie's bowed head, remembered her thanks to God for creatures I could see no use for.

And that's the sort of thing that I thought of when I was told that the world is too full of needless suffering. Just as he had faith in science being able to explain all, I had faith in God and His providence to explain all.

You cannot prove that any given instance of suffering has no point, you can only make the claim as an opinion. Therefore, there is no such thing as pointless suffering, only suffering that we do not yet understand the purpose of.

(Excerpts from Corrie ten Boom's The Hiding Place)

The evolution of Darwinism

"Did God, the supreme intelligence, deign to design distinctive shell patterns for the tortoises of each island?"
-"Evolution of a Scientist," Newsweek, Nov. 28, 2005, p. 54

Evolution is always an interesting subject to me. Partly because it's such a hot-button topic for many people, and partly because despite that fact, there are many people who insist it's not a hot-button topic at all.

In a recent Newsweek article about the life and legacy of Charles Darwin, there were a number of interesting comments, including the above quote, which I'll get to. One thing in particular that jumped out at me was a quote from the sidebar. "Evolution is not controversial in the field of science." (quote by "Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education") While in a sense this is not quite true (there are scientists who feel that evolutionary theory is not sufficient to explain life as we know it), in another sense it's so true as to be a sort of "duh" statement. The strange thing about "science" in what I believe to be its truest form, is that nothing is controversial from within science. The idea of "science" is to find ways to understand the way the world works. Ethics, philosophical truth, theology, popular opinion and the like, while indeed able to influence scientists, should not in theory influence science itself. Some people who oppose evolutionary theory do so with the argument that saying we humans evolved from lower life forms cheapens the value and dignity of human life. While not everyone agrees with this, from the scientific point of view it doesn't matter if a scientific theory cheapens anything at all. If a scientist found a way to make substantial amounts of gold from common household items, then the value of gold would be cheapened, but that wouldn't change the fact that the method would exist. (Of course, atomic theory would tell us such a method does not exist, but that's beside the point.)

Another excellently thought-provoking quote was, "[Intelligent Design] says, if there's some part of science that you can't understand, that must be where God is. Historically, that hasn't gone well. And if science does figure out [how the eye evolved]—and I believe it's very likely that science will ... then where is God?" (quote by "Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian") There once was a time when I believed this, and it's a popular view, actually: that God is to be found in the gaps that science cannot fill. But Collins is right; if we claim this to be the case, then does God get smaller and smaller each time science takes a step forward? I personally believe that there is nothing about the physical world that is beyond the range of science to understand, given enough time and resources. If there is no end to time, and scientists eventually get to the point where there is virtually nothing that is not understood in a scientific perspective, will God suddenly cease to exist? I have heard some atheists express the view that we're already there, particularly in the case of evolution. To many atheists, the existence and complexity of life on the planet was one of the biggest hurdles to overcome to be confident that there is no God. As Richard Dawkins has said, evolution makes it "possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." The fact is, no matter how unlikely a person may think the idea of life evolving from non-life spontaneously is, the probability is not completely zero, and it allows atheists to get a toe in the door of plausibility. I don't like the idea that somehow the more plausible the atheists' claims on truth may be, the less plausible theists' claims become to balance things out. And what may be worse, when one views science as the enemy of faith, I believe one will tend to reject anything science has to offer. This is a great shame.

The article also points out that scientists don't call it "Darwinism". I have no idea if this is true on the whole but I don't doubt it's true in general. Calling something by a word that ends in an "-ism" makes it seem more philosophical than scientific, and even if a scientist might reject evolutionary theory, they would surely prefer to dismiss it on scientific grounds rather than cheapening it with an easy label. Still, "Darwinism" is found in many dictionaries, and is indeed a well-understood word, even to those who would rather not use it. Also, my main concern about "Darwinism" is that I often wonder why it is considered more of a science than a philosophy. I don't say it to cheapen it, I actually do believe that evolution clearly happens, I only question the scale: yes, animals change and speciate, but does that mean that all life as we know it today is here as a result of speciation from some single original life form? As I said, evolution does have a toe in the door of plausibility, but does having that toe imply that the door must be flung wide? Yes, we see speciation, we have a fossil record that shows us some rather extensive history of evolution, but until all the gaps are filled in (which they may never be, even if evolutionary theory of the more extensive sort is true) how can we really know the origin of life? Claiming that science can explain a one-time event that happened billions of years ago with no record to speak of smacks of philosophy to me rather than science.

But what of creationism? What of God's role in all of this if indeed He exists and has taken a role? Couldn't God have used evolution as a tool, but not necessarily the only tool at His disposal? Could God have created life that has the appearance of having evolved when, in fact, it did not? Why not? It seems to me that every argument and piece of evidence I have heard for evolutionary theory could be reworked into evidence for creationism. For instance, all mammals have either five digits on each of four limbs, or evidence of rudimentary structures that suggest four five-fingered limbs. To a biologist that believes in evolution, this suggests a common ancestry for all mammals. To me, it suggests a common base design for all mammals that has been tweaked by the creator in various ways. The same goes for similarities in DNA, protein structures, etc. Is it common ancestry, or common design? I think evolutionary theorists are making the same mistaken logical leaps that "intelligent design" advocates are. Like the idea that God is where science cannot explain things, ID suggests that if we find biological structures that we cannot explain the evolution thereof, they must have been designed. Why does this make any more or less sense than to say that those things we can explain must have evolved (without any supernatural intervention)? I think it's flawed inference on both counts.

But Darwin famously did an extensive study of variations in finch beaks in the Galapagos Islands. So many different kinds of finches, and each one had its own little ecological niche to fit into. He speculated (not proved) that perhaps they all might have come from a common ancestor. This speculation seems reasonable enough, but why must it then follow that God had no hand in the matter? Could not God have created different species of finches? Could not God have directed varieties of finches towards the ecological niches that they would best fit? Could not God have created the original ancestor of all finches, whose descendants then had, by very simple natural forces, come to speciate into their modern equivalents? Why is God excluded? Matthew 10:29 says "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father." If God takes personal interest in the life of a sparrow, why not the beak of a finch?

Would God "deign to design distinctive shell patterns"? Why is the answer an implied "no"? For all the glory and power and honor the Bible attributes to God, I believe it also attributes the kind of character that gives us a clear answer of "yes". Does that mean God did? I don't know how one would find the answer to that.