Green Oasis

Lincoln Cannon recently made me aware of Our God Truly Is God by Elder Douglas Callister of the LDS church. He devoted a portion of his talk to the subject of evolution.

The LDS church is officially agnostic regarding organic evolution, at least according to a 1909 First Presidency message reprinted in the February 2002 issue of the Ensign, the official church magazine. Yet I have never read a single article in the Ensign in favor of organic evolution. It’s much easier to find those which are opposed to it, Callister’s being one.

Naturalism’s explanations of the origins of life and the miracle of our bodies often appear convoluted when placed side by side with the simple truths of the revealed word and divine scripture.

Evolution is complex, certainly more complex than bumper sticker creationism: “Big Bang Theory: God said it, and BANG! It happened!” Simple ideas don’t equate to true ideas. Just because evolution can be relatively hard to understand, that doesn’t justify seeking easier to understand theories which don’t reflect our experiences well. As Einstein is often paraphrased, “Theories should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

With its 107 million cells, connected to the brain by over 1 million neurons, the eye is more perfect than any camera ever invented. It caused Charles Darwin to humbly admit, “That the eye with all its inimitable contrivances … could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest sense.”

It is a sign of Darwin’s scientific honesty that he admitted the existence of data which seemed to him to contradict his own theory. Callister ignores that scientists have evidence which suggests that the eye was in fact evolved.

The Psalmist wrote, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God” (Psalm 53:1). Such a foolish disbeliever ought to look at his hands. Seventy muscles contribute to hand movements. Much of the rest of the body is devoted to optimizing the complex function of the hand. There are no muscles in the fingers. The sole purpose of the forearm, its muscles and bones, is to move and position the hand.

I’ll excuse Callister’s playground taunts on the ground that he’s just mirroring the questionable behavior exemplified in his sacred texts.

However, he makes a fundamental assumption that all highly complex systems must have a designer. This assumption is understandable because most complex systems in our everyday lives (e.g. cars, computers, and Congress) have human designers. There is no evidence, however, that this relationship holds for natural systems, eyes and hands notwithstanding. His argument boils down to something like “I just can’t understand how complex human beings evolved without the intervention of a Designer”, an argument from either incredulity or ignorance. His inability to accept evolution is probably partially rooted in a lack of familiarity with the details of evolutionary theory.

Sir Isaac Newton is reported to have said: “In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence.”

Newton was a very interesting genius. His contribution to our understanding of natural laws cannot be overestimated. Yet he had his own blind spots. He spent a significant portion of his time pursuing alchemy, a pseudoscience on par with astrology. This illustrates why we shouldn’t appeal to authorities in order to base our beliefs. I wonder if Callister would give equal credence to Newton’s views on alchemy as he seems to give to his thoughts on the thumb.

One of my brothers is a physician. During medical school he was assigned to study anatomy in companionship with an agnostic. Their education eventually required that the two of them carefully examine and dissect a cadaver. They studied the incredibly complex yet harmonious systems of the body.… My brother and his friend became silent as they contemplated the miracle they were examining. Sensing the moment was right, my brother challenged: “Coincidence is a marvelous thing, isn’t it?” His agnostic classmate responded, “You win.”

This anecdote might make the creationist feel good to see the opposition conquered, but it also shows me that Callister doesn’t properly understand evolutionary theory. To call it “coincidence” demonstrates that he believes evolution to be a purely random process. It isn’t. No one aside from creationists believes that evolution is purely random.

This earth departs from its orbit of the sun by only one-ninth of an inch (2.82 mm) every 18 miles (29 km). If, instead, it changed by one-tenth of an inch (2.54 mm) every 18 miles, we would all freeze to death. If it changed by one-eighth of an inch (3.18 mm), we would all be incinerated. Did this all happen by accident?

I don’t know how true this is, but this statement seems a little misleading because the Earth travels 18 miles every second. That distance is therefore an insignificant part of the Earth’s orbit (i.e. 1 part in 31.5 million). Any small deviation over that tiny portion of the orbit would accumulate to huge deviations over the course of a year.

But allowing that what he says may be true, does this show that there is a Divine Designer? What are the odds that a habitable planet would happen at random around the average star? To be overly generous, let’s just guess that the odds are one in one billion billion (i.e. one star in every 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 stars has a habitable planet). There are believed to be 10²¹ stars in the universe. That still leaves 1000 habitable planets in a universe based on pure, dumb luck.

Questioning why we happen to be on one of those habitable planets is like a puddle questioning how it happens to live in a hole that seems tailor-made to fit its shape precisely.

The doubter requires too much of us when he asks us to believe that the miracles of eyes and hands and DNA and order in the universe all happened by chance. The passage of time, even long intervals of time, is not a “cause” and provides no answers without an intelligent designer.

Further evidence that he doesn’t understand evolution.

It is not possible to contemplate the immeasurable vacuum and purposelessness that would exist in our lives if He were not there. We would regret the passing of every day and the passing of every loved one, knowing that neither time nor relationships could be extended. We would approach the autumn and then the winter years of life with crescendoing fear. Every day of our lives we should thank Him that He is there and that this life is not all there is.

It is possible. It is true that contemplating a world without a loving God can make our time with loved ones more precious and death more dreadful. I want to live in a world where chocolate makes me lose weight and the opposite sex is powerless to resist my charms. Too bad that’s not the world I live in.

The Situationist (one of my new favorite blogs) posted about our ability to judge our own bias relative to others’.

Because bias tends to occur non-consciously, searching for it in one’s explicit thoughts is a little like looking for one’s car in the refrigerator. In assessing other peoples’ bias, however, we tend to look at their behavior.

In other words, we overestimate our ability to judge the intentions of our own mind. We scan our conscious thoughts for bias even though bias is often unconscious and therefore opaque, even to ourselves. We don’t know ourselves as well as we think.

People’s willingness to recognize their own biases is, of course, an important first step in prompting them to correct for and overcome those influences. Once people are able to recognize that they can be biased without knowing it, perhaps they can stop relying on their good intentions and introspectively clean consciences for evidence of their own freedom from biases that range from corrupt, to discriminatory, to unfairly conflictual behavior. From that more humble starting point, they may be more open to engaging in efforts to rid themselves of their own biases and to understanding how others can be biased without knowing it. Such efforts are not just scientifically sensible, they are socially wise.

So there is hope.

So I was a little envious of my wife. She got to teach our daughters a cool story about a Heavenly Father swooping down and creating everything. The basics of the story any toddler can comprehend. And she had cool pictures to back her up.

Then I try to teach them about evolution and modern cosmology and it just doesn’t grab their attention. I don’t have personal experience of how to teach children about evolution and so on because my parents are creationists. There are amazingly few books aimed at really young children on the subject. At least I couldn’t find many. I tried to make it up as I went, but I was doing a pretty crumby job of telling the story.

“So you see, the mammals evolved into apes and then into human beings. Isn’t that cool?”

“…”

So, anyway, I was a bit jealous.

Then I found a delightful trilogy of books that take us from the first moments of the Big Bang to modern humans. They take the form of a letter from a personified Universe to the reader. The Universe tells its own story in colorful, comprehensible terms. The words are accompanied by equally colorful illustrations. The reader is placed in the middle of an epic adventure of truly universal proportions.

Born with a Bang starts with the big bang and ends with the formation of planet earth. Along the way we learn about inflationary theory (really!), particles and anti-particles, the formation of hydrogen, the birth of stars and galaxies, and how we are made of the stardust from a supernova. The second and third books, Lava to Life and Mammals that Morph, which I have read fewer times so far, tell our story from abiogenesis to the development of modern humans. I’m no astrophysicist or paleontologist, but everything seems to check out. The authors stuck close to the current scientific understanding.

Any books that can get my four-year-old asking about atomic forces, comparing black holes to bathtub drains, and remembering why grass grows from the bottom-up deserve an A+ in my book.

The books are too long for my two-year-old, though I think she would like the story and illustrations if I just skimmed through. Each page has boldface text which convey the central idea. I think the authors may have intended it just for the purpose of shortening the story for those with a short attention span. I plan to try it out soon.

To top off all the learning about science, the Universe uses its own story to teach the reader important lessons like life is risky, we have to work toward our dreams, diversity is important, and so on.

While this book makes no mention of religious ideas, it is not hostile to religion either. I believe that a religious parent who accepts the current scientific theories (even the Pope accepts the theory of evolution) can benefit from these books. If God acted through the Big Bang and evolution, then these books tell God’s creation story in an inspiring way.

These books present an engaging creation myth that isn’t fiction. I got the books in the hopes of teaching my girls about current scientific theories about human origins. I ended up being inspired by my place in the story of the universe.

I recently finished reading The Mind’s I by Douglas R. Hofstadter, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, and Daniel C. Dennett, the Santa Claus-like patron saint of the recent publicly resurgent atheism. Sometimes books come into your life at the precise moment when they will have maximal impact. That happened for me with this book.

It is a collection of writings from authors such as Alan Turing, Richard Dawkins, John Searle, StanisÅ‚aw Lem, and Jorge Borges on the subject of mind, consciousness, and artificial intelligence. That’s exactly what I’ve been pondering lately. The authors present conflicting viewpoints (they promise to make everyone think) and then present their responses to the essay. A simple, very effective format.

The authors delivered on their promise. The book caused me to take a long look at what exactly it means to be a conscious, intelligent being. What is the self? Is there a soul? Can consciousness be explained reductively by interactions of neurons? What gives rise to our experience of consciousness? Many were the thought provoking moments that I spent with this book.

By the way, this is the book that I was reading in that Indian bistro a while ago.

An excellent read.

A prescient Charlie Chaplin on the hope for a better world. (via Truthdig)