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Monday, December 31, 2007
Jay Fitzgerald hits the nail right on the head with regards to what's wrong with conservative journalism today: Here's a dirty little secret about modern conservativism, as gleaned by yours truly while devouring National Review, American Spectator etc. during my brief hard-core conservative stint in the '80s: Many conservative pundits and intellectuals have an inferiority complex when it comes to arguing with liberals. They know that liberals have an all-encompassing view of the world that provides them with ready-made put downs (accusations of fascism, McCarthyism etc.) -- and for years that argumentative style infuriated conservatives to the point where the former publisher of National Review, William Rusher, wrote a book called 'How to Win Arguments.' For years, the book was heavily advertised in National Review -- along with countless articles dwelling on conservative frustrations with getting around the arguments of liberals and their allied lackeys in the media. That debate-club compulsion to win arguments became part of the modern conservative mindset -- with the ultimate debate-club tactic being to turn the tables on liberals, or 'to fight fire with fire,' as one conservative friend once put it to me.As readers of this blog are aware (all three of them), I've long been a critic of the poor quality of conservative journalism when it comes to science. So Jay's take comes as no surprise. (But he puts it better than I did....) 2 comments Sunday, December 30, 2007
0 comments Wednesday, December 26, 2007
2 comments Teresa Nielsen Hayden reminds us, this Christmas, of how important language is and why it is so much fun to trace its evolution:
Read the rest! 0 comments Tuesday, December 25, 2007
0 comments Monday, December 24, 2007
This Christmas, it seems, life is not so good at the Origin: Israel cannot afford to lose the Palestinian Christians: They have long represented a moderating force. A century ago, they accounted for 25% or more of the Holy Land population. Today, they represent less than 1.5%. Since 2000, Bethlehem alone has lost 10% of its Christian population. 1 comments Friday, December 21, 2007
Overlooked reviews that shouldn't be overlooked (er, by me, that is): Hitchens claims that some of his best friends are believers. If so, he doesn't know much about his best friends. He writes about religious people the way northern racists used to talk about "Negroes" -- with feigned knowing and a sneer. God Is Not Great assumes a childish definition of religion and then criticizes religious people for believing such foolery. But it is Hitchens who is the naïf. To read this oddly innocent book as gospel is to believe that ordinary Catholics are proud of the Inquisition, that ordinary Hindus view masturbation as an offense against Krishna, and that ordinary Jews cheer when a renegade Orthodox rebbe sucks the blood off a freshly circumcised penis. It is to believe that faith is always blind and rituals always empty -- that there is no difference between taking communion and drinking the Kool-Aid (a beverage Hitchens feels compelled to mention no fewer than three times). 0 comments Former college classmate and now Our Man in Rome, Father John Wauck, says it's too soon to give up on "old" Europe. He's right. 0 comments 0 comments Friday dose of Krauthammer:
0 comments Thursday, December 20, 2007
Nick Fraser, the editor at Storyville, is just one of the Brits sizing up the overrated and underrated for 2007: OverratedOuch. 0 comments Wednesday, December 19, 2007
I just finished reading Brother Guy Consolmagno's new book, God's Mechanics. Brother Guy is a Vatican astronomer who specializes in the study of meteorites and dwarf planets. He's also a regular at various science fiction conventions (and I'm hoping to catch up with him at this coming February Boskone), and the thing I liked most about his book, aside from his techie sense of humor, is he gives a very interesting answer (or set of answers) to the question: how do scientists, who are trained to be skeptics, make sense of religion? Here's a brief sample: So if doing science is ultimately a religious act, why does the story of a split between science and religion exist in out culture today? Because too many religious people have been scared away from science by the very stories of this split. Because most scientists keep their religion private, as is their right. Because the religious people most likely to be heard in the news are those whose strong bent in engineering hides their very limited education in science: the creationists. Because the scientists who do speak publicly about these topics have been precisely those whose very limited education in religion (people like Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould) have made them "science fundamentalists"," every bit as narrow as the religious fundamentalists and probably not the best representatives of their fields--just the best known. (p. 169--emphasis mine)[You can just hear all the caterwauling that will take place on the skeptic blogs once they get wind of this.] Couldn't resist another bon mot: "Atheism is a luxury of the well-to-do; it goes hand in hand with flush toilets." (p. 186) Highly recommended. 0 comments This is a little snippet of my father, the late David J. Farrell, from a new documentary I'm working on over the next several months, in cooperation with other Boston media and political figures, which I hope will give a nice sense of how the city and its media landscape have changed over the last 40 years. Any Boston area journalists or pols who are interested in being interviewed or contributing photos or video from the era, please let me know in the comments section--or email. 0 comments This is pretty funny: Wilson’s real obsession here is not Céline but the thorny philosophical problem on which her reputation has been impaled: the nature of taste itself. What motivates aesthetic judgment? Is our love or hatred of “My Heart Will Go On” the result of a universal, disinterested instinct for beauty-assessment, as Kant would argue? Or is it something less exalted? Wilson tends to side with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who argues that taste is never disinterested: It’s a form of social currency, or “cultural capital,” that we use to stockpile prestige. Hating Céline is therefore not just an aesthetic choice, but an ethical one, a way to elevate yourself above her fans—who, according to market research, tend to be disproportionately poor adult women living in flyover states and shopping at big-box stores. (As Wilson puts it, “It’s hard to imagine an audience that could confer less cool on a musician.”) 2 comments After some prodding by friendly readers, I'm enabling comments. I haven't in the past, mainly because I've found glitches...but it seems that hand-coding the feature on my old template has allowed the proper functioning with Blogger...so we'll see. 0 comments Monday, December 17, 2007
Online now: My recent feature article for the Oct/Nov issue of Streaming Media Magazine, Whatever Happened to QuickTime? Those who've been devotees of Apple's coolest software may like this. Sunday, December 16, 2007
Barfield Reconsidered (by accident) We're pleasantly snowed in today, and during my morning coffee and reading, a footnote led me off to my attic bookcases and Owen Barfield. I was thumbing through The Rediscovery of Meaning, Barfield's 1977 collection of essays, and landed on "The Coming Trauma of Materialism." Barfield was an eloquent opponent of reductionism and its effects on society. I had not read him in years however, and about halfway through this essay I stopped short at this pothole: This paragraph could've been written last week by almost any one of the flaks at several conservative think tanks or journals. Rhetorical juice spectacularly innocent of any acquaintance with scientific facts. I don't mind saying this has depressed me, for it's evident that Barfield as much as anyone else who was a conservative in the 1970s, was taken in by the romantic notion that Darwin's theory was really a house of cards about to collapse. Note by the way that Darwin Retried was written by a lawyer (Norman MacBeth, not George), and if you look at the table of contents, it bears more than a passing resemblance to another lawyer's more recent vaunted tome, Darwin on Trial. Happily, the former is out of print. Note what else has not changed in 30 years: 1. The assumption that scientific academia is a garrison of correct thought. (i.e. what's true in English departments must also therefore be true of science departments.) 2. That the suggestion of differing viewpoints in science is punishable by banishment. And that 3. Darwin's theory doesn't have a leg to stand on, based on selective quotes from aged specialists taken out of context. One expects this kind of depressing swill from murmurantes like Bethell and Gilder. (I couldn't resist that one, I've also just rediscovered one of St. Thomas's gems: "There is no contradiction in affirming that a thing was created and also that it was never non-existent" from De aeternitate mundi contra murmurantes. You gotta love St. Thomas: "Hey you. Yeah, you, murmurante, what the hell are you talking about?") But still, it was disheartening to rediscover it in Barfield of all people. It makes me question now how seriously I should read him on the other subjects. That now, 30 years later, amongst an increasingly aged and ossified 'thinking class' of conservatives in institutes and at journals, the same unexamined rhetoric is routinely regurgitated is not a matter for inspiration. And then they wonder why most college students majoring in science are liberal? Friday, December 14, 2007
Probably the best assessment of Dawkins I've read yet: The God Delusion cannot be understood as a work of scholarship or of effective engagement of a topic. It's frequently idiotic, and engages in rhetorical misconduct that disqualifies it as a work of intellectual value. Understood as folk scholarship (we might call it folk theology or folk philosophy), it makes perfect sense. The God Delusion isn't intellectually sound, and it's not meant to be. Its purpose is to make people feel better about their world-view. I have the impression that it's effective in that regard. Thursday, December 13, 2007
Brendan Hodge takes a closer look at one of the Church's more interesting encyclicals from the last century on social teaching (is capitalism an unfettered good?). In this sense, what I see as the correct conservative approach to social teaching does not have nearly the warm and comforting glow as the "progressive" approach. And yet, I think it more correctly accounts for the reality of our nature as moral and mortal beings, living out our time on earth in expectation of what is to come. Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Steve Matheson posts a lot less frequently than I would like--but when he does, he's always excellent. From today's post on gene duplication: First, take note that this article is another example of a sophisticated, hypothesis-driven experimental analysis of a central evolutionary concept. Research like this is reported almost daily, though you'd never learn this by reading the work of Reasons To Believe or the fellows of the Discovery Institute. The mis-characterization of evolutionary biology by the creationists of those organizations is a scandal, and as you might already know, my blog's main purpose is to give evangelical Christians an opportunity to explore the science that is being so carefully avoided by those critics. You don't need to understand sign epistasis or the structure of transcription factors to get this take-home message: evolutionary biologists are hard at work solving the problems that some prominent Christian apologists can't or won't even acknowledge. How does gene duplication lead to the formation of genes with new functions? The folks at the Discovery Institute can't even admit that it happens. Over at Reasons To Believe, they don't mention gene duplication all, despite their fascination with "junk DNA." That's from a ministry that claims to have developed a "testable model" to explain scores of questions regarding origins. Monday, December 10, 2007
Larry Krauss is a good scientist who has written some fascinating articles and books. But as Bill Vallicella makes clear, that doesn't excuse him for saying something totally stupid. Einstein wasn't kidding when he said the man of science is a poor philosopher. The New York Post has a funny review of the Golden Compass. Best line: The film is not as silly as it sounds; it's much sillier. Remember the worst line in "Star Wars"? "But I was gonna go to the Tashi station to pick up some power converters!" Imagine a whole movie like that. Friday, December 07, 2007
Memo to Dinesh D'Souza: Hire a debating coach. D'Souza debated Daniel Dennett at Tufts on November 30th, on the question of whether God is a man-made invention. The QuickTime of the full debate is here. While Dennett was laid back, I didn't find his points particularly challenging, but in response D'Souza was shrill beyond belief. He makes Pat Buchanan look like Ian McKellan. It's painful to watch, and while he had some good points, the heavy-handed delivery undercut his entire performance. Doesn't exactly inspire me to run out and buy his books. Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Is it possible to be on the cutting edge of science...for (gasp) religious reasons? Siris looks back to the 17th century...when religion and science were cool with each other. Monday, December 03, 2007
Steve Matheson has a nice post showing just how seriously biologists take one of the extremely rare examples of peer-reviewed papers published by 'senior' fellows at the Discovery Institute: What was Wells' idea? Well, he thinks that centrioles look like turbines. So he thinks maybe they are turbines. And so maybe they rotate around each other, just at the right moment during cell division, and create an oscillation in all those microtubules, thereby generating a vortex that drives the polar ejection force. And maybe that rotation is regulated by calcium. That's the Rivista paper in a nutshell. Sunday, December 02, 2007
A Question of Boundaries Well, it's been a year since the paperback came out and two years since the hardcover. The reception from most magazine reviewers has been very good. And I can't complain about sales given the modest print run. Still, there has been a particular criticism raised by two journals which I think deserves response. The First Things 'briefly noted' review is the more recent example (December 2007 issue, online for subscribers only). It basically hints at the same complaint that Touchstone made in the close of their review of November 2006. Here's Briefly Noted from First Things: "Lemaitre, in the author's telling, subscribed to a radical division between scientific and religious truth that many thinkers today would view as naive." Here's Touchstone. The review, it's worth noting by the way, is by Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez, who is currently (whether he likes it or not I imagine) being held up by the Intelligent Design movement as a martyr because he was recently denied tenure.
I'm responding to both--not because I think their point isn't valid, but because I don't think it applies to Lemaître, that Lemaître was too guarded, too strict about a "radical" separation be supposedly built between his faith and his science. And what could be more theologically suggestive than evidence that the universe had a beginning? Even atheists like Fred Hoyle saw this point clearly. What is perplexing is why it eluded both Lemaître and his biographer. Well, it didn't if you read the book carefully. First off, recall that Fred Hoyle was dead wrong about the steady state theory, so it's hardly a mark in his favor or the reviewers to remind us that he had metaphysical reasons (his dislike of the Big Bang's implications) for his developing a failed theory in the first place. If anything, Hoyle proves my point: don't mix your science with faith (whether it's good faith or bad). By the way, this might be good advice for Michael Behe who has essentially done more to discredit natural theology with his theory of irreducible complexity than any poorly trained theologian who'd never seen a biology book in his life might have. Secondly, Lemaître never denied that science can have theological implications--and neither do I. But when he took issue with the Pope in the passage Touchstone's review cited, it's worth recalling what the Pope actually said at the Papal Audience in 1951:
I think this comes across pretty obviously as more than simply presenting the theological implications of what was at the time a very tentative theory (this was over ten years before the cosmic background radiation was discovered and Hoyle's theory was getting more support from scientists in the UK). The Pope was straightforwardly identifying the Big bang with the "instant of the Fiat Lux". I don't think Lemaître was out of line to point out this was going too far. It's one thing to keep a wall of separation between your science and faith. I don't think Lemaître did that. He was simply and always careful to distinguish the boundaries between the two, and he thought the Pope was assuming too much in his enthusiasm for the Big Bang. (I might recommend that more enthusiasts of Intelligent Design rethink the theological implications of their own support for it. See, for example, the excellent Edward T. Oakes deconstructing the usual suspects from the Discovery Institute on this point. And Scott Carson.) Pius XII by the way, was no wallflower. I think he certainly would have stood up for himself if he thought he was right; but he seems to have agreed with Lemaître, as he did not rebuke him on the score when Lemaître later discussed the situation, or continue insisting the Big Bang was "the instant of the Fiat Lux", since he was well aware, as any theologian could have reminded him, God's word preceded all in ontological, not just temporal terms, and therefore could not be subject to or defined by a temporal instant (or any other scientifically measurable quantity) at all. Lemaître was a better Thomist, I think, than Pius in this case. Recall that in the great dispute about the eternity of the world in St. Thomas' time, he was careful to point out that 1. philosophically it could not be demonstrated that the world had a temporal beginning, and further, that even if it could be shown the universe was temporally eternal, it in no way changed its radical existential dependence on God. "Hence that the world began to exist is an object of faith, but not of demonstration or science."˜St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Question 46, Article 2 Lemaître was simply making the same point when he said this: "As far as I can see, such a theory [Big bang] remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental Being. He may keep, for the bottom of space-time, the same attitude of mind he has been able to adopt for events occurring in non-singular places in space-time. For the believer, it removes any attempt at familiarity with God, as were Laplace's chiquenaude or Jean's finger. It is consonant with the wording of Isaias speaking of the "Hidden God", hidden even in the beginning of creation....Science has not to surrender in face of the Universe and when Pascal tries to infer the existence of God from the supposed infinitude of Nature, we may think that he is looking in the wrong direction." This last sentence bears thinking on. According to Paul Dirac, he and Lemaître had a conversation once about God and the universe. Dirac was an atheist: "When I was talking with Lemaître about this subject and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. However Lemaître did not agree with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closest to religion." It may seem strange that one of the 20th century's greatest physicists saw God more in the actions of his fellow men...and yet that's probably what most ordinary Christians do in our daily lives when we see examples of holiness, heroic courage, kindness, mercy, and self-sacrifice. If it seems pedantic to point this out, profuse apologies. But I stand my ground in disagreeing with the reviewers at First Things and Touchstone that Lemaître was being too careful about the distinctions all Christians should keep in their minds between science and faith. Copyright 2007 by Farrellmedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
