This post isn't for confirmed atheists, nor for confirmed theists. It's not for people who've already made up their minds, one way or the other.

No, this post is for the seekers, the in-betweeners, the tormented doubters. It's for the uncertain agnostics, people who aren't certain what they believe; it's for people who feel like they no longer belong in their church, but don't know of an alternative; and it's for people who are experiencing a full-blown crisis of faith and don't know where to turn. If you found this post through a web search, it's probably for you.

There are countless reasons why you might have come to this point. You may feel rejected or unwelcome at your church or your religious community, perhaps because you hold some views that are different from the orthodoxy. You may feel betrayed by a religious leader who turned out to be a hypocrite, or who abused the trust he was given. Or you may feel disappointed with God himself, perhaps because faith doesn't offer the comfort you thought it would, or because promised miraculous help didn't come when you needed it most. You may feel that your prayers aren't being listened to, that there's no one on the other end of the line. But however you came to this point, I'm almost certain that you feel like the only one who's different, the only one who doesn't fit in.

If you're one of these people, I have a message for you: Atheism is an option. You don't have to believe. You don't need to belong to a religion to lead a fulfilling, moral, and happy life. You can be an atheist, and you don't need to feel guilty about it. On the contrary, being an atheist can be a positive achievement to celebrate and take pride in.

The second most important thing I want to say to you, the seekers and the doubters, is this: You are not alone. There are others like you. In fact, there are more of us than you probably think. I've heard from other people who feel the same way, and nearly every prominent atheist I know can say the same. There are people in the pews and even behind the pulpits who no longer believe, but can't say so because they don't want to lose their major source of community, because they fear reprisal, or because they know no other way of making a living. I'd wager it's more common than people think. Like an iceberg whose depths lie below the surface, the number of visible, outspoken atheists might well be dwarfed by the number of those who are still counted as religious only by default.

I have no doubt that you've heard plenty of gloomy and frightening stereotypes about atheists, and I can assure you that they are not true. Atheism is not incompatible with morality, nor does it require hating religious people, nor does it mean a life lacking happiness or meaning. In fact, the journey to atheism can be a wonderful, exhilarating liberation, as many who've walked that road can tell. The only thing being an atheist means is that you don't believe in any gods. In every other respect, you can live your life however you want and be the same person you have always been.

If you're intrigued by these words, or if you're merely curious, there are plenty of resources where you can read and learn more, and numerous online communities - such as this one! - where you can participate.

If you choose to take the plunge and become an atheist, I can't promise that you'll never face misunderstanding, hatred, or prejudice. In fact, depending on where you live and how open you are about it, it's likely that you will. But I and many others can testify that, in the long run, being true to yourself is far more satisfying than trying to live a lie. You don't have to shout your nonbelief to the rooftops, but if you're doubting your religion, consider atheism. You may find it far more fulfilling and liberating than you expect.

Most religious people believe in the soul, an ethereal locus of consciousness that separates from the body upon physical death and travels elsewhere to receive its reward. To people who hold this belief, it's a natural next step to guess that the soul or spirit could sometimes leave a person's body while they're still alive and travel to distant places on its own initiative. Such is the belief in out-of-body experiences, the subject of today's Popular Delusions post.

Belief in OBEs is probably as old as humanity. The Bible alludes to a man who was "caught up to the third heaven", "whether in the body... or whether out of the body, I cannot tell" (2 Corinthians 12:2-3), and the apocryphal Ascension of Isaiah claims to describe that famous prophet caught up out of his body and taken to heaven to witness prefigurements of Christianity. However, OBEs today are mostly the province of New Age believers, who usually refer to them as "astral projection".

Although many purported OBEs involve voyages to dreamlike, conveniently unverifiable "spiritual realms" (where meetings with Jesus, guardian angels, and other religious figures are guaranteed crowd-pleasers), the existence of the phenomenon is an eminently testable claim. All that would be needed is for a person having an OBE to travel to some distant location, view it, and then give accurate details of their experience that could not have been obtained through normal sensory channels. Alas, all such attempts have come up short.

One of the most famous was the planetary voyage of the psychic Ingo Swann, who was enlisted by ESP researchers Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff to take an astral voyage to Jupiter. As reported by Swann, Jupiter was an eerie and compellingly beautiful place, with a surface of shifting sand dunes, enormous mountain ranges, and lakes or oceans in which icebergs floated. These marvelous discoveries were only slightly tarnished by the fact that none of them turned out to be true; Jupiter is a gas giant with no solid surface. Not to be deterred, Swann later claimed that he must have accidentally overshot Jupiter and traveled into another solar system entirely, and was describing a different planet which he saw there.

Other tests of OBEs, though more modest, proved equally flawed. The best-known were carried out by Charles Tart, such as this one on a subject who claimed she had experiences in which she left her sleeping body and floated up to the ceiling or through the walls of the room. Tart claims that his subject correctly perceived a remote target consisting of a five-digit random number during an OBE, but his methodology was less than rigorous:

The sleep laboratory consisted of two rooms... A large window was between the rooms for viewing, but in this experiment it was covered with a Venetian blind in order that the subject's room could be reasonably dark for sleeping. An intercom system allowed hearing anything the subject said. I monitored the recording equipment throughout the night while the subject slept and kept notes of anything she said or did. Occasionally I dozed during the night, beside the equipment, so possible instances of sleep talking might have been missed.

...The subject slept on a comfortable bed just below the observation window.... Immediately above the observation window (about five and a half feet above the level of the subject's head) was a small shelf (about ten inches by five inches)... This five-digit random number constituted the parapsychological target for the evening. I then slipped it into an opaque folder, entered the subject's room, and slipped the piece of paper onto the shelf without at any time exposing it to the subject.

So, to review: the number the subject was supposed to be psychically viewing was on a shelf five feet above her head throughout the night. She was neither recorded nor observed; the window into her room was covered by a blind, and Tart, who was sitting in the next room, helpfully notes that he dozed off several times during the night. Readers are invited to imagine a non-supernatural means by which the result could have been achieved.

This sloppy methodology, subjective judging, and flat-out inaccuracy pervades parapsychological research in general and on OBEs specifically. It shouldn't be a surprise that all the most striking claims of people gaining true information through OBEs are completely anecdotal, even hearsay - as in the famous case of the woman named Maria who allegedly saw a tennis shoe on a window ledge outside the hospital where she was having one. We have only the word of one person, a social worker named Kimberly Clark Sharp, that this OBE happened at all or that the shoe was there as described. Anecdotal accounts like this are impossible to test or verify. And so far, no rigorous, well-designed experiment has proven that people can acquire information this way at rates significantly greater than chance, much less that they can use it to do something genuinely useful, such as sending or receiving messages.

As with many other popular delusions, belief in OBEs is probably sustained in part by natural psychological phenomena which true believers have misunderstood (such as the role of sleep paralysis in alien abduction and haunting claims). The truth is, many people do have out-of-body experiences - that is to say, they have the experience of being outside their body. But that is not the same thing as saying that something actually leaves the body. Instead, these experiences appear to be nothing more than elaborate hallucinations caused by the brain misfiring.

I wrote on Ebon Musings about the brain's superior parietal lobe, also called the "orientation association area". Among its other functions, this part of the brain orients a person in three-dimensional space and calculates how to move through the world. In deep meditative states and other circumstances, the superior parietal lobe ceases its activity, causing a person to feel as if the physical boundaries of their self have been dissolved - they can no longer tell where their body ends and the world begins. It's easy to see how such an event could be implicated in an OBE. Another brain area, the angular gyrus, is involved in OBEs more directly. In at least one experiment, when electrically stimulated, it repeatedly caused them to occur in the patient.

No matter how impressive they may feel, out-of-body experiences are just tricks of the brain, and do not contain any sensory information not accessible to a person through normal means. A well-designed, repeatable experiment could prove otherwise, but an endless string of unverifiable anecdotes does not.

Other posts in this series:

• Popular Delusions

Ernst Haeckel died a hundred and fifty almost a hundred years ago [fixed - thanks, Alex!], but the creationists won't let him rest in peace. In this section, Wells again exhumes these old bones and takes a few kicks at them, and imagines that by doing so he's brought the entire edifice of modern evolutionary biology crashing down.

If you're not familiar with Haeckel, here's a bit of background. Ernst Haeckel was a nineteenth-century biologist, one who lived at about the same time as Charles Darwin. He's best remembered for his dictum "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", meaning that a developing embryo retraces the evolutionary history of its ancestors - i.e., a human fetus first passes through a fish-like stage, then an amphibian-like stage, then a reptile-like stage, and so on. Haeckel is also infamous for defending this claim by using his own drawings of developing embryos, which turned out to be faked to exaggerate the stages he claimed were there.

What makes this more than a hundred-year-old cautionary tale is that creationists claim that Haeckel's drawings are still presented in textbooks as evidence for evolution. Here's how Wells puts it:

"They're still being used, even in upper-division textbooks on evolutionary biology. In fact, I analyzed and graded ten recent textbooks on how accurately they dealt with this topic. I had to give eight of them an F. Two others did only slightly better; I gave them a D." [p.48]

Strobel chimes in, declaring that he too remembers being taught about these drawings as evidence for evolution, and that "anger was brewing inside of me" [p.48] as he realized that he had been duped.

I'll give Strobel the benefit of the doubt and assume he's confabulating memories. Wells, however, I don't intend to treat so charitably: again, he is lying, making statements which he must know are false. P.Z. Myers quotes one of the books which Wells disparages by claiming that it is "resurrecting Haeckel", Campbell's Biology:

The theory of recapitulation is an overstatement. Although vertebrates share many features of embryonic development, it is not as though a mammal first goes through a 'fish stage', then an 'amphibian stage', and so on. Ontogeny can provide clues to phylogeny, but it is important to remember that all stages of development may become modified over the course of evolution.

Myers also cites a post listing a large number of other college textbooks that point out the problems with Haeckel's hypothesis. Out of 15 books reviewed, only one presents recapitulation uncritically - and that one is from 1937!

All of Wells' indignation is a smokescreen, intended to cover up an uncomfortable point: namely, vertebrate embryos do pass through a stage, called the phylotypic stage or the pharyngula, in which they all look very similar. Haeckel's biogenetic law was a hypothesis intended to explain that observation. By criticizing one particular faulty hypothesis, Wells hopes to cast doubt on the observation itself.

Wells repeatedly attacks textbooks for making claims such as "the early embryos of most vertebrates closely resemble one another" [p.50], implying that this is an endorsement of Haeckel. In fact, this is a completely true statement, referring to the phylotypic stage. These patterns of embryological development are real, and they do not disappear just because one particular explanation of their origin is falsified.

To take the measure of Wells' mendacity, realize that when he gives "grades" to textbooks, he lowers the grade if the book contains actual photos of embryos. He considers this a "misleading" tactic when it comes to making the case for evolution. Why, we wouldn't want to show people what embryos actually look like, do we? It might give them the wrong idea!

This fact explains Wells' great annoyance over the term "gill slits", a lay term for branchial arches, which are a structure common to embryos at the phylotypic stage. Wells insists, despite the name, that these are not gills [p.51]. This is true, but unfortunately for him, he then goes on to undermine his own argument:

"In humans, the ridges become one thing; in fish, they become gills." [p.51]

It's correct to say that human embryos do not have gills. (That would be Haeckel's biogenetic law.) But the more important point is one that Wells, unintentionally I'm sure, has illustrated: vertebrate embryos pass through a stage where they are very similar, and the same structures that exist in the embryonic forms of many species develop into completely different adaptations in the adult forms of those species. This is a phenomenon that evolution provides a good explanation for. How, or whether, ID can explain it is a question never raised in this book.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

In April, I wrote a piece chastising Madeline Bunting for her willful invocation of the Courtier's Reply, in which she attacks atheists for criticizing the beliefs actually held and practiced by billions of people, rather than the beliefs of a tiny minority of theologians and pundits like herself.

But let it not be said that we shy from a challenge. In this post, I'll take up the issue of religion as it is held by Bunting and others of like mind.

Here's how she defines her own beliefs:

Apophatic is a word no longer even in my dictionary, but it's a major tradition of Christian thought, and central to the thinking of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas: it is the idea that God is ineffable and beyond powers of description. S/he can be experienced by religious practice, but as Armstrong puts it: "In the past, people knew we could say nothing about God. Certain forms of knowledge only come with practice." It makes the boundary between belief in God and agnosticism much more porous than commonly assumed.

...But the modern distortion was to make God into a proposition in which you either did or did not believe. He was turned into an old man in the sky with a long white beard or promoted as a cuddly friend named Jesus. Arguing about the existence of such human creations is akin to the medieval pastime of calculating how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.

Bunting quotes Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God, who holds similar views:

The reality that we call God, Brahman, Nirvana or the sacred is transcendent. That is, it goes beyond our mundane experience.... The Greek Orthodox believed that every statement about the divine should have two qualities. It should be paradoxical, reminding us that the idea of God cannot fit neatly into a human system of thought; and it should be apophatic - it should reduce us to silence, in the same way as a great poem or piece of music.

As I wrote in "One More Burning Bush", the record shows that, throughout recorded history, the gods have been shrinking. They started out as very tangible beings, present in the world, continually performing miracles. But with time and the advance of knowledge, every substantive, testable claim about them has been gradually chipped away, until we arrive at a god whose existence is indistinguishable from his nonexistence. The logical conclusion of this process is this, what's called apophatic theology: a god whose believers make no positive claims about him at all.

I have to admit, I've never had much affection for incoherentist arguments for atheism. The notion of "God" as believed in by most Western religions is perfectly comprehensible to me. I may differ with theists about whether there is anything in the real world that matches their description, but I can understand what it would mean for such a being to exist. But with believers in apophatic theology, this criticism has more merit. Their belief does not seem to have any content, indeed does not seem to be a belief about anything at all. It's the philosophical equivalent of the empty set. Can these people even explain what it would mean for their belief to be true, versus for it to be false?

This is a god of shadow and vapor. Advance towards it, and like a shadow, it disappears; try to grasp it, and all you grasp is insubstantial mist. While all gods share the distinction of not existing in the real world, this god seems to have the unique quality of not existing even in its own believers' minds. If they don't hold any positive beliefs about God, then what exactly is it that they believe?

Armstrong again:

....In the modern West, we have lost sight of this apophatic vision, and imagine that our statements about God and the ultimate are accurate expressions of this transcendence, whereas in reality, they must point beyond the limitations of our human minds.

The problem I've always had with statements like this is that our human minds, limited though they may be, are the only tools we have. If there is something that truly cannot be comprehended by the human mind, then it is pointless to talk about it or believe in it. The phrase "statements that point beyond the limitations of the mind" is just a string of words without meaning. By definition, any such statement would be indistinguishable from nonsense and gibberish. (Bunting's claim that "certain forms of knowledge only come with practice" sounds clever, but anyone who thinks about it for a few seconds will see that it's nonsensical: If we know nothing about God, how can we know what practices are appropriate?)

The only real difference between Bunting, Armstrong and other apophatic theists on one hand, and atheists on the other, is that they feel compelled to slap the label "God" on something, even if that something is a philosophical abstraction with no content. And that's fine if that's what they want, I really couldn't care less - until they start insisting, inexplicably, that belief in this nullity is a prerequisite for virtue; or worse, that this is what all theists really believe. Both of these claims are transparently false, and when they try to defend them, the apophatic apologists look just as disconnected from reality as the deity they claim to believe in.

The nineteenth-century German theologian Rudolf Otto, in his book The Idea of the Holy, popularized the term "numinous", an adjective describing the sense of mystery and wonder that purportedly stems from the presence of a deity. According to Otto, the sense of the numinous had two main characteristics: the mysterium tremendum, the sense of fear and trembling that comes from the presence of that which is wholly other, and the mysterium fascinas, the sense of fascination and curiosity that such an experience evokes.

Otto's theology concisely sums up the categories of religious experience. But the problem with his conception of the numinous is that it lacks one very important quality - understanding.

For Otto, as for many theists, the numinous is not something we should seek to comprehend. We should cower in its presence, or chase after it, or both, but there is no mention of penetrating the mystery, learning what it truly is and how it works. There is no mention made of pulling back the curtain of our ignorance, nor of plumbing the depths of the strange and unknown until it becomes known and familiar.

This idea may seem sacrilegious to theists, but I answer that it's what humanity has been doing throughout its history: piercing the mysteries that surround us, drawing them back one by one, and learning ever more about who we are and what our place in the world is. We are great solvers of mysteries; we have never been content to live in ignorance.

After all, to primitive people, the world was a strange and terrifying place ruled by forces they could not comprehend. To them, everything they encountered was a mysterium tremendum et fascinans: thunderstorms and lightning, sunrise and sunset, the cycle of the seasons, the fall of the rains and the coming of prey, the growth of crops and the bearing of children. Every one of these things, and many more besides, was once a religious mystery before which we worshipped in terror and awe.

But through science and reason, we have pierced the veil of these mysteries. We have learned that natural forces, which once must have seemed like mighty and capricious gods, were in reality grand clockworks, controlled by the predictable unfolding of the mathematical laws that govern the cosmos.

Thunder and lightning are not the spears of the gods, before which we cower in terror; they arise from the buildup of electric potential between cloud and ground, and the shock wave caused by the rapid superheating of air when that potential is discharged. The seasons come from the earth's axial tilt as it orbits the sun. Fertility is no longer a compelling mystery, but a section of the evolutionary trajectory of life as it perpetuates itself. These mysteries and many more we have solved, setting aside primitive superstitions of ritual and sacrifice, and learning through reason how to use the laws of nature for our benefit.

What, then, of the numinous? Is every religious experience doomed to fade as our understanding grows?

I think not. Or, rather, I think the religious experiences of our childhood, born of superstition and fear, will die - but when understanding comes, they can be reborn in a stronger and purer form. Far from science robbing the world of awe and wonder, I think it's only science that makes true awe and wonder possible at all.

I remember standing in the rain of El Yunque, touching the leaf of a plant and contemplating our kinship, our both belonging to that unbroken tree of evolutionary history that unites all life on Earth. My sense of the transcendent was not undermined, but deepened and magnified by that knowledge, the insight into the vastnesses of time and space and the twisting paths of contingency that led to we two living things side by side in the rainfall. I look at my hands with the knowledge that they are shaped from the dust of exploded stars, and that looking up at the night sky, I am looking at the place of my origin. Many more examples like this could be given, proving that true understanding does not diminish awe, but enhances it immeasurably.

The religious experience is, at best, a stunted variety of this feeling. Awe without understanding, or at least the desire for understanding, degenerates into mysticism: viewing a mystery not as a challenge to be solved, but something to be worshipped for its own sake. Mysticism states that ignorance is a desirable condition, a state we should glory in. This attitude only keeps us frightened and ignorant, and worst of all, robs us of the deeper and more genuine awe that comes with comprehension. I say, let us explore. There may be problems too high or too deep for us, mysteries we cannot penetrate - but so far, we haven't found any, and if there are any, they will not need to be protected from our investigations.

Via Making My Way (a great atheist blog, although its author doesn't update often enough!), this amazing historical fact.

I wrote in "Red Crimes" about how communism, demonized by religious apologists as an atheistic ideology, was more in the nature of a political system: willing to work with anyone who supported its goals and to persecute anyone who opposed its goals, regardless of their religious beliefs or lack thereof. As evidence of this, I cited the story of Andrei Sakharov, an atheist and a brilliant physicist who helped the Soviet Union develop nuclear weapons, but was exiled and placed under house arrest when he spoke out against the Soviet regime and in favor of human rights. On the other side of the equation, there's evidence that dozens of clergy members, including the one-time Archbishop of Warsaw, were Soviet collaborators who assisted the regime in spying on its enemies.

Now we can add another piece of evidence to this cumulative case. From the website Seventeen Moments in Soviet History:

The enmity between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet state came to an official end in September 1943 with the election of Patriarchal Locum Tenens Metropolitan Sergii Stragorodskii, de facto leader of the church for seventeen years, as Patriarch. The election had been preceded by a momentous September 4 meeting in the Kremlin between Joseph Stalin and three leading Metropolitans: Sergei, Aleksei Simanskii of Leningrad and Nikolai Iarushevich of Kiev. Stalin granted them the right to open a limited number of churches and religious schools, and to convene a national synod on September 8, which duly elected Sergei patriarch. Upon his elevation, Sergei immediately declared Stalin the divinely anointed ruler, initiating an uneasy collaboration between church and state that survived the Soviet system.

From Google Books, this excerpt from Robert W. Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch's The People's War confirms this story and adds more detail:

Stalin abolished the League of the Godless (founded in the 1920s) and arranged a temporary truce with the Orthodox Church; in return, the Metropolitan of Moscow publicly announced in 1942 that Stalin was "the divinely anointed leader of our armed and cultural forces leading us to victory over the barbarian invasion." Church reopenings were attended by multitudes of devout believers. The regime proudly communicated news about fund-raising efforts by churchmen and congregations to purchase tanks for the army; Ehrenburg openly described people praying, and Simonov wrote poetically and movingly of "the simple crosses on Russian graves."

The official allegiance between Stalin and the Russian Orthodox Church shows that communism's relationship with religion was nowhere near as black-and-white as modern Christian apologists portray it. While communists did persecute some churches, they happily made alliances with others - and those churches were more than happy to reciprocate.

In a comment on April's Poetry Sunday, Eric suggested another post featuring Wallace Stevens. I wanted to reprint Wilfred Owen's poem last month in honor of Memorial Day, but I'm always open to requests.

Today's post, like my previous selection from Stevens, highlights the poet's naturalistic, humanist views. According to Alan D. Perlis' book Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, this poem "eliminates angels from this world only to elevate the human soul to an angelic height".

Wallace Stevens was born in Pennsylvania in 1879 and attended Harvard University, and after his graduation worked as a lawyer and insurance agent. Unlike many famous 20th century poets, Stevens led a relatively quiet and uneventful life, often composing poems during his commute to and from the office. Despite this, and despite the late flowering of his artistic genius (he did not begin publishing until the age of 35, and many of his greatest works were published after he was 50), he is today recognized as one of the major modernist poets of the 20th century. He also held a firmly non-religious and humanist viewpoint; in his book Opus Posthumous, he wrote, "After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption." His published works include Harmonium (1923), The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937), The Auroras of Autumn (1950), and The Palm at the End of the Mind (1972). His Collected Poems (1954) won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and late in life he turned down an offer of a professorship from Harvard to remain at his insurance job.

Evening Without Angels

the great interests of man: air and light,
the joy of having a body, the voluptuousness
of looking.
—Mario Rossi

Why seraphim like lutanists arranged
Above the trees? And why the poet as
Eternal chef d'orchestre?

                                Air is air,
Its vacancy glitters round us everywhere.
Its sounds are not angelic syllables
But our unfashioned spirits realized
More sharply in more furious selves.

                                And light
That fosters seraphim and is to them
Coiffeur of haloes, fecund jeweller—
Was the sun concoct for angels or for men?
Sad men made angels of the sun, and of
The moon they made their own attendant ghosts,
Which led them back to angels, after death.

Let this be clear that we are men of sun
And men of day and never of pointed night,
Men that repeat antiquest sounds of air
In an accord of repetitions. Yet,
If we repeat, it is because the wind
Encircling us, speaks always with our speech.

Light, too, encrusts us making visible
The motions of the mind and giving form
To moodiest nothings, as, desire for day
Accomplished in the immensely flashing East,
Desire for rest, in that descending sea
Of dark, which in its very darkening
Is rest and silence spreading into sleep.

...Evening, when the measure skips a beat
And then another, one by one, and all
To a seething minor swiftly modulate.
Bare night is best. Bare earth is best. Bare, bare,
Except for our own houses, huddled low
Beneath the arches and their spangled air,
Beneath the rhapsodies of fire and fire,
Where the voice that is in us makes a true response,
Where the voice that is great within us rises up,
As we stand gazing at the rounded moon.

Other posts in this series:

• Poetry Sunday

I'm thrilled to announce that 3 Quarks Daily has officially chosen the winners of their 2009 Science Prize, and their first-place award, the Top Quark, has gone to Daylight Atheism!

Here's what 3QD's celebrity judge, Professor Steven Pinker, had to say:

Daylight Atheism’s Bands of Iron is my top pick. He starts with an something that attracts your attention purely on aesthetic grounds – stripes in a rock. He invokes it with deep, non-obvious, yet understandable principles, at the same time illuminating one of the most interesting phenomena in science – the coevolution of early life and the planet Earth –with a nod to a current issue for good measure.

Considering the quality of the competition, I'm amazed and humbled by this award. It's truly an honor. My deepest thanks to Prof. Steven Pinker, the editors of 3 Quarks Daily, and everyone who voted for me!

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 3

Jonathan Wells' second "icon" is Darwin's tree of life, which he says is a "dismal failure" [p.43] as an illustration of the fossil record.

With a lead-in like that, you'd expect a typical creationist jeremiad against transitional fossils. In fact, that's not what we get. The focus of Wells' complaint is about the Cambrian explosion, 550 million years ago. No transitional series more recent is treated here: not the origin of tetrapods, not the therapsids which illustrate the evolution of reptiles into mammals, not the beautiful and compelling whale transitional series, and certainly not the emergence of the human species. Wells never even mentions these compelling, and indisputably relevant, examples of evolutionary transition preserved in the fossil record. Instead, the source of his ire dates all the way back to the origins of modern phyla:

"Darwin knew the fossil record failed to support his tree. He acknowledged that major groups of animals - he calls them divisions, now they're called phyla - appear suddenly in the fossil record. That's not what his theory predicts." [p.43]

This is a lie. For the record, Darwin was well aware of the imperfection of the fossil record, and devoted an entire chapter of his book to explaining why we should not expect to see clear transitions preserved. If anything, he was too pessimistic, and our paleontological surveys have surpassed his expectations.

"Then at the beginning of the Cambrian - boom! - all of a sudden, we see representatives of the arthropods, modern representatives of which are insects, crabs, and the like; echinoderms, which include modern starfish and sea urchins; chordates, which include modern vertebrates; and so forth. Mammals came later, but the chordates - the major group to which they belong - were right there at the beginning of the Cambrian.
    This is absolutely contrary to Darwin's Tree of Life. These animals, which are so fundamentally different in their body plans, appear fully developed, all of a sudden..." [p.44]

Wells' argument is that the various phyla are so different in their body plans, they could not possibly have all diverged from a common ancestor in such a brief period of time. The best answer to this is a clever analogy originally proposed by Richard Dawkins to clear up just this sort of confusion:

Suppose you have a great oak tree with huge limbs at the base and smaller and smaller branches toward the outer layers where finally there are just lots and lots of little twigs. Obviously the little tiny twigs appeared most recently. The larger boughs appeared a long time ago and when they did appear, they were little twigs. What would you think if a gardener said, "Isn't it funny that no major boughs have appeared on this tree in recent years, only small twigs?"

Strobel and Wells would like their readers to believe that the various phyla were already radically different from each other at the time of the Cambrian explosion. This is not the case.

The phyla are like the twigs on Dawkins' tree. Originally, far back in the Cambrian, they were very similar to each other. But over great spans of geological time, they have diverged farther and farther, and what were originally slight differences became accentuated by evolution to fit the varying lifestyles to which they adapted. Today, the living representatives of these groups have major differences from each other, and looking all the way back, we can see how those differences developed from what were originally slight distinctions. In that sense, it's fair to say that the "fundamental body plans" first appeared in the Cambrian. But that's not the same thing as saying that the earliest members of these groups were radically different when they lived side by side.

When Wells speaks of "major groups", he subtly misleads the reader. Based on his examples, a lay reader might erroneously conclude that starfish, crabs, reptiles, insects, and the like all just suddenly appeared during the Cambrian. In fact, as already stated, most species of the Cambrian explosion were relatively similar, and none of them looked much at all like the modern groups that are thought to have descended from them. Here are several Cambrian animals that Wells claims represent "major groups" that are "fundamentally different in their body plans". Can you tell which one is the ancestor of what modern group?

(All images from the Smithsonian's Burgess Shale Fossil Specimens page.)

If you've given up, the first of these animals is called Aysheaia, and is thought to be an ancestor of the velvet worms (phylum Onychophora), segmented worm-like animals with rows of clawed feet. The second is Canadia, believed to be an ancestor of annelids (phylum Annelida), whose modern representatives include earthworms and leeches. And the last is Pikaia, believed, with some dissenters, to be an ancestor of the phylum Chordata - us. All modern animals with dorsal nerve cords - fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals - all of them were represented in the Cambrian by this tiny, one-inch-long free-swimming creature.

These supposedly vast phylum-level differences, in the beginning, were trifling things. It's only time and evolution that have turned these small twigs into great branches spreading far and wide.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

Shorter John Ensign: Gay marriage is going to take away my sacred, God-given right to cheat on my wife.