The Language of God, Chapter 5

By B.J. Marshall

The tagline of this books is "A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief." I've seen that the central thesis of the book is trying to harmonize religion and science, so I was surprised to find Collins spending a lot of time talking about how he mapped the genome - I could almost read the nostalgia in his voice - including the privatization issue that arose when Craig Venter (Celera) got into the genome-mapping fray. Part of how Chapter 5 begins is useful because it gives the reader a foundation to understand how heredity, mutations, and evolution work; he'll touch more on those points later. However, Collins doesn't really further his thesis with his discussion of using genomics to tackle the hereditary persistence of fetal hemoglobin variety of sickle-cell disease or finding the cause of cystic fibrosis in the majority of patients - the deletion of just three letters (CTT) in the protein-coding part of a gene now named CFTR.

But these two stories do bring home a really good point that his readers should not ignore. Given that I have often heard that faith is belief in the absence of or despite evidence, and that Collins' goal is to harmonize science and faith, perhaps the BioLogos Foundation should adopt this as its logo (courtesy of XKCD):

I ended up appreciating Collins' difficulty in discovering the cause of cystic fibrosis and his handling of hereditary persistence of fetal hemoglobin. Those were clearly problems that didn't have solutions before. So it dismays me when I read about problems we previously solved that are either willfully ignored or coming back through a campaign of misinformation.

The first category involves those faithful who think God alone will heal their children. I could see how one who wants to harmonize science and faith would contend that God gave humanity these awesome minds so we could come up with cures for diseases. (Of course, then they'd have the more difficult question of why God would give us diseases in the first place, but that's a different problem.) It seems every week, I read a blog post or see a news article about families who don't give their children medical attention to save their lives. Fortunately, people have begun to take action. Courts have been sending to trial (negligent homicide) parents whose children die from impotent placations to their equally impotent gods.

For the second category, this gets to a broader notion of pseudoscience. Clearly, Creation Science / Intelligent Design falls in this camp, but there are plenty of non-faith-centric areas of pseudoscience out there: acupuncture, chiropractic (link to audio describing chiropractic's start), and probably too many to list. My biggest pet peeve among pseudoscience quackery is the antivax movement, because it has a relative large body count. (It's not the only one with a body count, mind you; people have died from chiropractic, too.) It is not my intent to spend this blog post debunking the entire antivaxxers movement; interested readers should check out the Science Based Medicine blog, the Centers for Disease Control, and other science-based sites. Brian Dunning at Skeptoid has a great podcast discussing the ingredients in vaccines.

As always, don't take my (or anyone's) word for it - it should be up to you to conduct your own research to validate the facts and follow the conclusion the evidence points you towards. That said, I'm not suggesting that everyone needs to create their own cache of empirical evidence before reaching a conclusion. It doesn't seem very plausible for everyone to go out to conduct their own clinical double-blind trials to determine anything. But I think I have enough confidence in the bodies of evidence argued for by a general consensus among professionals in the field to warrant my conclusion in, say for example, anthropogenic global climate change.

The Internet is a great place to conduct one's own research, provided one doesn't get distracted by lolcats.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Language of God

The Language of God, Chapter 4

By B.J. Marshall

The last part of this chapter is a brief but pretty thorough overview of DNA and how it works. He gives a short background going through genetics (Mendel and Garrod), the discovery of DNA (Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty), and the discovery of DNA's structure (Watson and Crick). He then goes through several pages describing how DNA works.

He ends this chapter with a brief section he calls "Biological Truth and Its Consequences." He points out how people who subscribe to the "argument from design as a compelling demonstration of God's role in creating life" might find the content he describes in this chapter unnerving. Such an unsettled reader might protest: "Enough! Your naturalistic explanations are taking all the divine mystery out of the world!" (p.108). To this, Collins replies that there is plenty of divine mystery left, citing how "many people who have considered all the scientific and spiritual evidence still see God's creative and guiding hand at work" (p.108). Collins concludes that evolution can and must be true, and he adds that evolution doesn't say anything about the nature of its author. Science gives believers even more to be in awe about.

I found this concluding section problematic, despite being well-pleased with Collins' primer on DNA. Collins' reply to the unsettled reader left me with two questions. First, what exactly is the "spiritual evidence" that people have considered to be God's hand at work? I'm not talking about abiogenesis, the seemingly fine-tuned universe, or even the empty tomb - those appear to me to be all physical phenomena. I'm not even sure how one would go about validating such "spiritual evidence," or even being able to attribute it to any God rather than, say, an advanced space-faring race. Sounds to me like anyone subjecting their "spiritual evidence" to the Outsider Test for Faith would fail.

Second, I question the claim that "many people" have come to believe in God by considering the scientific and spiritual evidence. One point of contention is that we don't know how many "many" is, and this sounds similarly dodgy like The Discovery Institute's "A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism" petition versus the humorous counter-petition from the National Center for Science Education, "Project Steve." (Here is a very good piece comparing the two.) My other point of contention with this claim is that it's really fallacious: An argument is no more or less true simply because "many people" believe in it. If that were the case, the earth would still be flat. Given that more than one billion people believe in Islam, maybe that means Islam is true.

I find it a bit humorous that things we don't understand fall into a "divine mystery" category. I find myself defaulting to "natural mysteries," but that's only because "Every mystery / Ever solved has turned out to be / Not Magic". There's so much to life that we don't understand, and I think that's awesome. I don't need to find fairies at the bottom of my garden to appreciate its beauty.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Language of God

I'm pleased to announce the first-ever holiday edition of How to Think Critically. If you're planning to do your Christmas shopping soon, this post might just save you some money!

The mental phenomenon called "anchoring and adjustment" was first described in the 1970s by the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. When we're trying to estimate an unknown quantity, such as judging whether a price tag is reasonable or guessing what percentage of the population belongs to a certain age group, the first number we see tends to become a benchmark that colors all our subsequent estimates.

If you get charity solicitations in the mail, you've probably seen the anchoring effect at work. If it's written by a smart advertiser, the part of the letter that asks you to check off the amount you want to donate will look like this:

_ $250	_ $100	_ $75	_ $50	_ $25

and not like this:

_ $25	_ $50	_ $75	_ $100	_ $250

In experiments that expose people to situations similar to this, the first layout will consistently get higher donation amounts than the second layout. The "$250" you see first becomes an anchor that biases your judgment, subconsciously affecting your decision about how much is a reasonable amount to give.

Surprisingly, this effect persists even when the numbers that people are exposed to have nothing to do with the price of the item - as in this study by MIT economists. Study participants were asked to bid on an array of everyday items, from a bottle of wine to a cordless keyboard. But before placing their bids, they were asked to write down the last two digits of their Social Security number and then say whether or not they'd be willing to pay that amount for the items on bid. As it turns out, this meaningless exercise made a great deal of difference to the amount of the students' bids:

If people were perfectly rational, then writing down their social security numbers should have no effect on their bids. In other words, a student with a low valued social security number (like 10) should be willing to pay roughly the same price as someone with a high valued number (like 90). But that's not what happened. Look, for instance, at the bidding for the cordless keyboard. Students with the highest social security numbers (80-99) made an average bid of $56. In contrast, the average bid made by students with the lowest numbers (1-20) was a paltry $16. A similar trend held for every single item. On average, students with higher numbers were willing to spend 300 percent more than those with low numbers.

Retailers are well aware of the anchoring effect and consistently use it to their advantage. Take this post from the amusingly titled blog You Are Not So Smart:

You walk into a clothing store and see what is probably the most bad ass leather jacket you've ever seen.

You try it on, look in the mirror and decide you must have it. While wearing this item, you imagine onlookers will clutch their chests and gasp every time you walk into a room or cross a street. You lift the sleeve to check the price – $1,000.

Well, that's that, you think. You start to head back to the hanger when a salesperson stops you.

"You like it?"

"I love it, but it's just too much."

"No, that jacket is on sale right now for $400."

It's expensive, and you don't need it really, but $600 off the price seems like a great deal for a coat which will increase your cool by a factor of 11.

One of my first jobs was selling leather coats, and I depended on the anchoring effect to earn commission. Each time, I figured it was obvious to customers the company I worked for marked up the prices to unrealistic extremes. Yet, over and over, when people heard the sale price, they smiled and wrestled with their better judgment.

Of course, labeling an item with an inflated sticker price and then offering the customer a "discount" is one of the oldest tricks in the book. But anchoring can be used in even sneakier ways. Some retailers, for example, deliberately offer items for sale at "decoy" prices they don't expect anyone to pay, knowing that this will make everything else they sell look like a better deal. Some examples are cited in this review of William Poundstone's book Priceless:

Once you've seen a $150 burger on the menu, $50 sounds reasonable for a steak. At Ralph Lauren, that $16,995 bag makes a $98 T-shirt look cheap.

According to the review, the artist Damien Hirst even bought one of his own works - a platinum skull encrusted with diamonds - for $100 million, as a way of boosting the perceived value of the others. Apparently, it was successful, as a later auction of Hirst works smashed presale estimates.

The next time you go to the mall, you can be assured that some ad or salesperson will try to use this trick on you. The real dilemma for shoppers is that, unlike other kinds of cognitive bias, the anchoring effect tends to persist even when people are told about it. How to get around this? My suggestion: If you're dead-set on getting a deal, don't ever buy something the moment you lay eyes on it, even if it seems like a great bargain. Go to a competitor's store (or check the internet, if you have a smartphone) and compare prices. Having two or more numbers to compare against each other, rather than one number to anchor your decisions, ought to make it easier to judge the true value of what's on sale.

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• How to Think Critically

By way of The Panda's Thumb, I came across this story that just had to be shared.

Regular readers of this site are probably familiar with the arch-creationist William Dembski, one of the founders of the intelligent-design movement. When I last wrote about him, I mentioned that he, like other creationists who insist their work is motivated strictly by science and not religion, has somehow ended up at a conservative Christian seminary - in Dembski's case, the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.

In 2009, Dembski published a book, The End of Christianity. In it, he acknowledged the great age of the universe and the recent emergence of humanity, but argued that Adam and Eve were real individuals whose original sin traveled backwards in time and retroactively corrupted existence from the moment of the Big Bang so that it had always included natural evil. (Neat trick, that.) Although this view represents a dangerous flirtation with scientific fact, he would probably have gotten away with it - except that his book contained one other statement so outrageous it couldn't be allowed to stand:

Noah's flood, though presented [in the Bible] as a global event, is probably best understood as historically rooted in a local event.

Naturally, this drew the immediate ire of Dembski's colleagues at SBTC. In short order, according to an article in the Florida Baptist Witness, he was called before the college president, Paige Patterson, who sternly explained that Dembski had expressed thoughts which professors at SBTC are not allowed to think:

"Had I had any inkling that Dr. Dembski was actually denying the absolute trustworthiness of the Bible, then that would have, of course, ended his relationship with the school," he said.

Surely, this will be remembered as a pivotal moment in the history of the ID movement! One of the godfathers of intelligent design, one of its towering intellectual giants, is called before a religious authority and is told that his views - views which, he says, are based on solid empirical evidence - told that those views clash with the literalist interpretation of the Bible which many members of that particular sect profess. Surely, this would be a chance for Dembski to stand up for himself and affirm his intellectual independence. Surely, this would be the hill where he would plant his flag and fearlessly declare for all the world to see: "Here I stand, I can do no other!"

Surely...?

"In a brief section on Genesis 4–11, I weigh in on the Flood, raising questions about its universality, without adequate study or reflection on my part," Dembski wrote. "Before I write on this topic again, I have much exegetical, historical, and theological work to do. In any case, not only Genesis 6–9 but also Jesus in Matthew 24 and Peter in Second Peter seem clearly to teach that the Flood was universal. As a biblical inerrantist, I believe that what the Bible teaches is true and bow to the text, including its teaching about the Flood and its universality."

(I can't read that without hearing the minstrels from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "Brave Sir Dembski ran away...")

Take a moment to savor the irony. The ID movement has always made a special point of lamenting how unfairly they've been persecuted by advocates of science, how their views have been unjustly "expelled" from academia. Yet here we have William Dembski, one of the most influential modern creationists, experiencing genuine persecution for his views - and it's coming not from an evolutionary biologist, but from the president of a religious institution! (Meanwhile, creationists such as Michael Behe continue to teach at secular universities and haven't been forced out, even though Behe's views are widely rejected by his colleagues.) Doesn't this speak volumes about which side really stands for freedom of speech, which side welcomes an open debate, and most importantly, which side is doing science?

But just as fascinating, I think, was Dembski's craven response. When threatened with losing his job, he immediately recanted, despite everything he had said before about how his views were founded on the evidence. He immediately surrendered those views and, in his own words, "bowed to the text" - prostrating himself before the Bible and confessing that he believes it, not because that's what the evidence says, but because that's what's written and he knows he's not permitted to doubt or think independently. Regardless of what the facts say, he knows his beliefs must be subordinated to the cold demands of dogma. Is this not a total abdication of intellectual honesty?

That said, the only thing Dembski has really done is to say explicitly what all creationists believe implicitly. Their interpretation of scripture must be held as true, trumping all fact, all evidence and all reason. Their conclusions are dictated to them in advance, prior to any investigation of the world, with no possibility that the 21st-century descendants of the scientific revolution know anything more than the Bronze Age scribes who first wrote these ancient books.

This episode also shows the ongoing collapse of the ID movement's efforts to seek mainstream legitimacy. In the beginning, its advocates put on a pretense of doing science, cloaking their religious intent in neutral language to sneak their way past the First Amendment. But no one was fooled, particularly not the courts. With ID advocates failing to win the scientific acclaim they'd sought, they're falling back on their natural allies - the right-wing churches and religious institutions that never had any qualms about identifying themselves as creationist. Naturally, these groups have little patience for the watered-down legal apologia of ID, and demand instead that everything be slathered with a thick frosting of Jesus. With the ID advocates now dependent on these groups for their livelihood, they're doing as instructed. This is a very positive development for defenders of church-state separation, giving us extra ammunition the next time the advocates of ID try to slip their dogma into public schools.

The Language of God, Chapter 4

By B.J. Marshall

Collins mentions some creationist positions in light of the fossil record. It's obvious he doesn't agree with these arguments: "[n]o serious biologist today doubts the theory of evolution to explain the marvelous complexity and diversity of life. In fact, the relatedness of all species through the mechanism of evolution is such a profound foundation for the understanding of all biology..." (p.99). Later in the book, he will defend his thesis that just DNA by itself is enough to give credence to the theory of evolution. But he, unfortunately, does nothing to actually refute the arguments except make assertions of his own.

One creationist argument is that, with all the animals that have existed throughout the ages, there should be billions of transitional fossils for us to discover. Collins points out that fossils can be created only under specific conditions and, given this fact, "it is actually amazing that we have such a wealth of information about organisms that have lived in the past" (p.94). A second argument is that there are no transitional fossils. Collins: "Good evidence exists for transitional forms from reptiles to birds, and from reptiles to mammals. Arguments that this model cannot explain certain species, such as whales, have generally fallen by the wayside as further investigation has revealed the existence of transitional species, of at precisely the date and place that evolutionary theory would predict" (p. 96). A third creationist argument is the brevity of the Cambrian Explosion.

I understand how Collins wants to refute some creationist views. But he does so remarkably poorly - all he gives us are bald assertions. It doesn't matter if his assertions are correct; he does absolutely nothing to help the reader gain an appreciation for why he is correct. Where are the references, the citations, the footnotes? I'm not saying that Collins has to present a doctoral dissertation to get his readers to accept his statements, but I think even a couple of citations would go a long way. I also understand that this book is generally for the lay person, but I think he underestimates the capability of his audience. The endnotes he provides at the end of the book are pretty meager, so I don't think adding a couple dozen more would kill him. I'd almost go so far as to say that all Collins has to do is point his readers to the TalkOrigins Index of Creationist Claims and Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True. Of course, you know they won't read those sources; I bought my father Jerry Coyne's book and, after he finished, he said something like "I still don't see how macroevolution is true." *facepalm*

As far as his handling of the Cambrian explosion is concerned, he completely dropped the ball on this one. He goes so far as to say that those who think the Cambrian explosion was an intervention by a supernatural force fall into god-of-the-gaps thinking (it seems the god-of-the-gaps fallacy is the only one he's aware of, given how often he tosses it around), but he doesn't say why they get the Cambrian explosion wrong. Furthermore, he gets the chronology wrong. He says that evidence suggests that the land remained barren until about 400 million years ago (MYA), at which point plants appeared on dry land. 30 MYA later, we get animals. (Again, no references.) Maybe I'm unsure what Collins means by animals, but TalkOrigins.org cites the Cambrian explosion at around 543-530 MYA. And TalkOrigins does provide references.

Collins' whole point with this book is to find a way to harmonize science and belief in God (or, at least, his definition of God). He had a chance to do that in this section, and he didn't do nearly as much as he should have. And that's a shame.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Language of God

So, you may have heard that Rhonda Byrne, author of The Secret, has a new book on the same subject, called The Power. Personally, I'm bewildered. Her first book promised to tell you how to get everything you've ever wanted. What possible room could there be for a sequel?

You might also have heard of the famous athletes who are wearing this bracelet, which, according to its makers, uses "processed titanium and holograms" which are "designed to interact with your body’s natural energy", improving balance, energy, recovery time and flexibility. Although the makers admit they haven't done any scientific studies, they allegedly have favorable testimonials by major athletes from Alex Rodriguez to Shaquille O'Neil - and hey, what more do you need than that?

I wonder if any believers in these products ever tried putting them to even a simple test. For instance, the authors of The Secret claim that reality is controlled by human willpower, and that you can use this effect to get yourself wealth and riches, a dream job, a trophy spouse, a house on the beach, a fleet of luxury sports cars, etc., etc. To judge if this is true, why not try it on a much simpler and more unambiguous outcome? Why not, for example, flip a coin and will it to come up heads twenty times in a row, or roll a pair of dice and command them with your mind to turn up seven every time? If the claims of The Secret are true, this should be easy to accomplish.

Or take these magical "hologram bracelets" - why wouldn't you try, for example, shooting a hundred baskets (or hitting a hundred pitches, or a hundred putts, etc.) with and then without the bracelet, and see if the outcomes are noticeably different? Although it wouldn't be a double-blind experiment, it would still be better than no testing at all.

What these stories show is that humans don't have an instinctive grasp of the null hypothesis: the basic assumption, which you should always make in the absence of specific evidence to the contrary, that the events you see are due to chance. The Secret (and its inexplicable sequel) teach you to wish for what you want and keep on wishing until something good happens - and then triumphantly concludes that your wishes control the functioning of the universe. And if you don't get what you want, the author leaves herself a convenient escape hatch: you did get what you wished for, you just unintentionally wished for something different than what you thought you wanted. The belief is structured so that nothing can convince its devotees of the existence of chance, no matter how tenuous the connections they must draw.

Failure to employ the null hypothesis causes belief in all kinds of pseudoscience and magic. There's another example from a non-Western culture, this one from Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained, a case study of the Zande people of Sudan by the British anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard. When a house in the village collapsed, the people promptly concluded that those who lived there must have had enemies who were powerful witches. Evans-Pritchard pointed out, in vain, that the house was infested with termites. As the Zande explained, they were perfectly aware that termites could weaken the structure of a house and cause it to collapse. What they wanted to know why was it collapsed at that particular moment, when some people were sitting under it and not others - and that fact, they could think of no other way to explain than by blaming it on witches who bore those people ill will [p.13].

And then there's this classic story, from James Randi's Flim-Flam!: Gerard Croiset, a Dutch "psychic",

attended a parapsychology seminar and competed with an East German "psychic". During the encounter, the German concentrated on withering a flower, while Croiset concentrated on saving it. The flower survived, and Croiset crowed victory, saying that his powers were stronger. [p.143]

If you start with your conclusion and go looking for correlations that can be interpreted to support it, you'll almost always find one if you look long and hard enough. The world is full of coincidences, and the human brain is extremely good at finding connections, regardless of whether they exist in reality or not. To avoid falling into this error, it's essential to begin with the hypothesis of random chance and no connection, and then definitively rule it out with a repeatable experiment.

Other posts in this series:

• How to Think Critically

You may have heard that the scientific community is buzzing with excitement over the discovery of Gliese 581g, an Earth-sized planet circling the red dwarf star Gliese 581, 20 light-years from Earth in the constellation Libra. Five other planets orbiting this star were already known, but what's exciting is that the new one is smack in the middle of the star's habitable zone, making it the best candidate ever discovered for an extrasolar planet with liquid water. And where water flows, is it possible that life follows?

This finding is a major blow to the creationists who insist that Earth must be the only life-supporting planet that exists. As the scientists who discovered Gliese 581g pointed out, finding a habitable planet this easily means that we've either been incredibly lucky, or such planets are common.

But I wanted to turn my attention a little closer to home for the moment. You might think, given the effort scientists are putting into finding Earth-like planets beyond the solar system, that we've exhausted all possibilities for discovering alien life any closer to home. Surprisingly, not only is that far from the truth, we have evidence which could imply the existence of life dwelling on our very nearest planetary neighbors.

Take Venus. Despite being Earthlike in size and composition, Venus has a surface of crushing pressure and 900-degree temperatures, making it almost certain that no life could survive - on the surface. But the surface isn't the only environment on the planet where life could conceivably exist. The planetary scientist David Grinspoon, in a daring feat of imagination, hypothesized that free-floating microbial life could exist in Venus' atmosphere. In the upper reaches of the Venusian atmosphere, the temperature is a far more hospitable 80 degrees, with the same pressure as Earth, and some evidence even suggests the presence of water. It's possible that life began on Venus' surface billions of years ago, but as the steadily increasing greenhouse effect turned the surface into an inferno, it escaped into the atmosphere, drifting high above the killing heat.

And this hypothesis isn't pure speculation. There's some tantalizing evidence which could indicate the presence of life in Venus' clouds.

The astrobiologists Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Louis Irwin pointed out that Venus' atmosphere contains very little carbon monoxide. This is curious, because lightning and ultraviolet radiation should be producing this gas in large amounts. Even more suggestively, Venus' atmosphere contains significant amounts of three other molecules - hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, and carbonyl sulfide - which, at least on Earth, are only produced by life or by volcanic activity. Venus does have active volcanoes, but not as many as Earth (since it has no plate tectonics), and it's not certain whether it's enough to account for the measured abundances. It's possible that some as-yet-unknown chemical pathway is breaking down carbon monoxide and producing these other compounds. But it's also possible that what we see in our spectroscopes is the metabolic signature of Venusian life, drifting in the planet's clouds and thriving to such an extent as to alter the balance of its atmosphere.

Mars has been explored much more thoroughly than Venus, and it too has given evidence to tantalize us. The two Viking spacecraft which landed on Mars in the 1970s carried experiments designed to test for the presence of life. The most surprising of these was the so-called labeled release experiment, which added water and nutrients to a sample of Martian soil. The nutrients were "tagged" with radioactive carbon-14, and the assumption was that, if there were microbes in the soil, they would metabolize them and release radioactive carbon dioxide gas. And when the experiment was run, the carbon dioxide was indeed detected. Even more excitingly, when the experiment was repeated after heating the soil to sterilizing temperatures, no gas was detected - as if any microorganisms in the soil had been killed off.

However, Viking's gas chromatograph found no evidence of organic compounds in the soil. That seemed to be the death knell for possible life - until, in 2008, NASA's Phoenix lander discovered a compound called perchlorate in Martian soil. Perchlorate becomes a strong oxidizing agent when heated, as the gas chromatograph does, and some scientists feel that this would have rapidly broken down any organic molecules and would explain why they didn't show up in the analysis. The evidence from the Viking experiments is still much-debated and ambiguous, but it certainly doesn't rule out the possibility of life.

Also, like Venus, Mars has anomalous chemical compounds in its atmosphere: in this case methane, which was detected by the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft. This molecule would rapidly decompose under Martian conditions, so for it to exist there means that something must be continually replenishing it. As with the anomalous compounds on Venus, it could be released by volcanic activity - except that Mars has no known volcanism, and is believed to be geologically dead. It's possible that the methane is being produced by a geologic process called serpentinization. But it's also possible that Mars is home to methanogenic bacteria, producing the gas as a product of their metabolism. Most likely, Martian methanogens would live far below the surface, deep underground where it's warmer and there may be liquid water - similar to archaea on Earth that live in similar conditions deep within the crust.

The idea of life existing on either or both of these planets shouldn't be too surprising. Although Venus is a suffocating inferno and Mars a freezing dry desert, both planets had clement pasts with surfaces where liquid water flowed. Both these planets, during the formation of the solar system, presumably received organic molecules from the same source as Earth's. Depending on your assumptions about how likely abiogenesis is, life could well have started on all three planets at about the same time. We won't know for sure, of course, until we've had a more detailed look - but it's worth remembering that even the nearest shores of our vast and awesome cosmos may yet contain marvels we haven't dreamed of.

I'll post another update tomorrow, but in the meantime, I came across two videos that were too wonderful not to share:

• First, this montage of stunning moments from the documentary series Planet Earth, with music by the band Sigur Ros;

• and then, this video: a recording of Carl Sagan reading his immortal "Reflections on a Mote of Dust" speech from the book Pale Blue Dot - his words in his voice, set to a slideshow of pictures of the Earth from space.

If you can watch either of these and not get choked up, you're a stronger person than I am.

In past posts, I've argued that we shouldn't specifically target the beliefs of people in dire straits who rely on their religion for comfort. But there's an underlying assumption that at the very least deserves examination: Does religion actually comfort people in desperate circumstances? Does it make them feel better than they otherwise would?

This seems like it should be obvious, but things that are obvious aren't always true. Take this study reported on Science Daily, which examined the link between superstition and uncertainty about the future. The researchers found that superstitious beliefs give people a reassuring sense of control over outcomes that they otherwise thought of as beyond their power, and that superstition was more common in people who didn't believe they were in control of how their lives were going. No surprises there, of course. The surprising finding is that, after they were asked to contemplate their own death, people's levels of superstition went down.

Possibly, the explanation for this is that people use superstition as a coping strategy because they believe it will help them avoid undesirable outcomes. But since we know that death is unavoidable, superstition's value as a coping strategy is decreased. Although the study didn't directly address religious beliefs, the implications are obvious.

On a similar note, there's this study from 2009, on the correlation between religious beliefs and end-of-life care. Since we're always told that theists have faith in salvation and an afterlife, while atheists have no other existence to look forward to after death, you might expect that the atheists were the ones who'd demand the most aggressive, expensive medical care to extend their lives for as long as humanly possible. But in fact, the results were the opposite:

Terminally ill cancer patients who relied on their religious faith to help them cope with their disease were more likely to receive aggressive medical care during their last week of life, a study shows.

Patients who engaged in what the researchers called positive religious coping, which included prayer, meditation, and religious study, ended up having more intensive life-prolonging interventions such as mechanical ventilation or cardiopulmonary resuscitation....

The patients who reported a high level of positive religious coping at the start of the study were almost three times as likely to receive mechanical ventilation and other life-prolonging medical care in the last week of life as patients who said they relied less on their religious beliefs to help them deal with their illness.

A high level of religious coping was also associated with less use of end-of-life planning strategies, including do-not-resuscitate orders, living wills, and appointment of a health care power of attorney.

The reporters wrote, in a masterpiece of understatement:

It is not entirely clear why terminally ill patients who report relying more on their religion would choose more life-prolonging medical interventions.

Now, the obvious explanation is that this is because of religious opposition to euthanasia - that believers feel obligated not just to refuse any measure that might shorten their life, but to accept all treatment so as not to even give the impression that they want to hasten their own death. But even going by this reasoning, one might expect that the rates of aggressive end-of-life care among believers and nonbelievers would be at best equal - not that they'd be higher among believers, and much higher at that. Shouldn't there be some subset of believers who don't choose the aggressive option, who are content to "leave it up to God" whether they live or die? Why doesn't that effect show up in the data?

I'd like to propose an unorthodox explanation: Is it possible that religious believers, or even just a subset thereof, aren't as absolutely confident in their beliefs as they so often claim they are? Is it possible that faith unsupported by evidence isn't as helpful or as reassuring as its advocates claim - even, dare I say it, that some of these people doubt the very things they profess to believe? And if that's true, might it also be true that these believers aren't as immune to rational argument as we often think?

The Language of God, Chapter 3

By B.J. Marshall

After his prelude, Collins begins at the beginning: The Big Bang. He talks about what it is, asks what came before it, and argues that it cries out for a divine explanation. The Big Bang doesn't just cry out for an explanation - no, no, no - it cries out for a divine explanation. Nothing like checking your biases at the door when doing that science thing, right?

We saw previously that he knows what a theory is, so this guy knows how to do science. I was a little disappointed, though, when I saw he hadn't laid out many lines of evidence for the Big Bang. And, given a recent poll that only 33% of Americans agree that the universe began with the Big Bang, I really would have liked to have seen Collins give a fully credible account. Granted, he does a pretty decent job explaining Einstein's cosmological constant, but that only goes so far as to lend support to Edwin Hubble's observations of redshift that led to the conclusion that the universe was expanding. The only real lines of evidence Collins provides for the Big Bang are the cosmic microwave background radiation and the theory's ability to predict concentrations of hydrogen, deuterium, and helium - called nucleosynthesis.

Collins doesn't lay out all the lines of evidence for the Big Bang as I wish he had, so I'll add them here, courtesy of AstronomyCast:
Collins' list:

• Cosmic microwave background radiation
• Nucleosynthesis

Additional lines of evidence:

• Things are older as we look at things further away, with the example of the Hubble Deep Field.
• Olber's Paradox, which states that in a stable, infinite universe, the night sky should blaze with the light of the stars that lie in all directions, even those far away. Since this is not the case, the universe is not infinite and must have had a beginning.

OK, so we now have four lines of evidence for the Big Bang. But we aren't exactly sure what the Big Bang is. Collins states that physicists are in agreement that the universe began as an "infinitely dense, dimensionless point of pure energy" (p.65). This is regularly referred to as a singularity, but there's a problem with that: Scientists really haven't been in agreement over this. Here are some interesting hypotheses:

• Hawking, Ellis, and Penrose published works from 1968-1970 that would refute Collins' claim that a singularity is a dimensionless point of pure energy. For, as is a common misconception, the singularity did not appear in space; rather, space, time, matter, and energy all appeared in the singularity! Before the Big Bang, according to their model, nothing existed.
• Hartle-Hawking no-boundary models have the Big Bang representing the limits of time without the need of a singularity.
• Other models, like brane cosmology and chaotic inflation, invoke string theory and a possible multiverse.

Collins thinks the Big Bang begs the question of what came before that: namely, who or what was responsible? Specifically, Collins talks about faith traditions that maintain that God created the universe from nothingness (ex nihilo). However, Lawrence Krauss gave a lecture at the 2009 Atheist Alliance International meeting discussing a universe from nothing. (Note: this YouTube video is about an hour long, but totally worth it.) In the discussion, Krauss points out that the total energy of the universe is zero! Quoting from an adaptation of The Cosmos: Astronomy in the New Millennium, 1st edition, by Jay M. Pasachoff and Alex Filippenko, found on the Astronomical Society of the Pacific:

The idea of a zero-energy universe, together with inflation, suggests that all one needs is just a tiny bit of energy to get the whole thing started (that is, a tiny volume of energy in which inflation can begin). The universe then experiences inflationary expansion, but without creating net energy.

What produced the energy before inflation? This is perhaps the ultimate question. As crazy as it might seem, the energy may have come out of nothing! The meaning of "nothing" is somewhat ambiguous here. It might be the vacuum in some pre-existing space and time, or it could be nothing at all - that is, all concepts of space and time were created with the universe itself.

Collins finds his answer - God did it - from astrophysicist Robert Jastrow: "Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements and the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same; the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy" (p.67).

The essential elements and the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same?!? Hmm, let's compare (oh, and we'll only choose one of the two Genesis creation myths). I found a nifty image showing how attempting to harmonize the creation myth to evolutionary epochs fails miserably. But also note how fruit trees come before the sun, moon, and stars. Our sun is about 4.5 billion years old. Land plants (clade embryophyta) didn't appear until the Paleozoic era, which was between 543 and 248 million years ago. And let's not forget that the Bible considers the moon a great light (Gen 1:16). But that's just one of those pesky details that differs.

Finally, Collins says that he has to agree with Jastrow and that he "cannot see how nature could have created itself" (p.67). This is textbook God-of-the-gaps arguing right here. I could shake my head and say, "Oh, that wacky Collins!" as we see one more expert trying to render an expert opinion on a field of which he's wholly unqualified, but I know what harm it does when people read stuff like this. My parents gave me this book as a Christmas present last year, which happened to be the first Christmas since my open deconversion. My parents were utterly convinced that Collins' book would bring me back into the fold. After all, Collins is a smart guy, right? Now, every occasion is greeted by horrible apologetics; they gave me "The Case for a Creator" for my birthday. *sigh*

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Language of God