Beautiful.

From the NYT:

President Obama has nominated Francis Collins to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health. It would seem a brilliant choice. Dr. Collins’s credentials are impeccable: he is a physical chemist, a medical geneticist and the former head of the Human Genome Project. He is also, by his own account, living proof that there is no conflict between science and religion. In 2006, he published “The Language of God,” in which he claimed to demonstrate “a consistent and profoundly satisfying harmony” between 21st-century science and evangelical Christianity.

Dr. Collins is regularly praised by secular scientists for what he is not: he is not a “young earth creationist,” nor is he a proponent of “intelligent design.” Given the state of the evidence for evolution, these are both very good things for a scientist not to be.

But as director of the institutes, Dr. Collins will have more responsibility for biomedical and health-related research than any person on earth, controlling an annual budget of more than $30 billion. He will also be one of the foremost representatives of science in the United States. For this reason, it is important that we understand Dr. Collins and his faith as they relate to scientific inquiry.

What follows are a series of slides, presented in order, from a lecture on science and belief that Dr. Collins gave at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008:

Slide 1: “Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.”

Slide 2: “God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings.”

Slide 3: “After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced ‘house’ (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the moral law), with free will, and with an immortal soul.”

Slide 4: “We humans used our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.”

Slide 5: “If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?”

Why should Dr. Collins’s beliefs be of concern?

There is an epidemic of scientific ignorance in the United States. This isn’t surprising, as very few scientific truths are self-evident, and many are counterintuitive. It is by no means obvious that empty space has structure or that we share a common ancestor with both the housefly and the banana. It can be difficult to think like a scientist. But few things make thinking like a scientist more difficult than religion.

Dr. Collins has written that science makes belief in God “intensely plausible” — the Big Bang, the fine-tuning of nature’s constants, the emergence of complex life, the effectiveness of mathematics, all suggest the existence of a “loving, logical and consistent” God.

But when challenged with alternative accounts of these phenomena — or with evidence that suggests that God might be unloving, illogical, inconsistent or, indeed, absent — Dr. Collins will say that God stands outside of Nature, and thus science cannot address the question of his existence at all.

Similarly, Dr. Collins insists that our moral intuitions attest to God’s existence, to his perfectly moral character and to his desire to have fellowship with every member of our species. But when our moral intuitions recoil at the casual destruction of innocents by, say, a tidal wave or earthquake, Dr. Collins assures us that our time-bound notions of good and evil can’t be trusted and that God’s will is a mystery.

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1. Sea mammal blowhole: Any animal that spends appreciable time in the ocean should be able to extract oxygen from water via gills. Enlarging the lungs and moving a nostril to the back of the head is a poor work-around.

2. Hyena clitoris: When engorged, this “pseudopenis,” which doubles as the birth canal, becomes so hard it can crush babies to death during exit.

3. Kangaroo teat: In order to nurse, the just-born joey, a frail and squishy jellybean, must clamber up Mom’s torso and into her pouch for a nipple.

4. Giraffe birth canal: Mama giraffes stand up while giving birth, so baby’s entry into the world is a 5-foot drop. Wheeee!Crack.

5. Goliath bird-eating spider exoskeleton: This giant spider can climb trees to hunt very mobile prey. Yet it has a shell so fragile it practically explodes when it falls? Well, at least it can produce silk to make a sail. Oh, wait — it can’t!

6. Shark-fetus teeth: A few shark species have live births (instead of laying eggs). The Jaws juniors grow teeth in the womb. The first sibling or two to mature sometimes eat their siblings in utero. Mmm … siblings.

7. Human stomach: People can digest a lot — except for cellulose, the primary component of plant matter. Why don’t we have commensal bacteria in our guts to do it? They’re busy helping termites.

8. Slug genitalia: Some hermaphroditic species breed by wrapping their sex organs around each other. If one of said members gets stuck, the slug simply chews it off. What. The. Hell?

9. Quadrupeds: Let’s say you’re a four-footed animal. Now let’s say you get a wound on your back, or an itch, or a bug wandering up there. Tough luck, kid. You probably can’t do much about it. Hope there’s a low branch around.

10. Narwhal tusk: The unicorn-like protuberance on a male narwhal’s head is actually a tooth that erupts through the front of the jaw and keeps on growing, up to 9 feet. Narwhal: “Doc, I have a toothache.” Dentist: “Indeed.”

From the Irish Times:

SEVERAL HUNDRED villagers in northern India watched enthralled as a longhaired sadhu, or holy man, dressed in saffron robes produced ash out of thin air, exploded huge stones with “mental power”, and turned water into blood.

Captivated by his supernatural deeds in a small village near Rohtak in Haryana state, 60km (37 miles) from the capital New Delhi, the people witnessing this magical performance last month were intimidated by the man’s “divine power”.

They hoped, through generous donations at the end of his performance, to dissuade the miracle man from unleashing havoc on their village through his avowed “supernatural” prowess.

But as the awestruck villagers reached into their pockets, the holy man whipped off his saffron robes to reveal himself as the local college science teacher.

He then repeated his presentation, but this time round showed his audience how he had achieved the “miracles” using sleight of hand and a few chemicals.

Such proceedings are regularly organised by the Indian Rationalist Association in a bid to debunk belief in miracles, palmistry and astrology in the countryside, where the majority of people are illiterate and believe in the supernatural.

The charlatans’ performances often include setting objects on fire through “mind energy”, eating glass, walking on burning embers, piercing their flesh with steel tridents and, at times, even levitation.

A trick that Edamaruku says never fails to impress people is one that results in a small explosion after water is sprinkled on a stone. However, he says this is accomplished simply by pouring water on scattered sodium crystals.

Similarly, lighting candles or setting piles of dry grass on fire with the flick of a finger is achieved by using chemicals that ignite on exposure to sunlight.

Piercing the body with a trident is managed if it is bent specially at strategic points, giving the impression of deep penetration.

“These tricksters have a basic knowledge of chemistry but an exalted understanding of human psychology,” says Edamaruku.

The Indian Rationalist Association, whose nationwide membership has swollen to about 100,000, was founded six decades ago by a handful of scientists and intellectuals in the southern city of Chennai (formerly Madras).

Members are quick to point out that, though many of them are atheists, they are not opposed to freedom of religion but want to expose the widespread and cynical exploitation being carried out in its name.

“Our basic aim is to bring the rudiments of science and logic to ordinary people,” says Edamaruku.

Valerie Tarico, Ph.D. is a psychologist in Seattle, Washington.  She is the author of The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth, the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org, and the host of Christianity in the Public Square, Moral Politics Television, Seattle.

My father died in a climbing accident when he was 59, and I was in my mid-thirties. In one of our last deep conversations before his 300 meter misstep, he expressed his abiding hope that I would “get right with God.” Dad was the son of Italian immigrants, all Catholics, who got converted by door-to-door Pentecostals some years after their arrival in Chicago. His mother lived out her life in the Assemblies of God denomination that had recruited them all, while Dad settled into a closely allied form of Evangelical fundamentalism without the speaking-in-tongues bit. As far as I know, he never questioned his belief that the Bible was the literally perfect word of God and that Jesus died for his sins. And yet of his six children, three of us, by Evangelical standards, are now slated for eternal torture. We are on the wrong side of a battle being waged on a spiritual plane, a battle in which those who are not on the side of God are agents of evil. If Dad were alive, our lack of belief would grieve him.

Religious belief is one of the most powerful forces in our world. Believers think that it has the power to save us all. Increasingly, doubters fear that the opposite may be true: a tribal mindset, unaccountable to ordinary standards of reason and evidence but armed with state of the art weapons may hasten our extinction. In the United States, religious affiliation is the best predictor of political party alliance. Almost half of Americans insist that humans were created in their present form sometime within the last 7,000 years because the Bible says so. In the Middle East, Sunnis and Shia split over theological differences that seem trivial to the rest of us, but that in their minds create tribal boundaries worthy of lethal conflict.

Why is religious belief so widespread and powerful? The traditional Christian answer is: because it’s true, and people who haven’t hardened their hearts against God recognize this when God’s plan of salvation is presented to them.

But the recent explosion of knowledge in cognitive science offers a new way to look at this question, not from a moral or theological standpoint but from a practical standpoint. What is the mental machinery that lets us form beliefs? What does evidence and reason have to do with it? How is it that six devoted Christian kids can turn into three devoted Christian adults and three agnostics?

The more we learn about the hardware and operating systems of the human brain — the more we understand about human information processing — the more we glean bits of insight into the religious mind.

This article is the first in a series of six. Each takes a look at some part of our mental machinery, how it relates to our tendency toward religious belief. The articles will focus on the following questions:

• How does the structure of human information processing pre-dispose us to religious thinking? Given how our minds work, what kinds of religious beliefs are possible and what kinds are we immune to?
• How do we know what we know? What gives us a feeling of certainty? What is the relation between reason, evidence, and our sense of knowing?
• How do conversion experiences work? What makes religious conversion transformative?
• How does our social group influence or even control our religious beliefs? How do beliefs get transmitted from one person to another?
• Why do missionaries target children? How does religious identity develop in childhood? How is belief in childhood different from belief acquired as an adult?
• What makes beliefs resistant to change? What causes people to lose belief? When are people open to re-examining religious assumptions?

Before looking at these questions, it is helpful to understand why belief is so important in Christianity. For traditional Christians, belief is the heart of the Christian religion. It is the toggle that sends people to heaven or hell. In the final analysis, believing that Jesus Christ died as a ‘propitiation’ for your sins is the thing that matters to God. No matter how kind and loving your life may be, no matter that you strive to love your neighbor as yourself, no matter what great things you may accomplish in the service of humanity or the world at large — if you believe wrong you are doomed.

This focus on belief is not characteristic of all religions. In the Ancient Near East, the birthplace of Christianity, pagan religions placed little emphasis on belief. The existence of a supernatural world was broadly assumed because there seemed to be little other way to explain the good and bad things that happen to people or natural events like storms, earthquakes, illness, birth and death. But the point of religion wasn’t belief. It was to take care of the gods so that they would take care of you and your community. The word “cult” (Latin cultus, literally care) is related to the word “cultivation.” We talk now about cultivating ground so that it will bear fruit. Non-profits talk about “cultivating donors.” That was what the gods cared about, and so it was the heart of religious practice.

From the beginning, Christianity was different. Jesus worshipers cared tremendously about right belief, or orthodoxy. Bart Ehrman’s book, Lost Christianities, offers a fascinating window into the struggles that went on during the first and second centuries as groups with different beliefs about Jesus criticized and competed with each other, and one of them won out.

Some of groups (e.g. Ebionites) believed that Jesus was a fully human Jewish messiah and that Jesus worshipers must follow the law. Others (e.g. Marcionites) believed that Jesus was a being from the spirit world who only took on human likeness. Still others (Gnostics) believed that the human Jesus was inhabited by a divine “Eon” during the years of his ministry — revealing to his followers secret knowledge that would let them escape this corrupt mortal plane. Others, now known as proto-orthodox or Roman, had ideas about Jesus that lead to the views of Christians today. (“Roman Catholic” means Roman universal.) What all of these groups agreed on was that it was tremendously important to believe the right thing about who Jesus was and what Christianity should be.

This emphasis on right belief was and is unique to monotheism. It existed in a rudimentary form in Judaism, but even today Judaism is more concerned with living right than believing right. Christianity’s exclusive truth claims and emphasis on right belief helped it to out-compete other religions in the Roman Empire. Polytheists often are quite agreeable to adding another god to their pantheon. Christians could persuade pagans to add the Jesus-god and then could wean them off of the others. Today, in India, for example, Evangelical missionaries are much more likely to target Hindus than Sikhs or Muslims who would have to immediately abandon their primary religion in order to embrace the idea of Jesus as a god.

Eastern religions don’t share Christianity’s concern with belief. The emphasis is more on practice or “praxis” — spiritual living, self-renunciation, insight or enlightenment — and among ordinary people, a sort of cult or care-taking of the gods like that practiced by ancient pagans. Right belief isn’t what lets you move up through cycles of reincarnation or attain nirvana. Nor is it what gets you the favor of gods.

Just as biological organisms have many different adaptive or reproductive strategies, so religions compete for human mind share (market share) in different ways. An emphasis on propagating belief (ie. evangelism) and purity of belief (ie. orthodoxy) is only one of those.

In the late 19th and early 20th Century, a movement called modernism emerged within Christianity. Modernist theologians began re-examining traditional orthodox beliefs in light of what we now know about linguistics, archaeology, psychiatry, biology, and human history. In this light, traditional Christian certainties looked less certain, and many modernist Christians are more like members of Eastern Religions in that their primary concern is with spiritual practice rather than belief. But a backlash emerged in response to modernism. People who proudly called themselves fundamentalists insisted that no one who didn’t hold the traditional beliefs was a real Christian. Evangelicals inherited the fundamentalist torch, and even some of the more inquiring denominations have reverted back toward emphasis on right belief.

This is the mindset that dominates Christianity in the public square. It is the mindset that sends Christian missionaries out into the world seeking converts in impoverished corners of the planet. It is the mindset that prints Bibles to be distributed in Iraq and has organized to establish control of the American military hierarchy, seeking to create an “army of Christian soldiers.” To understand American Christianity specifically or Western religion more broadly, it is necessary to understand the psychology of belief.

Scientists have found a 47-million-year-old human ancestor. Discovered in Messel Pit, Germany, the fossil, described as Darwinius masillae, is 20 times older than most fossils that explain human evolution.

Known as “Ida,” the fossil is a transitional species — it shows characteristics from the very primitive non-human evolutionary line (prosimians, such as lemurs), but is more related to the human evolutionary line (anthropoids, such as monkeys, apes and humans). At 95% complete, the fossil provides the most complete understanding of the paleobiology of any Eocene primate so far discovered.

Set in 4th century Alexandria in Egypt, during the onset of decadence in the Roman Empire, Oscar-winner Rachel Weisz (“The Constant Gardener”) portrays the legendary Hypatia, who devoted herself to science, the search for truth and tolerance. Two men are competing for her heart, the privileged Orestes (Oscar Isaac) and Davus (Max Minghella), her slave. Davus remains with Hypatia, despite the fact his freedom could be won if he joined the unstoppable surge of the Christians and the religious violence in the streets of the city, which have also spilled into Alexandria’s famous library.

“It’s set in the 4th century, but when I read it, what struck me is that nothing has changed,” Weisz said Sunday about the film, which seemed to receive a rather lukewarm reception from critics here. “People still kill each other in the name of God. Fundamentalism still abounds, and in many countries in [that region] women are second-class citizens.”

Despite his personal beliefs, Amenabar took strains at the end of the press conference in Cannes to emphasize that the film was not against religion, inerrupting the moderator who was trying to close the conversation saying, “I just want to say one last thing. “I was brought up Christian, then I was agnostic and then I realized I was atheist. But we have actors [in ‘Agora’] who are Christian. This movie is about fundamentalism and hate.”

Tonight at 7 p.m. at the Eames Theater, Pacific Science Center, 200 Second Avenue North, Seattle