"The evolution controversy today is, I think, a Galileo moment," says Karl Giberson

Some evangelicals are questioning whether it was ever possible that there was actually an Adam and an Eve who together were the ancestors of all humans.

...some conservative scholars are saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account. Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: "That would be against all the genomic evidence that we've assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all."

Researching The Human Genome

Venema says there is no way we can be traced back to a single couple. He says with the mapping of the human genome, it's clear that modern humans emerged from other primates as a large population — long before the Genesis time frame of a few thousand years ago. And given the genetic variation of people today, he says scientists can't get that population size below 10,000 people at any time in our evolutionary history.

To get down to just two ancestors, Venema says, "You would have to postulate that there's been this absolutely astronomical mutation rate that has produced all these new variants in an incredibly short period of time. Those types of mutation rates are just not possible. It would mutate us out of existence."

Venema is a senior fellow at BioLogos Foundation, a Christian group that tries to reconcile faith and science. The group was founded by Francis Collins, an evangelical and the current head of the National Institutes of Health, who, because of his position, declined an interview.

And Venema is part of a growing cadre of Christian scholars who say they want their faith to come into the 21st century. Another one is John Schneider, who taught theology at Calvin College in Michigan until recently. He says it's time to face facts: There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence.

"Evolution makes it pretty clear that in nature, and in the moral experience of human beings, there never was any such paradise to be lost," Schneider says. "So Christians, I think, have a challenge, have a job on their hands to reformulate some of their tradition about human beginnings."

Has anyone mentioned this to Michelle Bachman or to "The Family?"

The fundamentalist - conservative mindset.

Steve Benen asked an interesting question about conservatives. "What did the unemployed ever do to offend the GOP this much?"It's part of the mindset of conservatives and religious fundamentalists. To them everything that happens occurs because someone intended it to happen. To them there are no unintended social forces!

If something bad happens to you it is because you did something to cause it to happen to you. People are not unemployed because there are no jobs. They are unemployed because they don't want to work. Blacks are not kept from getting jobs and held back from promotions. They don't want to work hard enough. Steve lists a number of other such statements from conservatives. This is not something that some crazy person says. It is a core part of both American conservative politics and Christian fundamentalist religion.

And if you cannot observe someone who caused the Earthquake - tsunami in Japan then it occurred because someone wanted it to. The need to personalize this malevolent intent is the source of the god symbol. That symbol represents the great "intender" who must exist when no single person can be blamed for their failings.

Very interestingly these individual guilty parties are always someone outside the conservative - fundamentalist tribal group. They can directly observe that those inside their personal tribal group did nothing to cause many of the bad things that happen to them.

Obviously, though, people who cause their own problems will not stop causing their own problems unless they are punished. God forbid that someone ("the government") should help them avoid the just punishment they are being given for their sins. Helping them will just encourage them.

It's a part of the pre-scientific mindset. Before Isaac Newton there were no recognized absolutely predictably impersonal forces. Everything happened because some person or god intended it to happen.

If you want to understand the conservative - fundamentalist mindset, read "Fundamentalism" by the Sociologist Steve Bruce (2000). That fact about there being no recognized impersonal forces prior to Newton is from Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow's great new book "The Grand Design." (2010) Warning - the latter is a superb layman's introduction to quantum theory. It's better than "A Brief History of Time."

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Addendum 3:54 PM
Fred is a commenter on the above referenced Steve Benen post. His take on the problem Republicans have with the unemployed dove-tails with mine. Mine shows personal psychology and his shows the sociological workings.

It's not hostility to unemployment, it's hostility to modernity. I see this attitude in the rural area where I live. The best work is for the "haves", the make-do work is for the lower class whites, and the field work is for minorities. By trying to preserve their income level after a job loss, the recently-unemployed are interfering with the natural order, resisting the downward pressure on wages that the GOP's true base seeks. Also, too, the current system imports what should be our home-grown bonded servant class.

The tragedy is that the lower class whites here go all in for this, and wear their difficult lifestyles as a badge of honor in proof of their grit. To see the class system in operation, visit anywhere outside a major city in the Old South.
Posted by: Fred on May 1, 2011 at 1:14 PM

If you want proof of Fred's assertion, look at the county-by-county Democrat/Republican breakdown after the 2000 election. The cities are the bastion of modernity, voting Democratic and the rural areas are Republican. This is especially true in the Old South states and Texas.

The Onion clarifies the abortion debate

This news item from the Onion News Network tells us everything that we need to know about the anti-abortion laws currently being proposed in several states.


New Law Requires Women To Name Baby, Paint Nursery Before Getting Abortion

See? See how simple and rational the whole thing is? It's obvious what needs to be done.

[H/T to Digby at Hullabaloo]

Mark Sanford needs to resign as SC governor over his incompetence

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is desperately trying to keep his job after his dalliance with his Argentine temptress. Here is his fourth mea culpa since he disappeared for six days and got caught on the way back.

Sanford is desperately trying every trick in his (christianist) work book to keep his job. He thinks that he should be forgiven for his flaws and given a second chance to be Governor. Apparently, judging by his repeated efforts at getting forgiven by the voters, it's not working. It shouldn't. Sanford is too incompetent to be left in the job of governor.

I won't disagree that true Christianity suggests that we should forgive the sinner his sins. Of course, I don't think he is aware of all the sins he committed in that little escapade. All he sees is the adultery, and he excuses that because of his "love" for the woman involved. What about his sins of abandoning the job he took on and committed to perform for nearly a week?

Nothing in Christian forgiveness says his constituents should keep an incompetent governor filling that job. He disappeared for for roughly a week, did NOT turn his job over to his Lt. Governor and left no method of contacting him. What would have happened if he had died en route or had a accident or was robbed and killed in Argentina? How long would it take to straighten out the mess he left behind? He can ask for personal forgiveness from those who are close to him. He has no right to ask for professional forgiveness in a job for which he is profoundly unsuited.


I don't think it is any of the public's business if Sanford cheated on his wife and family -- If he can keep that subterfuge from effecting his job. He clearly cannot keep the two separate, so he should resign immediately. He is simply not a competent governor.

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Regarding Sanford's profound incompetence to be Governor, consider the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual's criteria for the Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

DSM IV-TR criteria

A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:[1]

1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance
2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty or ideal love (megalomania)
3. Believes they are "special" and can only be understood by, or should associate with, people (or institutions) who are also "special" or of high status
4. Requires excessive admiration
5. Has a sense of entitlement
6. Is interpersonally exploitative
7. Lacks empathy
8. Is often envious of others or believes others are envious of him or her
9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes

He appears to be likely to meet at least item's 1, 5, 6 and 9. His repeated public statements about how much he loves his paramour suggests that he has no empathy at all for his wife and children, so item 7 is probably there also. The only reason he is saying anything at all is that he was caught out cold with no chance of "spinning" his sin and trying to keep it out of the public discussion. As for the other items on the list, we simply have no information at all in the national public record. Yet.

Physicians can avoid the anti-abortionist terrorists now

The ability to get a medical abortion, though legal, has been greatly reduced by the anti-abortion terrorists to only a few places. The medical abortion solution has had the problem that in about 1 case in 1000 a serious infection can occur, so many physicians have not used the procedure. Without the availability of a drug-induced abortion the alternative for women has been to patronize one of the rare abortion clinics and run the gauntlet of the anti-abortion terrorists.

No more.

About a fourth of American women getting early abortions last year did so with drugs rather than surgery, statistics show, as a new study reported improved safety in using the so-called abortion pill.

Some experts predict that the percentage of such "medical abortions," which offer more privacy than surgical termination at a clinic or hospital, will rise even more because of the new study.

The research, done at Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide, shows that a new way of giving pills to induce abortion virtually eliminates the risk of a rare but dangerous infection.

"This is the first really huge documentation of how safe and effective medical abortion is," said Dr. Beverly Winikoff, a professor of family health and population at Columbia University. "The technology is very good and very well-used in this country and probably will be used more and more."

Two pills are used to induce an abortion. The primary drug, Mifeprex, was first approved in the U.S. in 2000. Use has risen steadily, even though manufacturer Danco Laboratories Llc. of New York hasn’t promoted it and the drug can be obtained only at a clinic or doctor’s office, not through a pharmacy.

[...]

The group’s study analyzed medical abortions at Planned Parenthood centers from 2005 to mid-2008 — about 228,000 cases. It found that the abortion pill was about 98.5 percent effective and that changes in how the drugs were given reduced the risk of a serious infection from about 1 in 1,000 cases to 0.06 in 1,000.

This is a major setback to the anti-abortion terrorists. Their targets no longer are isolated and obvious. So it is good news for women.

Why do so many Conservatives make clearly insane statements?

I have long wondered why the conservatives publicly make so many absolutely insane statements. For example, Sarah Palin's Friday announcement of her resignation considered in view of her Presidential ambitions seemed utterly insane. So do the efforts of the Discovery Institute to abolish the teaching of science to our children in public schools and replace it with Bible instruction. Then I read a rather arcane literary search to find the source of an odd quotation, and suddenly I had a minor "Aha!" moment. Those people are not insane. They simply hear a different music from what I hear.

So bear with me. The way to the "Aha!" is, like so many such revelations, a bit twisty. Let me start with Mark Kleiman's posts on his problem quote.

Mark Kleiman at The Reality-Based Community recently was taken by a phrase and decided to track it down to its source. The phrase was

"Those who dance appear insane to those who cannot hear the music."

His investigation is reported at

• The Dancers vs Those who cannot Hear the Music. (Second post) and
• Bleg: Quotation Source (First post)

The posts are interesting as a literary puzzle, and the quotation itself does need some recounting of its history of use to make a lot of sense. So I read them both. And with the resolution to the puzzle, I got more than I bargained for. I got what appears to be a real lesson in how we humans understand each other - or how we fail to do so.

In explanation I need to reproduce the fruits of Mark's exploration first. It's a quotation from Henri Bergson translated from the French to English.

I would now like to draw attention, as a symptom no less worthy of note, the lack of feeling which ordinarily accompanies laughter. It seems that the comic can only shake a person up on condition of falling upon the surface of a truly calm soul, one that is well integrated. Indifference is its natural environment. Laughter has no greater enemy than emotion. I’m not saying that we cannot laugh at a person who arouses, for example, pity in us, or even affection; only that for a few moments it would be necessary to forget affection, to tell pity to be silent. In a society of pure intelligences one would probably no longer cry, but one would perhaps still laugh; whereas souls that are invariably sensitive — in agreement and at one with life, where every event would be prolonged as a resonance of feeling — would not recognize or understand laughter. Try, for a moment, to let everything that is said or is being done capture your attention; act, in your imagination, with those who act, feel with those who feel, let your sympathy open up as wide as possible, and as though struck by a magic wand you will see the lightest objects take on weight, and all things imbued with a severe color. Now detach yourself, look upon life as an indifferent observer; even dramas will turn into comedy. It is enough for us to stop up our ears to the sound of music, in a room where people are dancing, in order that the dancers immediately appear ridiculous. How many human actions would be able to resist a test of this type? and would we not see many of them go from being solemn to funny, if we isolated them from the feeling that accompanies them? Therefore, the comic, in order to produce its complete effect, in the end demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. It is addressed to pure intelligence.

In essence that says "You cannot understand how the dance you see makes sense if you do not know the environment - the music - the dance is conducted in."

Or to reverse that, if someone does or says something that is simply incomprehensible to the point of being insane, perhaps you are not aware of the environment within which it is being done or said.

Which brings me to the way conservatives and liberals see the political issues that are current in today's American political climate. For one point, why did Sarah Palin's announcement of her resignation effective July 26th seem so insane? We don't know what the actual environment Palin is operating in. In terms of Palin running for President in 2012, her resignation announcement is simply insane. But her running for President is the talk of the Pundits. Palin may simply not want to run for President. In fact, Palin may not want to advance in politics at all. Some reports indicate that she is sick of it. If the music she is dancing to suggests that she simply go back to her family and look for other ways to earn a living, then her announcement suddenly makes complete sense.

Or take another thing. The idea being pushed by the Discovery Institute that science is inherently wrong and at best should only be taught to children in school in classes that contrast evolution with the Biblical myths of the creation. As a person with extensive training in science, statistics and research methods and academic management studies, I find the idea that the Creation myth could substitute for science to be literally insane. But what I do not have is a correspondingly deep grounding in the Christian Bible, since it never made rational sense to me and never had sufficient literary interest to keep my attention for long. ^*

No doubt what the Discovery Institute wants to do is push a thorough grounding in the Bible onto all students. The fact that my mother was similarly insistent and I quickly learned to resist such pressures as not responding to the things I was curious about means nothing to the religious zealots of the Discovery Institute, nor does the utter impracticability of the the literal reading of the Bible as a substitute for science. I simply don't want and have never wanted induction into their environment. But also pretty obviously, they have no use for the environment I have been attracted to all my life. They reject it (science) and want modern children to similarly do so.

The real "Aha!" for me was to realize that Creationism is NOT insanity. It is simply the rational expression of the total environment the Fundamentalist Christians have created for themselves and now emerse themselves into. They have their own school systems, their own separate churches (which reject mainstream churches and call them "Unchristian") and with FOX News, they have their own captive popular news outlet on TV. They also teach their followers that all sources outside their captive media are telling lies and should be rejected.

US Senators like Jeff Sessions and Jim Inhofe have come out of that environment and are representative of it. The apparently insane statements they make describing their beliefs are not so much insane as they are representative of the very insular fundamentalist Christian culture which is their total environment.

But the reverse is undoubtedly true. They see my statements in many cases to be quite as insane as I see theirs. That's because they have no idea of my environment and want nothing to do with it.

Religion is not the only area in which individuals from different environments see each other as spouting insane statements. True believers in Libertarianism also represent such a closed total environment, and for all the logic that has gone into assembling the theories of economic market libertarianism, it simple fails in practice whenever it is tried. The True Believers will not accept that it has failed, however. They don't consider reality and real situations to be refutation of their neat and pretty theory.

Given all that, I don't think I can any longer see what the conservatives say as being insane. It is simply representative of a very different environment. I cannot hear the music to which they are dancing. But unfortunately, they cannot hear the music to which I dance, either. The conflict is not going to end.

But since government has to operate for everyone in the area governed, it cannot operate based on any given ideology. That is the great power of the separation of Church and State given us by the Constitution. The purpose of that provision is clearly to keep the police functions of government from intervening in what is often a conflict between people who have sharply different and conflicting environments and world views. What the Fundamentalists are demanding is that their world view that is expresses as Creationism be taught as a replacement for the world view of the Enlightenment as expressed in science on the general level and Evolution in particular. But public schools are specifically set into place by government to teach students how to operate government without enforcing a specific ideology.

Both Libertarians and Fundamentalist Christians reject reality-testing of their ideologies, because science works by proving that assertion are false. The fundamentalist ideologues reject any suggestion that their ideologies are false, so they attack the schools, teachers and publications the teach other views.

That rejection is a key method of teaching and perpetuating the memes that are at the core of their ideologies. Neither fundamentalist Christianity nor Libertarianism can continually be transmitted to new converts reliably if they are allowed to test the memes against reality occasionally. That avoidance of reality-testing permits the passing on of the memes and perpetuating the doctrine.

So welcome to my analysis of insane political pronouncements. The real problem is that they are only insane when you cannot hear the music the speaker is "dancing to." Does that help?

Beats me. But it satisfies my curiosity.

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^* A strange and very pleasant recent exception is the outstanding book entitled A Palpable God by Reynolds Price. I picked it up because his opening 44 page essay on the nature of "Narrative" was said to be the best writing on the subject out there. He then goes on to illustrate what he means by translating 30 stories from the Bible, mostly old testament. I will agree that the essay is the best I have found on the subject of what narrative is and how it works, and his illustrating stories become fascinating in context. I find the subject of the nature of narrative particularly interesting because I read that brain researchers using modern tools to study the brain in action have concluded that our memories are laid down in the brain in a narrative form.

Humans have been equipped by evolution, not only with language, but also with the narrative form of structuring thoughts in language. That, it seems to me, also has massive implications on how human societies are formed and aggregated into larger structures like clans, towns, and Empires. In an oral age, story-tellers carried the knowledge of human civilization to others as well as stories being the primary way of passing knowledge from one generation to another.

It also may be the explanation why such written stories as The Torah, the Bible and the Koran consist of are so central to organized western religions.

This is the Republican religious right - flawed, arrogant, irrational and dangerous - and past their peak

Fundamentalist Christianity, which is the basis of the Republican religious right, is based on a specific set of doctrines. Since they are religious doctrines rather than political doctrines they should have little effect on American politics. Unfortunately, the religious doctrines of Christian fundamentalism are in direct opposition to and are contradicted by the commonly accepted ideas of rigorous procedures of thought which grew out of the Enlightenment. Since the American Republic is based on Enlightenment doctrines, American Christian fundamentalism finds itself contradicted and attacked by the Constitution and by the very intellectual basis of American political society. American Constitutional political thought and Christian fundamentalism are in basic conflict.

So what are the basic ideas of Christian Fundamentalism? They are: the inerrancy of the Bible, Sola Scriptura, the virgin birth of Christ, the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. These religious doctrines are not themselves incorrect (nor are they provably correct in any objective manner) but as specified in the Bible, they are not the same as what modern theologians have demonstrated they really were.

This set of doctrines as currently taught in Fundamentalist Churches are a reaction to Modernism. They are not ancient ideas. They were developed in the 19th century as a reaction to "modernism." That leads to the logical question - what is Modernism in Christianity? The most important point is that modernism in Christianity grew out of the Enlightenment requirements for rigorous procedures of thought. Both politics and Christian doctrine were among the many aspects of human life to which such rigorous procedures of thought were applied. In politics it led to democratic forms of government. In Economics it led to the Industrial Revolution. With all the other changes in society, Christianity was not ignored by modernism. Modernism changed the way many people looked at
Christianity.

Modernism in Christianity is not a set of beliefs. Instead, it is the idea that by using modern tools of analysis as developed by Enlightenment thinkers, the basic source of Christianity - the Bible - came under question. The Enlightenment is characterized as demanding the use of rigorous procedures of thought rather then deferring to authority or tradition. Enlightenment ideas require the application of rigorous procedures of analysis and thought to ancient documents. The application of such procedures to the Bible must make the Truth inherent in the Bible more accurately understood.

Such analytical procedures demand that instead of viewing the Bible as an inventory of factual statements, the statements reported in the Bible must be considered as documents of the human authors' beliefs and feelings about God at the time of its writing — within an historic/cultural context. So Biblical Modernism is just a set of procedures that are used to try to learn what the authors of the Bible were describing within their personal limitations of description. Such an outgrowth of the Enlightenment forms of scientific research are designed to reach the reality behind written descriptions in the Bible.

The Christian fundamentalists see Modernism as inherently wrong. They believe that what is written in the Bible is (forgive me) gospel Truth. They believe that the very words of the Bible are “The Truth of God.” The Christian Fundamentalists reject the application of rigorous procedures of thought to the Bible. Instead the Bible is to be taken as "literal Truth" based on the face of the words it presents.

Instead of an analytical understanding of the Bible, the Fundamentalists offer – nay, they demand – the application of the ideas given by their authorities. The fundamentalists Biblical authorities read the words of the Bible and take the truth to be what they find in the literal interpretation of those words. Then those authorities demand slavish acceptance of the doctrines of the inerrancy of the Bible, Sola Scriptura, the virgin birth of Christ, the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and the imminent return of Jesus Christ a they interpret them. The authorities establish doctrine.

A doctrine is body of principles presented for acceptance or belief, usually by a religious leader. A doctrine is the concept that the religious leader expects you to accept as describing the meaning of evidence provided to you, but it is not necessarily the real meaning. It is the opinion of the religious leader regarding what the evidence presented means. Doctrine is not something given by God. It is something men use to try to understand reality, but it is not reality.

This fundamentalist authoritarian doctrine is the intellectual demand that supports social control by tradition, irrationality, superstition, and tyranny. This is the basis of Christian Fundamentalism. Authority and tradition overrule rational thought. This is the basic intellectual(?) underpinning of the Republican religious conservatives. In my opinion, I don't think that Christ, the Gautama Buddha. Or Lao Tze would accept such poor thinking, and probably not Muhammad.

Christian fundamentalism is based on this sand of foundation. It is a reaction to modernist investigation that provides a greater in-depth idea regarding the religious truth of the Bible than does tradition.

It is a poor foundation for religious belief, and it is not decent support for political action.

A lot of people fear leaving the religious beliefs they have been comfortable in all their lives. OK. Fine. But they cannot enforce those irrational beliefs on the rest of us through government. Such an action violates both reality and the American Constitution. But this is religious, not political doctrine.

The problem with the Christian Fundamentalist religious doctrine is that the American political doctrine is based on Enlightenment modernist thought and enshrined in the U.s. constitution. The Fundamentalist religious doctrine cannot survive in an environment of modernist Enlightenment thought, so Christian fundamentalism, being basically authoritarian in nature, is inherently in opposition to the American Constitution and to democracy.

This is the conflict that America is currently undergoing. We have an inherently premodern authoritarian set of religious beliefs that represents the beliefs of a significant minority of the American population - especially the Old South, because the Bible was used there to justify slavery and is still used there to justify segregation. These believers are in direct conflict with and feel attacked by modernist democratic beliefs that dominate most of the rest of America. Federal government enforcement of laws requiring Civil rights for minorities (especially Blacks), women and homosexuals are key elements of this attack fundamentalists face.

Politically adherents of fundamentalist religion have been the "swing vote" in America since the Depression. They were the Southern Democrats, who, with the Democrats in the rest of the nation, controlled the federal Congress. When Nixon's Southern Strategy incorporated the Southern fundamentalist racists into the Republican Party, they took with them the control of the federal government. But only for a short time.

Most of America is intellectually based in the Enlightenment. The fundamentalist and authoritarian views of the American South became allied with the Wall Street Republicans who were still unhappy that the 1929 Depression they caused them to lose control of America in 1033. Between them the Republican allies elected Reagan, Bush 41, the 1994 Congress, and with greater emphasis on the fundamentalist Christians, Bush 43 in 2000. They were shocked and angry at the repudiation the voters gave them with, rejecting the Reagan budget idiocies in 1992 and helped by the entry of Ross Perot into the Presidential race, Clinton was elected in 1992. The marginal election of Bush in 2000 was the high-water mark for the Republican alliance. Only 9/11 allowed Bush to be reelected in 2004. But the last four years especially has exposed the anti Enlightenment views of the Christian Fundamentalists, and the American public is now set to reject them nationally.

House Republicans come from highly gerrymandered districts and have strong incumbent advantages. 2008 is not going to see a large number of Republican Congressmen removed. But of the 34 Senators up for election in 2008, I am willing to bet that only those Republicans from the reddest states survive, and most of those will see declines in their margins of election.

The battle for American political dominance recently has been between modernist mostly secular voters and Christian fundamentalists. The Fundamentalists have become as powerful as they are by allying themselves with the Wall Street Republicans who still are angry at the election of FDR and who have been Cold War extremists. But American voters no longer see the relevance in any of them. Their time in politics is over.

I don't expect a massive shift in the 2008 election, though. American national politics changes very slowly. But the Republicans in 2008 will lose the White House decisively, and will lose seats in both houses of Congress. The result is going to be a collapse of the religious right as a major power in national politics.

America will finally move into the post WW II age of modern industrial nations.

Thank God!