Saturday, April 26, 2008

The intellectual dishonesty of Ben Stein

I haven’t seen Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed yet. It’s the new film by Ben Stein, the former lawyer and speechwriter for the Nixon and Ford administrations; he currently teaches libel and securities law and ethics at Pepperdine University (as he has for the last 22 years).

I freely admit I haven’t read all of his work, or even been aware of everything he’s been involved with, but I did respect his intelligence and his wit—particularly after seeing him compete on Win Ben Stein’s Money, a now-defunct Comedy Central game show. The man was bright, certainly, and knew a lot. But that personal regard has now taken a deep and possibly fatal blow.

My own experience with creationism

I have an interest in, if you’ll pardon the phrase, how creationism has evolved. I was raised as an ardent Biblical creationist, after an initial dinosaur crush that I think most six-year-old boys go through. Eventually, my passion for creationism took a hard blow when I actually started doing my own research about evolution, astronomy, and the other sciences involved, and I began realizing that the creationist works I had been reading were full of misunderstandings, inaccuracies, misstatements, red herrings—and yes, outright lies.

Over the following year, I found myself getting genuinely angry about the whole thing. Time and time again, the creationist works I had been devouring turned out to be flat-out wrong, and often deliberately deceptive. Cosmology and evolution, it turned out, had a very strong case, tested in the always-hot forge of science. The creationists—and the Biblical creation story (both of the versions in Genesis)—had no tangible basis in fact. In short, the supposedly Christian authors had been lying—and that really bothered me a lot.

Now, mind you, once I got over the shock, I was okay with the idea that Genesis was not an accurate account. Once you can accept the fact that people who had no inkling (much less comprehension) of the scale of the universe in time and space, without even the faintest hint of realizing that there were cells or molecules or atoms, could in no way construct a literal or accurate representation of Creation simply means that the Biblical creation story had little chance of being right. It says nothing about the rest of the Bible; it just means that that part is wrong.

Yes. Parts of the Bible got it wrong. It was written by human beings, with the intellectual and scientific limits of their time. Some of the stories are certainly apocryphal. Isn’t it time to get over that? No? What are you, the Jihadist Extremists of the Old Testament?

In fact, once I got past that fact, it made perfect sense to me. If you’re talking about a Being that created the Universe, you’re talking about a Being far vaster than we are, operating on an incomprehensibly larger scale of time and space than we can readily imagine. Is it any wonder that authors of the Bible didn’t understand it all, when here in the twenty-first century, we’re still discovering new and amazing things? Whether you’re a theist or not, the impossibly huge numbers we’re talking about are breathtaking and awe-inspiring no matter what your take on the origins of the universe.

If anything, that space and time has turned out to be larger than the author(s) of Genesis were able to comprehend should count as something reassuring to those who have a fondness for Genesis: that no box that we mere mortals can come up with is large enough to stuff the Creator into.

Intelligent Design?

When the intelligent-design [ID] movement came about, I looked into it, thinking that perhaps something new had turned up. In fact, the only new parts were how much more blatantly dishonest it was. There were no new ideas—just rehashing the old ones under a rather moldy repainted banner. It was a terrible disguise, and needed a lot more lying and activism to support it.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, there’s an episode of the venerable and well-respected PBS program NOVA that addresses Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. You should go watch it; it’s a very good episode, and successfully illuminates a lot of the things I’ve come to loathe about the creationist movement.

Time and time again, the loudest proponents of intelligent design have turned out to be scientifically and ethically bankrupt. They’re just creationists under a new name, perhaps with a bit more desperation and volume than I remember them having.

So why is Ben Stein flogging their empty rhetoric?

Oh, dear

Because I wanted to see why, I recorded Mr Stein’s appearance on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson Friday morning. I was hoping for some revealing insight. What I found left me aghast. Here’s how he began to describe the movie:

Now, these are the dumbest rationales I’ve heard against evolution in a long time. Darwinism doesn’t explain the laws of gravity? Did it need to? Darwinism doesn’t explain the laws of thermodynamics? Was that part of the Genesis account I missed somewhere along the way? “And God saw that all his creation, thus isolated, would only permit processes that increase entropy, and the evening could therefore never warm the morning”?

Horrors! The theory of gravity doesn’t explain haggis! The second law of thermodynamics doesn’t explain the popularity of Hannah Montana! Cosmology doesn’t address the existence of poodle skirts! Obvious gaps of knowledge that science hasn’t addressed! All these theories must therefore be completely invalid!

Stein isn’t alone

Another example of this sort of thing I recently stumbled across is a weedling complaint by the increasingly confused former star of Growing Pains, Kirk Cameron, on Bill O’Reilly’s odious show.

Now, keep in mind, for decades, creationists asserted that Darwin couldn’t possibly be right because there were no transitional forms in the fossil record. Then, as transitional forms began to turn up in the fossil record, their demands got more specific, eventually focusing on why there wasn’t a transitional form between dinosaurs and birds, since biologists seemed so intent on linking the two. Then just such a fossil turned up: Archaeopteryx lithographica, a clear transitional form, which should have settled the argument.

Instead, Mr Cameron tries to persuade people that evolution can’t be true because science has never shown the existence of a “crocoduck,” brandishing a Photoshopped version of one.

This sort of specious argument is ID’s bread and butter: decrying science for not having evidence for increasingly bizarre assertions, while ignoring what science has discovered to date. Cameron’s “argument”—and I hesitate to grant it even that much—displays fundamental distortions in what evolution asserts, ignores the fossil record that has been discovered, misrepresents the scientific community, and simply presents what amounts to a worse-than-ridiculous argument that is intended to deceive people into believing that the scientific community has no case. The only way they have of “poking holes in science” is to say, “Well, science hasn’t explained this yet,” coming up with finer and finer (and more ludicrous) methodologies for this as more “thises” are explained.

I have a similar beef with Kirk Cameron’s buddy, the evangelist Ray Comfort. There’s a short video floating around YouTube where Ray extols the obvious proof of a Creator in the form of a banana—or as he puts it, “the ayetheist’s nitemeh.” This is just another form of the pick-and-choose “scientific proof” that Cameron relies on: Mr Comfort asserts that because it’s the perfect size for the hand, has a non-slip surface, has an “easy-open tab” on top, has a color coding scheme to determine when it’s right for eating, has a biodegradable wrapper, shaped perfectly to eat, and so on, that a Creator must have been involved.

Unfortunately, bananas aren’t my favorite fruit. I like watermelons. I love watermelons. Once, a while back, I had a watermelon every day for three days. There were . . . er, side effects, so I don’t do that anymore, but I’m still tempted. But watermelons violate nearly every one of Ray’s reasons: slippery, hard-to-get-through surface, messy to eat, no convenience to it, studded with indigestible seeds, no way to tell if it’s perfect for eating, and so on. Sure, if you want to concentrate on the banana, you can make fruit seem suspiciously engineered. But what about all the other fruits? Watermelon, pineapple, even the repellent durian—not terribly easy to eat.

What’s more, bananas as Ray knows them are a fairly recent invention. Most cultivated bananas today have small, non-viable seeds. Originally, bananas were small, starchy, and had numerous hard seeds, and this is still true of many species of wild bananas. The Cavendish banana Ray was holding was very much a product of man, and it replaces the earlier Gros Michael bananas which were virtually wiped out by 1960. (Remember the song Yes, We Have No Bananas? That came out in 1923, about the same time that Panama disease was beginning to have a serious impact on banana plantations.)

So in short, Ray is extolling the end result of a process of both natural and artificial selection. He’s just either too deceitful to admit it, or too dumb to realize it.

This is their methodology: red herrings, deep misunderstandings and ignorance, distraction, and a firmly held inflation of their own importance and contribution. None of them have any scientific method of attack: it’s all opinion and assertions based on what science has not yet discovered, while steadfastly ignoring what science has discovered. It’s pathetic anti-intellectualism, and not even a very interesting attempt at it.

Stein on the bandwagon

And so, for the first time, I’ve now seen Mr Stein go down this same road. Maybe it’s old news to you, but it’s new to me, and I’m so very disappointed.

Going back to Mr Stein:

I don’t know about you, but in my considered opinion, any science teacher who links Darwin to orbital mechanics in any way should be fired for incompetence.

I cannot think of a single person I’ve met who has ever asserted that any form of evolution is related to anything other than biology. And in many ways, this line of “reasoning” by Mr Stein may just give away his underlying agenda: that he considers evolution a direct assault on the Genesis story, which does involve cosmology (which the Bible also gets wrong pretty much every time it ventures into that area).

Certainly, while Darwin was among the first to realize the sweeping nature and full implications of evolution, he himself noted that others had speculated on such a thing before. But Darwin was the first to put it all together and come up with a coherent theory, in spite of knowing nothing about the astonishing existence of DNA, much less access to the genetic code that we now enjoy. Darwin was meticulous, but limited to the equipment and knowledge of the nineteenth century. We know that in a few respects, he got it wrong. But so much of what he wrote about turned out to be right—and we see that underlying mechanism hold up in discovery after discovery about the genome, some 149 years after Darwin wrote The Origin of Species.

There is another parallel to this, of course, in Newton, and since orbital mechanics has already entered into this, we may as well draw the parallel. Newton turned out to be wrong, too. It wasn’t until Einstein’s insights came about that this became clear, but Newton was wrong. For most purposes, though, Newton’s theory is sufficient for very close approximations provided that the speeds involved are not sufficiently relativistic. Similarly, Darwin’s theory of evolution is a very good approximation for what happens in nature, but certain specifics have been adjusted, so that one can say that the current model is not strictly Darwinism.

But it’s easier to attack Darwin’s work—it’s a somewhat antiquated view of evolution now. It would be like attacking physics by focusing on Aristotle’s work.

And so, it seems that Mr Stein has given in to this mendacious philosophy of “intellectual design.” I have a lot of difficulty believing that he doesn’t understand the issues—as I said, he seems bright and knowledgable—so I am sadly confronted with the strong possibility that he knows that he’s not being forthcoming or clear.

For someone who teaches legal ethics, he should know better. Issues of disclosure, discovery, argument, avoiding fallacy—all those have clearly gone out the window as far as his personal and public philosophies go.

And that makes me very sad—and baffled why such a learned man would pursue this line of non-reasoning.

Why do we need to dumb God down?

It’s time for Republicans to confront the truth and admit a few things to themselves.

Evolution is a well-supported model for how nature works. The evidence is very strong for the simple truth that we, Homo sapiens, evolved from beings that were not of our species—beings that were the forefathers of other kinds of primates. Before that, we had an ancestor that was almost certainly not even mammalian. And before that, our line stretches back across the massive branching structure that constitutes the story of life on this planet, for thousands of millions of years. Mankind has a history stretching back before the Genesis account. Earth was not created in six days—more like 1,650,000,000,000 days. The Universe more-or-less as we know it has been around for some 13,700,000,000 years, and possibly longer than that in other forms that we cannot yet clearly imagine.

Isn’t that amazing? And astonishing that we’ve worked out so much of it from a vantage point on a speck of iron and silica and oxygen orbiting a modest star among thousands of thousands of thousands in a spinning puff of stars in a universe some 100,000,000,000 times larger than that? And all of it with the collective power of a bunch of disconnected custard-like cellular masses communicating abstract concepts through marks created by dragging pigments over dried flat things with little wiggly things controlled by those custardy things, and through buzzing sounds filtered through bits of flesh both flobby and firm, received by little tubes with tiny membranes that move bones that translate those sounds into electrical impulses that create abstract concepts inside other custardy things?

And if you still believe in the separation of church and state—still the only way of guaranteeing the religious freedom of all Americans—isn’t it in all our best interests to stop pandering to creationists and let scientists uncover more of the surprises the Universe has in store for us?

Why must so many Republicans actively try to suppress new discoveries, to confuse the issues, to lie? Do Republicans really have to reduce God to a level that the ancients could readily understand?

Even taking a Christian perspective, Genesis isn’t what makes humans special. It’s John 3:16.

Take a stand for truth. Please.