Taner Edis

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According to a paper in PLoS Biology by Michael B. Berkman, Julianna Sandell Pacheco, and Eric Plutzer, 16% of US secondary school biology teachers are creationists.

Well, 16% is a high number. Or maybe it's low, given that more like 48% are creationists among the general public.

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I apologize to everyone on behalf of physicists.

The infamous Shroud of Turin, believed to be the burial cloth of Jesus with a miraculously imprinted image of Jesus on it by some conservative Protestants and Catholics, is yet more evidence that supernatural convictions are impervious to criticism. It's a bizarre claim at face value, and there's good evidence the shroud is a medieval forgery. Joe Nickell, in particular, has extensively debunked Shroud claims, along with other skeptical investigators. It should be as clear as it can be that the Shroud is no miracle. It's not even interesting to talk about any more. And yet, the Shroud never goes away.

It's not just the popular apologists who blissfully ignore the skeptical criticism who perpetuate Shroud belief. It's also a bunch of scientists who act like True Believers, continually coming up with far fetched scenarios about how the carbon dating to medieval times might be a result of contamination etc. etc.

And I'm sad to say that the last two times the Shroud has come to my attention again has been due to physicists making fools of themselves.

The first was Frank Tipler, who endorses the Shroud and comes up with ludicrous modern physics scenarios to validate it in his embarrassment of a book, The Physics of Christianity. Tipler has long been known to have drifted off the deep end, what with his Intelligent Design sympathies and all that. But this book turns the craziness up another notch.

The second is John Jackson, a long-time Shroud "researcher" who is a physics Ph.D. and lectures on physics at the University of Colorado. Yesterday the Chicago Tribune ran a wide-eyed article on Jackson's latest scheme to validate the Shroud. Oh bloody hell, not again...

So, I apologize again on behalf of physicists. We have our fair share of lunacy.

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I ran into a former student who once took my Weird Science course. She's pretty religious and a creationist, and she told me that she recently watched a movie featuring Lee Strobel that she liked. It made her think of my course.

I've read a couple of Strobel books, and I regularly lend out his The Case for a Creator to students who want to learn more about creationism and intelligent design firsthand. It's basic conservative Christian apologetics. In other words, intellectually dishonest propaganda. Strobel makes a point of repeating how he once used to be an atheist but then saw the light, and his trick of the trade is to go visiting conservative Christian scholars, interviewing them and popularizing their views in such a way as to give the impression that conservative Christianity is an intellectually formidable edifice. All the best science, all the best historical scholarship turns out to prove fundamentalist Christianity correct. Strobel creates this impression by being extremely selective in the views he represents, giving little indication of the fringe nature of most of his interviewees positions as far as mainstream academia is concerned. He certainly does not detail why in most of the intellectual world, such fundamentalism is not taken seriously.

And yet, Lee Strobel is apparently a big shot in popular Christian apologetics. I read this as an indication of the insularity of conservative Christian culture. Most believers who read Strobel and similar literature are apparently satisfied with such highly selective presentations. I expect most don't know or perhaps even care about the misrepresentation of intellectual life in such apologetics. It's enough that someone out there is doing battle for the Lord, I suppose.

Now, most people, I imagine, tend to read and watch things that they tend to agree with. Most people who read my books must be nonbelievers. But I have to say, I don't think nonbelievers are anywhere near as insular as conservative Christians in this regard. If Richard Dawkins, for example, is an icon of nonbelief today, he may get a lot of criticism but it would be hard to make a charge of gross misrepresentation of the current intellectual landscape stick against him. And I don't think people who own a copy of The God Delusion are quite as insular as the audience for Lee Strobel and company.

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I recently posted a rant concerning honor killings, using an Iraqi Muslim example. Well, I just ran into a Hindu example that is just as horrifying to modern liberal moral sensibilities.

Again, note the connection to religion. There should be no surprise here: traditional communities depend on their religion for their sense of moral order. Any moral order is kept in place by a degree of coercion, and one important function for old-fashioned religion is to tell when coercion, including violence, is legitimate. And again, note how many in the community concerned celebrate the act of violence as honorable, as a cleansing, as a way to restore the proper moral order.

Is religion then a bad thing? Maybe. I don't see that we can say a lot based on such examples, other than that since just about everything in traditional communities is entangled with their religions, their religions must be involved in whatever we praise or condemn about them. If we dislike violent control of sexuality, yes, we can assign some blame to traditional religions. If we like the warmth of tight-knit communities as opposed to modern individualism and anomie, yes, we can praise the religions that condition people to go beyond their selfish inclinations and commit to a higher purpose.

And then there is the complication that traditional religion is not all of religion. There are plenty of modern, individualistic variants and interpretations of supernaturalistic belief systems. They tend to go along with the modern, liberal moral consensus.

So if we're looking for a secularist case against religion in general, it's not easy to get this on the basis of sweeping statements about what kind of social order religions support. Maybe we can try to argue that there is something about supernatural belief—the attitude of "faith" is a good candidate—that tends to make it dangerous or dysfunctional too often in modern conditions. Maybe liberal religions are quasi-secular to begin with; their positive (from our point of view) characteristics come about despite their endorsement of transcendent realities. There are respectable arguments in favor of such a view. I don't, however, think that the case has quite been made yet.

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Steven Pinker has a very good essay on The New Republic online, "The Stupidity of Dignity." It examines the uselessness of the concept of dignity in bioethics, particularly the Catholic-inflected "theocon" version of bioethics that has become very influential in the US government.

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Here is a gut-wrenching story from The Guardian about a young Iraqi woman brutally killed by her father and brothers because of an infatuation with a British soldier. The police did not detain the father, and even supported him. By and large, the local community considers such honor killings right and proper. Honor killings, indeed, are quite common throughout the Middle East, and are carried out in Muslim immigrant communities in Western countries as well.

Now, as far as I'm concerned, honor killings are among the more appalling, disgusting acts sanctioned by religion. And make no mistake, religion is deeply involved. It is not true that "True Islam" never allows such brutality. There is no such thing as True Islam. The varieties of popular Islam that permeate the everyday lives of very large numbers of Muslims either directly sanction honor killings, or sanctify a relentlessly male-dominated sexual morality that supports an environment in which honor killings are perceived as just.

But I also think that secularists and nonbelievers nevertheless have to be cautious. I am not so sure we can using examples such as honor killings to condemn supernatural beliefs. Look at the very end of the story, and notice that the mother of the murdered woman, who has left her monstrous husband, says "God will make her father pay, either in this world ... or in the world after." In other words, even in the eyes of the people most harmed by the custom of honor killings, God and religion is not something that is called into question. If someone's moral perceptions go against honor killings, they will rarely doubt Islam. Instead, they will be inclined to think that God's commands, properly understood, must go against this sort of murder. True Islam, they will come to think, condemns honor killings.

Indeed, people who want to fight honor killings generally find it most advisable to say that Islam opposes such acts. The same goes with female genital mutilation. Many who fight against this practice also emphasize interpretations of Islam that reject mutilation. It is best to enlist what is considered sacred in your cause, not to fight against it.

From this perspective, secularist moral outrage against religious atrocities is itself questionable. After all, if our main goal is to prevent atrocities, we should try to work with people's deeply held religious sensibilities rather than giving offense and making the task of changing behavior more difficult. When we hold up honor killings and genital mutilation as particularly disgusting examples of the harm religions cause, we are exploiting tragedy for antireligious propaganda. Worse, we use suffering as a kind of secularist pornography, only to reinforce our righteousness and moral superiority.

I think there is something to such charges. If we want to make a case that most of us would be better off without supernatural religion, we cannot just make lists of religious outrages. It is not even enough to point out that the outrages are directly and organically linked to particular religious views. (Remember, I think this linkage holds true with honor killings.) We need something more comprehensive, and I'm honestly not sure this is available. If we really are concerned about honor killings, maybe we should shut up about the evils perpetrated by religion and just support gentler interpretations of belief. We may even have to knowingly promote a false belief, that there is such a thing as True Islam and that it endorses our moral convictions.

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Here's another book I want to recommend: Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, edited by Louise M. Antony (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Half the book is taken up by informal descriptions by philosophers of why they don't believe. Many are very interesting, and the more informal reflections are, I think, a good way of bringing out a distinctly philosophical sensibility leading to nonbelief. Plus, mercifully, no one goes on about ****ological arguments or other traditional themes of the philosophy of religion. One thing I noticed, though, is that moral considerations have a large role in what the philosophers in this book think about God and religion. Usually this is something I don't care too much about, but then that's possibly another difference in sensibility.

Especially in the second part of the book, there are a number of contributions that try to do something a bit different compared to more familiar narratives of nonbelief. I want to comment on three that I found especially interesting.

Kenneth A. Taylor's chapter, "Without the Net of Providence: Atheism and the Human Adventure," is something I want to celebrate because it's rare for me to encounter a philosophical essay so in tune with my own sensibilities. In particular, I like the way that Taylor distinguishes between whether something is true and whether it is rational to believe something.

Suppose we ask not what we rationally ought to believe, but how, all things considered, we should rationally prefer to live. The answer cannot be that we should always rationally prefer to lead a life guided by beliefs that are rationally grounded in the evidence or even that we should always prefer that our beliefs be true rather than false. Some beliefs, even if they are both true and rationally grounded in the evidence, may serve only to undermine our deepest, most identity-constituting projects and thus to undermine our very being in the world. Whatever else beliefs are, they are instruments for guiding and supporting our practical projects. If holding a belief would be instrumental to the success of a practical project, then that by itself may give us sufficient reason, in particular sufficient practical reason, for adopting that belief, even if that belief is false or unwarranted by the evidence. [page 151]

Hear, hear! I think this is very important to keep in mind when discussing religion, and not just the different question of whether there is something to supernatural notions or not.

David Owens has a very interesting paper, "Disenchantment," about some moral dangers inherent in secularism and modern science and technology. What happens, he asks, if we attain the capability to easily manipulate not just the world around us but our own minds and personalities: if we have to decide what kind of person we want to be? If we end with a large range of low-cost choices about what kinds of choices we would prefer to prefer, the result is a kind of vertigo. What, Owens asks, if we face this kind of situation without the moral fixed points provided by religion?

I was also intrigued by Georges Rey's paper "Meta-atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-Deception." Many of us skeptics have had occasion to wonder if some of the religious people we encounter really believe in what they insist they do. We get further suspicious when some of their behavior seems to fit badly with their beliefs: why, for example, all the devastation and mourning if a loved one really has gone on to a wonderful afterlife? Rey develops such questions and intuitions into a very interesting philosophical argument. I think it would have been more compelling if it drew on more scientific research on religion. A good number of people working in this area would agree with Rey that there is something odd about religious thinking and that there's more than what meets the eye in avowals of belief. But they'd also temper that observation with a knowledge of the ways that supernatural concepts really are compelling for most normal human brains.

Anyway, it's a good book; take a look.

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A Turkish barber working in Saudi Arabia has been condemned to execution, based on testimony that he had sworn at God during a personal quarrel. (Think of it as a Muslim equivalent of denouncing the Holy Spirit: completely unforgivable.)

You can read about it in the Arab News or Turkish Daily News.

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For a while now, I've been an Honorary Fellow of The Jefferson Center in Ashland, Oregon. When I was first invited to speak there, I thought of it as an ultraliberal religious organization, and soon discovered that quite a few people associated with it were at least ambivalent about supernatural beliefs.

I got to know some of the very nice people involved with the Jefferson Center, particularly Robert Semes, its energetic Executive Director. He has a very interesting background, having spent much of his life as a priest. Recently, he publicly came out as a secular humanist. He will be coming out with a book soon, which should be fascinating.

Anyway, especially if you're in Oregon or the northern end of California, do check out the Jefferson Center. They have some interesting programs, and you can always combine it with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.

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When you write skeptically on religion, you get some interesting reactions. My favorite so far is is a Muslim comment on An Illusion of Harmony:

. . . that book by the enemy of Allah, and the mini-dajjal of our era Taner Edis.

(I ran across it on an online forum discussing a nasty review of Illusion by some sheikh.)

This is sort of like calling someone an enemy of God, a mini-Antichrist, in a Christian context. I kind of like it, actually. It's over-the-top and weird enough to be amusing.

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In Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed interpret results from a Gallup World Poll to describe what a large and apparently representative sample of Muslims think. As with any popular work by Esposito, it has an overriding concern to counter the demonization of Islam. And again typically, this anti-demonization easily shades into a kind of apologetics and mush about cultural sensitivity.

Still, there is some interesting information here. I found it interesting that when Esposito and Mogahed try to place the overwhelming anti-secular sentiments among Muslims in context, they bring out parallels to the United States. For example, a majority of Muslims want the tradition of Islamic Law to be a main source of legislation in their countries; a smaller number would prefer sharia to be the only source of law.

Many regard religion as a primary marker of identity, a source of meaning and guidance, consolation and community, and essential to their progress. Majorities of both men and women in many predominantly Muslim countries want to see Islamic principles, Sharia, as a source of legislation. These respondents have much in common with the majority of Americans who wish to see the Bible as a source of legislation. Both groups emphasize the importance of family values and are deeply concerned about issues of social morality. In fact, what respondents in the Muslim world and a significant number of Americans say they admire least about Western civilization is an excessive libertinism in society.

The authors point out that according to a 2006 Gallup poll in the US, 46% of Americans want the Bible as a source of legislation, plus 9% want it as the only source.

In other words, religious conservatism is very strong in most Muslim environments and in the US. Whee.

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David Berlinski, the "agnostic mathematician" associated with the Intelligent Design movement, has just published a short piece online called "The Scientific Embrace of Atheism."

It's largely a set of distortions. For example,

The great physical scientists — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein — were either men of religious commitment or religious sensibility.

Well, yes and no, and of dubious relevance. All in the list except Einstein are from the 19th century or earlier, when the state of scientific knowledge was very different compared to today. And Einstein's "religious sensibility" was very ambiguous, certainly not close to theism. It's wearying to constantly encounter Einstein being enlisted as a figure sympathetic to conventional supernaturalistic religion.

Berlinski adds his thoroughly inexpert judgment on physical cosmology:

There is quantum cosmology, I suppose, a discipline in which the mysteries of quantum mechanics are devoted to the question of how the universe arose or whether it arose at all. This is the subject made popular in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. It is an undertaking radiant in its incoherence. Given the account of creation offered in Genesis and the account offered in A Brief History of Time, I know of no sane man who would hesitate between the two.

Arrant nonsense.

And then there is the obligatory snideness against Darwinian evolution, an endorsement of the film Expelled, and hey, even a comparison of contemporary scientists to Soviet Comissars.

This is beyond any sort of respectable critical position that would be part of a legitimate intellectual debate. OK, we might say that this is a short piece summarizing the thesis of Berlinski's recent book, The Devil's Delusion. Maybe he does better in the book.

I recently spent forty minutes reading through the first chapter or so and skimming the rest. I was actually tempted to buy it and not look for it used, as I happen to be one of the physicists Berlinski refers to as a recent defender of nonbelief. On the one hand, I don't like my ego bruised by negative criticism, but on the other hand, I think I have enough of an intellectual ethic to see if I can respond to critics and perhaps revise my views.

But as it turns out, Berlinski says nothing about my views, except for an offhand remark about physicists being willing to believe in anything. Nothing. A few more physicists get sneered at more extensively, such as Victor Stenger, but there too, Berlinski by and large refuses to seriously engage with the arguments made by science-based critics of supernatural claims. So my impression now is that the book has little substance, and that I'll go back to my policy of looking for it used.

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I just read the revised and updated edition of John Beversluis's C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion. Very interesting.

I confess I hadn't paid much attention to C.S. Lewis's apologetics before. Oh, it's impossible not to know about his books, since they're so popular among conservative Christians. I've every gone through a couple. But his arguments generally struck me as, well, so weak as not to be worth spending time on.

Beversluis's book surprised me. Not because of his criticism of C.S. Lewis's apologetics; as I said, I took it for granted that these were very poor arguments. I figured it would be good for a philosopher to take the time to go over them properly, but I saw it as the equivalent of a physicist spending time explaining what goes wrong with "free energy" schemes. Someone's got to do it, but it really doesn't interest me. But Beversluis convinced me that there's actually something to be learned by a detailed examination of Lewis's thought.

Anyway, it's well worth reading, especially if you're in an environment where C.S. Lewis's kind of arguments are popular.

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According to the BBC, at recent conference in Qatar, "Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth." Indeed, "A prominent cleric, Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawy, said modern science had at last provided evidence that Mecca was the true centre of the Earth; proof, he said, of the greatness of the Muslim 'qibla' - the Arabic word for the direction Muslims turn to when they pray."

Most of this is yet another echo of science-in-the-Quran nonsense. But it has other attractions, mainly, I would guess, an appeal to cultural authenticity. It's hard not to notice, particularly if you're a devout Muslim, how much of the modern world is shaped by the conventions of infidels. Weights, measures, timekeeping—the recent standards for almost everything is Western European in origin. Much of this is bound to come across as alien cultural impositions. In occasions like the Qatar conference, devout Muslims rail against cultural imperialism, talking about the colonization of Muslim minds.

But then, most Muslims are not Arabs. When I run into Muslims in places like Turkey who want to do things in a more Islamically Correct fashion because "this is more genuinely ours," I have to wonder why so often "ours" really means "derived from the practices of seventh century Arabs." There's no cultural imperialism that succeeds so deeply as getting someone to adopt your religion.

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In some corner of the multiverse, there exists a universe-bubble with physics close enough to our own to be recognizable, but different enough to make colonizing the stars feasible. In some point in this universes history, there was a Galactic Empire that ruled over many zillions of humans with an iron fist, imposing its religion upon all its subjects.

According to the theology of the One True Faith, the gods were just. The gods cared deeply that judicial procedures and punishments be carried out painstakingly. The Empire committed enormous resources to its judicial system, run, naturally, by the priesthood. The worst crimes—treason, heresy, blasphemy (much the same sort of thing, according to the priests)—deserved a particularly nasty capital punishment. The condemned person was to be put in front of a special pulsed laser cannon produced at enormous expense, whose components were made of sacred diamonds, and which produced a pulse sequence coding for all the details of the most sacred hymns in the Holy Book of Retribution. And the condemned was to be shot in the middle of the forehead, dying with Truth branded on her brain.

The gods of the One True Faith were also merciful. While demanding the highest standards of their trials and sacred execution devices, they also knew that humans were not perfect. So the Law allowed that if the beam from a laser cannon was to miss the condemned, this would mean that the gods had caught and corrected a mistake. The priesthood was commanded to make their instruments as reliable as possible, but also enjoined to allow for divine intervention.

The diamantine laser had to be prepared with the best available technology, according to precise ritual specifications. The best scientists in the Empire came together to calculate the probability of the laser not hitting the center of the condemned heretic's forehead. They found that there was only a one in a zillion chance of the beam not hitting the precise correct spot, but still causing death. This would be a sign that the heretic was guilty, but of some sin other than that determined by the Imperial Courts. And there was also a one in a zillion chance that the beam would miss the condemned, leaving her alive. Then she was to be set free.

These probabilities of an off-center beam could not be determined by experiment, by shooting the laser a few hundred zillion times and observing the outcomes, as this would be way too expensive, even for the Empire. In fact, there were even priests who thought it might be sacrilege to shoot a pulse coding for the Book of Retribution at a non-live target. But many of the components could be empirically tested, and the Imperial College of Science had excellent methods to calculate failure probabilities for a complex assembly of components. Indeed, the very success of the Star Drives that led to the conquests forming the Empire depended on the very same methods, and the Star Drives were extremely reliable.

The theologians of the Empire argued for letting the condemned in a failed execution go by the same impeccable reasoning to Intelligent Design that they used to establish the existence and guidance of the gods. After all, an event that was very improbable according to physics would have taken place. And this was not just any improbability: it fell in a very meaningful, pre-specified set of possibilities. Someone, very improbably, ended up alive. Clearly this could not happen just by accident. It had to be a complex specified event that was therefore intelligently designed.

Another ritual requirement for these most sacred of executions was that the person triggering the laser had to be an innocent, knowing nothing about the preceding trial, or indeed about the justice system in general. So one day, to dispatch a famous heretic, the Imperial Authorities selected a physicist from a provincial planet, knowing that physicists are famously oblivious to judicial matters.

The oblivious physicist was summoned to the capital planet for the occasion, and given charge of the execution device, which he immediately recognized as an unnecessarily elaborate pulsed laser. He triggered it, and soon experienced great outcries of surprise and prayer. The beam had grazed the accused arch-heretic, badly mutilating her in the cheek but still allowing her to live. She was therefore let go, and allowed to live out her life in a monastic planet under a vow of silence.

Soon after the missed shot, however, the physicist started asking what really happened. He went through painstaking checks of the diamantine laser, recording everything, sending information out to experts and also doing his own calculations. He eventually confirmed that absolutely nothing looked tampered with, and that the one in a zillion probability calculations were perfectly correct. All the evidence showed that the laser was operating normally.

Now, the physicist wondered again, what happened? There could have been a mistake, or perhaps even some worldly conspiracy that tampered with the laser in order to save the heretic and then covered its tracks. But that seemed much more implausible than a one-in-a-zillion chance allowed by the physics. So, if dumb luck or some sort of intelligent cause that transcends physics were the only two real options in play, which one was the better bet?

And here, to make it more interesting, are some other questions.

First, assume that the physicist was so oblivious about events that he had no idea how many times the laser had been used in previous executions. For all he knows, it could have been the first and only time. How should he reason in such circumstances?

Second, say this was the one-hundredth execution, and the physicist knows this. The other ninety nine resulted in the heretic being fried straight in the forehead. Does knowing this change anything?

Third, assume that half the galaxy had recently been convulsed by religious wars, and that Imperial Troops resorted to mass killing, ritually exterminating zillions of captured heretics using identical diamantine lasers. The expected rate of a handful of survived executions occurred during these exterminations. The physicist knows this. How would his reasoning change?

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Secular nationalism might not take a stand on supernatural beliefs, but it restricts the public role of religion. Citizens are expected to have an allegiance to a modern state and its political process, while their specifically religious commitments get relegated to private life. Legitimate coercion, including violence, and the task of imposing public order are monopolized by a secular state. Religions that emphasize cosmic order reflected on Earth, and that legitimize coercion in the context of a divine social order, get marginalized.

To many of us, this is right and proper. We don't have to be nonbelievers; more individualist religious believers can also take a secular political framework for granted. But life can get complicated, especially when our very notion of what binds us as citizens is closely connected to religion.

For example, to many Americans, the United States is a Christian country. This does not mean that government institutions should be linked to particular churches, or that non-Christian minorities should be second class citizens. It does mean, however, that many Americans expect that public life should have a generically Christian moral coloring. Being a good American means accepting the framework of a Protestant civilization—Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims can be welcome, provided they organize themselves similarly to a Protestant denomination and do not challenge the generic civil religion of the country. Secularists, when they push principles like church-state separation too far, threaten the public moral order.

Such informal cultural ties between citizenship and religious identity are common in other countries as well. Being Polish means, to a large degree, being a Catholic by culture and perhaps practice. Being Turkish means being a Muslim—most Turks will not call a member of a religious minority Turkish, even if Turkish is their mother tongue and they have always been a Turkish citizen.

And in many countries, secular nationalism that tries to privatize religion, and religious nationalism that demands explicit acknowledgment of a religious moral order, comes into conflict. In Sri Lanka, Sinhalese Buddhists demand that all citizens, of every religion, be aware of a unifying overall Buddhist culture that defines Sri Lanka. Tamils resist, often violently. In India, movements and political parties upholding hindutva clash with secularists, and with Muslims. In Egypt, the government is never Muslim enough for the Islamists, even though Egyptian culture and politics have been re-Islamized with a vengeance in the last decades. The status of Copts is always a problem. And so on, practically all over the world.

Mark Juergensmeyer's Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to al Qaeda, is a very interesting guide to what he describes as a global rebellion against secular nationalism. A more explicitly religious nationalism is attractive in non-Western countries who want to throw off the cultural aspects of colonialism and establish a more authentic modernity. But it also finds significant constituencies in secular Western countries.

There is a lot in the book that will interest secularists in particular. For example, Juergensmeyer makes the observation that secularism is the prime enemy for religious nationalists, even more so than religious minorities with whom they may also clash. Finding some accommodation with another religious community is not impossible. But,

Could the accommodation approach work with secular minorities? Even in traditional religious cultures there are people who were raised in religious households but who, through travel, education, or association with modern urban culture, have lost interest in religion. Should there not be a safe cultural haven for such people in a religious society, just as the cultures of Copts and other minorities are maintained as islands in seas of religiosity? From most religious nationalists to whom I posed the question, the answer was a resounding no. They could accept the idea that other religious traditions provide valid alternatives to their own religious law but not secular culture: it has, in their eyes, no links with a higher truth. From their point of view, it is simply antireligion. Some religious nationalists found it difficult to accept secularism even in Europe and the United States, where, they felt, Christianity failed to keep its backsliders in line. Still, it seems to me that the logic of the two-level-shari'a admists at least the possibility of islands of different cultures within a religious state. [Page 237.]

I can add my own observations in support of this. Among Turkish Islamists, the idea of treating secularists as a separate "religious" community with its own laws and communal rights has been discussed. It doesn't seem to me to have got far. Secularism is too alien, too much the enemy.

If the political trend today is toward religious rather than secular nationalism, secularists and nonbelievers have to give serious thought to how we might survive in such public environments. This does not mean that the trend is toward some premodern fantasy of being governed by pure religious laws. Religious political movements are often pragmatic and not as violent as their stereotype. Their main demand is that religion take a leading role in public legitimization, and that religion inform the overall moral climate of a society. They are not trying to abolish modern political forms. But nonetheless, the success of religious politics is inevitably a loss for those of us who identify with more secular political aspirations.

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Last year, a student told me that he could never accept evolution because that would destroy his faith, and without his faith, life would have no meaning.

I think I remarked that that was interesting, and left it at that. I teach science, but I figure sorting out meaning-of-life issues is beyond my capabilities and not my job anyway. I guess I could have suggested that there are more liberal religious people who accept some version of evolution and seem to do fine in the religious meaning to life area as well. But this student clearly had a more specific religious commitment in mind; some vague promise of higher meaning was not going to be enough.

He may have had a point as well. Since I didn't want to pry, I don't know any specifics, but it's not hard to imagine that his understanding of life was tightly wrapped around a more fundamentalist faith. His social environment, moral allegiances, and concept of what his life is all about may militate against taking evolution on board as if it were just another fact. There would be too much at stake. And I'd hesitate to say that getting the science right is so important that it justifies disrupting so much else that he considers valuable.

I don't know if standard secular musings on the meaning of life help all that much in such situations. And this goes with strongly religious commitments in general, not just fundamentalism. Many religious believers are very invested in the notion of a higher purpose to life beyond worldly satisfactions. That's a pretty important feature of religiosity, we might even say. And so, if we produce a standard secular response, saying that maybe there is no transcendent purpose of life, but we certainly have purposes within nature that can inspire us, that may come across as just not good enough. Ordinary goals fall flat.

I'm not even sure this is something to argue about, even. I'm fine with worldly purposes, and honestly, I am so hopelessly secular that I have trouble figuring out what this whole higher meaning thing is all about. But not just my perceptions of the world but my interests, my temperament, my way of life—all of this is very different compared to strongly religious people. We want different things out of life, and I suspect it's demanding too much from any argument to expect an argument to change that.

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I teach at a rather nice Missouri university, and Missouri, like many (most?) states in the US, gets quite a bit of conservative Christian pressure on state-supported science education.

The feeling of being persecuted has deep roots in creationist movements. It's partially true, for that matter. Within the scientific community, the small minority of creationist scientists are usually treated like deviants, and often met with offhand contempt. The notion that people are hounded out their careers strikes me as being more fantasy than reality, but it is true that scientific circles are rarely comfortable environments for creationists. And where our science classrooms are concerned, we are no more going to treat creationism as a serious option than a flat Earth.

The anti-evolutionary right wing therefore regularly tries to solve their problem by legislating "academic freedom" in such a way as to protect creationism. And just now, the Missouri legislature is gearing up for another fight on these matters. Introduced April 1, House Bill 2554 is all about "teacher academic freedom to teach scientific evidence regarding evolution." In other words, creationism. It uses what has become standard creationist language such as "teachers shall be permitted to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of theories of biological and chemical evolution." Since it would not affect universities, it would not directly interfere with my classroom, but it's nasty stuff nonetheless.

Ah, but then, since December 3, we have a House Bill 1315 to be considered. This is about "intellectual diversity" in higher education. It does not mention evolution, but the political constituencies pushing it intend "intellectual diversity" to mean that we should not have our science classes to be so one-sided as to discuss only evolution in biology and only present physical cosmology in physics.

I do have to admire the intellectual judo act going on, though. These right wing bills are full of impeccably liberal language about diversity, anti-discrimination, and fairness. Why not? If preventing anybody taking offense becomes so politically central, it's not that surprising that protecting conservative religious sensibilities also becomes a concern.

Added: 1 minute video of Mike Huckabee on creationism and academic freedom.

• [syndicated|from secularoutpost.blogspot.com]

David Berlinski, the intelligent design proponent, is out with a new book, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions.

Another hatchet job on Richard Dawkins & Co., by the looks of it. And the blurb for it online is not promising. Here are a couple of its bullet points:

• Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here? Not even close.
• Have the sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life? Not even close.
• Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought? Close enough.

From this, and his past ID writings, my guess is that Berlinski does his usual act: sneer at some current scientific ideas from evolutionary biology and physical cosmology, and misrepresent the actual reasons scientists are attracted to these ideas.

Sigh. I figure I'll read it at some point, like most ID stuff. I'll keep my eyes open in used book stores.