Bart Ehrman: God's Problem

I've started listening to Bart Ehrman's book God's Problem on cd on my way to work. His book explores the (in his view) inability of Christianity (and specifically, the Bible) to satisfactorily answer the question of why there is suffering in the world. It's an important and difficult question for Christians to face.

One interesting thing is the subtitle of the book: How the Bible fails to answer our most important question - why we suffer. While it is certainly an important question, it is not clear that this is the most important one; it is also not clear that the Bible's purpose is to answer this question. In this sense, I wonder if the whole premise of the book is slightly off. Usually it is the Christians who are accused of viewing humanity as all-important, but if Mr. Ehrman thinks the question of why humans suffer is the most important question there is, it would seem it is he who as an elevated view of humanity.

Another bizarre idea of Ehrman's is that he believes that to say the problem of suffering is beyond our ability to comprehend (i.e. a mystery) is the same as saying there is no answer to the problem of suffering. Just because humans may not know an answer does not mean there is no answer. It would seem that Ehrman is elevating humans to a level where if we cannot arrive at a solution to something or cannot comprehend it then it must not exist.

Still, I am interested in hearing him out. The books seems like it will be a passionate articulation of both a difficult intellectual problem and the reasons for Ehrman's loss of faith (he used to be an evangelical Christian).

Augustine and Astrology

As we’ve covered earlier, Christianity often gets a bad rap for its supposed detrimental effects on scientific work, particularly during the medieval period. Many contemporary thinkers similarly dismiss astrology and alchemy as worthless nonsense despite the fact that historians of science, such as David Lindberg, have shown that modern astronomy and chemistry would likely not exist (or would be very different) without these medieval precursors.

Astrology throughout the Middle Ages was not simply the horoscope and zodiac obsessed practice that we know today. It was a branch of natural philosophy dealing with the physical influence of the cosmos on the earth. Casting horoscopes, etc., was a part of astrology, but a contentious one. Many medieval thinkers criticized this part of astrology while accepting the idea that celestial events have an influence on earthly ones. And they had good reasons for doing so. For example, it was clear that the sun had a profound influence on the earth, bringing heat and light and causing the seasons. The moon also had a clear influence by causing the tides. Several Greek intellectual traditions considered the investigation of the connections between the heavens and the earth as a legitimate and rational enterprise. Interest in astrology was also in many cases the primary motivation for the expansion of astronomical knowledge. Astrology played an important role in the development of modern astronomy and was not entirely wrong in its descriptions of the causal influence of the heavens on the earth.

Also, it turns out that long before modern secularists dismissed astrology as a pseudoscience, the Christian church was its major critic. Some of the common tenets of astrology included the idea that celestial bodies were divine and could influence or determine the fate of human beings on earth. The church objected to both of these doctrines, asserting that humans have free-will and that celestial bodies were not gods that could determine events on earth. St. Augustine was the most influential of these critics, writing against “vulgar astrology” and condemning its practitioners as frauds and imposters. He did not deny that celestial bodies had some influence, but rejected the determinism inherent in astrological predictions concerning fate. Augustine's influence freed later church writers to be similarly critical of the claims of astrologers; it was common for the church to denounce them as charlatans. In short, we find the early and late medieval Christian church cutting astrology down to pretty much the same size a modern scientist would: acknowledging that celestial events have a physical influence on the earth while denying the divinity of stars and planets and their ability to determine the fate of human beings.

Computers, DNA, and the Origin of Life

Evolution and intelligent design are controversial, complicated topics. I am not a creationist, but I am sympathetic to some of the criticisms leveled at evolution (some from intelligent design theorists, some from within the field itself). Research on the origin of life, in particular, has some difficult conceptual issues to face. Here is one that I find interesting:

First, I want you to look at the computer that you are using right now to view this page. Whether it is a laptop or a desktop computer, you are looking at something rather special. Here's what I mean: your computer is made of ordinary elements. Silicon, aluminum, iron, carbon, etc. The elements in your computer are not any different from elements you could find anywhere else. But, in this case, they are allowing you to connect to a world-wide network of information and view things like this webpage. Why? Nothing in the elements themselves dictate this sort of function. One could have all the appropriate elements and compounds together, but there would be no tendency for a computer to emerge. This means that these elements, along with the physical and chemical laws that govern their behavior, allow a computer to be built out of them. However, the raw materials themselves along with the natural laws that govern them are not capable of creating a computer. We can therefore say that computers are contingent; that is, the existence of computers cannot be explained by any known scientific laws, and nothing in the universe requires that they exist. Contrast this to, say, the gravitational attraction between the Earth and the Sun. In our universe, the laws (of gravity, in this case) demand a force of attraction (in Newtonian terms) of a certain magnitude between these two masses. They have no choice in the matter. A computer, on the other hand, is entirely contingent. Your computer's elements have been organized in a complicated, specific arrangement that results in the functional computer you have in front of you, but nothing in the physics or chemistry of those elements led to this specific arrangement.

OK, so what does this have to do with the origin of life? It turns out that biological life, as we know it, is contingent. DNA, for example, contains the genetic information that you or I or any living thing are built according to. DNA can be said to contain the blueprints of an organism. It consists of long strands of what are called nucleotides, major parts of which are made of nucleobases such as adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T). The arrangement of these nucleobases is largely responsible for the information contained in the strands of DNA. For a simple analogy, think of the words in an encyclopedia, or in this post. The arrangement of the letters (of the English alphabet, in this case) determines the information contained in a written entry. Different arrangement, different meaning. Different arrangements of the four "letters" of the genetic language (A, C, G, T) are responsible for all of the different organisms we see on earth. Now, this is not merely an analogy; DNA is not like a language, it is a language. Contemporary biologists have come to realize that when they speak of genes, they are speaking of information, not something physical. Here's where it gets interesting: information transcends physics and chemistry.

I don't mean this in some mystical, metaphysical way. Think about it. When you write a journal entry in your notebook, you are using ink and paper to represent information. But the ink and paper itself cannot be responsible for the information content, nor can the ink and paper itself said to be the information. Rather, the ink and paper happen to be the physical medium for embodying that information. The information itself transcends the physical and chemical. At first the information was in your mind, then on your paper, and then could be typed into a computer document, then transferred onto a thumb drive, etc.

In each case the information was being physically stored in a medium, but it is clear that the physical media are not themselves responsible for the creation of the information. In fact, the physical medium must be neutral, or flexible, in order for it to usefully store information. Consider your ink and paper again. If whenever you wrote the letter "t", the physical properties of the ink and paper forced the next bit of ink to form the letter "s", then you would have a very difficult time writing anything meaningful. The physical and chemical properties would determine the content of the paper, and your journal entries would be limited to repetitive strings of letters. Physical and chemical laws are good at repetition (a rock will always fall the same way, bits of lava will crystallize again and again in the same pattern), but cannot explain the origin of complex, specific information.

Let's get back to biology: our DNA strands, with the arrangement of our bases (letters) A,C,G, and T, cannot be explained by any physical or chemical laws. Like the ink and paper, the physical laws of the DNA strand itself allow a near infinite variety of arrangements of DNA letters. How then, can the materialist explain the origin of genetic information? If one is a materialist (i.e. one who holds that the physical, or nature, is all that exists), one is stuck trying to explain the origin of genetic information in terms of the known physical and chemical laws of the genetic molecules themselves. This is very literally like trying to explain this essay by appealing to the physics and chemistry of the molecules in the computer screen, or like trying to explain a newspaper's information content in terms of the physical and chemical properties of the ink and paper. As we have seen, the physical medium itself must remain neutral on the arrangement of letters or else the medium is useless for information storage. A neutral physical medium cannot explain why we see one particular arrangement and not another.

[In case the reader is wondering, chance cannot explain the first bit of genetic information; the probabilities of accidents resulting in even the "simplest" self-replicating cell are incredibly low (a single cell in your body contains vastly more information than Encyclopedia Britannica). Origin of life researchers do not consider chance to be a viable explanation, but are investigating scenarios where unique chemical conditions can hopefully explain the emergence of the first self-replicating machine.]

I am not trying to suggest that materialists are stupid; I am merely drawing attention to an important conceptual problem. If you are familiar at all with origin of life research then you know that scientists have investigated a huge range of possible scenarios leading to the origin of the first cell with some genetic information. While this research is extensive and informative, it is also above all strongly inconclusive. See Shapiro's Origins for a devastating critique, or Schopf's Life's Origin for an optimistic but honest assessment of the research. I am not calling for origin of life researchers to quit and say "God did it." I am, however, suggesting that researchers should pay careful attention to criticisms like those discussed above. It is possible that new laws will be discovered that can shed light on this problem. Only time will tell if the origin of life will eventually be explicable in physical and chemical terms. I will enjoy following along to find out.

Climate Change Mystery

New research on a temperature spike that occurred in earth's climate around 55 million years ago supports the idea that past climate change has been caused primarily by factors other than carbon dioxide levels. In this case, the increase in CO2 that accompanied the temperature spike could only account for a little over a third of the warming. Most of the warming was caused by something else. In most of the research I came across while I was writing a paper on climate change, CO2 was a secondary forcing, often following the temperature change, not causing it. This does not mean that CO2 cannot cause warming (it does), but that Al Gore's simplistic presentation of "in the past CO2 varied with climate, therefore CO2 is causing the current warming" is incorrect. Today's warming is rather unique in this sense, as CO2 might actually be the primary cause in this case.

"Baby Einstein" May Actually Make Your Babies Dumb

Oops. It turns out that the currently trendy (among middle and upper-class parents) push to start teaching little babies and toddlers how to read, write, and do basic arithmetic may do more harm than good. This article in the Boston Globe details some of the latest findings. It's quite long, so I'll summarize some of the stuff I remember.

All of these efforts to start making kids smart earlier are wrongheaded because the education is not developmentally appropriate to those age groups. Research has found, for example, that children who learn how to read later on, around 6 or 7, actually become better, more enthusiastic readers in the long run. If they are "taught" too early, the children learn how to associate symbols with sounds, but that's it (that's all their brains can do at that point). Though parents may think their kids are reading, they are actually just parroting back noises, and any "advantage" in reading the kids may appear to have disappears around first grade. And kids who are part of normal kindergarten (not super-academic kindergarten), with good old-fashioned play time, become the better students over the course of their education.

Research has also shown that for every hour of things like "Baby Einstein" babies and toddlers watch, their vocabulary decreases by some percentage. Their brains are simply not ready for that, and it does not help to try and force it. What then should parents do to encourage good brain development? Keep it simple: love your kids, provide a nurturing environment, let them play, and read to them. Read to them a lot. And don't worry if your child seems like they are developing a little late...the research shows that these children often have the more advanced brain down the road.


P.S. the commonly heard "Einstein was just an average student" is misleading; though he sometimes earned average grades, he was actually a brilliant student. The problem was that he was kind of a rogue and his instructors often didn't like him. He was reading Immanuel Kant at age 14 and loving it (for context, one of Kant's books remains untranslated because the scholars who have tried have stopped for fear of losing their sanity).

Darwinism, Racism, and Victorian Anthropology

Contemporary critics of Darwinian evolution (e.g. over at Uncommon Descent) are often also interested in criticizing Darwin himself, as well as making connections between Darwinism and racism, eugenics, and the view of social progress known as Social Darwinism. There are indeed connections between these ideas, but neither those who would demonize Darwin nor those who hold him up as a sort of saint have got the full picture. The truth is, of course, more complicated.

The idea of evolution undoubtedly had a strong effect on Victorian beliefs and attitudes. An evolutionary idea of progress permeated Victorian culture; one might say it was the zeitgeist of the 19th century and even the beginning of the twentieth. Europeans saw themselves as the pinnacle of progress, while nonwhite peoples were seen as inferior and less intelligent, with the primates just below them, and so on. But, this cultural bias towards other races existed before Darwin and his theory of evolution. As early as the 17th century (Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859) naturalists were studying human skulls from various cultures and concluding that whites were the superior race. Louis Agassiz, Samuel Morton, and Robert Knox were prominent 19th century writers/scientists who, before Darwin, concluded that blacks were an inferior race, even the “lowest grade of humanity.”

While we certainly cannot blame Charles Darwin for these prejudices, his theory was seen to provide scientific support for them. His specific theory of evolution, suggested that all life forms compete in the struggle for existence. The more fit will survive while the less fit die out. It was clear, then, that European culture, having survived and progressed far beyond any others, was superior to other cultures. In other words, Darwin’s mechanism could explain, scientifically, how some races could come to be superior to others. It was also used to validate slavery. For example, it was argued that if blacks were set free that they would inevitably go extinct. Blacks, being inferior to other races, would lose in the struggle for existence; it was therefore charitable to keep them as slaves and preserve their race (besides, it was also well-known that blacks became vicious when given freedom and an education). We must remind ourselves again, though, that the idea of evolution did not originate with Darwin and was already quite well-known by the time Darwin published his book. The idea of a struggle for existence, both biological and social, had also already been made popular by Thomas Malthus and Herbert Spencer. In other words, Darwin’s theory was built upon, and was in some sense a product of, preexisting Victorian values.

Victorian anthropologists, before Darwin, were ethnocentric: Europeans were seen as the highest, most advanced race, while other races were viewed as lower and inferior. However, these anthropologists were largely monogenist, meaning they viewed all races as being part of the same human species. In the late 19th century, after Darwin published The Origin of Species, many physical anthropologists became polygenist, viewing other races as separate species from Europeans. Eventually a developmental view of society emerged. In short, this developmental viewpoint saw native peoples as relics of our evolutionary past; people who had not evolved much higher than the apes, and whose adults had intelligences similar to that of European children (a side note: many Victorians also saw European women as having intelligences similar to a child’s). This evolutionary, developmental view of culture did not exactly encourage an equitable view of races and cultures.

It is safe to say that Darwin’s theory was used to support the ethnocentric and racist Victorian view of other races. It also perhaps tilted physical anthropology into a slightly more racist mode (it also eliminated previously strong ties with missionary work). But we cannot place too much blame on Darwin. Racism was a general prejudice of the time, and cannot be linked solely to Darwinism (even the general idea of evolution cannot take all the blame: Louis Agassiz, mentioned above, was a creationist who viewed blacks as having been separately created and inferior to whites). Darwin's theory may be responsible for adding scientific credibility to racism, but not its genesis.

Darwin himself, on the other hand, was an abolitionist and was convinced that the differences between races was one of education and upbringing, not inherent natures. This was made clear to him through his experiences with "civilized savages," men from primitive cultures who had been raised in England and whose behavior and intellect were indistinguishable from Europeans.

Information Theory and Biological Evolution

The question of the origin of species, which Darwin was concerned with, or the origin of the first life form can be more broadly stated as the question of the origin of biological information. Whether one is interested in the origin of the first protein or in the development of new structures such as an eye or a wing, a successful explanation of these requires an accounting for an increase in biological information (e.g. DNA, RNA, or proteins). Darwin's theory of natural selection and mutation became famous because it proposed a natural explanation for such increases in information (though Darwin of course would not have phrased it quite that way), which previously had been widely regarded as requiring an intelligent agent (which would have been God, for most).

Darwin's combination of chance and natural selection was crucial; chance by itself (random mutations in the genetic code or random conglomerations of organic chemicals) is a hopeless approach to constructing even the simplest biological molecule. Take a small protein which consists of a chain of around 100 amino acids; the chance for a small functional protein to form in a random search is around 1 in 1270000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000. This is well beyond any reasonable probability limit, as would be the probability for any other biological feature (e.g., a strand of DNA). But, with natural selection preserving the individual random changes that are beneficial, larger changes can gradually accumulate. Richard Dawkins illustrates this with the following scenario: take the phrase "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL." Imagine a computer randomly generating phrases out of the 26 letters of the English alphabet; the probability of producing this phrase through random letter generation is practically zero. However, if whenever a letter that is part of the phrase appears, the computer keeps that letter, then gradually (in fact, quite easily) the target phrase will be generated. In the biological world, natural selection and mutation achieve something similar: natural selection preserves the beneficial random mutations, resulting in new biological information.

But can information really be gotten so easily? It turns out that Dawkin's illustration is fatally flawed. Consider: the computer had a target phrase, and preserved incremental changes by comparing the randomly generated letters to this target phrase. In nature there can be no targets; natural selection and random mutation do not have a goal in mind. In nature, only beneficial changes can be preserved, not changes that will be beneficial in the future. An intelligent agent (Dawkins, in his illustration) may know that the gibberish is gradually turning into something that makes sense (METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL), but blind natural forces cannot possibly be shooting for such a target. So it turns out that the illustration meant to show how blind natural forces can generate information actually contains the target information ahead of time, put there by an intelligent agent.

William Dembski and Robert Marks II are working on what they are calling the Law of Conservation of Information. Essentially, it states that you cannot get more information out of a computational algorithm than you put in initially. If this is true, nonteleological evolution cannot in principle explain the origin of new biological information. See their paper here: http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/life%E2%80%99s-conservation-law-why-darwinian-evolution-cannot-create-biological-information/