God & homo sapiens

This is an edited version of a story by Cornelia Dean that appeared in The New York Times on Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Roving Defender of Evolution, and of Room for God

University of California Irvine professor, Francisco J. Ayala, a former Dominican priest, tells his audiences not just that evolution is a well-corroborated scientific theory, but also that belief in evolution does not rule out belief in God. In fact, he said, evolution “is more consistent with belief in a personal god than intelligent design. If God has designed organisms, he has a lot to account for.”

Consider, he said, that at least 20 percent of pregnancies are known to end in spontaneous abortion. If that results from divinely inspired anatomy, Dr. Ayala said, “God is the greatest abortionist of them all. If God or some other intelligent agent made things this way on purpose, he said, “then he is a sadist, he certainly does odd things and he is a lousy engineer.”

That is the message of his latest book, “Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion” (Joseph Henry Press, 2007). In it, he writes that as a theology student in Spain he had been taught that evolution “provided the ‘missing link’ in the explanation of evil in the world” — a defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence, despite the existence of evil.

“As floods and drought were a necessary consequence of the fabric of the physical world, predators and parasites, dysfunctions and diseases were a consequence of the evolution of life,” he writes. “They were not a result of a deficient or malevolent design.”

He said he was saddened when he saw the embrace of evolution identified with, as he put it, “explicit atheism,” as in the books of the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins or other writers on science and faith. Neither the existence nor nonexistence of God is susceptible to scientific proof, Dr. Ayala said, and equating science with the abandonment of religion “fits the prejudices” of advocates of intelligent design and other creationist ideas.“Science and religion concern nonoverlapping realms of knowledge,” he writes in the new book. “It is only when assertions are made beyond their legitimate boundaries that evolutionary theory and religious belief appear to be antithetical.”

Read the unedited version at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/science/29prof.html?_r=1&ref=science

And here is an intelligent review of the book that appears on Amazon.com
REVIEW

James F. MCGRATH - See all my reviews
[reproduced from my blog, EXPLORING OUR MATRIX, at the author's request]

I've been reading several books on evolution, intelligent design, and related subjects, as I seek to decide on representative readings to assign for my religion and science course this Fall. It seems to me that the differences between many viewpoints centers around the question of what God does.

Naturalistic explanations of various things in the world around us have always challenged religious beliefs. The monotheistic God of the Abrahamic traditions continues to have adherents precisely because of the flexibility and all-encompassing character of this concept of God. While Zeus' thunderbolts are now the domain of meteorology rather than metaphysics, the God who is responsible for everything does not disappear so easily. Yet the question must be asked by any religious believer: if you believe in God, what do you envisage God doing, and how?

Francis Ayala's book Darwin's Gift: To Science and Religion, is appreciative of arguments such as those of Paley, even when disagreeing with his conclusions. Paley, after all, was working with the best scientific knowledge available in his time. Paley was also an opponent of slavery, which Ayala helpfully notes - it is easy to regard those whose views we disagree with as foolish, particularly authors in the past, and so it is helpful to be reminded of other aspects of their life and work, to remind us to be appreciative of their place in our intellectual history, as well as of the fact that no one alive today will not seem as off target as Paley to some future author writing with the benefit of centuries of hindsight.

Ayala takes completely seriously the evidence for evolution, and the fact that, now that we have DNA evidence, there really is no more doubt about common ancestry and evolution than about the criminals we put away on the basis of the same sorts of forensic evidence. Even Behe acknowledges as much.

What is the fundamental difference between the various approaches to theology and to the intersection of religion and science today? The question of what (if anything) God does, and by what means. Answers to such questions will by definition involve metaphor - the challenge is to find metaphors that do justice to our deepest religious experiences and insights in a way that also does justice to not just the present state of our scientific knowledge, but the fact that science's track record suggests that natural explanations of things currently unexplained will one day be forthcoming.

See all the Amazon.com reviews here: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Gift-Religion-Francisco-Ayala/dp/0309102316//www.msn.com/defaulto.aspx

The New York Times covers the end of The Capital Times

Here is how The New York Times covered the end of The Capital Times:

Reluctantly, a Daily Stops Its Presses, Living Online
By NOAM COHEN
April 28, 2008 With print revenue down and online revenue growing, newspaper executives are anticipating the day when big city dailies and national papers will abandon their print versions. That day has arrived in Madison, Wis. On Saturday, The Capital Times, the city’s fabled 90-year-old daily newspaper founded in response to the jingoist fervor of World War I, stopped printing to devote itself to publishing its daily report on the Web.

An avowedly progressive paper that carried the banner of its founder, William T. Evjue, The Capital Times is wrapped up with the history of two larger-than-life Wisconsin senators, the elder Robert La Follette (whom it favored) and Joseph R. McCarthy (whom it opposed). But in recent years, the paper’s circulation dropped to about 18,000 from a high in the 1960s of more than 40,000.

“We felt our audience was shrinking so that we were not relevant,” Clayton Frink, the publisher of The Capital Times, said in an interview two days before the final daily press run. “We are going a little farther, a little faster, but the general trend is happening everywhere.”

The Web strategy, while seen as a long-term solution, is still a work in progress, Mr. Fanlund says. It revolves around a portal, Madison.com, which is owned under the same joint arrangement mandating that both Madison papers share revenues, though they are editorially independent.

“If there is a window of opportunity for newspapers on the Web, it is locally,” said James L. Baughman, director of the University of Wisconsin journalism school in Madison. “The reason the online version of the Cap Times may have life is that opportunity. ”Once upon a time, the afternoon newspaper was the Internet of its day, Mr. Baughman said, giving afternoon baseball scores and stock market reports in a quick turnaround. It was the more lucrative slot as a result.

It doesn't give you a lot of confidence that anyone knows what's coming next, does it? You can read the entire story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/business/media/28link.html?_r=1&sq=the%20capital%20times&st=cse&oref=slogin&scp=1&pagewanted=print

The African part of Nicholas Wade's story

Our April selection, Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade, was concerned solely with the small group of people who crossed the Red Sea from Africa and populated the rest of the world. At our last meeting, some of us wondered what was going on with the ones who stayed behind in Africa. Their story is suggested in the current (April 24) issue of The Economist:

A study carried out under the auspices of the Genographic Project used the mitochondrial DNA of more than 600 living Africans to show how genetic diversity has developed in Africa. The team paid particular attention to samples taken from the Khoi and San people of southern Africa. Comparing Khoi and San DNA with that of other Africans shows that the first big split in Homo sapiens happened shortly after the species emerged, 200,000 years ago. Most people now alive are on one side of that split. Most Khoi and San are on the other. The consortium's analysis of which DNA “matrilines” are found where suggests that for much of its history the species was divided into two isolated populations, one in eastern Africa and one in the south of the continent, that were defined by this split. However, few other matrilineal splits from the first 100,000 years of the species's history have survived to the present day.

This suggests the early human population was tiny. Homo sapiens may have come close to extinction. Indeed, there may, at one point, have been as few as 2,000 people left to carry humanity forward.

This shrinkage coincides with a period of prolonged drought in eastern Africa, and was probably caused by it. The end of the drought, however, was followed by the appearance of many new matrilines that survive to the present day. The researchers estimate that by 60,000-70,000 years ago, the period when the exodus that populated the rest of the world happened, as many as 40 such groups were flourishing in Africa—though that migration involved only two of these groups.

The African matrilines, however, seem to have remained isolated from each other for tens of millennia after the exodus. It was not until 40,000 years ago that they began to re-establish conjugal relations, possibly as a result of the technological revolution of the Late Stone Age, which yielded new and more finely crafted tools. Only the bushmen seem to have missed out on this panmictic party. They were left alone until a few hundred years ago, when their homelands were invaded from the north by other Africans and from the south by Europeans. Panmixis thus came full circle. And that particular party was certainly not a happy one.

The Capital Times rides into the sunset

Today The Capital Times rolled off the presses for the last time.

Oh, they will say it's not really gone, that the voice of The Capital Times will still be heard. But it will be a ghost of itself, living on in name, but no longer master of anyone's destiny, least of all its own. Henceforth, it will be an arm of the Capital Newspapers media conglomerate and the money that formerly went for newsprint and salaries of news-gatherers will be available for an endless series of redesigned web sites, each trying to fill some niche that some 56 year old publisher believes will surely appeal to 26 year old consumers. But the truth is it has been heard less and less anyway. Once it thundered and Washington heard the echo. Lately it's hardly heard beyond East Washington Avenue.

When I joined The Capital Times in 1971, circulation stood at about 40,000. No one knew it, of course, but the paper was at an apogee; there was nowhere to go but down. Evjue had just died in June. Miles McMillan had moved into the publisher's office, Elliott Maraniss became Executive Editor, Dave Zweifel was named City Editor and I got Dave's old desk behind the post, in front of Whitney Gould and next to Jeff Smoller. I think it may have been Aldric Ravell's old desk too, though he was gone by then. The glorious Watergate years followed, but so did the newspaper strike in 1977. If nothing else, the strike revealed that Madison was nowhere near as liberal as it was reputed to be and nowhere near as liberal as The Capital Times needed it to be. Few cancelled their subscriptions. Professors sent their students to apply for jobs as scabs. It was a cold winter.

So there's an element of inevitability in this last edition.

The Times it is a'changin'. I'm just sad to see it go.

The rediscovery of Wendell Berry

Like the rest of the environmental world, The Drinking & Reading Society is finally catching up with Wendell Berry, although some of us have read a lot of his stuff and some have read none. Blame it on the slow food movement and the new concern about what we’re eating. Our book for May is his collection of essays What Are People For? In these selections, I think you can see why he has angered just about every segment of the population – right, left and apolitical:

The supermarkets are crammed with food and the productivity of American agriculture is, at present, enormous. But this is a productivity based on the ruin both of the producers and the source of production. What Are People For? (1985)

I am making a plea for diversity not only because diversity exists and is pleasant, but also because it is necessary and we need more of it. We need a greater variety of species of plants and animals, of human skills and methods, so that the use may be fitted ever more sensitively and elegantly to the place. Our places, in short, are asking us questions, some of them urgent questions, and we do not have the answers. An Argument for Diversity (1988)

The mess that surrounds us must be understood not just as a problem in itself, but also as a symptom of a greater and graver problem: the centralization of our economy, the gathering of the productive property and power into fewer and fewer hands, and the consequent destruction everywhere of the local economies of household, neighborhood and community. Waste (1989)

The industrial eater is one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical – in short, a victim. The Pleasures of Eating (1989)

The newfound popularity of Berry’s essays is an example of the principle that while science and technology may change our lives, the arts and humanities change our values. In company with Alice Waters, Michael Pollan and others, the rehabilitation of Wendell Berry is a harbinger of social change on the march. Come Senators, Congressmen, please heed the call.

Here's the best part

Gospel of evolution

I am sure it's very comforting to explain evolution as a clever act of God, but there is also great value in being able to hold two apparently contradictory notions (God+evolution) in your head at the same time because it acknowledges the obvious fact that we don't know everything there is to know about God, evolution or anything else. But in any case, here's the information about this guy.

NEWS RELEASE
Evolutionary Evangelist coming to Madison

Madison, WI - Rev. Michael Dowd, author of the bold new book “Thank God for Evolution!”, is bringing his cosmic gospel to Madison in May.

Rev. Dowd, an ordained Christian minister and former Baptist and United Church of Christ pastor, and his wife Connie Barlow, an acclaimed science writer and author of "Evolution Extended" (MIT Press) and “The Ghosts of Evolution” (Basic Books), are packing pews and leaving audiences across America awestruck with their programs that present evolution as theology, not theory.

Dowd's breakthrough book, "Thank God for Evolution!" and the couple's mobile ministry propose a marriage of science and religion that is being embraced by those on both sides of the debate over the origins of the Universe and evolution of life on Earth, including five Nobel Prize-winning scientists and a long list of religious leaders.

Grounded in mainstream science and preached with pentecostal fervor, the former anti-evolution fundamentalist turned evolutionary evangelist shares a “God’s eye view” of everything from microbiology to supernovas in provocative program that is inspiring evolutionary epiphanies among believers and non-believers alike and liberating religious literalists left, right and center.

Wednesday, May 7, 2008 7:00 PM - Free Workshop Covenant Presbyterian Church 326 South Segoe Road
Thursday, May 8, 2008 7:00 PM - Free Workshop Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative 426 West Gilman Street