Dr Chuck Pearson

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August 30, 2005

This might be the single most profound three-paragraph blog post I have ever read.

Posted by Chuck at 08:19 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

August 28, 2005

The "personal relationship" motif in contemporary Christianity

As a general rule, when Mark Noll writes something, I read it. He's the guy who wrote the text The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which was my primary motivation to engage in scholarship as a Christian and to commit to the academic life. His articles are generally insightful and show a heart that is dedicated to serving Christ in his thinking.

So, when the Christianity Today weblog pointed me towards an article of Noll's from the Wall Street Journal's op/ed page that questioned one of the dominant themes of American Christianity, asking if believers need to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, I was taken a bit aback, and I don't think I've recovered yet. Especially from this paragraph:

So it is, as well, in a modern America marked by the increasing demands of work, strain between the generations, political acrimony, international uncertainty and peripatetic lifestyles. Into such a culture a Christian message stressing the possibility of an enduring--and often less demanding--personal relationship with the loving Creator of the universe sounds very appealing. But does such an adaptation retain enough of historic Christianity's other dimension? Or does dinner with a perfect stranger fit a little too conveniently into our lives?

"Historic Christianity's other dimension" involves a God of extreme holiness, one that makes an impeccable demand of holiness and responsibility on our part. And I don't think that's an unfair level of expectation to place on us (so long as we remember the meaning of Jesus' death and resurrection, and we meet those expectations not out of adherence to a law, but out of gratitude for the sacrifice of the cross).

But de-emphasizing the personal relationship? I mean, on the one hand, I see the benefit. That's always been a part of my struggle to get my hands around Christianity - everybody else around me has always seemed closer to God than I am, and the more rational of an adult I have become, the less I've felt strong conviction about God speaking to me as much as I have spoken to God. I can't be the only person who feels this way. If there is a stronger sense in which I am supposed to "be still and know that he is God" instead of expecting to hear something back from Him, then that wouldn't just be easier to take, it might be easier for others of my ilk to take as well.

Still, that's been so ingrained in my path through evangelical Christendom - and in the lives of most of us in the American churches - that I don't know how you de-emphasize that, even if we're really supposed to. That's part of what appeals to us when we first hear about the faith. Yeah, it's easy to imagine a God that is in charge of the whole universe, has steered it towards His ends, has set Justice and Mercy themselves into motion. But what really breaks the brain is the idea that this very same God is interested in each one of us as individual people - and the reason for the sacrifice of the cross was that concern for us as individual people.

Noll's concern came out of a book that completely de-emphasized other aspects of the Christian life to focus on that personal relationship. I've not had occassion to read that book, so I can't speak to the issue directly - but is the existence of such a line of a thinking a good thing for Christianity overall?

Posted by Chuck at 03:27 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 20, 2005

Highly shallow formatting question

As I reset the blog on this new domain goodness, I changed the tagline from the venerable "Somebody tell me what this should be" to my favorite quotation:

"Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Now, I've had a couple of odd browser issues, so question: can you actually SEE all that up there? Or does it cut off after the first line?

(Of course, I'd like it better if it actually formatted in the post.)

Posted by Chuck at 07:32 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

How to send me running into the waiting arms of the Discovery Institute, part II

Why, yes, the only newspaper I read is the Washington Post.

Why, do you ask?

Because even when I get all bent out of shape with the direction that their editoral content takes, they can put out some awfully good journalism. And, in so doing, take what had been a raging he-said-she-said controversy out of the realm of he-said-she-said and into the realm of fact.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg made a fateful decision a year ago.

As editor of the hitherto obscure Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Sternberg decided to publish a paper making the case for "intelligent design," a controversial theory that holds that the machinery of life is so complex as to require the hand -- subtle or not -- of an intelligent creator.

Within hours of publication, senior scientists at the Smithsonian Institution -- which has helped fund and run the journal -- lashed out at Sternberg as a shoddy scientist and a closet Bible thumper...

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which was established to protect federal employees from reprisals, examined e-mail traffic from these scientists and noted that "retaliation came in many forms...misinformation was disseminated through the Smithsonian Institution and to outside sources. The allegations against you were later determined to be false."

"The rumor mill became so infected," James McVay, the principal legal adviser in the Office of Special Counsel, wrote to Sternberg, "that one of your colleagues had to circulate [your résumé] simply to dispel the rumor that you were not a scientist..."

McVay, who is a political appointee of the Bush administration, acknowledged in the report that a fuller response from the Smithsonian might have tempered his conclusions. As Sternberg is not a Smithsonian employee -- the National Institutes of Health pays his salary -- the special counsel lacks the power to impose a legal remedy.

So, here's the story: We have a small-fry journal editor who makes the ultimate decision, after following a peer-review process, to publish a article friendly to intelligent design. The guy is then harrassed, rumors are spread about him, every single association the guy takes is questioned to high heaven and investigated as clues to "what he really believes", and hounded out of effectiveness in his current job, possibly hounded out of a scientific career in the process.

Yeah, that really makes me believe that the Smithsonian (or any government scientific body, for that matter) practices unbiased science.

Unfortunately, just about everything else you read online about Sternberg (or is it von Sternberg? what about decent reporting on what we call the guy? I've seen it both ways on the Google searches) enters very rapidly into the realm of he-said-he-said. The closest you get to half-decent reporting is this David Klinghoffer piece from the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal site, and while I'm quite frankly sympathetic to the biases woven into the piece, they're still biases and they don't give you much insight into other plausible explanations as to why Sternberg would claim to be so comprehensively harassed as to make his position untenable. The closest I got on the Technorati searches to a decent criticism of the WashPo piece was this blog post which speaks far more clearly to the blogger's internal issues than to the actual question of whether a practicing scientist who followed his best instincts in a publication decision was persecuted for that.

In other words, I'm not generally happy with the level of discussion that's going on here, with people being more wrapped up in their political or religious biases than the facts at hand. Big surprise there, hrm?

With all that said, let me make three points:

• Since the publication of the paper itself was a watershed (and surely in no way related to the fact that its author turns out to be a Discovery Institute bigwig), the offending paper, "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories" by Stephen Meyer, gets the full treatment on the Discovery Institute's website. It's worth a read if you can stomach the scientific writing. Quite frankly, given the way the paper is put together - putting a good many eggs into this "Cambrian explosion" basket that argues that there is a point in history where the number of species on the planet, and therefore the amount of biological information on the planet, exploded - and given the background of the guy writing it, I probably wouldn't have accepted the paper, were I in Sternberg's shoes, unless I was absolutely intent on causing trouble. The guy simply HAD to know how rank and file biologists, let alone influential evolutionary biologists, would respond to it.
  


• Another blogger makes the point that by and large, all the reporting on the scientific issues here isn't any good. The problem is, of course, that none of the scientists in question here is capable of writing a straight explanatory paragraph. Let's throw out two key examples of this, first from the introduction to the Meyer article itself:

  In a recent volume of the Vienna Series in a Theoretical Biology (2003), Gerd B. Muller and Stuart Newman argue that what they call the “origination of organismal form” remains an unsolved problem. In making this claim, Muller and Newman (2003:3-10) distinguish two distinct issues, namely, (1) the causes of form generation in the individual organism during embryological development and (2) the causes responsible for the production of novel organismal forms in the first place during the history of life. To distinguish the latter case (phylogeny) from the former (ontogeny), Muller and Newman use the term “origination” to designate the causal processes by which biological form first arose during the evolution of life. They insist that “the molecular mechanisms that bring about biological form in modern day embryos should not be confused” with the causes responsible for the origin (or “origination”) of novel biological forms during the history of life (p.3). They further argue that we know more about the causes of ontogenesis, due to advances in molecular biology, molecular genetics and developmental biology, than we do about the causes of phylogenesis--the ultimate origination of new biological forms during the remote past.

  Now, from Sternberg's own website, explaining why he really doesn't fall into the Darwinist or Intelligent Design camps:

  I subscribe to a school of biological thought often termed “process structuralism.” Process or biological structuralism is concerned with understanding the formal, generative rules underlying organic forms, and focuses on the system architectures of organisms and their interrelationships. Structuralist analysis is generally ahistorical, systems-oriented, and non-evolutionary (not anti-evolutionary). Both creationism and neo-Darwinism are, in contrast, emphatically historicist with one positing extreme polyphyly (de novo creation of species) and the other radical monophyly (common descent). Since the structuralist perspective runs somewhat perpendicular to the origins debate, creationists and evolutionists tend to see it as inimical to their positions. The truth is structuralism has little at stake in the origins issue, leaving a person like myself free to dialogue with all parties. For this reason, I frequently discourse with ultra-Darwinians, macromutationists, self-organization theorists, complexity theorists, intelligent design advocates, theistic evolutionists, and young-earth creationists without necessarily agreeing with any of their views.

  And your response, like mine, is probably: what the blue blazes? Yes, if I was willing to read determinedly and patiently, I could make head or tail out of all of that. But why? Why can't Sternberg just say "Look, I'm interested in how organisms are put together, and their similarities and differences. I don't have any interest in the origins stories, either the evolution or the creation ones, and quite frankly I think you do the scientific process more harm that good by obsessing on them." (Because if he'd say that, I just might find myself agreeing with him.)

  Now, if anybody can figure out Meyer's opening paragraph and what it has to do with anything, let me know.
  



• So, Sternberg can't write for beans, Meyer writes even worse, and I don't think Sternberg did himself any favors accepting Meyer's paper for publication. None of this should take away from the fact that I now officially never want to work for the government doing science. Ever. The simple fact that Sternberg was subject to this level of harassment over an editorial decision - over an ever-loving scientific opinion - frightens me to high heaven, way more than a certain religious body coming into my school frightens me.

  Maybe that's a statement of my own bias, I don't know.

I'll freely take any other takes. I fear this post is more scattered than usual, and I'm still trying to read the relevant documents and understand what's gone down.

UPDATE: This is why Jeff is the king:

Jeff: Fascinating stuff. I think the distinction between 'structuralist' and 'historicist' is a fascinating one...
ShorterPearson: ...and one that the culprits in general need to put into words of one syllable.
ShorterPearson: Because the populace at large doesn't understand it.
Jeff: Yea, there is that. Hiding behind rhetorical smoke is a symptom of a heated debate landscape.
Jeff: Indeed.
ShorterPearson: Buddy, you're about to get yourself quoted. :-)

And, indeed, he has.

Posted by Chuck at 02:21 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 14, 2005

Two notes on general mental health issues

(Categorized under "foolishness" because I can't think of a better place to put it; horribly out of date, but because I've been trying to figure out how to post again on this thing, this is my OWN attempt to get momentum again.)

From those of us who have fought through being completely unable to write anything for a blog that we have kept, Eric Burns gets a biscuit. A tasty, tasty biscuit.

And, from those of us who are still fighting our tendencies towards shutting the whole world out and telling them to go away, make sure you read this Inside Higher Ed piece. And, if required, act on it. "Share the burden, tell a friend, and stay away from Vigilantes of Love records..."

Posted by Chuck at 04:25 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Oh, wow.

When you get a MT blog of your very own, do you know how difficult it is to figure out where all the edit tools are? That requires some measure of skillz.

I'm updating this thing again now.

Posted by Chuck at 04:23 PM | TrackBack

August 05, 2005

How to send me running into the waiting arms of the Discovery Institute

Unbridled arrogance should just about do it. That's pretty much what that Washington Post editorial on "intelligent design" and its newfound presidential acclaim boils down to.

Now, I'm not going to speak to the quality of the W's comments on this debate; last I checked, he wasn't exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, and probably hasn't been reading Thomas Kuhn's philosophies on scientific paradigms. But the Post's response might be even more clueless and maddening.

I'm going to go sentence-by-sentence through the key paragraph, by my reading:

Of course the president is right that, in the context of a philosophical debate, it would be appropriate to discuss both sides of an issue before arriving at a conclusion. In the context of a religious discussion, it would also be very interesting to ponder whether the human race exists on Earth for a purpose or merely by accident.

This is reasonable enough, although I hate how the reasonable point is spun to have the look and feel of a subtle dig at Christian theology. "Yeah, discussion is nice. Let's discuss this: Is there really a point to your existence, as a human being?" People answer that question for themselves daily, as a faith decision. Even that very question would be offensive enough to some people.

I'm not opposed to offending people, mind - but if you're interested in being fair-minded with what you're about to say, you'd probably choose a different example.

But the proponents of intelligent design are not content with participating in a philosophical or religious debate. They want their theory to be accepted as science and to be taught in ninth-grade biology classes, alongside the theory of evolution.

This is the standard line of argument that starts to raise my hackles. "ID people are subversive. They want in the classrooms. They want to undermine the good and proper science with their pseudoscientific ideas." And I'm not going to sit here and say that there isn't a group of people out there who aren't subversive - but to say that every last person who struggles theologically with the implications of the evolutionary synthesis is out to have creationism taught on an equal scientific level as evolution is to paint with too broad a brush.

The whole Intelligent Design movement is doing one thing right now very well. It is criticizing the evolutionary synthesis. It points out details that are not satisfying about the current theory, and it acknowledges that men are not going to very easily let go of the idea that they were put here by a power more intelligent than themselves. I don't see the problem putting this in front of young thinkers.

In fact, I think we insult their intelligence by not saying anything about it; by so thoroughly separating the religious thought from the scientific thought in the classroom, we may think that we're being respectful to kids who have a different belief system than the majority, but it's not like high school students haven't figured out that some people believe one way and others believe another.

Bottom line: telling students that intelligent design ideas are out there does not equate to putting those ideas on the same scientific plane as the evolutionary synthesis. (And those people who do want to do such things, I have different issues with them.)

For that, there is no basis whatsoever: The nature of the "evidence" for the theory of evolution is so overwhelming, and so powerful, that it informs all of modern biology. To pretend that the existence of evolution is somehow still an open question, or that it is one of several equally valid theories, is to misunderstand the intellectual and scientific history of the past century.

And this is where I make like my grandfather and say "Just a cotton pickin' second."

To pretend that ANY scientific question isn't, at some level, an open question, is to misunderstand the entire history of science. The modern advances of computing and personal technology would have been impossible if the atomic theory of John Dalton had been considered not been considered open for debate in 1900. The ideas of Einstein that are so widely celebrated today were considered in large part heretical when first proposed. For crying out loud, if everything that was understood about motion through 2000 years of history had not been considered an open question by Galileo, would simple words like acceleration and force be understood today?

Simply put, to put evolution on a pedestal that is beyond any question and critique is to fall into a trap that stagnates proper scientific thought. The best thinkers are those that can rigorously filter through all ideas, not just those ideas that are most comfortable or satisfying to you.

None of this is to suggest that I don't want to teach evolution. Frankly, given the fact that there are no other viable scientific descriptions working right now (again: Intelligent Design right now works best as a criticism, not an alternate scientific theory), we pretty much have to. But I'd hope it would be taught for what it is - the scientific idea that best explains the available evidence right now. As "overwhelming and powerful" as that evidence appears to be, all it takes is the right piece of evidence that doesn't agree for the whole thing to tumble like a house of cards, and sends everybody struggling to build something totally new.

Besides, I'd argue that the Post's obsessing about how awesome the science behind evolution is misses the real point:

We are in favor of basic scientific education that reports the consensus of scientists on questions of scientific fact while carefully avoiding disputed theological or philosophical claims. But really, what does it matter what the president thinks about evolution or how it should be taught? There are no national standards that require evolution, or any other subject, to be taught in a certain way in the public schools. Nor should there be. (The most common argument for a national standard is that math in Oregon isn't different from math in New York. But scientific facts and mathematical relations are also the same in Kiev, which does not mean we need binding international standards in education.)

That evolution is a national issue is almost entirely the result of mistakes by the Supreme Court. It has first set itself up as the regulator of all local governmental practices that have religious overtones. Compounding the error, it has decided to try to figure out the motivations of all those practices. So a local school board's failure to teach evolution becomes, literally, a federal case: a violation of the Court's version of the separation of church and state.

...those who wanted more federal control over education should have been more careful what they wished for, because they just might have gotten it.

Posted by Chuck at 08:28 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack