Blue Collar Scientist

Yesterday the press was full of discussion of the (UK) National Archives releasing a bunch of previously-classified government information on UFOs. One thing that characterizes most of the press accounts, which are numerous, is a total unwillingness to provide a link to these newly-released resources.

Well, I’m not that way. Here you go!

I recommend that you get what you want promptly - some sources are saying the material will only be available for free download for the first month. I’m slurping the stuff down now, and let me tell you, the site is running slow.

First glance through the materials that I’ve gotten already, and some of the stuff the reporters have found buried in the archives, is pretty interesting.

One person reports long-term psychic contact with green space aliens since they were a child. One of these aliens was apparently assassinated by a rival group of aliens just before he was going to contact the UK government in 1981.

There’s the guy who thought that a UFO which used decoys to escape detection (”Look! It’s a duck, ummm, on fire, with a, ummm, kazoo, and - just look over there, dammit!”). The UFO did not carry humans or aliens, but fallen angels.

In other words, much of the material isn’t merely phenomenological - that is, reports of sightings of things that are flying which the observer can’t identify. Instead, many of the reports are bound up with other false beliefs, such as angels and psychic powers; and with conspiracy theories like rival alien political factions willing to use violence to get their way.

The first impressions that I get are - why was this stuff ever classified in the first place? Maybe that’s justified for some of the material in the archives - I’ve not gone through it all - but the stuff I have seen is clearly just new-age religious nonsense combined with an unhealthy dose of the dramatic, cribbed from the cheapest clichés that science fiction has to offer. A good portion of the material is no different from anything you’ll find at your local woo-promoting bookstore.

The Anchorage Daily News reports that Richard Wagner, the 46 years old youth pastor at Kenai Bible Church in Kenai, Alaska, has been arrested on charges that he molested a young boy.

Wagner has worked as a volunteer at the nondenominational Kenai Bible Church for about two or three years, teaching Sunday school to the children, said Vance Wonser, the church’s pastor. Church officials learned of the allegations Thursday night, he said.

He was charged with Second Degree Sexual Assault of a Minor. Reports are that at least two children spent the night unsupervised at his house, and that one of them accused him of molestation.

“As soon as we were made aware of the allegations, we immediately removed him from contact with the youth,” [Pastor Vance] Wonser said. “The one allegation that was made was not anything that occurred at the church … it was on his own time and away from the church.”

It is interesting that the church pastor, when responding to these allegations (whether true or not), takes pains to emphasize that if this was done, it was done on his own time, and not on church grounds. I’m puzzled what I’m supposed to think of this. What I’m actually thinking is almost certainly not what the pastor would want: that ethics and morals are the things you do when you are alone and nobody else can see, that a church’s moral teaching should be taken beyond the doors of the church, and that the pastor’s remarks seem to presuppose that this church has failed at that enterprise. The veritable storm of sanctimonious claims that religion provides morality seems, from this perspective, to be yet another a load of baloney.

I’ve said a number of times here that Christian creationists, whether ID or otherwise, who deny science are religious extremists. At various times, I’ve pointed out Ken Miller, the Clergy Letter Project (which has 11,000 religious leaders affirming evolution), and other examples to support my claim that creationists are minority radicals.

(Of course one reason that I promote this meme over and over is to marginalize creationists and assist any split that may develop between them and more mainstream religionists. But don’t tell anyone. I wouldn’t want to be accused of doing framing wrong, or anything.)

Today there’s another example of how radical creationism is a fringe view. Reasons To Believe is an non-denominational Christian think tank, and they take Christian apologetics pretty seriously. They are also among the more thoughtful such groups. Some time back, they posted some tentative comments on Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which opens today:

Many people have asked Reasons to Believe (RTB) to make a statement about the movie. For the sake of integrity, we cannot offer an assessment until our scholar team has had a chance to view the movie.

RTB views the scientific enterprise as a vital component of carrying out one of God’s first recorded commands to Adam and Eve. Without the understanding derived from scientific investigation, it would be impossible to take care of this home God provided for us.

I’m quoting selectively. They have some questionable material up there, but on the whole these are reasonable people that you could talk to. They understand their own shortcomings, and they understand the value of science.

Now some of the Reasons To Believe leaders have seen the movie, and sources say they have released this statement:

After previewing the promotional materials provided by the movie’s marketers, we were concerned that the movie took an adversarial approach to the scientific community. A number of RTB scholars and staff attended a prerelease screening in Los Angeles recently and confirmed that EXPELLED definitely does take such an approach…. EXPELLED implicitly argues that the scientific community deems certain questions off-limits, particularly any question about the legitimacy of neo-Darwinian evolution. The movie further argues that academia, the media, and the courts all conspire as “thought police” to oppress any and all dissent from the party line.

Clearly some oppression and discrimination have occurred, but the experience of RTB scholars and many of their contacts refutes the movie’s premise that the scientific community systemically and unilaterally fosters these injustices.

They end with a policy decision:

Therefore, we ask all chapter members and volunteers to refrain from endorsing EXPELLED in any official way.

Reaction to this has been favorable:

Kudos to them. This is outstanding.

And again:

indeed. this is an excellent response!

is this on the web anywhere? I would like to direct others to read this.

And yet again:

Yes. It is posted prominently on the front page of the RTB site at www.reasons.org.

I am very proud of them for this response.

I could go on - the favorable reaction to Reasons To Believe’s stance against the movie continues.

The point of all this? Expelled isn’t even appealing to all of its expected core audience. Expelled is so extremist that it has split their demographic.

Hat tip to Panda’s Thumb.

Ok, folks, click you way over to And Say We Did and read about the Orthodox Christians in Russia who have holed up in an underground shelter to await the end of the world.

The problem? Authorities are trying to get them to leave, because mudslides threaten to bury the, uhh, already technically buried shelter - you know what I’m getting at - people will die. Including four children.

Check it out.

Over on Panda’s Thumb, there is a posting about the case of Nancey Murphy, a professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary. Dr. Murphy, an ordained minister in the Church of the Bretheren, opposes intelligent design, and she wrote an article critical of creationist Philip Johnson’s book, Darwin on Trial. She has said that intelligent design creationism is not only poor theology, but “so stupid, I don’t want to give them my time.”

For her trouble, Philip Johnson called up a trustee of Fuller and reportedly tried to have her fired.

“His tactic has always been to fight dirty when anyone attacks his ideas,” (Murphy) said. “For a long time afterward, I would tell reporters I don’t want to comment, and I don’t want you to say I don’t want to comment. I’m tired of being careful.”

According to the story, Johnson denies it:

Johnson denied he had tried to get Murphy fired. He said that he had spoken with a former trustee of the seminary who was himself upset with Murphy but that he was not responsible for any action taken against her.

Yeah, right. Both the trustee and Johnson were pissed off at Murphey but they didn’t talk about being pissed off at Murphy and nothing they said could have encouraged such persecution. Makes perfect sense.

Anyway, if you read down through the comments, you come to a very interesting list of people that creationists have harassed, gotten fired, threatened, or killed because of their understanding of evolution. (Yes, creationists have killed someone over evolution.) It kind of puts the lie to creationist Johnson’s further remarks:

“It’s the Darwinists who hold the power in academia and who threaten the professional status and livelihoods of anyone who disagrees,” Johnson said. “They feel to teach anything but their orthodoxy is an act of professional treason.”

Apparently, Johnson is having some trouble telling the truth. Here’s a working list of people fired, compromised, or killed by creationist nutbags (no claim is made that this list is complete, and I’d like to see some citations to sources, so maybe I’ll work on that for a future post):

2 professors fired, Bitterman (SW CC Iowa) and Bolyanatz (Wheaton)

1 persecuted unmercifully Richard Colling (Olivet)

1 attempted firing Murphy (Fuller Theological by Phillip Johnson IDist)

1 successful death threats, assaults harrasment Gwen Pearson (UT Permian)

1 state official fired Chris Comer (Texas)

1 assault, fired from dept. Chair Paul Mirecki (U. of Kansas)

1 killed, Rudi Boa, Biomedical Student (Scotland)

Death Threats Eric Pianka UT Austin and the Texas Academy of Science engineered by a hostile, bizarre IDist named Bill Dembski

Death Threats Michael Korn, fugitive from justice, towards the UC Boulder biology department and miscellaneous evolutionary biologists.

Will Expelled be talking about these cases? Right. Didn’t think so.

Edit to add: Link for Richard Colling.

Writerdd over on Skepchick, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite bloggers, has some remarks about non-fundamentalist religion:

In comments on another post a few weeks ago, I questioned the idea of criticizing Christians for “cherry picking the Bible” — that is, ignoring the parts they find abhorrent and clinging to the parts they find inspirational…. Ignoring parts of the Bible or Koran should not be ridiculed. It is a good thing that leads away from fanatical violence. We should be encouraging this type of behavior.

I agree, utterly and completely.

The fact is, sensible people will read parts of the Bible and correctly discern that it isn’t a science textbook. In a recent TV interview on the evolution wars, I said that a person reading the first four chapters of Genesis as a story that tells us about human nature - our curiosity, our response to authority, etc - has done a sensible thing. Not as sensible, perhaps, as studying psychology, but they’ve at least read the text and learned from it the things that I think the author was trying to teach. Somewhat more discerning people might read the same text and recognize that it is also a slap in the face to prevailing political and religious institutions in contemporary Babylon - and if so, they’ve done an excellent job of interpreting the text.

Readers who decide those chapters are an anatomy lesson and come to the conclusion that men have fewer ribs than women¹ have made a fundamental error about the scope of the text. As have those who believe that it is a textbook for science and/or history. If someone reads the first four chapters of Genesis and still thinks that men and women have the same number of ribs, does it make them an infidel,² or somehow not-really-Christian³?

Ummm, no, it makes them more sensible than their peers.

In doing the science/skepticism educational activities I’m neck-deep in, I have to communicate with forthrightly religious people all the time. The sensible ones, who lack fundamentalist impulses, have no difficulty grappling with the reality that is demonstrated by experiment. And lest we body-check them for nevertheless believing in god, let’s keep in mind that all but the superheroes among us believe something that isn’t true⁴.

Dialogues often develop between fundamentalists and less strident religionists in the class discussions that I lead, and my conclusion from these experiences is that I want more of the latter in my world. They are simply much less prone - no, let’s say, not prone at all - to condemning me to a violent end for “believing in” the Big Bang Theory, and shutting out everything I have to say simply because my beliefs aren’t the same as theirs. What’s disturbing about that is my “beliefs” are never aired - they just assume the person they are dealing with is a minion of Satan. As writerdd notes, there is a big gulf in social adjustment between these two populations.

And that is why I distinguish between religious extremists, and everyone else. (Well, that, and because the term marginalizes extremists.)

1. This is a belief I have actually encountered in the wild. [↩]
2. From the perspective of fundamentalist Christians. [↩]
3. From the perspective of an atheist or adherent to another religion. [↩]
4. That’s actually the most humbling thing about doing science - finding out that your view of reality is seriously messed up, over and over again. [↩]