Lying for Jesus?

The blogs are ringing with ridicule. Mark Mathis, duplicitous producer of the much hyped film Expelled, shot himself in the foot so spectacularly that the phrase might have been invented for him. Goals don't come more own than this. How is it possible that a man who makes his living from partisan propaganda could hand so stunning a propaganda coup to his opponents? Hand it to them on a plate, so ignominiously and so UNNECESSARILY.

In writing this for RichardDawkins.net, I have assumed that our readers will already be familiar with the facts of the case, from Pharyngula and the more than 40 other blogs that have picked up the story and are listed at http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2008/03/pz_myers_expelled_gains_sainth.php....

Now, to the Good Friday Fiasco itself, Mathis' extraordinary and costly lapse of judgment.... In the course of this film, Mathis tricked a number of scientists, including PZ Myers and me, into taking prominent parts in the film, and both of us are handsomely thanked in the closing credits.

Seemingly oblivious to the irony, Mathis instructed some uniformed goon to evict Myers while he was standing in line with his family to enter the theatre, and threaten him with arrest if he didn't immediately leave the premises. Did it not occur to Mathis -- what would occur any normally polite and reasonable person -- that Myers, having played a leading role in the film, might have been welcomed as an honoured guest to watch it? Or, more cynically, did he not know that PZ is one of the country's most popular bloggers, with a notoriously caustic wit, perfectly placed to set the whole internet roaring with delighted and mocking laughter? I long ago realised that Mathis was deceitful. I didn't know he was a bungling incompetent.....

Dawkin’s pathological circularity is breathtaking. I have not seen the film in question but Dawkin’s rationalizations are instructive on his overall failure to introspect:

“The alleged association between Darwinism and Nazism is harped on for what seems like hours, and it is quite simply an outrage. We are supposed to believe that Hitler was influenced by Darwin. Hitler was ignorant and bonkers enough for his hideous mind to have imbibed some sort of garbled misunderstanding of Darwin (along with his very ungarbled understanding of the anti-semitism of Martin Luther, and of his own never-renounced Roman Catholic religion) but it is hardly Darwin’s fault if he did. My own view, frequently expressed (for example in the The Selfish Gene and especially in the title chapter of A Devil’s Chaplain) is that there are two reasons why we need to take Darwinian natural selection seriously. Firstly, it is the most important element in the explanation for our own existence and that of all life. Secondly, natural selection is a good object lesson in how NOT to organize a society. As I have often said before, as a scientist I am a passionate Darwinian. But as a citizen and a human being, I want to construct a society which is about as un-Darwinian as we can make it. I approve of looking after the poor (very un-Darwinian). I approve of universal medical care (very un-Darwinian). It is one of the classic philosophical fallacies to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. “

If people misunderstand Darwin, its not Dawkins fault. If people misunderstand Christianity, well. . . too bad for Christian advocates. In fact the misunderstanding speaks volumes as to how human beings love to judge and take those judgements to the end of the line. Hmm . . . how might we remedy this judgment problem?

Dawkins caveats about Darwin hardly justify his relentless misinterpretations of Christianity and other religions, yet he seems plenty touchy of he or Darwin are misinterpreted.

What’s your opinion of what is said here?:

“Evolution by natural selection in the classical sense—unguided, with no transcendent agent to direct mutations along “certain beneficial lines,” as Asa Gray put it, hasn’t a clue about how to explain religion—or mathematics, or philosophy, or our ability to do science, for that matter.

Evolution might or might not be able to account for the complexity of our brains, per se, but it’s mute and powerless to “explain” the higher products of our brains, which are of course by far the most complex objects yet known to us anywhere in the universe.

Many agnostic and atheist philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists have stated this much in frank terms. Our ability to do higher mathematics, for example, was utterly irrelevant to our survival in evolutionary terms—our ancestors needed to know absolutely nothing about topology or fractals, manifolds or tensors, even differential calculus, in order to outwit mammoths and saber-tooth tigers.

Nor did they need to know the profoundly shocking fact (from the point of view of naturalism) that mathematics of the kinds just mentioned is incredibly powerful for understanding the external world—a fact that just cries out for a deeper explanation.

Pinker, Dawkins, Dennett and company are flying into the face of the facts on this one. We can not only do mathematics, but our mathematics actually matches the subtlest details of the external world. How does this make any sense at all, if we aren’t in a very real sense created in the image of God, the divine mathematician (as Kepler, Galileo, and Copernicus regarded God) who also created the external world?” ~ Ted Davis 3/24/08 Professor of the History of Science Web page: http://home.messiah.edu/~tdavis/

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