Neo-geocentrism

A big part of the claim that Christianity is at war with science is geocentrism, the belief that the earth is at the center of the universe. As readers of this blog are aware, this issue is almost entirely misunderstood: in the ancient/medieval cosmology, the closer you were to the center of the universe, the less privileged and esteemed you were. This is precisely why hell is even closer to the center of the universe than the surface of the earth, and why Dante placed Satan at the exact center of hell (and thus of the entire universe), immobilized in a field of ice.

The misunderstanding is that since the premoderns thought the earth was at the literal center of the universe, they must also have thought it was the metaphorical center as well. It confuses geocentrism with anthropocentrism. But this can only be maintained by completely ignoring their Aristotelian cosmology, according to which the universe was arranged in concentric spheres, with God on the outside as the prime mover. The furthest place in the universe from God, therefore -- the furthest place in a sphere from what is outside the sphere --, is at its center. Of course, this ignores the fact that in Christian theology God is not merely transcendent to the universe but omnipresent within it as well; nevertheless, the premoderns maintained that the closer you were to the center, the less valuable you were. This has been amply demonstrated by Dennis Danielson in his essays "Copernicus and the Tale of the Pale Blue Dot", "The Great Copernican Cliché", and chapter 6 in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion; Humphrey wrote an enlightening post on this issue as well.

But I find it interesting that when Christians are told that their worldview requires a belief that conflicts with science, some respond by embracing the belief in question. Thus, there are geocentric ministries today which argue that being a Christian requires belief in a geocentric universe -- although they prefer the term "geocentricity" as it doesn't have as much historical baggage. The Geocentricity website is the official site of the Association for Biblical Astronomy, "biblical astronomy" meaning Aristotelian/Ptolemaic astronomy. The second link takes you to a collection of the publications of their journal.

There's another site that bothers me more. When I was in (Protestant) seminary, my favorite theology professor used a book for one of his classes written by a Protestant-turned-Catholic entitled, Not by Faith Alone. I didn't take that class, but I did plan to someday study this book, maybe together with Alister McGrath's Iustitia Dei, and see where I came out. However, the author of Not by Faith Alone has also published a two volume work entitled Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right, volume 1 of which deals with "the scientific case for geocentrism", thus absolving me of any requirement to take him seriously. (Update: Just to be clear, I'm not tying the Catholic doctrine of justification to geocentrism. I'm only saying that particular author is not credible.)

The Geocentric Bible is essentially an online book arguing for geocentrism; he says he first heard of this view from a young-earth creationist ministry. This leads to another point: most young-earth ministries have embraced a neo-geocentrism in order to account for the problem of starlight travel time. They argue that the universe we know is actually a white hole -- a black hole so crunched that light begins to escape via quantum tunnelling -- with our galaxy (the Milky Way) at its center. They call it "galacto-centrism" since the earth is only approximately at the universe's center. I critiqued the scientific case for this claim here. For now I'd just like to point out that in arguing for this view, they appeal to the idea that if we're important to God, we should expect to find ourselves at the center of the universe. In other words, they accept the conflation of geocentrism with anthropocentrism, a conflation which is not only unhistorical, but which was invented in order to mock and ridicule Christianity. This strikes me as an extremely unwise concession: when fighting the spirit of the age, you shouldn't let it define the terms of the debate. Moreover, the fact that they have to appeal to geocentrism in order to defend their belief in a young earth makes the latter even less plausible than it already was.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)


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Some Interesting Stuff over the Weekend

If you haven't already, take a look at Tim O'Neill's detailed review of Charles Freeman's Closing of the Western Mind over at Armarium Magnum. Tim largely agrees with my own assessment of a couple of years ago which also gave rise to some correspondence with Charles Freeman himself. Freeman has a book out from Yale in September called A New History of Early Christianity which they have kindly promised to send me a review copy of. Perhaps this book will plug some of the gaps that Tim identifies in Closing of the Western Mind.

Some of the papers are noting that Richard Dawkins is subsidising a summer camp for atheists' kids. That's fine by me and I hope they have a good time. My only query is, why is it OK for Dawkins to give money to this while attacking the Templeton Foundation for using its resources to spread its own message? Can you imagine the fuss if Templeton started running camps for kids instead of journalists? As always, a foolish religious person was on hand to criticise Dawkins but I can't imagine many people will have any objections.

Finally, I am pleased to announce that God's Philosophers has gone to print. The team at Icon have been working extremely hard and the resulting book looks great. I only hope that the writing lives up to the quality of the production. Publication is on schedule for early August.

Lawrence Krauss and Stalin

Lawrence Krauss has written an article on the accommodation controversy for the Wall Street Journal which is almost sweet in its naïveté. He takes J.B.S. Haldane (1892 – 1964) as his example of a man of reason whose science led him to accept atheism in everyday life. Krauss notes,

J.B.S. Haldane, an evolutionary biologist and a founder of population genetics, understood that science is by necessity an atheistic discipline. As Haldane so aptly described it, one cannot proceed with the process of scientific discovery if one assumes a "god, angel, or devil" will interfere with one's experiments. God is, of necessity, irrelevant in science. Faced with the remarkable success of science to explain the workings of the physical world, many, indeed probably most, scientists understandably react as Haldane did. Namely, they extrapolate the atheism of science to a more general atheism.

But there is a problem. Krauss appears to be ignorant of where reason led Haldane. Because Haldane didn’t just become an atheist, he became a lifelong supporter of one of the greatest monsters of history – Josef Stalin. Right at the moment that Haldane was founding population genetics, his hero was depopulating the Ukraine. And when Stalin put the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov on trial for challenging the notorious Trofim Lysenko, Haldane refused to utter a word of condemnation.

I very much doubt that Lawrence Krauss approves of this behaviour. But I have to ask why he thinks holding up Haldane as a paragon of rationality is going to advance his argument that scientists ought to behave like atheists. Haldane was a very great scientist. He was also an apologist for mass-murder and an ardent follower of one of the most inhumane doctrines ever to come from the mind of man. If that is where reason gets you, I don’t think we need worry about scientists being a bit irrational in their spare time.



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Accommodating Coyne

What should we say to Jerry Coyne, P.Z. Myers and others who claim evolution and Christianity are incompatible? Coyne has been arguing that organisations that promote evolution, like the National Centre for Science Education (“NCSE”) should be neutral on the issue and say nothing to promote accommodationism. This reminds me of the pleas of creationists that schools should be neutral on the issue whether Darwinism or intelligent design are true.

By the way, ‘accommodationism’ is the term now used for the argument that there is no reason why a Christian cannot be a Darwinist. Christian Darwinists, like me and Ken Miller, obviously believe that this is the case. So do some atheists like Michael Ruse. Jerry Coyne disagrees, as he is entitled to do. But he goes further and says that educational and scientific organisations should stop using accommodationist arguments in their campaign to promote Darwinism on the grounds that he and some other atheists disagree with the philosophical foundations of accommodationism.

There are two issues here. The first is whether or not Coyne is correct to say that evolution and Christianity are irreconcilable. The second is whether we should stop using accommodationist arguments to promote Darwinism and combat creationism. I’ll deal with the second issue in this post.

It would be a poor reason for abandoning accommodationist arguments because Jerry Coyne says we ought to. And abandoning them because P.Z. Myers says we should is a downright bad idea. They have whinged that the NCSE does not reflect their dissenting views. Again, they sound just like the Discovery Institute complaining that Intelligent Design is never given a fair crack of the whip. If accommodationism appears to be a useful tactic for promoting Darwinism, we should use it. We should not fail to use it because extremist atheists or fundamentalist creationists think that we should not.

When a dispute comes down to whether something is permissible because it is useful or forbidden because it is doctrinally impure, it is the fanatic who refuses to compromise on the grounds of utility. I think accommodationism is true. But even if I didn’t, I’d recognise that my own views were unhelpful for the campaign against creationism. I’d also note that some Christians are very good scientists and so if there is an incompatibility, it probably doesn’t matter much in practice. So I’d respect the opinion of those who disagree with me and help promote Darwinism in some other way. Only if I was more interested in campaigning for atheism than evolution would I take the line of Coyne and Myers that accommodationism should be removed from the anti-creationist arsenal.



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Some Reflections on Comment is Free

Following on from below, as commentators here have kindly pointed out, I’ve been given a kicking by Jerry Coyne, Ophelia Benson and PZ Myers. But I’m grateful for the discovery of Butterflies and Wheels which looks among the best of the neo atheist blogs, both in terms of articles and commentators.

One thing I’ve learnt is never descend to PZ Myers’s level. It will only get you into trouble. Another thing is that replying to some comments annoys the people to whom you don’t reply. But since its impossible to respond to everyone, I suppose that is unavoidable.

Finally, it is nice to see my name on the Guardian website’s front page and nice that over six hundred and fifty comments have accrued to my article (so don't click on that link unless you have a broadband connection). I’m very grateful to the editors for using my piece and hopefully I’ll be able to contribute another one soon.



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A Science Writer in Trouble

Simon Singh is an author of popular science books. I remember I enjoyed Fermat’s Last Theorem over a decade ago and he has had success with various other books in the meantime. Recently, however, he has landed in hot water.

It started with an article in the Guardian to promote a book of his called Trick or Treatment. This is one of the attempts by well-meaning journalists to debunk alternative medicine – efforts which have no effect on its popularity whatsoever. In the Guardian article, Singh described as ‘bogus’ some of the claims made for a treatment called chiropracy. ‘Bogus’ is a label I would attach to almost all forms of alternative medicine, although I’m generally quite tolerant of people who choose to use it. I won’t bore you with what chiropractors do or what they think they can cure. The point is that Singh was sued for libel by an organisation called the British Chiropractic Association (“BCA”). The Guardian offered to settle out of court but Singh does not want to see science dictated to by the libel laws.

Singh and I probably don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. But his case is important for all of us who want to see science based on the free investigation of nature and not decided by judges. You’d hope that the BCA would be laughed out of court, but alas they have already won the first round. Mr Justice Eady (who last year decided the Mosley case against the News of the World) has ruled that the word ‘bogus’ suggests that chiropractors are deliberately dishonest rather than just wrong. This makes Singh’s case much harder to win.

I think this matters because if the BCA succeed, it would restrict valid criticism of people whom you think are wrong if they are acting in good faith. So, Singh deserves support and the fact that the neo atheists are on his side does not detract from that. My microscopic show of solidarity was to include the word ‘bogus’ in my own Guardian article. Perhaps if that became a meme then it might even help (while ruining a perfectly good word).

There is much more on Singh’s website and here’s a good article on the background from Nick Cohen.



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Me on Comment is Free

The Guardian's Comment is Free has plumbed new depths with an article by some bloke called James Hannam on the conflict between science and religion. Apparently, Hannam thinks the conflict is a myth, but luckily plenty of better-informed commentators are on hand to set him straight.



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Sumption on the Hundred Years war

A small treat for medievalists: an interview with Jonathan Sumption QC. Sumption is an extremely expensive barrister much favoured by the UK Government. He represented them at the Hutton Inquiry into the death of David Kelly after the Iraq War. He also successfully fought of a small army of private investors who were trying to sue the Government over the collapse of Railtrack.

However, even if he’s taken on some questionable cases in his legal career, he is an excellent narrative historian. The Albigensian Crusade is a masterpiece of prose and research. I have not read any of the massive volumes of his history of the Hundred Years War, but I am looking forward to having the leisure time to do so. The release of the latest volume, Divided Houses, is the occasion for the interview linked above. One story from Sumption’s research was completely charming:

I once read in the Public Record Office the records of an enquiry into the alleged treachery of an English garrison commander accused of taking a bribe to surrender his castle. The case ended in his acquittal. Some weeks later I found in the French archives the actual receipt he had given for the bribe.

There is nothing like handling the primary sources and no way to get closer to history.



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Science Vs Religion - The Battle of Human Origins

"The Caucasian Race is characterized by a naturally fair skin, susceptible of every tint; hair fine, long and curling, and of various colors. The skull is large and oval, and its anterior portion full and elevated. The face is small in proportion to the head, of an oval form, with well-proportioned features. . . . This race is distinguished for the facility with which it attains the highest intellectual endowments. . . . The spontaneous fertility of [the Caucasus] has rendered it the hive of many nations, which extending their migrations in every direction, have peopled the finest portions of the earth, and given birth to its fairest inhabitants. . . ."

The Negroes are proverbially fond of their amusements, in which they engage with great exuberance of spirit; and a day of toil is with them no bar to a night of revelry. Like most other barbarous nations their institutions are not infrequently characterized by superstition and cruelty. They appear to be fond of warlike enterprises, and are not deficient in personal courage; but, once overcome, they yield to their destiny, and accommodate themselves with amazing facility to every change of circumstance.

Samuel George Morton

In the early nineteenth century science, not religion was becoming the highest authority on matters of racial origins. Edinburgh University became the centre of a new science which aimed to clearly define the races of the world and establish which ones were inferior. This new discipline was based on phrenology, the ‘science’ of determining the character of people by looking at the shape of their skulls. The phrenologists claimed that the brain was the organ of the mind and consisted of individual faculties which controlled personality, thought and moral action. The strength of these different features could be gathered by feeling the protuberances on the skill and each race manifested its particular traits through the shape of the cranium.

Followers of this technique quickly assembled a large collection of skulls from around the world and began making pronouncements such as that the ‘Hindoos’ had been conquered by Britain because of their ‘small organs of destructiveness and combativeness’. Scientific racism was born and quickly spawned a number of societies including the Anthropological Society of London which brought meetings to order with a mace topped by a ‘negro’s head gnawing a human thigh bone’ and preached that the white man’s duty was to enslave, control and denigrate inferior races.

A debate had been raging in the early decades of the 19th century between the monogenists, those who argued for one single origin for racial descent, and the polygenists, those who believed that whites and blacks were separate biological species. The polygenist thesis was taken up by slave traders and owners to argue that blacks were an intermediate species somewhere between apes and humans. This argument was also conducted between theologians, those who pointed to a common descent from Adam and Eve, and those who pointed to biblical passages arguing that humans had multiple origins. Of the two theories, the monogenist theory had the most support from the Bible due to the Genesis narrative, although some would still argue that despite the common origin, the darker races had fallen into sin, degenerated and lost civilisation. With the rise in the authority of science, the monogenist position became increasingly embattled as influential biologists began to argue for separate origins. In the earlier view derived from the work of Buffon each plant and animal represented a different species (each could be seen as having been created by a separate act of God). The species constituted archetypes from which variation would be permitted, therefore the various races of man were variations of the same species. This view began to crumble because of the introduction of the concept of ‘type’ which categorised human races according to mental and physical traits and arranged them hierarchically (from inferior to superior) with established differences between them. It followed from this that they had been created separately.

In the antebellum period the US became home to a flourishing, southern planter-friendly anthropology which emphasised a scientifically grounded pluralist view of human origins. One of the chief proponents was the Swiss-American Louis Agassiz who argued that different races had been created for specific climactic zones. Agassiz had found blacks disgusting on his encounters with them in the U.S. In 1850, in the slave city of Charleston, he affirmed that the human races were different species - which, like all other species, did not adapt or evolve. When his position came into conflict with his fellow Christians who insisted on descent from Adam and Eve, Agassiz argued for the independence between science and religion.

Another famous contributor was the Philadelphia physician Samuel George Morton, who managed to assemble the largest collection of crania in the United States. Raised a Quaker, Morton retained his religious faith and viewed God as having fitted the peoples of the world to their circumstances of climate and locality. In doing so the dark races had been ‘retarded’ and therefore the deity’s wise purposes included giving the white race an unquestionable superiority over all the nations. As Morton wrote, demonstrating a heady mixture of divine intent, racial superiority and nationalism:

‘Was it not for this same mental superiority, these happy climes which we now inhabit would yet be possessed by the wild and untutored Indian, and that soil which now rejoices the hearts of millions of freeman would yet be overrun by lawless tribe of contending barbarians'.

Yet Morton was all too aware that the less enlightened religious faithful would not be so enamoured with this. In a letter to he wrote that:

‘I avow my belief in a plurality of origins for the human species..when I took this ground four years ago, (and with some misgivings, not because I doubted the truth of my opinions, but because they would lead to some controversy with the clergy)’

Armed with an impressive array of data, Morton and the other polygenists proclaimed that the monogensits were deluding themselves. It seemed improbable that all races could have changed their skin colour and their mental and physical characteristics through environmental factors of degeneration from the time of the deluge to the rise of Egyptian civilisation. With polygenism established those who sought to justify the suppression of non-whites eagerly embraced the new science.

In 1839 Morton published the infamous ‘Crania Americana’ which divided humanity neatly into four separate races, Europeans, Asians, Native Americans and Africans. While the Caucasian race was ‘distinguished for the facility with which it attains the highest intellectual endowments’ and had ‘peopled the finest portions of the earth, and given birth to its fairest inhabitants’, the Africans were ‘joyous, flexible, and indolent’ and ‘not infrequently characterized by superstition and cruelty’; they had ‘little invention’ but ‘a great talent for music’. The Native Americans fared little better, being classified by Morton as:

‘averse to cultivation, and slow in acquiring knowledge; restless, revengeful, and fond of war.... crafty, sensual, ungrateful, obstinate and unfeeling, and much of their affection for their children may be traced to purely selfish motives... their mental faculties, from infancy to old age, present a continued childhood’.

He did have some good things to say about the Asian race but considered them to be best ‘compared to the monkey race, whose attention is perpetually changing from one object to another’

Another key figure was a man trained by Morton, Josiah Nott a physician from Alabama. Nott desperately believed that Negroes and White were separate species and promulgated this theory in leaflets, publications and letters in an attempt to fend off the abolitionist movement. He began earnestly producing treatises on anthropology, a subject he referred to as ‘niggerology’. One of these included ‘Types of Mankind’, a book which argued through ‘qualitative data’ and tables that the Negroes were like children who needed direction and better off enslaved. He wrote:

'Dr Morton, quoted in another chapter, has proven that the Negro races possess about nine cubic inches less of brain that the Teuton; and, unless there were really some facts in history, something beyond bare hypothesis, to teach us how these deficient inches could be artificially added, it would seem that the Negroes in Africa must remain substantially in that same benighted state wherein Nature has placed them'

The religious rhetoric of the abolitionists which was marshalled against these 'scientific' observations irritated Nott. In a letter to Morton he said:

‘You have not gone far enough...to blow up all the chronologies although it may not be very politic to say so in these days of Christian intolerance. The Bible, if of divine origin, was clearly not intended to include in it’s code of beautiful morals, the whole range of natural science, for it knows no knowledge beyond human knowledge of the day and its great ends did not require any other – even the septeaguit account is far too short to take in the events of Egypt, to say nothing of geological formations which are now placed before the beginning of Moses’.

Neither Morton, Agassiz or Nott were atheists and they all maintained their belief in a divine creation. Their writings reveal them to be free-thinking Christians seeking to put dogma aside in the search for scientific ‘truth’. However their theory of origins increasingly came into bitter conflict with the views of theologians who were stating that all people were descended from Adam and Eve. Yet the biblical view of monogenist origins appeared antiquated next to the ‘American School’ of anthropologists. As Nott wrote:

‘My main object...is to cut loose the natural history of mankind from the Bible and place it upon it’s own foundation where it may remain without collision or molestation....The scientific facts...cannot be explained in my humble opinion, without doing violence to the mosaic account’.

Some years later he became more direct in his approach, stating that:

‘The unity of races...can only be deduced from forced construction of the Old and New Testaments...where is the evidence of the descent of black and red races from Adam, so clear as to upset the whole physical history of man?’

In response to this, Monogenesists such as M. M. Noah reminded their readers that:

‘God that made man in his own image gave to the Indians an origin and parentage like unto the rest of the great family of mankind, the work of his own almighty hand’

His contemporary Dr Forry concluded his review of natural history stating that:

‘On the one hand he has the conclusions of Dr Morton...and, on the other, he has the authoritative declaration of Moses that all human kind has descended from a single pair’

Another monogenesist, James Southall wrote that ‘there must be a trial of strength between the Bible and science’

And yet the pluralist view of origins would be dealt a fatal blow, not by scripture, but by a new theory from the British naturalist Charles Darwin. This was not fatal to scientific racism which became stronger than ever in the late 19th century and reformulated in Darwinian terms (Ernst Haeckel for example argued that the human genus had evolved into nine separate species). The common ancestry of mankind had been given greater plausibility but the battle would rage on.

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All's Fair in Love and Politics

The talk is of assassins, coups, bloodbaths and extinction. Surprisingly though, no one has been hurt. But political reporters do so love their hyperbole and there is no doubt that the crisis shaking the British Government is severe and will probably proof terminal at the general election due within a year. We are assured that the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, will cling to power with all his might. But actually this is not true. Within a year, the British people can throw him out of 10 Downing Street and there is not a thing he can do about it. That’s the wonder of democratic politics. Unlike a dictator, Brown is toast (there goes another colourful metaphor) but no one will have to kill him. That’s not something we should take for granted, even as voter turnout continues to decline.

I clearly remember in 1992 watching the most powerful man in the world, a victor in war, being turfed out on the say-so of American voters. But the older President Bush spoke then, if I recall, of “the great mystery of democracy.” No one had to shoot him to force him out of office.

So, as we watch the histrionics of Westminster, we can rest assured that compared to the method of removing leaders followed through most of human history, it’s all a bit of fun (as Peter Snow would say).

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