The Princeton Guide to Evolution is a collection of 107 articles on various aspect of evolution. The editors felt they should address the obvious conflict between evolution/science and religion. There are at least five different approaches they could have taken.
- An atheist perspective on the incompatibility of evolution/science and religion. Richard Dawkins or Jerry Coyne would be good choices.
- An atheist perspective on the compatibility of science and religion (the accommodationist view). Michael Ruse or Nick Matzke are obvious choices.
- A theist view of the incompatibility of evolution and religion. Phillip Johnson could have explained this view but so could a number of other creationists.
- A theist explanation of the compatibility of evolution/science as long as they stick to their proper magisteria. Francis Collins, Ken Miller, and several other religious scientists could present their case.
- The editors could have published four articles representing the main viewpoints or commissioned a single article that would have covered all the angles.
The big advantage of an atheist perspective is that it fairly represents the views of a majority of evolutionary biologists. Having a theist write the article would not be as fair. I think we can all agree that option #5 is by far the best choice.
Before reading any further, take a minute to decide what you would do if you were the editors of The Princeton Guide to Evolution.
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One of the problems in most debates and discussions in the problem of definitions. It's common for two opponents to end up talking past one another because they don't agree on what they are arguing about. That's why an important component of critical thinking is to define your terms so that everyone knows what you are defending (or attacking).
But there's more. If you are going to be a good critical thinker, then you have to be aware of other points of view. If there are other, equally valid, definitions out there then you MUST acknowledge them and incorporate them into your argument. You can't, for example, just make up your own definition of words like "noncoding," "junk," or "function," and declare that you are right. Since you know that there are other definitions out there, you are obliged to show why YOUR definition is the only correct one. That's a crucial part of the debate.
If you don't even know that there are other valid definitions then you are not an expert and you should not be pretending to be an authority on the subject. This is why I object to people who argue against the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology without understanding what Francis Crick actually said.
Let's look at a video of Elliott Sober lecturing on "Some Questions for Atheists to Think About." He begins by asking the members of his audience whether they are atheists or agnostics. Apparently, most members of the audience are atheists and ony a few are agnostics.
Next, he defines his terms ...
Theism = God exists
Atheism = God does not exist
Agnosticism = We don't know whether God exists
The lecture is about something called "evidentialism." Elliott Sober claims that the following proposition is true ...
For any proposition, you should believe it only if you have evidence that it is true and you should disbelieve it only if you have evidence that it is false.
He then goes on to show that we can never have evidence that God does not exist. Therefore, "If 'God exists' is untestable, you ought not to be an atheist. You should be an agnostic."
He suggests that all the atheists in the audience should become agnostics because of evidentialism. If I had been in the audience, I would have pointed out that MY definition of atheist is that an atheist is someone who doesn't believe in god(s). My definition is such a common definition that it's part of the Wikipedia article on Atheism. Since I do not need "evidence" to not believe in something, I'll remain an atheist, thank-you very much. My position is perfectly consistent with the proposition about evidentialism.
Here's the problem. Elliott Sober is a prominent philosopher. Doesn't he realize that his argument relies entirely on his definition of "atheism"? Doesn't he realize that his argument is completely useless if an atheist is simply someone who doesn't buy into the God delusion? This sort of thing makes me livid and it makes me wonder whether there's something seriously wrong with modern philosophy.1
1. I am not suggesting that Sober's definition is wrong. He should not be ignoring the fact that many members of his audience don't agree with his definition and that's why they are atheists.
A few days ago, I asked the following questions, Is the "Modern Synthesis" effectively dead?, and What do they mean when they say they want to extend the Modern Synthesis?. The point I was trying to make was that there are many different views on evolutionary theory and it's often difficult to figure out which version of evolutionary theory someone is defending.
For example, which version of evolutionary theory is compatible with the "selfish gene" as a metaphor for evolution? Or for adaptation? Which version of the "Modern Synthesis" is being attacked in the book edited by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd Müller? Is it the version defended by Ernst Mayr? Does it incorporate Neutral Theory and random genetic drift?
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Here are the questions on yesterday's exam for students in my course. Students will be graded on their explanations and not so much on the actual answer they give. The idea is to reward critical thinking and that includes the ability to see both sides of an issue and recognize problems with whatever side you choose to defend.
- Assuming that the technology is safe and effective, should we, or should we not, have laws forbidding the cloning of humans?
- What is the best definition of a "gene"? Explain why you choose that definition and give examples of possible "genes" that don’t fit your definition.
- Elliott Sober is a highly respected philosopher. He explains that theistic evolution is a reasonable hypothesis because God could easily cause mutations to occur in a way that scientists would not be able to detect. In other words, a specific, directed, mutation would be indistinguishable from a random mutation. Thus, it would appear that evolution was an entirely naturalistic process while, in fact, its direction was being guided by God. Do you think this is a reasonable argument in support of theistic evolution? Why or why not?
- In his book, The Myth of Junk DNA, Jonathan Wells writes.
According to intelligent design (ID), it is possible to infer from evidence in nature that some features of the world, and of living things, are better explained by an intelligent cause than by unguided natural processes.
What sorts of positive arguments do ID proponents use to support this inference from evidence in nature? Are they effective?
Peter Arzt-Grabner2. Korinther1. Auflage 2014
583 Seiten Leinen
ISBN 978-3-525-51002-5
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
Papyrologische Kommentare zum Neuen Testament - Band 004120,00 €Bei Abnahme der Reihe: 110,00 €BuchPDF eBook99,99 €
2013 Leipzig eHumanities Seminar ScheduleAbstract Corpus Linguistics Tools for Sahidic Coptic Amir Zeldes1 & Caroline T. Schroeder2
1 Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2 University of the Pacific Coptic, the language of Christian Egypt in the Hellenistic era of the first millennium, offers both a chance and a challenge for digital humanities research in the 21st century. On the one hand, there are comparatively few digital resources available: no publically available automatic tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, or corpus search software, nor any guidelines on how to undertake these tasks (we are aware of only one, incomplete and unreleased effort to tag Coptic in Orlandi 2004; our work bases partly on Orlandi’s lexical resources, kindly made available to us). On the other hand, an explosion of work in digital humanities (standards like TEI/EpiDoc for manuscript digitization, cf. Cayless et al. 2009 or digital infrastructure like Perseus, cf. Crane et al. 2009, to name just two) has led to a wide range of resources one can draw on in bringing Coptic to the level of technology now enjoyed e.g. by Greek and Latin. To seize these opportunities, we have endeavored to develop comprehensive, freely available tools for the automatic linguistic processing of Coptic manuscripts that can be corrected manually and made available online. We present the first publically available tokenizer (lexicon and rule-based) for the main Sahidic dialect of Coptic, as well as two corresponding part-of-speech tagging schemes and training models, fine and coarse grained. Tokenization for Coptic is a non-trivial task, since manuscripts are written in scriptio continua (without spaces), but Coptic word forms are linguistically segmented at two levels: both into minimal morphemes, and into larger word forms, corresponding to nominal or verbal complexes, including related prepositions and articles (nouns) and multiple concatenated conjugation bases with subject/object pronouns and allomorphy (verbs). Our tokenizer currently addresses only the first task, and assumes that a human annotator has separated the scriptio continua into the coarse word forms. Example (1) shows morpheme borders added by the tokenizer, represented by pipe symbols. In some cases, letters can stand for two sounds that belong to different morphemes. In such cases the tokenizer saves the original diplomatic form and also outputs an alternative orthography which allows morphemes to be represented separately. This is shown in (2) for the letter 
theta), which stands for a /t/ followed by /h/ coming from different morphemes (individual letters are transliterated in angle brackets). In words of Greek origin, theta, phi and chi should be retained, while coincidental combinations of multiple morphemes leading to these letters must be disentangled. Etc. at Abstract
Today is the day of the final exam in my course on critical thinking and scientific misconceptions.
I thought my students would get a kick out of this photo.
I'm certain that all regular Sandwalk readers know what I'm talking about but just in case there's any new readers who don't get it, here's a short clip from the movie.1
1. Note to IDiots and other creationists ... Gandalf is a fictional character, he doesn't exist. There are many fictional characters who appear to be powerful and menacing but that's only in stories and myths.
