Science-and-Religion Links Dump

The big science-and-religion issue of the week has been Expelled, which The AV Club gave an F, writing:

Perhaps what Bruce Chapman of ID advocacy group The Discovery Institute says about Darwinists applies best to Expelled: "People who don't have an argument are reduced to throwing sand in your eyes." If only this movie could be washed away as easily.

I'm amazed at the number of otherwise sensible people who have paid to see this cinematic turd. Not only does it sound about as appealing as oral surgery, but I'm not willing to see one nickel of my beer money go to the dishonest swine who made it. My impression from reviews and other posts is that more thought has gone into debunking it, via sites like Expelled Exposed than went into making it.

Speaking of dreadful "Christian" "entertainment," if you're not reading Fred Clark's page-by-page analysis of Left Behind, you really ought to be. The latest installment covers pages 426-430, as the characters prepare for the climactic showdown with the Antichrist:

So let's recap, according to Bruce: 1. The Antichrist can control the minds of anyone who isn't born again; 2. Buck isn't born again; 3. Buck is about to meet with the Antichrist.

Given all that, Bruce decides the best course of action is to tell Buck all about his super-secret anti-Antichrist guerrilla squad and to provide him a list of the founding members. Genius.

Clark's Left Behind series is an essential public service (read the whole thing), not only because it's smart and funny and points out the desperately bad writing, but because he attacks the books on their own turf. He explains why they're not just bad books in a literary sense, but bad in a theological sense as well. That's a much more useful critique to have out there then yet another Godless academic denouncing them for poor literary quality.

On my pet subject of atheist organization, Arts & Letters Daily points to a New York magazine article about atheist churches:

The quartet of best-selling authors who have emerged to write the gospel of New Atheism--Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Dawkins (the Four Horsemen, as they are now known)--has succeeded in mainstreaming atheism in a nation that is still overwhelmingly religious and, in the process, catalyzed a reexamination of atheistic raison d'être. But for some atheist foot soldiers, this current groundswell is just a consciousness-raising stop on the evolutionary train, the atheist equivalent of the Stonewall riots. For these people, the Four Horsemen have only started the journey. Atheism's great awakening is in need of a doctrine. "People perceive us as only rejecting things," says Ken Bronstein, the president of a local group called New York City Atheists. "Everybody wants to know, 'Okay, you're an atheist, now what?' "

So some atheists are taking seriously the idea that atheism needs to stand for things, like evolution and ethics, not just against things, like God. The most successful movements in history, after all--Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc.--all have creeds, cathedrals, schools, hierarchies, rituals, money, clerics, and some version of a heavenly afterlife. Churches fill needs, goes the argument--they inculcate ethics, give meaning, build communities. "Science and reason are important," says Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain of Harvard University. "But science and reason won't visit you in the hospital."

Hallelujah! Somebody gets it. More like this, please.

Finally, John Wilkins points to a debate between Daniel Dennett and Lord Robert Winston on the question "Resolved: religion is the greatest threat to scientific progress and rationality today." From the summary, it sounds like it was civil (you would expect nothing less from the British), and the nays won, narrowly.

And that's it for this week.