frankhagan.com

Well, well, well … it looks like Goldman Sach’s doesn’t really want the TARP bailout loans after all:

Is it any coincidence that on the same day that the Obama Administration announces restrictions on executive pay for companies taking government bailout money, Goldman Sachs announced that it is pulling out of the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program?

The investment bank, says CFO David Viniar, is chafing under the restrictions that came attached to its $10 billion loan. The new pay rules, which could be applied to existing TARP participants in a later iteration, may have been the last straw. “We would like to get out from under that,” said Viniar. Goldman intends to pay back the loan by the end of the year.

From the Heritage Foundation’s The Foundry blog.

The Foundry labels this an “unintended consequence”. Usually that phrase is reserved for negative results that were not anticipated. For background, the pay cap limits executive pay to a mere half a million dollars, a sum that evidently doesn’t warm the hearts of the men who have destroyed our financial system, run their companies into the ground, and deserve to be sued by their stockholders rather than garner bonuses.

I think its about the greatest thing the Obama Administration has come up with. Not that they knew what they were doing; it is “unintended” that some would refuse the TARP money. The Administration has obviously have been trying their hardest to stuff money into any pocket that will take it. But the salary cap will have the effect of appealing to the entrenched short-sighted, damn-the-rest-of-you attitude of the country’s chief executives and boards of directors. And the less of these … excuse me here … bastards that take our money to bail them out of their own mistakes the better.

Faith, Politics

I’m experimenting with moving my religious posts to a new blog, A Conservative Christian Considers …, where I can present my musings on faith and practice in a more dedicated space. I’m always a bit uncomfortable with mixing my political beliefs up with my religious pronouncements, especially since my political beliefs diverge from my fellow conservative Christians (I tend to me more libertarian in outlook).

Today, I posted a new article examining the differing standards of proof used by science and us religious folks, especially in the creation/evolution debate. Standard of Proof attempts to show that while Christians engage in debates with honest intent, they are often using the familiar legal standards of proof rather than the scientific method’s standard.

Culture, Faith, Science

One of the historical arguments against the existence of God was that something cannot come from nothing, and the idea of God creating living matter from non-living matter (“dust of the earth”) was “illogical”. The problem with “logical” arguments is that they also presume that all the facts are in play when often they are not. The problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know.

That logical argument isn’t heard much anymore because science now postulates just that, that life arose from inanimate matter. Sort of “something from nothing”. The problem of not knowing what we don’t know is alive and active here, especially when we try to define “life” from a scientific perspective. Our categories and definitions in this area are always subject to change as we learn more. It is often only in retrospect that we realize what we didn’t know previously, and what was seemingly illogical is suddenly made logical.

In the debate between creationists and evolutionists the origin of life is often ceded as either beyond the realm of science or not within the purview of evolution. But that isn’t true; science can look at the very beginning of life because we have the ability to look at natural processes and the intelligence to understand how it could have happened. The problem is often one of defining exactly what we mean by “life”.

Mike Haubrich at Clashing Culture discusses the definition problem:

Abiogenesis [the rise of life] is not limited by nature to a single event, it is limited by our ability to clearly define life. The more that investigators learn about early replicators, the more they understand how complex the definition has to be.

He does a great job of discussing this issue. He was inspired by a Panda’s Thumb article by Nick Matzke that clarifies what we do know about the origin of life:

All known life can be traced back to a single common ancestor which, compared to what most people think of as present-day life (i.e. plants and animals), was relatively simple – microscopic, single-celled, perhaps as complex as an average bacterium or perhaps somewhat less so.

Because a lot of creationists, and sometimes others, are a bit thick in the head on correctly understanding this point, let me bash away at some common misconceptions. The phrase “single common ancestor” does not, and never has for people who were paying close attention, referred to a literal single individual organism. Think about a phylogenetic tree with humans and chimps on the branches. When you trace the tree back to the “common ancestor” of chimps and humans, does that node represent a literal single individual? No, of course not! Everyone (well, everyone paying attention) realizes that that ancestral node represents a species or population sharing genes in a gene pool. Ditto for all of the other ancestral nodes in a phylogenetic tree, including the Last Common Ancestor of known life.

More good stuff there.

The Christian shouldn’t have a problem understanding that we may not know what we don’t know; faith itself is defined in ways that show there are things we don’t understand. But the Christian need not stop there; while there are things that will only be revealed to us when we depart from the physical world, God has opened all of creation to our inquiry, without restriction.

Both creationists and evolutionists often claim that the origin of life is outside the purview of evolution. But I think that takes too narrow a view of evolution, decoupling it from the rest of the sciences and our understanding of the universe. Evolution is not a stand-alone theory, wholly independent from the rest of the sciences; it forms a link or two in the chain of our understanding of the universe. That understanding requires many different disciplines, including astronomy, biology, cosmology, and geology to name just a few.

Because the rise of life undeniably happened in the physical world, it is within the scope of science to understand it. Saying science doesn’t have all the answers begs the question; it should be rephrased to add the all important qualifier at the end: “Science doesn’t have all the answers yet.

We know we don’t know some things. When we learn those things, we may find other gaps in our knowledge we haven’t anticipated. In life, in science, and in faith, we often don’t know what we don’t know. Yet.

Faith, Politics, Science

For quite some time I’ve been trying to formulate how to explain how Creationists and ID thinkers express themselves in a very different way from those engaged in the sciences, and how these differences seem almost like the Christian and the scientist are speaking different languages. I don’t have a complete explanation yet, but in thinking about it, I see that it happens both in methods of debate and in differing standards of proof. Here, I’ll talk about the differences in methods of debate, and why both sides often don’t understand the other.

On the political front, where most Creationists and ID believers stand, the basic method of debate is the Socratic Method:

The Socratic method is a negative method of hypotheses elimination, in that better hypotheses are found by steadily identifying and eliminating those which lead to contradictions. The method of Socrates is a search for the underlying hypotheses, assumptions, or axioms, which may subconsciously shape one’s opinion, and to make them the subject of scrutiny, to determine their consistency with other beliefs. The basic form is a series of questions formulated as tests of logic and fact intended to help a person or group discover their beliefs about some topic, exploring the definitions or logoi (singular logos), seeking to characterize the general characteristics shared by various particular instances.

Compare this “negative method” of questioning to “drill down” to a core with the scientific method that forms the basis of science instruction (and therefore, the standard that scientists adhere to):

Scientific method refers to the body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. It is based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.

Although procedures vary from one field of inquiry to another, identifiable features distinguish scientific inquiry from other methodologies of knowledge. Scientific researchers propose hypotheses as explanations of phenomena, and design experimental studies to test these hypotheses. These steps must be repeatable in order to dependably predict any future results. Theories that encompass wider domains of inquiry may bind many hypotheses together in a coherent structure. This in turn may help form new hypotheses or place groups of hypotheses into context.

The science-trained mind cannot comprehend why the socratic questioner asks a few questions and draws a conclusion; that’s not how it is supposed to work. For the science-trained mind, you assemble the facts and work forward; in the Socratic method, you drill down to what you already know.

In debate, these two forms of thinking “speak past each other”. The audience hears the version they are more familiar with, and bizarre results ensue … “bizarre” to the other side, at least.

Its not a well formed argument yet, and needs some work. But like my nascent theory about differing standards of proof, where the scientist is looking for testable results and the faithful are looking for a looser “legal standard” (such as “preponderance of the evidence”), it can help explain the confusion in the arguments themselves.

Faith, Politics, Science

While the comments show that the strident, irrational atheists don’t like it, PvM at Panda’s Thumb provides an excellent commentary on theistic evolution and how it is not at odds with Christian faith:

One of the major processes of evolution is variation and natural selection. Those familiar with natural selection will remember that Darwin appealed to artificial selection to make his case for natural selection. In other words, God can at least in principle affect the process of natural selection. Second of all, the process of variation. Much confusion exists over the meaning of the term random here. Sufficient to say that random seems to be misunderstood by many an ID Creationist who misinterprets it as ‘unguided’, or ‘guided by a pure chance process’ when in fact logic dictates that random refers to the immediate relevance of said variation in the environment. Furthermore, science has shown how variation can become biased by the same processes of evolution, as long as the source of this variation in variation is genetic. In other words, natural selection can select for sources of variation which are more likely to be successful.

PvM notes that the process of evolution is more akin to other natural processes we attribute to God. I have no problem reconciling the language of the Bible when it says God can measure the volume of water in the oceans in the hollow of His hand (Isa 40:12) with the scientific principle that a hand large enough to hold all the water couldn’t possibly scoop it up (displacement, etc.) We don’t quarrel with the scientific theory that a rainbow is due to light refraction through water vapor in the air, while at the same time believing that it is also God’s promise that He won’t send another flood to destroy all humanity (Ge 9:13).

In fact, it is easy to argue that God’s Creation was set in motion to eventually result in a form of life which could gain spirituality and a soul and thus become aware of His existence. Furthermore, even if God had set in motion a Darwinian process, He could still have intervened, as I have explained above, without violating natural law. In other words, the process would still appear purely Darwinian and at the same time would be guided.

Here, PvM gets to the essence of the modern Christian’s thought about creation and evolution. The reaction against evolution in the US has been primarily a fundamentalist reaction, spurred on by unscientific statements in textbooks that evolution “must be” random and must be “without direction”. I think these statements are from the atheist’s heart, rather than from the scientist’s mind. The truth is that science can only prove what is provable, and the existence of a “supernatural” creator … one outside the laws and boundaries of the physical world … cannot be proved or disproved. For this reason, science must be functionally atheist in assessing the physical world. The Christian scientist remains both functionally atheist in his work while entirely spiritual in his life. There is no contradiction in this, any more than there is in allowing a mechanic to use a wrench to fix your car rather than a prayer shawl.

The Creationist and ID claim that you should look for the creator’s mark on every unexplained feature in our physical world serves only to abandon inquiry and, in the end, stop the worshipful practice of learning more about the world (created) through (natural processes). For even the atheist worships God when he observes and catalogs the magnificence of the universe.

Faith, Politics, Science