NYT: Two strikes, one ball
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Pirate modeUpdated below.
Very few people seemed to like the NYT article I panned yesterday—Brad DeLong, Brian Leiter, Newton's Binomium, and Cosmic Variance have all chimed in, I think Abnormal Interests gives the best analysis of the flaws, and Mike the Mad Biologist has inside information that will show Behe to be wrong, again…not that that will perturb him in the least. EvolutionBlog has a more positive but preliminary view of the article, we'll have to look forward to his more detailed defense.
So now the NY Times has come out with a third article in their series.
I didn't like it.
Surprised? It may not be as bad as the first two, but it's largely irrelevant and plays right into the hands of the Discovery Institute by pandering to the religious biases of readers. It's titled "Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science", and that's exactly where the creationists want to place the issue in the minds of the public: as a conflict between gods and science. They know which way the uninformed will flop.
On the positive side, the article spends most of its time on Collins and Miller, two very well known scientists who are also Christian, and makes the case that you can be religious and be a scientist. That's good, in that it undermines one common creationist lie.
However, it also reinforces a bias that there is something deplorable about atheist scientists—once again, they are the wicked little boogeymen shooed out of the spotlight, lest they frighten the good christian folk. They trot out the old 1997 Nature survey and emphasize that 40% of scientists believe in God…which is fine, but leaves hanging the complementary observation, that 60% don't. What we need is an article with the spine to note that, in the scientific community, atheists work productively with theists side by side, with no conflict and no animosity over their different views on religion, and that maybe it's the bigots who think atheism is evil who need to correct their attitudes. I don't care that Collins and Miller are religious—their virtue is their tolerance, something the creationists could emulate.
Well, their tolerance is good, but their religiosity does screw them up sometimes. I thought this conclusion was weak:
But he [Collins] said he believed that some scientists were simply unwilling to confront the big questions religion tried to answer. "You will never understand what it means to be a human being through naturalistic observation," he said. "You won't understand why you are here and what the meaning is. Science has no power to address these questions—and are they not the most important questions we ask ourselves?"
Grrr. The old "atheists are afraid of god" nonsense. I would just like to point out that religion has no power to address those questions, either—it's a palliative that deludes people into believing they have the answers. All too often, the answer they get back is to kill the unbelievers, not the kind of benevolent inspiration I suspect Collins is imagining.
I will say that this readers' opinion piece today, "Grasping the Depth of Time as a First Step in Understanding Evolution", was excellent (Josh agrees). Maybe what the Times needs to do is fire their journalists as tainted goods and start from scratch with a few more competent outsiders.
EvolutionBlog defends Chang's article. I'm not convinced. The gist of the argument is that Chang did bring up rebuttals to many of the creationists' points; I agree, but don't believe that that rescues the article. The problem is that those rebuttals are buried, weakly expressed, and expressed in the form, "The DI says X, but scientists say Y." I already know all the weak points in the DI's feeble arguments, and they've been said over and over again. What we need is a clear, forceful destruction of the DI's position by a credible media source. The NYT did not provide that. It provided more cover for them.
Ooooh - that letter is GOOD! How did they let a reader write something so long?