Glass Cathedral, a Religious Novel with a Lot of Science

Stan Rice’s novel Glass Cathedral deals with big religious questions not in the form of serious debate but in good-natured banter among three of the main characters, Dan (the atheist), Emilio (the evangelical Christian), and Misty (the Christian who has deep and serious doubts about her religion). I have written in my other blog about the religious aspects of this novel.

This is the author’s summary from Amazon:

The newspaper staff writers of a small desert town assume the strange light in the sky is merely sunlight refracted by ice crystals: atheist Dan Hardy; the spiritually-searching Misty Barbour; and even the confirmed Christian editor Emilio Villanueva. Then the light turns out to be God—maybe. This is enough to make Misty leave her doubts behind and marry Emilio. Dan, who was hoping to win Misty’s affection, is skeptical, especially since God showed up on no photographic images, and everyone in town saw God differently. The government authorities declare the light was a mass hallucination.

Emilio and Misty raise money to build a glass cathedral in the desert, near the place they think God appeared. When thousands of people come for the inaugural celebration, a storm pulls the glasshouse into the sky. Misty gets trampled. At the end, Emilio and Misty, who is now disabled, conclude that God’s work is to help people, not to build a cathedral, and even Dan agrees.

 What I want to say in this science blog is that Dan arrives at his atheism thoughtfully and at great personal cost.

His interest in science began when, as a boy, he saw a horsehair worm discharged from the anus of a dead cockroach. This got him interested in reading everything he could about biology and ecology, especially parasitism, which earned him the name Buttworm Boy. In a natural world pervaded by evolutionary mercilessness, Dan sees no room for a Creator.

His atheism is challenged when he meets, becomes attracted to, and becomes physically entangled with a Mormon girl, Margaret. Margaret is not an enthusiastic Mormon, but wants Dan to join her to raise nice kids. In this way, Dan discovers that religion does not have to be correct—as Mormonism is clearly contradicted by history—in order to fill a role in a person’s life. This, however, is not enough for him.

Another main character, Misty, is a dedicated Christian, at least until her comfortable religious world is shattered by the assassination of her fiancé. The main event of the novel—God appearing in the sky out in the California desert, or not—restores her faith. But what is it that brings Misty the Christian and Dan the atheist together for meaningful discourse? It is science, of course. They see, then carefully examine, the desert wildflowers, Dan as a scientist and Misty because Jesus said to consider the lilies of the field. That is, to look closely, carefully, and thoughtfully at them. This is something that very few Christians actually do.

The novel also contains other scientific plot elements. In the glass cathedral that Misty and her husband Emilio build out in the desert, a giant band-o-rama has hundreds of tubas that happen to play the resonant frequency of the building, so that it shatters and blows away like a giant jellyfish in a desert storm.

I think the author has a lively, almost childlike, sense of wonder, at the lilies of the field and the surprises that wait within the laws of physics. I think readers of this blog would enjoy Glass Cathedral.

Balanced Pathogenicity in Shangri-La

When I first learned about balanced pathogenicity back in the 1980s, it made me feel good about the world. This is the process in which germs evolve into milder forms over time. Natural selection favors the milder strains of germs because they can spread more readily. Any germ that kills its host is at a disadvantage. There are many examples in which diseases used to be very virulent, but today they are milder even without vaccination or medication. Examples include smallpox, which in Europe and North America evolved into a mild disease; leprosy, which today is a slow skin disease but used to kill people quickly. There are even diseases such as the “sweating sickness” that had major outbreaks in Europe in past centuries but appears to have evolved itself out of existence (it persists only in very mild forms): there are no diseases today that have exactly those symptoms. Balanced pathogenicity was part of the balance of nature in a blessed world.

Or so I thought. That’s what I wanted to believe.

Then I started learning about the exceptions. Waterborne diseases such as cholera do not evolve into milder forms. Insect-borne diseases may evolve into even worse forms. So I had to change what I taught and wrote: balanced pathogenicity applies to diseases that spread to a new host by close proximity to the victim. My main example was ebola, which, I thought, will evolve into a milder form since the worst forms of it keep healthy people from coming in close proximity to the victims.

But it turns out that even ebola can evolve into a worse form, as explained in this article by Carl Zimmer. I suppose that this evolution of worse forms of ebola is a temporary reversal of the overall trend of balanced pathogenicity. But I am now having to make so many “exceptions to the rule” that I am beginning to wonder how much of a pattern balanced pathogenicity really is.

My original feeling about balanced pathogenicity came about because I wanted to believe that there was a fundamental goodness to the world. Bad things happen, but within them is the seed of a better world. This was partly because I got my optimism from the same source that I got my original information: Rene Dubos. I learned about balanced pathogenicity by reading his Man Adapting and Celebrations of Life. He was a scientist and informal philosopher in the same mold as Lewis Thomas. A great thinker. But his “gospel” was that evolution ultimately produces a better world. I wanted very badly to believe that evolution was a good process that God incorporated into a good world. But the world in which evolution works for the Greater Good is more of a Shangri-La than a real world.

Balanced pathogenicity happens, except when it doesn’t. Evolution makes the world better, except when it doesn’t. Creationists look for scientific reasons to believe God is good. Theistic evolutionists look for scientific reasons to believe that evolution produces goodness that God intended. In this particular sense, I am not sure that theistic evolution is much of an improvement over creationism.

What is Hell Like? Come to Church and Find Out, or Not

I think this is the third time I have posted photos on this blog from the marquee of the church down the street from where I live. In the first photo, the marquee indicated, “Big Bang Theory: You’ve Got to be Kidding—God.” Interesting that God should actually provide a direct quotation to this particular church without providing it to other churches. I kind of thought they believed the Bible was God’s word, but apparently God sends them direct quotes. I used this photo in my 2012 book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged,Stressed-Out World. At first I thought God was ridiculing cosmology, but I have gradually come to realize that what really disturbed God was the television series by that name. Apparently God really hates TV shows with geeks in them. In the second photo, the marquee announced, “Evolution: The Science of Calling God a Liar.” I made a YouTube video of this sign, and it got copied around the FaceBookosphere.

Note of caution: There is a website that makes fake church marquee images. They are funny but don’t take them seriously. For example, the church sign that said, “God to President Bush: Those little voices are not from me. Check your meds,” was funny but not genuine. And that joke about the church marquee that said, “What is Hell? Come to church and find out” is likewise apocryphal.

But in this third example the marquee looks, at first, not too different from other church marquees. It is not outrageous, but subtly misleading in a way that I think is interesting enough to discuss at this point. There is apparently a multi-church seminar called “ExploreGod.” In this series, they ask important questions, such as Does God exist? or (as in this photo) Why does God allow pain and suffering? These are good questions. But how a church approaches them and how scientists might approach them reveal a fundamental difference between religion and science.

First note that science itself cannot answer either question. But scientists as people frequently wonder about such questions and come up with personal answers to them.

When a church asks, Does God exist?, there is only one possible answer. And everything that leads up to their conclusion is forced into lockstep march toward that conclusion: the answer of Yes. But when scientists ask, Does God exist?, you get a whole range of answers. Science does not force its arguments into a lockstep march toward the answer of No. Many scientists answer Yes, many answer No. But many scientists, myself included, cannot answer this question. Instead we ask, what do you mean by God? If you mean a supreme being who controls all the details of the universe, the answer is clearly No. But if you mean a spiritual essence of love, the presence whereof can never be tested but which many of us would really, really like to believe in, the answer is a resounding I hope so for those of us in the middle. Scientists are always questioning our assumptions and biases. The churches answer the question like an army; scientists answer it like a herd of cats.

Similarly, when churches ask the question in the photo, you know that they will reach some kind of answer or other that leaves God both merciful and all-powerful. They might answer it (especially this church), “God allows suffering because there are Democrats in the world.” Others might answer it, “Because God is testing and strengthening us.” But both of these answers fail to match the evidence, because (in response to the first) even Republicans suffer now and again—there are some forms of pain from which even assault weapons cannot protect them—and (in response to the second) because pain and suffering is way, way, prodigiously, lugubriously, supercalifragalisticexpialadociously, abominably greater than is necessary for strengthening a person’s character. We all expect life to be challenging, to find thorns in a rose garden, but for many people (so far, not for me) suffering has been overwhelming. A little Palestinian kid getting killed by an Israeli mortar, or getting killed because she was used as a human shield by an Islamist terrorist, does not promote that kid’s spiritual development. (See, here is common ground between Israel and Hamas: they both believe that Palestinian civilians are expendable.)

The one answer a church will not permit is to say, “Shit happens and God doesn’t stop it.” There may be a God-essence that wants us to overcome struggles to the extent that we can, and this can be considered a potential Christian answer, but no church would say this, because then people would stop coming and bringing their money. That is, if you can’t get God to alleviate your suffering, then what is the point of prayer and church involvement?

But scientists as people are open to a range of responses to such a question.

As Bart Ehrman has pointed out in his book God’s Problem, the Bible offers about four different answers to the question of why God permits suffering, depending on which part of the Bible you read. The answers all contradict one another. Scientists, as people, would note this range of Biblical answers without trying to force everyone to believe just one of them, without screwing the scriptures that say otherwise into confirming the belief decided in advance.

And of course there are lots of religious answers outside of Christianity. Christian Scientists (who are not Christian scientists) claim that suffering is an illusion.

Conservative religion says, “We have the answer, and we will force all evidence, even scriptural evidence, into confirming it.” Scientists as people say, “There are different possible answers, and we may just have to accept the fact that we cannot know which if any are correct.”

In closing, I point out that this photo was taken on September 22, 2014. Notice that the sign just below the marquee is still advertising a God-loves-guns-and-wants-you-to-have-assault-weapons seminar they sponsored the previous May. The seminar is over enough already and you should take the sign down. But they don’t, because apparently this sign—apparently a permanent fixture now—expresses that they think the Gospel is really about: not Jesus, not God, but guns.

DNA, Intelligent Design, and Theodicy, Part Two

In the previous entry I presented one of the main points that John C. Avise made in his recent book Inside the Human Genome: A Case for Non-Intelligent Design. If God designed the world, why are there so many, and such horrific, mutations in the human genome? Not only is there a huge number of different genetic diseases, but each one of these diseases can be caused by numerous different mutations. Mutations happen so often that the same diseases keep evolving over and over and over. This presents a major challenge to theodicy, which is the attempt to justify God in a world of suffering—in this case, genetically-based suffering. Thus one of Avise’s points is that, if God designed DNA, he could have made more efficient repair mechanisms to counteract the (perhaps inevitable) mutations.

Avise goes on to make another, very important challenge to theodicy: the very structure of the genome itself is inconsistent with the idea that the genome, or the human body, or the world was designed by God. Not just the mutations in the genome, but its very structure.

The human genome is full of stuff that interferes with the use of genetic information to produce healthy and functional enzymes and bodies. First, consider the fact that only about 1 percent of human DNA codes for those enzymes. About 68 percent of the DNA consists of non-coding DNA that is between the genes, and about 31 percent of the DNA consists of non-coding DNA that is inside of the genes. This is, at best, a clumsy system, because whenever a cell divides, all of this DNA is copied, not just the DNA that the cell will use. In addition, since each gene is broken into little “exon” fragments by a large amount of internal “intron” DNA, the genetic information must be spliced together in order to be put to use. That is, to get a functional enzyme, the genetic information from lots of exon fragments has to be cobbled together. If it works, there is no problem, but the whole system is so cumbersomely complex that it often fails. Not only are many genetic diseases caused by mutations in the genes themselves, but many genetic diseases are caused by (or also caused by) failures of the cell to deal properly with the non-coding DNA and the splicing.

Much of the non-coding DNA bears the clear mark of evolutionary origin. For example, there are a lot of pseudogenes, which are old genes that are not used anymore. Some of them are extra, duplicated copies of genes, complete with their introns (unprocessed pseudogenes); others are DNA copies of RNA transcripts, from which the introns have been removed (processed pseudogenes). There are also lots of mobile genetic elements, which either have or had the ability to move around among the chromosomes. Some of them are transposons, which can “cut and paste,” to use Avise’s metaphor, moving from one place to another. Some of them are retrotransposons, which can “copy and paste,” with one copy being left behind and the other going to a new place in the genome. Many of these retrotransposons are old dead viruses. We know this because they still have major chunks of the reverse transcriptase enzyme, an enzyme used only by certain kinds of viruses! Retrotransposons cannot actually become viruses anymore, because they have lost the genes that allow them to make protein capsules. Another evolutionary pattern is that species that have the most similar genetic DNA also have the most similar non-coding DNA, which makes no sense if they do not share a common evolutionary ancestry. You see, we know where much of this non-coding DNA came from, and it is not part of a system designed by a God.

There are even examples of some genes fighting against other genes. Some mutations cause a gene to over-represent itself in the next generation (“selfish genes”), which is harmful to the organism that carries it; and there are other mutations that suppress those selfish genes. So not only does the genome contain a clumsy load of non-coding DNA, but even DNA that fights against itself.

We know that such complexity of non-coding DNA is not necessary for the function of a genetic system, because bacteria do not have any of this: no introns, no pseudogenes, no transposons. They get by just fine without them.

The more we learn about DNA, the more we see that there is really no place for a Creator or Designer to fit in. It looks like, in Avise’s words, the Creator’s “primary role was to set into operation natural evolutionary forces.” Yes, you can believe that God designed evolution, and then let evolution do everything. But this would be like saying that angels push the planets around the sun by means of the laws of gravity and momentum. To slip God into an invisible realm behind the operation of natural laws, including genetic processes, seems more and more like fantasy.

And it sets God up for culpability for an immense amount of human suffering. Mutations of genes (previous essay) and malfunctions of genetic operation (this essay) cause human misery and death, in addition to killing perhaps one-third of fertilized egg cells. If God is behind the processes of human genetics, says Avise, then God is the “world’s leading abortionist and mass murderer.” Does this offend you? Then you need to reconsider what you believe about the role that God might play in the universe.

Creationists often claim that all of these mutations and flaws have occurred just since the Fall of Man. There is no Biblical basis for this belief. Genesis says, cursed is the ground, not cursed is the chromosome. Some creationists insist that the pre-Flood world had few if any mutations, which is why people lived to be over nine hundred years old. Either way, this entire burden of bad genes would have accumulated just in the last few thousand years. Mutations are not accumulating that rapidly today. Some creationists believe that Satan designed all the bad things in the genome. This is, needless to say, also without any scriptural basis. In no part of the Bible is Satan depicted as being smart enough to have redesigned the entire architecture of the human genome.

Don’t miss my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just published by Prometheus Books.