Proceedings of ASA Houston Section Meeting, Sept. 8, 2007 - please review and comment

For all who were there, please review and comment/correct/supplement as appropriate. I publish on the e-newsletter at the end of Sept.

I'm making the two preliminary discussions into blog posts on their own, so we may continue the discussions.

- ser


Proceedings of the Houston Section of the ASA OK-TX Section
September 8th, 2007

There were six of us: Christine Smith, Bruce Koons, Andy Coleman, Kevin Crosby, Roger Rowe, and Scott Robinson. We started at 12:00 and were still having a lively discussion at 3:40 when Scott’s family arrived to take him away, and the meeting adjourned.

We introduced ourselves, since Kevin was new and Christine hadn’t met everyone yet. Then we chatted about a few subjects before our main discussion.

Evolution or Special Creation for Humans

The topic of Reasons to Believe came up, and Scott noted that RTB’s Testable Creation Model proposes that mankind was specially created, not evolved, and wondered what Hugh Ross would say to some arguments about that from Francis Collins’ new book, The Language of God. Collins points out that in non-coding regions of the human genome (98.5% of it) there are errors or blunders, where functional genes have gotten accidentally inserted and therefore made non-functional, and that the same non-functional copies exist in the same places in the human and mouse genome. Why would a Creator add the same non-functional blunders to the human genome that were introduced in the mouse genome through generations of mutations? In some cases, it is even partial genes and not whole genes that are repeated – things that could never function, according to Collins. It was much more reasonable to take this as evidence that humans descended from non-human ancestors and inherited their genome mistakes too.

The others didn’t buy that. They thought that RTB’s model didn’t require humans be created de novo without ancestors. They also thought it more likely that those regions had to be there for some reason we don’t understand yet. Similarities between our genome and other species’ don’t require common descent.

Natural Selection Can’t Account for Human Altruism

Scott is reading Collins’ book, The Language of God. He said that the main reasons Francis Collins gives for his becoming a Christian were the inability of naturalistic science to explain the existence of the Moral Law and the universal human tendency to yearn for something (C. S. Lewis called it “Joy”) beyond this world. Natural selection couldn’t account for either of these. He drew much of his thought from C. S. Lewis. However, he also gave one other argument, that natural selection cannot explain human altruism. We discussed this in our group at length.

Scott brought an article from Natural History magazine describing investigations into altruism in amoebas which come together to create a multicellular fruiting body when food becomes short. Some amoebas form the spore-generating body, some form the stalk. Only the genes of the amoebas in the spore-generating body get passed on. A mutation that let an amoeba always join the spore-forming body would soon dominate the population and destroy the “altruism.” Christine objected that altruism requires thought and choices, and this didn’t qualify. Scott replied that this is Darwinian or biological altruism, and may have a slightly different definition from human altruism. However, to Darwinists human altruism has to be explainable by natural selection just as all other traits of all species had to be.

Preliminary indications were that altruism (the tendency of amoebas to join the stalk) was associated with a gene that was also associated with a very vital function, so that if the gene turned off, the amoeba would lose the tendency to join the stalk but also be fatally crippled and not survive.

Darwinists don’t have a problem explaining “altruism” in social insects, in which all members work toward the good of the Queen, because they are all monoclonal – all are her children and all have the same genome, and are therefore all working to perpetuate the same genome. However, among humans that isn’t true. If I save someone’s life and die in the process, his genes are passed on, not mine, and that means altruism in humans should be selected against by natural selection. It’s a real puzzle, according to Collins.

Christine proposed that communal, or group, behavior does confer survival value on the group, helping all their genomes tend to survive, and therefore communal behavior does get selected for. Altruism in humans could be just a sharpening of that same instinct. Christine thought that God gave humans the Moral Law to intensify and extend that instinctive communal behavior to all humans – building on the inborn communal behaviors, but giving humans something that is not all due to natural selection.

That is where we left it when the food was done and it was time to commence our main discussion.


Main Discussion

For our topic of the month, we discussed an article Christine suggested, “Thinking Critically and Christianly About Technology,” by Dr. Ken Funk, who is associate head of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University (PSCF, September, 2007, pp. 201-211).

We read over the article first, then started discussing it. Here’s an outline of the article’s main points

He is advocating that we make careful, systematic value judgments about technology by Christian principles. One cannot separate technology from the practitioner of it – the very root word, techne, means technique or process in Greek.

Funk proposes a hierarchy, or priority order, of three fundamental principles by which to value technology:

1. Technology ought to facilitate our communion with God and the fulfillment of our moral obligations to Him.
2. Technology ought to facilitate the preservation and improvement of human welfare and the fulfillment of our moral obligations to people.
3. Technology ought to facilitate the preservation of the natural world and the fulfillment of our moral obligations to God’s lower creation.

Funk then points out four ways in which technology subtly promotes negative behavior/values. He argues that “technology amplifies and exacerbates our own human tendency toward evil… It creates an environment in which speed, power, and efficiency dominate our thinking and the ends to which it propels us become merely matters of personal choice, one being equivalent to any other. Technology’s many great successes encourage us to trust in our own capacities to solve our own material problems and to elevate our own material conditions, as if we were independent of God’s power and grace. Technology distracts us from the higher good and conditions us to attend mostly to the lower good. Technology not only changes the material world. In these and many other ways, it changes us morally, and not for the better” (p. 207).

Funk proposes a checklist of questions as the first draft of a guide to thinking critically and Christianly about technology. We never got to it, but it’s a very interesting table, on p. 208 of the article.

I took up note-taking after a few points had already been covered, but here’s what I caught:

Roger observed that if the world is going to end very soon, as he believes, then it won’t matter if we use up the resources on the planet. There would be no sense in trying to save them for later, since there will be no later.

Scott and Andy pointed out that Interior Secretary Watt under Reagan made the same point, and was roundly criticized for it. Even Christine (who was not alive then) had heard of Watt.

Christine thought we still have a moral obligation to steward the earth’s resources whether Jesus is coming back in a day or 1,000 years. She and Roger discussed it a bit more.

Roger asked Christine if she thought the world as a whole was doing better or worse on earth stewardship than we were 20 years ago. Christine thought we were. Bruce noted that the U.S. is leading the way, too. Scott was surprised. Christine said it depends on which area you consider.

Roger remembered that everyone used to dump their used motor oil on the ground after changing it. These days, you’d never do that. Bruce recalled that 20 years ago there was more oil entering the ocean from all the used motor oil dumped on the ground, than from all the oil spills at the time. He also remembered smelling the refineries every day in Houston, 20 years ago. Now that smell doesn’t reach him, though he and his wife haven’t relocated in that time.

Roger noted that some of the conservation we practice now is due to technology. Some things were impossible 30-40 years ago without bankrupting the country.

Andy noted that the U.S. didn’t sign the Kyoto agreement because India and China weren’t required to sign. Christine corrected that slightly – they were signatories, but they had no target quota to shoot for, just made a pledge that they’d reduce emissions.

Roger thought the pendulum would swing the other way on global warming in the future, as science learns its true causes. The earth as a system is always changing, something non-geologists don’t easily grasp. Christine noted that she is also a geologist, and understands the earth changes, yet she thinks it makes sense to reduce carbon emissions from a stewardship perspective for two reasons:

1) Global warming is happening very fast. It’s hard to believe it’s natural.
2) We have very little time to adapt to the changes in crop patterns, coastlines, etc – even changing political boundaries.

Roger noted that the last glacial period ended fairly rapidly, and the ice melted quite quickly at the end of that time. Since then, the rate of glacial retreat has tailed off but is still occurring. Still, it’s a very slow rate compared to the end of the last Ice Age.

Andy cautioned, however, that once we figure out the true causes, it might be too late to do anything about it, if human activity really is the cause. It wouldn’t be prudent to do something about it now, just in case.

Christine said that the idea that human activity is changing the climate is nothing new. The idea was advanced 100 years ago, and has been studied since the ‘50s and ‘60s. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has published a consensus document taking into account the opinion of the majority of scientists and governments, which makes it fairly conservative in its assertions. It says human activity is the major driver of climate change now.

Bruce noted that on the Internet, one can find a document signed by a panel of 500 scientists, dissenting from that view. He knows because he was one of the signatories. That was a few years ago. He’s not a climate expert, but he was skeptical of it and the highly politicized nature of the debate then.

Christine asked Bruce what evidence it would take to convince him that human activity was driving climate change? Bruce answered that he’d need to see credible estimates of the contribution of all natural causes. Volcanoes put out considerable CO2, for example. It is very difficult to accurately estimate the amount of CO2 contributed by each natural source.

Christine noted that the historical data shows a clear correlation between the rise in global temperature and global CO2. The IPCC report asserts that the temperature increase can’t be accounted for by the total of natural CO2 sources. When human contributions are added, it becomes much closer to the observed temperature increase.

Roger was skeptical. If they can’t model a hurricane for 5 days into the future, how can they model the entire earth? Christine responded that weather and climate are different things, and regional and global scale are different as well.

Bruce asked if CO2 is still increasing. Christine said yes it is, worldwide. Scott asked if that was because of China and India. Christine said it is. Soon China will pass the U.S. as the largest greenhouse-gas emitter, at the rate they’re growing.

To return to the article, Scott said, once one understood what was really going on climatically, one would apply the three principles in this article to help decide what to do. It was interesting to Scott that the first principle was individual, the second group-oriented, and the third nature. He wondered if that reflected a Western cultural bias. Christine said the author did state that principle 1 included group communing with God as well as individual, so probably not.

Christine was interested by Funk’s section on the “Illusion of Human Sovereignty”, i.e., that technology’s success makes people think they can do anything, given enough time and resources. Andy noted that he’s often thought of technology as undoing the Fall.

Roger noted that our high living standards will evaporate if there is an economic crash, such as many people predict for the U.S. economy in 10-20 years. We don’t have any “right” or entitlement to this high living standard, and it may be ephemeral.

Christine thought Roger’s observation fit well with the section on p. , “Promotion of Subsidiary Goods.” To explain the author’s point, Christine took the example of computers. They are a tool by which we do much more than we could without them, but because of that, the computer itself becomes exaggerated in importance, and pursued as a “good” in itself. Scott tried to sum it up by saying that computers freed up peoples’ time, but instead of using that free time for more communion with God (the highest of Funk’s 3 principles), they used the free time to improve computers to gain more free time to improve computers to gain more free time, etc.

The author’s right when he points out that all technology brings some bad along with the good. Chips implanted in pets are really handy. Now some are suggesting implanting them in disadvantaged people to help them keep their records; but other people are objecting that the potential for misuse of that technology is too great for it to ever be used. Andy noted that the iPod is handy, but one can listen to any music on it – good or bad.

At this point, the discussion was still lively, but Scott’s family came to take him away (it was already 3:40, past our quitting time), and the meeting broke up after that. Evidently we all found Dr. Funk’s article to be very stimulating. Good choice, Christine!

Blog Entry Coming on Global Warming

After the meeting broke up, Christine offered to find some information on global warming for our next meeting, and Scott suggested that it would be good if she could find something that addresses the skepticism Roger, Bruce and Scott share: We are all skeptical that we can really tell whether human activity has raised the temperature, eliminating all other causes. She offered to put it on the blog when she finds it. That should generate some postings and discussion!