Pointing out the emperor's nudity.

The Pope is wrong on religious speech

By Heidi Schlumpf

 

 

 

The popular Pope Francis is taking some hits himself after some lighthearted comments that included a pretend punch to a colleague. The comments came while trying to make the point that free speech should have some limits, including on the right to insult another's faith.

Speaking Thursday to reporters on the plane ride to the Philippines, the Pope gestured with a fake punch to demonstrate what he would do if someone were to say "a swear word against my mother."

Heidi Schlumpf

Most journalists interpreted it as a joke, not a justification of violence, especially since the Pope had also just forcefully stated that "one cannot kill in the name of God."

Still, the Vatican felt the need to clarify, in response to a later CNN question about the punch, that his words were "spoken colloquially" and consistent with the Pope's "free style of speech."

I don't for one minute think the Pope is advocating for any type of violence, whether religiously motivated murder or sparring among friends who dis each other's mamas.

 

What concerns me is his apparent belief that religion should have special protection when it comes to free speech.

"One cannot provoke, one cannot insult other people's faith, one cannot make fun of faith," he said. "There is a limit. Every religion has its dignity. ... In freedom of expression there are limits."

 

 

The Pope, responding to a general question about the interplay between religious liberty and free expression, was clearly referencing the massacre of journalists at Charlie Hebdo magazine by Islamist militants in Paris last week.

Although he did not say the slain cartoonists brought the attack upon themselves because of their satirical criticism of Islam, it's not a huge logical leap to that conclusion and raises the likelihood of such a misinterpretation.

Let's just say it's not what most public relations professionals would advise.

And while the Pope has been known to talk more informally with reporters on the papal plane (his "Who am I to judge?" comment about gay Catholics came on the return flight from Brazil in 2013), he's still on the record and obviously aware that his words will be reported and analyzed.

The Pope is not the only prominent Catholic raising the issue.

Bill Donahue, a self-appointed spokesman fighting "anti-Catholicism" as the president of the New York-based Catholic League, released a statement with the headline, "Muslims have a right to be angry," on the day of the killings.

 

On Thursday, his statement was headlined: "Pope sides with Catholic League." Such chutzpah.

While no one can match the offensive tone of Donahue, who actually said Charlie Hebdo's Stephane Charbonnier "didn't understand the role he played in his own death," the gist of the Pope's message was the same: Criticism of religion is problematic.

As an aside, I'll be curious to see if those who slammed Donahue have the same harsh words for the Pope.

Perhaps both of them should take a lesson from the response of another Christian, Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners, a progressive, evangelical community and publication. He had a different suggestion for how people of faith should respond to the Paris attacks:

"Jesus tells us to bless those who persecute us, to return love for hate and good for evil, and even to love our enemies," Wallis wrote. "Loving your enemies certainly includes supporting the foundational commitment to free speech, and defending the right of free speech, even, or especially, for those who offend you."

I think most American Catholics agree that while blasphemy -- offensive speech against God or religion -- is not particularly nice, it does not follow that it can or should be regulated or outlawed. In the United States, the Supreme Court outlawed blasphemy laws in 1952.

I'm hoping the Pope was only offering counsel to his followers, rather than advocating for any sort of legal position. No one has the right not to be offended. Even the Pope.

 

Bottled sunlight.

On separating science from mysticism

In Light of New BIO-Complexity Paper, Maintaining Neo-Darwinism Means Rejecting Established Methods of Historical Science

Casey Luskin January 23, 2015 4:31 AM

 

In the new BIO-Complexity paper, "Enzyme Families-Shared Evolutionary History or Shared Design? A Study of the GABA-Aminotransferase Family," Mariclair Reeves, Ann Gauger, and Douglas Axe find that modern enzymes cannot be easily mutated to acquire new functions. One 2009 study that their paper cites states, "[M]any attempts at interchanging activities in mechanistically diverse superfamilies have since been attempted, but few successes have been real¬ized." This suggests that modern enzymes are not amenable to evolutionary conversions. The typical response from evolutionists is that perhaps ancient enzymes were different, and more readily mutable to acquire new functions. Perhaps so. However, as Reeves, Gauger, and Axe explain, this means evolutionary scientists must then ignore experimental evidence showing that protein conversions require many mutations. That would reveal Darwinism as being grounded in speculation instead of experimental data. In their new paper they write:

We are asking whether the enzymes now pres¬ent in life are as amenable to functional conversion as ancient enzymes must have been in order for evolution to work. If the answer to this is No, then the classical recruitment scenario does not work today, anyway. That realization would be of consider¬able importance, in that it would call for careful consideration of how processes that do not work today somehow did work long ago. In other words, it would reinforce the importance of grounding evolutionary explanations in observable science.

The same rejoinder might be offered to defenders of the "promiscuity" hypothesis of protein evolution. According to this model, perhaps ancient enzymes performed many functions. Then, over time some of those functions may have been lost and others finely tuned, leading to today's enzymes which perform specific functions extraordinarily well. Do modern enzymes show the kind of promiscuity that ancient enzymes supposedly needed? That's not clear. Moreover, this model relies upon loss of function to explain enzyme specificity, and never accounts for the origin of new enzyme functions in the first place. Reeves, Gauger, and Axe continue:

This idea of functional divergence from promiscuous ancestral enzymes, though possibly of some value, leaves the most fundamental aspects of the origins question unchanged. Whether ancient enzymes resembled modern ones closely or only loosely, the modern ones are both the things to be explained and the things we can observe. The importance of grounding evolutionary explanations in actual study of modern enzymes therefore remains as important now as ever. Yet the promiscuity hypothesis leaves the actual origin of new enzyme functions unexplained. In the end, then, functional conversion by mutation is still the only evolutionary explanation for those first appearances.

As we saw previously, their experimental data suggests that many mutations -- including deleterious ones -- would be necessary to generate new protein functions. It would take enormously long periods of time -- longer than the age of the earth -- to generate the mutations needed for new protein functions. When the experimental data conflicts with the predictions of the theory, what is a Darwinian to do?
The answer is they ignore the experimental data. They assume that biological systems in the past could evolve because they worked very differently than they do today. This is not a scientific form of reasoning. It's a dictated not by the evidence but by faith in the overall Darwinian doctrine.
We saw the same kind of thing when UC Berkeley paleontologist Charles Marshall debated Discovery Institute's Stephen Meyer in 2013 on the origin of new biological information. A point that emerged was that Marshall simply pushed back the question of the origin of new information. He ignored the evidence showing that modern developmental gene regulatory networks (dGRNs) don't tolerate mutations, making it very difficult to evolve new body plans. When you mutate developmental gene regulatory networks, the organism dies. In response to Meyer, Marshall argued that perhaps in the past, dGRNs were more plastic than they are today, thereby allowing new body plans to evolve. Meyer explained in rebuttal that Marshall had stopped using uniformitarian reasoning:

Marshall and other defenders of evolutionary theory reverse the epistemological priority of the historical scientific method as pioneered by Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin and others. Rather than treating our present experimentally based knowledge as the key to evaluating the plausibility of theories about the past, Marshall uses an evolutionary assumption about what must have happened in the past (transmutation) to justify disregarding experimental observations of what does, and does not, occur in biological systems. The requirements of evolutionary doctrine thus trump our observations about how nature and living organisms actually behave. What we know best from observation takes a back seat to prior beliefs about how life must have arisen.

In light of the experimental data from Biologic Institute, much the same could be said of proponents of the co-option model of protein evolution. As Meyer artfully put it, those who simply assume that ancient enzymes were more amenable to evolutionary conversions "reverse the epistemological priority of the historical scientific method." Evolutionists are welcome to ignore the experimentally derived real-world workings of modern biology if that's what they want to do, but they should acknowledge that they are asking for special treatment for their theory. In defense of Darwinism, they have departed from the established methods of historical science.