Obama administration won’t prosecute wind farms for killing thousands of endangered birds

From Fox News. (H/T Melissa)

Excerpt:

The Obama administration has never fined or prosecuted a wind farm for killing eagles and other protected bird species, shielding the industry from liability and helping keep the scope of the deaths secret, an Associated Press investigation has found.

More than 573,000 birds are killed by the country’s wind farms each year, including 83,000 hunting birds such as hawks, falcons and eagles, according to an estimate published in March in the peer-reviewed Wildlife Society Bulletin.

Each death is federal crime, a charge that the Obama administration has used to prosecute oil companies when birds drown in their waste pits, and power companies when birds are electrocuted by their power lines. No wind energy company has been prosecuted, even those that repeatedly flout the law.

[...]Documents and emails obtained by The Associated Press offer glimpses of the problem: 14 deaths at seven facilities in California, five each in New Mexico and Oregon, one in Washington state and another in Nevada, where an eagle was found with a hole in its neck, exposing the bone.

One of the deadliest places in the country for golden eagles is Wyoming, where federal officials said wind farms had killed more than four dozen golden eagles since 2009, predominantly in the southeastern part of the state. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the figures. Getting precise figures is impossible because many companies aren’t required to disclose how many birds they kill. And when they do, experts say, the data can be unreliable.

When companies voluntarily report deaths, the Obama administration in many cases refuses to make the information public, saying it belongs to the energy companies or that revealing it would expose trade secrets or implicate ongoing enforcement investigations.

Nearly all the birds being killed are protected under federal environmental laws, which prosecutors have used to generate tens of millions of dollars in fines and settlements from businesses, including oil and gas companies, over the past five years.

“What it boils down to is this: If you electrocute an eagle, that is bad, but if you chop it to pieces, that is OK,” said Tim Eicher, a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service enforcement agent based in Cody, Wyo.

Most other people like dogs and cats, but I like birds. I am concerned about birds of prey who are endangered species. I believe in conservation. To me, what this story says is that Obama doesn’t really care about the environment. The federal government does have some legitimate functions, like protecting us from threats, maintaining roads and protecting endangered species. But they don’t have to be subsidizing wind power, especially when it causes pain and suffering to innocent birds.

Filed under: News, Birds, Birds of Prey, Conservation, Eagle, Endangered Species, Falcon, Golden Eagle, Hawk, Nature, Raptor, Wind Farm, Wind Power

Philip E. Johnson lectures on science, evolution and religion

I found this fun lecture by the grandfather of the big-tent intelligent design movement, Berkeley law professor Philip E. Johnson.

I’ll bet you guys have all heard of him, but you’ve never heard him speak, right? Well, I was a young man, I used to listen to Phil’s lectures and his debates with Eugenie Scott quite a bit. This is one of my favorite lectures. Very easy to understand, and boilerplate for anything else in the origins debate. This is a great lecture – funny, engaging and useful. You will definitely listen to this lecture several times if you listen to it once.

The MP3 is here. (91 minutes, 62 megabytes)

The Inherit the Wind stereotype

• Many people get their understanding of origins by watching movies like “Inherit the Wind” (or reading science fiction)
• The actual events of the Scopes trial are nothing like what the movie portrays
• The law forbidding the teaching of evolution was symbolic, not meant to be enforced
• The actual Scopes trial was a publicity stunt to attract attention to Dayton, TN to bring business to the town
• The ACLU advertised for a teacher who would be willing to be sued
• They found a substitute physical education teacher who would be willing to “break” the law
• The movie is nothing like the actual events the movie is a morality play
• The religious people are evil and stupid and ignorant and bigoted
• The scientists and lawyers are all intelligent, romantic, and honest seekers of the truth
• The religious people think that the Bible trumps science and science is not as reliable as the Bible
• The movie argues that the reason why there is ANY dissent to evolution is because of Biblical fundamentalism
• The movie presents the idea that there are no scientific problems with evolution
• The movie says that ONLY Biblical fundamentalists who believe in 6 day, 24-hour creation doubt evolution
• The movie says that Biblical fundamentalism are close-minded, and not open to scientific truth
• The movie says that people who read the Bible as making factual claims are misinterpreting the Bible
• The movie says that smart people read the Bible for comfort and feelings and arbitrary values, not for truth

Guided evolution and methodological naturalism

• What scientists mean by evolution is that fully naturalistic, unguided, materialistic mechanisms caused the diversity of life
• Scientists do not allow that God had any real objective effect on how life was created
• Scientists think that nature did all the creating, and any mention of God is unnecessary opinion – God didn’t DO ANYTHING
• Scientists operate with one overriding rule – you can only explain the physical world with physical and material causes
• Scientists DO NOT allow that God could have done anything detectable by the sciences
• Scientists WILL NOT consider the idea that natural, material processes might be INSUFFICIENT for explaining everything in nature
• You cannot even ask the question about whether natural laws, matter and chance can explain something in nature
• Intelligent causes can NEVER be the explanation for anything in nature, and you can’t even test experimentally to check that
• Scientists ASSUME that everything can be explained with natural laws, matter and chance – no questioning of natural causes is allowed
• Where no natural explanation of a natural phenomenon is available, scientists SPECULATE about undiscovered natural explanations
• The assumption of naturalistic sufficiency is called “methodological naturalism”
• To question the assumptions that natural is all there is, and that nature has to do its own creating, makes you an “enemy of science”
• But Johnson says that naturalists are the enemies of science, because they are like the Biblical fundamentalists
• Naturalists have a presumption that prevents them from being willing to follow the evidence where it is leading
• Experiments are not even needed, because the presumption of naturalism overrides any experimental finding that falsifies the sufficiency of natural causes to explain some natural phenomenon

What can natural selection and mutation actually do?

• what evolution has actually been observed to do is explain changing populations of moths and finches
• finches with smaller or larger beaks are observed to have differential survival rates when there are droughts or floods
• no new body plan or new organ type has been observed to emerge from these environmental pressures
• the only kind of evolution that has been observed is evolution within types – no new genetic instructions are created
• in textbooks, only confirming examples are presented – but what is required is a broad pattern of gradual development of species
• if you look at the fossil record, what you see in most cases is variation within types based on changing environments
• the real question is: can natural law and chance be observed to be doing any creating of body plans and organ types?

What kind of effect requires an intelligent cause?

• the thing to be explained in the history of life is the functional information sequences
• you need to have a sequence of symbols or characters that is sufficiently long
• your long sequence of characters has to be sequenced in the right order to have biological function
• the only thing that can create long sequences of functional information is an intelligent cause
• intelligent design people accept micro-evolution – changes within types – because that’s been observed
• the real thing to be explained is the first living cell’s functional information, and the creation of new functional information

Critical response

The next 15 minutes of the lecture contain a critical response from a philosophy professor who thinks that there have been no developments in design arguments since Aquinas and Paley. He basically confirms the stereotypes that Johnson outlined in the first part of the lecture. I recommend listening to this to see what opposition to intelligent design really looks like. It’s not concerned with answering scientific questions – they want to talk about God, the Bible and Noah’s ark. It’s our job to get people like this critic to focus on the science.

Here’s my snarky rendition of what he said:

1) Don’t take the Bible literally, even if the genre is literal.

• all opposition to evolution is based on an ignorant, fundamentalist, literal reading of the Bible
• the Bible really doesn’t communicate anything about the way the world really is
• the Bible is just meant to suggest certain opinions and experiences which you may find fetching, or not, depending on your feelings and community
• if Christians would just interpret the Bible as myths and opinions on par with other personal preferences, then evolution is no threat to religious belief

2) As long as you treat the design argument as divorced from evidence, it’s not very effective

• the latest and best version of the design argument is the old Paley argument which involves no experimental data, so I’ll critique that
• this 200-year old argument which doesn’t rely on science has serious problems, and unnamed Christians agree with me!
• Christians should NOT try to prove God’s existence using evidence from the natural world (as Romans 1 says), and in fact it’s “Pelagianism” to even try
• Christians should divorce their faith from logic and evidence even though the Bible presents faith as being rooted in reason and evidence
• Christians should not tie their faith to the science of today, because science is always changing and the theism-friendly evidence of today might be overturned tomorrow
• It’s a good idea for me to critique the arguments of 1000-year old people who did not know anything about the cosmic fine-tuning argument – that’s fair!
• I find it very useful to tell people that the argument from design is false without mentioning any design arguments from DNA or cosmic fine-tuning
• We need to assume that the natural world is explainable using only natural causes before we look at any evidence
• We should assume that natural causes create all life, and then rule out all experimental evidence for intelligent causes that we have today
• As long as you accept that God is a personal opinion that has nothing to do with reality, then you can do science
• The non-Christian process theologian Teilhard de Chardin accepts evolution, and therefore so should you
• Remember when theists said God caused thunder because he was bowling in the clouds and then we found out he didn’t? Yeah well – maybe tomorrow we’ll find out that functional sequences of amino acids and proteins have natural causes! What would you do then?

3) What the Bible really says is that you should be a political liberal

Q&A time

The lecture concludes with 13 minutes of questions.

Filed under: Podcasts, Assumption, Charles Darwin, Darwin, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Materialism, Metaphysical Naturalism, Methodological Naturalism, Naturalism, Nature, Philip E. Johnson, Philosophy, Pre-Supposition, Process Theology, Religion, Science, Speculation, Theistic Evolution, Theology

Can science explain why anything at all exists?

This interesting post is from cosmologist Luke Barnes. (H/T ECM)

Dr. Barnes takes issue with Lawrence Krauss’ book about the origin of the universe, in which Krauss, an atheist and materialist, tries to explain how something came from nothing without God.

He writes:

Here is my argument.
A: The state of physics at any time can be (roughly) summarised by three things.

1. A statement about what the fundamental constituents of physical reality are and what their properties are.
2. A set of mathematical equations describing how these entities change, move, interact and rearrange.
3. A compilation of experimental and observational data.

In short, the stuff, the laws and the data.

B: None of these, and no combination of these, can answer the question “why does anything at all exist?”.

C: Thus physics cannot answer the question “why does anything at all exist?”.

And here is his conclusion:

Now, why think that neither the stuff, the laws or the data or a combination can answer the question of why anything exists?

1 can’t do it: A statement of the basic constituents of reality, in and of itself, obviously cannot explain why such things exist, any more than the statement “the sky is blue” can explain why the sky is blue. So 1 is out.

2 can’t do it: Mathematical equations describe properties, and existence is not a property. 5 dollars plus 5 dollars equals 10 dollars, but that fact will not tell you how much money is actually in my account. The same is true for all mathematical equations, even the more sophisticated ones used by modern physics. Write down any equation you like – you will not be able to deduce from that equation that the thing it describes really exists. Mathematical equations are abstract entities, they have no causal powers. They can’t do anything, least of all jump off the blackboard and pull entities into existence. So the answer cannot be found in 2.

1 and 2 can’t do it: 1 and 2 together give a theoretical description of reality as we know it, so succumb to the same problems as 2 alone.

3 can’t do it: for the same reason that 1 can’t. The statement “I observed an electron strike a screen” cannot explain why there are electrons at all, and thus (a fortiori) cannot explain why anything exists at all.

1, 2 and 3 can’t do it: Sitting and staring at 1+2 on one hand, and 3 on the other, will tell you why we think that 1+2 really describes our universe. They account for the data, which is what science does. But once again we see no resources to attack the question of why anything at all exists. We’ve successfully described our universe. But that is all.

Thus, physics cannot answer the question “why does anything at all exist?”.

It is important to realise that no amount of progress in physics will change this situation. Imagine the final equation, the law of nature, written on a blackboard to thunderous applause. After the adoration dies down, we will still be faced with the question “why does a universe described by that equation actually exist?”.

This reminds me of what the famous physicist Richard Feynman says about how scientists should speak to laymen.

He writes:

I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you’re not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We’ll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were. “Well,” I said, “there aren’t any.” He said, “Yes, but then we won’t get support for more research of this kind.” I think that’s kind of dishonest. If you’re representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you’re doing– and if they don’t support you under those circumstances, then that’s their decision.

It seems to me that Dr. Barnes is acting on Dr. Feynman’s advice, while Lawrence Krauss, in writing a sensational book that attempts to mislead laymen about what science can and cannot do, is not.

I think that science is a good thing, and that it is helpful to theists. It strengthens the theistic hypothesis in many ways, especially with research about the Big Bang, research about cosmic fine-tuning, research about the origin of life and DNA, research about the fossil record and the Cambrian explosion, research in astrobiology and habitability, and so on.

Filed under: Polemics, Atheism, Cosmology, God, Lawrence Krauss, Luke Barnes, Materialism, Nature, Nothing, Physics, Richard Feynman, Science, Theism, Universe

Philip E. Johnson lectures on science, evolution and religion

I found this fun lecture by the grandfather of the big-tent intelligent design movement, Berkeley law professor Philip E. Johnson.

I’ll bet you guys have all heard of him, but you’ve never heard him speak, right? Well, I was a young man, I used to listen to Phil’s lectures and his debates with Eugenie Scott quite a bit. This is one of my favorite lectures. Very easy to understand, and boilerplate for anything else in the origins debate. This is a great lecture – funny, engaging and useful. You will definitely listen to this lecture several times if you listen to it once.

The MP3 is here. (91 minutes, 62 megabytes)

The Inherit the Wind stereotype

• Many people get their understanding of origins by watching movies like “Inherit the Wind” (or reading science fiction)
• The actual events of the Scopes trial are nothing like what the movie portrays
• The law forbidding the teaching of evolution was symbolic, not meant to be enforced
• The actual Scopes trial was a publicity stunt to attract attention to Dayton, TN to bring business to the town
• The ACLU advertised for a teacher who would be willing to be sued
• They found a substitute physical education teacher who would be willing to “break” the law
• The movie is nothing like the actual events the movie is a morality play
• The religious people are evil and stupid and ignorant and bigoted
• The scientists and lawyers are all intelligent, romantic, and honest seekers of the truth
• The religious people think that the Bible trumps science and science is not as reliable as the Bible
• The movie argues that the reason why there is ANY dissent to evolution is because of Biblical fundamentalism
• The movie presents the idea that there are no scientific problems with evolution
• The movie says that ONLY Biblical fundamentalists who believe in 6 day, 24-hour creation doubt evolution
• The movie says that Biblical fundamentalism are close-minded, and not open to scientific truth
• The movie says that people who read the Bible as making factual claims are misinterpreting the Bible
• The movie says that smart people read the Bible for comfort and feelings and arbitrary values, not for truth

Guided evolution and methodological naturalism

• What scientists mean by evolution is that fully naturalistic, unguided, materialistic mechanisms caused the diversity of life
• Scientists do not allow that God had any real objective effect on how life was created
• Scientists think that nature did all the creating, and any mention of God is unnecessary opinion – God didn’t DO ANYTHING
• Scientists operate with one overriding rule – you can only explain the physical world with physical and material causes
• Scientists DO NOT allow that God could have done anything detectable by the sciences
• Scientists WILL NOT consider the idea that natural, material processes might be INSUFFICIENT for explaining everything in nature
• You cannot even ask the question about whether natural laws, matter and chance can explain something in nature
• Intelligent causes can NEVER be the explanation for anything in nature, and you can’t even test experimentally to check that
• Scientists ASSUME that everything can be explained with natural laws, matter and chance – no questioning of natural causes is allowed
• Where no natural explanation of a natural phenomenon is available, scientists SPECULATE about undiscovered natural explanations
• The assumption of naturalistic sufficiency is called “methodological naturalism”
• To question the assumptions that natural is all there is, and that nature has to do its own creating, makes you an “enemy of science”
• But Johnson says that naturalists are the enemies of science, because they are like the Biblical fundamentalists
• Naturalists have a presumption that prevents them from being willing to follow the evidence where it is leading
• Experiments are not even needed, because the presumption of naturalism overrides any experimental finding that falsifies the sufficiency of natural causes to explain some natural phenomenon

What can natural selection and mutation actually do?

• what evolution has actually been observed to do is explain changing populations of moths and finches
• finches with smaller or larger beaks are observed to have differential survival rates when there are droughts or floods
• no new body plan or new organ type has been observed to emerge from these environmental pressures
• the only kind of evolution that has been observed is evolution within types – no new genetic instructions are created
• in textbooks, only confirming examples are presented – but what is required is a broad pattern of gradual development of species
• if you look at the fossil record, what you see in most cases is variation within types based on changing environments
• the real question is: can natural law and chance be observed to be doing any creating of body plans and organ types?

What kind of effect requires an intelligent cause?

• the thing to be explained in the history of life is the functional information sequences
• you need to have a sequence of symbols or characters that is sufficiently long
• your long sequence of characters has to be sequenced in the right order to have biological function
• the only thing that can create long sequences of functional information is an intelligent cause
• intelligent design people accept micro-evolution – changes within types – because that’s been observed
• the real thing to be explained is the first living cell’s functional information, and the creation of new function information

Critical response

The next 15 minutes of the lecture contain a critical response from a philosophy professor who thinks that there have been no developments in design arguments since Aquinas and Paley. He basically confirms the stereotypes that Johnson outlined in the first part of the lecture. I recommend listening to this, because it shows how weak the counter arguments are, and how these pseudo-intellectuals mislead unprepared students to question their Christian faith – especially dangerous since they have the power of the grading pen. Notice especially how he never mentions any arguments that Christians actually use, nor does he mention any actual science. Everything is “words, words, words” as Hamlet might say – no talking about experiments.

Here’s what he says:

1) Don’t take the Bible literally, even if the genre is literal.

• all opposition to evolution is based on an ignorant, fundamentalist, literal reading of the Bible
• Christians need to reinterpret the Bible so that it is basically relaying personal preferences, and not factual information, regardless of the genre intended
• the Bible really doesn’t communicate anything about the way the world really is
• the Bible is just meant to suggest certain opinions and experiences which you may find fetching, or not, depending on your feelings and community
• if Christians would just interpret the Bible as myths and opinions on par with other personal preferences, then evolution is no threat to religious belief

2) As long as you treat the design argument as divorced from evidence, it’s not very effective

• the latest and best version of the design argument is Paley’s argument which involves no experimental data, so I’ll critique that
• this 200-year old argument which doesn’t rely on science has serious problems, and unnamed Christians agree with me!
• Christians should NOT try to prove God’s existence using evidence from the natural world (as Romans 1 says), and in fact it’s “Pelagianism” to even try
• Christians should divorce their faith from logic and evidence even though the Bible says that Jesus performed miracles to supply evidence for his claims
• Christians should not tie their faith to the best science available today, because science is always changing – what happens if we discover that the universe is eternal tomorrow?
• What if! What if! Just because you guys have the facts on your side today, tomorrow science might prove that the universe is eternal! What would you do then?
• It’s a good idea for me to critique the arguments of 1000-year old people who did not know anything about the cosmic fine-tuning argument – that’s fair!
• I find it very useful to tell people that the argument from design is false without mentioning any scientific evidence of design from things like DNA and fine-tuning
• We need to assume that the natural world is explainable using only natural causes
• We should assume that natural causes create all life, and then rule out all experimental evidence for intelligent causes that we have today
• As long as you accept that God is a personal opinion that has nothing to do with reality, then you can do science
• The non-Christian process theologian Teilhard de Chardin is actually a Christian, and he accepts evolution, so quit complaining you ignorant fundies!
• Remember when theists said God caused thunder because he was bowling in the clouds and then we found out he didn’t? Yeah well – maybe tomorrow we’ll find out that functional sequences of amino acids and proteins have natural causes! What would you do then?

3) What the Bible really says is that you should be a political liberal

Q&A time

The lecture concludes with 13 minutes of questions.

Filed under: Podcasts, Assumption, Charles Darwin, Darwin, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Materialism, Metaphysical Naturalism, Methodological Naturalism, Naturalism, Nature, Philip E. Johnson, Philosophy, Pre-Supposition, Process Theology, Religion, Science, Speculation, Theistic Evolution, Theology

Atheist Thomas Nagel defends the scientific value of intelligent design

From Evolution News.

Excerpt:

In September, Oxford University Press officially releases the hardcover version of a new book by renowned philosopher Thomas Nagel at New York University. It’s a bombshell.

Already available on Kindle, Nagel’s book carries the provocative title Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. You read that right: The book’s subtitle declares that “the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.” Nagel is an atheist who is not convinced by the positive case for intelligent design. But he clearly finds the evidence for modern Darwinian theory wanting.

Nagel writes:

In thinking about these questions I have been stimulated by criticisms of the prevailing scientific world picture… by the defenders of intelligent design. Even though writers like Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer are motivated at least in part by their religious beliefs, the empirical arguments they offer against the likelihood that the origin of life and its evolutionary history can be fully explained by physics and chemistry are of great interest in themselves. Another skeptic, David Berlinski, has brought out these problems vividly without reference to the design inference. Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems that these iconoclasts pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair.

Read the rest here. Thomas Nagel previously named Stephen C. Meyer’s “Signature in the Cell” a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. He is a very independent thinker, and very honest about his motivations and the evidence.

Filed under: News, Atheism, Atheist, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Materialism, Naturalism, Nature, Science, Thomas Nagel