Religion and science: a meeting of minds

Is 'Who were Adam and Eve?' even a question? Graphic: Source

The trans-Atlantic New Atheism tag team of figures such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, the late Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali have certainly had an impact on the public's attitudes towards science and religion, according to a report published in Britain in the past week.

The report from Theos, the Christian think tank which commissioned the research, "draws on a three-year project in which the researchers conducted over a hundred in-depth interviews with leading academics and science communicators, and commissioned a YouGov public opinion poll of over 5,000 British adults".

There is good news for those hoping for a balanced conversation on the topic, but it's worthwhile studying first the fact of the residue of antagonism that has been deposited – or cultivated  – in the public's mind by the campaigning of that tiny clique of atheists who loved to court controversy, with their efforts ebbing in more recent years.

The 'science-religion' research report's executive summary provides these negative findings:

The British public are more likely, by a proportion of 2:1, to think that science and religion are incompatible (57%) than compatible (30%). 

There is an even more pronounced difference (3:1) between those who think they are strongly incompatible (22%) than those who think they are strongly compatible (7%). 

This issue has a noticeable gendered and ethnic dimension. Men are more likely to voice an opinion on this matter and to be hostile than are women. Conversely, respondents from non-white ethnic groups are more likely to be positive than white respondents.

Of those who expressed an opinion, 68% of white respondents were on balance ‘incompatible’, compared with 48% of those from nonwhite ethnic groups respondents. In effect, white men are the group most likely to have a negative view of science and religion.

However, the good news on attitudes concerning the interaction of science and religion suggests that "the angry hostility towards religion engineered by the New Atheist movement is over". 

The summary states: 

About 15 years ago, [...] a ComRes poll found that 42% of UK adults agreed that “faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate”. Today, that figure is 20%. 

By comparison, 46% of people today agree that “all religions have some element of truth in them”, 49% that “humans are at heart spiritual beings”, and 64% of people agree that “there are some things that science will never be able to explain”. 

One of the report's writers adds:

Moreover, younger people are notably less hostile about all this than any previous generation. Gen Zs, aged 16-24 in the survey, are more likely to agree that it is possible to believe in God and evolution, more likely to believe that you can be religious and be a good scientist, more likely to think religion has a place in the modern world than any other generation, more likely to disagree that science will be able to explain everything one day, and more likely to disagree that science is the only way of getting reliable getting knowledge about the world. For them at least, the conflict seems to be passing. 

On closer inspection, there seems to be a conflict of image rather than substance: 

Tension with specific sciences is much less than with ‘science’ in general. If you ask people about their view of religion and science, they are likely to lean towards incompatible. If you ask them about religion and a specific science, e.g. neuroscience, medical science, chemistry, psychology, geology or even cosmology, they are more likely to say that, on balance, it doesn’t make it hard to be religious.

A similar point can be made for specific religions. The perception of hostility between ‘science and religion’ is greater than it is between ‘science and Christianity’ or ‘science and Islam’. 

Although much of the science and religion debate has been focused around evolution, it has rightly faded as a matter for contention.  Only 6% of the religious group disagree (3% strongly) with the statement that there is “strong, reliable evidence to support the theory of evolution”.

Religious people and even regular worshippers are only marginally more antagonistic to the theory of evolution than non-religious. Even among strict biblical literalists, a small group (3%) who are traditionally the most hostile to Darwinism, only just over a third rejects evolution.

In fact, any antagonism that may exist between religion and science does not appear to arise from the religion side.  When asked whether they agreed that “the dangers of science outweigh its benefits”, only 12% of the religious grouping strongly agreed or agreed compared with 9% of the general public. Conversely,  61% of the religious disagreed or disagreed strongly, just below the figure for the general public.

On this, the report's writers state that "[...] the religious are no more antagonistic towards science itself than are the non-religious, and:

In short, much of the science and religion ‘battle’ has been smoke – and there has been a lot of smoke – but without much real fire. 

This comes out clearly in the more than 100 in-depth expert interviews with scientists, philosophers, and sociologists. One strong atheist in this expert category stated:

“I want it on record, don’t just list me as an atheist in the Richard Dawkins type. Because I am not an atheist like him at all.” 

The report writer says separately:

Perhaps most tellingly, the sense of hostility seems to weaken with knowledge and education. The higher your level of education or knowledge is, the less likely you are to think that, for example, “you can’t be a good scientist and be religious”. Indeed, we spoke in depth to leading scientists and philosophers, from Brian Cox to Adam Rutherford – people who were recruited on the basis of their expertise and their non-belief – a surprising number (two-thirds) saw science and religion as compatible, far more than the general public.

 In the words of one interviewee, the evidence seems to show that “there is much less of a conflict for anyone who has had to think a bit about it, whether they be a practicing scientist or a practicing member of a faith community. The idea of a problem comes more from those who aren’t either and who have just picked up the cultural zeitgeist.”

The report writers continue: 

The contention of this report is that the science and religion debate has been distorted by being viewed primarily through a few narrow lenses – in particular, evolution (“vs creation(ism)”), the Big Bang (“vs God”), and neuroscience (“vs religious experiences”) – and because these are ‘conflictual’ lenses, the resulting picture is one of wholesale conflict, a conflict that the public feels but finds it hard to locate or explain.

The research findings seem to provide evidence for the view that:

 “‘Science and Religion’ is a lot like a swimming pool. All the noise is up at the shallow end.”

The commissioning think-tank acknowledges that there are remaining areas of conflict but the hope is that by understanding it better deeper issues can be examined in a mutually respectful manner. Rather than a war of words, the goal is to have a meeting of minds on matters such as metaphysics, epistemology, anthropology, and ethics.

Two of the expert comments were these, first with regards anthropology and then ethics: 

“Although there are tensions within modern thinking, I don’t think they’re specifically problems for religious belief, they’re problems for our ways of thinking about ourselves as human beings.” 

 “I think there is a real tension [here] but I think it’s an area, having said that, where having religious people and scientists together discussing it can be very interesting and possibly fruitful.”

The report itself states:

Properly speaking (as a number of philosophers and sociologists of science and practising scientists themselves pointed out in our interviews), science itself is an inherently conflictual process. Disagreement is not a problem. 

There is no reason why the science and religion conversation should be any different. In the process of those disagreements, some will come to a place of broad compatibility between science and religion, some to one of broad incompatibility, and some will linger in ongoing contestability. That is fine.

The goal, then is not "premature or unwarranted harmony" nor "staged and exaggerated conflict". 

What we hope is that, wherever people do find themselves on this issue, they do so on the basis of the best and most nuanced thinking possible, and that, in the process, they get a taste for quite how stimulating and intellectually provocative the field of ‘science and religion’ really is.

To close, we note this statement in the report, perhaps referring to the discrete disciplines of the History of Science, and the Philosophy of Science:

What is important is to recognise that the territory of science even today still has complex, contestable borders and numerous different elements within it. 

That issue, and others relating to the nature of religion, are worthy of scrutiny in a further post. Look out for it in the coming week.

Ω Find the full Science and Religion report here 

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Making babies in the most unnatural way

Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra. Photo from Chopra's Instagram

Horse-wrangling a baby into the world is one way of describing the work of the fertility industry, which is sucessfully promoting its technologies at a time when society otherwise cries out for nature to be respected to the utmost degree. 

There is the physical and mental torture that women must endure in in vitro fertilisation (IVF), but also the health impact on the children arriving in this way.

The ways in which IVF is an attack on a woman's body are made clear for us in Kourtney Kardashian's confessions on the most recent episode of The Kardashians. She said medication as part of her IVF treatment 'basically put me into depression'. She added:

'I think because I'm so clean and careful about what I put into my body, it's just like having the complete opposite reaction and working as a contraceptive instead of helping us.'

'I have everything in the world to be happy about. I just feel a little bit off and not like myself. Super moody and hormonal, like I am a lunatic half the time.'  

The article goes on to explain:

IVF is usually used by women or couples who are struggling to conceive naturally, and it involves the retrieval of eggs from the ovaries, which are then fertilized by sperm in a lab, before being transferred into the uterus.

Many women who are preparing to undergo IVF will be given one or more forms of fertility drug by their doctor, which are used to trigger the release of hormones that then stimulate egg production.

As well as the destruction of unused human embryos, a scientific journal lays out the dangers to women:

There are a number of potential risks to women who conceive through in vitro fertilisation (IVF). Among these, ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome and multiple pregnancies are the most serious. Other potential risks include increased levels of anxiety and depression, ovarian torsion, ectopic pregnancy, pre-eclampsia, placenta praevia, placental separation and increased risk of cesarean section. 

Another article reports how unserious this manner of having a baby can be, given the self-centred mentality so apparent in society: 

Last year, Kourtney confessed on Ellen DeGeneres' YouTube show Lady Parts that she was peer pressured into the freezing eggs procedure before turning 40.

She explained: 'I froze mine too. Hopefully they're sitting there okay. Just for... you never know. I really got talked into it. 

'I was like, "Okay whatever, I'll do it one time. Since everyone else is doing it I might as well."

'Everyone's doing it. I believe I was 39. Top notch, top tier. I think it gave me a feeling of, like, taking a deep breath. You know I was 39 and I was about to turn 40 and everyone was like, "If you're going to do it, you've gotta do it now."

'So I was like, "Okay everyone, stop rushing me. I don't even know if I want to have another kid or if that's like in the future or whatever."

Meanwhile, children are affected by this technological process. A study has found that children born after IVF treatments have a greater chance of certain health problems. A newpaper report of the study states:

Children conceived from parents who used infertility treatments may be at an increased risk of developing asthma, eczema or having allergies, a new United States study finds.

Researchers at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, both part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), found that the treatments have been growing in prevalence in recent years may be leaving the child vulnerable.

Children who are conceived after the use of the treatment are 77 percent more likely to suffer from eczema, at a 30 percent increase risk of asthma, and are 45 percent more likely to require a prescriptions allergy medication in their youth.

The mechanism causing this phenomena could not be determined by the NIH research team, but they are calling for further investigation into potential links between the treatment and these types of conditions. 

Background to the study included these points:

These types of treatments are gaining popularity around the U.S., making the findings of the NIH have wide reaching effects on Americans.

According to a Pew Research Center poll in 2018, around a third of U.S. adults had either used themselves or know someone that used the treatment. Nearly half of college educated adults, and half of those that makes $75,000 per year or more, also reported using or knowing someone that had used the treatment.

The researchers, who published their findings last week in Human Reproduction, gathered data from 5,000 mothers and 6,000 children that were born from 2008 to 2010.

The mothers were surveyed on whether they used the treatment before, their own health and the health of their children. 

 'Specifically, we saw that children conceived with infertility treatments – including in vitro fertilization, taking drugs that stimulate ovulation, and undergoing procedures that insert sperm into the uterus – were more likely to have at least 2 reports of wheeze by age 3, which is considered a potential indication of asthma early on,' Dr Edwina Yeung, a researcher at the NIH, told DailyMail.com in an email.

'When we followed these kids to about seven to nine years of age we found children conceived with these treatments were more likely to have asthma, eczema or have a prescription for allergy medication.'

In a similar fashion to the above, the news that Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas have had a baby through surrogacy was widely featured when news broke in January. The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong reported:

According to multiple reports the couple decided to opt for a surrogate because their busy work schedules were interrupting their family planning. It is reported that the actress does not have fertility issues, but it was difficult for them to plan to be together when she could conceive.

It was also reported that Chopra, who is 39, had been involved in a film in London while Jonas was living at their home in Los Angeles. 

The SCMP also reported that in an earlier interview with Vanity Fair, Chopra had said the couple wanted a family and “by God’s grace, when it happens, it happens”.

It's a shame that the couple did not hold steady to that sentiment, for the reason that, as with IVF, surrogacy is a dehumanizing and unnatural business that represents a renunciation of the created order. Employing technologies of various kinds to achieve a child is a distortion of the curative purpose that health care and medical intervention rightly pursue.

Barton Gingerich is an Anglican pastor in Virginia with a concern at the 21st-century’s rapid submission to the customs bred from a Brave New World mindset. He writes:

Obviously, surrogacy finds itself on the fast-track to normalcy (at least among those who can afford it). Only a few years ago, the promises of the fertility industry were the stuff of science fiction, particularly of the dystopian variety. To implant donated sperm and eggs into another woman’s womb and for her to carry the baby to term would strike previous generations as deeply unnatural—which it is.

And surrogacy is a business. Although some generous souls do voluntarily offer to carry someone else’s child, the vast majority of these birth mothers are paid for their services. There’s big money to be had in fulfilling the primal paternal and maternal desires of parents who cannot conceive or, more sinisterly, refuse to suffer the burdens of childbearing but still desire offspring. To the shallow and well-resourced, surrogacy can ensure ease of life and a pre-natal Hollywood body for the wife. Let someone else deal with the wear-and-tear of pregnancy, just pay someone to bear the child. It’s not difficult to see how this could become incredibly popular in materialistic, immoral cultures, with the wealthy offloading the burden of childbearing upon the poor.

Gingerich supports the view that surrogacy dehumanizes both women and children:

Laying aside the immense confusion of who the real mother of a surrogate child truly is, separating a woman from an infant she carried in her womb for around nine months is traumatic and exploitative. Surrogacy turns the woman’s womb into a rented space. Couples that opt for surrogacy simply because they renounce pregnancy do themselves dishonor by revoking their own created nature—a God-given order that governs our flesh and our shared human life.

As for children, they aren’t products—they are sacred gifts of the Creator who opens and closes the womb. In terms of our own conception and gestation, we are begotten, not merely made. When God closes the womb, the right response is not to seek unnatural means.

Of course, children resulting from surrogacy are still of sacred worth and full human dignity, to be cherished by God and men, just like those that were conceived in other bad circumstances, including rape, adultery, incest, and so forth.

Likewise, surrogacy is not the same as adoption. Adoption pivots on pre-existing children who are orphaned or in a deeply broken situation in need of love and care. Surrogacy is about producing children to suit desires. Finally, there is no proof-text verse against surrogacy, just like there isn’t one for insurance fraud or cybercrime. It’s still wrong because it violates clear Biblical principles, particularly the sacred bond that exists among father, mother, and child—a bond God created, ordained, and blessed.

A potent conclusion offers food for thought:

To put things more clearly, women are not incubators. Children are not products. Despite all our pride in our enlightened “progressive” society, we still haven’t learned that the human body is not for sale. Christian ethicists have been sounding the alarm on this issue for decades now, and they will continue to do so in the future.

Ironically, the chaotic moral hellscape of The Handmaid’s Tale may arise, not from patriarchal, religious right-wingers who prize traditional moral values, but from wealthy Hollywood elites and, eventually, aspirational suburban couples who want babies but without suffering and sacrifice. 

Carrying and protecting an unborn baby does entail sacrifice, but that sacrifice lays the foundation for a family in which suffering is inevitable, but where an upwelling of love is achieved through the perserverance already learned.  

Already we are seeing in the WEIRD world the use of IVF and surrogacy of various kinds by single men and women, as well as homosexual couples, with donors providing the means to achieve a child. The use of technology may ensure the satisfaction of "parental" desires, but it also leaves the child with the deep-felt urge to plead: "But tell me who my real mother/father is!"

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The mystery of life for us to wonder at

Natural beauty that inspires us to use our ability to wonder

The ever-creative Maria Popova and American Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman are featured in this post on science, wonder and reality.

The United States-based Popova's work is dedicated to giving people experiences that rekindle their sense of enchantment, a quality much needed as imaginations wither in the desert of modern life. She is a bibliophile and celebrates the best of the literary and arts world, supporting creativity to guide those lost in the wilderness of superficiality that Western culture has become.

One of her latest projects has been a collaborative effort that combines poetry, science, and animated video. The title of this adventure is The Universe in Verse:

a season of perspective-broadening, mind-deepening, heart-leavening stories about science and our search for truth, enlivened by animated poems with original music: emblems of our longing for meaning.

Popova's perspective reaches out beyond the boundaries of the here-and-now, to the point of acknowledgement that what inspires our wonder manifests the profound love shown by God the Creator. 

Her introduction to Feynman's contribution to The Universe in Verse illuminates all of human life: 

Here we are, each of us a portable festival of wonder, standing on this rocky body born by brutality, formed from the debris that first swarmed the Sun 4.5 billion years ago and pulverized each other in a gauntlet of violent collisions, eventually forging the Moon and the Earth.

Here we are, now standing on it, on this improbable planet bred of violence, which grew up to be a world capable of trees and tenderness. A conscious world. A world shaped by physics and animated by art, by poetry, by music and mathematics — the different languages we have developed to listen to reality and speak it back to ourselves.

Here we are, voicing in these different languages our fundamental wonderment: What is all this? This byproduct of reality we call life: not probable, not even necessary, and yet it is all we know, because it is all we are, and it is with the whole of what we are that we reckon with reality, that we long to fathom it — from the scale of gluons to the scale of galaxies, from the mystery of the cell to the mystery of the soul.

In setting the scene for Feynman's piece, Popova writes: 

In the autumn of 1955, a decade before he won the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work on quantum electrodynamics, Feynman took the podium at the National Academy of Sciences to contemplate the value of science. Midway through his characteristically eloquent and intellectually elegant lecture, addressing the country’s most orthodox audience of academic scientists, he burst into what can best be described as a splendid prose-poem about the mystery and wonder of life, inspired by a reflective moment he spent alone on the edge of the sea, where Rachel Carson, too, found the meaning of life. It later became the epilogue to Feynman’s final collection of autobiographical reflections, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, published the year of his death [1988].

[UNTITLED ODE TO THE WONDER OF LIFE]

by Richard Feynman

I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think. There are the rushing waves… mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business… trillions apart… yet forming white surf in unison.

Ages on ages… before any eyes could see… year after year… thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what?… on a dead planet, with no life to entertain.

Never at rest… tortured by energy… wasted prodigiously by the sun… poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar.

Deep in the sea, all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves… and a new dance starts.

Growing in size and complexity… living things, masses of atoms, DNA, protein… dancing a pattern ever more intricate.

Out of the cradle onto the dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity.

Stands at the sea… wonders at wondering… I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe.

 Yes, our two creative commentators agree. Feynman denotes each of us as a superb "I", splendid because we are "atoms with consciousness... matter with curiosity", crowned with excessive capabilities  —  each of us "wonders at wondering". We are endowed, as Popova states, with "life: not probable, not even necessary", and beyond that outrageous element of reality, we have in our hearts the eyes to contemplate "the mystery and wonder of life".  

Ω See also this post on science and immortality.

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

I’m a licensed physician in Florida. I got this amazing notice today from the Florida Health Department. They sent it to all doctors. pic.twitter.com/VP6qpM8Leg

— Grazie Christie, M.D. (@GChristiemd) April 20, 2022

Trans sports people warn against transgender access

Mianne Bagger, played competitive women's golf after transitioning

It's telling that even sports people who identify as the opposite sex reject the proposition that transgender players should be have complete freedom to compete against those who are, in reality, of the opposite sex. 

A case in point is Mianne Bagger, an Australian professional golfer who made history at the Women's Australian Open as the first transgender athlete to compete in a professional golf tournament. Bagger, who transitioned in 1995, explained in an newpaper interview why it was necessary to support the moves in Australia to enact legislation to exclude persons of one sex from competing in sports designated as being for the opposite sex.

Bagger, now 55 years old, said that for a man transitioning there is a loss of strength and stamina, but only over a long time.

However, the main factor is to protect women-only spaces. Bagger said in the interview:

"These days, [the dynamic] has crept into what's called self ID or self identification: male-bodied people presenting as women, who live as women, with varying degrees of medical intervention and in some degrees, no medical intervention, which is just — it's crossed the line, in my view, it really has … It's a slap in the face to women."

She stressed that, when considering the bill, it was "really important" to note "the difference between general society and sport, particularly really high-level sport".

"In every day society, of course we want an inclusive, egalitarian [society]. We want equality, lack of discrimination, and of course every single person should have equal access to life and services and work in society. Of course we all want that, and so do I.

"In sport? It's different. Sport is about physical ability. It's not just about discrimination, it's not just about equality and equal access. It is a physical ability. Now, if you've got one group — males — that are on average stronger, taller, faster, as opposed to women, there has to be a divide. There has to be a division."

Bagger would answer in the affirmative the question: Can one be a true supporter of transgender rights, while also maintaining that an athlete such as American swimmer Lia Thomas, a biological male, shouldn’t be allowed to compete in the women’s division?

Another is American Nancy Hogshead-Makar, who won three swimming gold medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and is now an outspoken proponent of women’s sports.

As Associated Press columnist Paul Newberry writes:

Hogshead-Makar considers herself a liberal on social issues. She also has made it clear that she thinks Thomas has a huge biological advantage that should bar her from taking part in women’s events.

“We’ve got people who are twisting themselves into pretzels trying to justify the fact that they didn’t get their act together and change the policy so that it’s fair for biological women,” Hogshead-Makar said in an interview, less than 24 hours after Thomas became the first transgender swimmer to win a national championship.

Newberry says that his view that there was no example of an athlete gaining an unfair advantage after transitioning from male to female has been challenged by Thomas’ performance. He continues:

Competing as a male at the University of Pennsylvania, Thomas had some success but nothing of national significance. After going through hormone-replacement therapy and — let’s make this clear — following the rules set up by the NCAA for transgender athletes, she joined the Penn women’s team and became one of the best college freestylers in the nation.

Qualifying for the NCAA women’s championships at Georgia Tech in three events, Thomas overpowered the field in the closing laps of the 500 free Thursday night, touching 1.75 seconds ahead of everyone else.

What a field it was.

The runner-up, Virginia’s Emma Weyant, was a silver medalist in the 400-meter individual medley at last summer’s Tokyo Olympics. Third-place finisher Erica Sullivan of Texas also won a silver medal in Tokyo, behind the great Katie Ledecky in the 1,500 freestyle. Fourth place went to Stanford’s Brooke Forde, who earned an Olympic silver in the 4x200 free relay.

Thomas finished fifth in Friday night’s 200 freestyle. She came into the meet as the top seed, just as she was in the 500, but touched more than 2 seconds behind Stanford Taylor Ruck.

Hogshead-Makar said Thomas’ times as a female swimmer show her biological advantage “has not been mitigated”.

“She didn’t go from being 500th as a male to 500th as a female,” Hogshead-Makar said. “She went from not being able to even qualify for the NCAAs as a male to being a national champion as a female. That’s not fair.”

In her eyes, Thomas’ supporters are blending gender rights with the biological realities of sex.

“I want trans people to be happy. I want them to have full acceptance,” Hogshead-Makar said. “But this isn’t fair to the women’s category. You can hold those two things to be true at the same time.” 

That last thought is in direct contrast to the line pushed by transgender activists that there are so few transgender athletes that there should be minimal supervision on this matter by sports bodies. That argument fails to convince those women athletes who battled to raise the status of women's sports with regards pay, prize money, and public recognition of achievement. If more Lia Thomases appear women athletes would soon lose heart at their ability to make it to the top.

That there has to be a division in sex categories to protect women was also the stance of a leading New Zealand sportswoman last year as a man who identified as a woman was selected to represent New Zealand women in weightlifting at the Olympic Games. At the time, it was reported:

Former New Zealand Olympic medallist Lorraine Moller has questioned the fairness behind allowing transgender athletes to compete in the women's categories at the Games.

Moller's professional running career stretched 22 years and saw her compete at an impressive four Olympic Games starting at the 1984 event in Los Angeles, as well as three Commonwealth Games.

The now 66-year-old was also a strong advocate for women's rights in sport, calling on female athletes to be paid alongside men at a time when they received nothing.

Moller is continuing her support for women's sport, and has taken aim at the potential inclusion of transgender athletes in women's categories at the Olympic Games.

"We fought very hard in our time, especially for us women who didn't have parity in the Olympic events. We were involved in a campaign back then just to have our own events for ourselves, separate from the men's category," she said. 

"Now we have suddenly this whole issue of men who identify as women wanting to be included in the women's category, and I find that very concerning and it seems that there's a possibility of derailing the very thing that we fought for because men have considerable advantage across the board. The top women could never beat the top men and if it had been an open category, I would never have had an Olympic team or stood on the podium." 

Moller says there is a petition going on behalf of Save Women's Sport - an organisation that's part of an international coalition of women's sport organisations, athletes and support - that believes "sport must be categorised by sex, not gender identity".

Society needed to give more guidance to sports bodies in order to have "more review and be very careful before we allow men to take part in women's sports because we certainly wouldn't want to derail or dilute the opportunities that have been created for young women to enjoy sport at all levels," Moller said.

It's not only sport where men identifying as women were seen to be creating difficulties for women. It has arisen as a problem for women employed in financial services in Britain when it came to assessing equality of access to management positions and to company boards.

The Financial Conduct Authority has now ruled that men identifying as women should not be automatically registered as women in female diversity quotas.

This was a change from an earlier plan to make it compulsory to include "those self-identifying as women" in female diversity targets for boards and senior management roles. The change came after hundreds of women complained about the possible distortion in the actual number of women in those roles.

According to the newspaper report used as the source of this information:

The move is part of the FCA's wider "comply or explain" push for diversity - which will also demand that at least one board member be from an ethnic minority. Companies who fail to meet the requirements will be expected to "explain why not". 

The report also noted that transgender activists had created such an outcry that the regulator had to water down its requirement, "ultimately giving UK-listed companies the 'flexibility' to decide how they report their female quotas".

City of London lawyer Cathy Pitt, who is a member of the Sex Matters advisory group, said:

Collecting and reporting data on sex remains important, because how else can we measure improvement on closing the gap between men and women? Large listed firms still need to tackle sex-based discrimination on everything from pay and promotion to harassment and corporate culture.

Maya Forstater, executive director of Sex Matters, said: 

The FCA was wise to allow companies to report straightforwardly on the proportion of male and female members of their boards, [...], and not to start requiring them to ask board members to declare that they have one of many fluid “gender identities”. It is not for the financial regulator to redefine what ‘man’ and ‘woman’ mean.

That last point is an important one. It's for society as a whole to uphold the biological reality of a person's sex so that good order is preserved in society. The FCA had been pressured by activist groups to force companies to have management and board members to self-identify, no matter the biological reality, and that personal declaration would be entered  

 A sensible rethink changed that requirement, as we saw above.

In such instances as these, we have seen how, whether with sports bodies or other authorities, the promotion of a transgender ideology that proclaims that each person has a "right" to declare their own sex and that everyone else must comply with that declaration - how unfettered self-invention disrupts the harmony that the usual forms of self-restraint of personal desires allow. 

Here is the original form the Financial Conduct Authority put forward for use by companies in assessing sex diversity:

Here is the form that the FCA finally decided would be operative:

 
To conclude, in his column quoted above, Paul Newberry talks of the goal of fairness and equality when it comes to athletes who identify with the opposite sex. That's a noble sentiment - yes, there is a "but" - but we have to compare like to like for both to be achieved. Personal desires are fine except when they involve the impostion of principles that would transform and re-define social goods like how society can recognise essential characteristics of its members. Society also has a responsibility to protect its members, and to preserve the best conditions for the fundamental life-giving cell of society, the family.

We must respect the minuscule group who suffer from true gender dysphoria. However, the aggressive promotion to young people in particular that the binary nature of biological reality is false, must be combatted so that key elements of society are safeguarded  The first of those elements is individual identity, and the second is the family as formed with biologically (meaning physically, psychologically, and emotionally) complementary parents. Therefore, vigilance against the virus that is wokeism, and its mutant offspring, transgender ideology, is imperative for the well-being of all.

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The future is possible for those with a 'nose for reality'

Pope Francis at St Peter's Square on Easter Monday.   Antoine Mekary | ALETEIA 

 Where can young people get a vision of the future that does not lead to despair? What is the source of hope? From what can true joy spring for those with their life ahead of them?

The war in Ukraine is everyday fratricidal conflict writ large, as societies contend with divisions and inequalities that secular leaders are largely unwilling to seek solutions to or witless as to how to implement them, with their position in the social elite always at the forefront of their considerations.

However, the young have been offered a light to guide them to future horizons, as Pope Francis offered words to inspire, and reasons to hope when addressing about 80,000 young Italians who gathered in the square in front of St Peter's Basilica on the day after Resurrection Sunday. 

“The clouds that darken our time are still dense,” Francis told them. A useful report on the event continues to quote him as saying:

 “In addition to the pandemic, Europe is experiencing a terrible war, while injustices and violence continue in many regions of the earth that destroy mankind and the planet,” he said, noting that it is often young people who pay the highest price, as they lose their hope and dreams for the future.

He then referred to the Gospel passage in which Peter and John along with a handful of others, after Jesus’ resurrection, go out for an unsuccessful night of fishing. In the morning, Jesus appears and tells them to try again, and when the disciples obey, their nets are full of fish.

 “Sometimes life puts us to the test, makes us touch our frailties, makes us feel naked, helpless, alone…We must not be ashamed to say: ‘I’m afraid of the dark!’ We are all afraid of the dark. Fears must be said, fears must be expressed in order to be able to drive them away.”

“When the fears, which are in darkness, go into the light, the truth bursts out,” he said, insisting that the important thing about moments of crisis is not the crisis itself, but “how I manage this crisis”.

Staying isolated and closed off from others doesn’t help, but talking to and confiding in others does, he said.

Francis soon put his prepared speech aside to be able to speak more freely. The report of the event states: 

[He] urged youth to maintain their enthusiasm for life and their “nose” for reality, saying adults over the years tend to lose their sight, their hearing, and their “nose” for life.

“You have ‘the nose.’ Don’t lose this, please! You have the nose for reality, and it’s a great thing,” the pope said, voicing hope that young people would have “the nose of John” in the Gospel, who was the youngest but the first to recognize Jesus after the night of fishing, as well as “the courage of Peter,” who was the oldest, but the first to jump in and swim to the shore where Jesus was standing.

           [Do] not to be “ashamed of your outbursts of generosity”.

“The nose will lead you to generosity. Throw yourself into life,” he said, adding, “don’t be afraid of life, please! Be afraid of death, the death of the soul, the death of the future, the closure of the heart, be afraid of these things. But of life, no. Life is beautiful.”

Life, the pope said, “is for living and giving to others, not to close it in on itself”.

“It is important that you move forward,” he said. “The fears? Illuminate them, say them. Discouragement? Win it with courage, with someone to give you a hand. And the nose for life: don’t lose it, because it’s a beautiful thing.”

During his time with the young people, Pope Francis listened to testimonies from them about their lives, and the larger event included music, including a performance from top Italian rapper Blanco, and activities featuring other artists, leaders in their field.

The time of prayer, fun and sharing showed the enthusiasm of young people is a rich resource for any society wishing to cooperate with God in his plan that we have life, and have it to the full.

Some of the young people at St Peter's Square on Easter Monday    Antoine Mekary | ALETEIA

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What Christians can affirm as good and true

R R Reno, the powerhouse editor of First Things

Christians see that many forces within WEIRD society are driving it off-track - have even already ensured it end up in the wreck category! Therefore, the pressure is great to warn, to educate, to lead any members of the ideologically fashionable elite who are still open to reality, to science and to an escape from self-imposed suffering, to return to the way of life that is narrow in form but generous in outcome.

This matter is addressed in the latest annual report of the Protestant-Catholic magazine First Things, published in New York and a prominent example of quality writing on the human condition. In the report, the editor, R R Reno, explains what he and his staff have in their hearts:

Dear First Things readers,

It’s often easy to see what we oppose. We’re against woke tyranny. We reject the culture of death. We parry the unmerited claims that strong religious voices in public life run counter to liberal principles and America’s constitutional traditions. We are against tiresome claims about “the arc of history” and their threadbare second cousin, the outdated theological program of “relevance”. I could go on. There’s a great deal of ruin in the contemporary West, and we’re right to oppose bad ideas and destructive trends. But if we define ourselves only by what we oppose, we risk losing sight of what we are for.

The salt of the gospel gains its savor from what it affirms, not what it opposes. The same holds for the salt of natural truths, which ask us to say “yes” in addition to “no”. Opposition to abortion arises from an affirmation of the sanctity of life. Rejection of same-sex marriage is rooted in our “yes” to the biblical vision of the natural and spiritual fruitfulness of the union of a man and a woman.

In 2021, the First Things editorial staff met on a number of occasions to talk about what we affirm—and how to bring those affirmations to life in our pages. Here’s a snapshot.

We affirm beauty in art, intelligence in literature, and wisdom in tradition, publishing essays and reviews that bring before readers images, books, and activities worthy of their admiration: Gary Saul Morson on The Brothers Karamazov, Algis Valiunas on Charles Dickens, Bruno Chaouat on the sweet nostalgia of Chateaubriand, and Elizabeth Corey on Kim’s Diner and books for children. Our gaze is not uncritical, but our aim is to refine our love with critical judgment, not to dampen its yes-saying ardor.

We affirm moral truths. It is not sufficient to condemn abortion, euthanasia, and other grievous evils. We need a vision of human law guided by natural law and legislation that aims to promote the common good. These are contested notions, and rightly so. When we publish John Finnis or Hadley Arkes, we know that their arguments invite counter-arguments. But if we are to move beyond what we are against, then a substantive vision needs to be ventured, a “yes” needs to be proposed.

We affirm the tranquility of order, especially between the sexes. This is especially difficult to translate into a concrete proposal for society, given that so much has been disrupted by the sexual revolution. All the more reason, therefore, to applaud Scott Yenor and Mary Harrington, whose articles last year (“Sexual CounterRevolution” and “Reactionary Feminism”) may not be the last word on what kind of culture we want to build for our children and grandchildren, but they are at least a first word.

And we affirm God’s benevolent and life-giving power. It’s not just that we believe modern conceits of autonomy are misguided and often destructive. When those conceits about autonomy infect theology, they impede our obedience to God, which is the royal road to true freedom. Whether Patricia Snow’s memoirs of conversion or Carl R. Trueman’s theological trumpet blasts, First Things exists to champion the triumphant “yes” of God’s love, which evokes from us the “yes” of faith.

“Againstism”. That’s what I call the no-saying temptation that is satisfied with opposition. This temptation shirks responsibility for leadership. I pledge to you that I will resist this temptation. First Things is published so that we can assume our roles as leaders, an imperative if we’re to bring sanity (and perhaps a smidgen of sanctity) to our confused, disordered, and increasingly tense and anxious societies. And to be leaders, we must build upon the very best of our inheritance— artistic, political, moral, and theological—to venture a vision for a better future.

Sincerely,

R. R. Reno

Dip into First Things here to enjoy the freshness that can be found in good writing, and rich perspectives rarely found in mainstream media, or other media as well for that matter. This publication, in print and online, can rightly claim the status of  America's most influential journal of religion and public life. 

The next step is to enable the positivity that Christian living embodies, given the new life witnessed at Easter, to thrive in our minds and hearts so that we can share this gift with those burdened by the bleakness this age casts upon us.

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'Prayer is the greatest freedom of all'

Father Giles Conacher, a Benedictine monk in Scotland for 47 years, reflects in a brief BBC video on what freedom means to him and how to achieve it:

I think that freedom everywhere, anywhere, is love. Letting yourself be loved, which is always risky. And loving, which is maybe even riskier.

Prayer, I suppose, is the greatest freedom of all, because it's a relationship, it's a gift of God. It's very mysterious, I think. It's a gift and you just accept what comes.

Silence is an enabling thing. It frees you for listening, for availability, for avoiding imposing yourself.

How often in speech are we trying to do someone down or demonstrate our superiority or all of that? So, silence frees you from those things. 

Most monks do all sorts of things. So you take your turn washing up, peeling the spuds, cooking the lunch, driving the car. Many little jobs. Just like a family. 

Habere est haberi, which means, "What you possess, possesses you". The less you've got, the more freedom you have. And that’s a freedom which is quite hard to acquire in some ways because letting go of things is detachment.

It's difficult but it's essential for freedom because as our lives go on, you have to let go of things. Maybe your memory, maybe your sight, maybe your hearing, maybe mobility. You've got to let them go.

Because one day, you have to let go of your life, the ultimate impoverishment. But that’s the only way to get to the freedom of eternal life. 

It will be tough at times, everybody's life is tough at times. But as they say, the retirement benefits are out of this world. 

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Good Friday - the servant of God suffering for us

Look, my servant will prosper, will grow great, will rise to great heights.

As many people were aghast at him

- he was so inhumanly disfigured that he no longer looked like a man - 

so many nations will be astonished and kings will stay tight-lipped before him,

seeing what had never been told them, learning what they had not heard before.

Who has given credence to what we have heard? 

And who has seen in it a revelation of Yahweh's arm?

Like a sapling he grew up before him, like a root in arid ground. 

He had no form or charm to attract us, no beauty to win our hearts; 

he was despised, the lowest of men, a man of sorrows, 

familiar with suffering, one from whom, as it were, we averted our gaze, 

despised, for whom we had no regard. 

Yet ours were the sufferings he was bearing, ours the sorrows he was carrying, 

while we thought of him as someone being punished and struck with affliction by God; 

whereas he was being wounded for our rebellions, crushed because of our guilt; 

the punishment reconciling us fell on him, and we have been healed by his bruises. 

We had all gone astray like sheep, each taking his own way, 

and Yahweh brought the acts of rebellion of all of us to bear on him.

Ill-treated and afflicted, he never opened his mouth, like a lamb led to the slaughter-house, 

like a sheep dumb before its shearers he never opened his mouth. 

Forcibly, after sentence, he was taken. 

Which of his contemporaries was concerned at his having been cut off from the land of the living, 

at his having been struck dead for his people's rebellion? 

He was given a grave with the wicked, and his tomb is with the rich, 

although he had done no violence, had spoken no deceit. 

It was Yahweh's good pleasure to crush him with pain; 

if he gives his life as a sin offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his life, 

and through him Yahweh's good pleasure will be done. 

After the ordeal he has endured, he will see the light and be content. 

By his knowledge, the upright one, my servant will justify many by taking their guilt on himself. 

Hence I shall give him a portion with the many, and he will share the booty with the mighty, 

for having exposed himself to death and for being counted as one of the rebellious, 

whereas he was bearing the sin of many and interceding for the rebellious.

Isaiah 52:13-53-12 New Jerusalem Bible

Personal advice from a trans survivor

Teens are ready victims of cultural forces. Stock photo Anna Shvets (Pexels)

The Washington Post, to its credit, has let a man who identifies as a woman state why troubled young people are not able to comprehend the life-long consequences their urgent decisions will have. Corinna Cohn gets the chance, rare in US mainstream media, which tend to hoe the line set by the elite and its latest fashionable ideology, to tell about the impact now that life as a 50 year old approaches.

Cohn says that at 19 he was too young to make the decision that "committed me to a lifetime set apart from my peers". As a young man he had been attracted to men and thought that by becoming a woman he would be  "more successful in finding love". 

"In high school, when I experienced crushes on my male classmates, I believed that the only way those feelings could be requited was if I altered my body."

This is the kind of confusion Cohn wants to prevent and is alarmed at the "strong cultural forces" that are pushing children to make such definitive decisions without the support of parents. Cohn writes:

As a teenager, I was repelled by the thought of having biological children, but in my vision of the adult future, I imagined marrying a man and adopting a child. It was easy to sacrifice my ability to reproduce in pursuit of fulfilling my dream. Years later, I was surprised by the pangs I felt as my friends and younger sister started families of their own.

The sacrifices I made seemed irrelevant to the teenager I was: someone with gender dysphoria, yes, but also anxiety and depression. The most severe cause of dread came from my own body. I was not prepared for puberty, nor for the strong sexual drive typical for my age and sex.

Surgery unshackled me from my body’s urges, but the destruction of my gonads introduced a different type of bondage. From the day of my surgery, I became a medical patient and will remain one for the rest of my life. I must choose between the risks of taking exogenous estrogen, which include venous thromboembolism and stroke, or the risks of taking nothing, which includes degeneration of bone health. In either case, my risk of dementia is higher, a side effect of eschewing testosterone.

Dangers of affirmation

Cohn's message to society is this: 

I chose an irreversible change before I’d even begun to understand my sexuality. 

Therefore, affirmation can be insidious:

Where were my parents in all this? They were aware of what I was doing, but by that point, I had pushed them out of my life. I didn’t need parents questioning me or establishing realistic expectations — especially when I found all I needed online. In the early 1990s, something called Internet Relay Chat, a rudimentary online forum, allowed me to meet like-minded strangers who offered an inexhaustible source of validation and acceptance. [Emphasis added]

I shudder to think of how distorting today’s social media is for confused teenagers. I’m also alarmed by how readily authority figures facilitate transition. I had to persuade two therapists, an endocrinologist and a surgeon to give me what I wanted. None of them were under crushing professional pressure, as they now would be, to “affirm” my choice.

Most of all, slow down 

What advice would I pass on to young people seeking transition? Learning to fit in your body is a common struggle. Fad diets, body-shaping clothing and cosmetic surgery are all signs that countless millions of people at some point have a hard time accepting their own reflection. The prospect of sex can be intimidating. But sex is essential in healthy relationships. Give it a chance before permanently altering your body.

Most of all, slow down. You may yet decide to make the change. But if you explore the world by inhabiting your body as it is, perhaps you’ll find that you love it more than you thought possible.

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The bright spark of resurrection

American astronomer Rebecca Elson died of cancer in 1999 when she was 39. As well as her science, Elson wrote poetry, "never losing her keen awareness that we are matter capable of wonder" (Source). In fact, the one book of poems she left us is titled A Responsibility to Awe.

Listen as Patti Smith reads one of Elson's works and enjoy the aninimation:

The Universe in Verse | Part 4: Let There Always Be Light from Maria Popova on Vimeo.

The poem for your deliberation on the "beguiling beauty" of creation that overwhelms the scientist: 

LET THERE ALWAYS BE LIGHT (SEARCHING FOR DARK MATTER)

by Rebecca Elson

For this we go out dark nights, searching

For the dimmest stars,

For signs of unseen things:

 

To weigh us down.

To stop the universe

From rushing on and on

Into its own beyond

Till it exhausts itself and lies down cold,

Its last star going out.

 

Whatever they turn out to be,

Let there be swarms of them,

Enough for immortality,

Always a star where we can warm ourselves.

 

Let there be enough to bring it back

From its own edges,

To bring us all so close we ignite

The bright spark of resurrection.

Kids poorly served by trans 'science'

Andrew Sullivan has been a leader in intellectual circles in the United States and was the principal proponent of same-sex marriage before it took off as a mainstream issue. He is a homosexual and is a victim of the HIV epidemic. He writes often about the experience of the gay community and has increasingly expressed concern that the ideology of transgenderism, which has been readily absorbed by Western elites, is bent on doing harm to gay people and all young people.

In his latest weekly column on his Substack The Weekly Dish newsletter (behind a paywall), Sullivan presses the question of who is looking out for kids since American schools are generally surreptitiously rolling out instruction in critical queer and gender theory in the kindergarten through primary school years. When children reflect the confusion that critical queer theory necessarily generates, the schools keep it all secret from parents, and this at the crucial time of puberty. 

When Sullivan examines some of the reading texts in use at public schools he finds a definite pattern throughout all the materials:

The words “boy” and “girl” are never used to refer to biological sex; and they are never used as a binary. You can be neither, both or something else. And this is taught to all kids.

[...] these words, “boy” and “girl,” used by most people to refer to someone’s sex, are re-made in a child’s mind to refer only to gender. “I’m not a girl. I’m a boy in my heart and brain.” When Calvin’s parents accept him, we get the mantra: “We love you if you are a boy or a girl or both or neither.” Sex is gone; gender is everything; gender can be anything, even non-human. In this [Human Rights Campaign]-recommended book, the baby “can’t decide what to be. Boy or girl? Bird or fish?” Yes: fish.

Before long, as you peruse the material, you see a consistent message being sent to children: that being a boy or a girl has nothing to do with your body; and that you can “become” either, both or “something else entirely”.

That is why Sullivan starts his column by stating, "Getting a grip on reality is not so easy these days..." because in the "approved" texts:

“Sex” [...] becomes a “pronoun assigned at birth.” Yes, you read that right. Biological sex is merely “what the doctors or midwives said when you were born.” It’s a word without meaning. And you will note that in the “snowperson” lesson, the human body has no part to play at all.  

Parents are beginning to hear their kids talk about “women with penises,” as more teenage girls suddenly announce they’re transitioning, and the White House doubles down on affirming puberty blockers for children, even as European countries begin to realize they overstepped. (In the U.K., Sweden, Finland, and France, medical authorities are sounding the alarm. But the Biden administration regards these drugs as essential.)

The key argument that Sullivan supports with evidence in this column is this:

It seems to me that any books that teach kids to be compassionate and accepting, and aware of different ways of being human, are a positive thing. I don’t doubt the good intentions behind them. Having some materials for a genuinely trans child is a good thing. But teaching all public school kids under the age of eight that their body has no reference to their sex is a huge development — and news to most American parents. And encouraging toddlers to pick pronouns like “ze” and “tree” is not exactly what parents send their kids to public school for. 

Implications of gender theory

He graphically exposes the horrendous implications of this kind of critical queer and gender theory:

These teaching materials aim to be inclusive of the tiny minority of trans children — but they do this by essentially universalizing the very rare experience of being transgender, and suggesting that everyone’s gender is completely independent of biological sex, and trumps it in any conflict. The only way to help trans kids feel better about themselves, this argument goes, is to tell the lie that their experience is everybody’s experience. We are all varieties of trans people now, choosing our sex and performing our gender.

But, of course, we’re not all varieties of trans; the overwhelming majority of humans, including gay humans, experience sex and gender as completely compatible — when they think about them at all. And our species is sexually dimorphic. When pushed to defend the idea that humans are not a binary sexual species, critical theorists lean on the “univariate fallacy.” That argues that any single exception to a rule completely demolishes the rule. If there are any exceptions to every human being male or female, even if they are a tiny percentage of the whole, then there is no sex binary.

But that’s bizarre. That a small percentage of people are attracted to the same sex, for example, does not invalidate the rule that humans are overwhelmingly heterosexual — and if this were not the case, humans wouldn’t exist at all. Gay people are the exception that proves the heterosexual rule. The much smaller number of trans people, likewise, does not disprove that the overwhelming majority of people are completely at ease with their biological sex. It actually proves it, by showing the terrible psychic cost of being otherwise. (Trans kids and adults deal with huge mental health challenges, and commit suicide at staggering rates.) Intersex and [Differences in sex development] people are not a separate species, or some kind of third sex, no more than people with Down Syndrome are anything but fully human. They are a variation in the sex binary. 

Activist trans groups like HRC or the ACLU may thereby be unwittingly putting gay children at risk, misleading them about their sex and their bodies, putting ideas in their head that in the current heated atmosphere could easily lead to irreversible life-long decisions before puberty. And none of this is necessary. It is perfectly possible to look out for the very few genuinely trans children, without revolutionizing everything we know about the human body and biology. It’s possible to be welcoming to gay kids without insinuating that their real problem could be being “in the wrong body”.

The revelations that Disney productions have been feeding children over many years with the mindset that reality does not matter, that you can be anything you feel, tells us how woke degeneracy can have a severe impact on whole generations. This would be part of the explanation as to why there has been, in many WEIRD countries, an eruption in the number of children expressing confusion about sexual identity, girls especially.  

The capture of social elites by ideological pressure groups linked to transgenderism, always under the guise of Christian "human rights", continues as academia bows to what is fashionable (usuing the term "acceptable") and "morally superior".

Scientific paper distorts the facts

Investigatory journalist and author Jesse Singal has just produced in-depth scrutiny of another case of the stupid deceit that this gender ideology engenders in those wishing to stay professionally virtuous.

This is Singal's finding, stated as a headline: Researchers Found Puberty Blockers And Hormones Didn’t Improve Trans Kids’ Mental Health At Their Clinic. Then They Published A Study Claiming The Opposite.

The authors are mostly based at the University of Washington–Seattle or Seattle Children’s Hospital. The publication of their article was backed by a PR campaign by the university, leading to national interest in the findings. Singal writes:

All the publicity materials the university released tell a very straightforward, exciting story: The kids in this study who accessed puberty blockers or hormones (henceforth GAM, for “gender-affirming medicine”) had better mental health outcomes at the end of the study than they did at its beginning. 

He adds:

It isn’t just the publicity materials; the paper itself tells a similar story, at least a few times.

However, - and it's a big however - Singal discovers that the dramatic findings claimed are nonsense:

What’s surprising, in light of all these quotes, is that the kids who took puberty blockers or hormones experienced no statistically significant mental health improvement during the study. The claim that they did improve, which was presented to the public in the study itself, in publicity materials, and on social media (repeatedly) by one of the authors, is false. [My emphasis]

The kids in the study arrived with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems, many of them went on blockers or hormones, and they exited the study with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems.

If there were improvement, the researchers would have touted it in a clear, specific way by explaining exactly how much the kids on GAM improved. After all, this is exactly what they were looking into — they list their study’s “Question” as “Is gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary (TNB) youths associated with changes in depression, anxiety, and suicidality?” But they don’t claim this anywhere — not specifically. They reference “improvements” twice (see above) but offer no statistical demonstration anywhere in the paper or the supplemental material.

I wanted to double-check this to be sure, so I reached out to one of the study authors. They wanted to stay on background, but they confirmed to me that there was no improvement over time among the kids who went on hormones or blockers.

That’s why I think the University of Washington–Seattle, JAMA Network Open, and the authors of this study are simply misrepresenting it.  

The researchers used a model that allowed for certain conditions relating to their research, but Singal finds that this cannot be the reason for the claimed findings. He finds the authors, so caught up in the ideological hot-house that this issue has become, pushed their findings to the limit and beyond:

It’s frequently argued that if kids don’t have access to this medicine, they will be at a high risk of killing themselves. I don’t know what this claim could possibly mean if it doesn’t mean that upon starting blockers or hormones, a trans kid with elevated levels of depression or suicidal ideation will experience relief. These researchers, firmly enmeshed in this debate, found that kids who went on these medications did not experience relief — and yet they don’t mention this worrisome fact anywhere in their paper.

Singal offers a thorough methodological critique of the research and calls in an research expert to check his areas of disagreement with the authors. 

His evidence builds to confirm that "the science has become completely intertwined with the politics". He fears that research efforts are now part of a race to prove just how wrong politicians are in introducing legislation that would limit the use of medical treatments for young sexually confused children, and that researchers may want to produce evidence showing the treatments work to win kudos from issue activists as well as professional colleagues.

A serious tone given the implications of failure can be discerned in Singal's conclusion: 

[W]e should maintain vigilance and call out half-baked science when it comes to the literature on youth gender medicine. Adolescent mental health and suicide research, in particular, is a vitally crucial area of science, and we should hold it to high standards. If we can’t agree that it’s wrong and potentially harmful to distort research on these subjects, what can we agree on?

In short, we must stick with reality, whether it's the common sense of the sex binary that sustains much of the natural world that Andrew Sullivan is defending, or the findings of scientific practitioners, where evidence is discovered that enables us to know reality, rather than having the character of our existence obfuscated in an ultimately useless effort to distort reality for civilisation-changing political or ideological ends.  

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Surgery on 24-week baby

This is amazing. Dr. Darrell Cass and his team at the Cleveland Clinic performed fetal lung surgery on 24-week old baby girl. She was born without complications 12 weeks later. It's so inspiring to see work like this that saves valuable lives! #prolife https://t.co/kIjhSM0bO1 pic.twitter.com/aJn0PzGCAS

— Oregon Right to Life (@OR_RTL) April 7, 2022

Science forgets respect for truth

Searching for the truth. Photo Pavel Danilyuk

Good scientists know the provisional nature of their work. Long-held conclusions are superseded by later findings. As well, good scientists don't try to overrule the knowledge we have from sources other than the scientific method.

My previous post on this blog, Scientists's theories thrown into confusion, describes how the Standard Model of quantum mechanics is in being chipped away at as new findings raise doubts about it. 

Such misgivings about the solidity of established models must sear from the broad scientific community any conceit held as to certainty concerning findings, eliciting an attitude in social discourse of humble service.  

There is conceit but also corruption within the scientific community:

In their [2010] book, Merchants of Doubt, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway explain how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists, with extensive political connections, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. In seven compelling chapters addressing tobacco, acid rain, the ozone hole, global warming, and DDT, Oreskes and Conway roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how the ideology of free market fundamentalism, aided by a too-compliant media, has skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era. [Source]

Corruption in science is not only for monetary advantage, but also for ideological ends, as we can see with the civilization-ending transgender ideology sweeping through the "science-based" professions. These capitulate if not through simple cowardice at bucking the professional fashion, then because members do not care enough about the truth. 

Naomi Oreskes, saw her work Merchants of Doubt, referred to above, make a valuable impact, particularly through a film sequel, in establishing the forces at play over the climate crisis. She is professor of the History of Science and affiliated professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. A world-renowned geologist, historian and public speaker, she is a leading voice on the role of science in society and the reality of anthropogenic climate change. 

In our context of the role of science in social discourse, her 2019 text Why Trust Science?  warrants fresh attention. 

As Nick Spencer notes in a piece this month, Oreskes offers many examples in the history of science where science was not worthy of our trust. Neither the "absurdities" of phrenology (taking the skull as indicative of mental faculties and traits of character) nor the "horrors" of eugenics did not prevent both being "considered serious and established disciplines in their own time".

He reports on further areas where scientists' mindset got in the way of good science:

Limited Energy Theory, from the late [1800s], argued that women were not suited to higher education on the grounds that it would adversely affect their fertility. Building on the ideas of thermodynamics, medics argued that the female of the species had only a limited supply of physical energy, much of which was needed for reproduction. Higher education would shrivel their ovaries and uteri. The medics who propounded the theory were all men.

Continental Drift, the idea that Earth’s continents had drifted over its surface in geological history, was well established in Europe by the end of the nineteenth century, but American geologists had methodological objections to it:[...] too much theory, not enough observation. By why was this an issue in America and not in Europe? According to Oreskes: “American geologists…explicitly linked their inductive methodology to American democracy and culture… deduction was consistent with autocratic European ways of thinking and acting… [the Americans] methodological preferences were grounded in their political ideas.” 

So how can we accept anything that scientists proffer as a fact? Oreskes answers that in recent times method has won through as the main means to quieten sceptics. The popular view was that "the processes of science enabled theories to be verified, or they enabled theories to be falsified, or they enabled things to be predicted", as Spencer phrased it, adding: "Science was trustworthy because of its commitment to a reliable method."

However, complete acceptance of that principle has faded, with method being seen as necessary, but not necessarily sufficient. Distrust of science is rearing its ugly head again, as anti-vaxxers pick up on any inconsistencies in official scientific pronouncements, or as medical and psychological services leave young people mutilated as the transgender fad sweeps many Western societies. 

Central to the trustworthiness of science is this, as Spencer explains, drawing on Oreskes:

“It is not so much that science corrects itself, but that scientists correct each other.” And, as the growing body of sociology of science shows, when scientists are too homogenous, too similar, too close to outside interests, or too vested in certain ideologies, their ability and inclination to correct one another is blunted. “Objectivity [emerges] as a function of community practices rather than as an attitude of individual researchers.” (52) 

Spencer adds: "It may be that the importance of [gender] diversity among scientists matters more for some disciplines – particularly those closer to the questions of human nature and society – than for others." 

He states that "none of this amounts to a wholesale rejection of scientific method, so much as a question mark over its sufficiency".

 In her conclusion, Oreskes outlines five “themes” that combine to produce scientific knowledge:

1. Method

2. Evidence

3. Consensus

4. Values

5. Humility

It is striking, says Spencer, that the last three direct the question of why we should trust science "away from the narrow confines of what most people consider to be science, and towards the wider social and ethical context in which science takes place". 

Oreskes uses her depth of knowledge of the history of science - all the wrong paths taken, personal preferences and delusions, the conceit and unwillingness to face new evidence, the blindness to ethical issues - to plot a course for us as we open the door, with too little care, to the world of AI, the pursuit of immortality, and genetic manipulation for reasons of vanity - designer babies.

To borrow from Spencer's language, Oreskes states that matters of import to society cannot be left to just the scientist. Scientists should work in association with others who are suitably educated, learned, and informed. But education alone is not enough. We need the community to be involved, with members bringing to the fore their various backgrounds and experiences. 

Community participants, like scientists, must be characterised by integrity, patience, diligence, and responsiveness. Their work should be marked by humility, a refusal to foreclose on answers, an openness to new ideas, a reluctance to claim that you have somehow finally fathomed the mind of God.

But above all, the community should be varied, so that just as scientists correct each other to make better science, so members correct each other to make a better interpretation of the evidence. 

Science is a process, and the material world is the usual ingredient of that process. As the leading agent in that process, the scientist must not be closed from the real world. Ideological filters must be removed in conducting research so that a wider reality is not excluded. Here, I'm thinking of those prominent WEIRD neuroscientists who take what they know - so far- of the brain and go on their way mocking the more than 85 per cent of the world's population who acknowledge a spiritual dimension in their life.

Three takeaways: Science is essential in knowing our world; science does not stand alone; science is one part of the warp and woof of our human experience. 

And a fourth: Scientists belong to a community that is devoted to the truth, and whose members are willing to fight for the truth.

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