an intellectual grandpappy

a few vintage thoughts on religion from a very old Bertrand Russell:

well, there can’t be a practical reason for believing what isn’t true … at least I rule it out as impossible: either the thing is true or it isn’t. if it is true, you should believe it, and if it isn’t, you shouldn’t. and if you can’t find out whether it is true or whether it isn’t, you should suspend judgment … it seems to be a fundamental dishonesty, and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it’s useful and not because you think it’s true.

divine numbers

apparently there has been a new study on that most magical of numbers, 7.  researches have long known about 7 (plus or minus 2) being the number the maximum number of things we can recall with short-term, or working, memory.  in this new study, however, researchers tried to create a model of brain activity to explain how the firing and suppressing of neurons involved in this process explains why it gets exponentially more difficult (for normal minds) to continue adding to this working memory.  it seems, as has been demonstrated repeatedly with human subjects, 7 seems to be the breaking point.  as the article states,

As a sentence or a string of numbers gets longer, it becomes exponentially harder for the excited cluster to suppress the others from firing, resulting in pathways that are weak or barely there. Recalling seven items requires about 15 times the suppression needed to recall three. Ten items requires inhibitory powers that are 50 times stronger, and 20 or more items would require suppression hundreds of times stronger still. That, Rabinovich explained, is normally not biologically feasible.

now, I’m not troubling myself with the details of the study here because it’s not what is interesting me right now.  instead, I’m thinking back to all the sermons heard and lessons learned in Sunday school about how 7 was the number of God.  7 days in creation, 7 days in the week, 7 days of Passover (ignoring that these are all pretty much the same thing…), 7 spirits of God, 7 churches in Asia,

the 10 commandments are found in the 70th chapter of the Bible (ignoring, of course, the later, sometimes arbitrary origin of those divisions), 7 loaves of bread,

7 deadly sins,

and so on.

of course, 7′s magicalness extends beyond the Bible: in addition to it simply being a lucky number, we have the 7 chakras in Hinduism, 7 heavens in Islam (as well as 7 fires of hell), Judaism’s 7-branched candelabrum (of the temple, not Hanukkah),

7 lucky Japanese gods of fortune

and, of course, the 7-layer whopper released in Japan last month.

so assuming that this new study is true — heck, let’s up the ante and say that the number 7 is not just the statistical average of things that can be held in short-term memory but in fact “written” into the brain’s hardwiring — I can’t help but think about how this story could and should be interpreted in light of the importance of the number in various cultures and their myths and religions.  one the one hand, there’s the could.  some people will surely see this as evidence that God — whose number is 7, remember? — created us in such a way that his number could be found implanted within our brains.  oh, the trickster!  glory!

on the other hand, there’s the should.  that the number 7 may be found across various cultures because of the structure of our brains.  now again, this is taking this study beyond face value and assuming way more than necessary, but it’s illustrative of a larger problem of how we interpret evidence.  for instance, you often hear about how the conditions on this planet, nay, universe, are perfect for life.  if the earth moved an inch in its orbit, we would all burn of freeze (nobody really knows the physics, they just know this).  everything we need for life and health is bountifully provided on the planet by the plants (and animals, if you’re one of those ).  and when we’re not inconsiderately interfering, the planet is fairly good at balancing itself out and maintaining homeostasis.  in short, clear evidence of design and of the hand of a beneficent creator.

the problem, of course, is that this type of thinking is backward.  it involves looking at the end product, irrespective of how it developed, concluding that things couldn’t have been any other way — that this was the intended product, or even the only imaginable one — and consequently marveling at the fact that conditions or means just happened to exactly what was necessary.  it entails looking first at the nutrients we need to develop and survive and then at what’s available in the world, which, lo and behold, match up quite nicely.  what are the odds?!  this is essentially how I learned to look at the world — excuse me, creation — growing up in church.  it is, like many other un or pseudoscientific views preferred by the church over time, alarmingly egotistic.

the correct view, of course, even crudely understood, is just the opposite.  the essential nutrients and conditions of life are not there to meet our needs as we are, but rather we are the way we are — and life is the way it is — because “we” evolved as we were able to break down those nutrients for energy and as “we” were capable of surviving — better, thriving — in those environments.  God didn’t create bluish/grayish eyes — much less give them specifically to me — so that people whom he wanted to live in cold environments with less sunlight could thrive; rather, the genetic mutation spread — and in recent evolutionary memory, at that — because of benefits for those who were already living in those environments.  I mean, that’s a pithy, pathetic explanation, but it’s immediately more reasonable that the former position, as humbling as that might be.

this doesn’t provide any really satisfying answer as to why the number 7 can be found in so many cultures, playing such an important role, but I’m not interested enough right now to sift through any explanations there might be.  plus, let’s not pretend that 7 is really that prevalent around the globe, or that it’s even all that important in the Bible.  rather, this is an instance of the human tendency to look for patterns and to bias all the instances of what we’re looking for — ignoring all the other numbers that are just as important/mundane.

where’d this (vegan) apple pie come from?

a friend posted one of the various autotune renditions of a Carl Sagan clip from Cosmos in which he makes the following claim: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”  love it all over.  then I got to thinking about how representative this is of a naturalistic, scientific outlook regarding the world we live in.  and then I thought about how silly it would be (and is) to take a creationist position, looking at a delicious pie and claiming, “God did it.”

the two aren’t exactly perfect opposites, and let’s ignore some of the inadequacies of the analogy, but overall I think this demonstrates how exciting and wonderful the scientific process, as a tool box, is when compared to supernatural explanations (although those could be fun, depending on how creative we’re feeling).  I mean, sure, among the supernatural camp there’d be disagreement about exactly which steps God was involved in (sifting flour? slicing apples?), or which parts of the ingredients God actually created (grew? from scratch?), or which bakers or farmers he created or used, and so on and so forth.  insert variety from the history of religious engagements with evolution over the past 150 years.  (I recommend Darwinism and the Divine in America, by Jon Roberts.)

but this is never as much fun.  or convincing.  but lest I seem to “strident,” as they like to say, I’ll make it clear that I don’t really have a problem with someone sitting at the table, fully aware of where this pie came from, thanking God (any god, really) for it.  FSM included.

oh, I also found this recipe card, which is priceless.

book review: The Sea

a gorgeously composed, brief novel about grief and loss and haunting, if imperfect, memories.  if you are in it for the plot, you might say that reading this book is about exciting as watching paint dry; if it’s beautiful writing you’re after, same analogy, but now the paint is that of a master painter, dripping slowly and smoothly into place.  or perhaps, more in line with the spirit of the book, it would be akin to the horrible beauty of watching a masterpiece melt.

one more lengthy quote:

I have ever held the conviction, resistant to all rational considerations, that as some unspecified future moment the continuous rehearsal which is my life, with its so many misreadings, its slips and fluffs, will be done with and that the real drama for which I have ever and with such earnestness been preparing will at last begin.  It is a common delusion, I know, everyone entertains it.  Yet last night, in the midst of that spectacular display of Valhallan petulance, I wondered if the moment of my entrance might be imminent, the moment of my going on, so to say.  I do not know how it would be, this dramatic leap into the thick of the action, or what exactly might be expected to take place, onstage.  Yet I anticipate an apotheosis of some kind, some grand climacteric.  I am not speaking here of a posthumous transformation.  I do not entertain the possibility of an afterlife, or any deity capable of offering it.  Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.  No, what I am looking forward to is a moment of earthly expression.  That is it, that is it exactly: I shall be expressed, totally.  I shall be delivered, like a noble closing speech.  I shall be, in a word, said.

the uncaring smear

PZ Myers is not one to pull punches when commenting on religion, so none of this should come as any real shock (if you know him, that is).  it’s not necessarily new, but it’s certainly interesting.  and funny (to me, at least).  today he has written about John Shelby Spong who, Myers writes, is “essentially an atheist who skims off a bit of the moldy skin of the rotten fruit of religion, and tells us how pretty the colors are … thereby making an implicit argument to keep the decaying garbage around.”

but his characterizations about someone like JSS and numerous other super-academic-liberal-not-really-religious-in-any-tangible-way-but-religious-apologists-of-whatever-sort-nonetheless are not only occasionally funny, but also sometimes insightful (and dead on, I would add).  continuing about JSS, he writes,

He’s like Karen Armstrong, so taken with the language of religion that they’re willing to ignore the substance. When you’ve reduced god to the uncaring smear of cosmic background radiation and a collection of psychological quirks in the human brain, you might as well admit it: he’s dead. Get over it and move on. And deceased figments don’t need a weepy wake or much sympathy for the family.

there are a few recently coined clever ideas that hopefully will start making their way into these seemingly endless debates (not that I really care to follow all of it or even participate, apart from on a personal, sincere, give-and-take level).  the first is Daniel Dennett’s phrase “deepity,” which refers to a statement with two meanings, one true but superficial, and the other sounding profound but ultimately meaning nothing.  this relates to his take on people like Karen Armstrong and others who utter all kinds of deliberately confounding and contradictory statements about religion and god, hoping that somehow, in our befuddlement, we’ll just nod and agree.  or at least be impressed.

the second comes from PZ and is called “theological whack-a-mole.”  it has to do with his response to some Christians that atheists should take the religious (biblical) claims of people (they specifically meant Christians like them) more seriously, paying more attention to historical context and broader narratives (e.g. Christological).  his response, while more scathing than anything I would ever dare to offer, is worth pasting in full:

What is “the” Christological narrative? There is none, or rather, there’s a thousand of them. We know the context, too — that the Bible is an evolving mess of over-interpreted poetry and tribal stories and crackpot history. Why you guys choose to selectively declare one interpretation of one subset of the conglomeration to be the absolute truth as dictated by anthropomorphic vapor, while another arbitrary subset is archaic and doesn’t apply anymore, is completely incomprehensible … not just to us, but to you, too.

We atheists actually do address the claims fervently held by millions of people. The sneaky trick the theological wankers pull, though, is that once we’ve smacked them down, they announce, “Oh, no — we didn’t mean those millions of believers. They’re stupid. We meant these other millions of believers.” It’s a big game of whack-a-mole. What you call “obscure Old Testament laws,” someone else will call the core of their faith. What you value as the “Christological narrative,” a member of yet another sect will call pretentious confabulations.

Atheists just cut through all the noise and call it all sewage.

And some of us see no reason to be nice to sewage, and get really cranky at demands to respect your steaming pile of ordure.

ouch.  not the best representative of a fruitful conversation with someone, especially not someone you care about, but I think it’s a decent response to the Spongs and Armstrongs and Eagletons out there.

anyway, here’s PZ with Mr. Deity.

the Bible: honorably primitive?

a newly resurfaced (or at least newly repurchased) letter of Albert Einstein is making a bit of a buzz in some atheist and religious circles, notably for a few choice lines:

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this….

the relevance of this is due to the use by some religious pundits of a few quotes from Einstein that supposedly enlist him in some shapeless god-fearing camp, temporarily and conveniently unclear on doctrinal matters, as opposed to some non- or anti-religious camps that point out Einstein’s letters, in which he is sometimes pretty clear on what he thinks about religion or god.

if you search for “Einstein and god,” you will get any number of collections of quotes or articles trying to prove something one way or the other (even a few laying out what he thought and then telling you why he was wrong).  he clearly used god language now and then, and referred to himself as a “deeply religious person,” but this was usually within the context of speaking about a sense of awe before the physical universe.  some have characterized his “religion” as a pantheism of sorts, a god of the philosophers, but not a personal, interfering god.

does it really matter all that much?  not really.  but it’s nice whenever personal letters find their way to the light (I say this, of course, heading toward a library program in archives, perhaps).  and I think a quote like this would be a nice balance to some of the quotes you sometimes see from Einstein about god outside of churches (New England ones, at least).

the entire transcript can be found here.

a coming extinction

a poem (sorry, Emily), “For a Coming Extinction,”  by W. S. Merwin, the twice-Pulitzer’d American poet.

Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours

When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices
Join your work to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important

humane sacrilege

a powerful (even more so in context) quote from Jose Saramago’s Blindness:

“…that priest must have committed the worst sacrilege of all times and all religions, the fairest and most radically human, coming here to declare that, ultimately, God does not deserve to see.”

book review: Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul

a wonderful book overall.  a stare into the abyss, if you will, and coming out on the side of reason.  a great explanation of why it is that evolution by natural selection is the great unifier of the natural sciences, and why there is more at stake in the ID movement than just challenging evolution–it is a challenge to the very core of science and scientific method, which will set us back centuries if it gets more popular or political support behind it.
I disliked his chapter in which he claimed “science” and “religion” aren’t at odds in any sense because they don’t make conflicting claims (the old “separate magisteria” claim), especially since he ruled out so much of the various “god” arguments with respect to evolution and the physics of the universe (brief discussion).  I wonder what his personal beliefs about god really are–and what, if any, relevance they hold for the real world.  of course he fell securely back on the western, christian canon (partly for personal reasons, i’m sure, but also given the opposition to scientific learning in this country), but can he really think that’s anything but relative?  what about miracles?  what about the historical specifics of scripture?  what about when religious traditions claim to have something to say about the world that conflicts with other, more testable ideas?  though I don’t always agree with the more aggressive, humanistic or science writers with respect to religion, I do think that the jump from some seemingly irrelevant view of “god” to the historical specifics and limitations of one tradition, and that we can say and believe things about god while putting him/her outside the realm of our understanding, is, as it has been put, “the mother of all cop-outs.”