more treachery

as a sort of follow up to the Bertrand Russell quote and video from the other day, I thought I’d add another from Sean Carroll.  this comes in the context of the incessant debates among scientists about whether or not scientists and, more importantly, science institutes (such as the National Center for Science Education) should engage in any amount of theology — that is, whether official representatives should weigh in on science vs. religion debates, and whether they should do any more than promote scientific education and, at most, acknowledge the fact that there are scientists who are religious.  do they have any business in theology, speaking of the compatibility of various beliefs with the cores of modern science?  Carroll thinks no.  He writes,

If science and religion are truly incompatible, then it would be dishonest and irresponsible to pretend otherwise, even if doing so would soothe a few worried souls. And if you want to argue that science and religion are actually compatible (not just that there exist people who think so), by all means make that argument — it’s a worthy discussion to have. But it’s simply wrong to take the stance that it doesn’t matter whether science and religion are compatible, we still need to pretend they are so as not to hurt people’s feelings. That’s not being honest.

he is open to the possibility that the two are compatible — he’s just unpersuaded by any of the arguments made so far, and he believes that science and religion, generally defined, are not compatible approaches to understanding the world.

in any case, his point here about pretending that science and religion are completely compatible without first establishing the validity of the claim — and how this is a dishonesty — is akin to Russell’s point about “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.”  it is (intellectually) dishonest to believe something that isn’t true (merely useful), and it’s dishonest for anyone — especially a national institute — to make claims about the ultimate compatibility of scientific and religious claims without first bothering to establish whether it’s true or not, regardless of how many people it would please.  in my mind, those who argue for incompatibility win the day (day after day) — and those who hold up “non-overlapping magisteria” shouldn’t at all be concerned with whether they are compatible (or overlap)!  so again, silence would be golden.

biology=morality

over at the Edge, Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard psychologist, has written a short article about the evolutionary origins of morality.  not much of this is new when compared to articles he’s published elsewhere, along with the few books he’s written on the subject, but this is a very nice summary and worth mulling over.  here are a few of his key points:

• when considering moral situations for which they do not have a pre-scripted, emotionally charged response (e.g., for abortion of euthanasia), people — regardless of sex, age, race, demographic, religion, or cultural background — show remarkable similarities in moral reasoning.
• there is a universal moral grammar — an impartial, unemotional code — that “provides us with an unconscious suite of principles for judging what is morally right and wrong”
• people tend to see action as worse (or more weighted, positively or negatively) than inaction (e.g., pushing someone in front of a train vs. letting someone fall in in order to save more lives)
• what transforms (or betrays) this impartial, universal code into moral atrocities that we all repudiate are our emotions, specifically or innate tendency (so also dealing with biology) to prefer members of our “group,” whether those who resemble us or whose language or ideologies we share (there is a particularly fascinating study about the preferences of babies regarding people of same “race” or language, and combinations thereof)
• what makes a psychopath is not an inability to understand moral issues or the consequences of actions, but rather an emotional numbness to those issues or consequences: “Here lies the answer to understanding the dangers of nurture, of education and partiality. When we fuel in-group biases by elevating and praising members of the group, we often unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, denigrate the “other” by feeding the most nefarious of all emotions, the dragon of disgust.”
• this psychology of preference (and Hauser considers this “good news”) is not fixed but flexible — something that has been known and widely disgusted in fields related to race and ethnicity for decades now; it is as abstract and “content free” as universal grammar.  when it comes to matters of culture and race, then, “Exposure to diversity is perhaps our best option for reducing, if not eradicating, strong out-group biases.”

Hauser then offers a (two-point) caveat regarding whether or not this innate moral reasoning is sufficient:

For one, some of our moral instincts evolved during a period of human history that looked nothing like the situation today. In our distant past, we lived in small groups consisting of highly familiar and often familial individuals, with no formal laws. Today we live in a large and diffuse society, where our decisions have little-to-no impact on most people in our community but with laws to enforce those who deviate from expected norms. Further, we are confronted with moral decisions that are unfamiliar, including stem cells, abortion, organ transplants and life support. When we confront these novel situations, our evolved system is ill-equipped.

The second reason is that living a moral life requires us to be restless with our present moral norms, always challenging us to discover what might and ought to be. And here is where nurture can re-enter the conversation. We need education because we need a world in which people listen to the universal voice of their species, while stopping to wonder whether there are alternatives. And if there are alternatives, we need rational and reasonable people who will be vigilant of partiality and champions of plurality.

I have written on numerous occasions about how I think our discussions about ethics, morality, social policy, etc., need to be rooted in a firmer understanding of the way our mind works, along with the manifold ways in which it doesn’t work so well (see Gary Marcus’s excellent book Kluge).  an essential step in that dialogue — if we ever get there on a broader scale — is ridding ourselves of the absurd notion that appealing to our natural, biologically founded moral “code” — along with our ability (also natural) to empathize and reason — is akin to throwing all guidelines and principles out of the window.

an understanding of evolution — particularly our evolution — does not mean we live and die by “survival of the fittest,” because that same process has provided us with the ability to love and show compassion and invest in the well-being of those around us.  the problem, of course, as Hauser points out, is that our “natural” reasoning falls short in many ways.  is this were religion steps in?  maybe — but it’s quite clear that religions can and most often have failed to provide the best corrective; in fact, religions (along with many overlapping cultural features) have helped entrench a number of beliefs that violate our ability to see others as fully human and thus to show them the appropriate compassion (think race, sex, and sexuality).  we need concerted efforts to break us of our eagerness to form and feed our in-group biases and out-gr0up prejudices.  it’s not us vs. them, it’s all of us together.

yet another reason to hate the Red Sox in New England. 

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.

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.

book review: Your Inner Fish

while I enjoyed and would recommend this book, I did feel that a bit too much time was spent on general descriptions (of, say, anatomical features) and analogy and not enough on the applications and significance of our evolutionary past.  just when you got to the “payoff,” he quickly moved on to another topic or another chapter.  it also felt that the last chapter, discussing some of our ills and how these relate to that past, was too rushed, whereas it should have been the bulk of the book (it’s what I was reading the book for…).

it ended up being more of an intro to evolution than I thought it would be, but unfortunately it wasn’t a great one — strayed a little too closely to the kind of “we needed to evolve so we did” picture of evolution and didn’t make the mechanisms clear enough (esp. if he is addressing the uninitiated).

still a good book, but maybe it needed a clearer focus.

anyway, I feel very sorry for anyone whose “ideological” background, let’s call it, prevents them from being able to truly assess and value the astounding evidence for the history of life — and the mechanism by which it has originated — on this planet.  I remember the first time I actually read a book about human evolution (Paul Ehrlich’s Human Natures), I was overwhelmed not only by how much evidence there is in support of evolution, but also by how much sense it made.  I felt ashamed for having only ever learned about evolution in its distorted, creationist polemical caricature.  of course evolution seems ridiculous and logically flawed when presented in such an hostile light, but that’s only because most of those people trying to disprove it never bothered to understand it in the first place.  they clearly don’t.  or worse, they are deliberately misleading people.

there’s a famous video among opponents of evolution in which Richard Dawkins is supposedly stumped by a creation “scientist” in an interview when asked a simple question.  the problem is, first, the man in the video wasn’t the one who asked him that question — he spliced himself into another video.  and second, Dawkins does have an answer, which was recorded by the original interviewer, and that answer goes to show how the question itself was flawed and demonstrated a misunderstanding of evolution.  so congregations to which this clip was shown were 1) lied to and 2) deprived of the clarifying answer that would help shed light on the misrepresentation.  all in the name of what?

anyway, books like this can do a lot of good when it comes to presenting a more accurate view of things — not to mention how exciting and fascinating it all is! — for general readers.  and you can watch a video of Shubin going one on one with Stephen Colbert here.

book review: The Beginnings of Western Science

(Note: couldn’t find the cover for my addition.  grr.)

overall, this book does what it sets out to do, and does it fairly well.  the reader gets a grand overview of the history of philosophical thought and other currents of knowledge that can broadly be construed as precursors to modern science.  a lot of what an author would choose to cover in a book like this depends on his or her take on the continuity vs. discontinuity debates regarding the continuum of ancient and medieval “science” with what is commonly (though sometimes begrudgingly) referred to as the “scientific revolution” — and Lindberg does a good job introducing this debate and what it means in the final chapter, providing a nice summary of his views.

at times it would have been more helpful to have had this summary and argument made before reading some of the chapters, as there were always questions lurking in the back of my mind, such as, What distinguished this from a “modern” (i.e. seventeenth-century and after) approach to the subject, What were the obstacles (social or intellectual) preventing certain thinkers from transitioning over to the “modern” scientific approach — in short, what was the key difference at the end of the Middle Ages that changed the game?  knowing his take, or being better informed about the positions, could have helped weigh the material in the various chapters.

I can’t say that I learned a lot — while the book remains a cursory overview, the specific strands of thought and arguments are far too deep in themselves to successfully wrestle with them as you go, and I’m not interested in memorizing too many names and dates just for the heck of it — but I do feel more confident in the general schema I’ve had in the back of my mind; and I at least know where to go (or where to point someone else) if need be.

and although I often wished he would pass more judgment or reflect more critically on the intellectual and religious systems either promoting the advancement of knowledge or preventing those steps that would make a night-and-day difference between medieval and early modern science — in terms of how the world is envisioned and how we go about understanding it empirically — I do understand his position as a historian providing a general introduction to this history, standing by his dictum that the task of the historian “is not to grade the past but to understand it.”

religion & intellectual dishonesty

someone I sort of knew from HDS posted this quote from Terry Eagleton (via Stanley Fish) today and it has been driving me somewhat crazy, esp. since another friend, someone I respect, seems to like it and agree with it:

…we are where we always were, confronted with a choice between a flawed but aspiring religious faith or a spectacularly hubristic faith in the power of unaided reason and a progress that has no content but, like the capitalism it reflects and extends, just makes its valueless way into every nook and cranny.

I find this to be untrue and intellectual dishonest on a number of fronts.  a rather obvious one is atheism or “scientism” as reflecting and extending capitalism.  schwat?!?  maybe insofar as each thrives on a marketplace of competing ideas, but otherwise I think it can easily be rejected out of hand, or especially on historical grounds.  most progressive socialist (and even anarchist) thinkers in the Western world were quite the atheists.  but even if you select a few individual examples, the comparison doesn’t really make any sense and probably is playing off the current global woes of capitalism.

most troubling, however, is the criticism of “faith in the power of unaided reason” or contentless progress and the valuelessness of a secularist/naturalistic/”scientist” outlook.  as if the history of most religious traditions–especially the one Eagleton winds up defending!–have a respectable record of leading social change.  Fish (and maybe Eagleton) also criticizes these outlooks as being superficial and tending to the perpetuation of the status quo–something that is patently false.

it is quite baffling that someone would want to criticize nonreligious “candidates for guidance” that have often done a far better job in promoting social change in the last century plus for perpetuating the status quo while criticizing their “unaided reason” while ignoring the fact those religious traditions most often opposed so many of the changes in society we now all consider to be essential.  so what has been the “aided reason” of these traditions?  why have they failed spectacularly in the last few centuries?  and how dare they try to usurp the progress made at the expense of those traditions and despite their best efforts and then claim that other “candidates” are valueless and hubristic?

as I posted in the facebook exchange, what I most want is more brutal honesty about all these “candidates” and a critical look at their track records and what they have to say about and contribute to the world today, with a willigness on everyone’s part to disregard what we find disagreeable and preserve what is best.  but I cannot understand how a religious person and adherent of a particular tradition–esp. Christianity–could enage in this activity without being devastated by that track record.  and as much as I don’t want to throw myself headlong into the current religion vs. science and religion/atheism debates today, I really cannot stomach intellectual dishonesty of this sort and efforts to repackage what was won at the expense of a religion as part and parcel of that tradition and as a weapon for winning some new cultural war.

a one-way street

Lawrence Krauss on whether science and religion are at odds:

“There is too much ink spent worrying about this question. Religion is simply irrelevant to science, and whether or not science contradicts religion may be of interest to theologians but it simply doesn’t matter to scientists. What matters are the important questions science is dealing with, from the origin and future of the universe to the origin and future of life.

All this talk about science and religion gives the wrong impression, as it suggests reconciling them or not reconciling them is a big issue… it isn’t. As I once put it to theologians at a meeting at the Vatican: theologians have to listen to scientists, because if they want to try to create a consistent theology (and while I have opinions about whether this is possible, but my opinions about this are neither particularly important nor informed) they at least need to know how the world works. But scientists don’t have to listen to theologians, because it has no effect whatsoever on the scientific process.”

The key point here is the one-way street regarding where new, relevant information about our world and who we are comes from. Theologians et al. can speculate about what all this emerging information means for believers, but are they doing anything more than pouring new wine into old wineskins?

Read more here.

religion as comfort?

The second shoot-from-the-hip explanation for the origin of religion that Boyer addresses in ch. 1 (of Religion Explained) is that which postulates religion as a source of comfort for all our existential crises. A few variations on this theme are

• religious explanations make mortality less bearable
• and religion allays anxiety and makes for comfortable world.

Keeping in mind that Boyer considers these general explanations as decent if ultimately unsatisfying starting points, he directs a few criticisms at this idea.

First, he argues, some facts of life are mysterious or awe-inspiring only in places where a local theory provides a solution to that mystery or a cure for the resulting angst. In other words, the same “crises” requiring comfort are not found the world over and some are quite particular to local concepts or beliefs. A good example is witchcraft, which is and has been found in numerous cultures and communities worldwide but is by no means a universal concern. In communities where witchcraft (and thus witches and other powers) is a salient belief, there are a variety of rituals, magical prescriptions, and precautions that do in fact provide comfort and imaginary control over these factors. So supernatural and religious beliefs or practices do bring about comfort here. However, writes Boyer, “[f]rom the anthropologist’s viewpoint it seems plausible that the rituals create the need they are supposed to fulfil, and probably that each reinforces the other” (20). Religion can be seen to provide comfort for, say, witchcraft or a powerful belief in the work of demonic forces, but whence the beliefs in the first place? This is, of course, Boyer’s main concern, and elaboration on the idea that the ritual precedes the belief will have to wait until a later chapter (that, fittingly, on ritual).

Boyer next points out the fact that religious concepts do not always—or often, depending on your view—do a very good job at solving emotional needs. He writes, “A religious world is often every bit as terrifying as a world without supernatural presence, and many religious create not so much reassurance as a thick pall of gloom” (20). Who, for instance, would fear the fires of hell were not belief in/fear of those fires not consistently stoked by religious leaders? “If religion allays anxiety,” he writes, “it cures only a small part of the disease it creates.” Interestingly, he points out, religions that are primarily—or exclusively—reassuring or positive, where they exist, are not found in places where life is significantly dangerous or unpleasant—for instance, the success and popularity of New Age mysticism in the affluent modern West.

Boyer then proceeds over to the issue of morality and gets straight to the point, making two points: (1) we ought to discard the parochial notion that religion everywhere promises salvation, and (2) people are not really motivated by metaphysical urge to explain or mitigate the general fact of mortality—however, one’s own death is more to the point.

His main concerning regarding the belief that religion provides comfort for the fear of death by postulating an afterlife is the fact that the human mind does not producing adequate comforting delusions against all situations of stress or fear—so why in this case? That is, he does not dwell at length on why he finds this belief to be inadequate because even if it were granted that religion exists to provide comfort for our existential crises—and he, of course, does not believe that to be a sufficient explanation—the real question, as he sees it, is how those beliefs become plausible enough that they can have comforting role. After all, those beliefs only have a palliative effect if they are genuinely held to be true. As he writes, “To entertain a comforting fantasy seems simple enough, but to act on it requires that it be taken as more than a fantasy. The experience of comfort alone could not create the necessary level of plausibility” (21).

He then takes a moment to look at fear and anxiety in the mind and at the “bundle of complicated systems working in the mental basement and solving very complex problems.” To be brief, he concludes that fear is not just what we experience about it, but also a program that works by computing various scenarios and responses in a given situation and choosing the best reaction. (21-22). But this only leads to more questions, such as, Why do we have this program and how does it work? When it comes to fear of predators, natural selection “designed” our brains, so to speak, in such a way to comprise a specific predator—otherwise, we wouldn’t survive long if mental program failed to kick in around wolf, or if it kicked in every time we encountered something as innocuous as a sheep.

In the end, he simply writes, “It is probably true that religious concepts gain their great salience and emotional load in the human psyche because they are connected to thoughts about various life-threatening circumstances. So we will not understanding religion if we do not understanding the various emotional programs in the mind, which are more complex than a diffuse angst” (23).

Once again, the key to understanding or explaining religion is understanding how the mind works. Religion may very well provide some degree of comfort—although, again, it often creates more anxiety than it alleviates—but this may not be the explanation of the origins of religious or supernatural beliefs so much as the explanation of their survival and salience.