Archive for the ‘skepticism’ Category
how to debate William Lane Craig, or not – part two, in which LFS begins to warm to the topic
the most convenient term in the language
So here we have, in toto, Luigi Funesti-Sordido’s response to the challenge thrown down by William Lane Craig. It will be rather lengthy, so I’ve broken it up into parts in the hope of making the whole more easily digestible. I’m hoping too, to present the video of LFS’s response in the near future, but at the moment it’s tied up in a beautiful red ribbon of legal and contractual wrangling and other such wishful thinking. We shall see.
Luigi Funesti-Sordido: Well g’day ladies and gents and others, believers and unbelievers, agnostics and sceptics, the notionally curious and the curiously indifferent. Dr Craig has urged upon me a particular and onerous task, to refute his eight arguments for the existence of his pet monotheistic being, within the next twenty minutes. That’s about one refutation every two minutes or so, which considering that he didn’t click me an email about what exactly he was going to say, seems a bit rich. But, as the bishop said to the actress, I’m sure I can rise to the occasion. However, I’ve got some news for you. Forget the time limit, I’ll take as much time as I damn-well please, and you will all sit down and shut up, and take your medicine. The point being that putting forward a few points for the existence of Dr Craig’s weird little being doesn’t take long, while pointing out all the weaknesses or unlikelihoods of the arguments can take quite a while – even just to untangle what it is that Dr Craig’s on about. That’s not to say that it’ll take hours to demolish each of Dr Craig’s points, because some can be dealt with much more quickly than others, but I certainly don’t intend to make this a rushed job, for the simple reason that I want it to be comprehensive and as final as it can be. You will note, by the way, that the doors to this auditorium are locked from the outside, and there is no escape. You will note also that if you try to rise from your chairs, you will receive an electric shock, mild at first but gaining in strength as you seek to widen the distance between your buttocks or other body parts and the comfortable upholstery provided for your viewing and listening pleasure. I wish no-one any harm so if you have any heart problems I’d strongly advise you to keep still and keep comfortable, and above all, don’t panic.
So, to the issues. I want first to make some general comments. Of Dr Craig’s eight arguments, five of them involve what appears to be up to date knowledge about the world, in terms of physics, cosmology, mathematics and the field of consciousness. This suggests that Dr Craig is a thoroughly modern and with-it, forward thinking philosopher. However, nothing could be further from the case. Anybody who has observed Dr Craig’s activities over the past several years, would, I think, be right to form the judgement that this is a man obsessed. In fact, I would go further and say, fanatically obsessed. It seems to me that Dr Craig’s sole purpose, his life’s work, his raison d’etre, is to pedal and promote his particular, peculiar and parochial brand of monotheism. Everything else he talks about, whether it be mathematics or morality, cosmology or consciousness, everything has to be bent and shaped and shoe-horned to fit with this peculiar, fanatical obsession. It follows from this, that nothing Dr Craig has to say about these various fields of activity and inquiry can be trusted. If you ask any expert in any of these fields how best to make a contribution, one thing you’re always likely to be told is to rid yourself, as far as you can, of preconceived notions. Keep an open mind. The two principals that drive science, to my mind, are curiosity and scepticism. Is that really the case? And what is the case? Does that argument really stack up? Can we find a better argument to fit the facts? Wow, here’s some new data, we’re going to have to rethink our basic assumptions, isn’t that exciting.
But these principles do not drive Dr Craig. He already knows the answers, all that remains for him is to convince the rest of the world. Students out there, be very wary of such individuals. Dr Craig doesn’t have the intellectual ingredients to make a good scientist. For a start, he doesn’t have a sceptical bone in his body. Imagine if Dr Craig’s dream came true, imagine if every debater capitulated before his watertight arguments, and not only that, after every debate, the whole audience ‘saw the light’ and converted in their thousands, and eventually millions, to his peculiar deity, with its father-part and its son-part and god knows what else? Where would science go then? What would happen to open and relentless questioning? I ask you to ponder that.
Dr Craig does seem to do well in these debates, and a lot of people try to put their finger on the reasons. They say he’s an ‘expert debater’ and that’s partly true, but I think the principal reason is his lack of scepticism, his absolute certainty about his position. This gives his talks something of a steamroller effect, a relentlessness which sceptics, accustomed to dealing with other sceptics, find difficult to handle. There’s also the fact of Dr Craig’s single-minded obsessionalism. This is his one and only topic, whereas his opponents – writers, academic philosophers and scientists in the main, have a much greater variety of interests and don’t, in general, spend a great deal of time thinking about their atheism.
The situation in this respect reminds me of that in Christine Garwood’s fascinating book ‘Flat Earth’. At the height of the Flat Earth belief in the nineteenth century, lecture halls in the US were regularly filled with people from all levels of society who had come to be discombobulated and entertained by the likes of flat-earth proponent ‘Prof’ Joe Holden, holding forth on the imbecilities of ‘global earth theory’, and using the language and theorems of mathematics, physics and astronomy to prove his point. In Britain at the same time, the notorious Parallax, another flat-earther, was challenging prominent scientists, including the Astronomer Royal, to debates on the matter. Another flat-earther of the time challenged no less a scientist than Alfred Russell Wallace to a test of the flat earth view against the global earth view, and according to a great many observers, actually won the contest. Of course, this is a footnote to history now, and I think the real test of Dr Craig’s position will also be how he is seen by posterity. For the fact is that Christianity is in retreat, in some places more rapidly than in others, but certainly in every western country on the planet. And this can hardly be attributed to ignorance.
Now to the first argument, and fortunately I have the gift of perfect recall, so I remember every detail of it. The best explanation of why something exists, rather than nothing, is a supernatural being. But what is a supernatural being? Not being bound by any rules of evidence, it could of course be anything you like. However, a lot of work done by anthropologists and psychologists into the supernatural beings worshipped and loved and feared and placated throughout the many cultures in the world and throughout history, and there have been many thousands of these beings, has found a number of traits in common. In particular, supernatural beings tend to be rather obsessed with us. In fact it almost seems to be that their very purpose is to protect us or punish us. This is clearly the case with Dr Craig’s god, and that should be seen as a big red flag.
To return to Dr Craig’s argument, he asks ‘What is the explanation of the universe?’ Take note of that question. It’s not ‘What is the cause of the universe?’ There’s quite a sizeable difference between those two questions, and I’ll come back to that. If you asked a bunch of cosmologists ‘What caused the universe?’ they might say- and I can only speculate of course – ‘you mean what caused the big bang’ and then they might, perhaps, find some consensus in saying, ‘well nothing caused the big bang, because causes always exist in time before their effects and time actually began with the big bang, so it makes no sense to speak of an antecedent cause, and if you think that’s a satisfying answer to us, you’re wrong, but that’s the best we can do, for now.’ Probably though, I’m underestimating these cosmologists, who would likely come out with something much more sophisticated-sounding. What none of them would say, I’m quite sure, is that the cause must be ‘a transcendent reality, beyond the material universe, whose existence is metaphysically necessary,’ which is what Dr Craig says. This reminds me of what Daniel Dennett says about Dr Craig, that he is able, with absolute equanimity, to pass from the most mundane to the most preposterous assertions in a heartbeat. So what is a transcendent reality, and why should it be metaphysically necessary? I think it’s an artifact of Dr Craig’s imagination, and it’s metaphysically necessary because that’s what Dr Craig desperately wants it to be.
Now let me return to the difference between ’cause’ and ‘explanation’, a word Dr Craig is fond of using. He says at the outset that his ‘god’, a metaphysically necessary transcendent being, is the best explanation of the universe’s existence, and he uses the analogy of the explanation for a ball found by the roadside. Now, the difference between an explanation and a cause seems to me to be that an explanation already assumes the existence of an agent, an ‘explainer’. Somebody, in this case maybe the owner of the ball, who can tell the story of how the ball came to be there. So, Dr Craig, argues, because the whole universe is just as much of a contingent object as a ball, it, too, must have a cosmic owner who can explain its being there. (This is of course why Dr Craig chose as his example a ball, and not, say, a large rock). Only, according to Dr Craig, whereas the ball’s owner/explainer is a contingent entity, like the ball itself, the universe’s owner/explainer must be a ‘transcendent, metaphysically necessary entity.’ To which one might be inclined to say ‘What the…? Where did that idea come from?’ Were I one of those blunt Aussie types, I might be tempted to reply ‘from out of the good doctor’s capacious arsehole’, but being much more civilized I should say that it reminds me of the old cartoon with the equations on the blackboard and the line ‘here a miracle happens’. I think Dr Craig needs to be a great deal more specific in that area.
In short, using the word ‘explanation’ to conjure up a transcendent, necessary explainer is nothing more than a semantic cheat. But I’m not finished with argument one yet. Let’s look more carefully at the argument form he presents:
1. Every contingent thing has an explanation of its existence.
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is a transcendent, personal being.
3. The universe is a contingent thing.
4 Therefore the universe has an explanation of its existence (from 1,3).
5. Therefore the explanation of the universe is a transcendent, personal being (from 2,4).
Now, this is a version of the age-old cosmological argument, which goes back at least as far as Aristotle, and which can be described in the briefest and most mocking terms as, something can’t come from nothing, therefore god. Arguments on both sides have been heaped up over the centuries, by Aquinas, by Leibniz, by Hume, by Kant, and by innumerable modern philosophers, and it’s unlikely any headway will ever be made, because it’s entirely speculative, or theological, and non-evidence based. The version of it presented here seems particularly weak and tenuous, because there just seems to be an almighty leap from the need for an explanation, supposing such a need is real, and the claim about a transcendent, personal being. In other words, the major problem lies in the conditional claim (2). I don’t find it at all reasonable, or even comprehensible to me, that the universe can be explained by a ‘transcendent’, that’s to say, non-material, personal being. Does this mean personal to me? That seems self-serving and egotistical. What else can be meant by personal? Personal to herself? (Let’s call her she – I’m really sick of male gods, please, please no more of them, please). That makes little sense. It seems to me that Dr Craig has thrown in the ‘personal’ term precisely to make the god our own little personal father-figure and protector. And let’s face it, Dr Craig’s god is very male. My response to that is in line with what Albert Einstein said many times. In his view, and in mine, belief in a personal god is simply a form of childishness.
I could say more, but it’s time to move on to argument two.
how to debate William Lane Craig, or not – part one, in which WLC presents his case
Some years ago I did a wee post on William Lane Craig – to the effect that he was a pushover, more or less. Yet Craig keeps on debating, and claiming ‘victims’. It depends on who you speak to or read, but there’s no doubt that Craig has appeared to come off best in most of the innumerable, and same-ish debates he engages in with atheist academics and/or celebrities. There’s even a forum-type website here, which declares to the world ‘you are not qualified to debate WLC’ (unless you’ve been studying all that WLC has been studying for the last twenty-odd years). Oddly, though the writer also declares that WLC’s arguments aren’t that good, so WTF? (I just threw that in there to go with WLC).
So I’m going to prove this writer, Andrew, wrong, by debating WLC right now, and comprehensively thrashing him. I’m going to base WLC’s presentation on a recent debate he had, last month, with ‘the 13th most important atheist in the world’, Alex Rosenberg, whom I’d never heard of before listening to this debate. The debate, called, ‘Is faith in God reasonable?’ followed a format which seems to be of WLC’s devising, in which he always goes first and sets out five points, or six, or as in this case eight (it was a big event), which show why said faith is reasonable (the debate topic could be ‘does God exist?’ or variants thereof, and he could trot out the same six or eight points). He gets 20 minutes or so to do this, and finishes by saying something like – ‘these eight arguments must each be refuted for the opposition to be taken seriously’. And so the opposition, namely myself (under my esteemed alias Luigi Funesti-Sordido, founding Secretary of the Urbane Society of Sceptical Romantics) will have twenty minutes to refute these eight points, after which there are 12 minutes each for rebuttals, and five minutes each of summing up, then a Q and A session.
But that’s not how this debate will go. Stay tuned for the drama…
WLC makes his way to the podium and begins. I’ve presented his arguments here virtually as-is, with just a bit of editing-out of examples and recapitulations, etc. Go to the debate for the full version.
WLC : I believe that God’s existence best explains a wide range of the data of human experience. Let me mention eight.
First, God is the best explanation of why anything at all exists. Suppose you see a ball by the roadside and you wonder how it got there, and your mate says ‘don’t worry about it, it just exists, there’s no explanation for it’, you’d think this was crazy, and you’d think the same thing even if the ball was swollen up to the size of the universe. So what is the explanation of the universe? It can lie only in a transcendent reality, beyond the material universe, and this transcendent reality is metaphysically necessary in its existence. Now there’s surely only one way to get a contingent universe out of a necessarily existing cause, and that is if the cause is a personal agent who can freely choose to create a contingent reality. It therefore follows that the best explanation of the contingent universe is a transcendent, personal, being, that’s to say, God. In sum, 1. Every contingent thing has an explanation of its existence. 2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is a transcendent, personal being. 3. The universe is a contingent thing. 4 Therefore the universe has an explanation of its existence (from 1,3). 5. Therefore the explanation of the universe is a transcendent, personal being (from 2,4).
Second, God is the best explanation of the origin of the universe. We have strong evidence that the universe isn’t eternal in the past but had an absolute beginning. In 2003, Borde, Guth and Valenkin were able to prove that any universe which has on average been in a state of cosmic expansion, cannot be infinite in the past but must have a past space-time boundary. What makes their proof so powerful is that it holds regardless of the physical description of the very early universe. Because we don’t yet have a quantum theory of gravity, we can’t yet provide a physical description of the first split-second of the universe, but the B-G-V theorem is independent of any physical description of that moment. Their theorem implies that the quantum vacuum state, which may have characterized the early universe, cannot be eternal in the past, but must have had an absolute beginning. Even if our universe is just a tiny part of a so-called multiverse composed of many universes, their theorem requires that the multiverse itself must have had an absolute beginning. Of course, highly speculative scenarios, such as loop quantum gravity models, string models, even closed time-like curves have been proposed to try to avoid this absolute beginning. These models are fraught with problems, but the bottom line is that none of these models, even if true, succeeds in restoring an eternal past. Last spring at a conference in Cambridge celebrating the 70th birthday of Stephen Hawking, Valenkin delivered a paper entitled, ‘Did the Universe have a beginning?’, which surveyed current cosmology with respect to that question. He argued, and I quote, ‘none of these scenarios can actually be past-eternal. He concluded, ‘all the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning’. But then the inevitable question arises, why did the universe come into being, what brought the universe into existence? There must have been a transcendent cause which brought the universe into being. In summary, 1. The universe began to exist. 2. If the universe began to exist, then the universe has a transcendent cause. 3 Therefore, the universe has a transcendent cause. By the very nature of the case, that cause must be a transcendent, immaterial being. Now, there are only two possible things that can fit that description. Either an abstract object, like a number, or an unembodied mind or consciousness. But abstract objects don’t stand in causal relations. Therefore the cause of the universe is plausibly an unembodied mind or person, and thus we are brought not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe, but to its personal creator.
Third. God is the best explanation of the applicability of mathematics to the physical world. Philosophers and scientists have puzzled over what physicist Eugene Wigner called, ‘the uncanny effectiveness of mathematics’. How is it that a mathematical theorist like Peter Higgs can sit down at his desk and predict through calculation the existence of a fundamental particle which experimentalists thirty years later after investing millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours are finally able to detect? Mathematics is the language of nature. But how is this to be explained? If mathematical objects are abstract entities, causally isolated from the universe, then the applicability of mathematics is in the words of philosopher of mathematics Penelope Maddy, ‘a happy coincidence’. On the other hand if mathematical objects are just useful fictions, how is it that nature is written in the language of these fictions? In his book Dr Rosenberg emphasizes that naturalism doesn’t tolerate cosmic coincidences, but the naturalist has no explanation of the uncanny applicability of mathematics to the physical world. By contrast the theist has a ready explanation. When God created the physical universe he designed it on the mathematical structure he had in mind. We can summarize this argument: 1. If God did not exist, the applicability of mathematics would be a happy coincidence. 2. The applicability of mathematics is not a happy coincidence. 3. Therefore God exists.
Fourth. God is the best explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life. In recent decades, scientists have been stunned by the discovery that the initial conditions of the big bang were fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent life with a precision and delicacy that literally defy human comprehension. Now there are three live explanatory options for this extraordinary fine-tuning. Physical necessity, chance, or design. Physical necessity is not, however, a plausible explanation because the finely tuned constants and quantities are independent of the laws of nature and therefore they are not physically necessary. So could the fine-tuning be due to chance? The problem with this explanation is that the odds of a life-permitting universe gotten by our laws of nature are so infinitesimal that they cannot be reasonably faced. Therefore the proponents of chance have been forced to postulate the existence of a world-ensemble of other universes, preferably infinite in number and randomly ordered so that life-permitting universes would appear by chance somewhere in the ensemble. Not only is this hypothesis to borrow Richard Dawkins’ phrase an ‘unparsimonious extravagance’, but, it faces an insuperable objection. By far, most of the observable universes in a world-ensemble would be worlds in which a single brain fluctuates into existence out of the vacuum and observes its otherwise empty world. Thus if our world were just a random member of a world-ensemble, we ought to be having observations like that. Since we don’t, that strongly disconfirms the world-ensemble hypothesis. So chance is also not a good explanation. It follows that design is the best explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe, and thus the fine-tuning of the universe constitutes evidence for a cosmic designer.
Fifth. God is the best explanation of intentional states of consciousness in the world. Philosophers are puzzled by states of intentionality. Intentionality is the property of being about something, or of something. It signifies the object-directedness of our thoughts. For example I can think about my summer vacation, or I can think of my wife. No physical object has this sort of intentionality. A chair, or a stone, or a glob of tissue like the brain is not about, or ‘of’ something else, only mental states or states of consciousness are about other things. As a materialist, Dr Rosenberg recognizes this fact, and so concludes that on atheism there really are no intentional states. Dr Rosenberg boldly claims that we never really think about anything. But this seems incredible. Obviously, I am thinking about Dr Rosenberg’s argument. This seems to me to be a reductio ad absurdum of atheism. By contrast, on theism, because God is a mind, it’s hardly surprising that there should be finite minds. Thus intentional states fit comfortably into a theistic worldview. So we can argue 1. If God did not exist, intentional states of consciousness would not exist. 2. But intentional states of consciousness do exist. 3 Therefore God exists.
Sixth. God is the best explanation of objective moral values and duties in the world. In moral experience we apprehend moral values and duties which impose themselves as objectively binding and true. For example, we all recognize that it’s wrong to walk into a school and to shoot little children and their teachers. On a naturalistic view however there’s nothing really wrong with this. Moral values are just the subjective by-product of biological evolution and social conditioning. Dr Rosenberg is brutally honest about the implications of his atheism. He writes ‘there’s no such thing as morally right or wrong, individual human life is meaningless and without ultimate moral value. We need to face the fact that nihilism is true.’ By contrast the theist grounds objective moral values in God and our moral duties in his commands. The theist thus has the explanatory resources which the atheist lacks to ground objective moral values and duties. Hence we may argue 1 objective moral values and duties exist 2 but if God did not exist, objective moral values and duties would not exist 3 therefore God exists.
seven. God is the best explanation of the historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth. Historians have reached something of a consensus that Jesus came on the scene with an unprecedented sense of divine authority, the authority to stand and speak in God’s place. He claimed that in himself the kingdom of God had come., and as visible demonstrations of this fact he carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcisms. But the supreme confirmation of his claim was his resurrection from the dead. If Jesus did indeed rise from the dead, then it would seem that we have a divine miracle on our hands and thus evidence for the existence of God. Now I realize that most people think that the resurrection of Jesus is something you just accept by faith, or not, but there are actually three facts recognized by the majority of historians, which I believe, are best explained by the resurrection of Jesus. Fact 1 On the Sunday after his crucifixion, Jesus’s tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers. 2 On separate occasions different individuals and groups of people saw appearances of Jesus alive after his death, and 3 The original disciples suddenly came to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, despite having every predisposition to the contrary. The eminent British scholar N T Wright near the end of his 800-page study of the historicity of Jesus’s resurrection, concludes that the empty tomb and post-mortem appearances of Jesus had been established to such a high degree of historical probability as to be ‘virtually certain, akin to the death of Caesar Augustus in AD 17 or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70’. Naturalistic attempts to explain away these three great facts, like ‘the disciples stole the body’ or ‘Jesus wasn’t really dead’ have been universally rejected by contemporary scholarship. The simple fact is that there just is no plausible naturalistic explanation of these facts. And therefore it seems to me that the Christian is amply justified in believing that Jesus rose from the dead and was who he claimed to be. But that entails that God exists. Thus we have a good inductive argument to the existence of God based on the facts concerning the resurrection of Jesus.
Eight. God can be personally known and experienced. This isn’t really an argument for God’s existence, rather it’s the claim that you can know that God exists wholly apart from arguments, simply by personally experiencing him. Philosophers call beliefs like this ‘properly basic beliefs’. They aren’t based on some other beliefs, rather they’re part of the foundations of a person’s system of beliefs. Other properly basic beliefs would be belief in the reality of the past, or the existence of the external world. In the same way, belief in God is for those who seek him as properly basic, grounded in our experience of God. Now if this is so then there’s a danger that arguments for God could actually distract our attention from God himself. The Bible promises ‘draw near to God and he will draw near to you’. We mustn’t so concentrate on the external proofs that we fail to hear the inner voice of God speaking to our own hearts. For those who listen, God becomes a personal reality in their lives.
In summary then we’ve seen eight respects in which God provides a better explanation of the world than naturalism. For all of these reasons I believe that belief in God is eminently reasonable. If [the ineffable Mr Funesti-Sordido] is to persuade us otherwise, he must first tear down all eight of the reasons I’ve presented, and then in their place erect a case of his own to show why belief in God is unreasonable. Unless and until he does that, I think we should agree that it is reasonable to believe in God.
After the voluminous applause dies away, the redoubtable Luigi Funesti-Sordido, Founding Secretary of the (new) USSR rises to the occasion, and changes the world….
a post about truth, knowledge and other heavy stuff
David Hume, still a cool dude
I’m just returning to blogging after a brief, disastrous spell of pretending to be a responsible teacher to young people in a field – transition to work – in which I have no expertise whatsoever. Fail, as the teens say. So it’s back to my irresponsible, unreliable, anti-authoritarian, perverse, ill-disciplined, reclusive, childishly dilettantish life of poverty and wafer-thin reflection on the dynamic world around me.
I note that, in my absence, my readership, small (but growing) though it ever was, has plummeted. So, time to pull the finger out, and to maybe occasionally have a go at communicating with others. Maybe.
I’ve been reading, among other things, a little book of ideas called Falling for Science, by Bernard Beckett, and I’ve found it both compelling and exasperating. My first impression was that it was going to be an attack on ‘scientism’, and that’s partially true, but it’s a bit more difficult to properly characterise it. Beckett is a novelist and maths-science educator, and the main purpose of his book appears to be an attempt to untangle science from story-telling and to explore the limits of science as ‘answer to everything’. Not that he’s anything but a hard-nosed science advocate, but he’s also fond of the Humean is-ought distinction – one that I’ve always been a bit dubious about. He’s actually very good at explaining stuff, and there’s a pretty good summary of Popper’s falsification thesis in chapter 3, as well as some stimulating story-telling, for example about how close some eighteenth century scientists, or proto-scientists, came to capturing the idea of natural selection, starting with Hume himself, who wrote:
Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out, much labour lost; many fruitless trials made, and a slow but continual improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of world making.
Hume here plays dangerously, heretically, with the idea of time and infinity, and even a many-worlds hypothesis, but his key idea was the one that Darwin later had to battle for against the age-of-the-earth pronouncements of Lord Kelvin (William Thompson), that there might be time enough for ‘slow but continual improvement’ in the the evolution of worlds, and hence life. Then there was Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who wrote this in 1753:
One could equally well say that the ape is of the family of man, that he is a degenerate man, that man and ape have a common origin; that in fact, all the families among plants as well as animals, have come from a single animal.
It’s striking, but Beckett presents an even more astute source, the mathematician and philosopher Pierre-Louis Maupertuis, who wrote, way back in 1751:
They would have owed their origin merely to some accidental formation in which the basic parts would not have preserved the arrangement present in their parents. Each degree of error would have created a new species, and from these repeated variations would have arisen the infinite diversity of animals that we see at the present day.
All of this is fascinating, and of course further evidence for the proposition that natural selection was a concept ripe for the picking by the mid nineteenth century, but I want to focus this post on what Beckett has to say about the debate, still raging, about evolution and its implications for the practice of religion.
Becckett’s broad argument is the familiar one that evolution isn’t incompatible with religious belief, and he seeks to distinguish between evolutionary theory and ‘evolutionism’, which he believes is a drawing of non-empirical conclusions from the empirical theory. The distinction he makes is a broad one between model and interpretation, with the latter being the story-telling, non-empirical, but nonetheless important, part.
Interestingly, Beckett starts his exploration of this issue with a mild version of a deconversion story, as someone brought up in the Roman Catholic tradition. This is interesting because I’ve recently been watching online deconversion videos that are truly harrowing and moving – young people brought up in close-knit more or less fundamentalist communities who, through an increasing unease about the truth-claims of their communities, have become alienated, isolated, suicidal and profoundly messed up. These of course are the stories of survivors – what of those who didn’t make it?
I mention this because it gripes me more than a little that Beckett’s argument against what he calls ‘evolutionists’ is that they’re wedded to a Platonic notion of truth. I find this argument completely spurious. First, I’m sceptical of hitching the notion of truth to some kind of Platonist idealism. To me, it’s an insult to those apostates who lost so much, in terms of family and community, in rejecting the false claims of Christianity. The author of Why I am no longer a Christian says at one crucial point in his video:
For the first time in my life I realised there was something more important to me than God, and that was truth, and for the first time in my life I learned that if I had to choose between God and truth, I would choose truth.
Compare Beckett’s remark toward the end of Falling for Science:
Unlike the Platonist I find no beauty in truth. Indeed I consider it an ugly word, a bludgeon wielded in battle by those who lack the social grace to back away. Yet all around us confident certainty abounds…
It seems the two here are at cross-purposes. The video author is making the point that living a lie, living in false consciousness as Sartre would say (remember him?) had come to be so painful to him that all his family and friends and the comfort and security they might offer, were no compensation – in fact their regular god-talk would’ve just added to his discomfort and misery. Beckett is talking about truth in a completely different way, as Truth with a capital, as the popes use it when they come out with their papal bull.
Beckett I think overplays his hand in coming out with this narrow and, I think, idiosyncratic way of treating truth. A shame, because he does have some useful things to say. In fact I agree with him about Truth, but not about truth. Truth isn’t an ugly word, but nor have I ever considered it beautiful in a Platonic sense – I’ve never been remotely sympathetic to Platonic idealism. Truth, rather, is a useful word, and even an essential one. Perhaps I can best explain that by avoiding, at least initially, the very word ‘truth’.
I’ve written before about how those twin drivers, curiosity and scepticism, move science forward. They’re also, I would argue, the drivers that drove our video author away from religious conviction. But you have to be curious and/or sceptical about something. As you can see in the deconversion video, the author began to explore the Bible critically and then to explore its authorship, and how Christianity, and Judaism before it, emerged from other religions. He also began to explore the psychology of religious belief. In other words, he was curious and sceptical about what was really going on within communities and in the individual minds of believers vis-a-vis religion, and how this all emerged and came together historically. It was a search for the truth. Not a search for certainty, but for a deeper understanding. And it is this search, this questing spirit, that drives science forward. A dissatisfaction with, or at least a doubt about, the answers so far given (scepticism) together with a push to know more, to understand more deeply (curiosity). You can talk about these forces towards knowing, and this questing drive towards a deeper understanding, without ever mentioning the word ‘truth’, but surely truth is what it’s all about.
To take an example I’ve often used, about my own initial exposure to religion via a Salvation Army Sunday School at the age of eight. Stepping into this world, having no religious background at all, and watching these adults, some of them uniformed, praying and singing naff songs (this was the mid-sixties and the Beatles were all over the airwaves – ‘Jesus loves me, this I know’ couldn’t really compare), and preaching about our heavenly father and maker and his love for us and how he was our lord and we worshipped him eternally and so on, I really thought, even at that age, that I’d entered into a madhouse, and I wanted no part of it. But I could also see that at least some of these people were otherwise normal, functioning people. So what was really going on here? Where did these ideas come from? What benefit were they deriving from this behaviour? Did they really believe in an invisible lord and master and protector, or were they just covering that particular, weird base just in case? Now you might think that an eight year old wouldn’t have the capacity to ask himself such questions, and I won’t pretend that I have a precise memory of my thoughts of the time, but I also think we tend to underestimate the sophistication of children’s thoughts, and my experience with children since then has confirmed that view. The point is that my curiosity and my scepticism were stimulated to the max. And even when we ask the basic question – wtf is going on here? – we’re talking about truth. We get an answer that fobs us off and we think, no no no, I want to know what’s really going on here. I want the truth, or at least something that makes sense. We don’t talk about the coherence theory of truth for nothing.
If you research the coherence theory of truth, and its ‘opponent’ the correspondence theory, you’ll have to grapple with propositions, truth conditions, entailment and the like, but broadly the coherence theory is about fitting things together in a most likely and coherent account. Young Earth Creationism, for example, is incoherent with respect to what we know of geology, cosmology and so much else, such as our tried and true methods of dating fossils. More controversially, the claim that the One True God, the Judeo-Christian one, is the creator of the world, is incoherent with respect to many things we’ve learned. We have cosmological theories about the origin of our planet, and of our solar system, and of our galaxy, and of our universe, which fit together and bear no resemblance to the Biblical account of creation. We also know that there have been many creator gods and creation myths, and that they all belong to an earlier, more speculative, pre-scientific era. And we know, or many of us know, that creator/protector gods who put humans at the pinnacle of their creation, and have a special interest in humans, are much more likely to be self-serving human fabrications than real existents. Our views on this are bolstered by our deeper understanding of a cosmos in which our planet is not at the centre, or anywhere near it, and our deeper understanding of a biosphere in which we are but a recently emerged life form clearly related to other life forms, on a planet in which life forms have come and gone with monotonous regularity.
All of this takes me back to what Beckett has to say on the evolution-religion battle, which he tends to portray as two groups of intransigent certainty-addicts head-butting each other. His attempt to find a pragmatic solution to this confrontation revolves around the distinction between model and interpretation, or theory (in its tight, scientific definition) and story. His argument is that ‘evolutionists’, as well as interested observers, often over-step the mark, moving from the truth of the evolutionary model, which is as empirically well-grounded as it can be, to the truth of their particular interpretation of that model, which has little or no grounding. For example, he quotes George Bernard Shaw on his personal response to the theory:
…when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honour and aspiration
Beckett is of course right in pointing out that there’s no warrant in the theory itself for this response, or for the very different remarks of Darwin – that there is grandeur in this way of thinking about life. These are of course perfectly legitimate personal responses, but they don’t follow in any logical sense from the theory.
What I’m not so convinced about is the claim that the model itself has no implications for religion, that only certain interpretations of the model have implications for certain interpretations of religion.
One of the problems is that, on the evolutionary side, certain facts provide real stumbling blocks for those religions (notably Judaism, Christianity and Islam) that stand or fall on a personal relationship between the creator god and his special beings or chosen people. We have a definite knowledge that we are a type of primate, that we share a common ancestry with chimps and bonobos, a slightly older common ancestry with gorillas, and further back with orang-utangs, and gibbons and so forth. The differences between us and other primates, though massive by any measure (other than genomic) are all explicable in purely material terms. This is model, not interpretation. Beckett is a bit cavalier in claiming that the religionist can say, ‘Ah, that’s how God did it’, for all this leaves her is an enfeebled, primum mobile-type deism. The Catholic Church, of course, steps over this mess by issuing the Truth that evolution is compatible with Catholic doctrine but nevertheless humans are their god’s special creatures – which is basically the same as saying, it’s compatible but incompatible. More serious and honest attempts have been made to rescue special creation from the evolutionary model, notably the book Finding Darwin’s God, by the highly-regarded biologist (and Catholic) Kenneth Miller, and although I haven’t read the book, I’ve read enough extracts from it and criticism of it to realize that it only highlights the difficulties of trying to effect such a rescue.
So I think evolution, the model itself, plays its part, along with other theories and models, whether geological, cosmological or psychological – with cognitive psychology allied to neurology having made great strides in recent years – in providing an increasingly coherent description of our world, a description which leaves no room for supernatural agency, especially not of the miraculously interceding kind. I agree with Beckett that accepting evolution doesn’t necessarily imply that you should love all the other critters on earth for being vaguely related to you, or that you should see them as competitors in the struggle for life. Yet I won’t let go of the idea that there are better interpretations of evolution and worse ones, and that the model itself, more thoroughly examined and more deeply understood, will help us towards those best interpretations.
I suspect that this is all a much more vexed question than Beckett allows it to be. It’s a well-known fact and ‘problem’ that sometimes researchers, often in the conclusions to their research papers, step aside, or forward, from the nuts and bolts of their experiments to consider the implications of their findings ‘for humanity’. They move from facts to interpretations or implications, from model to story, whatever. And critics and other scientists cringe, or criticize. Alternatively the researchers go the opposite way, refusing to speculate on implications, or playing them down as much as possible. In that case, informed and interested observers will inevitably step forward and make explicit those implications, or what they consider them to be. And the original researchers will cringe, and criticise. I think all this says something about human nature. I think Beckett is half onto this when he suggests replacing ‘truth’ in science with ‘usefulness’. It won’t do, because the curiosity and scepticism that drives science forward isn’t about usefulness, but about truth – ‘what’s really going on here?’ But it’s also human nature to look for implications, and applications, for any new piece of knowledge we’ve uncovered. Knowledge is power, but only if we apply it, surely. This is where fact and value, models and how we use them and what we draw from them, become difficult to disentangle – and my wondering question is – how important is it to disentangle them? Important, yes, but we should also be aware of what might seem obvious – that we pursue facts for value’s sake. We pursue knowledge in order to have greater control of our world. Why else? If we know what’s really going on, we feel in a better position to do something about it, to act, to decide, to fit what’s happening here into our larger world-view, thus refining and deepening it.
I’ve barely touched on a lot of complexities here, but I do feel that the frustrations felt by the PZ Myers and the Jerry Coynes of the world with the religious worldview, particularly vis-a-vis the world-dominating monotheisms, are seriously mischaracterised as dogmatic story-telling banging up against dogmatic story-telling. There’s so much more to say, but I’ll leave it at that.
reflections on the video ‘Why I am no longer a Christian’ – part 2
ah am the greatest
According to our video’s author – and his account derives, via Karen Armstrong, from a plethora of Biblical, historical and anthropological scholars – the monotheistic god worshipped by Jews, Christians and Moslems came into being around 2,600 years ago.
Going back to the Enuma Elish, as described in the previous post, a text dating back some 3750 years, the creation myth described there involved Marduk, a powerful warrior-god (and ‘patron god’ of Babylon at the time of Hammurabi) who defeats Tiamat, a sea-dragon goddess, representative of chaos, and then leads the other gods in creating the world. The general form of that creation was edited into the book of Genesis when the Israelites found themselves exiles in Babylon more than a millennium later. There are other references, such as Isaiah 51:9 ‘Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces, who pierced the dragon?’ (ESV), and Job 26:12 ‘By his power he stilled the sea; by his understanding he shattered Rahab’. Note also Psalm 74:13 ‘You divided the sea by your might; you broke the heads of the sea monsters on the waters’, and Psalm 89:10 ‘You crushed Rahab like a carcass; you scattered your enemies with your mighty arm’. Fascinating glimpses into the earlier ‘life’ of the Biblical god. Yahweh appears to owe much to Marduk. Rahab may here refer to Tiamat, but there are other examples, from the neighbourhood, of creator gods first battling with sea monsters. In Egypt, Atum fought with Nehebkau, and in Canaan, Baal fought with Yam. Another, more famous sea monster, at least to us moderns, oft-mentioned in the Bible, is Leviathan:
On that day, the Lord will take a great sword, harsh and mighty, and will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the writhing serpent, and will kill the dragon that is in the sea. (Isaiah 27:1)
It isn’t known from where this monster derives. Anyway, on to the Canaanite influences. The ancient Canaanite port city of Ugarit, which reached its height between 1450 and 1200 BCE, has been excavated, and clay tablets found there reveal that the principal god of the region at that time was El or Il, the father of humanity, and husband of the goddess Ashirah. Baal was their son. In fact El is first mentioned a millennium before this on clay tablets from Ebla, a site near modern Aleppo. El Shaddai, mentioned in the Bible in association with Abraham, seems to be a Hebrew derivation of this god, also known as El Elyon. It’s all very complicated. Shaddai may mean mountain, but it’s also clearly connected to the Bronze age Amorite city of Shaddai, in northern Syria, on the Euphrates. This god of Abraham, linked to Mesopotamian mythology, connects forward to the Islamic god Allah, one of whose prophets is Ibrahim, a patriarch of the religion.
The name El Elyon regularly occurs early in the Torah in association with Abraham and later Jacob. Jacob ‘chooses’ this god as his ‘Elohim’, another Canaanite term meaning his primary god. At this time there doesn’t seem to be any suggestion of monotheism. In so-called ‘pagan’ religions it was common to worship a locally popular ‘patron’ god above others.
In Exodus, Yahweh replaces El Elyon as the god of the hour.. All of this raises questions as to he. ow early the earliest writers of the Bible were. With all the reworkings that appear to have taken place, those earliest authors may be forever lost to us. In fact most scholars are agreed that the majority of the Old Testament as we know it today was written as late as the 4th century BCE, with fragments dating back as far as the 8th century BCE, and other fragments more recently. I don’t intend to spend a lifetime untangling it all. As for the Torah in particular, the retreat of the so-called documentary hypothesis in recent years has left something of a vacuum in terms of coherent hypotheses of authorship, and the field seems to have become a highly erudite and arcane free-for-all.
Yahweh is first associated with the rescue of the Israelites from captivity in Egypt – a mythical tale. He is hailed as a warrior-god and becomes the hero and patron-god of the Israelites, much like Genghis Khan was to the Mongols, or Kim Il-sung to the North Koreans. Clearly, though, he was first among many, not yet the only possible god of monotheism. This helps to explain the vengefulness of Yahweh once the Israelites have taken over and tamed the so-called ‘promised land’. After this, they no longer have such need of a warrior god, and other gods, such as Baal and Ashirah, tempt them. According to our video author, in reaction to this slackening of devotion to Yahweh, a cult of ardent devotees, the Yahwists, sprang up, spurred on by the ‘troubles’ of the eighth century, when a divided Israelite kingdom (though in fact archaeological evidence suggests that Israel was a sparsely populated tribal region at this time, hardly a kingdom) was under threat from the Neo-Assyrian empire. Three of these Yahwist ‘prophets’, Isaiah, Amos and Hosea, railed to their fellow-Israelites about the importance of loyalty to Yahweh, displaying a fervour amounting almost to monotheism. Of course, this didn’t stop the Assyrian takeover, but their writings were preserved, and almost a century later, a Yahwist ‘king’, Josiah, presided over the discovery of the book of Deuteronomy during renovations of the temple. This book’s authenticity as a ‘discovery’ is questioned and it’s generally dated to Josiah’s reign. It’s in this book that the strict covenant to Yahweh is made – and the laws binding the Israelites to their god are established. Another step towards monotheism. It’s also argued (and I know too little of this to make an evaluation) that during this period, the early books of the Torah were rewritten, strengthening Yahweh’s role, and emphasising his violent opposition to other gods. Still, the ‘no other gods before me’ commandment indicates that we’re yet a way from monotheism. Scholars have used the term ‘monolatry’, a recognition of many gods but a preference for one, to represent this intermediate stage between polytheism and monotheism. Shortly after Josiah’s time, Jerusalem came under threat once more, this time from the Babylonians. Another Yahwist thunderer, Jeremiah, predicted the fall of Jerusalem and blamed Israelite complacency and lack of ardour for the patron god. The Babylonians sacked Jerusalem and the Israelites (actually only a minority of them) were sent into exile in Mesopotamia. It was out of this crushing defeat that a new, apparently comforting idea arose with ‘second Isaiah’, who wrote:
I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god (Isaiah 44:6).
And so monotheism was born at last.
So, is that about how it went, historically? Qui sait? I’m not a sceptic for nothing.
reflections on the video ‘Why I am no longer a Christian’ – part 1
funny but not entirely relevant
Why I am no longer a Christian
I ‘m on the mailing list for an atheist meet-up group which, sadly, I rarely attend, but recently an email was sent around recommending a video called ‘Why I am no longer a Christian’. The author has been adding snippets to the video over the years and it’s now over 3 hours long, but you can watch it in chunks. I’ve found it thoroughly compelling viewing so far. The author narrates the story of his deconversion in great detail, in soft-spoken, measured style, conveying the atmosphere and the feel of US pentecostal religiosity from the inside. To me, this was important because it’s easy, coming from a very different background, to be dismissive and contemptuous of that world – as Dawkins is often accused of being (I note that he’s been keen to promote his loving, caring side lately).
Even so, and even though I was certainly not put off by the measured treatment of his faith days, his faith community, and the sacred music that accompanies these early sections (much sacred music is, of course, very beautiful and soothing), my interest really grew with his encounter with the ex-Christian academic, and his increasingly skeptical/curious readings of the Bible.
There are many outrageous passages in the Bible, so many in fact that the more subtle infelicities may easily go unheeded. And most of them aren’t so subtle when we decide to pause and examine them. For example, the author discusses Abraham, in Egypt, telling Sarah to lie to Pharaoh about his relationship with her (Genesis 12:10-20). The reason for the lie was that, finding Sarah very attractive, they might take her from him and kill him, if they thought she was his wife. If, on the other hand, they thought she was his sister, they would still take her, but would treat Abraham well, as the bearer of a gift of such a beauty into Egypt.
The author is struck by the passage because he believes (or believed at the time of reading it) that lying is never right, and he believed that this was a fundamental moral principle of the Bible, one of the Commandments. Interestingly, as a lifelong non-believer, I might’ve been struck by this lie (and I do recall being struck by it on first reading it) because it so contradicted the Commandment, but I doubt if I’d have been struck by its immorality. Abraham wanted to survive, first and foremost, and he considered that Sarah was doomed to be ‘looted’ from him anyway. Better to benefit from it than to die because of it. On the other hand, of course, he may have been wrong in his consideration that the Pharaoh and the Egyptians wouldn’t respect his ‘right of possession’ of Sarah. So we have a genuine moral dilemma here. In any case his decision to ask Sarah to lie doesn’t seem outrageous to me, given the patriarchal brutality of the era.
But it is the consequence of all this that the author is even more struck by, and rightly so. For Yahweh strikes Pharaoh down with illness because he takes the apparently single Sarah, rather than punishing the couple whose lies placed Sarah in such a compromising position. It doesn’t make sense to modern western morality, yet it makes perfect sense to those family honour-based societies that still exist today. The married Sarah’s honour has been besmirched, and Pharoah did it. Lying is as nothing beside having your way with a woman who is some other man’s possession, even if you didn’t know she was. It’s primitive and brutish, but that’s the Bible.
The author points out other questionable passages, including two contradictory ones about Judas that I hadn’t noticed before. In Acts 1:18-19, the unrepentant Judas is depicted as having his guts suddenly burst open in a field (bought by the proceeds of his betrayal), an Act of a wrathful Yahweh, but in Matthew 27: 3-8 , Judas, clearly guilt-ridden, tosses away his blood money and hangs himself from a tree. Completely incompatible stories, shocking to a discriminating, questing sensibility trying to understand this god’s book.
Later the author goes into aspects of the Bible’s production which I didn’t know about or the details of which I’ve read but forgotten, as an atheist who, knowing the books of the Bible are full of propaganda, fabrication and rescension, isn’t interested in the precise details the way many apologists are. Still they’re worth setting down here, to solidify them in my mind.
Some of this comes from Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, which I’ve actually read, but rather somnolently, probably because, like the video’s author, I was bored by the multifarious inventions of gods, or the qualities of gods, which she presents in the book, none of them based on anything but subjective speculation, albeit ingenious at times. It all started, from a historical perspective (rather than a pre-historic one) with the Enuma Elish, a Babylonian epic poem which presents, in a deliberately mythic way, a creation event, not out of nothing, but out of an eternal ‘raw material’. Armstrong claims that the creation of something out of nothing ‘was an idea that was alien to the ancient world’, including the writers of the Bible’s creation myths. An examination of the very first words of Genesis, however – at least in English – uncovers, at the very least, a vagueness about the issue. I quote from the KJV:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
What we seem to have here is a beginning in which only the single supernatural agent exists. This agent (whose maleness isn’t revealed until verse 5, though it’s likely that in highly gendered Hebrew it was clear from the start) apparently created two things, at least initially, out of what we don’t know (magic happens!), and one of them was formless and void, whatever that may mean. In fact there’s enough ambiguity in these opening lines to keep theologians going for centuries. Ah, such is the inscrutability of brevity.
Anyway, moving along. The Enuma Elish is dated to around 1750 BCE, and is, importantly, a tale of polytheism. It was doubtless a highly selective representation of the polytheistic myths circulating around Mesopotamia at the time and previously. It speaks of a power struggle between gods and then a creation out of a primordial world that’s also formless and void, with a sequence including light, the firmament, land, the sun, the moon, and finally humanity. It’s believed that the first verses of Genesis, written most likely at the time of the Babylonian exile, more than a thousand years after the Enuma Elish was set down, were inspired by and derived from this ancient epic.
In my next post I’ll look at the emergence of Judaeo-Christian monotheism out of polytheism, with reference to this video.
keep up the pressure
This guy, Tarcisio Bertone, a cardinal, blames it all on homosexuality
Big problems for the college of cardinals in electing the next pope – and that’s a cardinal’s only real job. A number of them are under scrutiny for their action and lack of action over abusive clergy, and under pressure not to participate in the election, and much of the pressure’s coming from catholics themselves, in Italy and in the cardinals’ home territories. It’s an unprecedented situation, and it seems unlikely to me that this trend will be reversed – it’s more likely to grow. Cardinals under the spotlight include Justin Rigali and Roger Mahony (USA), Sean Brady (Ireland) and Godfried Danneels (Belgium).
Story from Nicole Winfield of Associated Press.
a more realistic pope? don’t hold your breath
‘Catholic’ kids in Haiti, and plenty more where they come from
Herr Ratzinger has resigned, citing ill-health and old age, and a consequently increasing inability to get his head around all the issues and complexities involved in pretending to be the moral and spiritual leader of all humanity, whether humanity likes it or knows about it or not.
It might be argued that the fact that the 85-year-old’s decision caused ‘shockwaves’ through his community is an indication of how ‘away with the fairies’ that community is, but with some 600 years’ history of the big papa holding onto power till his last gasp, they can perhaps be forgiven their complacent fantasies.
So there’ll be a new pope soon, and the rest of us – that’s to say, those who take little personal notice of the pronouncements of the pontiff and the organisation he heads, but who also realize that a worrying proportion of the human population does take him seriously – engage in the more or less slim hope that a new leader will have a more realistic and less hubristic outlook, in terms of attitudes to women, to homosexuals, to contraception, to knowledge and ideas, and so forth.
But of course we outsiders won’t have a say in the election of the next male spokesman for a decidedly male one-and-only god. Nor will most catholics.
So who elects the next pope? A college of cardinals (as opposed to a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows or a conspiracy of ravens), that’s who. And, amusingly, if you’re a cardinal and over 80, you’re not considered compos mentis enough to vote for the next incumbent. That at least seems more in line with realism, but I don’t hear any noises about mandatory retirement of pontiffs – or cardinals, for that matter.
In Australia, judges of the High Court, the highest court in the land, are mandated to retire at age 70. That ruling came in in 1977, and before that the appointment was for life. No doubt similar rulings have been made internationally. And these days, because of the onerous workload, judges often retire before the mandatory date.
The next pope will be elected by about 118 cardinals (depending on when the election takes place, with cardies hurrying over the 80-year cliff as fast as their ruby-red dresses permit). More than half of these blokes were appointed by Ratzinger, and the remainder by his equally ultra-conservative predecessor, Karol Wojtyla, so it’s unlikely that many of them would be overly infected with realism. And of course the problem is that realism, a fairly mundane and anodyne notion for most of us, has been seen as forbidden fruit to the hierarchy of this organisation for centuries. So a dose of realism always carries the risk of Vaticanonical anaphylaxis (quite proud of that one).
Consider the last ‘realistic’ pope (it’s a relative term), Angelo Roncalli, who called the second Vatican Council in the sixties. Certainly his papacy made a case for ecumenicism that has been pursued, at least, in name, ever since, but Vatican 2’s promise has been almost entirely unfulfilled, and Roncalli’s famous ‘open the windows’ pronouncement has fallen on clogged ears inside the Vatican. What’s more, the possibilities Vatican 2 just might have opened up have proved so scarey to the hierarchy that a veil of silence appears to have been cast over its very existence. I suspect their attitude to reform has something in common with the notions of that old fuddy-duddy Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens, with his apparent loathing of softies, considered the Anglicans, with their female priests and their modern services and their acceptance of poofs and the like, to be far worse than the Catholics, who at least stood for something. The question is, is it better to stand for misogyny, homophobia, celibacy, anti-intellectualism and ignorant authoritarianism, than to stand for nothing at all? Well, actually, if bums on seats are the measure, the answer appears to be yes. Not that I’m convinced that the Anglicans stand for nothing, but whatever they do stand for, it doesn’t appear to be very popular. Anglican numbers are crashing in this country, whereas the Catholics are creeping rather more slowly towards extinction. Of course this has a little to do with the influx of Catholics as against Anglicans, compared to earlier days, but I’d bet too that it has much to do with the age-old appeal of militant conservatism, from Genghis Khan to little Adolf. And the Vatican has managed, over the years, to clothe its iron fist with the fetching velvet gloves of a humanism that almost seems modern. Kindness to children, to the poor, to the dispossessed and disadvantaged, that sort of thing.
So I’m not expecting anything particularly positive to come out of this change in leadership. The noises coming out of Africa, the fastest-growing Catholic region, are all about holding the line on the homosexual scourge, upholding the traditional family and the dignity of manhood, etc. If anything I see the Catholic Church moving backwards into the foreseeable future, retreating into conservative, anti-intellectual fantasy, much like the Pentecostals, only different. We shall tediously see.
revisiting that old chestnut, the separate spheres of science and religion
In any case, a most excellent book
It always surprises me when I hear scientists who are otherwise extremely stimulating and admirable taking up the old S J Gouldian position on religion. I have in mind here V S Ramachandran, in his recent book The tell-tale brain:
When I make remarks of this nature about God… I do not wish to imply that God doesn’t exist; the fact that some patients develop such delusions doesn’t disprove God – certainly not the abstract God of Spinoza or Shankara [an Indian mystic philosopher of the eighth century]. Science has to remain silent on such matters. I would argue, like Erwin Schrodinger and Stephen Jay Gould, that science and religion (in the nondoctrinaire philosophical sense) belong to different realms of discourse and one cannot negate the other.
Mmmm. Always a bit of a problem when science is told what it ‘has to’ do. Or is it just me that doesn’t like being told that? I do, though, take Ramachandran’s point that science has nothing directly to say about the supernatural, the realm of the ‘non-evidential’. To say that there’s no evidence for the non-evidential seems rather beside the point. And yet…
The whole point of religion is supernatural agency, and this, it seems to me, involves these other-worldly agents acting in this world; answering prayers, performing miracles and so forth. After all, a god who does nothing is, arguably, not worth worshipping. Worshipping a god is, it seems to me, a quid pro quo sort of thing, though this is rarely made explicit. We expect something from these gods, they made us for a purpose, hence their obsession with us, their fatal flaw, it might seem. I’m talking about monotheistic gods of course, the ones without siblings or goddy communities to distract them from being our eternal lords and masters.
How these issues can be claimed to belong to different orders of discourse is beyond me. To me, as I’ve written, science is born of relentless questioning, with two aspects, curiosity and scepticism. And one of the biggest questions, obviously, is – how did we come to be here? It’s a question that science relentlessly explores – the origin of life, the origin of matter, the origin of universal laws and forces. It’s also a question that religion, particularly monotheistic religion, purports to answer. The answer being, a deity is responsible. A deity far too complex and ineffable for us to be capable of understanding or even beginning to explore.
I don’t see any difficulty in treating this as a theory, or more accurately a hypothesis, like any other, to be treated with the same sceptico-curious questioning as any other claim about our world and our experience.
I note that Ramachandran isolates religion ‘in the nondoctrinaire philosophical sense’ as the only religious ‘type’ that’s beyond the realm of scientific inquiry. Or perhaps he means beyond scientific proof, as I’m sure he agrees that the areas and pathways of the brain associated with religious or spiritual feeling are well worth probing. In fact, quite a bit of headway has been made in recent years in neurophysiology and in experimental psychology, in teasing out the forces contributing to religious belief. So such belief does fall within the scientific ‘realm of discourse’ or purview. When I first encountered the concept of a god in Sunday School as a seven or eight year old, the first thing that came to me was a whole heap of questions. Questions in which, as always, you can’t disentangle curiosity from scepticism. Who? What? Where? Says who? Can you really be serious? What are you getting out of this? How can this idea be possible? Where did it come from? Why is he male? What do you mean that he’s our father – isn’t one more than enough?
I believe these to be scientific questions, but then maybe I have a broader definition of science than most. I certainly hope so. And maybe these questions can’t negate gods, or belief in them, but they can certainly make it hot for this whole bizarro world of ‘faith’.
The other side of Ramachandran’s argument, though, I certainly agree with. Whatever religious discourse is, it has no hope of negating science.
GM salmon: what to think?
a fish more fishy than most?
I get regular emails from worthy folks asking me to sign some petition or other relating to some political or social injustice or outrage, and sometimes I sign, but mostly I pass because I don’t the details and haven’t the time or energy to research the bonafides. Rarely, though, do I sit up and think ‘that’s not quite right’. That’s what happened when I received an invitation to complain about the USA’s new ‘fake salmon’ or ‘frankenfish’:
Attack of the Frankenfish
The US is about to treat the world to the first genetically modified meat: a mutant salmon that could wipe out wild salmon populations and threaten human health. Unless we stop it, this Frankenfish could open the floodgates for biotech meat around the world. Click below to build 1 million voices to stop it: Sign the petition.
Sounds pretty scary, but I’m well aware that, like climate change, the GMO debate tends to divide along politico-ideological lines, which makes me very keen to get my head out of the rhetoric and into the science. So let’s investigate further. By the way, for a very useful insight into the fraught domestic (US) politics of this issue, this article is a must-read. It comes from an organisation called Genetic Literacy Project, ‘where science trumps ideology’ – a good place to start if you want to inform yourself about the science.
The USA’s FDA gave its approval to genetically modified ‘AquaAdvantage’ salmon on December 26 last year. It’s likely that the date – buried in the midst of the holiday season – was deliberately chosen to avoid controversy as much as possible. This was indeed a landmark decision, the first GM animal ever approved for human consumption, and the forces opposing this development are loud and strong. They include not only the anti-GM organic food producers and consumers but the Alaskan fishing industry, which believes it could be wiped out by these new fast-growing farm fish.
The technology is hardly brand new, involving the modification of Atlantic salmon with a Chinook salmon growth hormone as well as genetic material from a large eel-like fish called an ocean pout, enabling it to reach maturity at a faster rate. One anti-GM site has described the increased rate as 30-fold, but a probably more accurate view comes from this essay, which claims only a 4-fold increase, based on the developer’s own assessment. However, this (clearly anti-biotech) site claims that AquaAdvantage’s claims about faster growth are completely bogus, and that ‘two major commercial growers have said that their salmon grow as fast as or faster than GE salmon’. Trying to arrive at the truth here is a pretty thankless task.
The process of approval has taken years, and the delays appear to have been more politically than scientifically motivated. The first viable salmon carrying these modifications was created in 1989, and the altered species entered the federal approval process in 1995, and as one commentator says, they’ve been swimming upstream ever since. The FDA released a preliminary FONSI (Finding Of No Significant Impact) report on the salmon back on May 4 2012, and I’m not sure as yet why it took another 7 months for the final approval (which is still subject to public comment and feedback). On the ‘threat to human health’ claims of the petitioners, the FDA had this to say:
With respect to food safety, FDA has concluded that food from AquAdvantage Salmon is as safe as food from conventional Atlantic salmon, and that there is a reasonable certainty of no harm from consumption of food from triploid AquAdvantage Salmon. Further, FDA has concluded that no significant food safety hazards or risks have been identified with respect to the phenotype of the AquAdvantageSalmon.
By the way, the tern ‘triploid’ here means, essentially, that the salmon have been rendered sterile through gene manipulation. They’re normally diploid.
Should we take the FDA’s word for all this? What are the health concerns of the anti-GM lobby? Well, let me provide a list, garnered from a few anti-GM sites.
1. Farmed fish swim in their own waste, and require regular doses of antibiotics to stay healthy (obviously this is an argument against farmed fish in general not just farmed GM fish).
2. The GM salmon are less healthy than wild or regular farmed Atlantic salmon. Studies have shown that they contain lower levels of heart- and brain-healthy omega-3 fatty acids than either form of regular salmon. These fish are also notably deficient in certain vitamins.
3. There’s a big concern that genetically modifying salmon could increase the incidence of seafood allergies among the public.
Well, actually, that’s it. There are other, genuine if possibly overblown, concerns about fish, in spite of triploidy, escaping the confines of the farm and interbreeding with other salmon, but this doesn’t directly affect human health. All we really have is the possibility of increased allergenic reactions and the possibility that we won’t get as many nutrients from these fish as from regular fish – hardly a scary issue. Oh and of course there’s the unstated but always looming notion that frankenfish or frankenfoods generally will create monster diseases/mutants that we’ll be unable to contain and which will wipe out human life as we know it, but I won’t address that here.
GMOs and allergies
One of the major consequences of introducing a new gene into an organism’s genome is the production of a new protein. Every protein has some possibility, however theoretical, of bringing on an allergic reaction,so it’s undoubtedly important to monitor responses to new proteins. And it’s true that no amount of monitoring of a new protein’s allergenic potential, before a product containing that protein is released to consumers, will be absolutely foolproof. However, it’s one thing to say that we can’t be sure there won’t be isolated cases of allergic reactions, and it’s altogether another thing to assume that allergic reactions will inevitably result from GMOs. Certainly in countries that have taken to GMOs – the USA for example – we’re not seeing any dire consequences. More importantly, perhaps, we’re learning a lot more about proteins and allergies, partly as a result of the testing and monitoring of GMOs, than we ever knew before. The database on allergens has become more extensive and detailed.
By studying the characteristics of known allergens, researchers have come up with a profile or set of criteria, common to these allergens, that they can test new GMOs against. In fact, because GMOs involve an alteration that produces a handful of new proteins at most, they’re much easier to screen in this way than a new type of fruit which may contain any number of new and generally less predictable proteins. The introduction of kiwi fruit to new markets resulted in allergic reactions, though only some years after they were introduced, thus underlining the need for long-term monitoring of all sources of unfamiliar proteins.
GMOs are subject to numerous rigorous reviews before being released to the public, far more than occurs with organic foods, and if there’s the slightest whiff of a potential allergen, they won’t be released. And not all GM foods produce new proteins, because the modification may involve simply switching off a ‘problem’ gene by incorporating a reversed copy of it.
Is there something especially dangerous about GM salmon, or seafood in general, and allergies? Well, very recently, Consumers Union, apparently a US-based consumer advocacy organisation, blasted the FDA for not adequately researching the potential for the fish to cause allergies.
FDA has allowed this fish to move forward based on tests of allergenicity of only six engineered fish—tests that actually did show an increase in allergy-causing potential,” stated Michael Hansen PhD, Senior Scientist with Consumers Union.
A more detailed critique of the FDA’s decision and its internal processes, from an organisation called Food and Water Watch, ‘a tireless champion in the fight to preserve our right to the untainted fruits of the earth’, is very much worth a read, as it addresses sample sizes, the nutritional content of the GM salmon, the lack of fisheries and environmental expertise within the FDA, the commercial viability of the product, and concerns about carcinogens and allergens. If you’re looking for a coherent and articulate presentation of the anti-GM salmon argument, you’ll find it here.
My mind remains open on the matter. The anti-GM lobby can only speak of potential dangers, though they shouldn’t be dismissed. However, the claim that this FDA decision, not yet final, ‘opens the floodgates’ for GM seafood and livestock sounds pretty unconvincing considering the long, winding upstream journey of AquaAdvantage salmon.
One thing I will say though, is that GM products should be labelled as such. The fact that this doesn’t occur in the USA amazes me considering the strength and independent-mindedness of consumer groups there. Even in Australia GM labelling is limited at best. Detailed labelling of all foods is, IMHO, essential to critical evaluation and consumer choice.
Finally, what always gets me about the people opposed to these developments is the anti-science bias. It may be the case that these salmon haven’t been tested rigorously enough (I’m sceptical though), but the call is usually not for more rigorous testing, it’s for abandonment of the whole enterprise. Similarly the negatives are highlighted far more than the positives, and solutions to those negatives are dismissed. And the unholy alliance between environmentalists and protectionist politicians concerned to maintain what is surely an unsustainable wild fishing industry strikes me as puzzling if not bizarre.
curiosity, the ineluctable correlate of scepticism
During a recent gathering with neighbours I found it hard to keep my cool when someone told me recent evidence had come out supporting reflexology’s credentials as a healing technique. Expressing just a touch of scepticism, ho ho, I got the irritated response that ‘science doesn’t know everything’. I’ve already treated that ‘criticism’ in my introductory ‘fountains of good stuff’ podcast, transcribed here, but I feel the need to go further in dealing with this odd line of attack, because it annoys the shit out of me.
‘Science doesn’t know everything’ is one of those semantically not-quite-right phrases that reminds me of the half-opaque lines of Ringo Starr (examples are ‘tomorrow never knows’ and ‘it’s been a hard day’s night’) that tickled Lennon and McCartney into basing songs around them. Science isn’t a sentient being as far as I’m aware – and if it is I hope it’s not a supernatural one – so there’s no chance of it ever ‘knowing’ anything.
I’ve already had a rough go at defining what science actually is in the aforementioned ‘fountains’ intro, but any definition should, IMHO, be light and provisional rather than hard and fast. Certainly it’s about reliable knowledge, and the means of arriving at it, but it’s also, as many have said, about a way of thinking, a way of life. A way of life characterised by, and fueled by, curiosity and wonder. And what better words can there be, in our language?
Science is about questions rather than answers, and so the questions that come to mind when I’m told that ‘they’ve found’ that reflexology really works are questions like – ‘Really?’ How does it work? So there really are connections between zones on the soles of the feet and the pancreas, the gall bladder, the eye, the lungs, etc etc, as the theory suggests? Are they direct connections, or do they work through the peripheral nervous system? What, precisely, is the cellular pathway? Are the signals communicated electrically or chemically? What, if any, are the messenger molecules? If they’re not felt, through the nervous system, via the brain, but are more directly connected, so that only a third person (i.e. a trained reflexologist) can detect the connection, why would such a system have evolved? What possible evolutionary benefit would such a bizarrely non-neurological system provide? Curiouser and curiouser.
I did ask my neighbour if she could provide more details about the actual study or studies supporting reflexology, and she promised to do so, but that hasn’t happened. Well, fine, it was all very informal and semi-drunken. I’ve googled myself for recent studies supporting reflexology, but I’ve come up empty. If anybody out there has evidence – obviously non-anecdotal – to contribute to this vital debate about the future of medical knowledge, I’d be very interested to hear about it.
The fact is, though, that our knowledge of the human body and how it functions, and goes wrong, is burgeoning. And the more we know, the more we have to learn. That’s to say understanding just keeps generating more questions, so that, paradoxically, we now know more and at the same time less than we’ve ever known before, and so it will continue. That’s the fuel of science – the not knowing, the wonder. There are today thousands of labs, studying intracellular molecules, nanoparticles, subatomic forces, retroviruses, glial cells, genes, etc etc, all of them fueled by this hunger to know. And all these researchers are well aware of, and delighted by, the fact that knowing will just lead to more questions, more research, more puzzlement and wonder. It truly seems to be a self-sustaining system. I find it invigorating and exhilarating. I also find it rather amazing that all this research, particularly in medicine, has accounted for the fact that we, in the west, have increased our life expectancy by 2.5 years in every decade, in extraordinarily linear fashion, since the mid-nineteenth century. That’s to say, since the regularisation of medical training and the universal acceptance of the germ theory of disease, among other things.
Which brings me back to reflexology and other forms of so-called complementary medicine. The ‘science doesn’t know everything’ remark, whatever can be made of it, seems to be arguing that Herr Science, that burly, self-absorbed, Germanic (i.e. barely comprehensible) autocrat, should stop being so smug and should listen to the wise practitioners of tried-and-true folk medicine, coz they might learn summat, en it?
Au contraire, I say.
To me, all the smugness is on the side of reflexologists, iridologists and homeopaths, and their supporters. Not to mention evasiveness, defensiveness, and, worst of all, lack of curiosity. All that can generally be gotten out of these people are ‘It works!’, ‘It worked for me!’ ‘You should try it!’ ‘How can you condemn it without even trying it?’ and of course ‘science doesn’t know everything!’ – and when you try to pin these people down about the mechanisms involved in such treatments – that’s to say, the field in which curiosity comes to play – just sit back and watch the obfuscations and contradictions pile up.
To focus more closely on reflexology again, I’ve presented the same ‘foot map’ as I did in my last post on the subject. Note, for example, that there’s a tiny zone on each foot, just below the middle toes that corresponds to the eyes. Unfortunately the map doesn’t tell us whether the zone on the left foot corresponds to the left eye, the right eye, or both, but hey, details details. What I’m curious about, for now, is – where did this map come from, and how does it compare to other reflexology maps? Presumably, if reflexology is true, then each reflexology map would be the same – just as modern maps of the human brain would be more or less identical in every one of the thousands of neurophysiology research labs worldwide. The zones won’t be shifting around according to different practitioners, right?
However, it should also be pointed out that, if every reflexologist is working from the same map, it doesn’t follow that reflexology is true, any more than the fact that a thousand priests are preaching from the same bible proves that the bible is true. They could all be working from copies of an original map which was the imaginative invention of a single ancient, or not-so-ancient, healer (or quack, or well-meaning but deluded Believer).
So let’s have a look at another map:
This zonal map comes from a Thai tourism site which presumably intends it be some harmless R & R for jaded westerners and a boost to the local economy. Good luck to them, I say, but the actual map – if you can ignore all the colours and shapes, which tend to obscure rather than illuminate the ‘zones’, is roughly similar to the one at the top of the post. It’s more detailed, and more ambitiously labelled, including zones associated with the gonads, and ‘insomnia points’ on both feet. However, there are some glaring and one might say pretty vital contradictions. In this coloured map we find a zone for the heart on only one foot (I don’t know if it’s the left or the right, because I don’t know if we’re supposed to be looking at the feet from above or below), just above centre and to one side. On the other map there are two zones for the heart, one on each foot, just above the instep. If we look at these zones on the coloured map, they refer to – the parathyroid glands! A pretty serious discrepancy, I would’ve thought. Possibly even fatal.
And of course there are other discrepancies and vagueries. The more carefully you look, the more you find. So how do we resolve these problems? Do we look at more maps and try to come up with ‘consensus zones’? Do we research all the maps to uncover the most authentic? And by what criteria?
Well, here’s another map:
Again this one is in general agreement with most zones on the other maps. It plumps for the ‘thyroid area’ instead of the more specific ‘parathyroid glands’ and the completely different ‘heart’ on the other two maps, and it adds the ‘buttocks’ at the heel, of which there’s no mention in the others, but overall there’s a sense that these might come from the same source.
So is this an ancient Ayurvedic or Chinese source? Well, the Thai tourism brochure mentioned above actually quotes from a Chinese source, but it clearly refers to simple massage, not anything so complex and extraordinary as reflexology (a term apparently invented by one Eunice Ingham in the 1930s, renaming it from zone therapy, a term and a ‘theory’ devised by one William Fitzgerald in around 1913). The only ancient source who actually comes close to hinting at anything like modern reflexology is the Roman medical writer Aulus Cornelius Celsus, whose writings are thought to be derived from the Greek Hippocrates. In his De Medicina, he writes this:
Much more often, however, some other part is to be rubbed than that which is the seat of the pain; and especially when we want to withdraw material from the head or trunk, and therefore rub the arms and legs.
It ain’t much, and no ancient ‘zonal maps’ are extant, and I very much doubt if any ever existed. References to any complex and precise ancient teaching about zones in the hands, feet or anywhere else connecting with organs or glands in the body are totally unsubstantiated. It’s likely that the various more or less related modern zonal maps are loose reproductions from the imaginative writings of Fitzgerald, Ingham and other early twentieth century enthusiasts.
So, my curiosity and scepticism have brought me to a dead end, really. There’s clearly little interest, either from supporters or detractors, in spending money on rigorous trials to evaluate a practice that seems incapable of even providing a mechanism or pathway for its working. It would be hard to work out what to test, and supporters of the practice could easily explain away null findings by arguing that the wrong maps were used or that the zones were rubbed clockwise rather than anti-clockwise, or without sufficient skill, or conviction even. And when all else fails, and the lack of any scientific evidence becomes impossible to ignore, these unsceptical and incurious believers can always just shrug and say, ‘well, science doesn’t know everything…’