Posts Tagged ‘truth’
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.
blogging, truth and getting back to the fountain
Hello, let me take this opportunity to remind people, or to educate people who seem to have little knowledge of these things, about what a blog actually is, and what it can be.
Clearly a blog such as this one reflects the personal views of its author. There are thousands of such blogs of course, of very varying standards, and written for very varying purposes. My own blog has its own variety of purposes, including self-education, the promotion of particular values such as skepticism and critical thinking, and, in an elaborate way, the pleasures of self-development and worldly exploration, a la Montaigne, ‘inventor’ of the essay, who once claimed that he wrote not to discover his thoughts but to invent them – or some such thing.
Sometimes in this blog I may focus on others – their views, their activities or whatever. Those others may not like what I write about them, but that of course would not give them the right to shut me down, any more than, say, a politician would have the right to shut down a blogger who violently disagrees with her policies. Of course, if the politician feels that the blogger has ‘overstepped the mark’, and feels personally abused or offended by the blogger’s remarks, there are various options open to her.
She could, for example, take advantage of the interactive nature of blogging, and leave a critical comment on the blog, thus possibly initiating a conversation with the blogger or, in more popular blogs than mine, with the blogger’s other readers and commentators. This is often a very fruitful exercise, as it helps to clarify opposing positions and to deepen and enrich the debate.
However the politician may feel it beneath her to dignify the blogger with a response – this is often the case with public figures. Of course it may be that the blogger’s writings are so malicious as to be unworthy of attention. Such writings are often self-defeating, and the mainstream blogosphere deals with them by ignoring them, thus relegating them to their own little busy corner of looniness.
However, let’s imagine that the blogger in my example is articulate and knowledgeable, and presents cogent arguments, or tells a plausible story. This, of course, presents a danger to the politician. She can’t easily take legal action against the blogger, even though he is accusing her of corruption, say. In US law, malicious intent would also have to be proven, and it’s likely much the same in Australia. Of course the law, as it relates to blogs and online content generally, is varied, weak and behind-hand throughout the western world. In such a situation the blogger is more protected than otherwise. Virtually any case brought against a blogger would be precedent-setting, and courts tend to be very conservative about that sort of thing. As it happens, the blogosphere is also a pretty powerful force for preserving its own interests and freedoms, and there is currently a website, the electronic frontier foundation, dedicated to developing legal protection for bloggers and online users, and advocating for them. This includes important successes in having bloggers treated as journalists, with all the rights and protections that accrue.
Even if the politician or public figure were to take legal action, the blogger – the actual writer of the offending article(s) – could be the only target of that action. Imagine the case that the blogger is a member of an organisation which he is defending on his blog against forces – individual or organisational – that he believes are maligning or damaging it. Clearly his views are his own, and he’s not representing the organisation in any official capacity (imagine he makes a clear and unequivocal statement about this on his blog). He has taken upon himself sole responsibility for his writings, and any consequences that might derive from them.
Of course, with blogs there are confidentiality and security issues, and this is a messy area, but certainly not an impossible one to negotiate. Some have suggested, for example, that it might be wrong to place on your blog a photo of a public figure you wish to criticise or draw attention to. From a legal perspective, this is untrue. Data-sharing of this kind occurs a million times a day on blogs, web-sites, online news sites and so forth. Occasionally the photo might be under copywrite, in which case you will need to get permission, but otherwise it’s pretty well open slather, especially if the photos are already out in the public sphere. Of course, if you use the photo to vilify someone, or if you distort the image in a malicious way, that may be another matter, but of course this also occurs on a regular basis and the law is generally powerless to do much about it, except perhaps in extreme cases.
It’s a similar situation with the actual naming of a person on a blog. Of course this happens all the time, but people may have legitimate reasons for not wishing to be named. However, unless the person is the subject of in-train legal investigation, with court suppression orders out against his or her name, this is not a legal matter, and the naming of people will be up to the discretion of the blogger. For example, the named person may approach the blogger, perhaps via blog comment or email, and ask for his or her name to be removed, presumably providing reasons for the blogger’s consideration (remember, we’re imagining here a ‘good’ blogger, who is motivated by truth-telling as he sees it, not by malice or spite). The blogger will then have to weigh the ethics of naming v suppression in this case.
It’s inevitable that, if the blogger is telling a story about the organisation he’s defending, and about the characters in that organisation, those characters will be recognised by some readers – even if their names are suppressed – due to their role within the organisation, their activities, their history and so forth. Again this isn’t a legal issue, except in exceptional circumstances. The best way forward here would again be negotiation. Imagine a character in the organisation doesn’t want her or his activities to be written about, not because of having something to hide, but because she or he doesn’t believe the blogger will present a sufficiently accurate or nuanced picture. The blogger may choose to go on in spite of protestations, while welcoming any corrections, by way of comment, to the portrait he offers, either by the person portrayed, or by third parties. Or the blogger may choose to omit all references to the person and his or her activities, thereby presenting only a partial or distorted version of the organisation, the degree of distortion depending on the centrality or otherwise of the omitted person’s role in the organisation.
I’ve focused here on some of the difficulties and the possible negotiations involved when an individual writes about an organisation which many individuals feel an allegiance to or part-ownership of, but there is a much more positive side to this, which is inherent in the interactive nature of the blog – or its potentially interactive nature.
We find this interactivity operating at a high level on the best of blogs. A blogger might, for example, post something on the latest research in integrated information theory [the most prevalent theory of consciousness]. This might attract an opponent of the theory, who leaves a comment on some supposedly dubious aspects of the research. Then one of the people actually involved in the research leaps into the fray, defending it and adding valuable detail. Along comes a veteran of thirty years’ experience in consciousness research, making informed comments to put the research into a broader perspective. And so on and so forth – with along the way commentators sniping about the failings of materialism and the hubris of science, all helping to give a complex account of expert and lay opinion on the subject.
But to return to our imagined, impugned organisation. A blog, properly handled, could be just about the best way to get its story, its honest story, out to the broader public. New media is becoming more powerful as a way of shedding full light on a situation or organisation precisely because of its multi-facetedness and interactivity. The old media usually has its one fixed perspective, and its one basic story to tell, with a beginning middle and end – maybe with a follow-up six months later, if it’s worth the candle. The new media can tell an open-ended, multifarious story, with nuance upon nuance, making it far less cut and dried and far more human. It can also provide a more coherent truth, vouched for many times over, by different tellers with their different angles, yet all converging to create something real, not perfect but human, and thoroughly authentic.
To me, there’s nothing worse, when you’re defending your organisation, than going in the opposite direction and presenting it with a mind-numbing gloss that’s as relevant to the reality as a sales brochure. It will convince nobody, and it insults the intelligence of the reader, who above all, is looking for a measure of truth. Sure, by admitting no errors or imperfections you’ll deny your enemies the chance to attack you further, but you’ll also remove from your potential friends and allies the motivation to support and defend you as real, believable people, doing their level best against a series of bizarre situations and a small set of impossible people, and a system that seems stacked against them.
I’ve written elsewhere against adversarial systems. I prefer co-operation to combativeness. I don’t want to win, I want to arrive at the truth – which in my view is a slippery, changeable thing, but always worth chasing – and to encourage others to arrive at it too, and to value it and respect it. That’s why I write, and why I read and watch and listen.
Having said all that, I feel a bit tired of people and their squabbles right now. My current mood chimes with that of Marcus Aurelius, philosopher and Roman Emperor, when he wrote this – and forgive me for being prétentieux:
In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his senses a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful. In short, all that is of the body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapours; life a warfare, a brief sojourning in an alien land; and after repute, oblivion. Where, then, can man find the power to guide and guard his steps? In one thing and one thing alone: the love of knowledge.
So, it’s back to fountains of good stuff!
is Julia Gillard lying about gay marriage?
Our Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, says she is opposed to gay marriage. The obvious question to ask then is – why? In fact, considering the obviousness of the question, it’s amazing that it’s so rarely asked. And perhaps more to the point, it’s amazing how often she’s allowed to get away without addressing this obvious why question.
When this question comes up from time to time, Gillard expresses amusement if not bemusement about it, as if she’s already addressed the issue many times. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, she has never addressed the issue. In the recent Q and A program, in which Gillard was the only guest facing a barrage of questions, she was asked in a very dignified way why she opposed gay marriage, and was accused, quite fairly, of denying the sanctions of the law to homosexual couples. Her response was utterly pathetic, and, in my opinion, of questionable honesty.
She began her response by saying that she was going to explain her view. I waited for this explanation, but it didn’t come. Her response was basically this: ‘I hear your concerns, I sympathise, but I take a different [unexplained] view. I can assure you that my view, though unexplained, is deeply held. But don’t worry, many people on my side of politics disagree with me, and I’ve allowed a conscious vote on this, so you never know, the law might change.’
Okay, so she didn’t actually say that the law might change, but she seemed to imply as much, and that it wouldn’t deeply disturb her if it did, even though her completely mysterious views on the subject were deeply held.
And here’s where the honesty is questionable. People with deeply-held views naturally feel that their views are the right views, and that those who hold other views are wrong, mistaken, ill-informed and so forth. They want to, and often feel a desperate, highly motivating need to, convert others to their view. To have a deeply held view that is relativistic, as Gillard’s purports to be, is essentially a contradiction in terms. And to have one that you seem to be at pains to avoid expressing, is nonsensical.
People with deeply held-views are keen, sometime overly keen, to express them, to advertise them, even to dedicate their lives to them. We find plenty of evidence of this, especially with those whose views are anachronistic – creationists, bible literalists, climate change deniers, holocaust deniers and flat-earthers have all tended to make the kinds of noises that exaggerates our sense of their numbers. These people, however fatuous or dangerous their views, are undeniably passionate and determined in their quests. They’re also often quite articulate, after a fashion, because they have thought and worried over their ideas long and hard. Julia Gillard, however, wants us to believe that she has a deeply-held view which is devoid of passion, which is never articulated, and which she’s happy for others to disagree with. It just doesn’t add up.
In trawling through Gillard’s response for anything remotely resembling an explanation of her position, I can only come up with this [and I paraphrase]: ‘How should we deal with this cultural institution of long standing in Australian society? Should we adapt it to fit changed circumstances, or should we develop alternative institutions which legitimise other arrangements? My deeply-held view is that we should choose the second approach.’
I have two responses to this line of thinking. First, trying to convince people that you can or should create alternative, equally legal arrangements for homosexual people [these are surely the only ‘other arrangements’ being referred to – though no doubt some time in the future someone will insist on marrying his or her cat] when there’s already a multi-purpose legal arrangement for people who want to co-habit, namely marriage, is never going to succeed. It also separates homosexuals from the rest for no good reason. They become separated not because their relationships are less loving, less intense or less legitimate. They become separated only because they are homosexual.
The second response is more complex and concerns the historical nature of marriage. Gillard describes it as a ‘cultural institution of long standing in Australian society,’ but white Australian society [which I think is what she’s referring to] is only a couple of hundred years old, and marriage, in one form or another, has existed for tens of thousands of years, and has always been a highly flexible institution, varying from culture to culture. In traditional Aboriginal culture, it was an institution involving complex kin group relationships and obligations far exceeding those in white society, but we haven’t adopted those traditions, no doubt because we saw the white tradition as ‘superior’. In medieval Europe, when ‘never was so much owned by so few’, ceremonial marriage barely existed among the ‘unwashed’ majority, whereas it was very important for the nobles, who had to prove the legitimacy of their inheriting children. In other words marriage, and the importance of marriage, depended on the structure of the overall society, and the way resources were controlled and divided by its members. In highly hierarchical and patriarchal societies, polygamous relationships at the top were commonplace, and we all know about the powerlessness of women even today under marriage arrangements within stagnantly patriarchal, mostly Moslem societies.
However, in more dynamic societies, marriage has changed to accommodate societal change, and will continue to do so. Nowadays, inheritance and ‘legitimacy’ are not so much of an issue, and marriage has become a more relaxed and ‘personal’ affair, no longer considered absolutely necessary for the raising of children. And just as couples no longer have to get married to raise ‘legitimate’ children, couples no longer need to have plans to raise children in order to get married. And that surely leaves the door open to homosexual couples.
It’s noticeable that most lobbyists keen to rigidly define marriage, so that homosexual couples are excluded from this option in perpetuity, are religious representatives. Religion has, of course, insinuated itself into the three prominent ‘milestones’ of human life – birth, death and marriage – since prehistoric times, but I don’t think anyone could dispute that we’ve managed to give birth and to die throughout history whether or not religion happened to be present. That this is just as true of marriage isn’t so well known or accepted, but the fact is that modern organised religion has a vested interest in the marriage ceremony, just as it does in baptisms, christenings and funeral rites. The difference with marriage is that, because it has little of the inevitability or obvious ‘naturalness’ of birth and death, it is more rather than less open to the manipulation of ‘interested parties’. With this comes an equal and opposite reaction, a resistance to the artificial rules imposed on the relationship by ‘authorities’, so that we have civil marriages, open marriages, same-sex marriages and de facto relationships which eschew the contract. I’ll have more to say about the origins of marriage, monogamous or otherwise, particularly in terms of evolution and our primate cousins, in another post.
The point is that Julia Gillard has given no indication, no hint of evidence that she has ever studied marriage and its history very deeply. Even reading Jane Austen might have provided her with insights into the profoundly materialist concerns, and needs, invested in the tradition – or rather, in one strand of the multivarious tradition. But she has spoken only of recent experience – her ‘cultural tradition of long standing’ – in Australia, and even then only perfunctorily.
I’m not surprised at this. I would have been more surprised had she shown real evidence of having studied the cultures and traditions of marriage, both historically and cross-culturally, and then come down strongly against gay marriage – because it would have suggested that she had an anti-homosexual bias that trumped all that knowledge about the flexible, pragmatic and adaptive nature of that institution.
So either Gillard is lying about her ‘deeply-held view’ about marriage, or she’s telling the truth, and her view is deeply discriminatory and homophobic. In an earlier revelation of her views, she held that marriage had always been between a man and a woman and she saw no reason to change that. Again, such remarks hardly reveal deep thought. It’s about as deep as saying, for example, that, in the past homosexuals have always been reviled, thundered against, ostracised and neglected – not to say tortured and murdered – and why should any of that be allowed to change?
In 2004 Australia amended its marriage act for one reason alone – to ensure that it discriminated against homosexuals. Before that, the status of homosexual love and commitment was so far beneath our consideration that the institution of marriage wasn’t ‘under threat’. Only in the twenty-first century, after centuries of denial and suppression, has homosexual love become recognised as such a force in Australian society that it had to be legislated against. The Labor Party colluded with the government of the day in ensuring that this deliberately discriminatory amendment passed with a minimum of fuss. In the twenty-first century. Surely one of the darkest moments in political life in this country. What were these politicians thinking? Did they really imagine that this rearguard action against a tidal movement for change would last? For how long? Until the 22nd century? Until half-way through this one? For a generation?
It’s my view that Gillard is lying about her ‘deeply-held view’. To think otherwise would be to think that she really has a deeply held view that homosexuals should be excluded in perpetuity from an institution that has never, in fact, been static or impervious to social forces. I would rather not think that.
So that leaves the question -whyis she lying? I don’t know the answer to that. Perhaps she has made a secret ‘devil’s deal’ with the churches, something like the one that Tony Blair made with George Bush before the invasion of Iraq. Perhaps she wants to bee seen as a person of backbone who doesn’t flip-flop as much as she’s perceived as doing, and she’s chosen this issue, a minor one to most pundits, to stand firm on. But she may well be hoping that, when it comes time to debate this matter and vote upon it again, her own ‘deeply-held’ view will be voted down. What’s the bet that, when it comes time for individual MPs to stand up and make their passionate, personal views known about the issue, Julia Gillard will not be one of them. She has nothing, really, to say.