23 posts tagged “science”
From the archives of the Penn Jillette Radio Show I give you this interview with James Randi. James Randi, as many of you may know (or not) is the founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation which offers the Million Dollar Prize to "anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event."
Could life exist on Mars? I'm not talking about right now, but could life on mars come from a seed planted by humans? I just finished watching a documentary that discussed this very idea. The concept of terraforming Mars includes warming the planet, planting plant life and eventually animals. All done by humans.
The idea is just starting to sink in for me, but wouldn't it be something if we could turn Mars into a living, breathing planet that not only sustains life but allows it to thrive?
For more, check out the wikipedia article on Terraforming.
Also, check out Creation Science 101 previously featured on this blog. Roy's album Faulty Intelligence is available on iTunes or his website.
For all the railing I did the other day on journalists not listening to what Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett are trying to say, I feel a bit of obligation to point out when they get it right. This is a recent Times article by Ruth Gledhill, a Religion Correspondent and believer of some sort (it's not clear exactly what her beliefs are, as is far too common with sensible believers), that gets it right. Mostly.
I don't agree with some of her conclusions about Dawkins, or even some of her musings. I think she misses the point just slightly in her zeal to align Dawkins with her "camp." But her attempts to listen to, understand, and have a meaningful dialogue with Dawkins is apparent, insightful, and very refreshing.
For those of you who have only had a brief glimpse into the complex personality that Richard Dawkins is, who have had their opinions of him swayed by slack-jawed articles with no understanding or compassion, this is a marvelous article.
Design geek tangent: I think the Times Online website rivals the New York Times website for best designed newspaper website on the web. It's fantastic.
Andrew Sullivan has posted his response to Sam Harris' latest essay in their debate on Religion on Beliefnet. It appears to be the last that he will write as Sullivan says, "Perhaps, then, Sam, we have talked as much as we fruitfully can." For risk that Sam may not offer another rebuttal, I will address Sullivan's essay, at length, here. I hope Sam does, ultimately, offer a final rebuttal and it will be interesting to me to see where we differ.
I'm going to skip the first paragraph and address it a little further down. I'm going to jump ahead to Sullivan's reason for thinking that he could never not exist:
The reason I cannot conceive of my non-existence is because I have accepted, freely and sanely, the love of Jesus, and I have felt it, heard it, known it. He would never let me go. And by never, I mean eternally. And so I could never not exist and neither could any of the people I have known and loved.
The main problem with this is that this is not a reason, but more a quasi-emotion. Under what justification has he "accepted" this to be true? How has he "felt it, heard it" and "known it"? Our own senses are notoriously unreliable for us to accept that he as "felt" anything resembling divinity. From whom has he "heard" this? Has he spoken personally to god? The last verb is that he "heard" it. From whom? His family and friends? A pastor? God himself? These assertions demonstrate nothing but an incomplete analysis of the situation.
Then Sullivan states that he really doesn't think god "exists" per se, but that he is something entirely different:
For me, the radical truth of my faith is therefore not that God exists, but that God is love (a far, far less likely proposition). On its face, this is a preposterous claim, and in my defense, I have never really argued in this dialogue that you should not find it preposterous. It can be reasoned about, but its truth itself is not reasonable or reachable through reason alone. But I believe it to be true - not as a fable or as a comfort or as a culture. As truth. And one reason I am grateful for this discussion is that you take this truth claim seriously on its own terms.
If god is "love" then why not call this phenomena "love" instead of "god?" Is god a being in and of itself or simply a feeling? If so, what are we arguing about? Love? I believe love exists, so in this sense I, myself, am a theist. Then again, what is Sullivan's definition of "love"? Things become incredibly fuzzy when we start substituting "god" for basic human emotions and I don't think that this sort of vocabulary gets us any further in understanding the "truth" of "love" (or, as Sullivan wants it, "god").
The feeling of love can be scientifically measured and there is plenty of data that supports belief in love. At this point, if I was Harris, I would ask Sullivan to define exactly what he means by "god" before moving forward. Such unclear language gets nobody closer to anything resembling a resolution of the issue.
But lets move on, in this next part Sullivan brings up how Jesus fits into this "god as love" hypothesis. He asks the question, "What did Jesus do?" Good question, let us examine what Sullivan says he did.
Sullivan says that "the first and immense thing [that Jesus did] is that he existed at all."
That is certainly debatable. I personally don't think there is any well demonstrated evidence that even suggests that Jesus existed. But for the sake of argument, lets just assume that he did. How is Jesus existing important?
From Sullivan's book, which he quotes in the article:
This, it seems to me, is the true mystery of the incarnation, the notion that in Jesus, God became man. I believe this in the only way I can: that one man represents, for all time, God's decision to truly be with us....
In this nonfundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important then theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle.
The most important part of this quotation is not the conclusions that Sullivan draws from his assertion, but in the assertion itself. How do we know that in Jesus "God became man"? If so, how did this happen? What he draws from this significance can be debated, and I don't think his conclusions are intirely invalid, but the at the heart of these conclusions is the claim that in Jesus we have god as a man. How is it possible to know this is true?
Sullivan continues:
This is what Jesus told people: to treat God as an intimate father, to pray simply, to believe against so much evidence that good does indeed prevail against evil, to know that God is not indifferent to us, and to re-enact his last meal for ever as a way to remind ourselves of his love and experience his real presence. And this is what Jesus lived: a life full of love and friendship and self-giving, even to the point of non-violent submission to violence, as proof of God's love.
Sullivan seems to be confusing the argument, he is wrapped up in the conclusions he has drawn from the assertion of God and Jesus' divinity. I partially blame this on Harris, as he has a tendency to show his distrust of religion through examples of religion's bad things. Sullivan seems intent on showing Harris that his religion isn't the religion of fundamentalism. But that's not the issue. The issue is do we have good reason to think that these conclusions come from a solid foundation? Circularly, Sullivan's justification for believe in Jesus is ... believing in Jesus. The idea that Jesus was allegedly a good guy somehow equates to proof of "God's love".
And that phrase, "God's love" is entirely inconsistent with what Sullivan has previously said. So god is love, but yet we are supposed to revere his love? Love's love? What?! Are we now again talking about God as some sort of entity, or is this some abstraction of language I do not understand? Perhaps the "god is love" thing was more an analogy. Or maybe he just forgot what he wrote only a few paragraphs before this one.
He continues, kind of saying why he can believe these things:
I do not need the proof of miracles to believe this. The universe itself is a miracle to me. If there are aspects of it that science has not yet grasped but that believers have somehow glimpsed, then I am content to allow for the possibility of miracles. But I have not witnessed any but the normal ones: the miracle of the blossoms out of my widow at this time of year or the miracle that someone else actually loves me unconditionally, or the miracle of a newborn child. This is miracle enough for me.
Under what definition does Sullivan attribute a miracle? Is this a joke of some kind? How is normal, everday occurrences that happen billions of times a day in billions of different locations a miraculous proof of god's existence? Silliness aside, these "miracles" certainly don't point to any creator. This argument is on par with the argument from design. Science can certainly discover why these miracles occur. Evolution explains the blossoms outside of his window, evolution explains why we love each other. Evolution explains the miracle of a newborn child. Sullivan's use of "miracle" in this example is closer to poetry than justification for theism.
The universe is certainly a "miracle" to me as well, but it does not point to any sort of god at all. In fact, as Richard Dawkins likes to put it, if there is a god behind the slow evolution of the cosmos and nature he somehow saw fit to create life in such a way that a god would appear to be unnecessary.
Ah, but what of the resurrection. Does he now suggest that the resurrection is merely symbolic language made up by someone in the late first or early second century? Not on your life:
The resurrection? Yes. But I see it as no more and no less remarkable than the incarnation - and it is, in many ways, the only possible consequence of the incarnation. The Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles provide contradictory accounts of what the resurrection actually was. Jesus appeared in the guise of others, as a vision, as a fully physical entity, and in other ways that defy science and logic. I don't know how to understand it except as a mystery. But I do believe in the empty tomb as much as I believe in the cramped manger. They go together - marks of an appearance in human history as mysterious as the divine must always be to human minds.
Pure unadulterated frustration is the only way to express my response to this excerpt. Sullivan doesn't claim to know even what the resurrection was, and instead of coming to the conclusion that contradictory accounts of this event should discredit it he concludes the exact opposite: that it's all the more reason to believe in it's "mystery". Why do you believe in the "empty tomb" and the "cramped manger", Andrew? How do you come to believe these things? Because they were told to you by an authority?
Okay, we're done with that horrible justification of faith. Lets move on, shall we? Sullivan addresses Harris specific points that he laid out in his essay. Instead of asking you jump back and forth between mine and Harris' article I'll just post Harris' point before Sullivan's and then add my own analysis (I think I just realized this will be quite a long essay. Sorry)
Harris (emphasis mine):
Moderation v. fundamentalism: There appears to be no principled separation between religious moderation and religious fundamentalism other than a facility for (and an inclination to) doubt. But how much doubt is too much? Why not doubt the whole shebang, as I do? The pope seems to believe many things which you doubt. Do you have reason to believe that the pope is mistaken about the true doctrine of Christianity, or do you just not like the social consequences of some of his beliefs? Can you justify the intermediate position you've taken with respect to Catholicism in terms of truth and falsity (rather than consolation and its lack)? And if you disagree that the truth of an idea can be neatly separated from its consolations, what does the phrase "wishful thinking" mean to you?
Sullivan says he addressed it at the beginning of his essay, so lets go there:
I argued that because we may be programmed by evolution for faith, faith may be intrinsic to being human and therefore something we should engage rather than deny. You make the solid point that we are also programmed by evolution for rape. Does that make rape defensible? Of course not, even though, as you point out, rape is a very effective and very natural way to disseminate DNA. But my response would not be to say that the evolutionary impulse to inseminate should be resisted entirely. I'd argue that the sex rive should be channeled respectfully toward others, i.e. moderated. So rape cedes to consensual DNA dissemination. Similarly, the drive for faith needs to be channeled respectfully toward others, i.e. moderated. Fundamentalism cedes to toleration. Hence my insistence on maintaining the humility apropriate (sic) for such immense claims about the meaning of everything; and hence my support for a faith that is live-and-let-believe in its social manifestation. I think my project in this respect is far more feasible than yours. By attempting to abolish rather than moderate faith, I fear you deliver an intrinsic human impulse into the hands of those who most abuse it - the fundamentalists of all stripes.
What I take from this is not that if extremism is bad so must be the moderate form of that expression. Harris' question is not wether moderation is nicer than extremism, but under what justification do these things fall. This is the key point that I've brought up before in discussing why I feel that my refuse to be "moderate" in my atheism is justified.
The problem is not whether or not these things are extreme or moderate but if they are true. Sam asks Sullivan to demonstrate his moderate position as "true" rather than merely socially acceptable. Sullivan has completely ignored the point of the question and gone off to show that moderation is itself a good thing. I don't disagree but I don't agree at the same time. The more important question to ask is if these things are themselves true.
Taking the discussion outside of the umbrella of religion can illuminate better what I mean. Imagine that a person is standing in the middle of the street and sees a car approaching them. If they do not move, they car will hit this person. Further, lets assume that the driver is not really paying attention to the road and will not move out of the way.
Now, for a person to believe that they will not be hurt by the car hitting them is clearly a false and foolish idea, no matter if this belief is held extremely or moderately. The problem isn't how moderately or extremely this belief is held, but that it is a false belief.
If a person believes the truth in this matter, that the car will hurt them if it strikes them, that belief is clearly true and not harmful no matter how moderately or extremely. However you feel about the extremity of the situation doesn't matter, as long as you get out of the way of the car.
To continue on, Harris second point:
The inadequacies of the Bible: What is the intellectual justification for considering the Bible to be the inspired word of God, given how much bad stuff (like slavery) is in there, and how much good stuff (like all of science) isn't? Do you really think that no mere mortals could have written Mark, Matthew, John and Luke? Not even the combined talent of a first-century Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy? It seems to me that this textual claim really lies at the core of the matter: either the Bible is a book like any other great work of literature, or it's a magic book. Once one accepts it to be a magic book, I agree that a wide range of religious implications follow; but if one doesn't accept this claim, it seems to me that the basis for being a Christian (as a opposed to anything else) evaporates. Would it really surprise you if God told you that the Bible was a product of fallible, human minds? And if this wouldn't truly astound you (in the way that finding out that George Washington never existed presumably would), how can you claim to be so certain of the doctrine of Christianity?
Sullivan's response:
Is the Bible uniquely the word of God? Yes - but it was also first spoken and then written by human beings. I don't believe in its inerrancy or its literal truth. But I believe in the deepest truths of the Gospels, and the truth of the life and death of the man they describe. Has God spoken to us in other ways? Of course. But for me, the words of Jesus speak of God's love more truly than anything else I have ever come across. I'm still looking.
So ... yes but no? Sullivan apprently takes the bible as "divinely inspired" route. If we messed up the translation even a little bit, how does that impact our use of the knowledge currently contained in the bible? If things like slavery are contained in the bible but we reject them today, why can't the "good" things be equally rejected? Of what use is a mistranslated word of god?
Sullivan completely ignores Harris' point about "Ontological fancy footwork." Maybe he didn't understand it. On with Sam's next point:
The contingency of your own faith: As you said, if you'd been raised a Buddhist, you'd probably be a Buddhist. And yet, you also believe that Christianity is really true. This seems to entail that, by sheer accident of birth, you were raised and culturally conditioned to believe the one true faith. Do you really believe this? Doesn't it seem more likely that you just happen to subscribe to the religion into which you were born (as most people do) because of social pressure, emotional consolation, attachment to tradition, etc.?
Sullivan's response:
Contingency? An eternal truth has to enter human discourse at one time or another. It will become necessarily contingent as soon as it touches the human and becomes part of history. There is no other way. So faith's contingency is neither an argument for or against it."
So ... there is some truth to this religion stuff but we humans fuck it up? Well then, certainly Christianity is screwed up the message somewhere along the way. Why not reject it? This is not an argument against god existence, but it certainly poses problems for any one specific faith.
The next point Sam brings up:
The troublesome example of other religions: Don't you think Mormons and Muslims have similar stories to tell about feeling consoled in the presence of death, hearing voices, etc.? Can't both Mormons and Muslims use the same argument you have used about the cultural success of their faiths to vindicate their own truth claims? How is it that you reject their claims, and how is it that in rejecting them you don't find your own religious beliefs coming under pressure?"
Sullivan's response:
Other religions. I'm curious. And I find in many of them many of the themes of Jesus: the unimportance of wordliness, the oneness of God, the equal dignity of human beings, the impulse to charity. But I do find Christ's witness the final truth, which must mean that others fall short. But I do not see this as a reason to hate or condemn or even deny the alternatives, where they also see this deeper truth. Everything is true as long as it isn't taken to be anything more than it is. And I am in no position to judge the sincere choices of others in matters inherently beyond our knowledge.
So ... Sullivan's explination is that "everything is true." You have got to be kidding me. Mr. Sullivan, we are evaluating truth or falsity. Everything is not true. You must justify the differences that you say are true that aren't found in other religions and vice versa. This isn't a matter of taste, Mr. Sullivan.
Harris' next point:
The argument from cultural success: Apart from the fact that the argument from cultural success would vindicate any religion that has millions of subscribers, it's also just plain false. The success of Christianity (or any faith) is not an argument for its truth. While dialogue and consensus (and, therefore, cultural success) play a role in our knowledge gathering, we don't do epistemology by plebiscite. The majority of people really can be wrong-as are the majority of American Christians about the age of the universe and about the evolution of life on this planet."
Sullivan's response:
Cultural success? I agree that such success doesn't actually prove anything about a faith. But it is a sign that a truth has endured the test of time and is more than a sudden spasm of fashion. That the life of Jesus has altered human history in ways rarely equaled is indisputable. That's not dispositive, but it is something."
He's right, it is something. But it doesn't answer any of our questions. The success of an idea doesn't determine its truth or falsity. It must be evaluated and supported by evidence. There is no evidence that points to the god of Christianity existing.
Well ... that was fun, right?
In this video Dennett talks about evolution, religion, and The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren.
The latest from Sam Harris in his debate with Andrew Sullivan on beliefnet. I'm hard pressed to find much to disagree with Harris on.
Are you really surprised by the endurance of religion? What ideology is likely to be more durable than one that conforms, at every turn, to our powers of wishful thinking? Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe. The methodology isn't perfect, and the history of science is riddled with abject failures of scientific objectivity. But that is just the point-these have been failures of science, discovered and corrected by-what, religion? No, by good science.
I do not deny that there is something at the core of the religious experience that is worth understanding. I do not even deny that there is something there worthy of our devotion. But devotion to it does not entail false claims to knowledge, nor does it require that we indulge our cultural/familial/emotional biases in an unscientific way. The glass can get very clean-not sterile perhaps, not entirely without structure, not contingency-free, but cleaner than many people are ready to allow. One need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to experience the "ecstasies of Teresa" (or those of Rumi, for that matter). And those of us with the benefit of a 21st century education can be more parsimonious in drawing conclusions about the cosmos on the basis of such ecstasy. Indeed, I think we must be, lest our attachment to the language of our ancestors keep their ignorance alive in our own time.
My Groups
-
political Updated: 21 minutes ago
-
Freethinkers (host) Updated: 21 minutes ago
-
apple, inc. Updated: 9 hours ago
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
