From Joe.My.God, about numerous recent events.
REMINDER: When major national Christian groups with millions of followers call for boycotts, that is a righteous use of the free market in order to preserve morality, marriage, family, and the American way. But when gay folks call for a boycott, THAT is homofascist intimidation, intolerance, bullying, economic terrorism, a stifling of religious liberty, and an attempt to deny the freedom of speech. And don’t you forget it.
The Kalam Cosmological Argument is one of the traditional, philosophical, arguments for the existence of God. The idea is that everything must have a beginning; therefore the universe must have a beginning, therefore God. (Which those who use this argument naturally assume is the God of traditional western religion.)
This is the kind of argument, like so many similar arguments, that is persuasive only to those already inclined to accept its conclusion. There are of course several problems with this argument. (If it were really a tight philosophical argument, why would the world’s intellects not be convinced and this debate not be foreclosed?) Wikipedia has this post about the argument, with simple refutations and descriptions of more technical responses. For a detailed technical response by an actual physicist, see Sean Carroll: Does the Universe Need God?. And Carroll, who debated the Christian apologist William Lane Craig a couple months ago, specifically addressed this argument, as summarized in his post-debate reflections.
My own take is twofold.
First, the premise is assumed without empirical evidence. How does anyone know that everything that exists needs a cause? And, did the universe actually begin to exist at some point? Perhaps the universe is an exception; perhaps this assumption about cause is merely a psychological assumption by the minds of human beings. (There are in fact cosmological theories that take our universe as one of many, born out of previous universes via black holes, in an endless series. See Lee Smolin, and Stephen Hawking. Or, cf. Hawking, that space-time is a kind of infinite loop; the ‘big bang’ is an apparent beginning only in the way that a circle, or a globe, has a beginning.) Does a circle have a cause? If a circle does not have a beginning, does it therefore not exist by this premise?
There’s a YouTube video about this, which suggests that believing that something can exist without a cause is akin to magic. Well, if the answer to the universe existing is, um er, ‘God’, then why can God exist without a cause? The usual answer is that ‘God’ is outside human understanding or need for a cause, but this is begging the question. Why shouldn’t the universe itself have this state?
Later in the video: it uses one of the oldest, silliest, most easily discredited arguments about evolution and cosmology: that somehow the “second law of thermodynamics” discredits these ideas. Hello? The second law of thermodynamics is as much a scientific conclusion as is evolution, or cosmology. Get it? You can’t use science when it’s convenient for your side, and dismiss it when it’s not. (That is, maybe the second law of thermodynamics is false. That’s as plausible as evolution or cosmology being false.)
Third, the video claims that anything must have a beginning.
Again: Circle.
Second– Even if the video’s argument were valid, so what?
The video jumps from the dubious conclusion about the need for something to have caused the universe to the assumption that this cause must be the traditional idea of ‘God’ – as if the only option for this cause has to be the ‘God’ the arguer happens to believe in. Of course, anyone subscribing to any of the other thousands of religions around the world could use this chain of argument to justify their *own* beliefs.
Really, people of intelligence have been debating these issues for centuries, even millennia. If there were really an argument, or arguments, to ‘prove’ the existence of ‘god’, why would we still be debating this? Mathematics and science has generated arguments based on reasonable premises for millennia (see Cosmos), and the result is our high-technological civilization, where you can post invalidated arguments about the existence of ‘god’ on an internet that depends on a worldwide network of computers and satellites that is a result of centuries of advances in physics and cosmology. While religious apologists fall back on philosophical arguments from centuries past that have been discredited, again and again, by modern intellects. Because they always have an audience of relatively uneducated, credulous people, to support their positions. Is the intellectual capacity of human beings to be dismissed? To some, maybe. Perhaps happiness, in ignorance or delusion, is all that matters.
From a few days ago, this post by Andrew Sullivan, on his blog, about a recent discovery of a particularly weird animal sexuality.
The more we learn about nature, the more the notion that the universe reflects a cosmic version of human heterosexuality gets discredited. Gender can be fluid in some species; in others, females have the testosterone; in this case, females have dicks. And rather elegant ones at that. We now know what Victorian scientists discovered but hid: that same-sex behavior is also endemic in the animal kingdom, unusual, but widespread. We know that some humans are born with indeterminate gender, that others have a gender that belies their external sex organs, that others still have no problem with their gender but are emotionally and sexually attracted to their own.
The reason why this matters is that the vast apparatus of “natural law” still permeates a huge amount of our thinking about human sexuality and emotion.
In the case of the Catholic Church, a crude and outdated version of natural law is integral to arguments about the “objective disorder” of homosexuals; among many evangelicals, gender diversity is regarded as something that needs to be beaten (sometimes literally) out of a child; reparative therapy is still lamentably used to terrorize the psyches of those born with a different nature. But almost all of this is based on something that has been exposed definitively as untrue.
The fact of the matter is, for whatever (as yet not completely understood) reason, homosexuality is not uncommon among many animal species, and has been part of human societies forever. (There is also evidence of homosexual behavior among many animal species, so the peculiar argument that humans should limit their behavior to what is ‘natural’ among other animals fails on more than one ground.) The difference in human societies throughout history is the way they respond to this situation; whether they accept the variations among human sexuality and the resultant relationships, or whether, in the name of (subconsciously driven) species survival or religious rectitude, demonize them. It’s rather analogous to how parents regard their children; are children only worthy to the extent they perpetuate the species?
The faithful, who defer to ancient religious texts written by primitive folks who believed the world existed only as far as their eyes could see, are living in a fantasy world. And who either don’t understand, or simply reject, the real world.
Everyone’s posting about Easter today, so I’ll acknowledge two or three of those posts, that capture better than I have time to do myself why I find the whole Easter tradition fascinating as a cultural development, but implausible and uninteresting as a religious observance.
Jericho Brisance: Infographic: Taking Easter Seriously [or, do believers realize how inconsistent and contradictory the four gospel accounts are?]
CJ Werleman at Alternet: Celebrating Easter? Which Contradicting Biblical Account of Jesus’ Death and Resurrection Are You Going to Pick? [or, how do believers rationalize the discrepancies between the gospels, written decades after the event by writers who “hadn’t even met Jesus, and [..] hadn’t met the people who had allegedly met Jesus”?]
And this history lesson in a Facebook graphic [that is, that like Christmas, Easter is a Christian holiday piggybacked an on earlier, pagan holiday, in this case Ishtar, a goddess of fertility and sex. (Spring!)] Oops, never mind! Debunked, at least the part about Ishtar=Easter. Still, the spring/rebirth theme is pretty obvious.
Saturday night’s concert: LA Philharmonic, Disney Hall, Philip Glass’s “CIVIL warS”, as discussed in an earlier post. Fabulous concert, with noticeable and intriguing differences in dynamic balance and tempo in the performance compared to the two recordings I have, and with bonuses: two intermediate passages of additional music, 3 or 4 minutes each, one between the prologue and Act One, as the chorus comes on stage; the other between Acts Two and Three, as two the soloists slowly leave.
(It’s the sort of supplemental music that I gather composers are often asked to provide, just in case; depending the staging. If you suspect Glass composed music by the yard, well, so did Tchaikovsky.)
I was not bothered by the staging issues the reviewer found foolish; I thought the staging worked well enough for a piece with operatic elements but which is not an opera, but an orchestral work with the full orchestra in view, (and a chorus on stairs behind), and various soloists coming and going on and off stage.
Here’s the final act:
Posting Thursday evening:
Saturday evening we are going to a performance by the LA Philharmonic of Philip Glass’ 1984 music for ‘the CIVIL warS’. It’s one of my favorite Glass pieces — along with Symphony #5, the early operas Satyagraha and Akhnaten, and the three ‘qatsi film soundtracks — Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002). And the Kundun soundtrack. And the String Quartet #5. And La Belle et la Bete. And maybe a few others — The Hours soundtrack now springs to mind. There are hundreds of compositions and nearly as many recordings of Philip Glass music, and many of them do seem repetitive and too similar to other compositions, but a small dozen or two stand out as brilliant pieces that will withstand the tests of time.
The Civil Wars music by Glass has an interesting history; it was composed for a grand concert to be performed at the 1984 Olympics, in Los Angeles, staged by Robert Wilson, but funding fell through and it was never staged as intended. (A daylong piece by various composers; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Civil_Wars:_A_Tree_Is_Best_Measured_When_It_Is_Down.) The then LA Phil performed it a year or two later, and in my Philip Glass zeal (I had discovered his LP Glassworks 2 years earlier, and had heard “Einstein on the Beach” on KPFK at some point), I tape recorded the concert off the radio, and listened to that recording on a cassette for years and years until the first CD recording came out, on Nonesuch, in 1999.
An anecdote I’ve always remembered is that members of the then LA Philharmonic, especially the string players, in 1984 or so, so objected to the perceived simplistic repetitiveness of Glass’ music, that they, the string players, deliberately turned their pages very noisily during that concert I recorded off the radio.
Times have changed, somewhat. While Glass symphonies or operas are hardly a staple of professional orchestras or opera companies, his music is in fact alive and well, as evidenced by this second or third ‘Minimalist Jukebox’ series of concerts being staged this month by the LA Philharmonic.
(On the other hand, looking at the complete list of Glass compositionns on Wikipedia, it’s still remarkable how many of these pieces, especially the operas, have never been recorded. Two operas based on Doris Lessing novels?? No recordings; I’ve never heard them. The recent opera about Walt Disney? NY Times coverage, but no recording, yet.)
And, listening to this piece again right now — yes, the strings play these repetitive arpeggios. But the vocal lines above them are soaring, lyrical, and gorgeous. This is possibly the most distinctive trait of Glass’ music. It’s a magnificent and moving work of music.
The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
There’s *another* great science show running [in addition to “Cosmos”], “Your Inner Fish”, based on the book by Neil Shubin, which explores the physiological resemblances among animals, from fishies to humans, that are of course one of the many lines of evidence that support biological evolution. Shubin’s story is especially interesting since he not only *predicted* that a certain type of fossil would be found, and where it would be found, but that fossil, dubbed Tiktaalik by the local Inuits, is one of the key ‘missing links’ of all time — the amphibian with legs that crawled up out of the sea.
Chris Mooney at Slate has a nice write-up about the show, with obligatory notice of reactions of creationists, who simply shrug and dismiss any evidence that doesn’t conform to biblical worldviews.
(Episodes are available online: Your Inner Fish.)
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There seem to be a handful of articles every week about science and religion and how the right-wing of American culture is trying to undercut scientific understanding that threatens religious worldviews. Am I just more sensitive to these lately, given the development of my thematic interests in the past year, or do these articles signify a true cultural shift that reflects the fracturing of American culture into echo-chamber tribes?
In any case, here is Andrew O’Hehir at Salon on America: Stupidly stuck between religion and science.
This is an overview of many current issues, worth reading; here is a passage the struck me:
William Jennings Bryan, although revered as a forefather by today’s creationists, would have had nothing in common with them politically and very little theologically. (Bryan would have told you that the Bible was “true,” but he didn’t mean that God created the universe in six literal 24-hour days.) Islamic fundamentalism, the particular bugaboo of Dawkins and Harris, is more recent still, a metaphysical uprising against late modernism and the global force of Western consumer culture.
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Next, this very reasonable article at Salon about how science isn’t a matter of “authority” of one or any number of scientists; it’s about what the evidence actually says. With a particular target about those who misrepresent such evidence.
Fox News hates science: How the media misrepresents “authority”
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And finally for today, another book excerpt at Salon, Stop twisting the Bible: There is no message against same-sex marriage
Which Salon subtitles: “Moses and Paul are being misinterpreted: They were against gang rape and pederasty, not loving relationships”.
A subject visited by many writers, among them John Corvino. But there are so many who don’t want to hear it. Or, to take an entirely different angle — how generations throughout history pick and choose and interpret those passages of holy books that conform to their ways of life, or conform to their ideas of the ‘others’ they want to condemn. It’s a human tradition.
Several interesting links today to articles I’ve not yet had a chance to read, but I’ll defer those to note this review in Entertainment Weekly of a book called Struck by Genius by Jason Padgett (and Maureen Seaberg… probably the actual author); subtitled, “How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel”.
There are numerous cases in medical history of how brain injuries – via concussions, or objects thrust into the skull – change a person’s personality utterly, sometimes causing them to lose critical skills. This book, about which I’ve only read this review, is about an opposite case: a man who, assaulted in a bar fight and suffering a concussion, became a mathematical prodigy.
This strikes a chord as yet another example of how the mind is inextricably bound with the brain, or more correctly, to acknowledge that they are one and the same. There is no numinous ‘mind’ or ‘soul’ that is distinct from the functioning of the brain, as far as decades of neuroscience have been able to determine. (I have an unread book on my shelf called We Are Our Brains.) If traumatic examples like this one aren’t sufficient evidence of this equivalence, you’d think everyday experiences in which alcohol, caffeine, or other drugs change brain chemistry and thus influence the personality and the way one’s ‘mind’ interacts with the world would be obvious evidence as well.
(The example in this book also implicates the philosophical question of whether mathematics is an inherent truth about the world, or a creation of the human brain. The subject of this book “describes hours spent eagerly conversing with customers about the way he understands pi or how fractals work.” A change in the functioning of his brain changed the way he understood these ideas.)
Despite which, the mind/brain distinction, ever since clarified by Descartes, persists in common culture, and religious doctrine. In science fiction, a common theme for decades (through the 1960s, at least) was about telepathy, premonitions, and other forms of ESP (‘extra-sensory perception’) – a theme I have the impression has much faded since then, except perhaps in media SF, as the evidence for the reality of such phenomena has conspicuously failed to materialize and their existence has become more a matter of wish-fulfillment.
I’ve long had a notion – which I may have picked up from reading somewhere, or which may be an original thought – that a sign of a truly advanced intelligence (e.g. some non-human, independently evolved, intelligence) would be the extent to which mathematical truths were obvious. Humans, even the mathematicians, need to construct proofs of the Pythagorean theorem, for example; would a relatively superior intelligence see this as trivially true, the way we realize that two non-parallel lines in the same plane can intersect at only a single point? Not to mention the vast realms of higher mathematics, number theory, group theory, analytical analysis, and so many other fields for which humans need to carefully construct elaborate, logically rigorous proofs, an ultimate example of which might be the enormously detailed proof by Andrew Wiles of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Would all of that be obvious to a vaster intelligence than ours?
Have now heard it often enough on KCRW‘s Morning Becomes Eclectic program that it’s embedded itself in my mind.
I’ve noted here and on Facebook that science fiction generally aligns with progressive values; science fiction is typically about speculating how things might be different, celebrating discoveries of what is new and celebrating conceptual breakthroughs of understanding, rather than reflexively rejecting anything new and different as a threat to traditional, conservative values. But science fiction is not a monolithic subculture any more than any other subculture is. A couple examples turned up today.
Here is an essay in today’s Guardian by regular reviewer Damien Walter, Science fiction needs to reflect that the future is queer, which recalls adventurous 1960’s and ’70’s work by Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and others about variants in heteronormative human sexuality [which when I read these books, back then, greatly expanded my understanding of the subject], and then cites reactionary responses to a recent essay on the subject:
When author and historian Alex Dally Macfarlane made a call earlier this year for a vision of post-binary gender in SF, her intelligent argument was met with predictably intractable ignorance from conservative sci-fi fans. For writers and fans like Larry Correia, whose virulent attack on MacFarlane was excellently dissected by Jim C Hines, sex is a biological imperative and the idea of gender as a social construct is a damn liberal lie! But Correia boils it down to a much simpler argument. However accurate a queer future might be, SF authors must continue to pander to the bigotry of conservative readers if they want to be “commercial”.
I cite this only as an example of the diversity of thought among science fiction writers and thinkers, and make no attempt to address that particular issue, except to note I am probably (since I haven’t read all the arguments) not on Correia’s side.
Coincidentally on two counts –- since I’ve started rereading some early Arthur C. Clarke, as I mentioned on Facebook, and since it reflects a similar divide in the SF field, though along completely different lines, no wait, three counts, since it’s also in the Guardian –- is a vintage book review column reposted at the Guardian site a couple days ago, a column from 1965, in which J.G. Ballard dismisses a volume of Clarke reprints thusly:
An Arthur C Clarke Omnibus (Sidgwick and Jackson, 30s) contains two novels, “Childhood’s End” and “Prelude to Space,” and a short-story collection, “Expedition to Earth.” Reprinted after a ten-year lapse, they illustrate the failure of traditional science fiction. Wholly concerned with an outer space seen in terms of the crudest extrapolations, these stories are dated not only by their superficial scientific gimmickry, but by the trivial dialogue and characterisation. The difference between the old and new science fiction is the point where invention ends and imagination begins.
The issues here are also vast and I won’t try to address them right now. Suffice to say for the moment there are various standards for what constitutes success or failure in any kind of artistic field, especially literature, especially science fiction.
