Religion and Science, Natural or Not

Posted on Tuesday 25 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Connor Wood summarizes the thesis of Robert McCauley’s book Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not.

McCauley believes that maturationally natural systems get at the core difference between science and religion – religion relies on them, while science shuns them. Since our minds find it easier to see the world in terms of persons and goals, religions often construe the world as being goal-oriented and animate. Meanwhile, science challenges our basic, gut-level assumptions by insisting that the world is not filled with personality and agency, that nature is not goal-oriented. Because this mechanistic view of nature goes against our basic cognitive predispositions, it takes effort to achieve it. Science, in other words, is hard. And religion is just what comes naturally.

Wood counters with ideas from Tanya Luhrmann that religion isn’t necessarily so easy and intuitive; “that modern American evangelical Christians work very, very hard to develop their spiritual senses – that prayer is work, in other words.”

McCauley is almost certainly right that the human brain finds it easier to think in terms of personality and agency than in terms of mechanical causation. We’re prone to making predictable cognitive errors – something Francis Bacon already pointed out in the 17th century – and one of them is to see creatures where none exist. But it’s not obvious that this tendency toward cognitive error explains everything about religion, or even most of it. Despite the fact that religiosity is apparently correlated with agential (that is, social) thinking, and that people with social-cognitive deficits, such as those on the autism spectrum, tend to be less religious than average, religion clearly does require significant work. After all, McCauley’s argument isn’t that religion is a social thing and science isn’t (although that would be an interesting book); it’s that religion rides our basic cognitive predispositions, whereas science counters them. If it takes serious effort to learn how to be religious, how to coax the brain into producing spiritual experiences, then McCauley’s argument may need some rethinking of its own.

Wood seems to think that McCauley’s thesis is more or less on target, though perhaps needing a more nuanced take on faith. I have McCauley’s book and will get to it eventually.

Posted in Atheism, Religion | Comments Off on Religion and Science, Natural or Not

Sam Harris’ Forthcoming Waking Up

Posted on Tuesday 25 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Looking forward to Sam Harris’ next book, especially since I’m skeptical of what it seems to be about.

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-path-between-pseudo-spirituality-and-pseudo-science

I am often asked what will replace organized religion. The answer, I believe, is nothing and everything. Nothing need replace its ludicrous and divisive doctrines — such as the idea that Jesus will return to earth and hurl unbelievers into a lake of fire, or that death in defense of Islam is the highest good. These are terrifying and debasing fictions. But what about love, compassion, moral goodness, and self-transcendence? Many people still imagine that religion is the true repository of these virtues. To change this, we must begin to think about the full range of human experience in a way that is as free of dogma, cultural prejudice, and wishful thinking as the best science already is. That is the subject of my next book, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion.

Which is,

In Waking Up, I do my best show that a certain form of spirituality is integral to understanding the nature of our minds. (For those of you who recoil at every use of the term “spirituality,” I recommend that you read a previous post.)

My goal in Waking Up is to help readers see the nature of their own minds in a new light. The book is by turns a seeker’s memoir, an introduction to the brain, a manual of contemplative instruction, and a philosophical unraveling of what most people consider to be the center of their inner lives: the feeling of self we call “I.” It is also my most personal book to date.

Posted in Atheism, Spirituality | Comments Off on Sam Harris’ Forthcoming Waking Up

Lucius Shepard, RIP, and Readerly Notice

Posted on Sunday 23 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

I did not know Lucius Shepard, beyond seeing him across the room (at the bar) at some con, perhaps the Portland Westercon in 2001, looking back at my schedule. But as a reader of his, I have the following observation. Like many another writer in the sf/f field, he gained huge attention in the first decade or so of his career, and then tended to fade into being taken for granted in terms of major awards nominations, and perhaps best-of-the-year anthology inclusions, even though he continued doing good and great work for his entire life (based on the occasional later works of his that I read). There are numerous precedents for this pattern (I’m thinking of names I could mention but perhaps I won’t), and it’s a pattern that’s understandable in terms of readers more interested in celebrating hot new talent rather than rewarding continued good work from veterans. I’ve read many tributes here on Fb that mention his early two novels and his couple early collections – but really, he did lots more great work after that. And it’s an unfortunate pattern of many writer careers that sustained work often goes unnoticed, and unrecognized. Alas, Shepard did not live long enough for any of the various Grand Master or Life Achievement awards.

–Captured from a Facebook post last Thursday evening. It got some comments from Gardner Dozois and Terry Bisson, plus a private email from a big name in the field who agreed with my point about the focus on newer writers but felt it untoward to say on Facebook.

There’s more to be said along these lines. As a reader, I discovered certain writers who opened up worlds to me early on, in my early teens, and whom I stuck to for years as I read through their works. I discovered other writers, at first by random chance, picking up their books off newsstands or in bookstores, mostly influenced by cover art and also by publisher brand [I was big on Bantam Pathfinder and anything Ballantine, in those late ’60s]. Some of them were turkeys, others opened worlds I had not seen in my earliest passions for Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke. (In particular, late ’60s and early ’70s Silverberg revealed more to me about life than what I’d gotten from those writers.) And once I became aware, originally through P. Schuyler Miller’s columns in Analog, of the various awards, and then through awards news in Locus, which I first discovered as a mimeographed stapled fanzine at A Change of Hobbit bookstore back when it was a one-room shop above a laundry-mat, a few blocks south of UCLA, where I went to college — then I became a proactive reader, seeking out writers I’d not already discovered.

Years and decades pass. My point is that any adventurous reader, I would think, checks out new writers all the time, and at some point, maybe after one book or a couple, decides to abandon this or that writer, no matter how popular or acclaimed, in order to focus one’s time on the writers that continue to reward attention. There is only so much time in anyone’s life.

My notion in my original post about readers always on the search for the next new thing is like that to some extent. I think literary culture does tend to take for granted many reliable, productive writers, who continue to produce good work even though they may never develop passionate fan bases that launch their visiblity into Hollywood notice. It’s up to dedicated readers, and literary reviews ‘zines like (ahem) Locus and The New York Review of SF and others, who have reviewers who do keep up with such writers, to keep them in the attention of readers.

Not sure I’ve wrapped up this line of thought, but that’s all the time I have tonight.

Posted in Book Notes, science fiction | Comments Off on Lucius Shepard, RIP, and Readerly Notice

The Cozy Cosmos vs. Growing Up

Posted on Friday 21 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Some religious folks don’t like Cosmos because they prefer a cozy universe with human beings at the very center: nice article by Adam Lee about Why Small-Minded Religious Fundamentalists Are Threatened by Wonders of Universe.

For the vast majority of our history as a species, we were wanderers, small hunter-gatherer bands. Civilization is a recent innovation, arising within the last few thousand years, and science is more recent still, appearing only in the last few hundred. But in just those few short centuries, we’ve made dramatic strides, from wooden sailing ships to space shuttles, bloodletting to bionic limbs, quill pens to the Internet. We’ve drawn back the curtain on ancient mythologies and glimpsed the true immensity of time and space. Compared to that vastness, we’re unimaginably small and insignificant; yet we possess an intelligence and a power of understanding that, as far as we still know, is unique among all the countless worlds. As Carl Sagan said, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

However, not everyone accepts this as a positive development. There have always been those who prefer a small, comprehensible cosmos, with human beings placed firmly at the center. The religious belief systems that posit such a universe were our first, fumbling attempts to explain the origin of the world, and they rarely share power gladly. Those who clash against conventional wisdom, who dare to suggest that the cosmos holds wonders undreamed of in conventional mythology, have always found themselves in grave peril from the gatekeepers of dogma who presume to dictate the thoughts human beings should be permitted to think.

Lee goes on to cite some religiously-motivated folks who actually still defend the execution of Bruno, the persecution of Galileo, and the Spanish Inquisition. The article continues with the all too familiar contemporary litany of science-denial that dismisses climate change, evolution, and vaccination as targets of “regressive, superstitious, authoritarian world views both religious and political”.

I suppose the same kind of worldview uncomfortable with the immensity of the universe would also wonder why the universe should be any older than traditional recorded human history – a few thousand years. I imagine that’s partly why Creationism makes sense for many people. What would be the point of a universe older than modern humans, if the entire purpose of the universe is to host humanity? For that matter, why shouldn’t the universe be a flat immovable tablet under a dome with tracks for the sun and moon to go around and around, as the ancient mythologies supposed? The rejection of science is because the scientific evidence that the universe is much larger and older than those ancient notions leads to the implication that, hey, maybe the universe *isn’t* in existence merely to host one race of beings on one tiny planet in a vast cosmos full of billions of galaxies… And that discomforts many people.

The steadily increasing understanding of humanity’s place in the cosmos is analogous to a child discovering the world as it grows up. As a child your whole world is at first only your parents and your immediate surroundings. Then you become aware of other family members, if you have siblings. Eventually you meet outsiders, kids whom you recognize as somewhat like yourself, adults somewhat like your parents, but somehow strange and different. Your worldview expands. You meet more and more of these strange others, you realize how many there are, even if part of your extended family or community, but how different their lives and concerns are compared to yours. You realize that the entire world doesn’t revolve entirely around you! As your awareness of other places and other people expands, you come to realize that there are many, many other people in the world whom you will never meet, who know nothing about you, who have lives of their own, often with values completely contrary to those of your family and community. That’s part of growing up, maturing: the realization that you are not sitting at the center of the universe, that your family or hometown or home state or country isn’t necessarily the most correct or special place in the whole world (or universe!) just because that’s where you happen to have grown up. In a sense, the creationists and cosmos-deniers who point to some ancient holy book and say end-of-story, haven’t realized this; they cling to a universe in which humanity is at the center of everything. The evidence suggests otherwise. In a cosmic sense, they have not grown up. Or even realized that it’s possible to do so.

[last para revised 22mar14 5pm]

Posted in Cosmology, Religion, Science | Comments Off on The Cozy Cosmos vs. Growing Up

Sophisticated Theology, Proofs of God, Humanism, Religious Persecution, Morality

Posted on Thursday 20 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

I got the book! You know, the one with the best arguments for God

Jerry Coyne lists books to read before criticizing atheism (just as theists keep issuing books about the ‘best’ arguments for god which they insists atheists must read before drawing any conclusions). Coyne, as I’ve mentioned before, actually reads books by those whom he slightly mocks as “sophisticated theologiansTM” and responds in detail in occasional posts on his blog.

In contrast, most religious people never concern themselves with such sophisticated arguments.

An Awful List of ’7 Things That Prove God Is Real’

People impressed by these arguments are very easily impressed.

Here are four great videos by Stephen Fry about Humanism, and how we know what’s true:

https://humanism.org.uk/thatshumanism/

And here’s a nice quote about what religious persecution really means:

America’s Right-Wing Has Gone Gay Crazy

Religious persecution is the maltreatment of an individual or group because of their religious beliefs. The Holocaust is one example. Shia versus Sunni violence in Iraq is another. Despite what Fox News, the Christian Right and the Republican Party will have you believe, religious persecution is not government refusing to grant Christians the ability to persecute others.

And finally for tonight, Jerry Coyne on that survey about whether people need to believe in ‘God’ to be moral.

Must you be religious to be moral?: A worldwide survey, and its lesson

[T]he primary reason for abject child poverty in … Southern states is that more than a third of children have parents who lack secure employment, decent wages and healthcare. But thanks to religion, these poor saps vote for the party that rejects Medicaid expansion, opposes early education expansion, legislates larger cuts to education, and slashes food stamps to make room for oil and agriculture subsidies on top of tax cuts and loopholes for corporations and the wealthy. Essentially, the Republican Party has convinced tens of millions of Southerners that a vote for a public display of the Ten Commandments is more important to a Christians’ needs than a vote against cuts in education spending, food stamp reductions, the elimination of school lunches and the abolition of healthcare programs.

Posted in Atheism, Culture, Religion, Thinking | Comments Off on Sophisticated Theology, Proofs of God, Humanism, Religious Persecution, Morality

Same-sex marriage, Context, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Posted on Tuesday 18 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Some comments tonight about gay marriage, prompted, as most of my posts are, by online articles and debates. For the past couple of weeks there have been back and forth articles on Slate, The Atlantic, and the New York Times, between William Saletan, Nathaniel Frank, Mark Joseph Stern, and Ross Douthat (with commentary by Andrew Sullivan at his blog), about whether one can disapprove of gay marriage without being ‘homophobic’, and in what way same-sex marriage is analogous or not to interracial marriage. (It’s a sign of the times that only extreme right-wing websites are still posting tracts against the idea of same-sex marriage as a sign of western civilization’s imminent collapse, or an imminent cause of God’s wrath. See Right Wing Watch for almost daily links to such sites and tracts.)

I don’t have anything to contribute to this debate, necessarily, except context: as a gay man in my ‘50s, I’ve lived my entire life with the idea that ‘marriage’ is an institution for conventional heterosexual people, all about raising children and maintaining lines of inheritance, and I’ve been comfortable for my entire life not being conventional (in many ways). Even having been now in a long-term [gay] relationship for nearly 13 years. My partner and I registered for a California domestic partnership in December 2012, but frankly we did so for pragmatic reasons – I was laid off from my job, with health insurance only for a few months of severance, and my partner’s company being among the many with progressive benefit policies, he was able to enroll me in his company’s health plan as a domestic partner. Even so, I’m sure he deeply appreciated the implicit commitment that a domestic partnership indicated. Yet I doubt we will ever get formally ‘married’, mainly for personal reasons involving his relationship with his family in China. (Though it will be interesting if California follows Washington State’s plan to automatically convert all domestic partnerships into legal marriages. We could find ourselves married without having planned to do so!)

And, keying to the blog’s ultimate theme… I grew up reading science fiction novels by Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany and others, many of which were about unconventional family and sexual relationships. Nothing shocks me. –Except perhaps for the pace at which the idea of same-sex marriage has advanced in many countries worldwide, even in the religion-besotted United States of America. It was unthinkable even 20 years ago. Offhand I would attribute the advance of this idea to the interconnection of worldly ideas through the internet. It is becoming more and more difficult for ideologically rigid groups to shield themselves from the outside world of other ideas.

Anyway – tonight’s post is inspired by the latest round of this online debate about same-sex marriage, from William Saletan in Slate: The Arc of History.

Saletan quotes an earlier installment of the debate by Nathaniel Frank:

Moral positions evolve as new information and possibilities become available. And for all the incessant moralizing of the right wing over the last 50 years, the sin of current opponents of gay marriage is an unwillingness to open their minds to change. There comes a time when there’s only one morally correct answer, and the space for having the wrong answer has dried up. I’d argue that time has come.

Saletan responds,

This is a beautiful paragraph. I agree with most of it, right up to the point where Frank says opponents of gay marriage haven’t changed. In fact, they’ve changed enormously. On every question, from sodomy laws to job discrimination to marriage, antigay politicians and activists have lost public support. The fact they’re now fighting over same-sex marriage, an idea that was once politically absurd, underscores their retreat. People who would have equated homosexuality with pedophilia 50 years ago have come to accept domestic partnerships or civil unions. Too many gay people have come out. The myths and fears have lost too much credibility. The culture is changing.

“Moral positions evolve as new information and possibilities become available.” This is the essence of what I think of as progress: the expansion of possibilities. Gay marriage provides an opportunity for “the pursuit of happiness” for many people who before never had that option – some 5% of the population, given current estimates. With no negative consequences except for the bruised presumptions of religious folks offended that their standards for living are not writ into law to be enforced upon everyone.

This post provides occasion to link and quote to something I bookmarked many months ago – a year and a half ago, I see. It is a comment to a post by Dan Savage about the gay marriage issue. The anonymous commentator said this:

As soon as marriage stopped being about the inheritance of property, the production of children and the perpetuation of the legalized subjugation of women, and started to be about two equals coming together out of love and attraction, that’s when the “slippery slope” to marriage equality began. And since this all happened when gays were still in the closet, it is we straights who did it. Marriage became about emotions, and once that happened, you can no longer say your emotions are superior to someone else’s and that they can’t have the same rights and privileges as you do.

Needless to say, anyone who thinks history or religion has always implicitly endorsed the one man one woman ‘ideal’ of marriage hasn’t read history, or even the Bible.

Posted in Culture, Personal history, The Gays | Comments Off on Same-sex marriage, Context, and the Pursuit of Happiness

S. T. Joshi Work Habits; The Only Common-Sense Position

Posted on Monday 17 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Thinking about this topic of work habits lately, and so keyed on this passage, from this New York Times profile of S.T. Joshi, H.P. Lovecraft scholar and atheist/agnostic writer.

Mr. Joshi does not teach, and he rarely lectures. For money, he writes. He keeps to a rigorous schedule, working every day from about 9 to 5, scheduling periodic breaks for refreshment. “I am sort of a tea addict,” he said. “I structure my day by cups of tea. If you don’t enforce that kind of discipline as a freelancer, you won’t get anything done.”

The article also has this passage, after mentioning academic ‘amateurs’ like Christopher Hitchins, Sam Harris, and James Randi and the illusionists Penn and Teller:

Perhaps because many academic philosophers take atheism to be a given, the only common-sense position, it is left to these quirky, freelance amateurs, with their large cabinets of obsessions, to make the public case against God.

Posted in Atheism | Comments Off on S. T. Joshi Work Habits; The Only Common-Sense Position

Changing My Mind

Posted on Monday 17 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Here is something I’ve changed my mind about, recently, based on the evidence.

I used to think you could appeal to the rationality in any person, present evidence and establish a chain of reasoning, and cause a person to change their mind about something. This apparently is not true. (I’ve posted a couple other items on this theme recently.)

Salon: From creationism to ESP: Why believers ignore science.

This is a review of a book by Will Storr called The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science, in which the author, as he interviews various adherents of creationism, homeopathy, Holocaust denial, and so on, finding them immune to evidence and reason, increasingly finds himself doubting his own convictions; despite feeling firm in his intellectual convictions, he also knows that he is bound to be wrong about some of them. How to resolve this? Interesting essay.

(My answer: By not taking positions on topics one has not studied. [See passage from Sam Harris (scroll down) that I linked this past week.] And in areas one does have familiarity with the subject matter, by being aware of the brain’s psychological biases, and applying scientific reasoning. And being prepared to change one’s mind.)

The same theme is invoked by Peter Boghossian in his new book. He says the first thing to do in trying to persuade someone out of their rote faith is to forget about presenting evidence. It’s more about challenging a believer to question the basis for their faith. More on this when I finish reading his book.

Posted in Religion, Science | Comments Off on Changing My Mind

Evolutionary Politics

Posted on Monday 17 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Fascinating. Via Andrew Sullivan’s summary at

Political Biology

Chris Mooney looks at a book by Avi Tuschman about evolutionary accounts of politics—

Conservatives, he suggests in one of three interrelated evolutionary accounts of the origins of politics, are a modern reflection of an evolutionary impulse that leads some of us to seek to control sexual reproduction and keep it within a relatively homogenous group. This naturally makes today’s conservatives more tribal and in-group oriented; if tribalism does anything, it makes it clear who you are and aren’t supposed to mate with.

Tuschman’s liberals, in contrast, are a modern reflection of an evolutionary impulse to take risks, and thereby pull in more genetic diversity through outbreeding. This naturally makes today’s liberals more exploratory and cosmopolitan, just as the personality tests always suggest. Ultimately, Tuschman bluntly writes, it all comes down to “different attitudes toward the transmission of DNA.” And if you want to set these two groups at absolute war with one another, all you need is something like the 1960s.

While a review of the same book by Arnold Kling says Tuschman is engaged in confirmation bias:

Overall, the pattern is that for Tuschman, every evil of conservatives is essential, by which I mean that it follows directly from the conservative point of view. On the other hand, every evil of the left is accidental, meaning that it occurs in spite of what leftists believe.

Tuschman’s account does sound very similar to other such analyses.

Posted in Culture, Religion | Comments Off on Evolutionary Politics

Big Bang Evidence

Posted on Monday 17 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Very significant new evidence today of the so-called ‘inflation’ of the universe in the very tiny moments after the beginning.

Phil Plait has a good overview of today’s announcement about direct evidence for inflation in the very early universe, just after the Big Bang.

Cosmic News: Astronomers Find the Twisted Fingerprints of Inflation in the Background Glow of the Universe

It’s all pretty abstruse, he admits. Yet…

But what does this meant to you? Well, that’s up to you, of course. Most of us can live our daily lives without worrying overly much about gravitational waves, subatomic particles, or what the Universe was like in the tiniest sliver of the first moment of its existence.

But think about that: We can understand what the Universe was like in the tiniest sliver of the first moment of its existence! These aren’t wild guesses, or just-so stories, or fanciful myths. This work is the result of an intense amount of research, the application of math, science, physics, and technology over hundreds of years, the painstaking acquisition of knowledge that must withstand the fires of scientific scrutiny and skepticism to survive. And so far, they have.

Posted in Physics, Science | Comments Off on Big Bang Evidence