God and Morality

Posted on Monday 17 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

The US is an outlier among nations whose peoples believe that belief in God is essential to morality.

http://www.alternet.org/belief/no-you-dont-need-god-be-good-person

The trend across the world is mirrored within the US:

Not coincidentally, led again by Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas, nine of the top 10 poorest states are also found in the South, while northern and pacific states such as Wisconsin, Washington, California, New York, New Hampshire, and Vermont are among the least religious and the most economically prosperous.

As I’ve commented before, the idea that you need God or the Bible to be moral does not withstand a simple reality-check — there are vast areas of the world full of people who do not subscribe the Christianity and the Bible, and are they immoral? Are their societies rank with the kind of chaos that the faithful think is the result of not being religious? …No they are not.

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Truth-Claims?

Posted on Monday 17 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Jerry Coyne links to Sam Harris’ characterization of Christianity, in a long exchange with Nature science writer Philip Ball.

There are more polite versions of this, but for anyone who did not grow up with this narrative and is an outsider to Christianity’s central story, this is a good take on why it seems so outlandish.

In its most generic and well-subscribed form, Christianity amounts to the following claims: Jesus Christ, a carpenter by trade, was born of a virgin, ritually murdered as a scapegoat for the collective sins of his species, and then resurrected from death after an interval of three days. He promptly ascended, bodily, to “heaven” — where, for two millennia, he has eavesdropped upon (and, on occasion, even answered) the simultaneous prayers of billions of beleaguered human beings. Not content to maintain this numinous arrangement indefinitely, this invisible carpenter will one day return to earth to judge humanity for its sexual indiscretions and sceptical doubts, at which time he will grant immortality to anyone who has had the good fortune to be convinced, on Mother’s knee, that this baffling litany of miracles is the most important series of truth-claims ever revealed about the cosmos. Every other member of our species, past and present, from Cleopatra to Einstein, no matter what his or her terrestrial accomplishments, will (probably) be consigned to a fiery hell for all eternity.

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Political parties, religion, and individualism

Posted on Friday 14 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Connor Wood at Science on Religion writes about current social and political trends and where libertarians fall in the republican-democratic spectrum, and how both of those parties may be splitting into factions.

Big changes are coming to politics in America. Here’s why

And which of these factions finds religion the most appealing.

A communitarian theory of religion explains this uncomfortable dynamic: less-privileged groups are often more religious because religion is the tool that creates in-person communities most efficiently, with minimum cognitive overhead –- allowing people without a lot of free time or extra energy on their hands to focus most on what matters in life. It does so by using tools like ritual, evocative symbols, and established traditions to ensure that everyone fulfills their obligations to the collective and to each other.

…

This is why, as I’ve written before, it takes tremendous subsidies coming from such large-scale systems to make individualism – of either the supposedly conservative, libertarian kind or the liberal variety — tenable. Individualism, which both liberals and libertarians value so highly, does not exist outside wealthy democracies. Even within such democracies, it is usually limited to those groups with most access to education and economic resources. And because of this, many of the traditionalists and social conservatives who reject individualism do so, in part, because individualism would be an utterly disastrous bet for themselves and their families.

With a link to moralfoundations.org and its outline of the five or six foundations of moralities. And YourMorals.org, where you can take quizzes and contribute to research.

Wood explores relationships between religion and societal status — that’s his thesis, apparently, in grad school — and they correspond with other commentaries I’ve read that associate atheism — a rational, science-based worldview that rejects not just one faith tradition but all of them — with the relative privilege and luxury of advanced societies, and in large cities, where community cohesiveness is not a priority. Is this entirely true, I wonder? It seems to be true for many European countries, especially the northern ones, where religious faith is low and standards of living on various scales are very high. The US, and China, seems to be the outliers in this trend.

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A Fellow Heir of Carl Sagan

Posted on Thursday 13 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Via Friendly Atheist, this post of a Tale of a lapsed Christian who grew up in a household that mocked Carl Sagan when the first Cosmos series was aired.

In my childhood home, Carl Sagan was a fundamentalist caricature of science. He was a figure of scorn and mockery, conjured in conversation only when one needed a large and easy target for pillorying evolution. … As the product of a mostly terrific private school education, I never had to worry about encountering something like Sagan’s “Cosmos” in my school science classes. A literal reading of the book of Genesis, including a six-day creation, 6,000-year-old Earth, and a historic Noah and Tower of Babel, constituted our learning of cosmic and human origins. Evolution was a dreadful ploy spat up from the pit of hell, with which the world’s scientists were in complete collusion.

It was reading Sagan’s novel Contact in later years that triggered his uncertainty that his faith provided all the answers.

But the questions festered, continuing to grow and feeding off my neglect, until they were too large to ignore. I could not be intellectually honest and continue to ignore them. They demanded a verdict.

I did not abandon my faith because I was hurt or angry or disillusioned. I did not abandon my faith because I wanted to rebel, or live a life of sin, or refuse god’s authority. I left because I could no longer believe. I left because I felt there simply was no convincing evidence for my belief. I left because my faith insulted reason one too many times. I left because once I applied the same level of skepticism and incredulity to Christianity that I always had to all other faiths, it likewise imploded. Once I accepted that the Bible’s account of cosmic and human origins could not possibly be true, I began to realize that it was just the first in an interminably long line of things the Bible was wrong about.

Science killed my faith. Not “science,” the perverse parody invented by some Christians — a nefarious, liberal, secular agenda whose sole purpose is to turn people from god — but rather science, an objective, methodological tool that uses reason and evidence to systematical study the world around us, and which is willing, unlike faith, to change direction with the accumulation of that evidence. Science is a humble and humbling exercise. Science is the impossibly dense core of curiosity — always asking, always seeking, always yearning to know more, never satisfied.
…
This, for me, is Sagan’s most enduring legacy — this realization that science is the most emotional journey imaginable. Science does not castrate awe or inhibit transcendence — science unleashes it.

As I alluded in a previous post, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos was not so much a life changer for me as a confirmation of the path I was already on, via Isaac Asimov, astronomy texts, and others. I had a very mild religious upbringing, and at some point I will spell out those early experiences and how they did or did not influence my mature thinking.

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Steven Pinker: Work Habits

Posted on Wednesday 12 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

When I remember a passage from something I read a day or two before, I think it’s worth capturing.

From that Steven Pinker interview last week (originally at Mosaic), two paragraphs about work habits, and his book The Better Angels of Our Nature.

“When I write a book, it’s almost all-consuming,” he says, recalling the year he spent in his house on Cape Cod writing The Better Angels, seven days a week, and sometimes until three in the morning. (He’d spent the previous year doing little but reading in preparation for it.) “I do try to exercise. I try to spend some time being a human being with my wife” — as recreation, he and Goldstein ride a tandem bicycle and paddle a tandem kayak. “Fortunately, she’s also a very intense writer, so she sympathizes.”

The couple do not have children, a fact Pinker sometimes uses to illustrate the non-determinative nature of genetic predispositions. (He might be predisposed, thanks to natural selection, to reproduce, but he’s used his frontal lobe, a crucial part of his evolutionary inheritance, to decide not to.) “Some things have to give,” Pinker says. “I’m not on Facebook, I don’t see a whole lot of movies, I don’t watch much TV — not because I consider myself above TV, I just don’t have time. And I don’t have a whole lot of face-to-face meetings.” The Pinker–Goldstein house is sometimes almost silent, except for keyboard-tapping, for days and weeks on end.

There’s a 77 minute video at MIT of Pinker on the topic of “Communicating Science and Technology in the 21st Century”, which I will link here though I’ve not had a chance to watch it yet.

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Fox, Certainty, Arrogance, Evidence, and Cosmos

Posted on Wednesday 12 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Follow-up article in Salon about the man whose father was lost to the paranoid outrage of Fox News. (The original article on this topic inspired my explanation about how science fiction represents the antithesis of such dead-end traps of ideology and dogma.)

The new article describes how Fox News invited the father – but not the writer of the article – on TV to defend himself and denounce his son, though in doing so it demonstrated many of the points of the original article. The son writes that the host

misstated, misunderstood or fibbed about the tone of the original piece, picking the most salacious moments, trying to rile up my dad. She acted exactly how I portrayed Fox News in my first piece, needlessly inflammatory and defamatory.

But what struck me were these observations and conclusions at the end of this article.

Certainty is the most dangerous emotion a human being can feel in politics and religion. Certainty stops all outside thought or reason. It closes the door and is a metaphorical spit in the face of anyone who disagrees. Changing one’s mind is the essence of critical thinking. As Thomas Jefferson himself said, “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.”

In America we’ve stopped hearing each other in the streets, restaurants, churches and, in my case, in my own home, talking with my father. It is tragic, but it’s not all our fault. Fox News makes a living dividing people, offering the seductive lie of certainty to some people who just want to be reassured. Who doesn’t want ironclad answers?

My father said something to me before the interview that struck me. He said I’m wrong about Fox News. “Fox didn’t warp me,” he said. “I created Fox News so I’d have something to watch.”

What a nugget of pure genius. Dad has always been conservative, although as I said, not to the extent that he is now. He and like-minded conservatives created a “news” source that would tell them what they wanted to hear, without calling into question their preconceived notions. Confirmation bias is a much different thing than news.

This is why the more heartfelt and impassioned one is about one’s certainty – without evidence or reason to back it up – the less persuasive and more suspect it is.

This dovetails with the common accusation that science is somehow arrogant to draw conclusions that challenge faith or conventional wisdom. Those who think so don’t understand the content of science or even the concept of science. Here is a relevant passage from a Sam Harris book I’m part way through (The Moral Landscape (p.124) that, coincidentally, I was reading last night:

…while it is a standard rhetorical move in such debates to accuse scientists of being “arrogant”, the level of humility in scientific discourse is, in fact, one of its most striking characteristics. In my experience, arrogance is about as common at a scientific conference as nudity. At any scientific meeting you will find presenter after presenter couching his or her remarks with caveats and apologies. When asked to comment on something that lies to either side of the very knife edge of their special expertise, even Nobel laureates will say things like, “Well, this isn’t really my area, but I would suspect that X is…” or “I’m sure there are several people in this room who know more about this than I do, but as far as I know, X is …” The totality of scientific knowledge now doubles every few years. Given how much there is to know, all scientists live with the constant awareness that whenever they open their mouths in the presence of other scientists, they are guaranteed to be speaking to something who knows more about a specific topic than they do.

So why do you hear so many scientists speak with such certainly about, say, the age of the universe or the fact of evolution? Because for those topics, there really are mountains and mountains of consistent evidence in support of those ideas.

This is why Cosmos needs to allude to those chains of evidence at some point, rather than merely revel in grandiose conclusions. Otherwise the ignorant and self-satisfied will blow off such conclusions as just some other kind of “faith” concocted by people who (they probably imagine) hate God.

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Hidebound, Unreflecting, Blind

Posted on Tuesday 11 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Andrew Sullivan (that gay conservative Catholic author and blogger) has an ongoing thread about Christians who feel persecuted for not approving of same-sex marriage. His blog doesn’t take comments, as this one doesn’t, but he posts substantive responses from email. (As I would.) Such as.

The Christianist Closet? Ctd

But it astonishes me that [Rod] Dreher [of The American Conservative] can’t understand why people would be appalled at anti-equality attitudes. He may think it’s just people adhering to their religious faith, but to people like me (pro-equality), those attitudes exhibit a lack of self reflection and empathy that I find disturbing in otherwise intelligent people.

Look, the biblical commands against homosexuality are a few lines in a book that otherwise talks mostly about the proper way to sacrifice beasts, and yet the Christianists are constantly harping on the topic as if the primary focus of Christian belief is some weird and futile goal to eradicate homosexuality. So no, if a colleague tells me that she’s opposed to same-sex marriage on the basis of her religious beliefs, I’m not going to assume that she’s a bigot, but I am going to think her to be hidebound, unreflecting, and a blind adherent to an ideology that she hasn’t bothered to really try to understand. It’s not enough that there are a few lines in the Old Testament to support systemic social injustice against millions of people.

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Religion vs Cosmos

Posted on Tuesday 11 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Tech writer Andrew Leonard writes in Salon about religious outrage against science.

Watch out, “Cosmos”! The Holy Inquisition is not happy with you

The best part: “Cosmos” is labeled “a glossy multi-million-dollar piece of agitprop for scientific materialism” as if that’s a bad thing. I mean, I understand why religious zealots might think it’s cool to slander a science documentary in language suggesting it’s all a Communist plot. (The Big Bang — brought to you by Stalin and the good ole boys at the KGB.) But if there is one thing that the United States sorely needs right now, it’s more effective propaganda in support of facts and the scientific method.

And, of course, it is no accident that Giordano Bruno appeared in the first episode of “Cosmos.” Because whether or not Bruno himself was a scientist, there’s not a whole lot, besides their relative lack of access to killer barbeque tools, that differentiates the current crop of intelligent design advocates and Texas textbook revisionists and inheritors of the Moral Majority mantle from the shame and terror of the Holy Inquisition.

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Cosmos Is Great So Far, but It’s Missing Something

Posted on Monday 10 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

The new Cosmos series seems to be just fine, so far. It celebrates science and our knowledge of the vastness of the known universe, and takes a legitimate stand against the religious resistance that would deny or trivialize this knowledge.

Is Neil dT just a tad patronizing, as if spelling things out very simply for his audience? Probably not, since I’ve understood this worldview all my life and realize that many in his audience have never had any exposure to these topics. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

There have been twitter feeds and Facebook threads by the devout who cling to religious fantasies — or who presume that the revelations of Cosmos *confirm* their faiths (e.g. What Are (Some) Christians Saying About ‘Cosmos’ on Twitter? You’ve Been Warned…)

For example,

Wow, and they believing in God is insane? Takes more “faith” to believe what I just watched.

And this takes me to what, at least so far, is missing from Cosmos: any consideration of the vast history of *why* scientists have concluded all these wondrous things. Ironically perhaps, the example of Bruno in this first episode was unfortunate, because his idea about a vast universe of other suns was an inspired guess, but not based on evidence. Galileo had evidence. The history of these past four or five centuries of our expanding understanding of the universe has been based on evidence, vast amounts of evidence that keeps mounting and is all consistent (though as always, with ragged edges of what we don’t quite yet understand). The tweeter quoted above has no idea of this; he apparently thinks science is just something that some guys made up. Cosmos owes it to its audience to disabuse this view.

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Billy Budd

Posted on Sunday 9 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Last night’s performance of Billy Budd by the Los Angeles Opera was… compelling. I know some Benjamin Britten music (especially “Four Sea Interludes”), but had never heard this opera — nor have I ever read the Melville novella, though I was vaguely aware of it.

The staging was dramatic, the singing very good. The music, even being 60 years old now, is still rather too modernistic for some in the audience, it seemed. (There were a few disappearances after intermission.) I grew up listening to a wide variety of music (some from modernistic film scores of the era), and realize it takes two or three or four hearings before some unfamiliar music ‘takes’; some of the greatest music in the world is incomprehensible on first hearing, but becomes essential on repeated listenings (think “Rite of Spring”) (whereas the catchiest music on first hearing is the quickest to become grating).

YouTube seems to have everything, I keep realizing, so this afternoon I am listening to and partially watching a 1966 BBCtv recording of the complete opera, which features Britten’s partner Peter Pears in the role of Captain Vere, a role Britten wrote for him.

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