Today’s New York Times’ Science section is entirely devoted to ‘Families’, with articles about changing trends and also profiles of several nontraditional families, including one about a gay couple — in their 50s and 60s — who have adopted 6 children (!).
A similar idea has not been entirely out of my own thoughts, recently.
Another Andrew Sullivan post on The Dish– a few days ago, this, via Aidan Kimel and Herbert McCabe:
God must be incomprehensible to us precisely because he is creator of all that is and, as Aquinas puts it, outside the order of all beings. God therefore cannot be classified as any kind of being. God cannot be compared to or contrasted with other things in respect of what they are like as dogs can be compared and contrasted with cats and both of them with stones or stars. God is not an inhabitant of the universe; he is the reason why there is a universe at all.
…and so on.
Today, readers bristle, in several comments, e.g.
You have to be kidding. “We don’t know what God is” has got to be just about the most unintentionally hilarious statement about religion I have ever heard. For the longest time, atheists have been trying to make the point that the concept of God as defined in every faith is impossible. The concept of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omni-benevolent deity is self-contradictory using elementary logic.
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Presumably the purpose of this is to move the argument away from where atheism is succeeding on the merits – pointing out the logical inconsistencies of religious belief – into more favorable and murky territory. “Richard Dawkins get it wrong, because our God isn’t like all those other gods. Because we say so.” This is utter piffle, unworthy of you or your blog.
Every religion ascribes the very existence of the universe to their deity or deities. Otherwise they wouldn’t be gods. Saying “God is in everything” is meaningless. It doesn’t change the fact that religious belief is based on pure faith and nothing else.
Several other worthy responses.
Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish on The Inevitabilty In Beauty.
Theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed and novelist Ian McEwan recently discussed the relationship between art and science, often agreeing that what might unite them is beauty.
I like McEwan’s response:
I would like to feel that we could think about science as just one more aspect of organised human curiosity rather than as a special compartment. And it has, as has been very clear from this discussion, a powerful aesthetic. I think we need to generalise it. We need to absorb it into our sense that we can love the music of Beethoven without being composers and we could love science as a celebration of human ingenuity without being scientists.
Science has had a huge effect on my own sense of the world. It certainly has helped me along the way to a general global scepticism about religion. The world of faith is inimical to the world of science and in that sense science has helped me want to write books every now and then that celebrate a full-blooded rationalism. It’s one of our delightful aspects and it informs what we try to do with our laws and social policy.
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NYTBR reviews not one but two books about the ‘trolley problem’, a hypothetical situation in which the decisions people make reveal how intuitive moral decisions are made differently by different people. The question is, suppose you see a runaway trolley car about to hit five people. But you could throw a switch to move the trolley to another track, where it would hit only one person. Would you throw the switch?
An equivalent but more disturbing situation: You are on a bridge and see the trolley bearing down on five people. There is a fat man next to you, and if you push him over the bridge, his bulk would stop the trolley, though at the cost of his life. Would you push him off?
The two books explore results of psychological studies on these questions, as well as the philosophical principles they reveal. The reasons for different decisions by different people boil down to issues of psychology, though the review doesn’t quite state it in those terms. But it’s consistent with my other recent reading (e.g. McRaney).
“The contingent nature of our ethical responses in general emerges from other research. We are more generous toward a stranger if we have just found a dime; a judge’s decision to grant parole depends on how long it has been since he or she had lunch. Are these the “deep-rooted moral instincts” on which we are willing to found decisions that may affect tens or hundreds of thousands of fellow humans?”
I’ve been meaning to close out my thoughts on David McRaney’s brilliant second book, YOU ARE NOW LESS DUMB, which I first posted about a month ago.
First, let me follow up on his ‘narrative bias’ described in the first part of the book. A prime example of how human beings prefer story over reality is, to take something very topical, the commentary over the film Gravity. It is a brilliant film in many ways, but, to anyone schooled in basic physics, has a few obvious flaws. I mentioned a couple of these in my own blog and Facebook posts (especially about the scene in which George Clooney does *not have to let go*), but it was Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Twitter posts that raised the issue for most people. The common response was — who cares? It would compromise the *story*, so don’t be so finicky.
QED. “Human kind cannot bear very much reality” (T.S. Eliot)
And just recently, there is the depressingly frequent response to tragedies as in the Haiyan typhoon that struck the Philippines. It’s a paradoxical effect that the people who survive such tragedies (those who don’t aren’t around to offer their opinions), perversely claim their faith in God has *increased*. This strikes me as yet another example of confirmation bias and narrative bias. Survivors cling to what they think they understand, because, if they lose that, what else is left?
Second, I don’t think I mentioned this before, but there are ideas in McRaney’s two books that I had *not* heard about before, in any sense. One is the “Normalcy Bias”, in which people subjected to sudden catastrophes react in an oddly passive manner. The famous Canary Island crash of two 747s is one example that he describes; many passengers did not escape because the shock of the crash paralyzed them, if for only a minute — long enough for them to die in the explosion of the fuel tanks. The same principle explains why people in disaster-prone or threatened areas do not evacuate. They don’t think the threat will apply to them.
The finale of the second book is about the “Self-Enhancement” bias, about how everyone over-estimates their own abilities. The key point is that this is functional — without this bias, people might not keep functioning. With this bias, even if you’re ‘fooling yourself’, you will be happier. Everyone thinks they are above average — better drivers, more attractive, than the average.
This bias serves an evolutionary advantage — those who feel superior, for whatever reason, may reproduce more often, and pass this attitude on to future generations.
Which of course parallels the idea that religious people, while being deluded about the nature of reality, may actually be happier in life than those who perceive reality for what it is.
Now, I’ve threatened to write a book about how science fiction informs this great divide between what people think – the whole psychological narrative of biases that disguise true motivations while promoting (an in evolutionary sense, ahem) human behavior and existence – and what people, mostly scientists, perceive as the reality of the universe. If I were to do so, I would mine examples of stories that push the boundaries of what humans think of as reality – the assumptions of time and space – that indirectly challenge why humans should think we, living on one planet in an immense universe, should think that, for example, the conclusions of bronze-age desert tribes living in a tiny part of our planet, two or three thousand years ago, should have, coincidentally and magically, discovered the singular truth about the origin and purpose of the universe.
There are many such examples.
But recently I’ve been reading a rereading a number of classic short stories in the SF field, and here is one that speaks directly to the function of religion… as a sap, for those who can’t handle the truth.
It’s a Hugo winning story by George R.R. Martin, famous these days as the author of Game of Thrones and its sequels, basis for the TV series. The story is “The Way of Cross and Dragon”, (here’s a link) and it’s about a future Catholic church that investigates a heretical sect that proclaims Judas a saint. It turns out [– spoiler alert –] the author of this heresy just made it up. Because all faiths are Lies invented to make people happy.
The truths, the great truths—and most of the lesser ones as well—they are unbearable for most men. We find our shield in faith. Your faith, my faith, any faith. It doesn’t matter, so long as we believe, really and truly believe, in whatever lie we cling to.” He fingered the ragged edges of his great blond beard. “Our psychs have always told us that believers are the happy ones, you know. They may believe in Christ or Buddha or Erika Stormjones, in reincarnation or immortality or nature, in the power of love or the platform of a political faction, but it all comes to the same thing. They believe. They are happy. It is the ones who have seen truth who despair, and kill themselves. The truths are so vast, the faiths so little, so poorly made, so riddled with error and contradiction that we see around them and through them, and then we feel the weight of darkness upon us, and can no longer be happy.
Yes, exactly my theme. Human kind cannot bear very much reality. (Or perceive it to begin with, as the psychological studies increasingly show.)
So this post turns out not to be so much an examination of Mr. McRaney’s book – which, in any case, is brilliant, and which I recommend highly.
Enough for tonight.
Great post at Slate by Jerry Coyne — the original headline on the homepage has disappeared, so I’m reproducing from memory in this link:
Why Scientists Have No Faith in Science
The point is science isn’t about faith, not even ‘faith’ in the scientific method or ‘faith’ that scientific laws are valid. Science is about evidence and presumptions, such as the method and the ‘laws’, that have been proven themselves as valid and effective. (Thus our technological society.)
What about the public and other scientists’ respect for authority? Isn’t that a kind of faith? Not really. When Richard Dawkins talks or writes about evolution, or Lisa Randall about physics, scientists in other fields—and the public—have confidence that they’re right. But that, too, is based on the doubt and criticism inherent in science (but not religion): the understanding that their expertise has been continuously vetted by other biologists or physicists. In contrast, a priest’s claims about God are no more demonstrable than anyone else’s. We know no more now about the divine than we did 1,000 years ago.
The constant scrutiny of our peers ensures that science is largely self-correcting, so that we really can approach the truth about our universe.
Spelling it out for the many, many, who remain unclear on this concept, if they’ve bothered to think about it at all.
With the JFK 50th anniversary upon us, there have been numerous stories lately about this. Here’s one in Slate that wonders why so many people are so taken by outlandish conspiracy theories.
How can this be? How can so many people, in the name of skepticism, promote so many absurdities?
The answer is that people who suspect conspiracies aren’t really skeptics. Like the rest of us, they’re selective doubters. They favor a worldview, which they uncritically defend. But their worldview isn’t about God, values, freedom, or equality. It’s about the omnipotence of elites.
But it boils down to cognitive biases… seeing intents where only coincidences exist.
The common thread between distrust and cynicism, as defined in these experiments, is a perception of bad character. More broadly, it’s a tendency to focus on intention and agency, rather than randomness or causal complexity. In extreme form, it can become paranoia. In mild form, it’s a common weakness known as the fundamental attribution error—ascribing others’ behavior to personality traits and objectives, forgetting the importance of situational factors and chance. Suspicion, imagination, and fantasy are closely related.
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Conspiracy believers are the ultimate motivated skeptics. Their curse is that they apply this selective scrutiny not to the left or right, but to the mainstream. They tell themselves that they’re the ones who see the lies, and the rest of us are sheep. But believing that everybody’s lying is just another kind of gullibility.
It’s also worth quoting an earlier Slate article from a few days ago, by Fred Kaplan, who was attracted to JFK conspiracy notions for a while, until he read some of those books.
Then, one day, I looked up the footnotes in those books, most of them leading me to the multivolume hearings of the Warren Commission. I was shocked. The authors had taken witnesses’ statements out of context, distorted them beyond recognition, and in some cases cherry-picked passages that seemed to back their theories while ignoring testimony that didn’t. It was my first brush with intellectual dishonesty.
Check your sources.
The Fermi Paradox is the observation that, while calculations of the number of likely planets in the galaxy (or universe) that can support life suggests that there might be millions or billions of them — recent news stories, e.g. CNN, increase the number, if anything — nevertheless, no SETI signals have been detected. So, where are they?
A post a few days ago by Sean Carroll about the recent estimates of billions of potential habitable planets suggests a reason: the Enlightentment/Boredom Hypothesis (EBH).
The EBH is basically the idea that life is kind of like tic-tac-toe. It’s fun for a while, but eventually you figure it out, and after that it gets kind of boring. Or, in slightly more exalted terms, intelligent beings learn to overcome the petty drives of the material world, and come to an understanding that all that strife and striving was to no particular purpose. We are imbued by evolution with a desire to survive and continue the species, but perhaps a sufficiently advanced civilization overcomes all that. Maybe they perfect life, figure out everything worth figuring out, and simply stop.
I’m not saying the EBH is likely, but I think it’s on the table as a respectable possibility. The Solar System is over four billion years old, but humans reached behavioral modernity only a few tens of thousands of years ago, and figured out how to do science only a few hundred years ago. Realistically, there’s no way we can possibly predict what humanity will evolve into over the next few hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Maybe the swashbuckling, galaxy-conquering impulse is something that intelligent species rapidly outgrow or grow tired of. It’s an empirical question — we should keep looking, not be discouraged by speculative musings for which there’s little evidence. While we’re still in swashbuckling mode, there’s no reason we shouldn’t enjoy it a little.
As always, the scale of history and of humanity’s tiny presence in this history is my point of interest.
Reading A.C. Grayling’s The God Argument, a simplistic title that might be better replaced by its subtitle: “The Case Against Religion and for Humanism”. Grayling is a British philosopher who has written on many topics; i.e. he’s not just a ‘new atheist’ railing against religion; he’s a substantial philosopher taking time to spell out, in almost simplistic terms, why religion should be obsolete and ‘humanism’ is the best plan for a mature global society.
Let me just quote the opening paragraph.
To put matters at their simplest, the major reason for the continuance of religious faith in a world which might otherwise have long moved beyond it, is indoctrination of children before they reach the age of reason, together with all or some combination of social pressure to confirm, social reinforcement of religious institutions and traditions, emotion, and (it has to be said) ignorance — of science, of psychology, of history in general, and of the history and actual doctrines of religions themselves.
Precisely.
My own intent is not to be an anti-religion polemicist — for one thing, I’m not sure anyone is reading this blog. I’m collecting posts here mostly as, er, ‘research’ into a book I am thinking of writing, about the limitations of human judgement of reality (religion being an egregiously wrong-headed example), how reality exceeds the ability of human perception to perceive it, and how science fiction can help inform that divide.
I’m more than half way through Grayling and have seen many more succinct passages I may quote here presently.
Via The Dish, Embracing the Void.
Making the sky into a humanlike God is a shortcut to making it legible. If you believe that there is a man in the sky, you can interpret its unpredictable cinema, its colour shifts and stormy whims, as symbolic messages, communications from the cosmic creator. You can graft human traits and desires onto the sky’s impenetrable infinities, and soothe yourself with the comforting notion that the great unknown resembles you in some important way. This philosophical trick is hard for the order-seeking mind to resist, because it leads to a coherent picture of the world. And so, since antiquity, sky gods have gushed from the human imagination, and several of them survive to this day.
