Assumptions

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Richard Bowker

My birthday is August 15, which happens to be the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary — a holy day of obligation in the Catholic church. So, the two days of the year when I got presents — Christmas and my birthday — I also had to go to church. It was a tradeoff I was willing to make — not that I had any choice.

Of course, when you’re young you just accept your religious beliefs. I remember learning the distinction between the Ascension and the Assumption. Jesus ascended to heaven of His own power; Mary was assumed into heaven by God. Got it.

I can also recall being impressed that the proclamation of the Assumption as a dogma of the Church was an example of the pope (in this case, Pius XII) speaking ex cathedra — that is, infallibly. Here is the declaration:

By the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.

Most Protestants don’t believe in the Assumption because it has no Biblical basis. Actually, it has no basis in historical fact whatsoever. The Catholic Encyclopedia says the first mention of the corporeal assumption of Mary into heaven showed up in treatise in the fourth or fifth century A.D. So how does it become an infallibly pronounced belief of the universal Church?

This is a prime example of the Church considering its teaching authority to be as important a source of belief as the Bible. People have believed in the Assumption down through the ages, and so finally the Pope asserted that it is true, and that faithful Catholics must believe that it is true.

My very fine commenter Stan asked me if I think religions are insane. Of course not. But they are fundamentally irrational, and this is an example. Theologians wouldn’t see it that way, I suppose; they have scoured the Bible and the writings of the Church fathers to come up with texts that could be construed to support the dogma. But the dogma is based purely on belief and tradition — not reason, not evidence. Here, from Wikipedia, is the kind of “reasoning” the Pope uses:

Explaining these words of Sacred Scripture: “Who is this that comes up from the desert, flowing with delights, leaning upon her beloved?” [Song of Songs 8:5] and applying them in a kind of accommodated sense to the Blessed Virgin, [Saint Bonaventure] reasons thus: “From this we can see that she is there bodily…her blessedness would not have been complete unless she were there as a person. The soul is not a person, but the soul, joined to the body, is a person. It is manifest that she is there in soul and in body. Otherwise she would not possess her complete beatitude. …

Huh? Atheists are often chided because they take on fundamentalists rather than sophisticated theologians with their nuanced beliefs. Catholic theologians aren’t stupid; Pope Pius XII wasn’t stupid. But anytime I dip into Catholic theology I find stuff like this, which seems to have nothing to do with any reality that I understand.

Mistrust of science

Posted on April 1, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Kevin Drum provides us with this chart showing the trust in science by political stance since the 1970s:

I haven’t read the study from which this is derived, but the decline in conservative support for science seems accurate to me. I would have liked to see data going back to the sixties, because my sense is that the liberal support might have been lower than conservative support back then. Those were the days of questioning authority, of good intentions mattering more than clear thinking. But those days are long gone, and liberal support seems pretty stable.

The obvious explanation is that conservatives have gotten stupider over the years (or is appealing to stupider people, but that ain’t it. Trust in science has dropped more precipitously among educated conservatives than among uneducated ones. Drum says:

This is presumably part of the wider conservative turn against knowledge-disseminating institutions whose output is perceived as too liberal (academia, the mainstream media, Hollywood) in favor of institutions that produce more reliably conservative narratives (churches, business-oriented think tanks, Fox News). More and more, liberals and conservatives are almost literally living in different worlds with different versions of consensus reality.

This seems plausible. And, as Shermer notes in The Believing Brain, smart people are good at coming up with reasons to support what they already believe.

How do smart people decide not to trust science? One way is to fasten on perceived scientific misconduct like “Climategate” to prove that science nowadays is just politics and careerism. Another is to assert that it’s all relative, like Rick Perry’s characterization of evolution as “a theory that’s out there.”

Here is Stanley Fish in the New York Times saying the same thing in a more sophisticated fashion:

People like Dawkins and Pinker do not survey the world in a manner free of assumptions about what it is like and then, from that (impossible) disinterested position, pick out the set of reasons that will be adequate to its description. They begin with the assumption (an act of faith) that the world is an object capable of being described by methods unattached to any imputation of deity, and they then develop procedures (tests, experiments, the compilation of databases, etc.) that yield results, and they call those results reasons for concluding this or that. And they are reasons, but only within the assumptions that both generate them and give them point.

Vary the assumptions (and it is impossible to not have any), begin by assuming a creating and sustaining God, and the force of quite other reasons will seem obvious and inescapable. As John Locke said in his Letter on Toleration, “Every church is orthodox to itself,” and every orthodoxy brings with it reasons, honored authorities, sacred texts and unassailable methods of verification.

It is at bottom a question of original authority: with what conviction — basic orthodoxy — about where truth and illumination are to be found do you begin? Once that question is answered satisfactorily for you (by revelation, education or conversion), you cannot test the answer by bringing it before the bar of some independent arbiter, for your answer now is the arbiter (and measure) of everything that comes before you. Your answer delivers the world to you and delivers with it mechanisms for distinguishing good evidence from bad or beside-the-point evidence and good reasons from reasons that just don’t cut it.

So here is a very smart guy saying that there is no way of choosing among multiple approaches to the truth. So really Joseph Smith, say, is as worthy of belief as Einstein and Newton, as Dawkins and Pinker.

The standard answer to this (made repeatedly in the comments to his article) is that science, you know, works. The earth does in fact move around the sun. Germs do in fact cause diseases. If Fish got sick, would he rather be treated by a witch doctor or a medical doctor?

Somehow this gets lost in the Fish’s equivalence argument. And I suppose conservative elites will use the argument to buttress their suspicions of science. After all, even the New York Times has its doubts.

The night they burned the convent down

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Senator takes place in a city and state dominated by Irish Catholics. Rereading it reminds me that it wasn’t always like that. Here is an account of the night in 1834 when poor Yankee laborers burned down a Catholic convent in Charlestown:

Boston’s Irish Catholic population doubled in the 1830s; religious, ethnic, economic, and political tensions mounted almost as fast. Stories of papist plots were everywhere — in sermons, on street corners, at taverns and bars. The mysterious doings at the Ursuline Convent were the subject of endless rumors. The tales of kidnappings, forced conversions, murders, scandalous sexual activity mimicked a popular new literary genre, the gothic novel. A superstitious public already viewed Catholicism as a dangerous realm of secret rituals and mystical powers. However far-fetched they were, stories of women held in dungeons and crypts filled with infants’ skulls stirred up fear and anger.

The convent’s strong-willed, imperious Mother Superior did not help matters. A community of women led by a woman was a novelty, and one that most Americans found alarming. Her assertive, even arrogant manner — so far from the submissive, domestic norm — only reinforced the view that something unnatural was going on within the convent walls.

August 11^th was an oppressively hot night. An unruly, drunken mob of laborers, sailors, apprentices, and hoodlums gathered at the gates of the convent. They demanded to see one of the sisters who figured in a number of the rumors. When the Mother Superior refused, the men began to tear down the convent’s fence and used the wood to feed a roaring bonfire. The fire alarm was sounded, but Charlestown’s Protestant firefighters did nothing to fight the blaze.

The rioters shattered the convent’s windows, broke down the front door, and burst into the building. They went on a rampage, destroying furniture, musical instruments, books, and religious items, and then set the building on fire. The nuns gathered their terrified students and barely escaped out the back, fleeing through a hole that the Mother Superior ripped in the back fence. Dressed only in their nightclothes, they ran through the fields to a farmhouse a half-mile away, where they watched the convent burning. By daybreak, it lay in smoldering ruins.

I can remember the pride we felt when Kennedy was elected president in 1960, but of course I had no sense of the long, long history that led up to it. We lived in a big city, but it was very tribal; I don’t recall knowingly meeting a Protestant kid until I was in the sixth grade and had to go to public school.

Cushing and Contraception

Posted on March 17, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Apropos of this post, the Times has an article recounting Cardinal Cushing’s role in the battle to legalize contraception in Massachusetts back in the 1960s. Legalization at that time meant just for married couple over the age of 21, but the battle was basically won (the Supreme Court struck down the restriction on contraception for unmarried couples in 1972, according to the article). And Cushing’s position seems to me to have been precisely right: in a plurastic democracy, one group shouldn’t seek to impose its moral views on the rest of society.

I came of age in the 1960s, and it seemed for a while back then as if the world was headed in the right direction, with the Vatican Council and the Civil Rights Act and Medicare. As a knee-jerk liberal even back then, I thought all these things were obvious benefits to humanity. But, being young and stupid, I saw no reason why things couldn’t continue along the same course.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks that the world (and, in particular, the Catholic Church) has swerved in the wrong direction since then.

The Swerve

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Last time we checked in with The Swerve, we were complaining about typos. I’ve now finished the book, and I enjoyed it (maybe because I didn’t encounter any more typos). The plot is straightforward: a 15th-century Italian humanist named Poggio went in search of ancient manuscripts, and in an old monastery he came across De Rerum Natura by the ancient Roman poet Lucretius. The poem celebrates the philosophy of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, which was not a good fit (to say the least) with Christianity. The rediscovered poem then plays a role in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment: it helps Montaigne write his essays; it helps Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence. (It also helps Giordano Bruno get burned at the stake.) The Western world swerved from its accustomed course, and the poem was part of the reason why.

The book could have been shorter–I started skimming when Greenblatt went into the details of Poggio’s employment history at the Vatican and elsewhere. But he could also have brought the story forward to the present. Here is Greenblatt’s summary of what Epicurus and Lucretius believed:

Everything is made of invisible particles.

The elementary particles of matter are eternal, infinite in number but limited in shape and size. All particles are in motion in an infinite void.

The universe has no creator or designer.

Everything comes into being as a result of a “swerve”–a random, indeterminate change in motion that changes everything.

The swerve is the source of free will.

Nature ceaselessly experiments.

The universe was not created for or about humans.

Humans are not unique.

Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival.

The soul dies.

There is no afterlife.

Death is nothing to us.

All organized religions are superstitious delusions.

Religions are invariably cruel.

There are no angels, demons, or ghosts.

The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.

The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.

Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder.

Well, some of the science is wrong, but it’s closer to the truth than what Thomas Aquinas had to offer. And 600 years after Poggio rediscovered Lucretius, Richard Dawkins and others are making many of those same points; and if they aren’t getting burned at the stake, maybe it’s because their critics lack the power. They face many of the same arguments that were lodged against Epicurus and Lucretius: How can people be moral without religion and the fear of Hell? How can you view the universe with wonder if there is no God behind it and in it?

If Rick Santorum is a legitimate candidate for president, how much have we really swerved?

More on de Botton

Posted on March 11, 2012 by Richard Bowker

We met Alain de Botton yesterday saying that the question of whether religious beliefs are true is uninteresting. Today he shows up in the Boston Globe, where Joshua Rothman apparently read his book Religion for Atheists and was smitten. de Botton’s point appears to be that atheism should attempt to mimic the things that make religion effective, like rituals and buildings and monuments and uniforms. Rothman says:

How much of this religious wisdom can be adapted for the secular world? De Botton has some intriguing proposals, like secular monasteries, or an “agape restaurant,” in which patrons are seated next to strangers and given a script of thoughtful personal questions.

Those particular ideas sound kind of loony to me. But at a general level, it seems like de Botton is just trying to reinvent Unitarianism. The “truth” of Unitarianism is that most people need a sense of connection and community as they make their way through life. Some people find it in hymns and sermons on Sunday morning; other people find it in the sewing circle or the men’s breakfast. The good thing about Unitarianism is that it doesn’t require any beliefs — or lack of beliefs — to be part of the community. The problem Unitarians face is that not many people seem to want to buy what they are selling — they make up a mere 0.3% of American adults, according to a Pew survey. And that, perhaps, speaks to people’s cravings for belief and certainty. Why go to church if it’s just to have a conversation?

If de Botton builds the atheist cathedral he talks about, will anyone come?

Is religion, like, true?

Posted on March 10, 2012 by Richard Bowker

And does that, like, matter?

Here‘s an essay by a guy named Alain de Botton who has gotten a lot of press lately. (Don’t you wish you were named “Alain de Botton”?) The first paragraph goes:

Probably the most boring question you can ask about religion is whether or not the whole thing is “true.” Unfortunately, recent public discussions on religion have focused obsessively on precisely this issue, with a hardcore group of fanatical believers pitting themselves against an equally small band of fanatical atheists.

Folks like Jerry Coyne and Jason Rosenhouse are annoyed at this, and not just because they wish they were named “Alain de Botton.” It’s a common criticism of new atheists that they’re just like religious fundamentalists — all hung up about the literal truth of the Bible and whatnot — while more sophisticated folks (with sophisticated names like “Alain de Botton”) think more deeply and wisely about such matters.

This brings to mind an experience I had teaching a bunch of kids at my Unitarian church. Unitarianism is a kinda sorta religion, with no fixed creed, just a set of principles and an all-embracing support for each person’s “search for truth.” I was helping to teach a program called “Coming of Age,” which is the Unitarian equivalent of Confirmation or Bar Mitzvah. Our job in this program is to guide mostly eighth- and ninth-grade kids to an understanding of what they believe at this point in their lives. The goal is the production of a “Faith Statement” that they could present to the congregation.

This being Unitarianism, there are no right answers. The kid could decide he or she was a Christian, or an atheist, or a Buddhist, or a Wiccan . . . it’s all good! Maybe in ten years the kid will believe something entirely different — and that’s good too. Keep searching!

This is all fine, except . . . one Sunday we were discussing codes you can live by. One such code is the ten commandments (but there are others! and you can make up your own!). We were talking about God giving the tablets to Moses on Mount Sinai. And one kid asked, “Is this, like, true?”

What an interesting question — at least, I thought so. Alain de Botton would probably disagree. And the question started to bother me. In the entire curriculum, there was no opportunity to discuss the truth claims of any religion. It was almost as if such a discussion would be impolite. Further, we didn’t spend any time teaching kids how to think about or judge religious truth claims. Lots of kids were attracted to the idea of reincarnation; it has a moral feeling to it without being tied down to the kind of Christian dogma that probably drove most of their parents into Unitarianism. But we never said a word about whether there was any scientific evidence for reincarnation, or why such evidence would or would not matter. This left me with a feeling of unease about the program, a sense that we had let the kids down. We had liberated the kids from the constraints of dogma, but we hadn’t made any attempt to give them the tools to judge dogma in any kind of rational way. Should they care if there is no independent evidence of Moses’ existence beyond the story in the Bible? Should they care that evolution has shown that there couldn’t have been an Adam and Eve? Is it all about community and morality?

Does any of this matter? Alain de Botton would say it doesn’t matter because all religions are obviously untrue. Karen Armstrong would probably say it doesn’t matter because all religions are manifestations of underlying truths that are inaccessible to scientific or historical investigation. Lots of people would probably say: don’t worry about it, you’ve confused those kids enough as it is.

But I still can’t help feeling that I let them down….

A Universe from Nothing

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Richard Bowker

I finally finished the book. It’s fairly short — please note that Summit is twice as long and a quarter of the price, and it contains absolutely no equations (although I’ll admit it has lots of Russian names to keep track of).

The first part of the book is an overview of the current state of cosmology — suffice it to say that things are looking weirder and weirder, and the more scientists find out space and time and matter and energy, the more difficult it becomes to present a tidy narrative like the Big Bang of why things are the way they are. Much of this material was also covered in the Yale astronomy course I listened to, but that doesn’t mean I can understand it at even the most general level. I certainly can’t judge whether Krauss is right. He seems to have the credentials, although anyone who would write a book calledThe Physics of Star Trek has some ‘splainin’ to do (although it could be a great book, for all I know).

Krauss discusses the ramifications of modern cosmological research in the second part of the book. So:

Something from nothing. This is the key discussion. There is now a scientific approach to understanding “creation” — how something comes from nothing. It will undoubtedly not satisfy theologians, but putting creation ex nihilo within the reach of scientific explanation means that theologians and philosophers become irrelevant to the discussion.

The anthropic principle. This is the puzzling concept that physical laws seem fine-tuned for our existence. If some of the baseline constants of the universe were even slightly different, life couldn’t have formed and we wouldn’t be here to measure those constants and ponder this puzzling concept. Another way of thinking about this is Einstein’s famous question: “What I want to know is whether God had any choice in the creation of the universe.” (What Einstein meant by God is not what theologians mean byGod.) That is, do the laws of nature have to be what they are? If not, why are they what they are?

The trendy cosmological response to this is the theory of multiverses, which Krauss supports. There are lots of universes, goes the theory, maybe an infinite number, of which ours is just one. Krauss says:

[I]n discussions with those who feel the need for a creator, the existence of a multiverse is viewed as a cop-out conceived by physicists who have run out of answers–or perhaps questions. This may eventually be the case, but it is not so now. Almost every logical possibility we can imagine regarding extending laws of physics as we know them, on small scales, into a more complete theory, suggests that, on large scales, our universe is not unique.

(That final sentence is not one of Krauss’s better ones.) If ours is not unique, then there is nothing special about the laws that govern it — they just happen to be ones that allow for the development of intelligent life.

Of course, to make this science, the multiverse theory has to be testable — and how can you test it if you can’t see or experience or measure anything outside our own little universe? So is it science? This guy, at any rate, doesn’t think so.

Here is Krauss’s summary of his book:

We have discovered that all signs suggest a universe that could and plausibly did arise from a deeper nothing–involving the absence of space itself–and which may one day return to nothing via processes that may not only be comprehensible but also processes that do not require any external control or direction. In this sense, science, as physicist Steven Weinberg has emphasized, does not make it impossible to believe in God, but rather makes it possible to not believe in God. Without science, everything is a miracle. With science, there remains the possibility that nothing is. Religious belief in this case becomes less and less necessary, and also less and less relevant.

The afterword by Dawkins is inconsequential.

Faith and Doubt

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Richard Bowker

From the Washington Post, here is an interesting column about Richard Dawkins and belief. Some folks are enamored of the idea that the famous atheist might have glimmers of doubt about his atheism. But, as the writer points out, Dawkins has never claimed to be absolutely certain in his atheism — which makes him, strictly speaking, an agnostic. InThe God Delusion, he puts his certainty that there is no God at 6.5 on a 7-point scale he came up with. Elsewhere he goes as high as 6.9, apparently. But he’s not prepared to entirely rule out a deistic sort of God — because he can’t.

And that’s because he’s a scientist, and at the heart of science is doubt. All knowledge is provisional; nothing is absolutely certain; tomorrow’s data may overturn today’s laws. There was an interesting debate on some atheist blogs a while back about whether there could be any evidence that would convince the bloggers that there was a God. It’s a reasonable question. Almost anything you can think of could have a more plausible explanation than an all-powerful, all-knowing God — mass hallucination, intervention by an advanced race of aliens, previously unknown laws of physics…. But even a complete lack of persuasive evidence doesn’t mean it can’t be true.

For many believers, of course, lack of doubt is something to be proud of. But, as the column suggests, I expect that most believers cannot be as certain as they would like to be. A semi-major character in Pontiff has a daughter who was hit by a car when she was a little girl and left severely brain-damaged. As a result, the mother loses her faith — how can she believe in a God who would do this to her child? But then the annoying author sets about trying to test her lack of faith when she begins to think her daughter could be “cured” — by meeting the pope, who has a reputation for being a miracle-worker. If she has faith, maybe God will finally show some mercy….

And of course that is how the battle between faith and doubt is ultimately fought — not in books and debates, but in our needs and hopes and desires. The woman will do anything for her child — even believe in a God she despises.

The annoying author then provides us with a stunning plot twist in which…

But you don’t want me to tell you. You want to rush out and buy the book when it arrives at an ebookstore near you.

The Big Bang Theory and Pope Pius XII

Posted on February 25, 2012 by Richard Bowker

I’ve started reading A Universe from Nothing — $11.95 for the Kindle edition, not cheap for a short book but not ridiculous, I suppose.

The Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe was first proposed by a Belgian priest/physicist, George Lemaitre, in the 1920s. There’s some significance there, because religious people find the Big Bang very appealing.

Georges Lemaitre

During my endless commute I’ve been listening to a fabulous Open Yale course on Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics, and the professor, Charles Bailyn, notes that Catholic scientists tended to favor the Big Bang explanation, while atheistic scientists preferred the alternative Steady State theory. The Big Bang was the one that finally received convincing empirical support in the 1950s, and here is Pope Pius XII exulting:

It would seem that present-day science, with one sweep back across the centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to the august instant of the primordial Fiat Lux, when along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, and the elements split and churned and formed into millions of galaxies. Thus, with that concreteness which is characteristic of physical proofs, [science] has confirmed the contingency of the universe and also the well-founded deduction as to the epoch when the world came forth from the hands of the Creator. Hence, creation took place. We say: “Therefore, there is a Creator. Therefore, God exists!”

Here is Pius XII, who always struck me as a pretty grim-looking guy:

Pope Pius XII

Pius’s approach is standard. The belief comes first, and if there is corroborating evidence, the believer will embrace it. He may even come to believe that it’s the basis of his belief. In this case, the pope is delighted to embrace modern cosmology when it can be interpreted as confirming the Church’s teaching. But of course the teaching was there before the cosmological evidence, and it has no empirical basis whatsoever.

It is Krauss’s contention that the cosmological playing field has now changed. And this is going to cause problems for theologians who have been content with the Big Bang Theory. He notes that, when he talks about a universe from nothing, they challenge his definition of the word “nothing” — that it’s not really nothing if something can spontaneously appear out of it. Ultimately, he thinks they want to define it as “that from which only God can create something.” Which may make theologians happy, I suppose, and people who want to hold on to their beliefs. But not the rest of us.