The accommodationists’ best case (Part 2 of 3)

(See part 1 here.)

The problem with the attempts by theologians to argue that understanding the ‘mystery’ of human experience lies outside the realm of science is that tools to better understand how the brain works are already at hand, with ambitious plans to map out all the brain synapses. (Thanks to Machines Like Us for the link.) Since the brain is what creates consciousness, understanding how the brain works is the precursor to understanding how we think and experience. (Those who think that consciousness or the ‘soul’ exist independently of the brain are of course resorting to Cartesian dualism, that there is a mind-body split, an idea which no serious scientist takes seriously and which even Descartes found difficult to justify.)
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Here we go again

We are going to see another round of discussions about whether the Bible is literally true. New computer simulations suggest the possibility that winds could have created a temporary land path over the Red Sea.

Of course, there is no independent scientific evidence that any of the Biblical stories earlier than about 650 BCE (which encompasses almost all the period covered the Old Testament) are true but religious people tend to be desperate these days and are likely to seize upon this as ‘proof’ that the Bible is true.

Of course, this leaves the sophisticated theologians, those who argue that the reason there is no evidence for god is because he exists ‘outside of space and time’ in a quandary. Does god act within our space and time or not?

What we will see once again is religious people saying that science has no relevance to religious beliefs, except when it appears to provide some support for it.

Update: The lead author of the paper has a Christian website. Why am I not surprised?

The accommodationists’ best case (Part 1 of 3)

I have written quite a lot about the conflict between those who say that science and religion are incompatible worldviews (referred to as unapologetic or new atheists) and those who say they are compatible (known as accommodationists).

I definitely belong to the first group. On the other hand, the National Academy of Sciences, the most elite body of scientists in the US, that has gone out of its way to make the accommodationist case. This is somewhat surprising in view of the fact that a whopping 93% of NAS members express “disbelief or doubt in the existence of God.” The NAS lays out its accommodationist case most clearly in a 2008 publication called Science, Evolution, and Creationism that is free and online.

Why would people whose own deep study of science has clearly resulted in disbelief go out of their way to assure religious believers that science does not exclude god? I suspect that they fear that if the public concludes that science is inherently atheistic, this will result in reduced financial support for science. Science in the US is heavily dependent on public financing allocated by the Congress and the White House, both or which are fearful of religious voters. He who pays the piper calls the tune and some scientists do not want to alienate those upon whom they depend for support of research.

That does not mean that I think these scientists are cynically saying things they don’t believe. There are many skeptics and unbelievers in both the scientific community and the general public who genuinely do believe that the case for some form of compatibility between science and religion can be made, and the NAS has them too. I think they are mistaken in this belief but the case they make for accommodationism is as good as anything you are likely to get anywhere. My point is that there was no imperative for the NAS to take a stand on either side of this issue. It could have simply advocated for good science and left this particular debate to its individual members to participate in. The fact that they felt obliged, as an organization, to weigh in on the accommodationist side is what I think reflects a political calculation.

I believe that the best case for accommodationism is that made by the NAS, because it consists purely of scientists. What you don’t want to do in these discussions is include theologians and other religious believers because they end up saying absurd things like ‘god exists outside of space and time’ or that ‘god works through the uncertainty principle’ or that ‘god must exist in order to produce something out of nothing’ or to ‘god is necessary to provide meaning to the universe and our existence’. Scientists generally cringe at such arguments, rightly seeing them as relics of outdated philosophical thinking that have no relevance in the light of modern science.

As examples of the woolly thinking that emerges when theologians get into the discussion, consider these statements by current Pope Ratzinger and his predecessor Pope John Paul II on the science-religion conflict. Popes don’t usually issue formal statements on such controversial topics until they have been thoroughly vetted by their top theologians, so these usually represent their most sophisticated thinking.

Pope Ratzinger, at a meeting on Monday, January 28, 2008 of academics of different disciplines sponsored by the Paris Academy of Sciences and Pontifical Academy of Sciences tried to put limits to science by saying that it cannot address the ‘mystery’ of human existence.

Pope Benedict warned Monday of the “seductive” powers of science that overpower man’s spirituality, reviving the science-versus-religion debate which recently forced him to cancel a speech after student protests.

“In an age when scientific developments attract and seduce with the possibilities they offer, it’s more important than ever to educate our contemporaries’ consciences so that science does not become the criterion for goodness,” he told scientists.

Scientific investigation should be accompanied by “research into anthropology, philosophy and theology” to give insight into “man’s own mystery, because no science can say who man is, where he comes from or where he is going”, the Pope said.

“Man is not the fruit of chance or a bundle of convergences, determinisms or physical and chemical reactions,” he told a meeting of academics of different disciplines sponsored by the Paris Academy of Sciences and Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Even earlier Pope John Paul II, in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on October 22, 1996, titled Truth Cannot Contradict Truth, also tried to put on limits to science by saying pretty much the same thing, invoking the mystery of human consciousness.

In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII had already stated that there was no opposition between evolution and the doctrine of the faith about man and his vocation, on condition that one did not lose sight of several indisputable points.
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The conciliar constitution Gaudium et Spes has magnificently explained this doctrine, which is pivotal to Christian thought. It recalled that man is “the only creature on earth that God has wanted for its own sake”… It is by virtue of his spiritual soul that the whole person possesses such a dignity even in his body. Pius XII stressed this essential point: If the human body take its origin from pre-existent living matter, the spiritual soul is immediately created by God… Consequently, theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the spirit as emerging from the forces of living matter or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man.
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The sciences of observation describe and measure the multiple manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with the time line. The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation, which nevertheless can discover at the experimental level a series of very valuable signs indicating what is specific to the human being. But the experience of metaphysical knowledge, of self-awareness and self-reflection, of moral conscience, freedom, or again of aesthetic and religious experience, falls within the competence of philosophical analysis and reflection, while theology brings out its ultimate meaning according to the Creator’s plans. (my emphasis)

What these popes and other religious apologists are trying to do is shift the discussion away from empirical evidence and back to philosophy, where they think they have a chance of holding their own. They do not realize that while philosophy is undoubtedly invaluable in helping us think clearly and use language more precisely, it has become marginal to the study of scientific and empirical questions, even big ones such as the origin of the universe.

Next: What does the NAS actually say?

The tea party takeover of the Republican Party

Jon Stewart gets it exactly right when he says that the only difference between the tea partiers and the Republican establishment is that the tea partiers really believe the crazy stuff the leadership has been spouting for years and is determined to actually implement them.

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Does the existence of the universe violate scientific laws?

Continuing from yesterday’s post, I said that some religious people think that since there is matter in the universe that did not exist before the universe came into being, this must constitute a violation of scientific laws and thus requires some agency to create it. But they do not understand that energy comes in many different forms and that they all have to be included in the calculation. The fact is that despite all the matter that exists in the universe, the net energy of the universe is zero because the positive energy in the matter is canceled by the negative gravitational potential energy. So the appearance of an entire universe out of nothing need not violate the law of conservation of energy or any other law. Hence unless expressly forbidden by an as yet unknown law, there is nothing to prevent a vast, even possibly infinite, number of universes to have been created and exist simultaneously with ours, each with its own space-time and laws and matter distinct from ours.
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Hawaii Five-0

They are apparently making a new version of this hit TV show that ran from 1968 to 1980. I don’t know if it will reprise the theme music from the original, which was one of the best ever.

Ah, nostalgia! Too bad that the increased demand for commercial time is squeezing out opening theme music.

The unbearable whininess of rich people

This amazing blog post by a University of Chicago law professor complains how unfair it is to characterize people like him as rich and how his family will be badly hurt by letting the Bush tax cuts expire for those earning over $250,000. Michael O’Hare and Brad De Long deduce that the complaining professor earns around $450,000 and deliver much needed rebukes.

[Update: The law professor Todd Henderson has since deleted his post and given up blogging as a result of the response to his post, and also because he says his wife strongly disagreed with him and did not consent to him posting in the first place.]

As the effort to make the rich even richer gets under full swing this fall, we are going to hear a lot of whining like this as the December 31st expiry deadline draws near. A lot of smoke is going to be blown about what constitutes being rich and so it is good to bear in mind the facts of income distribution in the US.

20% of households earn less than $19,178
20% of households earn between $19,178 and $36,000
20% of households earn between $36,000 and $57,568
20% of households earn between $57,568 and $91,705
20% of households earn over $91,705

The median household income is around $50,000. (‘Median’ means that half earn below and half above that figure). If we break down even further the people in the very top brackets:

10% of households earn between $100,349 and $138.254
5% of households earn between $138,254 and $329,070
1% of households earn between $329,070 and $482,129
0.5% of households earn between $482,129 and $1,401,635
0.1% of households earn between $1,401,635 and $6,473,710
0.01% of households earn over $6,473,710

So the Chicago law professor’s family earns about nine times the median income, is in the top 1% or so of income earners in the country, and yet whines about how tough it is for him to get by. This curious combination of greed and entitlement of the rich seems to be getting worse. In a previous post, I showed how the income share of the top 10% has increased greatly since 1979, a period that is referred to as ‘The Great Divergence’. Kevin Drum provides a chart that breaks it down even more.

blog_income_shares_1979_2007_1.jpg

It is clear that the rich have been making out like bandits and they still want more. Anyone still doubt that we have an oligarchy? How bad must it get before people like the anti-tax zealots among the tea partiers realize that they are being played for suckers by the oligarchy?

The last goal post?

One of the fascinating things about watching how the science and religion debate has evolved is to see how religious apologists have been backpedaling, shifting the goal posts, trying to find ways to avoid having god become redundant. This process has been going on ever since scientists no longer saw their role as reconciling science with religious revelations and started pursuing their lines of inquiry wherever it led. This decoupling of science from religion began in the mid-19th century as the new sciences of geology and biology made it impossible to believe in a 6,000 year-old Earth or in the special creation of species.

This began the inevitable process of scientific explanations contradicting the religious ones that had been used as evidence of god’s actions. As various inexplicable phenomena and miracles that had been considered evidence of god’s actions came under scientific scrutiny, they were found to have natural, physical explanations. And science has the huge advantage over religion in that it is reliable and predictable, unlike god explanations. As Stephen Hawking says in this interview, science will win over religion because science works.

The more sophisticated theologians and religious apologists realized that having their faith depend upon the existence of such gaps in knowledge was a losing strategy that was causing religion to look silly because it required constant shifting of things that were supposedly inexplicable by science (‘intelligent design’ being the most recent manifestation) and ‘the god of the gaps’ became a term of derision, with even religious apologists disavowing it. As Isaac Asimov said, “To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.”

As an example, in response to the publicity surrounding the book The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow that claims that god is an unnecessary concept, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was quoted as saying that “Belief in God is not about plugging a gap in explaining how one thing relates to another within the Universe. It is the belief that there is an intelligent, living agent on whose activity everything ultimately depends for its existence.” (I have just started reading The Grand Design and will provide a review when I am done.)

Williams’ comments were supported by other religious leaders in Britain. Denis Alexander, director of The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, said “The ‘god’ that Stephen Hawking is trying to debunk is not the creator God of the Abrahamic faiths who really is the ultimate explanation for why there is something rather than nothing.” Similarly, Fraser Watts, an Anglican priest and a scholar in the history of science at Cambridge University, said that “A creator God provides a reasonable and credible explanation of why there is a universe.”

These apologists’ words signal a shift to what may be the last goal post. Rather than looking for specific inexplicable things to ascribe to god’s actions, a strategy that has not worked well for them in the past, they have gone big, for the Hail Mary, saying that the universe itself, either its physical existence or the reason for its existence or both, is inexplicable without god. The cartoon strip Jesus and Mo recent points out one obvious problem with this approach.

(Another response to Hawking’s claim that god is unnecessary is to adopt a world-weary ‘So what?’ attitude, and suggest that these questions are not even interesting. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said: “Science is about explanation. Religion is about interpretation … The Bible simply isn’t interested in how the Universe came into being.” Sacks also tried to pooh-pooh the support for atheism generated by Hawking’s book, telling the London Times “What would we do for entertainment without scientists telling us with breathless excitement that God did not create the universe as if they were the first to discover this astonishing proposition.”)

So sophisticated modern theologians have been reduced to claiming that god has to exist as the ultimate creator of the universe, which is no different from one of Thomas Aquinas’s old proofs of god that said that you needed something to produce the something of our universe out of a prior nothingness. This argument may have seemed plausible at one time. After all, the universe has a lot of stuff in the form of planets and stars. How could all this stuff suddenly appear? Surely their sudden appearance must violate the laws of science and the only way this could happen is because of the actions of some divine being?

But that argument is simply not credible anymore. Theologians think that since there is matter in the universe that did not exist before the universe came into being, this must constitute a violation of currently accepted scientific laws and thus requires some agency to create it, and thus is evidence for god. Of course, as I have argued before, saying ‘God did it’ is not an explanation for anything in the first place but in the next post, I will show why this hope is misplaced even on scientific grounds because the creation of the universe does not violate any laws.