The power pendulum

It has been some time since I wrote about John Rawl’s ideas in his book The Theory of Justice but the more I see how political developments are evolving both in the US and in the world, the greater the value of implementing his ideas.

The key idea that he proposed was that when creating a system or structure for anything, we should work under a ‘veil of ignorance’ in which we do not know which particular individual or group characteristic we ourselves will have once the system is underway. What this insures is that we will try and create a system that is as fair as possible for everyone.
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Asking the wrong questions about science history

In his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn points out that the kinds of questions we often ask about the history of science and that we think are simple and have been adequately answered (such as “who discovered oxygen and when?” “Who discovered X-rays and when?”) turn out on close examination to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to answer.

It is not that there are no answers given in authoritative sources. It is that when we actually do examine the historical record, the situation turns out to be very murky, giving rise to the strong suspicion that such questions are the wrong ones to ask about the scientific enterprise. The simple answers that are given to such questions represent a rewriting of history to give readers a simple narrative but at the expense of giving a distorted sense of how science is done, as if scientific discoveries were clear and decisive events. I remember being very impressed by Kuhn’s examples to support his thesis when I first read his book and subsequent readings of science history have convinced me that he is right.

For example, the latest issue of the newsletter of the American Physical Society’s called the APS NEWS (vol. 16, no. 5, May 2007, p. 2) has an account of the discovery of the neutron. (The article is here but the current issue is password protected and non-APS members will have to wait a month before it is archived and people are given open access.) The title says “May 1932: Chadwick reports the discovery of the neutron” and recounts the familiar (to physicists anyway) story of how James Chadwick 75 years ago this month made the famous discovery for which he received the Nobel prize in 1935.

As the article proceeds to describe the history of the process, it becomes clear that its own story contradicts the impression given in the title.

As early as the 1920s, people had suspected that there was something in the atom’s nucleus other than protons. Some thought these additional particles were made up of an electrically neutral combination of the already known proton and electron but no one could confirm this. But experiments went on trying to isolate and identify the particle, and around 1930 two scientists Bothe and Becker found radiation coming from a target of Beryllium that had been bombarded with alpha particles. They thought that this radiation consisted of high-energy photons. Other experiments done by Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie also found similar radiation that they too attributed to high-energy photons.

Chadwick thought that this explanation didn’t quite fit and did his own experiments and concluded that the radiation was caused by a new neutral particle that was slightly heavier than a proton. He called it the neutron. He published a paper in February 1932 where he suggested this possibility and then in May 1932 submitted another paper in which he was more definite. It is this paper that gives him the claim to be the discoverer.

But like all major scientific discoveries, acceptance of the new idea is not immediate within the community and it took until around 1934 for a consensus to emerge that this neutron was indeed a new fundamental particle.

So who “discovered” the neutron and when? Was it the people who concluded much earlier than 1932 that there was something else in the nucleus other than protons? They were right after all. Was it Bothe or Becker, or the Juliot-Curies who first succeeded in isolating this particle by knocking neutrons out of materials? They had, after all, “seen” isolated neutrons even if they had not identified it as such. Or do we give the honor to Chadwick for first providing a plausible claim that it was a neutron?

As to when the neutron was discovered, it is also hard to say. Was it when its existence was first suspect in the early 1920s? Or when it was first isolated experimentally around 1930? If we say that since the title of discoverer was awarded to Chadwick, the date of discovery has to be assigned to something he specifically did, when exactly did he realize that he had discovered the neutron? In his first preliminary paper in February 1932? Or in his more definite paper in May? Clearly he must have known what he knew before he submitted (or wrote) the papers.

All we know for sure is that sometime between 1930 and 1934, the neutron was “discovered” and that certain scientists played key roles in that process. For historical conciseness, we give the honor to Chadwick and fix the date as May 1932 and the judgment is not an unreasonable one, as long we insist on demanding that such events have a definite date and author. But it is good to be reminded that all such assignments of time and place and people for scientific discoveries mask a much more complex process, where “discoveries” involve extended periods of time involving large numbers of people during which understanding is increased incrementally. There is often no clear before-after split.

The detailed stories are almost always more fascinating than the truncated histories we are taught.

The nature of consciousness

In the model of Cartesian dualism, we think of the mind as a non-material entity that interacts somehow with the material brain/body in some way. Descartes thought that the locus of interaction existed within the pineal gland in the brain but that specific idea has long since been discarded.

But that still leaves the more fundamental idea, referred to now as Cartesian dualism, that states that I do have a mind that represents the essential ‘me’ that uses my material body to receive experiences via my senses, stores them in my memory, and orders actions that get executed by my body. This idea that there is an inner me is very powerful because it seems to correspond so intuitively with our everyday experience and the awareness that we have of our own bodies and the way we interact with our environment. Even the way we use language is intricately bound up with the idea that there exists some essence of ourselves, as can be seen by the way the words ‘we’ and ‘our’ was used in this and the previous sentences. The power of this intuitive idea of something or someone inside us controlling things has resulted in phrases like ‘the ghost in the machine’ or a ‘homunculus’ (from the Latin for ‘little man’) to describe the phenomenon.

For religious people, the mind is further mixed up with ideas of the soul and thus gains additional properties. The soul is considered to be non-material and can exist independently of the body, allowing for the possibility of an afterlife even after the body has ceased to exist. This soul model causes some problems that resist easy answers. For example, life begins with the creation of a single fertilized egg. This single fertilized cell (called a zygote) then starts to multiply to 2, 4, 8, 16 , 32,. . . cells and so on. All these cells are material things. At what stage along this progression did a non-material entity like the soul appear and attach itself to the collection of cells?

I think it is safe to say that almost all cognitive scientists reject the idea of a non-material mind, some kind of homunculus inside the brain somewhere that ‘runs’ us. This immediately rules out the religious idea of a non-material soul, at least in any traditional sense in which the word is used.

But even though the existence of a non-material mind or soul has been ruled out, the Cartesian dualistic model is still a seductive idea that can tempt even those who reject any religious ideas and accept a framework in which the material body (and brain) is all there is. The reason it is so seductive is that even if we discard the mind/body distinction as being based on a nonmaterial/material splitting, the idea of a central processing agent still seems intuitively obvious.

Consider a situation where I am responding to something in my environment. We know that we experience the external world through our five senses (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste) and that these senses are triggered by material objects coming into contact with the appropriate sense organs (eyes, ears, nose, skin, tongue) and excite the nerve endings located in those organs. These excitations are then transmitted along the nervous system to that part of our brains called the sensory cortex after which they. . .what?

At this point, things get a bit murky. Clearly these signals enter and proceed through our brain and excite the neural networks so that our brain becomes ‘aware’ of the phenomena we experienced, but the problematic issue is what exactly constitutes ‘awareness.’

Suppose for the moment we stop trying to understand the incoming process and switch to the outgoing process. It seems like we have the ability to make conscious and unconscious decisions (pick up a cup or shake our head) and then the brain’s neural networks send these signals to the part of the brain known as the motor cortex which transmits them to the appropriate part of the nervous system that sends the signal to the body part that executes the action by contracting muscles.

It seems reasonable to assume that in-between the end of the incoming pathway and the start of the outgoing pathway that I have described that there is some central part of the brain, a sort of command unit, that acts as a kind of clearing house where the incoming signals get registered and processed, stored in memory for later recall, older memories and responses get activated, theories are created, plans are made, and finally decisions for action are initiated.

As a metaphor for this command unit, we can imagine a highly sophisticated kind of home theater inside our brain where the screen displays what we see, speakers provide the sound, and is also capable of providing smell and touch and taste sensations, and banks of powerful computers by which memories can be stored and retrieved and action orders transmitted. ‘Conscious events’ are those that are projected onto this screen along with the accessory phenomena.

Daniel Dennett in his book Consciousness Explained (1991) calls this model the Cartesian Theater and warns against falling prey to its seductive plausibility. Accepting it, he points out, means that we are implicitly accepting the idea of a homunculus, or ghost in the machine, who is the occupant of this theater in the brain and who is the inner person, the ‘real me’ and what that inner person experiences is sometimes referred to as the ‘mind’s eye.’ One problem is that this approach leads to an infinite regress as we try to understand how the Cartesian Theater itself works.

But if this simple and attractive model of consciousness is not true, then what is? This is where things get a little (actually a whole lot) complicated. It is clear that it is easier to describe what cognitive scientists think consciousness is not than what they think it is.

More to come. . .

Does science destroy life’s mysteries?

One of the reasons that elite science and elite religion are now coming into conflict is that science is now addressing questions that once were considered purely philosophical. By ‘purely philosophical’ I mean questions that are serious and deep but for which answers are sought in terms of logic and reason and thought experiments, with the only data used being those that lie easily at hand or appeals to common everyday experience.

The difference with science is that the latter does not stop there but instead uses those things as just starting points for more esoteric investigations. It takes those initial ideas and converts them into research programs where the consequences of the ideas are deduced for well-defined situations that can be examined experimentally and tentative hypotheses can be tested.

Daniel Dennett in his book Consciousness Explained (1991) talks (p. 21) about how science tackles what he calls ‘mysteries’:

A mystery is a phenomenon that people don’t know how to think about – yet. There have been other great mysteries: the mystery of the origin of the universe, the mystery of life and reproduction, the mystery of the design to be found in nature, the mysteries of time, space, and gravity. These were not just areas of scientific ignorance but of utter bafflement and wonder. We do not yet have the final answers to any of the questions of cosmology and particle physics, molecular genetics and evolutionary theory, but we do know how to think about them. The mysteries haven’t vanished, but they have been tamed. They no longer overwhelm our efforts to think about the phenomena, because now we know how to tell the misbegotten questions from the tight questions, and even if we turn out to be dead wrong about some of the currently accepted answers, we know how to go about looking for better answers.

That passage, I think, captures well what happens when something enters the world of science. The mystery gets tamed and becomes a problem to be solved.

The charge that people sometimes make against science is that it seems to take away all the awe and mystery of life’s wonders by ‘explaining’ them. I have never quite understood that criticism. If at all, my sense of awe is enhanced by having a better understanding of phenomena. For example, I have always enjoyed seeing rainbows. Has my enjoyment become less now because I happen to know how multiple scattering of light in individual droplets of water produce the effect?

As another example, I recently listened to a magnificent concert of the Cleveland Orchestra playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto #1. It was a truly moving experience. Was my sense of awe at the brilliance of the composition and its execution diminished by my knowledge that the orchestra players were using their instruments to cause the air around them to vibrate and that those vibrations then entered my ear, got converted to nerve signals that entered my brain, which was then able to Fourier transform the signals into reconstructing rich orchestral ‘sounds’ that my brain used to trigger chemical reactions that resulted in my sense of emotional satisfaction? I don’t think so. I kind of like the fact that I can enjoy the experience on so many levels, from the purely experiential to the emotional and the cerebral. In fact, for me the truly awe inspiring thing is that we have reached such depths of understanding of something that would have seemed so mysterious just a few hundred years ago.

The taming of mysteries and converting them into planned research programs of investigation is now rapidly progressing in the areas of cognition and consciousness. The reason that this causes conflict is because such close examination can result in the philosophical justifications for religion being undermined.

For example, the existence of god is predicated on a belief in a Cartesian dualism. God is ‘out there’ somewhere separate from my body while ‘I’ am here encapsulated by my body, and there is some gateway that enables that boundary to be crossed so that ‘I’ can sense god. For many religious people, this contact between the ‘I’ and god is a deep mystery.

In some sense, Descartes started taming this mystery by postulating that the contact gateway lay in the pineal gland in the brain but he could not explain how the interaction between the non-material god and the material brain occurred. Of course, no one takes the special role of the pineal gland seriously anymore. But the basic Cartesian dualism problem remains for both religious and non-religious people, in the form of understanding the mind-brain split. What is the ‘I’ of the mind that makes decisions and initiates actions and seems to control my life? Does it exist as a non-material entity apart from the material brain? If so how does it interact with it, since the brain, being the place where our sensory system stores its information, is the source of our experiences and the generator of our actions?

Religious people extend this idea further and tend to think of the mind as somehow synonymous with the ‘soul’ and as a non-material entity that is separate from the body though occupying a space somewhere in the brain, or at least the body. It is the mind/soul that is the ‘I’ that interacts with a non-material god. So the mind/soul is the ‘real’ me that passes on to the next life after death and the body is just the temporary vehicle that ‘I’ use to interact with the material world.

Religious people tend to leave things there and suggest that the nature of the mind/soul and how it interacts with both the material world (including the body that encapsulates it) and god is a mystery, maybe even the most fundamental mystery of all, never to be understood. And for a long time, even scientists would have conceded that we had no idea how to even begin to address these questions.

But no longer. The cognitive scientists have tamed even this mystery and converted it into a problem. This does not mean that the problem of understanding the mind and consciousness has been solved. Far from it. But it does mean that scientists are now able to pose questions about the brain and consciousness in very concrete ways and suggest experiments to further advance knowledge. Although they do not have answers yet, one should be prepared for major advances in knowledge in this area.

And as these results start to come in, the prospects for maintaining beliefs in god and religion are not good. Because if history is any guide, the transition is always one way, from mystery to problem, and not the other way around. And once scientists see something as a problem to be solved, they tend to be tenacious in developing better and better theories and tools for solving it until only some details remain obscure. And the way the community of scientists build this knowledge structure is truly awe-inspiring.

So the answer to this post’s title is yes, science does destroy the mysteries but it increases the awe.

More to come. . .

Presidential candidates Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich

In the Republican and Democratic primaries, Reps. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) are the only ones who opposed the Iraq war authorization act in 2002 and both have been calling for US troops to be withdrawn and closing of the bases.

In the latest debate amongst the Republican presidential candidates on May 16, Paul was asked about his position.

MR. WALLACE: Congressman Paul, you’re one of six House Republicans who back in 2002 voted against authorizing President Bush to use force in Iraq.

REP. PAUL: Right.

MR. WALLACE: Now you say we should pull our troops out. A recent poll found that 77 percent of Republicans disapprove of the idea of setting a timetable for withdrawal. Are you running for the nomination of the wrong party? (Scattered laughter.)

REP. PAUL: But you have to realize that the base of the Republican Party shrunk last year because of the war issue. So that percentage represents less people. If you look at 65 to 70 percent of the American people, they want us out of there. They want the war over.

In 19- — 2002, I offered an amendment to International Relations to declare war, up or down, and it was — nobody voted for the war. And my argument there was, if we want to go to war, and if we should go to war, the Congress should declare it. We don’t go to war like we did in Vietnam and Korea, because the wars never end. And I argued the case and made the point that it would be a quagmire if we go in.

Ronald Reagan in 1983 sent Marines into Lebanon, and he said he would never turn tail and run. A few months later, the Marines were killed, 241 were killed, and the Marines were taken out. And Reagan addressed this subject in his memoirs. And he says, “I said I would never turn tail and run.” He says, “But I never realized the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics,” and he changed his policy there.

We need the courage of a Ronald Reagan.

Later, he took on the myth that the reason for the 9/11 attacks was that “they hate us for our freedoms” and in the a subsequent exchange refused to bow down to Giuliani’s grandstanding on this issue. (You can see the video of that clip here.)

MR. GOLER: Congressman Paul, I believe you are the only man on the stage who opposes the war in Iraq, who would bring the troops home as quickly as — almost immediately, sir. Are you out of step with your party? Is your party out of step with the rest of the world? If either of those is the case, why are you seeking its nomination?

REP. PAUL: Well, I think the party has lost its way, because the conservative wing of the Republican Party always advocated a noninterventionist foreign policy.

Senator Robert Taft didn’t even want to be in NATO. George Bush won the election in the year 2000 campaigning on a humble foreign policy — no nation-building, no policing of the world. Republicans were elected to end the Korean War. The Republicans were elected to end the Vietnam War. There’s a strong tradition of being anti-war in the Republican party. It is the constitutional position. It is the advice of the Founders to follow a non-interventionist foreign policy, stay out of entangling alliances, be friends with countries, negotiate and talk with them and trade with them.

Just think of the tremendous improvement — relationships with Vietnam. We lost 60,000 men. We came home in defeat. Now we go over there and invest in Vietnam. So there’s a lot of merit to the advice of the Founders and following the Constitution.

And my argument is that we shouldn’t go to war so carelessly. (Bell rings.) When we do, the wars don’t end.

MR. GOLER: Congressman, you don’t think that changed with the 9/11 attacks, sir?

REP. PAUL: What changed?

MR. GOLER: The non-interventionist policies.

REP. PAUL: No. Non-intervention was a major contributing factor. Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we’ve been over there; we’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We’ve been in the Middle East — I think Reagan was right.

We don’t understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. So right now we’re building an embassy in Iraq that’s bigger than the Vatican. We’re building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us. (Applause.)

MR. GOLER: Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?

REP. PAUL: I’m suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it, and they are delighted that we’re over there because Osama bin Laden has said, “I am glad you’re over on our sand because we can target you so much easier.” They have already now since that time — (bell rings) — have killed 3,400 of our men, and I don’t think it was necessary.

MR. GIULIANI: Wendell, may I comment on that? That’s really an extraordinary statement. That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th. (Applause, cheers.)

And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that. (Applause.)

MR. GOLER: Congressman?

REP. PAUL: I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback. When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the shah, yes, there was blowback. A reaction to that was the taking of our hostages and that persists. And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem.

They don’t come here to attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They come and they attack us because we’re over there. I mean, what would we think if we were — if other foreign countries were doing that to us?

Paul is quite right on the facts about the reasons for the attacks. Bin Laden published a fatwa in 1996 outlining his reasons for ‘declaring war’ on America. The pundits were surprised when in an (unscientific) Fox News poll on who won held immediately after the debate, Paul polled second (with 25%) to Romney’s 29%, after having even led at one point.

What was appalling was the enthusiastic response that some in the crowd gave when Giuliani and Sam Brownback and Mitt Romney and Duncan Hunter implicitly but enthusiastically supported torture and the denial of due process.

You can see Dennis Kucinich express his views on Bill Maher’s show and also see former Alaska governor Mike Gravel (also seeking the Democratic nomination) challenge strongly the bipartisan consensus on the war.

There have been rumors that Paul and Gravel may not be invited to future debates. That would be a travesty because it is only people like them who are really challenging the banalities uttered by the so-called leading candidates, since the media has abandoned that role.

Philosophy and science

An interesting example of the different ways that scientists and ‘pure’ philosophers view things arose in an exchange I had in the comments of a previous post.

Commenter Kenneth brought up an interesting argument that I had not heard before for the existence of the afterlife, an argument that he said had originally been proposed by the philosopher Spinoza (1632-1677). Basically the argument boiled down to the assumption that each one of us is simply a collection of atoms arranged in a particular way. When a person (A) dies, those atoms are dispersed and join the universe of atoms that percolate through space and time. But there is always the possibility that, purely by chance as a result of random motion, a set of atoms will arrange themselves in exactly the same arrangement that made up A when A was still alive. So thus A will have been ‘reborn.’ Kenneth argues that thus the existence of life after death has been established, at least in principle.

The nature of the argument can be perhaps understood better with a simpler example of thoroughly mixing ink and water in a glass and then leaving it alone to sit undisturbed. We would think that this mixing is an irreversible process and that separation into water and ink again would not be possible except as a result of extraordinary efforts by external agents. But in fact if you simply wait long enough, there is a very remote possibility that the random motion of the individual ink and water molecules will result in a momentary spontaneous separation of the mixture in the container into two separate regions, one of pure water and the other of purely ink molecules (whatever ink molecules are).

Since all that this argument requires is the ability to wait for a very long time for which these unlikely events to occur, Kenneth has satisfied himself, from a philosophical point of view, that Spinoza’s argument is valid. And that once we concede the possibility that someone’s atoms can be reconstituted in its original form, the existence of life after death has been established, at least in principle

But science does not limit itself to these ‘in principle’ arguments. Such arguments are just the first steps. Science is always looking at the detailed consequences of such ideas in order to translate them into research programs. And this is where Spinoza’s argument for the possibility of an afterlife breaks down.

For one thing, the human body is not just an arrangement of atoms, like that of molecules in a mixture of ink and water, or the oxygen and nitrogen molecules in a container of air. The atoms in the human body are bound together in complex organic molecules, which are in turn held together by other forces to form cells and tissues and so on. It is not enough to just bring the atoms together, you also have to create the chemical reactions that fuse them into these molecules, and this requires energy from the outside used in a very directed way.

It is like frying an egg in a pan. Just breaking an egg into a skillet and leaving it there will not result in a fried egg, however long you wait, unless there is a source of energy to drive the reaction forward. A fried egg is not just a rearrangement of the atoms in a raw egg. It is one in which new compounds have been created and the creation of these compounds is a non-random process.

In addition, the probability of all the atoms that make up your body randomly arriving at the same locations that they occupied when you were alive is microscopically small. This is not a source of concern to Kenneth because all he needs is that this probability not be zero in order to satisfy his ‘in principle’ condition. But there is an inverse relationship between the probability of an event and the likely time that you would have to wait for the event to occur. For example, if you repeatedly throw a die, you would have to wait longer to get a six than to get just any even number because the probability of the former is less than that of the latter.

In the case of the body’s atoms coming together again, the probability is so small that the expected time for it to occur would be incredibly long. Again, it would not matter if this were a philosopher’s ‘in principle’ argument. But those arguments tacitly assume that nothing else is changing in the environment and that we have an infinite amount of time in the world to wait for things to occur.

But in reality events are never in isolation and science is always concerned about the interconnectedness of things. And this is where the ‘in principle’ argument breaks down. We know that the lifetime of the Sun is about ten billion years and that it will then become a huge ‘red giant’ that will grow enormously and even envelop the Earth. And later still, all the energy producing nuclear reactions in the stars will end, resulting in the heat death of the universe. So there will not be any surplus energy around, even in principle, to drive the chemical reactions to reconstitute the body’s molecules, even if they did manage to arrive randomly in exactly the right positions.

I think that this is where scientific research and philosophical speculations diverge. A scientist is not interested in just ‘in principle’ arguments for the afterlife of the kind that Kenneth says Spinoza makes. To be become interesting to scientists, Kenneth will have to provide at least numerical estimates of the probability the body’s atoms reconstituting themselves, and then use that probability to estimate the expected time for such an event to occur.

If that time is more than the expected heat death of the universe, then the question becomes moot. If it is less, then the scientist will ask if there is enough free energy at that time to drive the reaction forward and what is the probability that this energy will spontaneously be directed at the atoms in just the right amounts and directions to recreate the human body.

All these considerations, when brought together, suggest that Spinoza’s argument fails and that life after death as proposed by him is not going to ever happen.

That is the kind of difference between the approaches of pure philosophy and science.

Alternative realities

One of the things that I have noticed in recent years is the proliferation of what I call ‘alternative realities’.

In classical learning theory, it is believed that when someone confronts evidence that runs counter to that person’s prior knowledge, a state of cognitive dissonance occurs in the mind of the learner which only goes away when the learner’s knowledge structures have been adjusted to accommodate the new information.

This model of learning underlies what are known as ‘inquiry’ methods of teaching science where the teacher, having an understanding of what her students are likely to erroneously believe about some phenomena (such as electricity), deliberately sets up experiments for them to do whose results will directly confront their misconceptions, thus forcing the student into the difficult process of re-evaluation of what they already believe. By repeatedly going through this process at different levels of sophistication and context, the hoped for transformation is that the student develops an experiential understanding of the ‘true’ theory that the teacher is trying to teach.
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The science-religion debate

The ABC news ‘Face Off”, the ‘great’ debate between religion and atheism, was broadcast on Nightline last week. You can see the video of the program here. (You may be able to find the video of the full debate here.)

The side arguing for God’s existence was evangelist Ray “Banana Man” Comfort and his trusty sidekick Boy Wonder Kirk Cameron. The side arguing against was Brian “Sapient” (not his real last name) and Kelly, the creators of the Blasphemy Challenge and the people behind the Rational Response Squad.

The debate was initiated by Comfort who had contacted ABC News and requested it, saying that he could prove god’s existence. He set the bar for himself quite high. He promised ABC News that he would “prove God’s existence, absolutely, scientifically, without mentioning the Bible or faith” and added that “I am amazed at how many people think that God’s existence is a matter of faith. It’s not, and I will prove it at the debate – once and for all. This is not a joke. I will present undeniable scientific proof that God exists.”

The video of the program shows that the ‘debate’ was at a disappointingly low level, although to be fair the debate lasted for about 90 minutes and only edited portions were shown. From the outset, Comfort broke his promise, invoking both the Bible and faith. But even when it came to the ‘science’ part of his argument, he resorted once again to the tired Paley’s watch/Mount Rushmore arguments.

The shorter version of this old argument is this: “We can immediately tell when something is designed. If something is designed, it must have a designer. Nature looks designed to us and therefore must have been designed. That designer can only be god.”

The operational and philosophical weaknesses of this argument has been exposed by many people, including me, so that anyone who advances it cannot really be taken seriously unless they address those challenges to it. As far as I can see, Comfort did not do this. Although Comfort had previously alleged that the banana was the “atheist’s nightmare” (because it fits so perfectly in the human hand and human mouth, the banana and human hand and mouth had to have been designed that way) he did not bring bananas along as props. Perhaps he had been warned that his video of that claim has been the source of widespread merriment.

Kirk Cameron’s role seemed to be to undermine evolutionary theory but the clips of him doing that showed an embarrassing ignorance and shallowness. He invoked the old argument about the paucity of transitional forms but even here he brought it up in a form that would have made even those sympathetic to his point of view wince. He seemed to have the bizarre notion that evolution by natural selection predicts the existence every possible intermediate state between all existing life forms. He showed artist’s sketches of things that he called a “croc-o-duck (a duck with the head of a crocodile) and a “bull frog” (consisting of an animal that was half-bull and half-frog) and argued that the fact that we do not see such things means that evolution is wrong. Really. It was painful to watch him make a fool of himself on national TV.

Cameron seems to be suffering from an extreme form of a common misunderstanding about transitional forms. The fact that humans and other existing animals share common ancestors does not imply that there should be forms that are transitional between them as they exist now. What evolutionary theory states is that if you take any existing organism and follow its ancestors back in time, you will have a gradual evolution in the way the organisms look. So when we talk about transitional forms, we first have to fix the two times that set the boundaries. If we take one boundary as the present time and the other boundary as (say) four billion years ago when the first eukaryotic cell appeared, then there are a large number of transitional forms between those two forms. Richard Dawkins book The Ancestor’s Tale gives an excellent account of the type and sequence of the transitional forms that have been found. Of course, these ancestral forms have evolved along the many descendant forms so we would not expect to see them now in the same form they were when they were our ancestors. They can only be found in that form as fossils.

The DNA sequencing shows the connections between species as well and provide further evidence of the way species branched off at various points in time. So when evolutionary biologists speak of ‘transitional forms’, they are referring to finding fossils of those ancestors who preceded various branch points. The recent discovery of Tiktaalik, the 375-million year old fossil that has the characteristics of what a common ancestor of fish and mammals and amphibians would look like, is one such example. So is Archaeopteryx as a transitional form.

The ‘missing link’ argument against evolution, although lacking content, is one that will never die. One reason is the existence of people like Cameron who use it incorrectly. Another is that it is infinitely adaptable. For example, suppose you have a species now and a species that existed (say) two billion years ago and demand proof of the existence of a missing link. Suppose a fossil is found that is one billion years old that fits the bill. Will this satisfy those who demand proof of the missing link? No, because opponents of evolution can now shift their argument and demand proofs of the existence of two ‘missing’ links, one between the fossils of two and one billion years ago, and the other between one billion years ago and the present. In fact, the more transitional fossils that are found, the more ‘missing links’ that can be postulated!

This is what has happened with past discoveries of fossils. The fossil record of evolution has been getting steadily greater but the calls for ‘proof’ of the existence of missing links have not diminished.

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Respect for religion-5: Are the new atheists practicing bad politics?

There is no doubt that atheists are becoming more outspoken these days and this has led to people asking why these ‘new atheists’ are now so ‘militant’. I do not think ‘militant’ is quite the right word. What has happened is that atheists are undergoing a change of attitude about what is and is not considered respect for religion.

It used to be that when it came to discussions about religion, a different standard applied than to discussions about (say) politics. With the latter, you could come right out and say that someone was wrong, and that was not considered disrespectful. But with religion, that was not the case. It was considered bad form to say that god and the afterlife did not exist and that those beliefs had no basis.

What atheists and others were supposed to do when god came up was to just be quiet and not challenge religious beliefs or statements of faith. But it was never clear why this has to be the rules of the discourse. After all, if someone claimed that they believed in the fairies dancing in their garden, we are not obliged to ‘respect’ that belief by not challenging it. At the very least we might ask for evidence or say something like “Really? How interesting. What makes you believe that?” So when someone says that they believe in god, why should we not respond the same way? But if we did so, they would likely be insulted because religious beliefs are supposed to be either self-evidently true or exempt from the rules of evidence or the bar for evidence is set so low that anything goes (“I know god exists because I feel his presence when I pray.”).

The new atheists are having none of this old-fashioned notion of what constitutes respect for religion. The most that ‘respect’ can command is that we do not treat religious believers as being crazy because it is undoubtedly true that people who are perfectly rational about almost everything can have irrational beliefs in compartmentalized areas of their lives.

Respect cannot, and should not, be extended to discouraging the challenging religious beliefs. What the new ‘new atheists’ are doing is expressing their skepticism about religion directly, publicly, and sometimes in a spirit of mischievous humor.

The Blasphemy Challenge, where individuals post video clips of themselves cheerfully denying the Holy Spirit, are direct challenges to the fundamental beliefs of Christianity. The trigger for this challenge is the passage in the Bible (Mark 3:28-29) where Jesus draws a very clear line in the sand and says: “I tell you the truth, all the sins and blasphemies of men will be forgiven them. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin.” In other words, this particular sin, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, is the ultimate no-no, the sin that cannot be forgiven, ever. What the people behind the site say is that passages like this are meant to frighten people into believing in god, and the ‘respect for religion’ trope is being used to prevent people from pointing this out.

In the past, atheists would have simply ignored things like this. If you don’t believe in a god, why would you care if you were condemned by this non-existent god? But now, there are hundreds of them going online, publicly risking damnation by making jokes about the Holy Spirit. They are not calling religious people names or things like that. They are simply and publicly saying what they don’t believe.

This new atheism has ruffled quite a lot of feathers in a religious establishment that has got accustomed to having their pieties accepted unquestioningly. The Rational Response Squad, which is behind the Blasphemy Challenge, was even profiled on Nightline. In the interview, it is interesting how often the idea of ‘lack of respect’ comes up in the words of religious believers and the interviewer. But all the atheists are saying is that there is no evidence for god and they are not afraid of hell because there is no evidence that it exists either. The language of the atheists is scientific while the religious people appeal to faith and mystery and fear of hell.

Once again, it is perhaps the existence of the internet that has been the galvanizing force in this new movement. Formerly atheists were isolated. But now they are realizing that there are many, many more of them out there than they thought, and they are joining up with others, and discovering that being an atheist, far from being a lonely experience, is a lot of fun. That has to be a good feeling.

There is a political price to be paid for speaking out this way. Some religious people are using the well-known public dislike for atheism to cast doubt on science by implying that science and atheism are joined at the hip and to argue that modern science demands atheism. Richard Dawkins says that he is sometimes told even by people who agree with his views that he is helping the forces of religious fundamentalism by enabling them to portray all scientists as atheists and that hence science itself is atheistic.

This has happened to me too. As some readers know, I was on Ohio’s Science Standards Advisory Board. During the struggle to keep intelligent design creationism (IDC) out of the standards, I was told that my public atheism was actually being used by some IDC advocates on the board to argue that evolution was atheistic and thus bad. It was gently suggested that I be more discreet about my atheism. I think that what some ‘moderates’ fear is that people’s attachment to religion is so strong that if asked to choose between god or no god, and if science is identified with no-god, , they will choose god and thus science will be rejected, and the religious moderates will end up allied with the fundamentalist and extremists.

This really is the fundamental political question.

I think that the best political alliances are those formed around specific issues, not on the basis of compatible ideologies or even people. For example, in the movement that opposes the Iraq war, there are many factions, ranging all over the political and religious spectrum, who are unlikely to agree on other issues. And that is fine. Coalitions should form because they advocate similar policies on a particular issue.

The same thing arises with social issues like poverty and health care. The alliances for each will again be formed on the basis of agreement over specific policy proposals. When forming such alliances, each person and group will stay true to their own principles but come together on strategy and tactics to achieve a certain result.

For example, I work with and support a religious group, the InterReligious Task Force in Cleveland which does excellent work on highlighting issues of injustice in Central and South America. They began their work in response to the brutal rape and murder of four Catholic nuns by the US-supported dictatorship in El Salvador in 1980, and their motivation arises from the feeling that their religion calls upon them to fight for justice. I respect that. My motivation is different from theirs but we agree on the goal of justice for the people of that region and that is sufficient for joint action.

The same should apply to the science-religion question. I think that there is nothing wrong with the new atheists pointing out that the beliefs of even mainstream religions are not rational, but still joining with them to oppose the teaching of IDC as science. Presumably mainstream religions are opposed to teaching IDC in science classes because they think it is a bad policy. Thus they should be willing to work together with anyone, including atheists, on this issue even though the new atheists seek that ultimate end of religious beliefs altogether. This kind of disagreement does not have to be a barrier to working together on those things on which they agree.

I do not think there is really a problem here, except for a shallow understanding of the nature of coalition politics. The problem, if at all, is that people get offended because they are mixing the public with the personal. If someone disagrees with them because of their views on topic A, they are personally offended and will not work with them on topic B, even if they agree with them.

Respect for religion-4: Religion as Conversation-stopper

I have written in the past about how religion should be kept in the private sphere and out of the public sphere. I have since discovered that philosopher Richard Rorty wrote an interesting essay with the above title on this topic in 1994, that was published in his book Philosophy and Social Hope (1999). In the essay, Rorty challenges Stephen Carter who wrote a book The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion. (Thanks to Michael Berube for bringing Rorty’s essay to my attention.)

Rorty says:

Carter puts in question what, to atheists like me, seems the happy, Jeffersonian compromise that the Enlightenment reached with the religious. This compromise consists in privatizing religion — keeping it out of what Carter calls “the public square,” making it seem bad taste to bring religion into discussions of public policy.
. . .
We atheists, doing our best to enforce Jefferson’s compromise, think it bad enough that we cannot run for public office without being disingenuous about our disbelief in God; despite the compromise, no uncloseted atheist is likely to get elected anywhere in the country. We also resent the suggestion that you have to be religious to have a conscience — a suggestion implicit in the fact that only religious conscientious objectors to military service go unpunished. Such facts suggest to us that the claims of religion need, if anything, to be pushed back still further, and that religious believers have no business asking for more public respect than they now receive.

Rorty adds:

Contemporary liberal philosophers think that we shall not be able to keep a democratic political community going unless the religious believers remain willing to trade privatization for a guarantee of religious liberty.
. .
The main reason religion needs to be privatized is that, in political discussion with those outside the relevant religious community, it is a conversation-stopper. Carter is right when he says:

One good way to end a conversation — or to start an argument — is to tell a group of well-educated professionals that you hold a political position (preferably a controversial one, such as being against abortion or pornography) because it is required by your understanding of God’s will.

Saying this is far more likely to end a conversation that to start an argument. The same goes for telling the group, “I would never have an abortion” or, “Reading pornography is about the only pleasure I get out of life these days.” In these examples, as in Carter’s, the ensuing silence masks the group’s inclination to say, “So what? We weren’t discussing your private life; we were discussing public policy. Don’t bother us with matters that are not our concern.”

This would be my own inclination in such a situation. Carter clearly thinks such a reaction inappropriate, but it is hard to figure out what he thinks would be an appropriate response by nonreligious interlocutors to the claim that abortion is required (or forbidden) by the will of God. He does not think it is good enough to say: OK, but since I don’t think there is such a thing as the will of God, and since I doubt that we’ll get anywhere arguing theism vs. atheism, let’s see if we have some shared premises on the basis of which to continue an argument about abortion. He thinks such a reply would be condescending and trivializing. But are we atheist interlocutors supposed to try to keep the conversation going by saying, “Gee! I’m impressed. You have a really deep, sincere faith”? Suppose we try that. What happens then? What can either party do for an encore?

Rorty captures exactly the problems raised by the ‘respect for religion’ trope. Not only does the introduction of religious ideas not advance public policy discussions, it actually hinders them by introducing a non-evidence based, non-negotiable belief and thus stops the conversation dead in its tracks.

Rorty makes the excellent point that putting religion into the private sphere is the only way that can guarantee religious freedom. Once religion gets a toehold into the public sphere, it increasingly becomes dominated by a narrower and narrower range of views that seeks to exclude all but the true believers. So all those who worry about having freedom of religion should be working to keep it out of the public sphere.

What we should be doing instead is trying, along the lines suggested by John Rawls in his book A Theory of Justice, to find what moral premises we all have in common despite our differing personal backgrounds and belief structures.

Religious people might complain, in the words of Carter, that they are being forced ‘to restructure their arguments in purely secular terms before they can be presented’ in the public sphere and suggests that this is somehow unfair to them. Rorty replies that all that this requires is dropping references to the premises of the arguments (i.e., not saying things like “But that violates what it says in the Book of Leviticus….”) when discussing public policy, and that “this omission seems like a reasonable price to pay for religious liberty.” He goes on that this requirement “is no harsher, and no more a demand for self-destruction, than the requirement that we atheists, when we present our arguments, should claim no authority for our premises save the assent we hope they will gain from our audience.”

Rorty in his conclusions makes an important point: “Carter seems to think that religious believers’ moral convictions are somehow more deeply interwoven with their self-identity than those of atheists with theirs. He seems unwilling to admit that the role of the Enlightenment ideology in giving meaning to the lives of atheists is just as great as Christianity’s role giving meaning to his own life.”

So when atheists (of the ‘new’ variety and others) say that religion does not have any special place in any discussions of public policy and should not be immune from criticism, they are not being disrespectful or rude to religion, they are merely pointing out that “a speaker’s depth of spirituality is [no] more relevant to her participation in public debate than her hobby or her hair color.”

The new atheists are simply advocating a model of good democratic politics.