two science jokes…

 

 

A neutron goes into a bar and asks the bartender, “How much for a beer?”
The bartender replies, “For you, no charge.”

 

 

 

 

Two molecules are walking down the street and they run in to each other.
One says to the other, “Are you all right?”
“No, I lost an electron!”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m positive!”

(source)

 

 

 

 

“philosophy isn’t dead yet”

by Raymond Tallis

 

In 2010 Stephen Hawking, in The Grand Design, announced that philosophy was “dead” because it had “not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics”. He was not referring to ethics, political theory or aesthetics. He meant metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that aspires to the most general understanding of nature – of space and time, the fundamental stuff of the world. If philosophers really wanted to make progress, they should abandon their armchairs and their subtle arguments, wise up to maths and listen to the physicists.

 

This view has significant support among philosophers in the English-speaking world. Bristol philosopher James Ladyman, who argues that metaphysics should be naturalised, and who describes the accusation of “scientism” as “badge of honour”, is by no means an isolated case.

 

But there could not be a worse time for philosophers to surrender the baton of metaphysical inquiry to physicists. Fundamental physics is in a metaphysical mess and needs help. The attempt to reconcile its two big theories, general relativity and quantum mechanics, has stalled for nearly 40 years. Endeavours to unite them, such as string theory, are mathematically ingenious but incomprehensible even to many who work with them. This is well known. A better-kept secret is that at the heart of quantum mechanics is a disturbing paradox – the so-called measurement problem, arising ultimately out of the Uncertainty Principle – which apparently demonstrates that the very measurements that have established and confirmed quantum theory should be impossible. Oxford philosopher of physics David Wallace has argued that this threatens to make quantum mechanics incoherent which can be remedied only by vastly multiplying worlds.

 

Beyond these domestic problems there is the failure of physics to accommodate conscious beings. The attempt to fit consciousness into the material world, usually by identifying it with activity in the brain, has failed dismally, if only because there is no way of accounting for the fact that certain nerve impulses are supposed to be conscious (of themselves or of the world) while the overwhelming majority (physically essentially the same) are not. In short, physics does not allow for the strange fact that matter reveals itself to material objects (such as physicists).

 

And then there is the mishandling of time. The physicist Lee Smolin’s recent book, Time Reborn, links the crisis in physics with its failure to acknowledge the fundamental reality of time. Physics is predisposed to lose time because its mathematical gaze freezes change. Tensed time, the difference between a remembered or regretted past and an anticipated or feared future, is particularly elusive. This worried Einstein: in a famous conversation, he mourned the fact that the present tense, “now”, lay “just outside of the realm of science”.

 

Recent attempts to explain how the universe came out of nothing, which rely on questionable notions such as spontaneous fluctuations in a quantum vacuum, the notion of gravity as negative energy, and the inexplicable gift of the laws of nature waiting in the wings for the moment of creation, reveal conceptual confusion beneath mathematical sophistication. They demonstrate the urgent need for a radical re-examination of the invisible frameworks within which scientific investigations are conducted. We need to step back from the mathematics to see how we got to where we are now. In short, to un-take much that is taken for granted.

 

Perhaps even more important, we should reflect on how a scientific image of the world that relies on up to 10 dimensions of space and rests on ideas, such as fundamental particles, that have neither identity nor location, connects with our everyday experience. This should open up larger questions, such as the extent to which mathematical portraits capture the reality of our world – and what we mean by “reality”. The dismissive “Just shut up and calculate!” to those who are dissatisfied with the incomprehensibility of the physicists’ picture of the universe is simply inadequate. “It is time” physicist Neil Turok has said, “to connect our science to our humanity, and in doing so to raise the sights of both”. This sounds like a job for a philosophy not yet dead.

(source)

 

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dan dennett’s seven tools for thinking

by Daniel Dennett

 

 

 

Use Your Mistakes

 

We have all heard the forlorn refrain: “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!” This phrase has come to stand for the rueful reflection of an idiot, a sign of stupidity, but in fact we should appreciate it as a pillar of wisdom. Any being, any agent, who can truly say: “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!” is standing on the threshold of brilliance. We human beings pride ourselves on our intelligence, and one of its hallmarks is that we can remember our previous thinking and reflect on it – on how it seemed, on why it was tempting in the first place and then about what went wrong.

 

I know of no evidence to suggest that any other species on the planet can actually think this thought. If they could, they would be almost as smart as we are. So when you make a mistake, you should learn to take a deep breath, grit your teeth and then examine your own recollections of the mistake as ruthlessly and as dispassionately as you can manage. It’s not easy. The natural human reaction to making a mistake is embarrassment and anger (we are never angrier than when we are angry at ourselves) and you have to work hard to overcome these emotional reactions.

 

Try to acquire the weird practice of savouring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, once you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully set them behind you and go on to the next big opportunity. But that is not enough: you should actively seek out opportunities just so you can then recover from them.

 

In science, you make your mistakes in public. You show them off so that everybody can learn from them. This way, you get the benefit of everybody else’s experience, and not just your own idiosyncratic path through the space of mistakes. (Physicist Wolfgang Pauli famously expressed his contempt for the work of a colleague as “not even wrong”. A clear falsehood shared with critics is better than vague mush.)

 

This, by the way, is another reason why we humans are so much smarter than every other species. It is not so much that our brains are bigger or more powerful, or even that we have the knack of reflecting on our own past errors, but that we share the benefits our individual brains have won by their individual histories of trial and error.

 

I am amazed at how many really smart people don’t understand that you can make big mistakes in public and emerge none the worse for it. I know distinguished researchers who will go to preposterous lengths to avoid having to acknowledge that they were wrong about something. Actually, people love it when somebody admits to making a mistake. All kinds of people love pointing out mistakes.

 

Generous-spirited people appreciate your giving them the opportunity to help, and acknowledging it when they succeed in helping you; mean-spirited people enjoy showing you up. Let them! Either way we all win.

 

Respect Your Opponent

 

Just how charitable are you supposed to be when criticising the views of an opponent? If there are obvious contradictions in the opponent’s case, then you should point them out, forcefully. If there are somewhat hidden contradictions, you should carefully expose them to view – and then dump on them. But the search for hidden contradictions often crosses the line into nitpicking, sea-lawyering and outright parody. The thrill of the chase and the conviction that your opponent has to be harbouring a confusion somewhere encourages uncharitable interpretation, which gives you an easy target to attack.

 

But such easy targets are typically irrelevant to the real issues at stake and simply waste everybody’s time and patience, even if they give amusement to your supporters. The best antidote I know for this tendency to caricature one’s opponent is a list of rules promulgated many years ago by social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport.

 

How to compose a successful critical commentary:

 

1. Attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”
2. List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
3. Mention anything you have learned from your target.
4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

 

One immediate effect of following these rules is that your targets will be a receptive audience for your criticism: you have already shown that you understand their positions as well as they do, and have demonstrated good judgment (you agree with them on some important matters and have even been persuaded by something they said). Following Rapoport’s rules is always, for me, something of a struggle…

 

The “Surely” Klaxon

 

When you’re reading or skimming argumentative essays, especially by philosophers, here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for “surely” in the document and check each occurrence. Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word “surely” is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument.

 

Why? Because it marks the very edge of what the author is actually sure about and hopes readers will also be sure about. (If the author were really sure all the readers would agree, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning.) Being at the edge, the author has had to make a judgment call about whether or not to attempt to demonstrate the point at issue, or provide evidence for it, and – because life is short – has decided in favour of bald assertion, with the presumably well-grounded anticipation of agreement. Just the sort of place to find an ill-examined “truism” that isn’t true!

 

Answer Rhetorical Questions

 

Just as you should keep a sharp eye out for “surely”, you should develop a sensitivity for rhetorical questions in any argument or polemic. Why? Because, like the use of “surely”, they represent an author’s eagerness to take a short cut. A rhetorical question has a question mark at the end, but it is not meant to be answered. That is, the author doesn’t bother waiting for you to answer since the answer is so obvious that you’d be embarrassed to say it!

 

Here is a good habit to develop: whenever you see a rhetorical question, try – silently, to yourself – to give it an unobvious answer. If you find a good one, surprise your interlocutor by answering the question. I remember a Peanuts cartoon from years ago that nicely illustrates the tactic. Charlie Brown had just asked, rhetorically: “Who’s to say what is right and wrong here?” and Lucy responded, in the next panel: “I will.”

 

Employ Occam’s Razor

 

Attributed to William of Ockham (or Ooccam), a 14th-century English logician and philosopher, this thinking tool is actually a much older rule of thumb. A Latin name for it is lex parsimoniae, the law of parsimony. It is usually put into English as the maxim “Do not multiply entities beyond necessity”.

 

The idea is straightforward: don’t concoct a complicated, extravagant theory if you’ve got a simpler one (containing fewer ingredients, fewer entities) that handles the phenomenon just as well. If exposure to extremely cold air can account for all the symptoms of frostbite, don’t postulate unobserved “snow germs” or “Arctic microbes”. Kepler’s laws explain the orbits of the planets; we have no need to hypothesise pilots guiding the planets from control panels hidden under the surface. This much is uncontroversial, but extensions of the principle have not always met with agreement.

 

One of the least impressive attempts to apply Occam’s razor to a gnarly problem is the claim (and provoked counterclaims) that postulating a God as creator of the universe is simpler, more parsimonious, than the alternatives. How could postulating something supernatural and incomprehensible be parsimonious? It strikes me as the height of extravagance, but perhaps there are clever ways of rebutting that suggestion.

 

I don’t want to argue about it; Occam’s razor is, after all, just a rule of thumb, a frequently useful suggestion. The prospect of turning it into a metaphysical principle or fundamental requirement of rationality that could bear the weight of proving or disproving the existence of God in one fell swoop is simply ludicrous. It would be like trying to disprove a theorem of quantum mechanics by showing that it contradicted the axiom “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”.

 

Don’t Waste Your Time on Rubbish

 

Sturgeon’s law is usually expressed thus: 90% of everything is crap. So 90% of experiments in molecular biology, 90% of poetry, 90% of philosophy books, 90% of peer-reviewed articles in mathematics – and so forth – is crap. Is that true? Well, maybe it’s an exaggeration, but let’s agree that there is a lot of mediocre work done in every field. (Some curmudgeons say it’s more like 99%, but let’s not get into that game.)

 

A good moral to draw from this observation is that when you want to criticise a field, a genre, a discipline, an art form …don’t waste your time and ours hooting at the crap! Go after the good stuff or leave it alone. This advice is often ignored by ideologues intent on destroying the reputation of analytic philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology, macroeconomics, plastic surgery, improvisational theatre, television sitcoms, philosophical theology, massage therapy, you name it.

 

Let’s stipulate at the outset that there is a great deal of deplorable, second-rate stuff out there, of all sorts. Now, in order not to waste your time and try our patience, make sure you concentrate on the best stuff you can find, the flagship examples extolled by the leaders of the field, the prize-winning entries, not the dregs. Notice that this is closely related to Rapoport’s rules: unless you are a comedian whose main purpose is to make people laugh at ludicrous buffoonery, spare us the caricature.

 

Beware of Deepities

 

A deepity (a term coined by the daughter of my late friend, computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum) is a proposition that seems both important and true – and profound – but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous. On one reading, it is manifestly false, but it would be earth-shaking if it were true; on the other reading, it is true but trivial. The unwary listener picks up the glimmer of truth from the second reading, and the devastating importance from the first reading, and thinks, Wow! That’s a deepity.

 

Here is an example (better sit down: this is heavy stuff): Love is just a word.

 

Oh wow! Cosmic. Mind-blowing, right? Wrong. On one reading, it is manifestly false. I’m not sure what love is – maybe an emotion or emotional attachment, maybe an interpersonal relationship, maybe the highest state a human mind can achieve – but we all know it isn’t a word. You can’t find love in the dictionary!

 

We can bring out the other reading by availing ourselves of a convention philosophers care mightily about: when we talk about a word, we put it in quotation marks, thus: “love” is just a word. “Cheeseburger” is just a word. “Word” is just a word. But this isn’t fair, you say. Whoever said that love is just a word meant something else, surely. No doubt, but they didn’t say it.

 

Not all deepities are quite so easily analysed. Richard Dawkins recently alerted me to a fine deepity by Rowan Williams, the then archbishop of Canterbury, who described his faith as “a silent waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark”.

 

I leave the analysis of this as an exercise for you.

(source)

 

*******

 

 

ac grayling on humanism

by AC Grayling

 

The current quarrel between religious and non-religious outlooks is another chapter in a story whose previous main incidents are to be found in the mid-nineteenth century and the early seventeenth century, in connection respectively with Darwin’s discoveries in biology and the rise of natural science. Both are moments in the slow but bloody retreat of religion; so too is what is happening now. For despite all appearances, we are witnessing not the renaissance but the decline of religion.

 

Here I wish to comment on something that, in the current climate of debate, has been mainly overlooked: the fact that those who are not religious have available to them a rich ethical outlook, all the richer indeed for being the result of reflection as opposed to convention, whose roots lie in classical antiquity when the great tradition of ethical thought in Western philosophy began.

 

For convenience I use the term “humanists” to denote those whose ethical outlook is non-religiously based, premised on humanity’s best efforts to understand its own nature and circumstances.

 

Consider what humanists aspire to be as ethical agents. They wish always to respect their fellow human beings, to like them, to honour their strivings and to sympathise with them. They wish to begin every encounter, every relationship, with this attitude, for they keep in mind Emerson’s remark that we must give others what we give a painting; namely the advantage of a good light. Most of their fellow human beings merit this, and respond likewise. Some forfeit it by what they wilfully do. But in all cases the humanists’ approach rests on the idea that what shapes people is the complex of facts about the interaction between human nature’s biological underpinnings and each individual’s social and historical circumstances.

 

Understanding these things – through the arts and literature, through history and philosophy, through the magnificent endeavour of science, through attentive personal experience and reflection, through close relationships, through the conversation of humankind which all this adds up to – is the great essential for humanists in their quest to live good and achieving lives, to do good to others in the process, and to join with their fellows in building just and decent societies where all can have an opportunity to flourish – and where kindness and mutuality is the prevailing note of ethical interaction.

 

And this is for the sake of this life, in this world, where we suffer and find joy, where we can help one another, and where we need one another’s help: the help of the living human hand and heart. A great deal of that help has to be targeted at the other side of what the human heart is – the unkind, angry, hostile, selfish, cruel side; the superstitious, tendentious, intellectually captive, ignorant side – to defeat or mitigate it, to ameliorate the consequences of its promptings, to teach it to be different; and never with lies and bribes.

 

Humanists distinguish between individuals and the wide variety of belief systems they variously adhere to. Some belief systems (astrology, feng shui, crystal healing, animism…the list is long) they combat robustly because they have falsehoods as premises – many indeed are inanities – and even more, because too often belief in some of those falsehoods serves as a prompt to murder. Humanists contest them as they would contest any falsehood. But with the exception of the individuals who promote these systems when they should know better, humanism is not against the majority who subscribe to them, for it recognises they were brought up in them as children, or turn to them out of need, or adhere to them hopefully.

 

These are fellow human beings, and humanists profoundly wish them well; which means that they wish them to be free, to think for themselves, to see the world through clear eyes. If only, says the humanist, they would have a better knowledge of history! If only they understood what their own leaders think of the simple version of the faiths they adhere to, substituting sophistry in its place. For whereas the ordinary believer has a somewhat misty notion of a father-cum-policeman-cum Father Christmas-cum-magician personal deity, their theologians deploy a polysyllabic, labyrinthine, intricate, sophisticated, complexified approach, that some go so far as to claim that god does not have to exist to be believed in. The standard basis of religious belief – subjective certainty – is hard enough to contest, being nonrational at source, but this is beyond orbit. It is hard to know which is worse: the theologians who are serious about what they say in these respects, and those who know it for a game.

 

In contrast to the certainties of faith, a humanist has a humbler conception of the nature and current extent of knowledge. All the enquiries that human intelligence conducts into enlarging knowledge makes progress always at the expense of generating new questions. Having the intellectual courage to live with this open-endedness and uncertainty, trusting reason and experiment to gain us increments of understanding, having the integrity to base one’s theories on rigorous and testable foundations, and being committed to changing one’s mind when shown to be wrong, are the marks of honest minds. In the past humanity was eager to clutch at legends, superstitions and leaps of credulity, to attain quick and simple closure on all they did not know or understand, to make it seem to themselves they did know and understand. Humanism recognises this historical fact about the old myths, and sympathises with the needs that drive people in that direction. It points out to such that what feeds their hearts and minds – love, beauty, music, sunshine on the sea, the sound of rain on leaves, the company of friends, the satisfaction that comes from successful effort – is more than the imaginary can ever give them, and that they should learn to re-describe these things – the real things of this world – as what gives life the poetry of its significance.

 

For that is what humanism is: to repeat and insist on the value of things human. Its desire to learn from the past, its exhortation to courage in the present and its espousal of hope for the future, are about real things, real people, real human need and possibility, and the fate of the fragile world we share. It is about human life; it requires no belief in an afterlife. It is about this world; it requires no belief in another world. It requires no commands from divinities, no promises of reward or threats of punishment, no myths and rituals, either to make sense of things or to serve as a prompt to the ethical life. It requires only open eyes, sympathy and the kindness it prompts, and reason.

 

Taken from AC Grayling’s Against All Gods, published by Oberon Books

 

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“why people believe in conspiracy theories”

by Sander van der Linden

 

Did NASA fake the moon landing? Is the government hiding Martians in Area 51? Is global warming a hoax? And what about the Boston Marathon bombing…an “inside job” perhaps?

 

In the book “The Empire of Conspiracy,” Timothy Melley explains that conspiracy theories have traditionally been regarded by many social scientists as “the implausible visions of a lunatic fringe,” often inspired by what the late historian Richard Hofstadter described as “the paranoid style of American politics.” Influenced by this view, many scholars have come to think of conspiracy theories as paranoid and delusional, and for a long time psychologists have had little to contribute other than to affirm the psychopathological nature of conspiracy thinking, given that conspiricist delusions are commonly associated with (schizotype) paranoia.

 

Yet, such pathological explanations have proven to be widely insufficient because conspiracy theories are not just the implausible visions of a paranoid minority. For example, a national poll released just this month reports that 37 percent of Americans believe that global warming is a hoax, 21 percent think that the US government is covering up evidence of alien existence and 28 percent believe a secret elite power with a globalist agenda is conspiring to rule the world. Only hours after the recent Boston marathon bombing, numerous conspiracy theories were floated ranging from a possible ‘inside job’ to YouTube videos claiming that the entire event was a hoax.

 

So why is it that so many people come to believe in conspiracy theories? They can’t all be paranoid schizophrenics. New studies are providing some eye-opening insights and potential explanations.

 

For example, while it has been known for some time that people who believe in one conspiracy theory are also likely to believe in other conspiracy theories, we would expect contradictory conspiracy theories to be negatively correlated. Yet, this is not what psychologists Michael Wood, Karen Douglas and Robbie Suton found in a recent study. Instead, the research team, based at the University of Kent in England, found that many participants believed in contradictory conspiracy theories.

 

For example, the conspiracy-belief that Osama Bin Laden is still alive was positively correlated with the conspiracy-belief that he was already dead before the military raid took place. This makes little sense, logically: Bin Laden cannot be both dead and alive at the same time. An important conclusion that the authors draw from their analysis is that people don’t tend to believe in a conspiracy theory because of the specifics, but rather because of higher-order beliefs that support conspiracy-like thinking more generally.

 

A popular example of such higher-order beliefs is a severe “distrust of authority.” The authors go on to suggest that conspiracism is therefore not just about belief in an individual theory, but rather an ideological lens through which we view the world. A good case in point is Alex Jones’s recent commentary on the Boston bombings. Jones, (one of the country’s preeminent conspiracy theorists) reminded his audience that two of the hijacked planes on 9/11 flew out of Boston (relating one conspiracy theory to another) and moreover, that the Boston Marathon bombing could be a response to the sudden drop in the price of gold or part of a secret government plot to expand the Transportation Security Administration’s reach to sporting events. Others have pointed their fingers to a ‘mystery man’ spotted on a nearby roof shortly after the explosions. While it remains unsure whether or not credence is given to only some or all of these (note: contradicting) conspiracy theories, there clearly is a larger underlying preference to support conspiracy-type explanations more generally.

 

Interestingly, belief in conspiracy theories has recently been linked to the rejection of science. In a paper published in Psychological Science, Stephen Lewandowsky and colleagues investigated the relation between acceptance of science and conspiricist thinking patterns. While the authors’ survey was not representative of the general population, results suggest that (controlling for other important factors) belief in multiple conspiracy theories significantly predicted the rejection of important scientific conclusions, such as climate science or the fact that smoking causes lung cancer. Yet, rejection of scientific principles is not the only possible consequence of widespread belief in conspiracy theories.  Another recent study indicates that receiving positive information about or even being merely exposed to conspiracy theories can lead people to become disengaged from important political and societal topics. For example, in their study, Daniel Jolley and Karen Douglas clearly show that participants who received information that supported the idea that global warming is a hoax were less willing to engage politically and also less willing to implement individual behavioral changes such as reducing their carbon footprint.

 

These findings are alarming because they show that conspiracy theories sow public mistrust and undermine democratic debate by diverting attention away from important scientific, political and societal issues. There is no question as to whether the public should actively demand truthful and transparent information from their governments and proposed explanations should be met with a healthy amount of scepticism, yet, this is not what conspiracy theories offer. A conspiracy theory is usually defined as an attempt to explain the ultimate cause of an important societal event as part of some sinister plot conjured up by a secret alliance of powerful individuals and organizations. The great philosopher Karl Popper argued that the fallacy of conspiracy theories lies in their tendency to describe every event as ‘intentional’ and ‘planned’ thereby seriously underestimating the random nature and unintended consequences of many political and social actions. In fact, Popper was describing a cognitive bias that psychologists now commonly refer to as the “fundamental attribution error”: the tendency to overestimate the actions of others as being intentional rather than the product of (random) situational circumstances.

 

Since a number of studies have shown that belief in conspiracy theories is associated with feelings of powerlessness, uncertainty and a general lack of agency and control, a likely purpose of this bias is to help people “make sense of the world” by providing simple explanations for complex societal events — restoring a sense of control and predictability. A good example is that of climate change: while the most recent international scientific assessment report (receiving input from over 2500 independent scientists from more than a 100 countries) concluded with 90 percent certainty that human-induced global warming is occurring, the severe consequences and implications of climate change are often too distressing and overwhelming for people to deal with, both cognitively as well as emotionally. Resorting to easier explanations that simply discount global warming as a hoax is then of course much more comforting and convenient psychologically. Yet, as Al Gore famously pointed out, unfortunately, the truth is not always convenient.

(source)

 

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singapore: LGBT hell

 

 

Justice Quentin Loh yields to Singapore’s prudish public mores when he rules that a law introduced by the British in 1938 which criminalises homosexual activity between men still stands.

 

High Court upholds anti-gay sex law, gay couple’s appeal rejected

 

The colonial statute reads:

 

“Any male person, who in public or private, commits or abets the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to 2 years.”

 

The prose is clunky and tortuous. I am not surprised the statute based itself on the wording of Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 of the United Kingdom.

 

One can read Justice Quentin Loh’s written judgement here.

 

Although the Singapore authorities do not actively crush out the LGBT community like cockroaches, think of Malaysia, think of Iran, Saudi Arabia, etcetera; to allow 377A to stand is to preach a clear message to the 21st century world. If you are gay, Singapore does not welcome you. If you are lesbian, Singapore tolerates you. If you are transgender, kiss your arse goodbye.

 

Singapore appears to be a society garbaged with religious and socially conservative hate-mongers and bigots who masturbate to outdated patterns of thinking. Many erroneously think marriage is defined only as one man plus one woman equal children when no forms of state-sanctioned contract existed in the early foundations of human history. Cave man might have fucked cave woman  but monogamy? Marital fidelity? Come on. Values like marital fidelity did not exist then. Right up to the 19th century, marriage acts were acts of economic and social convenience. Woman love man? No. Man love woman? Never.

 

Homogenital activity is not a Western invention. It existed since homo sapiens learnt to enjoy copulation. Ancient China. Persia. Ancient Greece. Ancient Rome. Certain ancient Southeast Asian communities. In Europe, Richard the Lion-Hearted’s romance with Philip the King of France was well known, even though he continued bedding other women. Monks and nuns wrote love letters and poetry to one another. Laws criminalising homosexual acts were almost non-existent in pre-crusading Europe. Homogenital play also exists in the non-human animal kingdom. Go ask the biologists and naturalists. Ask David Attenborough.

 

Is the “purpose” of marriage procreation? More like companionship. More like mutual love. If the State outlaws same-sex marriage on the fact that these couplings cannot produce offspring, then Big Brother should rule out infertile different-sex couplings too. There is no such thing as a “purpose” and “design” for everything. Marriage and the nuclear family are social constructions. They are not immutable and eternal entities.

 

And for the last time, homosexuality is NOT a choice. One does not choose to be LGBT like one chooses to attend City Harvest Church or New Creation Church or for that matter none of these money-hoarding rackets. Did Charles O. Howard choose to be gay so he could be thrown into the sea and drowned by thugs? Did Matthew Shepard choose to be gay for him to be tortured and murdered by anti-gay Christian bullies? Did Michael Sandy choose to be gay so that he could be run down by a car driven by anti-gay hooligans? Do LGBT Singaporeans choose to be the way they are only to be discriminated against and needlessly demonised? Do LGBT Ugandans choose to be the way they are so that they can be hunt down by the Ugandan Christian bigots and the predominantly Christian government like wild animals?

 

There is a lot of research already done on homosexuality and the conclusion seems clear. People do not choose their sexual orientation. They may be sexually abused by a member of the same sex when they were young. They may have felt unloved by their fathers when they were young. They may have imbibed mixed sexual identity signals when young. They may have several older brothers. They may have several older sisters. Whatever the scenario, whatever the hypothesis, may it be epigenetic, prenatal, biological or environmental, they do not choose to be the way they are. That is why the majority of gay “conversions” fail.

 

It is cruel to forbid the sexual expression of the LGBT community when they do not harm anyone. Laws are meant to protect and not alienate people. The argument that legalising homosexual activity may lead to acceptance of paedophilia and polygamy and all sorts of deviance is ridiculous. Having sex with prepubescent children harms them psychologically and emotionally. Polygamy rolls down the slippery slope of incest, sexual and psychological abuse. Zoophilia is still a debatable issue although I do not see why it is wrong if the act does not harm the animal and if precautions are taken to prevent animal-to-human transmission of disease. Consenting same-sex adults who make love to each other in private harms no one. What is it to Singaporeans that two men happen to enjoy jerking off together? We may be disgusted – as gays will too at the sight of breasts or erect clitorises – but it is none of our business.

 

I cannot understand how legalising homosexual activity will erode Singapore’s “moral values”. Heterosexual people will still be fucking other heterosexual people and if they wish, get married as well. They will not change their sexual orientation because Singapore chooses to treat the LGBT as equal. Besides, what moral values are Singaporeans talking about? The Singaporeans I see and know still avoid donating even peanuts on flag days. The Singaporeans I see and know still jostle and knuckle selfishly for seats on the bus or train during rush-hour, ignoring the pregnant, the elderly and children. The Singaporeans I see and know still put the blame on foreigners for their unemployment woes when they themselves do not wish to take on the jobs the foreigners take. The Singaporeans I see and know still tailgate, horn at and irritate one another on the roads. The Singaporeans I see and know still make life difficult for service industry providers. The Singaporeans I see and know still mishandle public funds for their selfish ends. The heterosexual Singaporeans I see and know still have extramarital sex, divorce one another, molest and rape women and children.

 

Tsk, tsk. Without same-sex marriage, already Singapore has relatively high divorce rates. Without legalising homosexuality, the family unit is already “breaking down”. Please stop accusing the LGBT community for being promiscuous and debauched.

 

For honesty’s sake, what “moral values” are Singaporeans talking about when they piss at their fellow LGBT Singaporeans? There is this ancient story about Jesus scribbling on the sand while a self-righteous mob attempted to stone a woman whom they caught in the act of adultery (one wonders how they manage to catch her in the act – peeping toms and voyeurs they must be). Jesus looked up and calmly request for anyone who has no sin to cast the first stone. No one did.

 

If the comments on Yahoo News Singapore are anything to go by, Singaporeans must be one cruel and vicious rabble of hooligans and thugs. Here are some of the comments:

 

“Now that it is ruled that sexual intercourse between 2 men is illegal (not only immoral) isn’t it proper they should be charged and arrested and put in jail?”

- Richard

 

“Its wont happened in singapore. i be the first one to say NO…SICK PEOPLE PLS GO UNITED STATES IF U SICK PEOPLE WANT it…”

- Ric

 

“Sodomy is wrong! All you sodomite and homosexual, the law had not penalised any of your kind. You are just pushing the limit.”

- Boggeh

 

“What kind of Lawyer is that Choo Zheng Xi? Does he not have any moral? Or maybe he only care about money? This is the kind of lawyers that I look down on. No sense of justice and moral. Just be careful of tribulation… will his kid be straight?…”

- Janeseeit

 

“Repealing Section 377 is like allowing terrorist to operate freely in Singapore. they will destroy the moral fabric , pollute the mind of the young and increase HIV infection. Homosexuality is a disease that need proper medical research to cure. This is not natural as some people think. Only Lady Boys are true because they are born as such. Others re due to their polluted values and mind set. We should not encourage such lifestyle. This are rotten western garbage. look at US and Europe , they are all sliding towards abyss. isn’t that enough?”

- BB See

 

“Knowing that it is something which is not right yet you FORCE the society to accept through legal actions or SANCTIONS is a way and a act of TERRORISM!!!

TERRORISM can be excercise in many forms not just physical attacks or bring harm to others but bringing harm to others by forms of THREATS is TERRORISM!”

- Crusade

 

“they never read sodom & gomorrah”

- Akhirat

 

“cut away their kkj, see they will change or not…I myself, believe gay should be jailed. f u gay.”

- Sanctuary

 

“There are only 2 Genders in this world. 1. Man 2. Woman.
Our body are living proof of GOD existence. The ability to recreate, regenerates, growth cells & reproductivity.
Man has his own reproductivity system so does woman, the shapes & it’s purpose.

Only sick men & women come out with 3rd gender which is Gender X.
The high court in Singapore not only lends out great help to the society but also does what pleases in GOD’s eye.

Everything is in Lord’s almighty creation is only foul humans came out with the Gender X and sickening relationship.
YOU are not born this way but YOU chose to!!!!!!”

- Crusade

 

“Since this couple has openly confessed that they are criminal, I urge the police to act with warrant of arrest and bring conviction in a court of law. That will teach these slef-made heroes a lesson.”

- Joseph

 

“thank God for the ruling. gays belong only within their own imagination… sick people… get help!”

- John, Mohd

 

“Gays are the most disgusting beings on earth. When it comes to holes, women still better – they have 3 holes.”

- Ritchie Gan

 

“Do not forget the lessons from the destruction of the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Vice and Homosexualism are some of the prime reasons for their punishment.”

- Simon B

 

“After the judgement was read, these two disgusting homosexuals Gary Lim and kenneth Chee went back home for suk, play back side and whatever these animals do. PCC each other. PUKE”

- Templar

 

“Good move, banned all this freaks… they can do all funny things at home, why wanna make it legalized?”

- Dolphin Tan

 

“If the gays are right, then God must have done wrong when he wiped out the gays in Sodom & Gomorrah. Who are gays in God’s eyes? Read Genesis 18-19 and Romans 1:24-32. Rubbish or repent?”

- Small

 

“What will they ask for next? That they be allowed to marry their favourite pet dog/horse or panda as kindness to animals??”

- Aristotle

 

One can read the rest of the piffle here.

 

I really hope the commentators are not mature adults but teenagers and their hormone-laced minds. Give them time and a good liberal arts education they will soon change their minds. I too was once an anti-LGBT bigot. I have since changed my mind on the subject after reading a significant number of research papers and studies on the issue. As for the religious arguments, they are rubbish. One does not interpret the bible at face value. I do not wish to repeat my arguments about biblical interpretation and theology. Why am I suspecting it is a waste of time reasoning with Singaporeans like the Yahoo News commentators? These folks do not listen to philosophical reasoning, logic and science. They seem to trust ancient texts more than contemporary knowledge.

 

We may lose this one battle. But the war continues. Like racism and slavery, the homosexuality issue will one day be won. Humanism, reason and science will triumph.

 

*******

“monkeys shun selfish others”

by LiveScience

 

Capuchin monkeys are known for their ability to recognize when they’re being treated inequitably, but it now appears the primates can even spot unfairness in situations that don’t involve themselves.

 

The fluffy-faced monkeys judge the social interactions of others and hold biases against individuals behaving poorly, new research shows.

 

In a pair of studies, researchers investigated how capuchin monkeys in captivity reacted to different third-party social interactions. In one study, capuchins watched two actors engage in reciprocity exchanges, in which one actor handed over several balls to another, who then either reciprocated or selfishly kept all the balls. The second study involved a similar setup, but this time one actor helped or refused to help another actor who was struggling to open a container.

 

After each scene, the monkeys chose a treat from one of the actors — they consistently avoided treats from actors who refused to reciprocate or help. Capuchins in the wild may keep tabs on group members to figure out whom to avoid interacting with on a specific day, researchers said.

 

“The research implies capuchin monkeys are judging other individuals even when they aren’t involved in the action, something that humans do all the time,” said Sarah Brosnan, an ethnologist at Georgia State University, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “It suggests the behavior may be deeply rooted in the primate family tree.”

 

In all fairness

 

In 2003, Brosnan and her colleagues discovered capuchin monkeys have a sense of fairness. They trained captive monkeys to hand them an object in exchange for a cucumber slice or the preferable grape. If a capuchin saw another monkey receive a grape while it was given a cucumber, it would refuse the reward or even throw the cucumber at the researcher.

 

Subsequent research showed other cooperative primates, including chimpanzees, also know when they’re being treated unfairly, but nobody has looked at whether nonhuman primates can spot inequity in situations that don’t involve themselves.

 

“So we wondered if they’re sensitive to third-party interactions,” said James Anderson, a primatologist at the University of Stirling in Scotland and lead author of the new studies. “Can they form impressions of individuals based on how those individuals behave towards one another?”

 

To find out, Anderson and his colleagues tested capuchins’ reactions to scenes of reciprocity. Two actors began with two containers each, one of which contained three balls. One actor held out an empty container to the second actor, who then placed her balls into the container. Next, the second actor similarly requested balls from the first actor. In half of the trials, the first actor refused to reciprocate and kept all six balls to herself (the actors switched places throughout the experiment and equally played the non-reciprocator role).

 

After each scene, both actors offered an identical treat to the monkey — the capuchin chose a treat by reaching toward one of the outstretched hands. The primates showed no preference when both actors reciprocated, but they consistently avoided taking treats from non-reciprocators, the researchers found in the study, detailed online recently in the journal Cognition.

 

The team then conducted “incomplete” and “impoverished” reciprocity sessions, in which the reciprocator gave over only one of her three balls or the single ball she started with, respectively. The monkeys showed no significant preferences in either cases, but were overall more likely to accept treats from impoverished than incomplete reciprocators, even if the receiving actors pretended to be satisfied with an incomplete exchange. “[The impoverished actor] gave everything she had started off with, so it’s as if the monkeys accepted her intention to fully reciprocate,” Anderson said.

 

Showing biases

 

In a companion study, published today (March 5) in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers tested how capuchins regard unhelpful people. Here, one actor struggled to open a container and requested help from the second actor, who either helped or turned away. Similar to before, the capuchins avoided accepting treats from unhelpful actors. [No Fair? 5 Animals With a Moral Compass]

 

The researchers then investigated what happens when both actors have a container. Again, if the second actor refused to help, the monkeys showed a sharp bias against her and accepted treats only from the other actor. However, if the actor didn’t help because she was too occupied with her own container, the capuchins showed no biases, further suggesting the monkeys considered the actors’ intentions. (The team also tested if the act of turning away, rather than being unhelpful, was specifically to blame for the monkeys’ biases; it wasn’t.)

 

Importantly, the objects handled in both studies had no relevance to the monkeys, Anderson said. If actors handled food, the monkeys would likely choose whoever they thought would give them the most treats.

 

Brosnan agreed: “Using food could have changed the capuchins’ behaviors.”

 

A widespread behavior?

 

“I think it’s a really interesting study with implications for helping us understand how cooperation comes about,” said Malini Suchak, a primatologist at Emory University, who wasn’t involved in the research. Capuchins and some other primate species are very cooperative, so knowing who in their community will be the most reciprocal or helpful is important. “If you choose the wrong partner — a cheater — you’ve lost at that point.”

 

Darby Proctor, also an Emory primatologist, says the research may help “inform us about our own evolution.” If social evaluation isn’t widespread among primates, it may mean the behavior evolved from some kind of selective pressure, she said.

 

Brosnan, on the other hand, wonders if the behavior exists in other animals, such as birds and fish that have been shown to gather information by “eavesdropping” on others.

 

But the experts agree that before looking at other species, researchers should see if capuchins really do judge the actions of their own kind. “I would want to see what they could get the capuchins to understand about two other capuchins,” Proctor said, adding that the studies’ results suggest the monkeys evaluate each other in the wild.

 

For now, Anderson is investigating what capuchins think of people who over-reciprocate. “Can monkeys develop a positive bias for a person who behaves generously?” he said.

(source)

 

*******

a miraculous conversation

 

Believer: In my opinion, miracles are the best proof God exists.

 

Sceptic: I’m not sure what a miracle is supposed to be.

 

Believer: Well, something extraordinary and unpredictable.

 

Sceptic: The fall of a large meteorite or the eruption of a volcano is extraordinary and unpredictable. You aren’t suggesting they are miraculous surely?

 

Believer: Of course not. Such phenomena are natural events. Miracles are supernatural.

 

Sceptic: What do you mean by supernatural? Isn’t it just another word for miraculous? (consults Oxford Dictionary.) It says here: ‘Supernatural. Outside the ordinary operation of cause and effect.’ Hmm. It depends on what you mean by ‘ordinary’.

 

Believer: I would say ordinary meant familiar or well understood.

 

Sceptic: A radio would have been regarded as miraculous by our ancestors, who were not familiar with electromagnetism.

 

Believer: I agree but we know a radio operates according to natural laws. A truly supernatural event is one whose cause cannot be found in any natural law, known or unknown.

 

Sceptic: Surely that is a useless definition? How do you know which laws might be unknown? There may be totally bizarre and unexpected laws we might have missed. Suppose you saw a rock float in the air. Would you regard that as a miracle?

 

Believer: It depends. I’ve to be sure there’s no illusion or trickery.

 

Sceptic: But there may be natural processes that produce super illusions nobody would suspect. One cannot be sure it is not some quirky magnetic or gravitational effect that’s levitating the rock.

 

Believer: It’s easier to believe in god than outlandish magnetic phenomena. It’s a question of credibility.

 

Sceptic: Ah! So by a miracle you mean ‘something caused by god’?

 

Believer: Absolutely! Though he may sometimes use human intermediaries.

 

Sceptic: Then you cannot present miracles as evidence for god or your argument is circular. Miracles prove the existence of an agency which produces miracles. Duh. What it boils down to is belief. You have to believe in god already for miracles to mean something. Apparently miraculous events in themselves cannot prove the existence of god. They might be freak natural events.

 

Believer: I concede that levitating rocks are dubious from the miracle point of view, but consider some of the famous miracles: Jesus feeding the multitude, for example. You can’t tell me any sort of natural law would duplicate loaves and fishes!

 

Sceptic: But what possible reason can you have for believing a story written hundreds of years ago by superstitious zealots with a vested interest in promoting their brand of religion?

 

Believer: You are cynical. Taken in isolation, the loaves and fishes story is nothing. You’ve to see it in the context of the whole bible. It was not the only miracle.

 

Sceptic: Remind me of another.

 

Believer: Jesus walked on water.

 

Sceptic: Levitation…I thought you dismissed that sort as dubious.

 

Believer: For a rock, yes, for Jesus, no.

 

Sceptic: Why not?

 

Believer: Jesus was the son of god and so possessed supernatural powers.

 

Sceptic: You’re begging the question again. I don’t believe the story.

 

Believer: The bible has been a source of inspiration to millions. Don’t dismiss it lightly.

 

Sceptic: So have the works of Karl Marx. I wouldn’t believe any account of his about miracles either.

 

Believer: You may not accept the bible but you can’t dismiss the claims of hundreds of people who experienced miracles even in recent years.

 

Sceptic: People claim all sorts of things: meetings with aliens, teleportations, clairvoyance. Only a fool or a madman listens to such nonsense.

 

Believer: I concede that many wild and fanciful claims are made but the evidence for faith healing is compelling. Think of Lourdes. Or Rony Tan of Lighthouse Evangelism in Singapore.

 

Sceptic: Psychosomatic. Surely it’s easier to believe in a few medical anomalies than to invoke a deity?

 

Believer: You can’t debunk all miracles as psychosomatic. Why should so many people be so convinced by miracles if they were just freaks of nature?

 

Sceptic: It’s all a hangover from the age of magic. Before the rise of science or the great world religions, primitive peoples believed almost anything that happened was caused by magic, the action of some minor god or demon. As science explained more and more and religion groped towards the idea of one god, so the magical explanations became moribund. But a vestige lives on.

 

Believer: You’re not suggesting that Lourdes pilgrims are demon worshippers!

 

Sceptic: Not overtly. But their belief in faith healing differs very little from African witch doctors or spiritualists, for example. Atavistic beliefs from the age of magic have simply been institutionalised by the great religions. Talk of miracles is just sanitised magic mongering.

 

Believer: There are powers of good and evil. They manifest themselves in many ways.

 

Sceptic: And do you take evil supernatural events as evidence for god too? Does he also wield evil powers?

 

Believer: Good and evil is a delicate subject with so many theological opinions. Man’s wickedness can act as a channel for evil, whatever its ultimate origin.

 

Sceptic: So god is not responsible for the so-called occult powers, if they exist?

 

Believer: Not necessarily, no.

 

Sceptic: So there are at least two types of supernatural events then, those originating with god and the black arts. There are also the neutral ones, like psychokinesis and precognition? It sounds a bit complicated to me. I’d rather accept they are primitive fantasies, relic of the age of magic, a vestige of polytheism. Your belief is just the respectable end of a spectrum of neurotic primeval superstitions.

 

Believer: It doesn’t seem to me to be unreasonable to suppose that supernatural powers exist and can be manipulated in a variety of ways, for good or evil. Faith healing is the good side.

 

Sceptic: And provides evidence for god?

 

Believer: I believe so.

 

Sceptic: What about the failures. the unfortunate ones who don’t respond to the healing? Does god care about them? Or does his power waver some times?

 

Believer: God moves in mysterious ways, but his power is absolute.

 

Sceptic: Yawn. That’s just a roundabout way of saying you don’t know. Besides, if god’s power is absolute, he doesn’t need miracles.

 

Believer: I don’t understand.

 

Sceptic: An all powerful god who rules the universe and who can make anything happen doesn’t need miracles. If he wants to avoid someone dying of cancer he could prevent him or her from contracting it in the first place. In fact, I regard miracles as evidence that any god had lost control of the world and was clumsily patching up the damage.

 

Believer: Through miracles, god demonstrates his divine power.

 

Sceptic: But why is he so obscure about it? Why does he not write a clear proclamation in the sky or turn the moon tartan or something else utterly incontrovertible? Why not avert some major natural disaster, or prevent the spread of devastating epidemics? However wonderful the few cures at Lourdes, the stock of human misery is enormous. The miracles you describe seem unworthy of an all powerful god. Levitation, multiplying fishes – they have the air of a cosmic conjuring act. Surely they are the products of puerile human imagination?

 

Believer: Perhaps god is averting disasters all the time.

 

Sceptic: That’s no reply! Anyone could claim the same. Suppose I say by pronouncing an incantation each morning I prevent world war, and cite as evidence the fact that world war has indeed not broken out? In fact, a group of UFO buffs claim just that.

 

Believer: Christians believe god continually holds the world in being, so in a sense everything that happens is a miracle, and all this talk of distinction between natural and supernatural is actually a red herring.

 

Sceptic: Now you’re shifting ground. You seem to be saying god is nature.

 

Believer: I’m saying god causes everything in the natural world, though not necessarily in the temporal sense. He doesn’t just set the whole thing going and then sit back. God is outside the world and above the laws of nature, sustaining all existence.

 

Sceptic: This is semantic nonsense. Nature has a beautiful set of laws and the universe runs along a pathway of evolution mapped out by those laws. You describe exactly the same thing but in theistic terms. What does it mean by god upholding the universe? It is the same thing as the universe continues to exist.

 

Believer: You cannot be content with the bald fact that the universe exists. It must have an explanation and god is that explanation. His power sustains the universe. He does this in an orderly manner most of the time, the natural laws. But from time to time he departs from this order and produces dramatic events as warnings or signs to human beings or to assist the faithful, like the parting of the red sea.

 

Sceptic: Modern biblical scholarship debunks the historicity of many of the narratives in the Torah, which includes much of the magic-making. Even if the god as explanation of the universe is true, it isn’t the one in the bible.

 

Believer: Modern biblical scholarship is wrong about the historicity of the bible.

 

Sceptic: How so?

 

Believer: I don’t know. They are the stuff the bible warned christians about. False teaching.

 

Sceptic: Oh I see. So they are wrong about the historicity of the bible because the bible says they are wrong. That is no refutation. Anyway, I still don’t see how so-called miraculous events can be regarded as evidence of god’s existence. You are simply exploiting the fairy godmother instinct we all have, turning lady luck into a real being and calling her god.

 

Believer: I don’t find anything incredible in god, who is creator of all, manipulating material objects. Compared to the miracle of his universe, what is so remarkable about parting the red sea?

 

Sceptic: You are still basing your argument on the assumption that god exists. I agree that if a god of the sort you describe exist, the red sea would be a no-brainer for him. But how do we know he exists?

 

Believer: By faith. It’s all a question of faith.

 

Sceptic: Precisely. (Checkmate.)

 

 

*******

This is adapted from Chapter 14 of Paul Davies’ God and the New Physics. 

“the war on words”

by Philip Pullman

 

I start from the position that theocracy is one of the least desirable of all forms of political organisation, and that democracy is a good deal better. But the real division is not between those states that are secular, and therefore democratic, and those that are religious, and therefore totalitarian. I think there is another fault line that is more fundamental and more important than religion. You don’t need a belief in God to have a theocracy.

 

Here are some characteristics of religious power:

 

There is a holy book, a scripture whose word is inerrant, whose authority is above dispute: as it might be, the works of Karl Marx.

 

There are prophets and doctors of the church, who interpret the holy book and pronounce on its meaning: as it might be, Lenin, Stalin, Mao.

 

There is a priesthood with special powers, which can confer blessings and privileges on the laity, or withdraw them, and in which authority tends to concentrate in the hands of elderly men: as it might be, the communist party.

 

There is the concept of heresy and its punishment: as it might be, Trotskyism.

 

There is an inquisition with the powers of a secret police force: as it might be, the Cheka, the NKVD, etc.

 

There is a complex procedural apparatus of betrayal, denunciation, confession, trial and execution: as it might be, the Stalinist terror under Yezhov and Beria and the other state inquisitors.

 

There is a teleological view of history, according to which human society moves inexorably towards a millennial fulfilment in a golden age: as it might be, the dictatorship of the proletariat, as described by dialectical materialism.

 

There is a fear and hatred of external unbelievers: as it might be, the imperialist capitalist powers.

 

There is a fear and hatred of internal demons and witches: as it might be, kulaks or bourgeois deviationists.

 

There is the notion of pilgrimage to sacred places and holy relics: as it might be, the birthplace of Stalin, or the embalmed corpses in Red Square.

 

And so on, ad nauseam. In fact, the Soviet Union was one of the most thoroughgoing theocracies the world has ever seen, and it was atheist to its marrow. In this respect, the most dogmatic materialist is functionally equivalent to the most fanatical believer, Stalin’s Russia exactly the same as Khomeini’s Iran. It isn’t belief in God that causes the problem.

 

The root of the matter is quite different. It is that theocracies don’t know how to read, and democracies do.

 

To begin with, the theocratic cast of mind has low expectations of literature. It thinks that the function of novels and poetry is to present a clear ideological viewpoint, and nothing else. This is brilliantly shown in Azar Nafisi’s recent book, Reading Lolita in Tehran (4th Estate, 2004). The author, a professor of English literature in Iran during the rule of the Ayatollah Khomeini, tells of her attempts to continue teaching the books she wanted to teach in the increasingly fanatical and narrow-minded atmosphere of the period following the Islamic revolution. In order to discuss the work of Nabokov, Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen or Henry James, she had to resort to various stratagems: to pretend to put the book on trial so as to elicit a “safe” defence of it, to meet with a small group of trustworthy students in her own home and so on.

 

At one point she is describing the attitude of the authorities to the sort of books she finds most valuable:

 

“Unable to decipher or understand complications or irregularities, angered by what they considered betrayals in their own ranks, the officials were forced to impose their simple formulas on fiction as they did on life. Just as they censored the colours and tones of reality to suit their black-and-white world, they censored any form of interiority in fiction; ironically, for them as for their ideological opponents, works of imagination that did not carry a political message were deemed dangerous. Thus, in a writer such as Austen, for example, whether they knew it or not, they found a natural adversary.”

 

Works of imagination that did not carry a political message were deemed dangerous – that is, an overt political message. Nafisi is too subtle a reader to think that Jane Austen, or any other great writer, is devoid of political implications, echoes, correspondences; but if they don’t stand up and wave a flag and shout slogans, they’re invisible, and hence suspect.

 

And that is true for believers and atheists alike. Here is an extract from a famous resolution of the central committee of the all-union communist party of August 14 1946:

 

“Recently in Zvezda magazine, along with important and worthwhile works of Soviet writers, there have appeared many worthless, ideologically harmful works. A crude mistake of Zvezda is the offering of a literary platform to the writer MM Zoshchenko, whose productions are alien to Soviet literature. The editorial staff of Zvezda is well aware that Zoshchenko has long specialised in writing empty, vapid and vulgar things, in spreading putrid nonsense, vulgarity and indifference to politics, so as to mislead our young people and poison their consciousness… In addition, Zvezda in every way popularises work by the authoress Akhmatova, whose literary and socio-political physiognomy has been known to Soviet people for a long, long time. Akhmatova is a typical exponent of empty, frivolous poetry that is alien to our people. Permeated by the scent of pessimism and decay, redolent of old-fashioned salon poetry, frozen in the positions of bourgeois-aristocratic aestheticism and decadence – “art for art’s sake” – not wanting to progress forward with our people, her verses cause damage to the upbringing of our youth and cannot be tolerated in Soviet literature.”

 

The charge of indifference to politics: there it is again. It is a consistent theme. In 1929, the writer Boris Pilnyak had been denounced by the Stalinist Literary Gazette for offences including “apoliticalness (not being a communist)” (Ian MacDonald, The New Shostakovich 1990). What it amounts to is that if a literary work doesn’t openly support your side, then it must be empty, and ought to be condemned.

 

So the trouble with the way theocracies read is that they have a narrow idea of what literature is: they think it only contains one kind of thing, and has only one purpose, which is a narrowly political one. This is true even of some apparent supporters of literature, such as the leftist activists described by Nafisi, who defended Scott Fitzgerald against the attacks of the Muslim activists on the grounds that “we needed to read fiction like The Great Gatsby because we needed to know about the immorality of American culture. They felt we should read more revolutionary material, but we should read books like this as well, to understand the enemy.” The theocratic cast of mind is always reductive whether it’s in power or not.

 

The second charge against the theocracies is that they only know one mode of reading. Because they think there is only one way that books can work, they have only one way of responding to them, and when they try to apply the one way they know to a text that doesn’t respond to that reading, trouble follows. There is a good description of two different modes of reading in Karen Armstrong’s The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (2001). Armstrong is eloquent on the difference between mythos and logos, fundamentally different ways of apprehending the reality of the world. Mythos deals with meaning, with the timeless and constant, with the intuitive, with what can only be fully expressed in art or music or ritual. Logos, by contrast, is the rational, the scientific, the practical; that which can be taken apart and put together again; that which is susceptible to logical explanation.

 

Both are necessary, both are to be cherished. However, they engage with different aspects of the world, and these days, says Armstrong, they are not equally valued. Her argument is that in modern times, because of the astonishing progress of science and technology, people in the western world “began to think that logos was the only means to truth, and began to discount mythos as false and superstitious”. This resulted in the phenomenon of fundamentalism, which, despite its own claims to be a return to the old true ways of understanding the holy book, is not a return of any kind, but something entirely new: “Protestant fundamentalists read the Bible in a literal, rational way that is quite different from the more mystical, allegorical approach of pre-modern spirituality.”

 

Not only Protestants, we might add, and not only the Bible. In March 2002, the BBC reported the publication of a story in several Saudi newspapers about a fire in a school in Mecca. According to the reports, the mutaween, the Saudi religious police, stopped schoolgirls from leaving the blazing building because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress. Fifteen girls died as a result. One witness said that he saw three policemen “beating young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya” (the black robe required by the kingdom’s strict interpretation of Islam). The father of one of the dead girls said that the school watchman even refused to open the gates to let the girls out. What is this but a failure to read with imaginative understanding, a triumph of literalism and the bare decoding of instructions over human empathy?

 

My third and final charge against the theocracies, atheist or religious, and their failure to read properly is this: that the act of true reading is in its very essence democratic.

 

Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book – and I mean, of course, a work of literature, not an instruction manual or a textbook – in private, unsupervised, un-spied-on, alone. It isn’t like a lecture: it’s like a conversation. There’s a back-and-forthness about it. The book proposes, the reader questions, the book responds, the reader considers. We bring our own preconceptions and expectations, our own intellectual qualities, and our limitations, too, our own previous experiences of reading, our own temperament, our own hopes and fears, our own personality to the encounter.

 

And we are active about the process. We are in charge of the time, for example. We can choose when to read; we don’t have to wait for a timetabled opportunity to open the covers; we can read in the middle of the night, or over breakfast, or during a long summer’s evening. And we’re in charge of the place where the reading happens; we’re not anchored to a piece of unwieldy technology, or required to be present in a particular building along with several hundred other people. We can read in bed, or at the bus stop, or (as I used to do when I was younger and more agile) up a tree.

 

Nor do we have to read it in a way determined by someone else. We can skim, or we can read it slowly; we can read every word, or we can skip long passages; we can read it in the order in which it presents itself, or we can read it in any order we please; we can look at the last page first, or decide to wait for it; we can put the book down and reflect, or we can go to the library and check what it claims to be fact against another authority; we can assent, or we can disagree.

 

So our relationship with books is a profoundly, intensely, essentially democratic one. It places demands on the reader, because that is the nature of a democracy: citizens have to play their part. If we don’t bring our own best qualities to the encounter, we will bring little away. Furthermore, it isn’t static: there is no final, unquestionable, unchanging authority. It’s dynamic. It changes and develops as our understanding grows, as our experience of reading – and of life itself -increases. Books we once thought great come to seem shallow and meretricious; books we once thought boring reveal their subtle treasures of wit, their unsuspected shafts of wisdom.

 

And we become better readers: we learn different ways to read. We learn to distinguish degrees of irony or implication; we pick up references and allusions we might have missed before; we learn to judge the most fruitful way to read this text (as myth, perhaps) or that (as factual record); we become familiar with the strengths and duplicities of metaphor, we know a joke when we see one, we can tell poetry from political history, we can suspend our certainties and learn to tolerate the vertigo of difference.

 

Of course, democracies don’t guarantee that real reading will happen. They just make it possible. Whether it happens or not depends on schools, among other things. And schools are vulnerable to all kinds of pressure, not least that exerted by governments eager to impose “targets”, and cut costs, and teach only those things that can be tested. One of the most extraordinary scenes I’ve ever watched, and one which brings everything I’ve said in this piece into sharp focus, occurs in the famous videotape of George W Bush receiving the news of the second strike on the World Trade Centre on 9/11. As the enemies of democracy hurl their aviation-fuel-laden thunderbolt at the second tower, their minds intoxicated by a fundamentalist reading of a religious text, the leader of the free world sits in a classroom reading a story with children. If only he’d been reading Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, or Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad, or a genuine fairy tale! That would have been a scene to cheer. It would have illustrated values truly worth fighting to preserve. It would have embodied all the difference between democratic reading and totalitarian reading, between reading that nourishes the heart and the imagination and reading that starves them.

 

But no. Thanks among other things to his own government’s educational policy, the book Bush was reading was one of the most stupefyingly banal and witless things I’ve ever had the misfortune to see. My Pet Goat (you can find the text easily enough on the internet, and I can’t bring myself to quote it) is a drearily functional piece of rubbish designed only to teach phonics. You couldn’t read it for pleasure, or for consolation, or for joy, or for wisdom, or for wonder, or for any other human feeling; it is empty, vapid, sterile.

 

But that was what the president of the United States, and his advisers, thought was worth offering to children. Young people brought up to think that that sort of thing is a real book, and that that sort of activity is what reading is like, will be in no position to see that, for example, it might be worth questioning the US National Park Service’s decision to sell in their bookstores a work called Grand Canyon: A Different View, which claims that the canyon was created, like everything else, in six days. But then it may be that the US is already part way to being a theocracy in the sense I mean, one in which the meaning of reading, and of reality itself, is being redefined. In a recent profile of Bush in the New York Times, Ron Suskind recalls: “In the summer of 2002, a senior adviser to Bush told me that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works any more,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.’”

 

The democracy of reading exists in the to-and-fro between reader and text, when each is free to engage honestly with the other. The democracy of politics needs the same freedom and honesty in the public realm: freedom from lies and distortions about other candidates, honesty about one’s own actions and programmes and sources of information. It’s difficult. It’s strenuous. The sort of effort it takes was never very common, but it seems to be rarer now than it was. It is quite easy for democracies to forget how to read.

(source)

 

*******

“miracles” and persuasion

 

Pentecostal, Charismatic and Third Wave christians tend to view “miracles” not only as part of the religious package but also means to “effective” proselytising. Because many buy into such Harry-Pottering, they assume their more intelligent counterparts do too.

 

Really. Unlike them, free-thinking agnostics, atheists and humanists do not accept fantasy.

 

When Darling ruptured her right fallopian tube last week, my younger sister who attends Victory Family Centre encouraged her to pray for god to physically restore the tube whole. She said such a “miracle” might convince me of god. Darling rejected the notion immediately, citing medical and physiological practicalities. Darling still believes if god is god, he or she or it can do anything. In theory, that is. When one observes and study the natural world, god doesn’t seem to do anything.

 

Anyway, my sister fantasises a lot. Christians like her do all the time. She “sees” miracles and divine interventions everywhere when there is none. If she prays for rain to stop, and the rain cease, it must be god. She doesn’t realise correlation does not mean causation. She doesn’t realise the rain would cease whether she prays or not. She doesn’t realise the numerous times she prays and zilch happens. If she prays for Samuel’s fever to go away, and it goes away, it must be god. Does she realise fever goes away whether or not she prays? Does she realise I give Samuel paracetamol and lots of water? Does she realise fever subsides through rest and recuperation even without medication?

 

Intercessory prayer does not work. The sure way of demonstrating its efficacy is to conduct a double-blind experiment with two groups of people suffering the same illness, say stage 4 cancer but do not undergo any form of medical treatment (which in itself is not medically ethical so such an experiment can never be conducted). Only one group is being prayed for. If only the group which is prayed for shows positive results, then prayer works.

 

It never happen. In fact, the opposite happens all the time whenever religious cuckoos refuse medical intervention for faith-healing. They die.

 

What about tumours which suddenly disappear without medical treatment? The question answers itself. Tumours sometimes disappear without treatment, even without prayer! Unless in the absence of prayer tumours never disappear, one cannot conclude that it is god who removes the tumours when prayer is offered. Once again, correlation is not causation.

 

It irritates me every time someone comes up and tells me how god heals him or her of a chronic backache, sore throat, flu, migraine, menstrual cramps and what-not. Such ailments go away all the time, whether on their own or through a combination of therapy, rest, meditation, exercise and the simple but weird process of waiting it out. It peeves me when I watch or listen to such stories at healing rallies. Think Benny Hinn. Think Rony Tan. People don’t realise that the typical Charismatic hocus-pocus rhetoric does induce suggestive states in people which result in bodily responses they themselves want to experience. The resulting surge of bodily hormones and chemicals like dopamine, serotonin and adrenaline can cause feelings of pleasure and the temporary absence of pain.

 

What about people raised from the dead? What about amputees growing back their limbs? They never happen. These reports are mostly hearsay and anecdotes passed from one pea-brain to another until they become urban legends. People assume there are actual documented reports but there are none. Ever notice why such incredulous stories usually come from countries like Africa and India and not the developed world? It is NOT because Africans and Indians have more faith (another evidence of faulty reasoning and confirmation bias), but Europeans in general are more educated to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, science and pseudo-science. They understand so-called “miracles” for what they are – psychosomatic occurrences, fabrications, inflated gossip and exaggerations.

 

There are incidents in which clinically dead individuals are later revived. These “miracles” occur whether one prays to god or not. But no cadaver has ever been documented to reanimate itself! No faith-healer can claim to have raised a one-week-old corpse to life. Unless he or she is schizophrenic.

 

Miracles are not Humean, they do not violate natural “laws”.  Scientific “laws” are unlike religious edicts and dogmas – they do not dictate – they describe. They state nature as it is, not how it should or must be. It is therefore non-sense to violate such processes. It is better to define miracles as scientific anomalies, occurrences which are very unlikely to exist considering the current natural state of affairs. They are unlikely to occur because of humankind’s limited abilities and knowledge. But if given time, the scientific method can and will understand those anomalies. So in a sense miracles exist, not all the time but some of the time. And they are not supernatural. And definitely not divine. They are just entities waiting to be naturalised by science.

 

When one thinks about it, christians who claim their god is a miracle-working god or that miracles happen all the time at their church don’t seem to know what they are claiming. If miracles happen all the time or very frequently, they are not miracles!

 

*******

“creating god in one’s image”

by Ed Yong

 

For many religious people, the popular question “What would Jesus do?” is essentially the same as “What would I do?” That’s the message from an intriguing and controversial new study by Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago. Through a combination of surveys, psychological manipulation and brain-scanning, he has found that when religious Americans try to infer the will of God, they mainly draw on their own personal beliefs.

 

Psychological studies have found that people are always a tad egocentric when considering other people’s mindsets. They use their own beliefs as a starting point, which colours their final conclusions. Epley found that the same process happens, and then some, when people try and divine the mind of God.  Their opinions on God’s attitudes on important social issues closely mirror their own beliefs. If their own attitudes change, so do their perceptions of what God thinks. They even use the same parts of their brain when considering God’s will and their own opinions.

 

Religion provides a moral compass for many people around the world, colouring their views on everything from martyrdom to abortion to homosexuality.  But Epley’s research calls the worth of this counsel into question, for it suggests that inferring the will of God sets the moral compass to whatever direction we ourselves are facing. He says:

 

“Intuiting God’s beliefs on important issues may not produce an independent guide, but may instead serve as an echo chamber to validate and justify one’s own beliefs.”

 

Epley asked different groups of volunteers to rate their own beliefs about important issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, affirmative action, the death penalty, the Iraq War, and the legalisation of marijuana. The volunteers also had to speculate about God’s take on these issues, as well as the stances of an “average American”, Bill Gates (a celebrity with relatively unknown beliefs) and George Bush (a celebrity whose positions are well-known).

 

Epley surveyed commuters at a Boston train station, university undergraduates, and 1,000 adults from a nationally representative database. In every case, he found that people’s own attitudes and beliefs matched those they suggested for God more precisely than those they suggested for the other humans.

 

Of course, correlation doesn’t imply causation – rather than people imprinting their beliefs onto God, it could be that people were using God’s beliefs as a guide to their own. Epley tried to control for that by asking his recruits to talk about their own beliefs first, and then presenting God and the others in a random order. And as better evidence of causality, Epley showed that he could change people’s views on God’s will by manipulating their own beliefs.

 

He showed some 145 volunteers a strong argument in favour of affirmative action (it counters workplace biases) and a weak argument opposing it (it raises uncomfortable issues). Others heard a strong argument against (reverse discrimination) and a weak argument for (Britney and Paris agree!). The recruits did concur that the allegedly stronger argument was indeed stronger. Those who read the overall positive propaganda were not only more supportive of affirmative action but more likely to think that God would be in the pro-camp too.

 

In another study, Epley got people to manipulate themselves. He asked 59 people to write and perform a speech about the death penalty, which either matched their own beliefs or argued against them. The task shifted people’s attitudes towards the position in their speech, either strengthening or moderating their original views. And as in the other experiments, their shifting attitudes coincided with altered estimates of God’s attitudes (but not those of other people).

 

For his final trick, Epley looked at the brains of recruits as they in turn attempted to peer into the mind of God. While sitting in an MRI scanner, 17 people had to state how they, God or an average American would feel on a list of social issues, including universal health care, stem cell research, euthanasia, abortion, sex education and more. As before, their answers revealed a closer match between their beliefs and those they ascribed to God, than those they credited to the average Joe or Jill.

 

The brain scans found the same thing, particularly in a region called the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) that’s been linked to self-referential thinking. The mPFC is more active when we think about our own mindsets than those of others. Epley found that it was similarly abuzz when the recruits thought about their own attitude or God’s, but lower when they considered the average American. The three images below show the differences in brain activity between the three tasks and you can see that the ‘God’ and ‘self’ scans had little to distinguish them.

 

The results suggest that similar parts of the brain are involved when we consider our own beliefs and those of God – Epley thinks this is why we end up inferring a deity’s attitudes based on those we hold ourselves.

 

Epley notes that his volunteers were almost entirely American Christians, and it’s not clear whether the results can be generalised to people of other faiths. But he suspects that the underlying processed would be similar. When it comes to predicting what someone else would do, we have a bevy of available information, including stereotypes, the person’s deeds and words, and the opinions of others. It stands to reason that Barack Obama has liberal beliefs because he is a Democrat, because he expresses liberal beliefs and because his colleagues say he’s liberal. We could even confirm this by asking the man himself.

 

Things are altogether harder when it comes to predicting the will of a deity. Religious people could try to consult with their deity through prayer, interpret sacred texts like the Bible or Koran, or consult with experts like priests of imams. But the fact that different denominations have such diverse views of God’s attitudes shows that these sources of information are inconsistent at best. As Epley says, “Religious agents don’t lend themselves to public polling”.

 

He thinks that these uncertainties make it more likely that people will increasingly look to their own beliefs when inferring those of their God. That’s made easier by the fact that we often think of deities in very human terms, despite their omnipotence and abstract nature.

 

Of course, many philosophers got there first. The very word “anthropomorphism”, now mainly used in the context of animals, was coined by Xenophenes in the sixth century BC to describe the fact that the pantheons of different cultures tended to share their physical characteristics. And many people, from Rousseau to Twain to Voltaire, are credited with the line: “God created man in his own image and man, being a gentleman, returned the favour.”

 

Epley’s results are sure to spark controversy, but their most important lesson is that relying on a deity to guide one’s decisions and judgments is little more than spiritual sockpuppetry. To quote Epley himself:

 

“People may use religious agents as a moral compass, forming impressions and making decisions based on what they presume God as the ultimate moral authority would believe or want. The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing. This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God’s beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing.”

 

(source)

 

*******

“the sixth paradigm”

by Richard Holloway

 

I want to take a glance at the whole of Christian history because one of the things I’d like to get at is this widespread notion that Christianity is or ever has been a single thing.

 

To do this I’ll use a large text, but I want to lead into it by addressing first a very slim text.

 

One of the most important and influential philosophical texts of the twentieth century was a short book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions written by an historian of science called Thomas Kuhn. Now Kuhn was a student at Harvard in the 1960s. He was a young physicist and was invited by the President of Harvard to teach a course on the history of science to humanities students who knew nothing about science. He said to himself, “You don’t refuse the President of Harvard!”

 

In his researches and preparing the course he surprised himself. He came across something that he had not hitherto realised was the case. He had a notion of science as a kind of linear activity – a bit like those machines in a coal mine which eat into the coal face – which bites its way through the facts of the universe. He thought of science as a cumulative process in which these facts were gradually laid out.

 

He discovered that it was in fact a more violent, interruptive activity. Hence the title of his essay. He discovered that science operates by what he called “paradigm revolutions” or “paradigm shifts”. He didn’t actually coin the word “paradigm” but he did give it a new kind of meaning. He said that the scientific community worked within what it called a paradigm, a constellation of views based on experiment, a world view or set of assumptions that it operated within. This was the going, working science of the time.

 

The paradigm was operated until it stopped working – that is, until new questions or new discoveries began to collide with the given view. Let me give you a fairly obvious example.

 

Aristotelian astronomy, upon which the worldview of the entire Bible is based, proposed a three-decker universe with the earth at the centre and all the spheres going round it. The whole idea was that the earth is the centre of the system both physically as well as theologically.

 

That was the going paradigm. And it still works. The Ptolemaic version of Aristotelian astronomy can still operate for a yacht person. You can cross the Atlantic using Ptolemaic astronomy, guiding your boat by the stars. So to that extent it can still be a working paradigm.

 

But it was overtaken by the great Copernican discovery which was revolutionary because it said, “Ah! The earth is not the thing which everything else goes round. In fact, we go round the sun.”

 

You’ll recall the great struggle which then took place. This was because the new paradigm appeared to contradict both the biblical account as well as the going scientific paradigm. Interestingly, it was only fairly recently that the Pope gave the sun permission to be the centre of the solar system.

 

What happens then is that you get a working set of systems which operates quite satisfactorily until along comes new knowledge, usually discovered by creatures of genius. They begin to ask questions about the old paradigm. Those who use the old paradigm resist the new – and it is entirely right that they should do so. One doesn’t want to keep changing a world view which works. It’s a confounded nuisance if you’re switching paradigms every few years. You need to get traction, a bit of tradition and leverage on the thing.

 

So you make it work as long as you possibly can. You use it to try to answer the new information which is coming in. There’s also in some people a natural kind of conservatism which doesn’t like any kind of change. They prefer the going paradigm to anything which is coming down the road. They do so for purely temperamental reasons – but it’s also true that the scientific method itself inherently tests new data until it overturns the old. And then you get a paradigm revolution and you move on.

 

Kuhn’s little book has influenced philosophers, culture critics and theologians since the early 1960s. I want to look now at a great text which has applied Kuhn’s conclusions about paradigms to Christianity.

 

The greatest living theologian is Hans Kung, a Roman Catholic. His is the “large text” to which I referred earlier. He doesn’t have the Pope’s driving licence because he wrote a book in the seventies attacking the doctrine of infallibility and he had his licence to teach withdrawn.

 

He still teaches theology at Tübingen University but he teaches it in a secular setting. Quite movingly, he’s an old man now and he would like to get his licence back. He’d like to die, as it were, at peace with the Roman Church. But he has been told that he will only get the licence back if he commits to the doctrine of infallibility.

 

So he will have to sacrifice his conscience to get back inside the Church (which shows you how corrupt churches are). I doubt if he will do that because his whole being has been one of challenge. He’s been a sort of Protestant theologian in the midst of Catholicism.

 

Kung set himself a few years ago an enormous task. He wanted to describe the religious situation of our day. He conceived three volumes – one on Christianity, one on Judaism and one on Islam.

 

He applies paradigm theory to religion. He says that contrary to what we all think, religion has been a story of shifting paradigms – an essentially dynamic, changing enterprise.

 

I want to race through his application of paradigm theory to Christianity. He says there have been five Christian paradigms. As we’ll see, these paradigms are all still in operation. In science, new paradigms succeed, complete and often oust those that came before. In Christianity, religious paradigms never seem to get discarded or superannuated. They simply get stacked up like trays in the trolleys of self-service restaurants.

 

I’m focusing on this aspect of the Church because I think we’re on the cusp of a big paradigm shift. We’re living in revolutionary times. All the signs are there. You’ve got people who resist change; you’ve got people who see what the future is and want to pull things towards it; and you’ve got a lot of people who are just very muddled and confused. I want to try to trace continuities of particular paradigms of the past with those of today and to note any enduring value the former may have.

 

The first paradigm which Kung develops is what he calls first-century early Christian apocalyptic. That’s a mouthful, but it’s actually quite easy to understand.

 

The point he’s making – and if you read Paul with only one eye open you can’t fail to get it – is that the early Christians were waiting for the end of the world and the return of Jesus. They didn’t expect to be around for very long – which is why one gets such unsatisfactory answers in the New Testament to 20^th century questions one puts to it.

 

You don’t get a developed ethic. You get what C H Dodd called an “interim ethic”. You don’t need a developed ethic because you’re only going to be around for two or three months. So what’s the point of getting rid of slavery, for example, if the great return of Jesus will take care of it. There’s not much point in any kind of social theology because this world is on its way out.

 

What Christians should do in this in-between state is simply be prepared for the return of Jesus, be expectant, and make as many converts as possible so as to be on the right side of the Rapture when it comes.

 

The whole point to all this is that there’s no point. It’s very difficult to get into the consciousness of apocalyptic Christianity. The way I imagine the apocalyptic mindset is to imagine myself waiting for a taxi. I’ve got a plane to catch at the airport and my taxi’s late. I’m standing at the window and I can’t settle down to anything. I can’t drink coffee or read the newspaper. I’m like a cat on a hot tin roof. I’m waiting for the great eschatological taxi to arrive. I’m in a state of indecision because I need to get out of where I am.

 

That is the apocalyptic scene. Certain sects set out even now to live permanently in this state. Two thousand years is a long time to wait for a taxi. Yet some claim to have got the timing right this time. While travelling by air in the United States I have seen people reading a magazine called Prophecy Today which claims to have finally cracked something called the “Bible code”. They think of the entire Bible as a deliberately designed code delineating the right date of the Rapture. Pat Robertson, the great capitalist fundamentalist, has set the date for 2007.

 

There are many Christians who like this kind of thing, who go in for this notion of a Rapture. It’s highly developed in the United States as a strange sort of religious psychology. I think George Bush believes in this. Certainly Ronald Reagan did. Perhaps the Iraqi war was an attempt to bring in the last things.

 

More amusingly, I read somewhere that it’s going to be tough on the people who are not the elect because if you’re in a jet ‘plane and the pilot is one of the elect, at the Rapture he’s going to be caught up, and all the poor passengers are going to crash. And if you’re in the dentist’s chair getting root canal work, and the dentist is called, then you’re going to be stuck with the needles in your jaw. Great stuff!

 

Was Jesus a genuine apocalypticist? Albert Schweitzer, the great Alsatian theologian, wrote a marvellous book called The Quest of the Historical Jesus in which he concluded that Jesus died as a despairing apocalypticist. Jesus felt he was called by God to bring in the eschaton (Greek for the end of the world), to precipitate conditions that would cause the irruption of the other into the now.

 

Almost the last words in Schweitzer’s book assert that Jesus “… lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and he throws himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes him. Instead of bringing in the eschatological conditions, he has destroyed them”.

 

Schweitzer believed that Jesus is hanging upon the wheel still, which is why, having finished that book, he said that the thing was to stop talking about Jesus and start living like Jesus.

 

So he went off into the jungle and became a doctor. He thought that there is nothing more to be said. Jesus failed – except as the greatest man who ever lived and who left us this absolutely fundamental ethical challenge. His was an eloquent book and an eloquent life.

 

Jesus scholars today reckon that Jesus went through an apocalyptic phase as a disciple of John the Baptist. They think that he then gave it up and went into what is technically called “realised eschatology”. Jesus taught, they say, that now is the day of judgement and that God is constantly coming to us every day rather than at some future date at the end of the world. After Jesus died, those disciples who came with him from the Baptist movement reverted to an apocalyptic theology which then quite quickly crept back into Christianity.

 

You can’t prove or disprove any of this stuff. Similarly, there are people who believe that Jesus ran a completely inclusive ministry in which there was no distinction between men and women. The gender prejudices were, they think, brought back later. You can take your pick on that. I don’t think there’s any way of resolving it.

 

The enduring value in apocalyptic Christianity is that provided you demythologise it and unshackle it from this notion that there is going to be an irruption from the supernatural into the natural, it’s still the most powerful part of theology because it calls us to change the world. The new or apocalyptic world of Jesus is a world we are constantly struggling to bring to pass. A new community is not one that is going to irrupt and land on earth straight from heaven. It’s something you have to work for.

 

Death is our own personal eschatology – “Look thy last on all things lovely every day.” You can use apocalyptic theology I think in many ways far more exciting than anything that’s left in traditional Christian theology.

 

That’s the first paradigm. It lasted roughly up to the end of the first century of the Christian era. After that it became increasingly difficult to sustain because Jesus obviously had not come again. Nevertheless, Christians kept the theology and the language around. Hence we sing all those Advent hymns. We talk about “Come again to judge the living and the dead” and all that. We don’t believe it except in some other kind of way.

 

Let me illustrate from the world of science. If you’re being trained as a scientist today you don’t start learning about Ptolemaic astronomy and then move on to Copernican astronomy. You start with the current paradigm. If you want to know the history of science and the paradigms of the past then you read a book about the history of science.

 

But, as you know, Christianity never abandons anything, so we still teach the apocalyptic first paradigm as essential to good doctrine – though we do try to demythologise it. Apocalyptic theology may have the deepest existential possibilities for us in terms of the nature of change.

 

Kung’s second paradigm ranges from the first to the sixth centuries. This is often called the Church’s Hellenistic period. The second paradigm arises out of the encounter between the Jesus movement and Greek philosophical intellectual culture.

 

This paradigm is still around. We call it theology. It’s also still around in some parts of the larger Christian institution. If you visit Cyprus you’ll see men in stovepipe hats still very much in many ways embedded in this paradigm. It may be true to observe that the Orthodox churches are least of all susceptible to cultural shifts and changes, and most of all likely to become locked into cultural imprisonment.

 

The language of the second paradigm dates back fifteen hundred years to the period in which Christian theology was being formulated. It was written up in Greek. So it makes understanding it difficult if you’re a 21^st century English speaker!

 

Remember that all translation is to some degree a distortion of the original. We all experience this when we talk in the creeds about three “Persons” in one “Trinity”. The word “person” means to us a separate individual. But it’s actually a translation of a translation of a Greek term that probably refers to the mask that Greek actors wore. When you’ve got three actors playing about fifteen parts in a Greek play, they switch to a new part by picking up a new mask – that is, a persona - in order to express another personality in the play. This word has been translated into English as “person”, which confuses things a good deal.

 

So Christian theologians grabbed some of this far older Greek language and these ancient Greek ideas in order to try and express their current experience of God through Jesus in the centuries after the apocalyptic era.

 

That’s when you get a developed christology and the notion of the two natures of Jesus as perfect God and perfect man. It’s also when the nature of the Trinity as the personas of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is worked out.

 

Most of the theological language we use today comes from this period. There is something exciting about it – but there’s also something intrinsically problematic about giving language that kind of power.

 

We should note that theological language has more power than normal language because it purports to be about God. It is supposed to inform us what God is like and how God has interacted with humans and the world. And if that’s the case we should obviously pay more attention to it than to language about, say, the merits and demerits of a film star.

 

The thing about words is that things are not what we say they are. My favourite example is that the word “bread” is not something edible. A word is a nothing that points to a something. It’s simply a breath. It’s simply a sign, rather like a road sign.

 

Words are a sort of map, if you like. But you can’t walk through the countryside on a map. Nor can you climb a hill on the contours of an ordinary survey map. We know that words are only guides to the world, not the world itself. For most purposes of language we make that distinction.

 

Unfortunately theological language has gone kind of paranoid. Ecclesiastical institutions tend to think that their language is in itself something. So you get theological wars. People actually fight over the meaning of words. And they fight because there’s nothing to which they can infallibly refer. When we talk about God we don’t actually have before us the thing to which God-talk refers. We only have the sign.

 

It’s a bit like operating in a country that is fully mapped but does not exist. So we have endless opportunity for quarrelling about the road signs themselves. We debate whether the word-maps really have measured that mountain, or whether that loch really does tuck in this way, or whether that firth is exactly like that. Obviously if the country to which the map refers is not available to us then we have an infinite opportunity to punch each other up over the exact status of the language.

 

That’s why theology is such a contentious, argumentative business. Apart from our natural quarrelsomeness as human beings, there’s something particularly quarrelsome about religion precisely because we don’t have access to the things we claim to be talking about. At the end of the day we can’t really decide the issues in question. That’s what makes theological language both so exciting and so precarious, and that’s why people like Schweitzer gave up on it.

 

It really is a kind of word game. We constantly invent new ways of doing it. There’s a new way, which I vaguely understand, called “radical orthodoxy”. It appears to be very highbrow and French and is taught in various universities up and down the United Kingdom. It seems to be very orthodox. It likes the old language and so it keeps it around.

 

How are we to take this movement? You know where you are with an absolute fundamentalist who thinks that God is essentially a kind of three-headed being or something like metaphysical triplets. They unabashedly place objective meaning on theological language.

 

It’s hard to tell what the radical orthodoxy people are doing except to note that they like to keep all the old words around and that they’re trying to develop new meanings for them.

 

The enduring element of the second paradigm is that it recognises and affirms that we are creatures who can think for ourselves. And if today we’re in a faith community we want (at least most of us do) to have the totality of our beings involved in living the Christian life. Insofar as we want that, we also want our minds to be involved.

 

The American Episcopal Church ran an advertising campaign some years ago which said, “You don’t have to park your mind outside our Church before you come in”. The idea being that it appealed to the mind as well as the emotions. And there’s one that I like even better. As we know, one of the big debates in the USA is the debate about prayer in school. A bumper-sticker in Texas once read, “If you won’t pray in my school, I won’t think in your church”.

 

The enduring element of this paradigm is precisely the wrestling that we do with our own meanings. As creatures in a universe that appears to be unconscious, we inevitably and irresistibly and compulsively ask questions about ourselves. Do we mean anything? Does the universe mean anything? Is there that which we mean by God? How best to live with one another?

 

The reason we have not rewritten the creeds, for instance, is that we couldn’t agree on any new versions. It’s far less trouble to disagree over fourth- or fifth-century creeds than over 21^st-century creeds. If we started thinking through and debating the latter it would surely develop into a major punch-up. At the moment we can keep the creeds, unchanged and inadequate translations of a foreign language that they are, and each claim to interpret them differently. If we actually started writing new creeds we really would show how differently we believe and how wide the gap is between different faith communities.

 

But rather than operate the way scientists do, which would be to put the creeds in the appendix at the back of the prayer book, we embed them in our worship. We stand up and recite English translations of abstruse metaphysical constructs from the fourth century as worship. Let’s not ignore the fact that the perennial debate about the past does provide opportunities for some people to earn a living. That’s not to be sneered at.

 

The whole enterprise of seeking answers is, I think, what is enduring about the second paradigm. And it’s very taxing – which is why a lot of people don’t want to get into it. They prefer a system which thinks for them and soothes them – and so they simply operate as Christians without too much questioning. You don’t want to disturb that. But for people who can’t turn their minds off, it does make theology a very vexing enterprise because it never, ever settles.

 

Paradigm number three is the medieval Roman Catholic paradigm. We’re talking here of the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. This one is still very much in business. It’s the biggest of the current paradigms in terms of numbers adhering to it.

 

If the second paradigm, the Hellenistic one, was the result of an encounter between the Jesus movement and the Greek genius for philosophy and thought, the third paradigm is the result of the encounter between the Jesus movement and the Roman genius for order, for discipline and for administrative brilliance.

 

And so it is the institutional paradigm par excellence. It’s highly rationalist. Even its theology is a kind of bureaucratic theology. If you do your philosophy through Thomas Aquinas you’ll find it’s a bit like reading an enormous theological highway code. You’ve got all the questions and all the answers. The complete picture is given to you.

 

This paradigm helped organise the Church in ways that still pertain. It formed Christianity into an enormous hierarchical articulation of order and authority.

 

All of these theologies are embedded in a particular time, so they partake of what was around. There was a lot of apocalyptic around in the first century. There was a lot of intellectual struggle and strife around in the early Christian and Greek world. In the medieval paradigm there was struggle from social chaos towards a political order based on authority.

 

It was appropriate in its day. It resulted in a highly articulated absolutist system. One Jesuit describes the Roman Catholic Church today as the last surviving absolute monarchy. It’s premised on the notion that there is a single fount of authority, God, and that everything flows from that. God is at the apex – and tucked under God’s left wing is the Pope.

 

Everything descends from that apex. It remains a system of authority in which no one thinks for themselves because they receive the truth from on high. This was brought home to me by the Roman bishops in Scotland some years ago. They said to me, “We would ordain women tomorrow if the Pope told us to”. In other words, their objection to the ordination of women was not theological, but entirely related to the hierarchy of what they perceived as a Papal court.

 

As an aside, and to ram home the point, the present Pope is not going to change his mind on contraception, but his successor probably will. It will probably happen overnight, because in Roman Catholicism everything is forbidden until it’s made compulsory.

 

So this is the great third paradigm. Some of us may in the past have had “Roman fever”. I certainly did as a young man. I thought that the Anglican Church was a second-rate, shoddy copy of great Mother Rome. I used to pray for the Pope during the Anglican liturgy (under my breath, of course). I did so because Rome is a grand spectacle. There is something about us which wants to give up the struggle and simply hand ourselves over to what appears magnificent and powerful.

 

To illustrate further: I was putting together a radio program in Rome some years ago. There were three of us called “The Three Amigos” – a Church of Scotland minister, a Roman Catholic priest and myself. We used to go around making radio programs called A Sense of Place. We would go to a place important to one of us who would talk about it while the other two would interrogate.

 

One day, John Fitzsimmons, a Roman Catholic priest, took us to Rome where he’d once been Rector of a college.

 

He took us to St Peter’s. I had been there many years before. I was overwhelmed. It is so massive with its great pillars and great statues and the nuns fluttering around like seagulls. I came out into St Peter’s square and said all this to John. He replied, “That’s just what the bastards want you to think!” He was, of course, referring to the whole Counter-Reformation endeavour of the 16^th and 17^thcenturies through which the Roman Church tried re-asserting its absolute authority over a world which was increasingly thinking for itself.

 

The Roman Catholic Church remains a compelling and fascinating institution. I suppose its enduring value is that it stands as a kind of counter-culture, a world of itself which stands for a sort of absolute dedication and obedience. The Pope can assert and speak truth that contradicts political truth, for example. On the whole his record is good on such issues. He was quite good at saying to Tony Blair and George Bush, “Thou shalt not invade Iraq!” It didn’t stop them, of course, but at least someone with some kind of spiritual authority has asked them to think again. I think his record is not so good on issues of private freedom.

 

The Roman Church is the biggest of the Christian shows, and therefore in a sense the biggest paradigm. It is diminishing considerably in Europe, of course, as the numbers of people adhering to it reduce and its institutional power in the secular world gradually wanes.

 

The main reason for this decline is that it’s so entrenched in its own paradigm that it’s not very good at adapting to the difficulties of its own position.

 

If I were the Pope I could, for example, solve all my ministerial problems tomorrow by ordaining celibate women and married men. It wouldn’t create new problems because having married clergy would alter the sociology of Rome more radically than ordaining women. This is because with married clergy the Church becomes more inevitably bourgeois and less set aside from the real world of ordinary people.

 

Kung’s fourth paradigm is one we’re more immediately familiar with – that of the 16^th century Protestant Reformation. It happened to coincide with the discovery of the Bible by ordinary people. Once the new printing presses had swung into action, many thousands of copies of the Bible became available to the person on the street. It was very soon translated from Latin into the vernaculars.

 

Just as the Roman institution had provided Christians with a feeling of absolute assurance, so also some people found a similar assurance in the words of Scripture. The absolute institution was replaced by texts which were perceived as the absolute truth straight from the mouth of God. The fourth paradigm promoted the same need for authority as did the third paradigm and pandered to the same fear of freedom.

 

More profound than such similarities is the way adherence to scriptural inerrancy prevents attempts to do theology differently. In order to preserve its internal consistencies, this paradigm must perforce retain an absolute commitment to a pre-scientific paradigm of how this world works.

 

In this paradigm the sun must be able to stand still, people must be able to walk on water, and the dead must be able to rise again. In contrast, institutions like the Roman Church can change and yet pretend they haven’t. But how can anyone move off a doctrine of scriptural inerrancy without admitting it?

 

From study of the Bible as God’s Word to humankind came the great theory that Luther evolved in contradistinction to the fundamentalism if the institution. It’s nearly impossible for many Christians today to read Paul’s letters to the early Church except through Lutheran eyes, so compelling was Luther’s interpretation of the infallible authority of the Bible.

 

Luther taught that God saves us not through any of our own works or good deeds, be they pilgrimages, or masses or earnest prayer, but only through God’s grace by the sacrifice of the Father’s son. That really was a paradigm revolution for those times. It blew away the monolithic medieval Christianity of Roman Catholicism.

 

The Reformation church is today perhaps the most dated in feeling of all the churches.

 

I don’t know if you ever go into a United Reformed Church building or a Presbyterian church. A few have developed new liturgical forms and norms, but on the whole the classic churches of the Reformation are, as we say in Scotland, very dour. They’re heavy. You get long sermons. They may be very thoughtful sermons but they’re long. It’s all minister-dominated. There’s no colour or brightness. It’s very heavy, it’s serious, it’s intense.

 

That is also it’s enduring value. It produces very serious people. Presbyterian Scotland was a very serious country which, by dint of focused effort over many years, produced a strongly democratic consciousness.

 

It also gave birth to the Protestant work-ethic. This was fundamental to Scotland’s experience and self understanding. From this paradigm sprang also a well-educated public. John Knox, the Scottish Protestant reformer, wanted a school in every parish and largely succeeded in his ambition.

 

Despite this enduring value, the Reformation remnant of the fourth paradigm remains depressing and sexless. If you want to have a good time, don’t go to one of these places on a Sunday morning. For unless you’re solidly masochistic you’ll come out feeling pretty rotten about yourself.

 

I often think that if you want a great exemplar of the virtues and maybe of the downside of the Reformation paradigm, look at Gordon Brown, the United Kingdom’s Chancellor of the Exchequer (equivalent to the Minister of Finance in other systems). He is a deeply serious man. There doesn’t seem to be any frivolity in him. He’s deeply committed to his project – but he’s not exactly a laugh a minute (although I’m told that with some decent malt whiskey beside him he can be quite good company). But there’s no sense of frivolity of skittishness about him. In many ways he’s a brilliant exemplar of the best of the fourth paradigm.

 

The fifth paradigm is the modern paradigm, that of the 17^th - 19^thcenturies. It is still powerfully with us, busily influencing and interpreting how we perceive the world and our lives. Nevertheless, we’re increasingly able to regard it to some degree dispassionately as we sail into new and unfamiliar seas.

 

This paradigm can perhaps best be identified as a heroic attempt to steer the Christian vessel between the hard rock of scriptural and institutional fundamentalism and the deadly shoals of the cultured despiser’s rejection of all religion as irrational and infantile.

 

It’s often called “liberal Christianity” and generally refers to an amorphous group within the Church which seeks to accommodate traditional formulations of Christian teaching within the strictures of Newtonian science and the thought and culture of modern times.

 

One is reminded of the well-known crack about Adolf Harnack, the modern German Church historian and theologian. His critics envisaged him looking down the well of time to discover the real Jesus – and seeing only himself reflected there.

 

The great difficulties of adapting tradition to the demands of analytical thought do not, I think, invalidate the liberal Christian project. All versions of Christianity, without exception, ultimately see themselves reflected at the bottom of that ancient well. Discovering a civilised, liberally-minded 19^th century European thinker there is no worse and a good deal better than some of the other characters seen down that well.

 

Despite its honourable history, however, liberal Christianity is probably the most terminally ill of all the five paradigms. Not only is it attacked from within the Church, but those outside the traditional fold also like to have a go at it. Strangely, and rather like a sewage worker inured to strong smells, the secular detractors of religion often claim to respect and to admire the sincerity of those who still adhere to an outdated way of interpreting the world – even though they don’t like it at all.

 

But the people they really despise are not those who cling to the old paradigms in spite of the ways these have been falsified by subsequent developments in human knowledge. They can quite easily tolerate those they dismiss as cranks, albeit well-intentioned ones. They truly despise those who try to adapt religion to contemporary knowledge.

 

This, says the cultured despiser of religion, is not possible. No translation of religion into contemporary language can succeed. There is no Rosetta Stone to transform pre-modern concepts into today’s way of perceiving the world. Not even an approximation is possible. The two world views are utterly incompatible.

 

As they see it, to be a Christian today one must install in one’s mind a set of first-century assumptions, rather like an outdated computer program being put into a new computer. They know and we know that these assumptions are false. The computer will reject outdated software. It simply can’t be read by an up-to-date machine. Therefore, the only honest religion is dishonest religion. The only valid religion today, they, they would proclaim, is obsolete religion. Religion itself is a relic, sometimes charming, sometimes scary, of a long dead world-view.

 

In addition, the mild-mannered, gently rational and somewhat hesitant mode of the liberal Christian (at his or her best) doesn’t sit too well with the strident, macho contemporary communications culture, with its straight talk and snappy, sound-bite responses. Generally more mild and unassuming, the liberal Christian voice tends to be drowned out in an all-pervading racket.

 

And yet the liberal outlook on life and faith endures and no doubt will continue to endure despite its conceptual difficulties and often low impact. Many tend to dismiss the earthy, complex nature of humanity, regarding men and women more as minds on stilts than anything else. They forget that our capacity to think, and all that springs from it, is the most distinctive thing about being human. After all is said and done, it is aspects of the way we think which set us aside from all other living beings.

 

When it has finished trying the fit a modern set of clothes onto the alien body of the past, liberal Christianity will no doubt retain its nobility. It will do so through its conviction that honest religion need not run counter to the best of the human intellectual enterprise, which has its own glory and ethic.

 

The sixth paradigm is in the process of emerging. It hasn’t yet fully formed. We are still, as I mentioned before, on the borders of entirely new territory.

 

Like a child in the womb this paradigm tends at times to take on rather strange and primitive-seeming shapes. Insofar as I’m able to perceive it, there seem to be five aspects of the embryonic sixth paradigm.

 

1. First, it is a paradigm about paradigms. Once we have discovered the idea of a paradigm, we cannot help but recognise that no religious expression is ultimate.

   The religious spirit is as wide and as untidy as humanity itself. Each historic expression has and will have some enduring aspects and qualities. Parts of each will endure beyond the death of the central myth. But every paradigm must by definition be seen as ephemeral in relation to the vast reaches of time through which humankind journeys.

2. The sixth paradigm is post-modern in the sense that humanity is increasingly, if gradually, becoming uneasy with any words and concepts claiming to be set in concrete.

   We are no longer comfortable with sweeping, absolute claims to verity. In contrast, religion is perhaps to be held up and talked about with modesty and humility if it is to mean anything much to the vast crowds who swarm outside the paper-thin bastions of Christian tradition.

   This unassuming stance may be particularly important in the context of ongoing scandals which presently disfigure and discount all the Abrahamic religions.

3. It is post-hierarchical. The ancient and not-so-ancient pattern of top-down power and authority is less and less workable.

   An increasingly important parameter of our times is a deep suspicion of power. In reaction to its negative use is a growing need to build in checks and balances wherever power is at issue.

   In contrast, the dominant Christian paradigms still rest on the foundations of previous, profoundly authoritarian cultures. They need to be radically revised.

4. Religion is recognised as a human construct. Those for whom Christianity is the result of divine intervention in the world order frequently accuse others of throwing out the baby with the bath water.

   But the sixth paradigm does not necessarily reject the possibility of a transcendent reality when it acknowledges that religion is created by us for ourselves. To admit that no one religion is God-given and that all derive from the fount of human need is not to proclaim the death of God.

   If something no longer works, it’s in our human remit to discard it. The capacity to move on from what is failing to what works better is a cardinal virtue upon which our very survival as individuals and as a species depends. Old, worn out paradigms can be discarded just as decrepit human institutions inevitably give way to the new.

   There is a heavy touch of irony in this aspect of the sixth paradigm. If we ditch claims to the absolute, we cease making absolute claims even for our lack of absolutes. It’s absolutely true that all claims to absolute truth are false.

5. The primacy of the creation begins to stare Christianity in the face as the sixth paradigm takes hold on our imagination. Perhaps, despite claims to high status in God’s dispensation, Christians aren’t actually nearly as important as they think they are.

   We begin to see dimly that our religion is little more than an accessory in life. Most people in the Western culture get on quite nicely, thank you very much, without any religion at all. In the process they don’t become any more depraved than the average believer. Indeed, they seem to me often to be a good deal kinder and more tolerant than religious people.

 

It seems we’re reaching towards a unitary understanding of the context in which we live, becoming aware of that whole which includes us as a tiny part of it. What a lot of people don’t much care to admit is that in this whole we are intrinsically no more important than any other part.

 

If every one of us were to disappear today, the world would carry on regardless just as it did when the dinosaurs went over the edge. Yet in our case it would be missing something grand and beautiful. No single word yet suggests itself for this all-embracing sense of context – but I would like the word “poet” to be in there somewhere.

(source)

 

*******

the purpose of education

 

“ It amazes me that people have pre-existing notions that defy the evidence of reality. But that they hold onto them so dearly. And one of them is the notion of creationism.

…allowing the notion that the earth is 6,000 years old to be promulgated in schools is like teaching kids that the distance across the United States is 17 feet. That’s how big an error it is.

Now you might say, look, a lot of people believe that, so don’t we owe it to them to allow their views to be present in school? Well, as I’ve often said, the purpose of education is not to validate ignorance but to overcome it.

Fifty percent of the people in the United States, when we probe them each year with the National Science Foundation, think that the sun goes around the Earth, not that the Earth goes around the sun. Now, does that mean in schools we should allow the anti-Galilean and Copernican idea that the sun goes around the Earth to be taught? Absolutely not. If, in fact, the very fact that people don’t know that, and the very fact that enough people are willing to somehow believe that Earth is 6,000 years old, means we have to do a better job of teaching physics and biology, not a worse job.

The last thing we want to do is water down the teaching of biology because some people don’t recognize that evolution happened. Evolution is the basis of modern biology and, in fact, if a lot of people don’t believe it, it only means we have to do a better job teaching it.”

- Lawrence Krauss (theoretical physicist)

 

*******

 

adolescent stress may lead to adult mental illness

by Medical Express

 

The findings, reported in the journal Science, could have wide-reaching implications in both the prevention and treatment of schizophrenia, severe depression and other mental illnesses.

 

“We have discovered a mechanism for how environmental factors, such as stress hormones, can affect the brain’s physiology and bring about mental illness,” says study leader Akira Sawa, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “We’ve shown in mice that stress in adolescence can affect the expression of a gene that codes for a key neurotransmitter related to mental function and psychiatric illness. While many genes are believed to be involved in the development of mental illness, my gut feeling is environmental factors are critically important to the process.”

 

Sawa, director of the Johns Hopkins Schizophrenia Center, and his team set out to simulate social isolation associated with the difficult years of adolescents in human teens. They found that isolating healthy mice from other mice for three weeks during the equivalent of rodent adolescence had no effect on their behavior. But, when mice known to have a genetic predisposition to characteristics of mental illness were similarly isolated, they exhibited behaviors associated with mental illness, such as hyperactivity. They also failed to swim when put in a pool, an indirect correlate of human depression. When the isolated mice with genetic risk factors for mental illness were returned to group housing with other mice, they continued to exhibit these abnormal behaviors, a finding that suggests the effects of isolation lasted into the equivalent of adulthood.

 

“Genetic risk factors in these experiments were necessary, but not sufficient, to cause behaviors associated with mental illness in mice,” Sawa says. “Only the addition of the external stressor—in this case, excess cortisol related to social isolation—was enough to bring about dramatic behavior changes.”

 

The investigators not only found that the “mentally ill” mice had elevated levels of cortisol, known as the stress hormone because it’s secreted in higher levels during the body’s fight-or-flight response. They also found that these mice had significantly lower levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine in a specific region of the brain involved in higher brain function, such as emotional control and cognition. Changes in dopamine in the brains of patients with schizophrenia, depression and mood disorders have been suggested in clinical studies, but the mechanism for the clinical impact remains elusive.

 

To determine whether cortisol levels were influencing dopamine levels in the brain and adult behavioral patterns in the abnormal mice, the investigators gave them a compound called RU486, known to block cells from receiving cortisol. (The drug is commonly known as the “abortion pill.”) All symptoms subsided. RU486 has also been studied in a clinical trial of people with difficult-to-treat psychotic depression, showing some benefits. “The mice swam longer, they were less hyper and their dopamine levels normalized,” Sawa says.

 

To shed light on how and why the mice got better, Sawa and his team studied the gene tyrosine hydroxylase (Th) and found an epigenetic change, essentially the addition of a methyl group to one of the gene’s DNA letters, limiting the gene’s ability to do its job, which is to create an enzyme that regulates dopamine levels. Without a fully functioning Th, dopamine levels are abnormally low.

 

Scientists have long studied gene mutations, permanent DNA changes that can tweak the normal function of a particular gene. But epigenetic alterations do not change the actual letters of the DNA sequence. Instead, they add a chemical group like methyl that can affect the function of the DNA. These changes can be transient, whereas genetic mutations are permanent.

 

Sawa says the new study points to the need to think about better preventive care in teenagers who have mental illness in their families, including efforts to protect them from social stressors, such as neglect. Meanwhile, by understanding the cascade of events that occurs when cortisol levels are elevated, researchers may be able to develop new compounds to target tough-to-treat psychiatric disorders with fewer side effects than RU486 has.

(source)

 

*******

why are more young people moving away from religion?

by NPR staff

 

One-fifth of Americans are religiously unaffiliated — higher than at any time in recent U.S. history — and those younger than 30 especially seem to be drifting from organized religion. A third of young Americans say they don’t belong to any religion.

 

NPR’s David Greene wanted to understand why, so he gathered a roundtable of young people at a synagogue in Washington, D.C. The 6th & I Historic Synagogue seemed like the right venue: It’s both a holy and secular place that has everything from religious services to rock concerts. Greene speaks with six people — three young women and three young men — all struggling with the role of faith and religion in their lives.

 

Interview Highlights

 

Miriam Nissly, 29, was raised Jewish and considers herself Jewish with an “agnostic bent.” She loves going to synagogue.

 

 

“I realize maybe there’s a disconnect there — why are you doing it if you don’t necessarily have a belief in God? But I think there’s a cultural aspect, there’s a spiritual aspect, I suppose. I find the practice of sitting and being quiet and being alone with your thoughts to be helpful, but I don’t think I need to answer that question [about God] in order to participate in the traditions I was brought up with.”

 

Yusuf Ahmad, 33, raised Muslim, is now an atheist. His doubts set in as a child with sacred stories he just didn’t believe.

 

 

“Like the story of Abraham — his God tells him to sacrifice his son. Then he takes his son to sacrifice him, and he turns into a goat. I remember growing up, in like fifth [or] sixth grade I’d hear these stories and be like, ‘That’s crazy! Why would this guy do this? Just because he heard a voice in his head, he went to sacrifice his son and it turned into a goat?’ There’s no way that this happened. I wasn’t buying it.

 

“Today if some guy told you that ‘I need to sacrifice my son because God told me to do it,’ he’d be locked up in a crazy institution.”

 

Kyle Simpson, 27, raised Christian. He has a tattoo on the inside of his wrist that says “Salvation from the cross” in Latin.

 

 

“It’s a little troublesome now when people ask me. I tell them and they go, ‘Oh, you’re a Christian,’ and I try to skirt the issue now. They go, ‘What does that mean?’ and it’s like, “It’s Latin for ‘I made a mistake when I was 18.’

 

“When I first got the tattoo I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this will be great because when I’m having troubles in my faith I will be able to look at it, and I can’t run away from it.’ And that is exactly what is happening.

 

“I don’t [believe in God] but I really want to. That’s the problem with questions like these is you don’t have anything that clearly states, ‘Yes, this is fact,’ so I’m constantly struggling. But looking right at the facts — evolution and science — they’re saying, no there is none. But what about love? What about the ideas of forgiveness? I like to believe they are true and they are meaningful.

 

“I think having a God would create a meaning for our lives, like we’re working toward a purpose — and it’s all worthwhile because at the end of the day we will maybe move on to another life where everything is beautiful. I love that idea.”

 

Melissa Adelman, 30, raised Catholic

 

 

“Starting in middle school we got the lessons about why premarital sex was not OK, why active homosexuality was not OK, and growing up in American culture, kids automatically pushed back on those things, and so we had some of those conversations in school with our theology teachers. The thing for me — a large part of the reason I moved away from Catholicism was because without accepting a lot of these core beliefs, I just didn’t think that I could still be part of that community.

 

“I remember a theology test in eighth grade where there was a question about homosexuality, and the right answer was that if you are homosexual, then that is not a sin because that’s how God made you, but acting upon it would be a sin. That’s what I put down as the answer, but I vividly remember thinking to myself that that was not the right answer.”

 

Rigoberto Perez, 30, raised as Seventh-day Adventist

 

 

“It was a fairly important part of our lives. It was something we did every Saturday morning. We celebrate the Sabbath on Saturday. It was pretty hard growing up in a lot of ways. We didn’t have a lot of money, the household wasn’t very stable a lot of the time, so when something bad would happen, say a prayer, go to church. When my mom got cancer the first time, it was something that was useful at the time for me as a coping mechanism.

 

“While I was younger, my father drank a lot. There was abuse in the home. My brother committed suicide in 2001. So at some point you start to say, ‘Why does all this stuff happen to people?’ And if I pray and nothing good happens, is that supposed to be I’m being tried? I find that almost kind of cruel in some ways. It’s like burning ants with a magnifying glass. Eventually that gets just too hard to believe anymore.”

 

Lizz Reeves, 23, raised by a Jewish mother and a Christian father. She lost a brother to cancer.

 

 

“I wanted so badly to believe in God and in heaven, and that’s where he was going. I wanted to have some sort of purpose and meaning associated with his passing. And ultimately the more time I spent thinking about it, I realized the purpose and meaning of his life had nothing to do with heaven, but it had to do with how I could make choices in my life that give his life meaning. And that had a lot more weight with me than any kind of faith in anything else.”

(source)

 

I concur. And if evangelical christians continue to live in the stone age, they are going to die out.

 

*******

“more than a body?”

by John Polkinghorne

 

What am I? A smart tap on the head with a hammer will show that I’m dependent on my body. But am I just a body? Is there a spiritual bit of me, too? Have I got a soul?

 

For much of the past two thousand years, people thought of themselves as apprentice angels. The “real me” was a spiritual component, trapped in a body but awaiting release at death. At the start of the third millennium, that’s an increasingly difficult belief to hold. Studies of brain damage and the effects of drugs show how dependent our personalities are on the state of our bodies. Charles Darwin has taught us that our ancestry is the same as that of other animals. Earth was once lifeless, and life seems to have emerged from complex chemical interactions. Many scientists think that we are nothing but collections of molecules.

 

Yet that’s a pretty odd belief too. Could mere chemicals write Shakespeare’s plays or compose Handel’s Messiah (or discover the laws of chemistry, for that matter?) There’s something more to us than the merely material.  But whatever that extra is, it is intimately connected with our bodies. We are a kind of package deal, mind and body closely related and not wholly detachable from each other. It’s a puzzle to understand this. Oddly enough, the clue we need may be found watching water being heated in a saucepan.

 

If the heat is applied gently, the water circulates from the bottom in a remarkable pattern. Instead of just flowing about any old how, it forms a pattern of six-sided cells, rather like in a beehive. This is an astonishing phenomenon. Trillions of molecules have to collaborate and move together in order to generate the pattern. The effect is a simple example of a new aspect of nature that scientists are just beginning to learn about. They call it complexity theory.

 

Physicists naturally started by studying the simplest systems available. They are easiest to understand. Recently, the use of high-speed computers has extended our scientific range, and it is now possible to think about quite complicated situations. As this began to be explored, an unexpected realisation dawned. Very often these complex systems turn out to have a quite simple overall behaviour, ordered in some striking pattern – just like those trillions of molecules moving together in the saucepan.

 

The way physicists traditionally thought was in terms of the bits and pieces that make up a complex system. The exchanges of energy between these bits and pieces look extremely complicated. However, it turns out that if you think about the system as a whole, there can be these remarkably orderly patterns of behaviour. In other words, there are two levels of description. One involves energy and bits and pieces. The other involves the whole system and pattern. At this second level, using computer-speak, we can say that what we need to think about is the information that specifies the pattern.

 

What has this got to do with the human soul? Whatever the soul may be, it is surely the “real me”, linking that little boy of sixty years ago with the ageing academic of today. That real me is certainly not the matter of my body. That is changing all the time, through eating and drinking, wear and tear. We have very few atoms in our bodies that were there five years ago. What provides the continuity is the almost infinitely complex pattern in which that matter is organised. That pattern is the soul, the real me.

 

So what do religious people make of that? Actually, they got there first! The Hebrews of Old Testament times never thought of human beings as apprentice angels. Instead, they took the package deal view that we are bodies full of life. The greatest thinker of medieval Christianity, St Thomas Aquinas, thought the same. He was greatly influenced by the ideas of Aristotle. For Aristotle, the soul was the “form” (that is, pattern) of the body.

 

But, if the soul isn’t a detachable spiritual part of us, what hope do we have of a destiny beyond death? Won’t that wonderful pattern that is you or me be dissolved at our deaths – and that’s that? If this is how you think, you have forgotten to take god into account. Our real hope that death is not the end depends on our belief in the trustworthiness of god. If we matter to god now – and we certainly do – we shall matter to god for ever. We shall not be cast aside like broken pots on some cosmic rubbish heap. Human beings are not naturally immortal, but the faithful god will give us a destiny beyond our deaths. It makes perfect sense to believe that god will remember the pattern that is you, or the pattern that is me, and re-create those patterns in the world to come. Christians call it resurrection. The true christian hope has not been survival, but death followed by resurrection. Such a hope is as credible in the third millennium as it has been in the preceding two thousand years.

(source: God for the 21st Century, a collection of short essays edited by Russell Stannard)

 

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“a revealed but hidden god”

by Carl Feit

 

How can professionally trained observers of nature view the same data and reach completely different conclusions as to what it all means?

 

A recent survey, reported in Nature, indicates that forty per cent of working scientists have a belief in a personal Deity. As a professional scientist, I find many of my colleagues are indeed devoted Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and others. But that is not to say our laboratories of molecular biology and particle physics are the breeding grounds for a massive new religious awakening. I have other colleagues who are equally outspoken as atheists or committed agnostics.

 

How does this disagreement come about?

 

Leading physicists, such as John Barrow and Paul Davies, argue that an accurate assessment of twentieth-century physics not only is compatible with religious thought but actually points to the necessity for the postulate that an omnipotent and purposive Creator is running the whole show. In a similar way, prominent biologists like Arthur Peacocke and Elving Anderson have been led to make comparable claims based on an understanding of the forces behind evolution and an increased awareness of the exquisite complexity of the genomes of living organisms.

 

Over the past twenty-five years or so, such views have led to a relatively quiet but increasingly substantive dialogue among many scientists and religious thinkers. Together they are reevaluating the age-old question of the interface between science and religion.

 

Maimonides, the preeminent medieval Jewish thinker who was both a philosopher and a scientist, wrote the following:

 

There is a positive commandment to have love and awe for the Almighty God as it is written, “You shall love the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 6:5). But by what method can one achieve this? When a human being contemplates god’s great and awesome works (the Universe) and examines His creations, and from them he sees the unmeasurable wisdom and infinite capacities of the Creator, he will immediately be filled with love, and desire to praise and understand more about the living god.

(Mishnah Torah, Laws of Torah Fundamentals, 2:1)

 

It would seem that Maimonides shared the view of those modern scientists who feel that a deep and profound inspection of the world, with its intricate laws and patterns giving rise to both profound simplicity and remarkable complexity, is the correct and perhaps only way for a finite mind to develop love and appreciation for the infinite.

 

But on the other hand, what are we to make of those scientists who look out at the world and do not see it resonating with divine wisdom; those who see only a whimsical, probabilistic universe, driven onward by fate and chance? Can we ascribe their reactions to mere self-delusion and/or an obstinate will not to believe? Have they an a priori commitment to a materialistic universe without even a blind watchmaker in charge?

 

To throw some light on this we need a deeper insight into the characteristic of the religious experience.

 

There is a beautiful hymn that is sung or recited at the Sabbath table during the third meal, as the holy day draws to a close. Written by a sixteenth-century Kabbalist, it begins: “God conceals himself in the beauty of secrecy, the wisdom hidden from all conception.”

 

Jewish thought has long recognised that while human beings long for the presence and company of god, it is often true that searching for the face of god can also be a frustrating experience. There are times when the world is undeniably a cold, hostile environment, not only lacking a suffusion of the warm love of god, but outwardly thwarting our most noble aspirations. We must understand that god at times hides his face.

 

This is fully acknowledged in the bible; it is called hester panim. While it is true that there are times when god’s guiding hand is abundantly apparent, as at the splitting of the red sea, there are also these periods of divine silence, as during the holocaust.

 

Jewish rabbinic thinkers have extended this idea by introducing the idea of Tsimtsum or contraction to explain how a finite material world can exist in the presence of an infinite, omnipresent Deity. In the act of creation, an all-powerful god had to contract and withdraw into himself, as it were, to make room for the finite physical world.

 

Since god “withdrew” in creating the universe, it is not surprising that there are no obvious footsteps leading back to god. Traditional Judaism is not tied nor necessarily committed to the validity of the Argument from Design. In fact, the Hebrew word for world or universe, Olam, is related to the root meaning “hidden”; god is, so to speak, hidden in this world. Our encounter with god is complex; it demonstrates a complementarity. As with the wave/particles of the quantum world, we are always exposed to the dual transcendent/immanent nature of the supreme Being.

 

As a staunchly orthodox Jew and a professional immunologist, I am pleased that this new dialogue is taking place. I am convinced that holding a religious perspective can help us understand the spiritual dimension of science. Equally, I believe that grappling with scientific questions can help us achieve deeper insight into our religious traditions.

(source: taken from God for the 21st Century, a collection of short writings edited by Russell Stannard)

 

*******

the mind (or soul) is the brain

 

...there are excellent reasons for concluding that humans do not have immaterial minds. 

First of all, if one suffers a serious, but not too serious, blow to the head, one may wind up unconscious. If the mind is the brain, the fact that a blow to the head, by affecting the brain, may cause one to lose consciousness, is not surprising. But why should this happen if the mind is an immaterial thing capable of existing without one’s body? A blow to the head might disrupt communications between the immaterial mind and parts of the brain, so that the person’s external behaviour was that of an unconscious person, but there is no reason why the immaterial mind should cease having thoughts and feelings during that period of time. 

Second, different parts of one’s brain can be permanently damaged through strokes, gunshot wounds and so on, and what one finds is not only that such injuries affect mental functioning and personality but that what psychological capacities or traits are affected depends on what parts of the brain is damaged. All of this is precisely what one would expect if the mind is the brain, for then the bases for psychological capacities, for personality traits, for memories and so on, lie in complex neuronal circuits. In contrast, if the mind were an immaterial entity, these results would be utterly unexpected, and would have to be given ad hoc explanations.

Third, there are diseases that can radically affect one’s mental functioning, one’s memories, and so on. One of the most familiar is Alzheimer’s, whose effects over time can be so extreme that it is quite natural to think that the person who once existed no longer does. How could a disease have such an effect on an immaterial mind? If memories are states of an immaterial substance, how are they destroyed, or how is it that the immaterial mind is unable to access those states?

Fourth, there is the phenomenon of ageing, where not only one’s body but also one’s mind deteriorates, so that various psychological capacities gradually decline. If the mind is the brain, there is nothing surprising here. But as there is no reason why an immaterial mind should deteriorate with age, the decline of the mind as one grows older is not at all what one would expect on the hypothesis that the mind is an immaterial substance. 

Fifth, the mental capacities of very young members of our species gradually increase as they mature. Again, there is nothing surprising in this if the mind is the brain: neuronal circuits gradually get built up. But why should there be such changes if the mind is an immaterial substance?

Sixth, psychotropic drugs can alter mood very significantly, can relieve depression and anxiety, can give rise to paranoia, or reduce it, and so on. Once again, if the mind is the brain, and emotional states depend on chemicals in the brain, all this falls into place, whereas these things are not at all something that one would expect if the mind were an immaterial substance. 

Finally, the differences that one finds both between humans and other animals and between different species of nonhuman animals correlate with differences in the structures present in the relevant brains. If psychological capacities have their bases in neuronal structures, this is once again precisely what one would expect and predict. But what is the explanation if the mind is an immaterial substance? 

In short, there is a wealth of familiar phenomenon that would be surprising and unexpected, and not at all what one would predict, if the mind were an immaterial substance, but that fall perfectly into place if the mind is the brain. There is massive evidence against the view that the mind is an immaterial substance. 

- Michael Tooley

 

*******

“cognitive biases that prevent you from being rational”

by George Dvorsky

 

The human brain is capable of 10¹⁶processes per second, which makes it far more powerful than any computer currently in existence. But that doesn’t mean our brains don’t have major limitations. The lowly calculator can do maths thousands of times better than we can, and our memories are often less than useless — plus, we’re subject to cognitive biases, those annoying glitches in our thinking that cause us to make questionable decisions and reach erroneous conclusions. Here are a dozen of the most common and pernicious cognitive biases that you need to know about.

 

Before we start, it’s important to distinguish between cognitive biases and logical fallacies. A logical fallacy is an error in logical argumentation (e.g. ad hominem attacks, slippery slopes, circular arguments, appeal to force, etc.). A cognitive bias, on the other hand, is a genuine deficiency or limitation in our thinking — a flaw in judgement that arises from errors of memory, social attribution, and miscalculations (such as statistical errors or a false sense of probability).

 

Some social psychologists believe our cognitive biases help us process information more efficiently, especially in dangerous situations. Still, they lead us to make grave mistakes. We may be prone to such errors in judgement  but at least we can be aware of them. Here are some important ones to keep in mind.

 

Confirmation Bias

We love to agree with people who agree with us. It’s why we only visit websites that express our political opinions, and why we mostly hang around people who hold similar views and tastes. We tend to be put off by individuals, groups, and news sources that make us feel uncomfortable or insecure about our views — what the behavioural psychologist B. F. Skinner called cognitive dissonance. It’s this preferential mode of behaviour that leads to the confirmation bias — the often unconscious act of referencing only those perspectives that fuel our pre-existing views, while at the same time ignoring or dismissing opinions — no matter how valid — that threaten our world view. And paradoxically, the internet has only made this tendency even worse.

 

In-group Bias

Somewhat similar to the confirmation bias is the in-group bias, a manifestation of our innate tribalistic tendencies. And strangely, much of this effect may have to do with oxytocin — the so-called “love molecule.” This neurotransmitter, while helping us to forge tighter bonds with people in our in-group, performs the exact opposite function for those on the outside — it makes us suspicious, fearful, and even disdainful of others. Ultimately, the in-group bias causes us to overestimate the abilities and value of our immediate group at the expense of people we don’t really know.

 

Gambler’s Fallacy

It’s called a fallacy, but it’s more a glitch in our thinking. We tend to put a tremendous amount of weight on previous events, believing that they’ll somehow influence future outcomes. The classic example is coin-tossing. After flipping heads, say, five consecutive times, our inclination is to predict an increase in likelihood that the next coin toss will be tails — that the odds must certainly be in the favour of heads. But in reality, the odds are still 50/50. As statisticians say, the outcomes in different tosses are statistically independent and the probability of any outcome is still 50%.

Relatedly, there’s also the positive expectation bias — which often fuels gambling addictions. It’s the sense that our luck has to eventually change and that good fortune is on the way. It also contributes to the “hot hand” misconception. Similarly, it’s the same feeling we get when we start a new relationship that leads us to believe it will be better than the last one.

 

Post-Purchase Rationalisation

Remember that time you bought something totally unnecessary, faulty, or overly expense, and then you rationalized the purchase to such an extent that you convinced yourself it was a great idea all along? Yeah, that’s post-purchase rationalization in action — a kind of built-in mechanism that makes us feel better after we make crappy decisions, especially at the cash register. Also known as Buyer’s Stockholm Syndrome, it’s a way of subconsciously justifying our purchases — especially expensive ones. Social psychologists say it stems from the principle of commitment, our psychological desire to stay consistent and avoid a state of cognitive dissonance.

 

Neglecting Probability

Very few of us have a problem getting into a car and going for a drive, but many of us experience great trepidation about stepping inside an air plane and flying at 35,000 feet. Flying, quite obviously, is a wholly unnatural and seemingly hazardous activity. Yet virtually all of us know and acknowledge the fact that the probability of dying in an auto accident is significantly greater than getting killed in a plane crash — but our brains won’t release us from this crystal clear logic (statistically, we have a 1 in 84 chance of dying in a vehicular accident, as compared to a 1 in 5,000 chance of dying in an plane crash [other sources indicate odds as high as 1 in 20,000]). It’s the same phenomenon that makes us worry about getting killed in an act of terrorism as opposed to something far more probable, like falling down the stairs or accidental poisoning.

This is what the social psychologist Cass Sunstein calls probability neglect — our inability to properly grasp a proper sense of peril and risk — which often leads us to overstate the risks of relatively harmless activities, while forcing us to overrate more dangerous ones.

 

Observational Selection Bias

This is that effect of suddenly noticing things we didn’t notice that much before — but we wrongly assume that the frequency has increased. A perfect example is what happens after we buy a new car and we inexplicably start to see the same car virtually everywhere. A similar effect happens to pregnant women who suddenly notice a lot of other pregnant women around them. Or it could be a unique number or song. It’s not that these things are appearing more frequently, it’s that we’ve (for whatever reason) selected the item in our mind, and in turn, are noticing it more often. Trouble is, most people don’t recognize this as a selectional bias, and actually believe these items or events are happening with increased frequency — which can be a very disconcerting feeling. It’s also a cognitive bias that contributes to the feeling that the appearance of certain things or events couldn’t possibly be a coincidence (even though it is).

 

Status-Quo Bias

We humans tend to be apprehensive of change, which often leads us to make choices that guarantee that things remain the same, or change as little as possible. Needless to say, this has ramifications in everything from politics to economics. We like to stick to our routines, political parties, and our favourite meals at restaurants. Part of the perniciousness of this bias is the unwarranted assumption that another choice will be inferior or make things worse. The status-quo bias can be summed with the saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” — an adage that fuels our conservative tendencies. And in fact, some commentators say this is why the U.S. hasn’t been able to enact universal health care, despite the fact that most individuals support the idea of reform.

 

Negativity Bias

People tend to pay more attention to bad news — and it’s not just because we’re morbid. Social scientists theorize that it’s on account of our selective attention and that, given the choice, we perceive negative news as being more important or profound. We also tend to give more credibility to bad news, perhaps because we’re suspicious (or bored) of proclamations to the contrary. More evolutionarily, heeding bad news may be more adaptive than ignoring good news (e.g. “saber tooth tigers suck” vs. “this berry tastes good”). Today, we run the risk of dwelling on negativity at the expense of genuinely good news. Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, argues that crime, violence, war, and other injustices are steadily declining, yet most people would argue that things are getting worse — what is a perfect example of the negativity bias at work.

 

Bandwagon Effect

Though we’re often unconscious of it, we love to go with the flow of the crowd. When the masses start to pick a winner or a favourite  that’s when our individualized brains start to shut down and enter into a kind of “group think” or hive mind mentality. But it doesn’t have to be a large crowd or the whims of an entire nation; it can include small groups, like a family or even a small group of office co-workers. The bandwagon effect is what often causes behaviours  social norms, and memes to propagate among groups of individuals — regardless of the evidence or motives in support. This is why opinion polls are often maligned, as they can steer the perspectives of individuals accordingly. Much of this bias has to do with our built-in desire to fit in and conform, as famously demonstrated by the Asch Conformity Experiments.

 

Projection Bias

As individuals trapped inside our own minds 24/7, it’s often difficult for us to project outside the bounds of our own consciousness and preferences. We tend to assume that most people think just like us — though there may be no justification for it. This cognitive shortcoming often leads to a related effect known as the false consensus bias where we tend to believe that people not only think like us, but that they also agree with us. It’s a bias where we overestimate how typical and normal we are, and assume that a consensus exists on matters when there may be none. Moreover, it can also create the effect where the members of a radical or fringe group assume that more people on the outside agree with them than is the case. Or the exaggerated confidence one has when predicting the winner of an election or sports match.

 

Current Moment Bias

We humans have a really hard time imagining ourselves in the future and altering our behaviours and expectations accordingly. Most of us would rather experience pleasure in the current moment, while leaving the pain for later. This is a bias that is of particular concern to economists (i.e. our unwillingness to not overspend and save money) and health practitioners. Indeed, a 1998 study showed that, when making food choices for the coming week, 74% of participants chose fruit. But when the food choice was for the current day, 70% chose chocolate.

 

Anchoring Effect

Also known as the relativity trap, this is the tendency we have to compare and contrast only a limited set of items. It’s called the anchoring effect because we tend to fixate on a value or number that in turn gets compared to everything else. The classic example is an item at the store that’s on sale; we tend to see (and value) the difference in price, but not the overall price itself. This is why some restaurant menus feature very expensive entrees, while also including more (apparently) reasonably priced ones. It’s also why, when given a choice, we tend to pick the middle option — not too expensive, and not too cheap.

(source)

 

*******

new statesman interview with sir david attenborough

by Robin Ince & Brian Cox

 

Robin Ince writes:

No other individual is held in such awe by as broad a group of people as Sir David Attenborough. On seeing him, one eloquent friend felt he must say something, and so he bounded up, blurted out “Thank you”, then scarpered. I have seen people held in high regard reduced to gibbering fan-kids on finding themselves in the same room as him. After 60 years in broadcasting, a career that has included commissioning Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, as well as astounding investigations into the varieties of life on this planet, he continues to work every day of the year with the occasional exception of Christmas Day.

 

The landmark series Life on Earth was my introduction to the theory of evolution and the work of Charles Darwin, a man who increasingly fascinates me the older I become. The writings of Darwin convey a mind restlessly ­attempting to understand the life he sees before him and driven to explain why it seems to be as it is. David Attenborough has allowed us to stay in our armchair and dwell on the complexity of living things on this small but densely populated planet. As Carl Sagan once wrote when contemplating the seeming rarity of life in the known universe, the earth is “a meadow in the sky”.

 

Whenever the case against television is brought up, the work of Attenborough is called by the defence. In the television world, where so much is required to be fake, from the smiles to the feigned interest of the interviewer, Atten­borough conveys passion, a wish to communicate not defined by pay packet or celebrity. He is not making a film about tribal art or bowerbirds or environmental crisis because it’s a job; he is doing it to share ideas, convey wonder and to learn for himself. This is not a tired academic going through the rigmarole of explaining life one more time; this is someone able to capture the excitement of the adventure because he is still on it. Where cynicism and ironic distance can seem the way of the 21st century, here is an unashamed enthusiast. As he leaned forward during this interview and told us of seeing the hasty and flamboyant mating ritual of a hummingbird slowed down so each intricate detail could be examined, he reminded me that it is criminal to feel bored in a world so rich.

 

Of walking in the Brazilian jungle, Darwin wrote: “The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind. If the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butterfly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect, one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over . . . The mind is a chaos of delight . . .” David Attenborough has helped stimulate minds into that state of chaotic delight.

 

***

 

Brian Cox How has the public perception and presentation of science changed over the 60 years that you’ve been involved with it?

 

David Attenborough I suppose there was a mystique about science and also a certain sus­picion of it. I went to grammar school: if you were very bright, you did classics; if you were pretty thick, you did woodwork; and if you were neither of those poles, you did science. The number of kids in my school who did science because they were excited by the notion of science was pretty small. You were allocated to those things, you weren’t asked.

 

This was in the late 1930s/early 1940s, and schools are better about that now. But it’s indicative of the way people thought about science: they didn’t really connect science and technology – “OK, yes, that’s how you mend a fuse, but that’s not science”– which of course is nonsense. Science was seen as something more remote and less to do with everyday life. Since then, our society has become so technologically based that you really can’t be a fully operating citizen unless you understand basic science. How are you supposed to make judgements about the health of your children if you don’t believe in science? How are you supposed to make a judgement about a generation of fuel and power if you don’t believe in science? You can’t operate as a sensible voting member of a democratic society these days unless you understand fundamental scientific principles to a degree.

 

BC And yet, today, there seems to be a politi­cisation and a polarisation of ideas. There’s a certain camp that distrusts science, particularly when we start talking about vaccination policy or climate change.

 

DA I’ve never known a time when scientists weren’t hypersensitive about not being understood by the rest of society. Whenever I come across scientific institutions, unless they are absolutely remote, sort of dealing with little pockets of independence – as hobbies, really – they never think that society as a whole understands what they are about. But I think it’s not as bad as many scientists now believe; I think it was worse 50 years ago.

 

BC Do you think the presentation of science on television has a role to play?

 

DA Yes, and the BBC can be reasonably proud there. In 1952, when I joined, there was a chap whose responsibility was “science” and he was a physicist. The head of the department where I worked – rather absurdly called Talks – was an Oxford geneticist, and she was extremely keen on science.

 

One of the great achievements of the 1950s and 1960s was a series called Your Life in Their Hands, which dealt with medical science. It presented the scientific evidence for the connection between tobacco and cancer, against the entrenched opposition, all of which you can quite easily imagine.

 

In those days, the doctors concerned were not allowed to use their names – it was against medical practice and ethics – so he was just called the “television ­doctor” and he presented the evidence of the connection between the two over and over again on television. A lot of people tried to stop it, but he carried on. It ruined his career, I suspect, in the medical sense, but he stuck to his guns. It’s one of early television’s badges ­of honour.

 

BC Do you feel you have become more polemical recently? Because I know you have written that the real delight you find is essentially in observing nature. Have you become more a campaigner?

 

DA It’s OK for you – you are a scientist. I am not a scientist.

 

BC You are a fellow of the Royal Society.

 

DA But I’m an FRS for popularising science and I don’t have a right to go out and talk about the details and physics of the upper atmosphere. I only take it from what other people say. I respect researchers who do that sort of work and can make some degree of assessment as to whether they’re cranks or not.

 

If you appear as frequently on television as I do, looking at bunny rabbits or whatever, it’s very tempting to think people notice what you say, because you’re the one person they see and hear on the subject of science, so they think you’re a scientist. You are not a scientist. I’m a television journalist and mustn’t become so intoxicated with my own intellect that I suddenly believe that I discovered these things or I have a privileged position to assess them.

 

All I can do is use what scientific education I have to say: “Look, listen, I know this about this, just look at this graph.”

 

In the early days of dealing with climate change, I wouldn’t go out on a limb one way or another, because I don’t have the qualifications there. But I do have the qualifications to measure the scientific community and see what the consensus is about climate change.

 

I remember the moment when I suddenly thought it was incontrovertible. There was a lecture given by a distinguished American expert in atmospheric science and he showed a series of graphs about the temperature changes in the upper atmosphere. He plotted time against population growth and industrialisation. It was incontrovertible, and once you think it’s really totally incontrovertible, then you have a responsibility to say so.

 

Robin Ince With Frozen Planet, there was some hullabaloo over the editing-together of footage of a polar bear birth. And journalists turned that into: “Can you trust anything in this series?” Do you ignore that kind of thing?

 

DA No, you can’t ignore it and you shouldn’t ­ignore it – because people are reading it, so you should respond.

 

With that, I wouldn’t say it’s mischievous, but you know, the fact that it was shot in the zoo was made clear by us to start with. If the programme had shown me, or anybody, saying, “Here I am, trudging across the Arctic, and I am going to see if I can find a polar bear den and then crawl through snow and then put it in a shot” – well, that’s a lie.

 

But if you are trying to create a sequence in which you are making a genuine attempt to explain the biology of bears, one of the key things is that the young are born in the middle of the hibernation period. Unless you understand that, it doesn’t make sense of the life cycle. You are doing a dud programme if you don’t include that sort of thing.

 

So we didn’t do the drama of showing me crawling around. We said: “This is the polar bear’s life.” I think I got one letter saying that was wrong, and all the rest – several dozen letters – were from people saying, “What do they take us viewers for? Do they think we’re stupid enough to think that every shot you’ve ever taken is exact?”

 

RI Your new Sky series is about Galapagos. Was your first visit to Galapagos with Life on Earth?

 

DA Yes.

 

RI It’s seen now, in terms of biology, as almost a mystical place, because of Charles Darwin. He used to talk about his mind being a “chaos of delight” there – did you find that, too?

 

DA Yes, before I ever went, if you talked about the Galapagos and Darwin, most biologists and naturalists would think of finches – and quite right, too: that’s what clinched the thing as far as Darwin was concerned.

 

But it wasn’t the finches that put the idea [of natural selection] in Darwin’s head, it was the tortoises. The reason he didn’t use the tortoises [in writing On the Origin of Species] was that, when he got back, he found he didn’t have localities on the tortoise specimens. Here the great god, the greatest naturalist we have records of, made a mistake. His fieldwork wasn’t absolutely perfect.

 

That was quite entertaining to start with, but also it’s much more comprehensible for the audience that [in Life on Earth] we went with the tortoise and the length of its neck rather than less dramatic changes in the shape of the bill of a sparrow-like finch.

 

RI Now that you have been making shows for 60 years, are there still moments when the natural world still flabbergasts you?

 

DA Things flabbergast me all the time. I wasn’t involved in filming it, but a friend of mine was up in the Andes filming the courtship display of a particular hummingbird, a high-altitude hummingbird. The female was trying to advance, and the male was coming and going, “prrrrrrt”, and then it was gone.

 

You think, “Oh, that’s OK” – but then my pal had the wit to shoot it at 250 frames [a second] and you suddenly saw the complexity of the display. It was astounding, all at this very, very high speed.

 

The moment you say that, you think of the timescale of hummingbirds, the speed of their hearts and the temperatures at which they operate. Their timescales are quite different. You suddenly realise your own limitations: how your sensory perceptions are governed by your heart rate.

 

I thought that was so exciting, and it taught you so much, not only about how complex nature is, but about how impoverished your perceptions can be, governed as they are by your human condition.

 

BC I suppose you would use “impoverished” in terms of not being exposed to these ideas and not being able to see the behaviour of these animals. So how important do you think broadcasting, and specifically public-service broadcasting, is to the fabric of the country?

 

DA I think you and I know, because we’ve ­spoken together before. You and I feel the same way about this. It seems to be a fundamental responsibility of a broadcaster to make these things apparent.

 

As we were saying earlier, how can you be a competent member of a democratic society, with a right to vote, and have no conception of or no basis for understanding the technology on which the whole of your society is built, from the food you eat and the schools you go to, to the way you move, the way you communicate, the way you look after your kids, the way you read at night? All these decisions are fundamentally scientifically based.

 

Now, if a public-service broadcasting organisation has any responsibility, then it must be in these areas where it doesn’t necessarily make a financial profit to talk about it.

 

Science is an obvious example. We spend a lot of time saying, “Oh yes, it’s very accessible and very exciting” – but it’s not always accessible, it’s not always exciting, and it’s quite easy to be boring about. It is the job and responsibility of the broadcaster to deal with these problems and make sure it’s available to everybody. I really feel very powerfully about that. If the BBC as a public-service organisation allowed its scientific output to dwindle, then it ought to be a national scandal.

 

RI Is there a danger of underestimating the public? Is there a worry that television producers get so worried about viewing figures that they begin to think their audiences are more stupid than they are – and decide to give them more dance shows, cookery, or whatever?

 

DA It’s certainly a danger, there’s no question about that. Perish the thought that the BBC as a public-service organisation should suppose that the only criterion for success is audience size. That would be absolutely dreadful.

 

In my view, the proper attitude of a public-service broadcaster is that it should attempt to cover as broad as possible a spectrum of human interest and should measure success by the width of those views. There shouldn’t be all that large a number of gaps in the spectrum; and a major element in the spectrum is scientific understanding. The fact that it doesn’t necessarily get as big an audience as cookery is of no consequence.

 

BC We touched on this at the start – over the time that you’ve been in television, making natural history programmes and science programmes, it’s very tempting to see a degradation in their quality. You read that a lot in the newspapers: “It’s not as good as it used to be.” So are you optimistic or pessimistic? Do you think standards are improving or declining?

 

DA I think that standards vary and there will be cycles. There were in my time, and it was certainly the case when ITV came into existence. I was at the BBC when it was a monopoly – and we assumed that because viewers had nothing else to look at, they would watch us and we were doing OK.

 

It came as a great shock to us that this wasn’t the case – that when ITV came into existence, suddenly lots of viewers who had the choice moved elsewhere. That was a very salutary lesson. You have to recognise that you don’t just put programmes out there to the poor public, who are supposed to regard themselves as privileged to have it put in front of them. You’ve got to do better than that, you’ve got to proselytise, if you believe that the standards of civilisation, of our society, are worth purveying.

 

BC Now you are working with Sky. Did you think you’d ever move to a commercial station?

 

DA No.

 

BC Does it hearten you that a commercial station will make these programmes and put this amount of money into them?

 

DA The division that happened in 1954 when ITV came into existence seemed very clear, and it was exaggerated on both sides. We were way up in the ivory tower and didn’t give a damn about what the audience thought, and we thought the other side were just muckraking.

 

Well, the broadcasting landscape has become much more complex, much more sophisticated than that. There’s no longer a duopoly; there are lots of us doing all sorts of things and I would never have thought, for example, that the BBC would take advertising.

 

You would say: “It doesn’t, does it?” But the fact is that it does. UKTV, in which the BBC has a 50 per cent share, takes BBC programmes and puts advertisements in them. The first time I saw that done to one of mine was a bit of shock. I thought, “I didn’t sign up for this.”

 

ITV is not as black as it was painted, and the fact that Sky is prepared to do a 3D programme and one of the first important things based on vertebrate palaeontology – that’s not bad.

 

RI In your 60 years making programmes, was there a moment when you thought “the childhood me could not imagine that I would be in such a situation”?

 

DA Oh, yes. Quite a lot, really. It occurs over and over again. But I remember one particular occasion in northern Australia. We built a hide on a big billabong and got there at about three o’clock in the morning, a couple of hours before sunrise. And the sun comes up, and you see this billabong thronged with magpies, geese, herons, cockatoos, kangaroos, coming down to drink, marine crocodiles.

 

You had a vision of the natural world, a Rousseau-esque kind of thing. You suddenly held your breath, because you were in a strange, godlike thing; you saw the world as it was without humanity in it. And then suddenly something happened – I forget what it was, someone made a noise or something – so the whole thing was gone. But that was a moment of perception which haunts you.

 

BC This edition of the New Statesman is a celebration of reason, and I think maybe science is on the rise again. Are you optimistic or pessi­mistic about our country’s scientific future?

 

DA I would have thought that, among the younger generation, the dominance of tech­nology is now such that you have to engage with realities of science. Just by working with some of these technological devices you are learning binary mathematics, you are learning logical processes which you didn’t have to do when you were considering what Ovid wrote or Plato’s arguments.

 

I begin to hope that this aspect of technology will lead to a rational approach to thinking about problems we’re going to face. That will be very important to instil in the kids. Do you think the same?

 

BC Yes, to an extent. Although earlier I asked the question about polarisation – because there is a polarisation and a politicisation, particularly on climate change, I’m thinking. There are people you may credit as being intelligent, people who we don’t have to name – we’ve got Nigel Lawson, for example . . .

 

DA But you’re missing one element, because you’re talking as if the playing field is even. It’s not. The playing field is in trying to see things as they are and, on the other side, trying to see things as you wish they would be because that would give you a bigger profit. Then you test the veracity or the strength with which you believe in rational thought.

 

So yes, two and two is four, but if saying two and two is four and a half would be worth a couple of hundred pounds, then you say it. That said, the theory of numbers itself is very, very interesting. [Laughter] It’s a generalisation in many ways. If you look at it from one point of view, it could well be four and a half.

 

BC Do you think we have a chance as a society of becoming so rational, or at least so respectful of science, that we will be able to address those challenges?

 

DA I hope we will, but you know the problems. As with the tobacco industry that we were talking about before – the leaders, were they all absolutely duplicitous? Or did they say, “I’ve become a multimillionaire as a consequence of this, and it’s not actually proven, this connection between cancer and nicotine. A lot of people love it, and the third world, what would they do without tobacco?”

 

You fudge it out of self-interest. I must be careful, because there are some people who genuinely believe it; quite a lot of people find it easier, happier, softer, more comfortable to believe than to face the awkward reality.

(source)

 

*******

biomechanics, kinesiology & isometrics

 

This is one of the most honest-to-god presentations of qi (ki in Japanese) as applied in aikido I have ever witnessed. Qi appears to be nothing more than a figure of speech to describe the martial artist applying principles of kinesiology and biomechanics to deflect forces seemingly larger than himself.

 

• Aikido Principles: Ki Part 1
• Aikido Principles: Ki Part 2
• Aikido Principles: Ki Part 3
• Principles Ki 4

 

Qi demystified. Finally.

*******

it’s derren brown again!

English conjuror and mentalist Derren Brown demonstrates the placebo effect in part one of his two-part television programme, Fear and Faith.

 

With help from his crew, Derren promotes what is in fact a placebo as a “revolutionary” drug which is claimed to be effective in almost eradicating the symptoms of fear in human beings. The military use it on their personnel to improve their war-time effectiveness. He rents an empty office building, renovates it into a credible and professional facade of a multinational pharmaceutical company and hires actors to be medical researchers and personnel.

 

He fools a group of ordinary Britons with particular ailments like social anxiety, fear of heights, fear of public singing, skin allergies, etc to try out the drug for a week or two.

 

The results were impressive. In only a few days to a week or so, the gangly and awkward lad who has severe social anxiety manages to interview strangers (he is a journalism student), stand up to a hooligan (played by an actor) and intervene in a pub brawl. The acrophobic bloke manages to cross a bridge without a companion and stands triumphant at the edge of a very high altitude bridge. A few others lose their allergic symptoms. The lone girl who failed to overcome her fear of singing in public while on the placebo manages to pull it off towards the end of the programme when Derren reveals to everyone that the incredible new drug is only a sugar capsule.

 

Human beings can do and overcome a lot when they believe and expect to do so. “Miracle” rallies like Rony Tan’s and Tay Cheng Kee’s at Lighthouse Evangelism and Bethesda Cathedral respectively employ the same placebo-like effect. They have nothing to do with the alleged healing powers of their three-in-one god. I was one of those Lighters (a silly name we call ourselves) who helps Rony along to “pray” for the sick! The overwhelming majority of “successful” healing cases are psychosomatic – ailments that will go away on their own over time even without “prayer”. They include sore throats, neck, shoulder and lower back pains, knee problems, muscle problems and headaches. Many of these cases are also temporary – it is common for people in such religious rallies to have increased levels of dopamine and adrenaline (causing feelings of religious ecstasy, happiness and what-have-you) which are known to alleviate certain symptoms of pain albeit temporarily. This is why there are many people who claim to have their back pains “healed” in moments of emotional and psychological ecstasy, mixed with psychological manipulation and herd instinct, only to have the pains return the next day or two.

 

As for the alleged miraculous healings of tumours and cancers, failed organs and even AIDS, there are many factors to include before one concludes supernatural intervention by Mr Jesus Yahweh Christ. It will only be a miracle if WITHOUT medical treatment a Christian gets “cured” from a cancer or tumour while praying to his god either privately or in a miracle rally. Why do Christians deceive themselves by attributing to god what is obviously medical science?? Many of the so-called miracle testimonies are made by people who are already undergoing medical treatment. It is the science that heals them, not god!! On the other hand, Christians who pray without seeking medical treatment usually, if not always, die. To me, this is hardcore evidence that healing prayers do not work.

 

And for the once-in-a-while genuine “miracles”, they are just that – medical anomalies. The human body does heals itself and there are times when supposedly malignant tumours just disappear. Science may not fully understand these anomalies now, but this does not exclude future enlightenment. It also does not warrant the god-in-the-gaps, using god as the reason for everything and anything we don’t yet understand.

*******

the odd couple

 

American biologist Jerry Coyne lectures a group of teachers and students of the University of Edinburgh Humanist Society on the reasons he thinks science is incompatible with religion.

 

Why Science and Religion couldn’t Cohabit

 

Coyne writes (Why Evolution is True) and speaks prose that is very clear and straightforward even though he tends to “eat” his words and mumble. That is annoying. I have a problem with his definition of religion though. While I agree scriptural literalism and religious fundamentalism is incompatible with science, I cannot quite see how religion in its sociological and anthropological sense is. Religion is a very broad term which includes not only the literal strands of the different traditions but also neo-philosophical strands like Buddhism (and its many variations) and Confucianism. There are also liberal christians who embrace the naturalistic methodology of science and use the christian story as a mythical framework for their ethical theories.

 

I doubt any intelligent and educated person disputes that a literal view of the bible (and similar literal views of other ancient religious texts) contradicts science and common sense. But there are many sensible christians who don’t interpret the bible like that. So does the “religion” these people practise incompatible with science and the empirical method?

 

I will like to admit that these people prefer religious mythology (people like great myths and epics) instead of contemporary moral philosophy to understand their ethical theories. Religion, unlike the arts and literature, offers a “historical continuity” of myth-telling through shared rituals in community. Homo sapiens, as highly evolved social animals, may have this preference for solidarity and community as part of their evolutionary heritage. This may make us lean toward the communitarian aspects of religion? Enjoying the arts and literature and studying moral philosophy can be very individualistic pursuits. Coming together once in a while to share views on a piece of literature or film is very different from sharing one’s life and the corresponding rites of passage with a community of “like-minded” myth tellers.

 

In this sense religion is to moral education what science is to knowledge discovery. Really, we may be comparing cats and dogs here.

 

Then again, I am open to correction.

 

*******

“seeing god in the third millennium”

by Oliver Sacks

 

There are many carefully documented accounts in the medical literature of intense, life-altering religious experience in epileptic seizures. Hallucinations of overwhelming intensity, sometimes accompanied by a sense of bliss and a strong feeling of the numinous, can occur especially with the so-called “ecstatic” seizures that may occur in temporal lobe epilepsy. Though such seizures may be brief, they can lead to a fundamental reorientation, a metanoia, in one’s life. Fyodor Dostoevsky was prone to such seizures and described many of them, including this:

 

The air was filled with a big noise and I tried to move. I felt the heaven was going down upon the earth and that it engulfed me. I have really touched God. He came into me myself, yes God exists, I cried, and I don’t remember anything else. You all, healthy people … can’t imagine the happiness which we epileptics feel during the second before our fit. … I don’t know if this felicity lasts for seconds, hours or months, but believe me, for all the joys that life may bring, I would not exchange this one.

 

A century later, Kenneth Dewhurst and A. W. Beard published a detailed report in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry of a bus conductor who had a sudden feeling of elation while collecting fares. They wrote:

 

He was suddenly overcome with a feeling of bliss. He felt he was literally in Heaven. He collected the fares correctly, telling his passengers at the same time how pleased he was to be in Heaven. … He remained in this state of exaltation, hearing divine and angelic voices, for two days. Afterwards he was able to recall these experiences and he continued to believe in their validity. [Three years later] following three seizures on three successive days, he became elated again. He stated that his mind had “cleared.” … During this episode he lost his faith.

 

He now no longer believed in heaven and hell, in an afterlife, or in the divinity of Christ. This second conversion — to atheism — carried the same excitement and revelatory quality as the original religious conversion.

 

More recently, Orrin Devinsky and his colleagues have been able to make video EEG recordings in patients who are having such seizures, and have observed an exact synchronization of the epiphany with a spike in epileptic activity in the temporal lobes (more commonly the right temporal lobe).

 

Ecstatic seizures are rare — they only occur in something like 1 or 2 percent of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. But the last half century has seen an enormous increase in the prevalence of other states sometimes permeated by religious joy and awe, “heavenly” visions and voices, and, not infrequently, religious conversion or metanoia. Among these are out-of-body experiences (OBEs), which are more common now that more patients can be brought back to life from serious cardiac arrests and the like — and much more elaborate and numinous experiences called near-death experiences (NDEs).

 

Both OBEs and NDEs, which occur in waking but often profoundly altered states of consciousness, cause hallucinations so vivid and compelling that those who experience them may deny the term hallucination, and insist on their reality. And the fact that there are marked similarities in individual descriptions is taken by some to indicate their objective “reality.”

 

But the fundamental reason that hallucinations — whatever their cause or modality — seem so real is that they deploy the very same systems in the brain that actual perceptions do. When one hallucinates voices, the auditory pathways are activated; when one hallucinates a face, the fusiform face area, normally used to perceive and identify faces in the environment, is stimulated.

 

In OBEs, subjects feel that they have left their bodies — they seem to be floating in midair, or in a corner of the room, looking down on their vacated bodies from a distance. The experience may be felt as blissful, terrifying, or neutral. But its extraordinary nature — the apparent separation of “spirit” from body, imprints it indelibly on the mind and may be taken by some people as evidence of an immaterial soul — proof that consciousness, personality, and identity can exist independently of the body and even survive bodily death.

 

Neurologically, OBEs are a form of bodily illusion arising from a temporary dissociation of visual and proprioceptive representations — normally these are coordinated, so that one views the world, including one’s body, from the perspective of one’s own eyes, one’s head. OBEs, as Henrik Ehrsson and his fellow researchers in Stockholm have elegantly shown, can be produced experimentally, by using simple equipment — video goggles, mannequins, rubber arms, etc. — to confuse one’s visual input and one’s proprioceptive input and create an uncanny sense of disembodiedness.

 

A number of medical conditions can lead to OBEs — cardiac arrest or arrhythmias, or a sudden lowering of blood pressure or blood sugar, often combined with anxiety or illness. I know of some patients who have experienced OBEs during difficult childbirths, and others who have had them in association with narcolepsy or sleep paralysis. Fighter pilots subjected to high G-forces in flight (or sometimes in training centrifuges) have reported OBEs as well as much more elaborate states of consciousness that resemble the near-death experience.

 

The near-death experience usually goes through a sequence of characteristic stages. One seems to be moving effortlessly and blissfully along a dark corridor or tunnel towards a wonderful “living” light — often interpreted as Heaven or the boundary between life and death. There may be a vision of friends and relatives welcoming one to the other side, and there may be a a rapid yet extremely detailed series of memories of one’s life — a lightning autobiography. The return to one’s body may be abrupt, as when, for example, the beat is restored to an arrested heart. Or it may be more gradual, as when one emerges from a coma.

 

Not infrequently, an OBE turns into an NDE — as happened with Tony Cicoria, a surgeon who told me how he had been struck by lightning. He gave me a vivid account of what then followed, as I wrote in Musicophilia:

 

“I was flying forwards. Bewildered. I looked around. I saw my own body on the ground. I said to myself, ‘Oh shit, I’m dead.’ I saw people converging on the body. I saw a woman — she had been standing waiting to use the phone right behind me — position herself over my body, give it CPR. . . . I floated up the stairs — my consciousness came with me. I saw my kids, had the realization that they would be okay. Then I was surrounded by a bluish-white light . . . an enormous feeling of well-being and peace. The highest and lowest points of my life raced by me . . . pure thought, pure ecstasy. I had the perception of accelerating, being drawn up . . . there was speed and direction. Then, as I was saying to myself, ‘This is the most glorious feeling I have ever had’ — SLAM! I was back.”

 

Dr. Cicoria had some memory problems for a month or so after this, but he was able to resume his practice as an orthopedic surgeon. Yet he was, as he put it, “a changed man.” Previously he had no particular interest in music, but now he was seized by an overwhelming desire to listen to classical music, especially Chopin. He bought a piano and started to play obsessively and to compose. He was convinced that the entire episode — being struck by lightning, having a transcendent vision, then being resuscitated and gifted so that he could bring music to the world, was part of a divine plan.

 

Cicoria has a PhD  in neuroscience, and he also felt that his sudden accession of spirituality and musicality must have gone with changes in his brain — changes which we might be able to clarify, perhaps, with neuro-imaging  He saw no contradiction between religion and neurology — if God works on a man, or in a man, Cicoria felt, He would do so via the nervous system, via parts of the brain specialized, or potentially specializable, for spiritual feeling and belief.

 

Cicoria’s reasonable and (one might say) scientific attitude to his own spiritual conversion is in marked contrast to that of another surgeon, Dr. Eben Alexander, who describes, in his recent book, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, a detailed and complex NDE which occurred while he spent seven days in a coma caused by meningitis. During his NDE, he writes, he passed through the bright light — the boundary between life and death — to find himself in an idyllic and beautiful meadow (which he realized was Heaven) where he met a beautiful but unknown woman who conveyed various messages to him telepathically. Advancing farther into the afterlife, he felt the ever-more-embracing presence of God. Following this experience, Alexander became something of an evangelist, wanting to spread the good news, that heaven really exists.

 

Alexander makes much of his experience as a neurosurgeon and an expert on the workings of the brain. He provides an appendix to his book detailing “Neuroscientific Hypotheses I considered to explain my experience” — but all of these he dismisses as inapplicable in his own case because, he insists, his cerebral cortex was completely shut down during the coma, precluding the possibility of any conscious experience.

 

Yet his NDE was rich in visual and auditory detail, as many such hallucinations are. He is puzzled by this, since such sensory details are normally produced by the cortex. Nonetheless, his consciousness had journeyed into the blissful, ineffable realm of the afterlife–a journey which he felt lasted for most of the time he lay in coma. Thus, he proposes, his essential self, his “soul,” did not need a cerebral cortex, or indeed any material basis whatever.

 

It is not so easy, however, to dismiss neurological processes. Dr. Alexander presents himself as emerging from his coma suddenly: “My eyes opened … my brain … had just kicked back to life.” But one almost always emerges gradually from coma; there are intermediate stages of consciousness. It is in these transitional stages, where consciousness of a sort has returned, but not yet fully lucid consciousness, that NDEs tend to occur.

 

Alexander insists that his journey, which subjectively lasted for days, could not have occurred except while he was deep in coma. But we know from the experience of Tony Cicoria and many others, that a hallucinatory journey to the bright light and beyond, a full-blown NDE, can occur in 20 or 30 seconds, even though it seems to last much longer. Subjectively, during such a crisis, the very concept of time may seem variable or meaningless. The one most plausible hypothesis in Dr. Alexander’s case, then, is that his NDE occurred not during his coma, but as he was surfacing from the coma and his cortex was returning to full function. It is curious that he does not allow this obvious and natural explanation, but instead insists on a supernatural one.

 

To deny the possibility of any natural explanation for an NDE, as Dr. Alexander does, is more than unscientific — it is anti-scientific  It precludes the scientific investigation of such states.

 

Kevin Nelson, a neurologist at the University of Kentucky, has studied the neural basis of NDEs and other forms of “deep” hallucinating for many decades. In 2011, he published a wise and careful book about his research, The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist’s Search for the God Experience.

 

Nelson feels that the “dark tunnel” described in most NDEs represents constriction of the visual fields due to compromised blood pressure in the eyes, and the “bright light” represents a flow of visual excitation from the brain-stem  through visual relay stations, to the visual cortex (the so-called pons-geniculate-occipital or PGO pathway).

 

Simpler perceptual hallucinations — of patterns, animals, people, landscapes, music, etc. — as one may get in a variety of conditions (blindness, deafness, epilepsy, migraine, sensory deprivation, etc.) do not usually involve profound changes in consciousness, and while very startling, are nearly always recognized as hallucinations. It is different with the very complex hallucinations of ecstatic seizures or NDEs — which are often taken to be veridical, truth-telling and often life-transforming revelations of a spiritual universe, and perhaps of a spiritual destiny or mission.

 

The tendency to spiritual feeling and religious belief lies deep in human nature and seems to have its own neurological basis, though it may be very strong in some people and less developed in others. For those who are religiously inclined, an NDE may seem to offer “proof of heaven,” as Eben Alexander puts it.

 

Some religious people come to experience their proof of heaven by another route — the route of prayer, as the anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann has explored in her book When God Talks Back. The very essence of divinity, of God, is immaterial. God cannot be seen, felt, or heard in the ordinary way. Luhrmann wondered how, in the face of this lack of evidence, God becomes a real, intimate presence in the lives of so many evangelicals and other people of faith.

 

She joined an evangelical community as a participant-observer, immersing herself in particular in their disciplines of prayer and visualization — imagining in ever-richer, more concrete detail the figures and events depicted in the Bible. Congregants, she writes:

 

Practice seeing, hearing, smelling, and touching in the mind’s eye. They give these imagined experiences the sensory vividness associated with the memories of real events. What they are able to imagine becomes more real to them.

 

Sooner or later, with this intensive practice, for some of the congregants, the mind may leap from imagination to hallucination, and the congregant hears God, sees God, feels God walking beside them. These yearned-for voices and visions have the reality of perception, and this is because they activate the perceptual systems of the brain, as all hallucinations do. These visions, voices, and feelings of “presence” are accompanied by intense emotion — emotions of joy, peace, awe, revelation. Some evangelicals may have many such experiences; others only a single one — but even a single experience of God, imbued with the overwhelming force of actual perception, can be enough to sustain a lifetime of faith. (For those who are not religiously inclined, such experiences may occur with meditation or intense concentration on an artistic or intellectual or emotional plane, whether this is falling in love or listening to Bach, observing the intricacies of a fern, or cracking a scientific problem.)

 

In the last decade or two, there has been increasingly active research in the field of “spiritual neurosciences.” There are special difficulties in this research, for religious experiences cannot be summoned at will; they come, if at all, in their own time and way — the religious would say in God’s time and way. Nonetheless, researchers have been able to demonstrate physiological changes not only in pathological states like seizures, OBEs, and NDEs, but also in positive states like prayer and meditation. Typically these changes are quite widespread, involving not only primary sensory areas in the brain, but limbic (emotional) systems, hippocampal (memory) systems, and the prefrontal cortex, where intentionality and judgement reside.

 

Hallucinations, whether revelatory or banal, are not of supernatural origin; they are part of the normal range of human consciousness and experience. This is not to say that they cannot play a part in the spiritual life, or have great meaning for an individual. Yet while it is understandable that one might attribute value, ground beliefs, or construct narratives from them, hallucinations cannot provide evidence for the existence of any metaphysical beings or places. They provide evidence only of the brain’s power to create them.

(source)

 

*******

“genesis revisited”

by Michael Shermer

 

To convey the logical absurdity of trying to squeeze the round peg of science into the square hole of religion, I penned the following scientific revision of the Genesis creation story. It is not intended as a sacrilege of the poetic beauty of Genesis; rather, it is a mere extension of what the creationists have already done to Genesis in their insistence that it be read not as mythic saga but as scientific prose. If Genesis were written in the language of modern science, it would read something like this:

 

In the beginning – specifically on October 23, 4004 BC, at noon – out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang, followed by cosmological inflation and an expanding universe. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, so He commanded hydrogen atoms (which He created from quarks) to fuse and become helium atoms and in the process release energy in the form of light. And the light maker He called the sun, and the process He called fusion. And He saw the light was good because now He could see what He was doing, so He created Earth. And the evening and the morning was the first day.

 

And God said, Let there be lots of fusion light makers in the sky. Some of these fusion makers He grouped into collections He called galaxies, and these appeared to be millions and even billions of light years from Earth, which would mean that they were created before the first creation in 4004 BC. This was confusing, so God created tired light, and the creation story was preserved. And created He many wondrous splendors such as Red Giants, White Dwarfs, Quasars, Pulsars, Supernova, Worm Holes, and even Black Holes out of which nothing can escape. But since God cannot be constrained by nothing, He created Hawking radiation through which information can escape from Black Holes. This made God even more tired and tired light, and the evening and the morning were the second day.

 

And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the continents drift apart by plate tectonics. He decreed sea floor spreading would create zones of emergence, and He caused subduction zones to build mountains and cause earthquakes. In weak points in the crust God created volcanic islands, where the next day He would place organisms that were similar to but different from their relatives on the continents, so that still later created creatures called humans would mistake them for evolved descendants created by adaptive radiation. And the evening and the morning were the third day.

 

And God saw that the land was barren, so He created animals bearing their own kind, declaring Thou shalt not evolve into new species, and thy equilibrium shall not be punctuated. And God placed into the rocks, fossils that appeared older than 4004 BC that were similar to but different from living creatures. And the sequence resembled descent with modification. And the evening and morning were the fourth day.

 

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life, the fishes. And God created great whales whose skeletal structure and physiology were homologous with the land animals he would create later that day. God then brought forth abundantly all creatures, great and small, declaring that microevolution was permitted, but not macroevolution. And God said, natura non facit saltum – nature shall not make leaps. And the evening and morning were the fifth day.

 

And God created the pongidids and hominids with 98 percent genetic similarity, naming two of them Adam and Eve. In the book in which God explained how He did all this, in one chapter He said he created Adam and Eve together out of the dust at the same time, but in another chapter He said he created Adam first, then later created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. This caused confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt, so God created theologians to sort it out.

 

And in the ground placed He in abundance teeth, jaws, skulls, and pelvises of transitional fossils from pre-Adamite creatures. One chosen as his special creation He named Lucy, who could walk upright like a human but had a small brain like an ape. And God realized that this too was confusing, so He created paleoanthropologists to figure it out.

 

Just as He was finishing up the loose ends of the creation God realized that Adam’s immediate descendants would not understand inflationary cosmology, global general relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, biochemistry, paleontology, and evolutionary biology, so He created creation myths. But there were so many creation stories throughout the world God realized this too was confusing, so created He annthropologists and mythologists.

 

By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrunneth with skepticism, so God became angry, so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply themselves (but not in those words). But the humans took God literally and now there are six billion of them. And the evening and morning were the sixth day.

 

By now God was tired, so He proclaimed, Thank me it’s Friday, and He made the weekend. It was a good idea.

 

*******

i love you with my brain

 

 

It is every other time when someone surrogates human self-consciousness with the rhythmically contracting hunk of hollowed muscle situated in the front of the vertebral column that I cringe. Unlike the euphemistic soul or spirit which translates what is luminous and transcendent in the human experience, heart appears to be as misleading a provenance as it is primitively bestial.

 

So alien are words like I love you with my heart but ghastlier will be remarks by certain evangelicals to the incredulous tune of having this hunk of muscle perform things other than pumping blood. One might recall the sincerity of these well-meaning creatures as they advice one to believe with the heart instead of the mind. One might crumple the eyebrows, as I did, to listen to mentally retarded counsel to spurn any critical and intellectual faculty in favor of some woo woo about seeing with the heart and believing or thinking with the heart.

 

So perilous can be such an advice that no educated and civilized human being should EVER consider it. It is odd that a fringed subculture like evangelicalism can be so willing to ostracize intellectual sobriety when it bemoans the ill effects of consuming alcohol which in large quantities do the same thing.

 

How does one think with the heart? Or believe with the heart? The heart contains neither consciousness nor volition. Has education in Singapore been so rubbished that no one seem to realize that human self-consciousness is caused by the brain? Is science so ill-respected that no one accepts the FACT that emotions like love and hate are chemical processes in the brain and NOT the heart?

 

I know of otherwise very bright and intelligent individuals who offer bovine filth like stop thinking, just believe, which unknown to them, irritate me so much that my heart, literally, burns all night, causing me problems.

 

That soppy and vulgar four-letter word. Unlike mammon, this alphabetical quartet seems more politically and socially appropriate. Our elite-loving politicians hallelujah its virtues over the tangible and empirically exacting mammon only to soothe the proletarian mob. But when no one is looking over their genitalia, we know how maniacally important mammon is to them.

 

Hi love.

 

L-o-v-e, if some do not already know, is also a function of the brain. There is no such thing as a heart which pumps romance and marital commitment. There is no such thing as a Happy Meal limited edition Jesus toy living in a person’s bloody heart who helps him or her to love better.

 

I want to know where Love is

 

And like every thing else in the natural world, l-o-v-e will soon be another demystified and demythologized casualty.

 

*******

 

 

an orgy of freethinking

 

“When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes and striving that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the case today. By the mere existence of his stomach everyone was condemned to participate in that chase. The stomach might well be satisfied by such participation, but not man insofar as he is a thinking and feeling being.

 

As the first way out there was religion, which is implanted into every child by way of traditional education-machine. Thus I came – though the child of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents – to a deep religiousness, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment – an attitude that has never again left me, even though later on, it has been tempered by a better insight into the causal connections. It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the “merely personal”, from an existence dominated by wishes, hopes and primitive feelings. Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking.

 

The contemplation of this world beckoned as a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in its pursuit. The mental grasp of this extra-personal world within the frame of our capabilities presented itself to my mind, half consciously, half unconsciously, as a supreme goal. Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights they had achieved, were the friends who could not be lost. The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it.”

- Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, 1979

 

*******

an atheist mother’s promise

 

I promise that by example I will teach you kindness, justice, cooperation, respect and tolerance. Because morality is part of what it means to be a responsible member of society and the world.

 

I promise to help you see other people’s perspectives, consider their experiences and be tolerant of their differences. I’ll encourage you to see beyond the labels of good and evil to understand the complexity of human existence.

 

I promise that as you grow and as I get to know you, I’ll accept you for who you are rather than any preconceived notion of who you “should” be.

 

I promise to teach you that you’re an agent of change in your own life and in this world. You aren’t a victim of circumstance and you don’t need to wait for unseen forces to bring you miracles. You’re your own creator — of fulfillment, joy, love and peace.

 

Alongside science, history, philosophy and the arts, I promise to teach you about all religions and give you the intellectual freedom to wonder, question and come to your own conclusions. And if your conclusions are different from my own, as many inevitably will be, I promise to respect them.

 

I promise to tell you the truth as much as I know it. And encourage a lifetime of curiosity, questioning and exploration in pursuit of more knowledge and your own truth.

 

I promise to show you that this moment right here is all the heaven we need. This life is our gift and our purpose. It’s our opportunity to live richly and to make lasting and meaningful change for society and humanity.

 

And in guiding you through life, I promise to talk to you about death — as much as I understand it — without euphemisms or fables, but as a natural part of this complex and enduring world. And I’ll talk to you about how brief a time we have in a world that existed before us and that will exist far after we depart.

 

I promise to love you fiercely, honestly and courageously.

(source)

 

Amen to that!

 

*******

“why there is something rather than nothing”

by Michael Shermer

 

Why is there something rather than nothing? The question is usually posed by Christian apologists as a rhetorical argument meant to pose as the drop-dead killer case for God that no scientist can possibly answer. Those days are over. Even though scientists are not in agreement on a final answer to the now non-rhetorical question, they are edging closer to providing logical and even potentially empirically testable hypotheses to account for the universe. Here are a dozen possible answers to the question:

 

#1. God

The theist’s answer to the question is that God existed before the universe and subsequently brought it into existence out of nothing (ex nihilo) in a single creation moment as described in Genesis. But the very conception of a creator existing before the universe and then creating it implies a time sequence. In both the Judeo-Christian tradition (along with the Babylonian pre-Judeo-Christian cosmogony) and the scientific worldview, time began when the universe came into existence, either through divine creation or the Big Bang. God, therefore, would have to exist outside of space and time, which means that as natural beings delimited by living in a finite universe, we cannot possibly know anything about such a supernatural entity. The theist’s answer is an untestable hypothesis and thus amounts to nothing more than a god-of-the-gaps argument.

 

#2. Wrong question.

Asking why there is something rather than nothing presumes “nothing” is the natural state of things out of which “something” needs an explanation. Maybe “something” is the natural state of things and “nothing” would be the mystery to be solved. As the physicist Victor Stenger notes in his book, The Fallacy of Fine Tuning: “Current cosmology suggests that no laws of physics were violated in bringing the universe into existence. The laws of physics themselves are shown to correspond to what one would expect if the universe appeared from nothing. There is something rather than nothing because something is more stable.”

 

#3. Grand Unified Theory

In order to answer the question, we need a comprehensive theory of physics that connects the subatomic world described by quantum mechanics to the cosmic world described by general relativity. As the Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll notes in his book From Eternity to Here: “Possibly general relativity is not the correct theory of gravity, at least in the context of the extremely early universe. Most physicists suspect that a quantum theory of gravity, reconciling the framework of quantum mechanics with Einstein’s ideas about curved spacetime, will ultimately be required to make sense of what happens at the very earliest times. So if someone asks you what really happened at the moment of the purported Big Bang, the only honest answer would be: ‘I don’t know.’” That grand unified theory of everything will itself need an explanation, but it may be explicable by some other theory we have yet to comprehend out of our sheer ignorance at this moment in history.

 

#4. Boom and Bust Cycles

Sean Carroll also suggests that our universe may be just one in a series of boom-and-bust cycles of expansion and contractions of the universe, with our universe just one “episode” of the bubble’s eventual collapse and re-expansion in an eternal cycle, and therefore “there is no such thing as an initial state, because time is eternal. In this case, we are imagining that the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the entire universe, although it’s obviously an important event in the history of our local region.”

 

#5. Darwinian Multiverse

According to the cosmologist Lee Smolin, in his book The Life of the Cosmos, our universe is just one of many bubble universes with varying sets of laws of nature. Those universes with laws of nature similar to ours will generate matter, which coalesces into stars, some of which collapse into black holes and a singularity, the same entity out of which our universe may have sprung. Thus, universes like ours give birth to baby universes with those same laws of nature, some of which develop intelligent life smart enough to discover this Darwinian process of cosmic evolution.

 

#6. Inflationary Cosmology

In his 1997 book The Inflationary Universe, the cosmologist Alan Guth proposes that our universe sprang into existence from a bubble nucleation of spacetime. If this process of universe creation is natural, then there may be multiple bubble nucleations that give rise to many universes that expand but remain separate from one another without any causal contact between them.

 

#7. Many Worlds Multiverse

According to the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are an infinite number of universes in which every possible outcome of every possible choice that has ever been available, or will be available, has happened in one of those universes. This many-worlds multiverse is grounded in the bizarre findings of the famous “double-slit” experiment, in which light is passed through two slits and forms an interference pattern of waves on a back surface (like throwing two stones in a pond and watching the concentric wave patterns interact, with crests and troughs adding and subtracting from one another). The spooky part comes when you send single photons of light one at a time through the two slits—they still form an interference wave pattern even though they are not interacting with other photons. How can this be? One answer is that the photons are interacting with photons in other universes! In this type of multiverse you could meet your doppelgänger, and depending on which universe you entered, your parallel self would be fairly similar or dissimilar to you, a theme that has become a staple of science fiction (see, for example, Michael Crichton’s Timeline).

 

#8. Brane Universes

A multi-dimensional universe may come about when three-dimensional “branes” (a membrane-like structure on which our universe exists) moves through higher-dimensional space and collides with another brane, the result of which is the energized creation of another universe.

 

#9. String Universes

A related multiverse is derived through string theory, which by at least one calculation allows for 10⁵⁰⁰ possible worlds, all with different self-consistent laws and constants. That’s a 1 followed by 500 zeroes possible universes (12 zeroes is a trillion!). In his book The Unconscious Quantum, Victor Stenger published the results of a computer model that analyzes what just 100 different universes would be like under constants different from our own, ranging from five orders of magnitude above to five orders of magnitude below their values in our universe. Stenger found that long-lived stars of at least 1 billion years—necessary for the production of life-giving heavy elements—would emerge within a wide range of parameters in at least half of the universes in his model.

 

#10. Quantum Foam Multiverse

In this model, universes are created out of nothing, but in the scientific version of ex nihilo the nothing of the vacuum of space actually contains the theoretical spacetime mishmash called quantum foam, which may fluctuate to create baby universes. In this configuration, any quantum object in any quantum state may generate a new universe, each one of which represents every possible state of every possible object. This is Stephen Hawking’s explanation for the fine-tuning problem that he himself famously presented in his 1996 book (co-authored with Roger Penrose) The Nature of Space and Time: “Quantum fluctuations lead to the spontaneous creation of tiny universes, out of nothing. Most of the universes collapse to nothing, but a few that reach a critical size, will expand in an inflationary manner, and will form galaxies and stars, and maybe beings like us.”

 

#11. M-Theory Grand Design

Stephen Hawking has continued working on this question, and this month, he and the Caltech mathematician Leonard Mlodinow present their answer in a book entitled The Grand Design. They approach the problem from what they call “model-dependent realism,” based on the assumption that our brains form models of the world from sensory input, that we use the model most successful at explaining events, and that when more than one model makes accurate predictions “we are free to use whichever model is most convenient.” Employing this method, they write, “it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation.” The dual wave/particle models of light are an example of model-dependent realism, where each one agrees with certain observations but neither one is sufficient to explain all observations. To model the entire universe, Hawking and Mlodinow employ “M-Theory,” an extension of string theory that includes 11 dimensions and incorporates all five current string theory models. “M-theory is the most general supersymmetric theory of gravity,” Hawking and Mlodinow explain. “For these reasons M-theory is the only candidate for a complete theory of the universe. If it is finite—and this has yet to be proved—it will be a model of a universe that creates itself.” Although they admit that the theory has yet to be confirmed by observation, if it is, then no creator explanation is necessary because the universe creates itself. I call this auto-ex-nihilo.

 

#12. Nothing is unstable – something is natural

In his 2012 book, A Universe From Nothing, the cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss attempts to link quantum physics to Einstein’s gravitational theory of general relativity to explain the origin of something (including a universe) from nothing: “In quantum gravity, universes can, and indeed always will, spontaneously appear from nothing. Such universes need not be empty, but can have matter and [electromagnetic] radiation in them, as long as the total energy, including the negative energy associated with gravity [balancing the positive energy of matter], is zero.” And: “In order for the closed universes that might be created through such mechanisms to last for longer than infinitesimal times, something like inflation is necessary.” Observations have revealed that, in fact, the universe is flat (there is just enough matter to eventually halt its expansion), its energy is zero, and it underwent rapid inflation, or expansion, shortly after the Big Bang as described by inflationary cosmology. Thus, Krauss concludes, “quantum gravity not only appears to allow universes to be created from nothing—meaning…the absence of space and time—it may require them. ‘Nothing’—in this case no space, no time, no anything!—is unstable.”

Many of these dozen explanations are testable. The theory that new universes can emerge from collapsing black holes may be illuminated through additional knowledge about the properties of black holes. Other bubble universes might be detected in the subtle temperature variations of the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang of our own universe. NASA recently launched a spacecraft constructed to study this radiation. Another way to test these theories might be through the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) that is designed to detect exceptionally faint gravitational waves. If there are other universes, perhaps ripples in gravitational waves will signal their presence. Maybe gravity is such a relatively weak force (compared to electromagnetism and the nuclear forces) because some of it “leaks” out to other universes. Maybe.

After a column I wrote in Scientific American on this topic (“Much Ado About Nothing,” May, 2012), I received an email from the Columbia University theoretical physicist Peter Woit cautioning me not to put too much emphasis on any one of these hypotheses/answers to the question of why there is something rather than nothing, noting that even these proposed tests probably themselves lack validity, if they could ever be conducted in reality. He explained that his skepticism came not out of religious conviction: “I’m as much of an atheist as anyone, and I’m really disturbed to see arguments being made that are going to end up discrediting skepticism and atheism.” He then posted a blog commentary on my Scientific American column, noting that my “authority here is the Hawking/Mlodinow popular book, but he’s also convinced that WMAP and LIGO are somehow going to provide evidence for multiverses, something that even the most far-out theorists in this field aren’t claiming.” Regarding my comment that perhaps gravity “leaks” out to other universes Woit responds: “Nobody seems to have told Shermer that this is not an idea taken seriously by a significant number of theorists, or that LHC data has shot down the hopes of the one or two such theorists.” Woit was prescient in that the prominent Intelligent Design creationist William Dembski did highlight Woit’s skepticism at his blog Uncommon Descent (“Serving the Intelligent Design Community”), quoting Woit and commenting: “Don’t nobody tell Shermer. It’s more fun this way.”

Given the fact that I appreciated Peter Woit’s skeptical book on string theory (Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law), I queried my sources. Physicist Victor Stenger responded: “The multiverse is not nonsense. It is based on good theory, but only theory. It is, in principle, detectable by measuring an anisotropy in the cosmic background radiation. That’s why I did not rely on it in The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning. I agree with Woit on M-theory, though.” Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow said he doubts that either he or Woit knows what “most physicists” think about the multiverse, and then opined that “most cosmologists certainly believe it,” recalling that Brian Greene “outlined the general thinking (as opposed to, say, Hawking’s particular views) very well in his book on it” (The Hidden Reality). Finally, Caltech physicist and cosmologist Sean Carroll noted: “You are completely correct, the multiverse is an idea that pops out of inflation (and string theory), not one that is put in out of desperation. Here is a column of my own making exactly this point. Carroll then cautioned: “Obviously the entire set of ideas is controversial and speculative, and should be presented as such, but it’s taken very seriously by a large number of extremely smart and respectable people.” For example: Leonard Susskind, Alex Vilenkin and Alan Guth (on the pro-multiverse side) and David Gross, Paul Steinhardt, and Edward Farhi (skeptical of the multiverse side).

In the meantime, while scientists sort out the science to answer the question Why is there something instead of nothing?, in addition to reviewing these dozen answers it is also okay to say “I don’t know” and keep searching. There is no need to turn to supernatural answers just to fulfill an emotional need for explanation. Like nature, the mind abhors a vacuum, but sometimes it is better to admit ignorance than feign certainty about which one knows not. If there is one lesson that the history of science has taught us it is that it is arrogant to think that we now know enough to know that we cannot know. Science is young. Let us have the courage to admit our ignorance and to keep searching for answers to these deepest questions.

(source)

*******

“how the higgs boson posits a new story of our creation”

by Lawrence Krauss

 

There has been a lot of hoopla since the July 4 announcement by the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) that the two largest experiments at the Large Hadron Collider had uncovered evidence for a new elementary particle. The particle in question appears to be the Higgs particle, which scientists have been seeking for almost 50 years and is at the heart of our current best theory of nature. But the real excitement seems to stem from the fact that this long-sought discovery is frequently called, in colloquial circles, “the God particle.” This term appeared first in the unfortunate title of a book written by physicist Leon Lederman two decades ago, and while to my knowledge it was never used by any scientist (including Lederman) before or since, it has captured the media’s imagination.

 

What makes this term particularly unfortunate is that nothing could be further from the truth. Assuming the particle in question is indeed the Higgs, it validates an unprecedented revolution in our understanding of fundamental physics and brings science closer to dispensing with the need for any supernatural shenanigans all the way back to the beginning of the universe—and perhaps even before the beginning, if there was a before. The brash notion predicts an invisible field (the Higgs field) that permeates all of space and suggests that the properties of matter, and the forces that govern our existence, derive from their interaction with what otherwise seems like empty space. Had the magnitude or nature of the Higgs field been different, the properties of the universe would have been different, and we wouldn’t be here to wonder why. Moreover, a Higgs field validates the notion that seemingly empty space may contain the seeds of our existence. This idea is at the heart of one of the boldest predictions of cosmology, called inflation. This posits that a similar type of background field was established in the earliest moments of the big bang, causing a microscopic region to expand by more than 85 orders of magnitude in a fraction of a second, after which the energy contained in otherwise empty space was converted into all the matter and radiation we see today! Alan Guth, the originator of the theory, called it “the ultimate free lunch.”

 

If these bold, some would say arrogant, notions derive support from the remarkable results at the Large Hadron Collider, they may reinforce two potentially uncomfortable possibilities: first, that many features of our universe, including our existence, may be accidental consequences of conditions associated with the universe’s birth; and second, that creating “stuff” from “no stuff” seems to be no problem at all—everything we see could have emerged as a purposeless quantum burp in space or perhaps a quantum burp of space itself. Humans, with their remarkable tools and their remarkable brains, may have just taken a giant step toward replacing metaphysical speculation with empirically verifiable knowledge. The Higgs particle is now arguably more relevant than God.

(source)

 

*******

love singapore drivel

 

“God’s dream shapes history.

 

It enters Earth through the Patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It’s a force for good and not for evil…”

 

- 4 July’s entry, “politics of dreams” (Love Singapore 40-Day Prayer 2012)

 

The above is excerpted from this year’s 40-Day prayer devotional, an intercessory prayer initiative by the Love Singapore network of evangelical churches. This christian network kids itself into megalomaniacal wishful thinking – that secular Singapore will some day be christianised. Legend has it that the chief christian shaman of South Korea, a Pastor Cho Yonggi of the notoriously dubbed largest church in the world, has once claimed that god told him (what charismaniacs call “prophecy”) Singapore is akin to the city of Antioch of biblical times and that countless numbers would bleat the name of Jesus in this country.

 

Dishonest christian demagogues love to fortune-tell what the sheep likes to hear – and they are often grandiose prognostications about personal calls to preaching and pastoral ministries, corporate visions of national christianisations, and even the proselytisations of political leaders.

 

And thus while the overt christianisation of Singapore is an orgasmic thought for evangelical christians here, it is but sandcastle-making in the nanyang air. There is this illusion of grandeur for many years about a spiritual “revival” which will some day occur in Singapore, airbagged by a facade of christian “success” in the likes of blood-diamond mines like City Harvest Church, New Creation Church, Lighthouse Evangelism, Faith Community Baptist Church, Trinity Christian Centre and Victory Family Centre.

 

But the statistics concerning the religious demographics gargle a more banal story. Although the number of buddhists has tumbled a huge 9.2% from 42.5% in 2000 to 33.3% in 2010, it is still the majority religion in this country. The statistics for christianity is a bit serpentine, as it umbrellas together Roman Catholicism, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Protestantism and perhaps even neochristian sects like the mormons ( I am not sure on this).

 

This means that while the number of christian adherents is a far second from buddhism with 18.3% in 2010, the actual number of evangelical christians (all protestants in Singapore) is a lot smaller. This makes the number of people with no religion as the second largest group of Singaporeans, at 17.0% in 2010 (the numbers may have increased by 2012). The third largest group would be the muslims at 14.7%.

 

If yours truly is allowed to do some prophesying , I will wager on the high probability of an “atheist” revival in Singapore, with many of its adherents dropping out of Christianity, Buddhism and Taoism. One has to realise that there are also a significant number of people who call themselves christians, buddhists, taoists or even muslims only out of cultural and ethnic loyalties. Many of them do not seriously believe any of the superstitious and premodern woo woo claims of these religions. Does that make them really christians? Or Taoists? Or muslims? Remember, some of these communities have serious esteem issues with people who want to leave the religion.

 

Anyhow…back to the excerpt at the start of the post. It was the reason for my scribbling anyway. Jeez, boy am I a windbag.

 

The scribbler for the 40-day drivel does not realise how stupid that first few sentences of the 4th of July entry makes him (or her). While Yahweh supposedly created the observable universe 14-odd billion years ago, he dilly-dallied for about 10 billion of those donkey years before fashioning this one singular planet in this teeny-weeny solar system. He procrastinated again for about 1 billion or so year before deciding to birth the first biological “life” in the solar system – some self-replicating molecule.

 

This omniscient warrior-god doesn’t seem to know what he is doing – allowing homo sapiens to arise only about 100 to 200 thousand years ago. What is he doing all those millions of years? Playing with the bacteria? Dancing with the flora? Fucking the dinosaurs? He is very benevolent and loving indeed, to allow his magnum opus – human beings – to grovel in the mud of a struggling and despairing existence for about 96 to 196 thousand years before he finally comes to his senses and “dream his Dream”. One wonders why he calls himself Yahweh, a very tribalistic hebrew name, if he wasn’t a tribal deity. Christians do not realise that they are relying more on greek philosophy than Jewish categories when they pontificate about Yahweh being metaphysically simple, all-powerful, all-knowing and singularly one and indivisible.

 

It becomes even more absurd why this god chose to “reveal” himself in mythical stories that cannot be verified by the best of our contemporary historical and archaeological research. One has to assume that sketchy figures like Abraham and Isaac are real historical people if one is to read the biblical narratives in any meaningful way. One has to assume also, that Adam and Eve are real (are they neanderthals then? Or homo erectus?) – otherwise the whole original sin thingy is rubbished.

 

Yet…no intelligent person today can honestly accept that the creation and national myths of the tanakh are historically accountable. And without the historicity of the hebrew texts, what more can we say about the christian new testament, a haphazard collection of scribblings which were obviously based on the hebrew tanakh to get their ideas?

 

*******

 

“the science of gaydar”

by Joshua Tabak & Vivian Zayas

 

“GAYDAR” colloquially refers to the ability to accurately glean others’ sexual orientation from mere observation. But does gaydar really exist? If so, how does it work?

 

Our research, published recently in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE, shows that gaydar is indeed real and that its accuracy is driven by sensitivity to individual facial features as well as the spatial relationships among facial features.

 

We conducted experiments in which participants viewed facial photographs of men and women and then categorized each face as gay or straight. The photographs were seen very briefly, for 50 milliseconds, which was long enough for participants to know they’d seen a face, but probably not long enough to feel they knew much more. In addition, the photos were mostly devoid of cultural cues: hairstyles were digitally removed, and no faces had makeup, piercings, eyeglasses or tattoos.

 

Even when viewing such bare faces so briefly, participants demonstrated an ability to identify sexual orientation: overall, gaydar judgments were about 60 percent accurate.

 

Since chance guessing would yield 50 percent accuracy, 60 percent might not seem impressive. But the effect is statistically significant — several times above the margin of error. Furthermore, the effect has been highly replicable: we ourselves have consistently discovered such effects in more than a dozen experiments, and our gaydar research was inspired by the work of the social psychologist Nicholas Rule, who has published on the gaydar phenomenon numerous times in the past few years.

 

We reported two such experiments in PLoS ONE, both of which yielded novel findings. In one experiment, we found above-chance gaydar accuracy even when the faces were presented upside down. Accuracy increased, however, when the faces were presented right side up.

 

What can we make of this peculiar discovery? It’s widely accepted in cognitive science that when viewing faces right side up, we process them in two different ways: we engage in featural face processing (registering individual facial features like an eye or lip) as well as configural face processing (registering spatial relationships among facial features, like the distance between the eyes or the facial width-to-height ratio). When we view faces upside down, however, we engage primarily in featural face processing; configural face processing is strongly disrupted.

 

Thus our finding clarifies how people distinguish between gay and straight faces. Research by Professor Rule and his colleagues has implicated certain areas of the face (like the mouth area) in gaydar judgments. Our discovery — that accuracy was substantially greater for right side up faces than for upside-down faces — indicates that configural face processing contributes to gaydar accuracy. Specific facial features will not tell the whole story. Differences in spatial relationships among facial features matter, too.

 

Consider, for example, facial width-to-height ratio. This is a configural physical feature that differs between men and women (men have a larger ratio) and reflects testosterone release during adolescence in males. Given that stereotypes of gender atypicality — gay men as relatively feminine and gay women as relatively masculine — play a role in how people judge others’ sexual orientation, our finding suggests that cues like facial width-to-height ratio may contribute to gaydar judgments.

 

Another novel finding: in both experiments, participants were more accurate at judging women’s sexual orientation (64 percent) than at judging men’s (57 percent). Lower gaydar accuracy for men’s faces was explained by a difference in “false alarms”: participants were more likely to incorrectly categorize a straight man as gay than to incorrectly categorize a straight woman as gay.

 

Why might “false alarm” errors be more common when judging men’s sexual orientation? We speculate that people overzealously interpret whatever facial factors lead us to classify men as gay. That is, it may be that straight men’s faces that are perceived as even slightly effeminate are incorrectly classified as gay, whereas straight women’s faces that are perceived as slightly masculine may still be seen as straight. That would be consistent with how our society applies gender norms to men: very strictly. (Decades of research has established that, at least in our culture, it is considered much more problematic for a boy to play with Barbie dolls than for a girl to play rough-and-tumble sports.)

 

We know that gaydar research may elicit discomfort. To some, the idea that it’s possible to perceive others’ sexual orientation from observation alone seems to imply prejudice, as if having gaydar makes you homophobic. We disagree: adults with normal perceptual abilities can differentiate the faces of men and women, and of black and white people, but such abilities do not make us sexist or racist.

 

Though gaydar may not be driven by homophobia, it is relevant to discrimination policy. One of the arguments against nondiscrimination protection for lesbian, gay and bisexual people is that if sexual minorities concealed their identities — à la “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” — discrimination would not be possible. We believe that such policies are unfair. But fairness aside, scientific experiments like ours indicate that such policies are also ineffective: discrimination against sexual minorities would not be eliminated by nondisclosure of sexual orientation, since sexual identity can be detected through appearance alone.

 

Should you trust your gaydar in everyday life? Probably not. In our experiments, average gaydar judgment accuracy was only in the 60 percent range. This demonstrates gaydar ability — which is far from judgment proficiency.

 

But is gaydar real? Absolutely.

(source)

 

*******

“how to determine if a controversial statement is scientifically true”

by Alan Henry

 

Every day, we’re confronted with claims that others present as fact. Some are easily debunked, some are clearly true, and some are particularly difficult to get to the bottom of. So how do you determine if a controversial statement is scientifically true? It can be tricky, but it’s not too difficult to get to the truth.

 

Every internet user has developed a healthy dose of skepticism that keeps us from being duped by things that don’t pass the smell test, but it’s not enough to just think something might not be true. What if you think the statement might be true and you want to learn more? What if you want to respond to the assertion or engage in conversation but you don’t know enough to do so?

 

We sat down with experts Dr. Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer, and David McRaney of You Are Not So Smart to figure out a working approach to discovering the truth of any statement, from obvious hoaxes (think Nigerian prince emails) to more difficult topics (think vaccine “controversies”.)

First, Learn to Avoid Confirmation Bias

 

Before we get into what you should do when confronted with a statement you’re curious about, the first thing you have to strip yourself of is confirmation bias. Says Dr. Plait:

 

The biggest problem is one of confirmation bias: finding an answer you already believe. If someone has a question about a belief or opinion—say, that vaccines are dangerous—then when they look it up online they’ll tend to be biased toward sites that have information they already agree with! This is a well-known effect, and is one reason some things, like anti-vaccination beliefs, are strong even in well-educated communities. The people are smart enough to look up and understand what they read, but perhaps not experienced enough in critical thinking to evaluate what they’re reading without bias.

 

So how do you beat back confirmation bias? “Even with experience, it’s incredibly tough to do,” Dr. Plait explained. First, be aware that confirmation bias exists, shake yourself of your natural tendency to draw a conclusion before you’ve researched a topic, and be open to information that falls on either side of a statement. Don’t just demand someone else present studies that support their assertion—go looking for them yourself. This must-read by David McRaney tackles the topic of confirmation bias in detail, but in short: Keep an open mind, seek evidence to the contrary for every opinion (especially ones you believe), and don’t treat your research like a crusade.

Your First Line of Defense: Search Google, Snopes, and Other Popular Web Sites

 

Your first instinct when confronted with a statement that seems controversial is probably to hit Google and start looking around for more information on it. That’s good: it’s the first thing that Phil Plait and David McRaney both suggest you do as well. In fact, you can prove and disprove many statements and research other contentious journal articles just by doing a little legwork and seeing what the web has to say.

 

“If you are skeptical of a claim or a factoid or a quote or whatever, try some Google-fu that includes the word “skeptic” or “hoax” or “bogus” or “rumor” or “urban legend” with your search term. If you are lucky, you might find existing discussions in the forums of skeptical societies or science groups,” McRaney suggested. Dr. Plait suggested the same, but noted, “This is becoming less useful, though, as people on the, um, wrong side of reality have taken up the mantle of ‘skeptics.’ That’s irritating. And you can’t always trust experts, since sometimes their credentials are inflated, or they’re simply wrong (I can name several Nobel laureates who have said probably wrong things about their own beliefs).”

 

So if Google doesn’t seal the deal, and you’re still awash in more opinions than facts, what do you do? Here are a few good places to visit if you’re on the hunt for good, unbiased information:

• Snopes: Snopes.com has been the rumor debunker of the internet for years, and despite the occassional claim against its own impartiality, it’s an excellent resource. “The first place I go when I’m in a hurry is Snopes,” McRaney said. “I’m often surprised at how quickly they cover a topic that is bouncing around in the echo chamber.” He also noted that Snopes lists its sources, so you can always jump off and do more reading if you want more data.
• Wikipedia: It’s not perfect, but Wikipedia does have a wealth of information, and in most cases, that information is sourced—which means that it’s less useful for its own articles, and more useful for the sourced links to any evidence you find.
• Science Daily: While more news and less rumor-debunking, Science Daily has a huge database of articles to search, most of which link off to the source journal articles and studies that may have started the rumor in the first place.
• Phys.Org: Again, Phys.Org is primarily a news site, but they’ve dedicated plenty of articles to debunking popular rumors or addressing trending topics in science and medicine. Plus, they also link to their sources if they can.

 

Finally, when you’re reading news articles and sites, even if they link to their supporting studies, try to pry apart the article from the studies. Speaking as someone who’s spent a lot of time in the scientific and media communities, both camps almost always mean well when trying to share news or studies with the public—it’s just incredibly difficult to get those stories out in a digestible, commonly understood way without losing the science in the message. If you’re skeptical, don’t dismiss the story or the study—look deeper and draw your own conclusions.

The Big Guns: Search Public Journals and Contact Science Advocates

 

So you’ve done some Google searching, looked at a few skeptical sites, but you want more information. That’s great! It’s time to go to the source: peer-reviewed journals, and people you can trust about science. One thing I like to do before I write about or share any news article that’s based on a study of some kind is to see if I can get to the study itself. Is it mentioned in an article, or did someone say “a study said X?” Fire Google back up and include the journal name and publication date, if you can. “Include “research” or “evidence” or “study” in your search terms. With enough digging, you will often find several scientific papers related to your topic,” McRaney suggests. Read the full-text if it’s available, or at least the abstract. It’ll help you get a picture for what the study really concludes.

 

Of course, you’ll probably run into many studies that are locked up behind paywalls. McRaney suggests using Google Scholar, a search engine just for peer-reviewed journals. “Just copy the full name of the paper you want and paste it into Google Scholar’s search bar. Look for .pdf versions, as they will most likely be the full paper.” If you still can’t find it, just email one of the study’s authors and ask for a copy. It may sound crazy, but “they are usually more than happy to oblige, and you’ll probably put a spring in their step for a full 24 hours.”

 

Finally, you can always ask the experts you look up to for their thoughts on a topic. Dr. Plait explained: “I get questions often about topics I’m not all that familiar with. I actually have a long list of people I know who are experts in various topics, and whose opinions I trust, so I will sometimes email them and ask. Not everyone has a stable of experts in their contacts list though!” He went on to explain that there are some people you can trust: researchers, medical professionals, and so on. Seek them out, ask your questions—often they won’t be able to resist weighing in on a hot topic, even if you’re asking out of the blue. McRaney pointed out that the Ask Science subreddit at Reddit covers a lot of popular, contentious topics from multiple angles. See if your statement has been debated. If not, bring it up yourself.

Extra Credit: Visit Your Local Library and Consult Librarians and Reference Materials

 

You’ve done your homework, looked up some studies, read both sides of an argument, and you’re still not sure what to believe, or if there’s enough information to believe anything. That’s great—you’re still hungry for information, and there’s one place left to get it: your local library.

 

If you catch yourself unable to download a specific study, or the study is so old (or too new!) that it’s not available, or you just want help getting to the bottom of an issue, visit your library’s reference desk. Often, public libraries—and especially university libraries—have free access to scholarly journals and their archives so you can download, print, and read full-text articles you wouldn’t be able to get at home. Even many university libraries only require student ID if you’re going to check something out, so they’re a great resource for everyone.

 

“Most university librarians will happily provide you a copy of a paper if you or someone you know is enrolled in the university,” McRaney adds. If you are going to chat up your local reference librarian, see what they think of the topic, and if they can do some digging on your behalf. Most often, they can do some research for you and present you with findings to read through, or they can at least help guide you to authoritative sources on the topic.

A Last Word: Research Is Great, but Don’t Forget to Think Critically

 

All of the research in the world won’t help educate you on a controversial issue or statement if you don’t look at the evidence and try to draw your own conclusions from it. “What I can say is that if you want to know what’s what, the best thing to do is approach the question honestly and openly,” Dr. Plait explains. “Read up on opinions for and against. Do the basic arguments make sense? Are the arguments simply ad hominems (attacks against the other side) or is there actual evidence backing up the claims? And what does the other side have to say about those claims?”

 

This isn’t perfect though, and both McRaney and Dr. Plait warned that here are a few things to watch out for when reading journals and articles that reference journal articles, or when you’re talking to science advocates:

 

• Watch out for anecdotal evidence. The problem with anecdotal evidence is well documented, and when presented with it, you should make a concerted effort to ignore it, or at least take it into lesser account than rigorous research. It’s difficult: our minds are wired to exaggerate the value of anecdotal experience, but if you’re thinking and reading critically, it’s important to discount them.
• Watch out for scientists who are anything but. Most scientists know their field well, but you still have to think critically about what you hear. Someone claiming to be knowledgeable may not be at all. “The problem there again is that there are people who claim to be in this group and aren’t,” Dr. Plait warned. “Or worse, ones who actively promote conspiracy theories against scientists—and those are legion. You’ve no doubt seen these—people who say scientists are lying to us, or that Big Pharma is paying them, or whatever. I have no easy solution for things like that.”
• Be careful which science advocates you trust. The best science advocates have backgrounds in science themselves, are passionate about science, and are willing to engage openly and non-defensively about a given topic. The worst tend to behave like conversations about research are political or religious ones, and roll out the ad hominem attacks at the first sign of dissention.

 

If may sound cliche, but Dr. Plait and Dave McRaney agree: If most scientists fall on one side of an argument, it’s a safe bet that’s where the evidence lies. Controversy does not disprove fact, and ongoing research doesn’t diminish the research already done. It may require unlearning things you already believe, but doing your own research is worth it. “There’s a reason lots and lots of scientists agree on something: usually because it’s right,” Dr. Plait said. “Sure, science can change its mind, but going with it is the way to bet, because there is usually vast research, evidence, and experience behind it. Go that way and you’ll be right the vast majority of the time.”

 

McRaney sums it up nicely:

 

We invented the scientific method because we are naturally terrible at explaining our own experiences. Without the scientific method, there is no way to know what causes simple, everyday things like thunder. Every explanation is as good as another, and if an explanation becomes culturally bound and passed down, that becomes the official explanation for millennia. Our natural tendency is to confirm our assumptions, but science tries to disconfirm our assumptions one by one until the outline of the truth begins to form. Once we realized that approach generates results, we went from horses and tobacco enemas to mapping DNA and walking on the moon in a few generations.

(source)

 

*******

“free will is an illusion”

by Victor Stenger

 

Research in neuroscience has revealed a startling fact that revolutionizes much of what we humans have previously taken for granted about our interactions with the world outside our heads: Our consciousness is really not in charge of our behavior.

 

Laboratory experiments show that before we become aware of making a decision, our brains have already laid the groundwork for it. In a recent book, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, physicist Leonard Mlodinow reviews a wide range of psychological experiments that demonstrate the dominant role the unconscious plays in our behavior. This recognition challenges fundamental assumptions about free will and the associated religious teachings about sin and redemption, as well as our judicial concepts of responsibility and punishment. If our brains are making our decisions for us subconsciously, how can we be responsible for our actions? How can our legal system punish criminals or God punish sinners who aren’t in full control of their decision-making processes?

 

Is free will an illusion? In his recent book titled Free Will, neuroscientist Sam Harris pulls no punches. He tells us in no uncertain terms: “Free will is an illusion.” We don’t exist as immaterial conscious controllers, but are instead entirely physical beings whose decisions and behaviors are the fully caused products of the brain and body.

 

Philosophers identify several different positions on the question of free will. Incompatibilists hold that free will is incompatible with determinism, the idea that our behavior is fully determined by antecedent causes such as fate, acts of God, or laws of nature. These split into two camps. Libertarians hold that we have free will since humans transcend cause and effect in ways that make us ultimately responsible. Determinists hold that we don’t have free will because either determinism is true or indeterminism (randomness) doesn’t give us control or responsibility. Both these groups are opposed by compatibilists, who argue that free will is compatible with determinism, or indeterminism for that matter.

 

What exactly is determinism? Two centuries ago, French physicist Pierre Laplace pointed out that, according to Newtonian mechanics, the motion of every particle in the universe can in principle be predicted from the knowledge of its position, momentum, and the forces acting on it. This is the Newtonian world machine. Since, as far as physics is concerned, we are all just particles, then this would seem to make free will an illusion indeed.

 

However, we now can say with considerable confidence that the universe is not a Newtonian world machine. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics showed that, deep down, nature is fundamentally indeterministic. But does quantum indeterminacy play an important role in the brain, and thus open a way for free will? Probably not, and here’s why.

 

The moving parts of the brain are heavy by microscopic standards and move around at relatively high speeds because the brain is hot. Furthermore, the distances involved are large by these same microscopic standards. It is easy to demonstrate quantitatively that quantum effects in the brain are not significant. So, even though libertarians are correct that determinism is false at the microphysical, quantum level, the brain is for all practical purposes a deterministic Newtonian machine, so we don’t have free will as they define it.

 

Although the brain is likely deterministic when it comes to the control of behavior, there’s plenty of “pseudo-randomness” (as opposed to “pure” quantum randomness) in the thermal motions of our brains and in the environment that feeds us data. It’s possible that this can provide sufficient uncertainty to give us the “feeling” of free will. Or, perhaps uncertainty plays no direct role and it is simply our lack of awareness about what causes our decisions that we interpret as being exempt from the causal laws of nature. Either way, this means that ultimately we do not have libertarian free will, even though we might be under the impression we do.

 

But here’s some consolation. Even though at the quantum level there is no rigid determinism, the compatibilists are correct in viewing the operations of the brain as causal processes. They also make another good point when they argue that even if our thoughts and actions are the product of unconscious processes, they are still our thoughts and actions. In other words, “we” are not just our conscious minds, but rather the sum of both conscious and unconscious processes. While others can influence us, no one has access to all the data that went into the calculation except our unique selves. Another brain operating according to the same decision algorithms as ours would not necessarily come up with the same final decision since the lifetime experiences leading up to that point would be different.

 

So, although we don’t have libertarian free will, if a decision is not controlled by forces outside ourselves, natural or supernatural, but by forces internal to our bodies, then that decision is ours. If you and I are not just some immaterial consciousness (or soul) but rather our physical brains and bodies, then it is still “we” who make our decisions. And after all, that’s what the brain evolved to do, whatever role consciousness might play. And, therefore, it is “we” who are responsible for those decisions.

 

And that’s what it all boils down to. Who cares whether we call an action “free will” or not? Calling it “free will” (as compatibilists do) is too confusing, since it suggests some form of dualism, supernatural or not; so let’s call it “autonomy.” The issue is: what is the moral and legal responsibility of an autonomous person, and how should society deal with wrongdoing?

 

Obviously, we cannot have a functioning society if we do not protect ourselves from people who are dangerous to others because of whatever it is inside their brains and nervous systems that makes them dangerous. Still, given that we don’t have libertarian free will that sets us above causal laws, it would seem that our largely retributive moral and justice systems need to be re-evaluated, and maybe even drastically revamped.

(source)

 

*******

silence of the lambs…

 

I hallelujah the time when paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey’s intelligent guess comes true, when evidence for evolution becomes so idiot-proof that it chloroforms the bleating of the evangelical neanderthals and their shoah-style denials of natural history. Not that the current evidence is not already compelling. In fact, it is so compelling that no intelligent and self-respecting person will deny that evolution is a scientific fact.

 

Unless one belongs to the species of homo ignorami who gouge their eyeballs to believe among other things, that the earth is flat and is at the centre of our solar system (there are some american catholics who still espouse this geocentric view of the earth), that homo sapiens coexisted with dinosaurs, that the “theories” of gravity, atoms and general relativity are only theories and not facts, and that the holocaust never happened.

 

I also hi-five his claim that humankind would be better able to respond to the global challenges when people like him are able to persuade the goons “on the evidence, that it’s solid, that we are all African, that colour is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive…”

 

A friend who calls himself a “bible-believing christian” pontificated recently in church why evolution could not be true. While I expected some pseudo-scientific nonsense one could easily regurgitate from crackpots like Ken Ham, Duane Gish and Henry Morris, the bloke simply blanketed that evolution as an idea is evil and contradictory to God’s Word as proclaimed in the book of Genesis. This dear friend doesn’t seem to understand that as a scientific proposition, evolution is amoral. One is engaging in philosophy and theology the moment one makes value judgements on the “moral values” of scientific theories.

 

Besides, since when does the book of Genesis claim to be a scientific tome on terrestrial and human origins?

 

Anyhow, the fact that all of life, including us humans, came from a single self-replicating molecule about 3 to 4 some billion years ago suggests that we are all interconnected. We are biologically and naturalistically ONE with our planet earth and share with the soil the common “breath” of God, to use a theistic metaphor. Yes we are apes who happened to have evolved highly complicated brains which some time in our evolutionary history awakened the spark of self-consciousness.

 

It is this self-consciousness that makes human life seemingly unique from the rest of terrestrial life. It also makes life miserable and existentially hollow when confronted with the impartiality of the vast universe. Thus the ancient need to invent the gods as a symbolic language for the transcendent and the luminous.

 

We will all return to the dust of the earth when our biological clocks wind down, period. There is neither recourse to play again the game of life (reincarnation) nor existence beyond the sheol of oblivion. This does not make life meaningless or humankind evil and selfish. In the first place, it is IMMORAL if we do good and be good just because we expect an otherworldly reward. We should do and be good for its own sake, that it is the right thing to do!

 

Biological existence has no meaning. We do not ask the why questions about darwinian life. But self-conscious existence HAS meaning. We ask ourselves these why questions. And we answer them ourselves. We compose our own hymns, write our own stories and paint our own portraits. We sing the choruses of our own making, narrate the epics of our own lives and showcase the master pieces that become our contributions to this beautiful but transient world.

 

It is because we are all headed towards extinction, towards annihilation, that we strive to make this one and only life a meaningful and good one.

 

*******

“god in evolution”

by Amy Johnson Frkyholm

 

While controversies over evolution continue to arise in some sectors of American Christianity, most mainline Christians have made their peace with Darwin. We may not grasp all the nuances of the scientific debate, but we have concluded that evolutionary theory is good science and therefore must be compatible with good theology. Darwin’s name doesn’t send chills up our spines. We are theistic evolutionists: we believe that natural selection is evidently part of God’s method of shaping the natural world.

 

But I suspect that the compatibility of evolutionary science with Christian theology is more often asserted than explored. I, for one, do most of my thinking about science out of one mental box and my thinking about religion out of another. On questions about evolution, the origin of life and the future of the planet, I look into the science box. On questions about God, salvation, theology and ethics, I turn to the religion box. While I think that the contents of the two boxes are compatible, I rarely try to work out the terms of their relationship.

 

Perhaps that’s because the contents of the two boxes are, when mixed, still combustible. When theology faces off against the account of the world set forth by evolutionary biology, God’s goodness and power and God’s plans for the future seem to be called into question with new force.

 

For instance, knowledge of evolutionary history raises questions of theodicy in an especially disconcerting way. Evolution reveals a vast history of unfathomable waste, loss, extinction, suffering and death in the natural world. What has God been up to all these millennia? And what is God up to now? If we believe that God oversees creation, then God’s way of doing it through evolution seems strange and even appalling.

 

Over the 4.5 billion years of our planet’s existence, 98 percent of species have become extinct. Extinction is written into the pattern of life. What does it mean, then, to talk about a God who cares for “each sparrow that falls”? How can we think of God’s care for the world in light of the millions of years of suffering and death that have been a feature of evolution in the natural world?

 

While traditional theology separated “human evil” from “natural evil,” I would venture to guess that for most Americans, the category of natural evil is a strange one. We understand nature as perhaps neutral or even good. Human evil is obvious, but is a tsunami or an earthquake, even while causing terrible effects, evil?

 

Evolutionary biology intensifies this problem because it connects humans to the natural world. We stand not outside of nature observing it but inside of it, an extension of the tree of life. Biologically speaking, we are animals, and our development as animals comes out of a slow process and deep connection to all of life. The field of evolutionary psychology is demonstrating great-ape behavior so similar to human behavior that even some of our cherished “human” attributes like peacemaking and expressions of selflessness might be attributed to our animal selves. We may be, as the psalmist says, “a little lower than the angels,” but we are also, literally, beasts. Understanding humans as connected inextricably to nature makes it very hard to distinguish human evil from natural evil, because we cannot distinguish the human from the natural. Human evil is natural evil. As Lutheran theologian Ted Peters puts is, “We inherit evil from the tree of life.”

 

If that’s the case, I would be tempted to set aside the category of evil altogether, as observers such as Richard Dawkins have done.

 

It might seem strange to use the term evil to describe the struggle for survival among animals that we see in evolutionary history, but Peters thinks such a label is necessary if we are to hold the human and animal worlds together–which is something we must do given the insights of evolutionary science. And if we refrain from using the category of evil in talking about the natural world, Peters says, we will end up in the intellectual position of having to view horrendous events in the human world–genocide, for example–as the natural product of evolutionary struggle and natural selection.

 

The notion that God oversees creation and is leading it toward redemption is deeply embedded in Christian language. Some modern defenders of Darwin–like Daniel Dennett, director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and professor of philosophy at Tufts University–argue that it is just such a notion of God that has to be discarded in view of evolutionary science. The processes of evolutionary development are simply too random, too intertwined with natural circumstances, for us to believe that an outside force, like God, is directing them.

 

But Robert Jenson, Lutheran theologian at the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton Seminary, suggests that such arguments are off target in that they operate with a view of God as external to the cosmos, acting on it from outside. This idea of God derives more from the Enlightenment than from Christianity. Christians, Jenson says, have traditionally conceived of the cosmos as contained in God. Holding to this conception of God, one can view natural selection not as a process separate from God but as a process that takes place in God.

 

The benefit of this approach is that God is not consigned to the gaps in scientific knowledge. While this view may not solve problems of theodicy, at least it does not pit theology against biology to see which has more explanatory power. Jenson’s formulation suggests that God may not oversee creation so much as work through it.

 

But how does God work through creation? The fact that suffering, pain, death and extinction are part of life in the evolutionary scheme–that the sacrifice of some creatures is necessary to the survival of others-remains a theological problem, but it is also an invitation to think more deeply about the nature of God’s power. To make sense of God’s role in this scheme, some theologians focus not on God’s directive power but on God’s self-sacrificing love in and for creation.

 

In the Christian understanding, God’s love shown in Jesus involves God’s own death and sacrifice for the sake of new life. Perhaps we can see this kind of self-sacrifice by God in the suffering of creation. Following this vein of thought, Denis Edwards, Catholic priest and a senior lecturer in theology at Flinders University and Adelaide College in Australia, says that the cross of Christ teaches us that God’s power is of a specific kind: “It does not destroy human integrity or natural processes, but brings life in and through them.”

 

Still, evolutionary biology makes it hard to discern purpose or direction in creation. For some theologians, facing a universe that includes randomness and chance may require a shift in thinking about how God works. John Haught, Catholic theologian and professor of theology at Georgetown University, suggests that we think in terms of a God who offers “a wide range of possibilities that the world can realize, a universe of innumerable possibilities.” Realization of any one possibility happens amid the play between God and creatures.

 

While in some ways this is a new and unfamiliar way of thinking about God, it is consistent with one key part of the scriptural tradition: in the Bible, God is the one who makes things new. God is the source of novelty. Evolutionary science, according to Haught’s way of thinking, shows us the dance between order and randomness by which novelty is produced.

 

Humans have their own special part in the creation of novelty, for we are a conscious part of the dance of order and randomness. Philip Clayton, a theologian at Claremont School of Theology, picks up on this dimension of evolutionary process and likens creaturely life to the unfolding of a jazz composition: God provides the motifs, but creatures (of various kinds, from the smallest to the largest) provide the original riffs.

 

The theological problem with going in this direction, of course, is that such a view leaves little sense of divine direction or action. Clayton argues that evolutionary biology severely limits what we can call divine action, though he believes that science does allow a small but significant space for interaction between creature and Creator. Nature can be “biologically constrained without being biologically determined,” he says. He calls the divine-creature interaction “the divine lure.” As evolution occurs, more complex structures emerge. And the more complex forms that emerge are not reducible to a mere compilation of the kinds that come before them. In the space between what is and what is becoming, God might be said to act.

 

Theologies that emphasize God as deeply involved in natural, open-ended processes seem better able to make sense of evolution than do the classical accounts of an omnipotent God. On the other hand, if Jenson is right, perhaps what is needed is a richer notion of the God in whom these processes occur. At the very least, substantial interaction between Christian theology and evolutionary biology is prompting new metaphors and new ways of thinking about God.

 

Perhaps the most tangible outcome of such interaction will be a new attitude toward the natural world. The drama of creation and evolution is being played out all the time, all around us, from the minute interaction between insects and plants to the vast realms of weather and climate. Perhaps we will learn to pay closer, more humble attention to our part in this drama. And as we contemplate the reaches of space and time, we can learn to say yet more earnestly with the psalmist, “What are we that You take thought of us?”

(source)

 

*******

“analytic thinking can undermine belief”

by Scientific American

 

People who are intuitive thinkers are more likely to be religious, but getting them to think analytically even in subtle ways decreases the strength of their belief, according to a new study in Science.

 

The research, conducted by University of British Columbia psychologists Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, does not take sides in the debate between religion and atheism, but aims instead to illuminate one of the origins of belief and disbelief. “To understand religion in humans,” Gervais says, “you need to accommodate for the fact that there are many millions of believers and nonbelievers.”

 

One of their studies correlated measures of religious belief with people’s scores on a popular test of analytic thinking. The test poses three deceptively simple math problems. One asks: “If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?” The first answer that comes to mind—100 minutes—turns out to be wrong. People who take the time to reason out the correct answer (five minutes) are, by definition, more analytical—and these analytical types tend to score lower on the researchers’ tests of religious belief.

 

But the researchers went beyond this interesting link, running four experiments showing that analytic thinking actually causes disbelief. In one experiment, they randomly assigned participants to either the analytic or control condition. They then showed them photos of either Rodin’s The Thinker or, in the control condition, of the ancient Greek sculpture Discobolus, which depicts an athlete poised to throw a discus. (The Thinker was used because it is such an iconic image of deep reflection that, in a separate test with different participants, seeing the statue improved how well subjects reasoned through logical syllogisms.) After seeing the images, participants took a test measuring their belief in God on a scale of 0 to 100. Their scores on the test varied widely, with a standard deviation of about 35 in the control group. But it is the difference in the averages that tells the real story: In the control group, the average score for belief in God was 61.55, or somewhat above the scale’s midpoint. On the other hand, for the group who had just seen The Thinker, the resulting average was only 41.42. Such a gap is large enough to indicate a mild believer is responding as a mild nonbeliever—all from being visually reminded of the human capacity to think.

 

Another experiment used a different method to show a similar effect. It exploited the tendency, previously identified by psychologists, of people to override their intuition when faced with the demands of reading a text in a hard-to-read typeface. Gervais and Norenzayan did this by giving two groups a test of participants’ belief in supernatural agents like God and angels, varying only the font in which the test was printed. People who took the belief test in the unclear font (a typewriterlike font set in italics) expressed less belief than those who took it in a more common, easy-to-read typeface. “It’s such a subtle manipulation,” Norenzayan says. “Yet something that seemingly trivial can lead to a change that people consider important in their religious belief system.” On a belief scale of 3 to 21, participants in the analytic condition scored an average of almost two points lower than those in the control group.

 

Analytic thinking undermines belief because, as cognitive psychologists have shown, it can override intuition. And we know from past research that religious beliefs—such as the idea that objects and events don’t simply exist but have a purpose—are rooted in intuition. “Analytic processing inhibits these intuitions, which in turn discourages religious belief,” Norenzayan explains.

 

Harvard University psychologist Joshua Greene, who last year published a paper on the same subject with colleagues Amitai Shenhav and David Rand, praises this work for its rigorous methodology. “Any one of their experiments can be reinterpreted, but when you’ve got [multiple] different kinds of evidence pointing in the same direction, it’s very impressive.”

 

The study also gets high marks from University of California, Irvine, evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, the only former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to have once been ordained as a Catholic priest, and who continues to assert that science and religion are compatible. Ayala calls the studies ingenious, and is surprised only that the effects are not even stronger. “You would expect that the people who challenge the general assumptions of their culture—in this case, their culture’s religious beliefs—are obviously the people who are more analytical,” he says.

 

The researchers, for their part, point out that both reason and intuition have their place. “Our intuitions can be phenomenally useful,” Gervais says, “and analytic thinking isn’t some oracle of the truth.”

 

Greene concurs, while also raising a provocative question implicit in the findings: “Obviously, there are millions of very smart and generally rational people who believe in God,” he says. “Obviously, this study doesn’t prove the nonexistence of God. But it poses a challenge to believers: If God exists, and if believing in God is perfectly rational, then why does increasing rational thinking tend to decrease belief in God?”

(source)

 

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ruining everything

 

(source)

 

“the haunted brain”

by Richard Wiseman

 

There is an old joke about a university lecturer who asks his class, “Has anyone here ever seen a ghost?” Fifteen students put their hands in the air. Next, the lecturer says, “Well, who here has touched a ghost?” This time only five hands go up. Curious, the lecturer adds, “OK, has anyone actually kissed a ghost?” A young man sitting in the middle of the lecture theater slowly raises his hand, looks around nervously, and then asks, “I’m sorry, did you say ‘ghost’ or ‘goat?’”

 

Thankfully, the results from national surveys have yielded more clear-cut findings. Opinion polls have consistently shown that around 30 percent of people believe in ghosts, and about 15 percent claim to have actually had a ghostly experience (Musella 2005). James Houran has carried out a great deal of research into the nature of these ghostly experiences. Houran is an interesting fellow. During the day this mild-mannered statistician works for a well-known Internet dating site creating mathematical models that help promote compatibility. By night Houran transforms into a real-life ghost buster, conducting surveys and studies that aim to solve the mystery of hauntings. Fifteen years ago, he analyzed almost a thousand ghostly experiences to discover what people report when they believe that they have encountered a spirit (Lange et al. 1996).

 

Houran’s work revealed that reports of full-fledged apparitions are very rare. In fact, they account for only 1 percent or so of sightings; when such figures do turn up, they usually appear at the foot of a bed as people are either waking up or drifting off to sleep. Around a third of Houran’s reports involve rather fleeting visual phenomena, such as quick flashes of light, odd wisps of smoke, or dark shadows that move furtively around the room. Another third involve strange sounds, such as footsteps from an empty room or ghostly whispering. The remaining third are a mixture of miscellaneous sensations, including odd odors of flowers or cigar smoke, sensing a ghostly presence, or feeling a cold shiver down one’s spine.

 

For well over a century, scientists have attempted to explain these strange experiences. Like much of the research into alleged paranormal phenomena, their work tells us a great deal about our brains, beliefs, and behavior.

The Rose without a Thorn

London’s Hampton Court Palace has been home to some of Britain’s most famous kings and queens. Nowadays the palace is a popular historical attraction, playing host to more than half a million visitors each year.

 

The palace is famous for many things: It houses invaluable works of art from the Royal Collection, contains the best-preserved medieval hall in Britain, and boasts a giant Tudor kitchen. It is also considered one of the most haunted buildings in Britain. Various spirits allegedly haunt the palace. There is a “lady in gray” whose walks through the cobbled courtyards are as regular as clockwork, a “woman in blue” who continuously searches for her lost child, and a phantom dog that lives in Wolsey’s closet. However, despite stiff competition, Hampton Court’s most famous spirit is that of Catherine Howard.

 

Henry VIII ruled Britain during the first half of the sixteenth century, but he did not have a great track record when it came to relationships. He cheated on his first wife, beheaded his second, lost his third while she was giving birth to his only son, and divorced his fourth. In a move that would make even the most experienced marriage counselor raise an eyebrow, the forty-nine-year-old Henry then became infatuated with a nineteen-year-old courtier named Catherine Howard. After a brief period of wooing, Henry married Howard, publicly declaring that she was his “rose without a thorn.”

 

A few months after getting married, Catherine found herself very much in love. Unfortunately, the apple of her eye was not her husband, Henry, but rather a young courtier named Thomas Culpepper. News of their affair eventually reached Henry, who promptly decided to fetch the garden shears and remove the head of his beloved rose. Upon hearing the bad news, Catherine was understandably upset. She ran to Henry to plead for her life but was stopped by Royal guards and dragged back through the corridors of the palace to her apartments. A few months later both Thomas Culpepper and Catherine Howard were beheaded at the Tower of London.

 

The ghost of Catherine Howard is said to haunt the corridor down which she was dragged against her will. By the turn of the last century this area of the palace had become associated with a whole host of ghostly experiences, including sightings of a “woman in white” and reports of inexplicable screams.

 

In January 2001, a palace official telephoned me, explained that there had been a recent surge in Catherine-Howard-related phenomena, and wondered whether I might be interested in investigating. Eager to use the opportunity to discover more about hauntings, I quickly put together an experiment, assembled a research team, photocopied hundreds of blank questionnaires, loaded up my car, and headed off to the palace for a five-day investigation (Wiseman et al. 2002, 2003).

 

The palace had called a press conference to announce the start of my study, attracting the attention of journalists from all around the world. We decided to make the press conference a two-part affair, with a palace official talking about the history of the haunting in the first half, a brief break, and then my good self describing the forthcoming investigation. A palace historian kicked off the proceedings by telling a packed room of reporters what happened when Henry met Cathy.

 

During the brief break, I stepped outside to get some fresh air. The strangest thing happened: A car containing two tipsy teenagers drove slowly past me. One of the teenagers rolled down the window and threw an egg at me. The egg smashed on my shirt. Unable to change, I tried to remove the worst of the stains and then returned to the press conference. A few minutes into my talk, one of the journalists noticed the marks on my shirt and, assuming that it was ectoplasm, asked whether Catherine Howard had already slimed me. I replied, “Yes. This is going to be a tougher investigation than I first thought.” Although said in jest, my comment was to prove prophetic.

 

Prior to the experiment, I had asked the palace to supply me with a floor plan of the corridor that would have held such unpleasant memories for Catherine Howard. I then met with Ian Franklin, a palace warder who had carefully catalogued a century of reports of unusual phenomena experienced by staff and visitors, whom I asked to secretly place crosses on the floor plan to indicate where people had consistently reported their experiences. To avoid any possible bias during the investigation, neither I nor any other member of the research team knew which areas had been marked by Franklin.

 

During the day, groups of visitors were transformed into ghost hunters. After hearing a brief talk about the project, each participant was handed a blank floor plan and asked to wander along the corridor and place an “X” on the floor plan to indicate the location of any unusual experiences that they might have (essentially playing a game of “spot the ghoul”). Each night we would place a variety of sensors and a £60,000 ($100,300) heat imager in the corridor in the hope of catching Catherine mid-“boo!”

 

Day one of the investigation went badly, with several participants wandering into the wrong corridor and then wondering why the floor plan was so wildly inaccurate. On day two, we were joined by a woman who claimed to be the reincarnation of Catherine Howard and said that she could provide a unique first-person perspective on the proceedings (“Actually, I was dragged up the corridor, not down it”; “Not sure that the new paint job in the kitchens works for me,” etc.). Day four turned out to be especially interesting. The team (which now included the reincarnated Catherine Howard) assembled in the morning as usual and reviewed the heat sensor data from the previous night. It was immediately obvious that something very strange had taken place, with the graphs showing a massive spike in temperature around 6 AM. We eagerly rewound the recording from the thermal imager to discover whether we had caught Catherine on tape. At dead-on 6 AM the doors at one end of the corridor burst open, and in walked a figure. The reincarnated Catherine Howard instantly recognized the figure as a member of Henry VIII’s court. However, a few seconds later the proceedings took a decidedly more skeptical turn when we saw the figure walk over to a cupboard, remove a vacuum cleaner, and start to clean the carpets. Thankfully, the data from the rest of the investigation proved more revealing.

 

People who believed in ghosts experienced significantly more strange sensations than the skeptics. Interestingly, we have obtained the same pattern of findings in several investigations at other supposedly haunted locations. Time and again those who believe in the paranormal experience more ghosts than those who don’t. As I loaded my equipment back into my car and said goodbye to our well-meaning but intensely annoying Catherine Howard wannabe, one question nagged away in my mind: Why?

The Machine in the Ghost

Neuropsychologist Michael Persinger, of Laurentian University in Canada, believes that ghostly experiences are caused by the brain malfunctioning and, more controversially, that these sensations can be easily elicited by applying very weak magnetic fields to the outside of the skull (Cook and Persinger 1997, 2001).

 

In a typical Persinger study, participants are led into a laboratory and asked to sit in a comfortable chair. They then have a helmet placed on their heads, are blindfolded, and are asked to relax for about forty minutes. During this time several solenoids hidden in the helmet generate extremely weak magnetic fields around the participant. Sometimes these fields are focused over the right side of the head; at other times they switch to the left, and once in a while they circle around the skull. Finally the helmet and blindfold are removed, and the participant is asked to complete a questionnaire indicating whether he or she experienced any strange sensations, such as the sense of a presence, vivid images, odd smells, being sexually aroused, or coming face-to-face with God.

 

After years of experimentation, Persinger claims that around 80 percent of participants tick the “yes” box to at least one of these experiences, with some even going for the “all of the above” option. The study has been featured in many science documentaries, resulting in several presenters and journalists putting Persinger’s magic helmet on their heads in the hope of meeting their maker. For the most part, they have not been disappointed. Psychologist Susan Blackmore, for example, felt as if something had gotten hold of her leg and dragged it up the wall, followed by a sudden sense of intense anger (which is exactly how I would feel if someone took my leg and dragged it up a wall).

 

All was going well with Persinger’s theory until a team of Swedish psychologists, led by Pehr Granqvist from Uppsala University, decided to carry out the same type of experiments (Granqvist et al. 2005; Larsson et al. 2005). (For additional information about this work, see www.nature.com/news/2004/041206/full/news041206-10.html.)

 

It all started well, with some of the Swedes visiting Persinger’s laboratory and even borrowing a portable version of one of his helmets for their own study. However, Granqvist became worried that some of Persinger’s participants may have known what was expected of them, and their experiences could therefore have been due to suggestion rather than the subtle magnetic fields. To rule out this possibility in his own work, Granqvist had all of his participants wear Persinger’s borrowed helmet but ensured that the coils were turned on for only half of the participants. Neither the participants nor the experimenters knew when the magnetic fields were on and when they were off.

 

The results were remarkable. Granqvist discovered that the magnetic fields had absolutely no effect. Three of his participants reported intense spiritual experiences, but two of these were not being exposed to the magnetic fields at the time. Likewise, twenty-two people reported more subtle experiences, but the coils were turned off for eleven of them. When Granqvist’s work was published in 2004, Persinger argued that the poor showing may have been due, in part, to the fact that the participants who had their helmet coils turned on were exposed to the magnetic fields for only fifteen minutes and to the fact that Granqvist ran the DOS-based software controlling the coils in Windows and thus possibly altered the nature of the magnetic fields. The Swedish team defended their work and stood by their findings.

 

The idea of electromagnetic spirits has caught the imagination of the media and public alike. However, the scientific jury is unconvinced. So has anyone solved the mystery of hauntings? Before we delve deeper, it is time to discover more about the power of suggestion.

The Subtle Hint of Silage

In the late 1970s, sensory scientist Michael O’Mahony from the University of California took the power of suggestion to new heights when he persuaded the BBC to undertake an ingenious version of his well known sensory study during a live program (O’Mahony 1978). O’Mahony constructed some mock scientific apparatus (think a large weird-looking cone, masses of wires, and several oscilloscopes) and managed to keep a straight face as he told viewers that this newly devised “taste trap” used “Raman Spectroscopy” to transmit smells via sound. He then proudly announced that the stimulus would be a country smell. Unfortunately, the studio audience interpreted his comments to mean the smell of manure, resulting in a significant amount of laughter. After clarifying that they would not be broadcasting the smell of cow shit into people’s homes, the research team played a standard Dolby tuning tone for ten seconds. Just as the bottles in the more pedestrian versions of O’Mahony’s study contained nothing but water, so the tone did not actually have the ability to induce smells.

 

Viewers were then asked to contact the television station and describe their experiences. A few hundred viewers responded, with the majority stating that they had detected a strong smell of hay, grass, or flowers. Although they were explicitly told that the smell would not be manure-related, several people mentioned that they had detected the subtle hint of silage. Many respondents described how the tone had brought about more dramatic symptoms, including hay fever attacks, sudden bouts of sneezing, and dizziness.

 

The “Raman Spectroscopy” was simply scientific mumbo-jumbo. In reality the experimenters were exploring how the power of suggestion can cause people to experience various smells. James Houran (of Internet dating and ghost-busting fame) also believes that suggestion may play a vital role in unlocking the mystery of hauntings.

 

Houran speculated that if suggestible people believe that they are in a haunted house, they may experience the strange sensations typically attributed to ghostly activity. In addition, he noted that those experiences are likely to create a feeling of fear that will cause people to become hyper-vigilant and pay attention to the subtlest of signals (Lange and Houran 1999). They will suddenly notice that tiny creak in the floorboards, the swaying of the curtains, or a brief whiff of burning. All of this will cause them to become even more afraid and therefore exhibit even greater hyper-vigilance. The process feeds on itself until the person starts to become highly agitated, anxious, and prone to more extreme sensations and hallucinations.

 

Findings from many studies support Houran’s ideas. In my own work, those who believed in ghosts reported far more weird experiences than skeptics, and their sensations tended to focus on the type of scary-looking locations that are frequently featured in horror films. Although these findings are encouraging, the ultimate testing of the theory involves taking suggestible people to a place that does not have a reputation for being haunted, making them believe that it does, and seeing if they experience the same kind of ghostly activity reported in “genuine” hauntings. Houran has conducted several of these experiments with intriguing results.

 

In one experiment he took over a disused theater that had absolutely no reputation for being haunted and asked two groups of people to walk around it and report how they felt (Lange and Houran 1997). Houran told one group that the theater was associated with ghostly activity and the other that the building was simply undergoing renovation. Those in the “this building is haunted” group reported all sorts of weird sensations, while the other group experienced nothing unusual. In another study, Houran asked a married couple living in a house that had no reputation for ghostly activity to spend a month making note of any “unusual occurrences” that they noticed in their home (Houran and Lange 1996). Reporting the results in the paper “Diary of Events in a Thoroughly Unhaunted House,” he noted that the couple reported an amazing twenty-two weird events, including the inexplicable malfunctioning of their telephone, their name being muttered by a ghostly presence, and the strange movement of a souvenir voodoo mask along a shelf.

 

Hauntings do not require genuine ghosts, underground streams, low frequency sound waves, or weak magnetic fields. Instead, all it takes is the power of suggestion.

Ghosts, Gods, and Goblins

Although the psychology of suggestion accounts for many ghostly phenomena, there still exists one final mystery—why on earth should our sophisticated brains have evolved to detect nonexistent ghostly entities?

 

Scientists have proposed various theories to account for what goes bump in our minds. Psychologist Jesse Bering (2006) from the University of Arkansas has suggested that both ghosts and God help forge a more honest society by convincing people that they are constantly being watched. Bering and his team tested their idea by carrying out a somewhat strange experiment. In their study, students were asked to complete an intelligence test. The test had been carefully constructed to ensure that the students could cheat if they wanted to, and the experimenters could secretly monitor each person’s level of deception. Just before taking the test, a randomly selected group of students was told that the test room was apparently haunted. As predicted by the “ghosts make people more honest” theory, the students who thought that they were in a haunted room were far less likely to cheat on the test.

 

However, perhaps the most popular theory to account for the evolution of ghostly experiences concerns the “Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device” (Barrett 2004). Oxford University psychologist Justin Barrett believes that the idea of “agency”—being able to figure out why people act the way they do—is essential to our everyday interactions with one another. In fact, it is so important that Barrett thinks the part of the brain responsible for detecting such agency often goes into overdrive, causing people to see human-like behavior in even the most meaningless stimuli.

 

In the 1940s, psychologists Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel conducted a now-classic experiment that provides a beautiful illustration of Barrett’s point. Heider and Simmel created a short cartoon animation in which a large triangle, a small triangle, and a circle moved in and out of a box. They then showed the meaningless cartoon to people and asked them to describe what was happening. Most people instantly created elaborate stories to explain the cartoon, saying, for example, that perhaps the circle was in love with the little triangle, and the big triangle was attempting to steal away the circle but the little triangle fought back, and the small triangle and circle eventually lived happily ever after.

 

In short, people saw agency where none existed. Barrett believes that the same concept helps explain gods, ghosts, and goblins. According to the theory, many people are very reluctant to think that certain events are meaningless, and they are all too eager to assume that the events are the work of invisible entities. They might, for instance, experience an amazing stroke of good luck and assume it is angels at work, be struck down with an illness and see it as evidence of demons, or hear a creaking door and attribute it to a ghostly woman in white. If Barrett is right, ghosts are not the result of superstitious thinking. Neither are they spirits returning from the dead. Instead, they are simply the price we pay for having remarkable brains that can effortlessly figure out why other people behave the way they do. As such, ghosts are an essential part of our everyday lives.

(source)

 

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“a universe without purpose”

by Lawrence Krauss

 

The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis. Everywhere we look, it appears that the world was designed so that we could flourish.

 

The position of the Earth around the sun, the presence of organic materials and water and a warm climate — all make life on our planet possible. Yet, with perhaps 100 billion solar systems in our galaxy alone, with ubiquitous water, carbon and hydrogen, it isn’t surprising that these conditions would arise somewhere. And as to the diversity of life on Earth — as Darwin described more than 150 years ago and experiments ever since have validated — natural selection in evolving life forms can establish both diversity and order without any governing plan.

 

As a cosmologist, a scientist who studies the origin and evolution of the universe, I am painfully aware that our illusions nonetheless reflect a deep human need to assume that the existence of the Earth, of life and of the universe and the laws that govern it require something more profound. For many, to live in a universe that may have no purpose, and no creator, is unthinkable.

 

But science has taught us to think the unthinkable. Because when nature is the guide — rather than a priori prejudices, hopes, fears or desires — we are forced out of our comfort zone. One by one, pillars of classical logic have fallen by the wayside as science progressed in the 20th century, from Einstein’s realization that measurements of space and time were not absolute but observer-dependent, to quantum mechanics, which not only put fundamental limits on what we can empirically know but also demonstrated that elementary particles and the atoms they form are doing a million seemingly impossible things at once.

 

And so it is that the 21st century has brought new revolutions and new revelations on a cosmic scale. Our picture of the universe has probably changed more in the lifetime of an octogenarian today than in all of human history. Eighty-seven years ago, as far as we knew, the universe consisted of a single galaxy, our Milky Way, surrounded by an eternal, static, empty void. Now we know that there are more than 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, which began with the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. In its earliest moments, everything we now see as our universe — and much more — was contained in a volume smaller than the size of a single atom.

 

And so we continue to be surprised. We are like the early mapmakers redrawing the picture of the globe even as new continents were discovered. And just as those mapmakers confronted the realization that the Earth was not flat, we must confront facts that change what have seemed to be basic and fundamental concepts. Even our idea of nothingness has been altered.

 

We now know that most of the energy in the observable universe can be found not within galaxies but outside them, in otherwise empty space, which, for reasons we still cannot fathom, “weighs” something. But the use of the word “weight” is perhaps misleading because the energy of empty space is gravitationally repulsive. It pushes distant galaxies away from us at an ever-faster rate. Eventually they will recede faster than light and will be unobservable.

 

This has changed our vision of the future, which is now far bleaker. The longer we wait, the less of the universe we will be able to see. In hundreds of billions of years astronomers on some distant planet circling a distant star (Earth and our sun will be long gone) will observe the cosmos and find it much like our flawed vision at the turn of the last century: a single galaxy immersed in a seemingly endless dark, empty, static universe.

 

Out of this radically new image of the universe at large scale have also come new ideas about physics at a small scale. The Large Hadron Collider has given tantalizing hints that the origin of mass, and therefore of all that we can see, is a kind of cosmic accident. Experiments in the collider bolster evidence of the existence of the “Higgs field,” which apparently just happened to form throughout space in our universe; it is only because all elementary particles interact with this field that they have the mass we observe today.

 

Most surprising of all, combining the ideas of general relativity and quantum mechanics, we can understand how it is possible that the entire universe, matter, radiation and even space itself could arise spontaneously out of nothing, without explicit divine intervention. Quantum mechanics’ Heisenberg uncertainty principle expands what can possibly occur undetected in otherwise empty space. If gravity too is governed by quantum mechanics, then even whole new universes can spontaneously appear and disappear, which means our own universe may not be unique but instead part of a “multiverse.”

 

As particle physics revolutionizes the concepts of “something” (elementary particles and the forces that bind them) and “nothing” (the dynamics of empty space or even the absence of space), the famous question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is also revolutionized. Even the very laws of physics we depend on may be a cosmic accident, with different laws in different universes, which further alters how we might connect something with nothing. Asking why we live in a universe of something rather than nothing may be no more meaningful than asking why some flowers are red and others blue.

 

Perhaps most remarkable of all, not only is it now plausible, in a scientific sense, that our universe came from nothing, if we ask what properties a universe created from nothing would have, it appears that these properties resemble precisely the universe we live in.

 

Does all of this prove that our universe and the laws that govern it arose spontaneously without divine guidance or purpose? No, but it means it is possible.

 

And that possibility need not imply that our own lives are devoid of meaning. Instead of divine purpose, the meaning in our lives can arise from what we make of ourselves, from our relationships and our institutions, from the achievements of the human mind.

 

Imagining living in a universe without purpose may prepare us to better face reality head on. I cannot see that this is such a bad thing. Living in a strange and remarkable universe that is the way it is, independent of our desires and hopes, is far more satisfying for me than living in a fairy-tale universe invented to justify our existence.

(source)

 

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