Science and religion

Are science and religion compatible? Science and religion are two different ways of acquiring an understanding of the universe we live in. Although the conclusions they reach at times contradict one another (as Galileo so famously discovered in Renaissance Europe[1], and as immunization clinic volunteers more recently discovered in Pakistan[2]), neither science nor religion is defined by its content, but rather by its methods. Hence the question: is it possible for both perspectives to be recognized as worthy human enterprises? Can an individual person be simultaneously engaged in both? I’ve encountered two reasonable answers.

The first, held by many intelligent friends of mine including several scientists, is that the two are “nonoverlapping magisteria[3]”, that is, they are tools for promoting understanding in entirely different domains of inquiry. One deals with the empirical, that which can be observed and quantified; the other deals with the spiritual, that which is so fundamental to the operation of physical reality that it cannot be examined by physical means. The neuronal membrane potential can be measured; G-d cannot.

The second view, favored mainly by those who prefer the term “atheist” to “agnostic”, is that religion is inherently flawed as a means of learning about the universe. Science is rigorous, self-correcting, open-minded, and perpetually skeptical, whereas religion is fuzzy, establishmentarian, dogmatic, and resistant to challenges. Truth is truth, they say, and one’s approach to ascertaining truth must make sense, in any domain. Religious faith, proponents of this view hold, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It is intellectually primitive at best, lazy or even dishonest at worst.

Neither view is likely entirely correct. The first ignores the fact that science specifically precludes faith: if it can't be demonstrated, or conversely, falsified, it can't be asserted. The second ignores the fact that many highly intelligent, thoughtful people hold religious beliefs. Carl Sagan, posthumous champion of the modern-day atheist (a distinction he might abdicate, were he still alive), quotes an anonymous religious leader in his 1996 book The Demon-Haunted World[4]:

“Honest religion, more familiar than its critics with the distortions and absurdities perpetrated in its name, has an active interest in encouraging a healthy skepticism for its own purposes… There is the possibility for religion and science to forge a potent partnership against pseudo-science. Strangely, I think it would soon be engaged also in opposing pseudo-religion.”

Does religion promote or discourage skepticism? If religious thinking does in fact permit questioning, doubt, and revision of cherished beliefs, then certainly a productive, progressive relationship with science is possible. But what form would that take? How does religious skepticism work? How does it resemble, and how does it differ from, the scientific method? I welcome any insights you might have.

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[1] http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/galileo/galileoaccount.html

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2727330/

[3] http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_noma.html

[4] http://www.amazon.com/The-Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle/dp/0345409469

Response to a Joss Whedon quotation

Whedon’s quotation brings up an interesting point: the word faith has two meanings, and we should be precise about which one we mean when we use it. Let’s take a closer look, and see how well the term applies to theists and humanists.

In one sense, faith is belief. Faith means accepting as true a claim for which the evidence is not conclusive. I personally believe that the Earth orbits the sun, that Barack Obama is President of the United States, and that I need oxygen to survive. These claims are not up for debate; the evidence in their favor is conclusive, and so these particular beliefs do not constitute faith.

I also believe that the 2008 New York Yankees were the greatest baseball team of all time, that brains are awesome, and that OJ did it. I believe that I will succeed in life. These claims are very much up for debate; the evidence in their favor is inconclusive, and so these particular beliefs might satisfy the criteria for faith. Rather, they would if I believed them without doubt, or at least to an extent not justified by the available evidence. As a pain-in-the-ass skeptic, I don’t.

In another sense, faith is practice. Faith means behaving as if something were absolutely true because our humanity dictates we do so. Faith is the way we make decisions that do not warrant a rational approach. For example, I am intensely loyal to the people I love. If someone in my family, or my girlfriend, were involved in a conflict, I would take their side without hesitation. This is not rational: a strictly rational actor would weigh costs and benefits, right and wrong. Concepts like “fairness” and “consequences” would come into play.

So, which of these meanings applies to religious faith? Would a theist lay down money that G-d exists? Or would she simply be inclined to live her life according to a religious paradigm, epistemology notwithstanding? I don’t have an answer to this question because I’m not a theist.

I would however argue that only the second meaning applies to humanism. As a humanist I have faith in humanity. I believe it’s important to strive to improve the human condition, whether or not humanity deserves it; on the latter point, I remain agnostic. 

Great short stories

A college acquaintance of mine, with whom I have not kept in touch, but who consistently manufactures witty Facebook statuses, recently posted a list of some of her favorite short stories. I looked 'em up and found links. Internet!

J D. Salinger: A Perfect Day for Bananafish

Philip Roth: The Conversion of the Jews

Raymond Carver: A Small, Good Thing

Amy Hempel: In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried

Tobias Wolff - Bullet in the Brain

Lorrie Moore: People Like That are the Only People Here

Ray Bradbury: The Veldt

Christopher Hitchens and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Christopher Hitchens was a pretty reasonable dude - definitely no shill for either side of the aisle. Check it out if you like; this essay about Ayaan Hirsi Ali is particularly relevant today. Hitchens agrees with the same 95% of Hirsi Ali's rhetoric that I do, particularly regarding freedom of expression and human rights. But there's more - her stance on Islam is at times reactionary and frankly a bit paranoid, and she espouses some scary infringements on the rights of Muslims in the Netherlands and the US. It's rare to disagree so strongly with someone I consider this brilliant.

Then again, there's her observation that here in the west, we tend to project our liberal values where they don't necessarily belong. Is the following position worth considering, at least, before we dismiss it as racist?

"But I don’t even think that the trouble is Islam. The trouble is the West, because in the West there’s this notion that we are invincible and that everyone will modernize anyway, and that what we are seeing now in Muslim countries is a craving for respect. Or it’s poverty, or it’s caused by colonization.

The Western mind-set—that if we respect them, they’re going to respect us, that if we indulge and appease and condone and so on, the problem will go away—is delusional."

Albert Einstein's extraordinary brain

The most striking feature of Albert Einstein's brain is that the sylvian fissure ends abruptly as it progresses posteriorly, running straight into the postcentral sulcus. This means he didn't have a parietal operculum: the brain region responsible for higher-order somatosensory processing. As a result, his inferior parietal lobule, responsible for abstract spatial reasoning, was proportionally enlarged.

To see this for yourself, look at figure 1c below. The sylvian fissure is the horizontal groove running from the front (right) of the brain towards the back. Notice how, about a third of the way back, it turns up sharply. The resulting vertical groove is the postcentral sulcus, often an entirely separate structure.

Compare that to a more typical brain, where the sylvian fissure is much longer (but, in this case, still contiguous with the postcentral sulcus:

I don't see why this would matter, or if it even stands up to familywise error correction, but Einstein also had a low neuron:glia ratio in his left angular gyrus, part of the temporoparietal junction, an area involved in understanding other people's mental states.

Lay article

Scholarly article (pdf)

Hay

We saw some of this stuff at a construction site on the walk back from dinner. I pointed it out, and the following conversation ensued:

Me: Hay.
Meaghan: What is it?
Me: *points*
Meaghan: Oh, hay!
Me: Heeeyyyy...

Dinosaur comics on justice

Because justice is meaningless when morality is relative and good is unquantifiable! Or something.

Atheist could face a year in prison for disrupting school board's prayer

Article

We are quite literally at war, and the battle is nearly at my doorstep (Bartow, FL is two hours from where I grew up).

Scary stuff.

I Am a Zombie Filled with Love

I Am a Zombie Filled with Love is both a surprisingly poignant love story and a harrowing commentary on human sexuality and society. It's also a philosophical musing with undertones of both French existentialism and Buddhist anti-solipsism. Additionally, zombies.

Solar ejections falling back to the sun

Solar ejections fall back to the surface, reined in by the sun's powerful gravity. Since the material is ionized (i.e., charged), it follows the sun's magnetic field lines, like iron filings in a kid's toy. Awesome. See Bad Astronomy for a more detailed explanation.

If you can will it, it is no dream

I can't tell if this is morbid or adorable. Probably both.

A new kind of astronomy

Article

In the general theory of relativity, Einstein postulated that big gravitational disturbances - like two orbiting neutron stars or the destruction of a planet - would generate gravitational waves, propagating outward like ripples on a pond. This isn't a totally crazy idea: lots of things work this way, such as light, sound, and ripples on a pond. What's intriguing about this idea is that if gravity works by warping space, it will generate waves that can be measured, and those measurements can tell us interesting things about the massive objects creating the waves. Since all of astronomy thus far has been based on electromagnetic waves (things like light, x-rays, radio waves, and gamma radiation), discovering gravitational waves and learning to interpret their physical properties will constitute a new kind of astronomy. And these guys think they can do it. Awesome.

How does it work?

Researchers use two long tunnels set at right angles to one another. They split a laser beam in two, sending one beam down each of the two tunnels where they bounce off of mirrors and return to the starting point. Since the two tunnels are exactly the same length, the two beams recombine where they started out.

But if the contraption is hit by a gravitational wave, ONE OF THE TUNNELS WILL SHRINK BY HALF AN ANGSTROM. First of all, SHRINKING TUNNELS. Second of all, half an angstrom is really really tiny. Not as tiny as the article says, but we're talking atomic level tiny here. And these guys are trying to measure it.

To give you an idea of how sensitive that is:

"The coast is more than 100km away but we can see the effect of the waves pounding on the North Sea shore on our instruments very clearly," said Lück. "Fortunately it is a highly rhythmical signal that is easy to remove from the output of our machines."

Cool.

Cool quotation about embodied cognition

From Michael Spivey's 2004 book, The Continuity of Mind:


"Indulge me while I recount a little anecdote that epitomizes, for me, the intimate role that the body plays in cognition. One day, I spent much of the morning and afternoon mulling over in my head different versions of a few sentences for a manuscript I was working on. I was somewhat frustrated with trying to find the right wording. Later, while sitting in the audience for a visiting speaker's lecture, the phrasing for those sentences suddenly fell into place. I quickly grabbed a pen and the back of an envelope, and scribbled them down just legibly enough that as long as I transcribed them onto my computer within 24 hours, I could probably decipher the chicken scratchings. Then, a brief, inexplicable, unidentifiable motoric urge came over me. For about half a second, I felt a dire need to carry out some unspecified motor movement that would safely preserve these precious sentences that I had finally, after several hours, found a way to arrange that was likable. Then the feeling was gone. I folded the envelope, tucked it in my pocket, and then continued to ignore the visiting speaker's words while my mind uncontrollably wandered to try to explore what that weird urge had been. By running some kind of mental inventory of my body, asking what limbs had wanted to move, I gradually localized it to my left arm. i am right-handed, so this seemed slightly odd. Then I felt the remnants of the motoric urge continue to localize themselves further, down my arm to my left hand. I wiggled those fingers, and two of them seemed to want to wiggle more than the others. My thumb and middle finger seemed somehow potentiated for action. But why? Then it hit me: My thumb and middle finger had wanted to press the Command and S keys on my keyboard to save those prized sentences! My left thumb and middle finger had participated in my powerful desire to preserve those much-pondered phrasings. That, for me, is the embodiment of cognition."

...or does it?

1. Make a 2x2 table
2. Rows: whether or not a correlation was found
3. Columns: whether or not a causal mechanism was ever demonstrated
4. Fill in table with all of the science ever done
5. Do chi-squared test
6. What did we learn?

This is not a true story

Comma

If nothing else, she helped me overcome my dependency on commas. A product of my prep school heritage perhaps, a school of thought obsessed with cramming as many ideas into as small a space as possible, possessed of the notion that more, and more, convoluted, was better, one would never have called me uncluttered. She harangued me for comma splices in my text messages. Even when the context was trivial and even when she was about to break up with me.

She broke up with me by moving to Phoenix. Her predecessors did it in text messages or over the phone. One used AOL Instant Messenger™ and another simply showed up at a party hand-in-hand with my (obviously erstwhile) best friend. I don’t blame her; it was as simple and clean as everything else she did.

We used to plan for our breakup. I asked her to kindly abstain from dating my friends for a few months. She asked me to kindly shut-the-fuck-up-and-kiss-her. Which I did. I was just so afraid of losing her. Rather I was afraid of her losing me the way the others had. I lied to you earlier: I was the AOLer and the texter. I hopped between friends like a slimy frog afraid if I sat too long on the same lily pad I’d sink.

As it turned out all that jumping around just tired me out and left an armful of pretty girls half-sunk in my hangups. I knew it wasn’t fair or even practical but it took this particular girl announcing one day that she was going to be an archaeologist in Arizona for me to get it through my skull that the past had already happened, the future hadn’t happened yet, and the present I created with someone was exactly half my responsibility.

She never spoke to her ex-boyfriends which makes me think she’ll never talk to me again. It’s not so much about bridges burned as it is about bridges never crossed again. I guess I’ll find out for sure on my birthday next month.

She told me she loved me on the fourth night we spent together. I informed her that she was crazy. Love is far too complex of a state of being to reach in two weeks. Whatever we were feeling couldn’t possibly be love until at least four months into an officially acknowledged relationship. She asked me to schedule our love for August. I gave up and started using the word too. At first I relegated it to aftersex and beforegoodbye but soon it began peppering our conversations with giddy nonchalance if that’s even possible. I think I actually fell in love in July.

She had no moral qualms with cheating. I did because cheating is wrong. She didn’t but she never cheated on me or anyone else because why would she want to? She broke up with boys when the relationship was over and not a moment later. She thought it was stupid that I usually waited another two months to pull the plug after sullying an affair with my conspicuous impatience. She told me my moral highground was littered with broken hearts.

We never fizzled or faded or even fought. We just ended.

http://reason.com/blog/2012/02/03/iranian-court-upholds-death-sentence-for

A little bit of perspective for you all, in preparation for the shitstorm of criticism likely to rain down this summer if this happens.

Aww, shucks

Yes, Jen. I will always be your girl

The circumcision debates

It's a little hard for me, as a Jew, to say it, but I completely agree with this. Along with some other comments on the thread, it effectively demolishes all of the arguments for circumcision except for one - and I can sum that one up in one word: Tradition.

I'm pretty sure my future son's grandparents are going to disagree, probably vehemently.

My friend Jen wants to get "microdermal piercings".

This is what she envisions

This is how it will actually be

Congrats, Jen. You know Kung-Fu

Insomnia and existentialism don't mix

So here I am, at 2:50 am, reading me some internets because I can't sleep, when I stumble across this new Abstruse Goose. The implications are pretty frightening, and have left me feeling like a prisoner inside my own head.

Now I'll never get to sleep.

In other news, I recently discovered that Allie Bosch, the brilliant author and cartoonist behind Hyperbole and a Half, is EXTREMELY ATTRACTIVE. I have been struck in the face by a speeding train of ineluctable joy.