Category: Religion

Science, Pre-science, and Religion

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Francis Fukuyama in The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution draws a bright line from reciprocal altruism to abstract reasoning, and then through to religious belief:

Game theory…suggests that individuals who interact with one another repeatedly tend to gravitate toward cooperation with those who have shown themselves to be honest and reliable, and shun those who have behaved opportunistically. But to do this effectively, they have to be able to remember each other’s past behavior and to anticipate likely future behavior based on an interpretation of other people’s motives.

Then, language allows transmission of historical patterns (largely gossip in tight-knit social groups) and abstractions about ethical behaviors until, ultimately:

The ability to create mental models and to attribute causality to invisible abstractions is in turn the basis for the emergence of religion.

But this can’t be the end of the line. Insofar as abstract beliefs can attribute repetitive weather patterns to Olympian gods, or consolidate moral reasoning to a monotheistic being, the same mechanisms of abstraction must be the basis for scientific reasoning as well. Either that or the cognitive capacities for linguistic abstraction and game theory are not cross-applicable to scientific thinking, which seems unlikely.

So the irony of assertions that science is just another religion is that they certainly share a similar initial cognitive evolution, while nevertheless diverging in their dependence on faith and supernatural expectations, on the one hand, and channeling the predictive models along empirical contours on the other.… Read the rest

Theology and Apologetics in Politics

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If politics is religion because political theories are not justifiable in any rational sense, then we should expect to find deep theology and apologetics accompanying political “theories.” And we certainly do. Moreover, we should expect that the apologetics gin up mythological frameworks to satisfy prevailing political winds. Social insurance programs are case-and-point. What originated as a scheme to counter the desire to redistribute wealth through a limitation on downward social mobility became synonymous with socialism itself. Elizabeth Anderson of University of Michigan points out the deep ironies in her Chicago Law Dewey lecture on this topic:

The ironies are amplified as we think about the debate over the current health care reform efforts and the flip-flopping of everyone from The Heritage Foundation (note, however, that Heritage denies flip-flopping through an appeal to nuance) to Mitt Romney.

Religion doesn’t care, of course. Religion just requires consistency and a consistent denial of oppositional rhetoric. It also helps to have an enemy, as Ms. Anderson points out. And having cartoon tracts can help, too, as this cartoon embodiment of Freidrich Hayek shows:

The Jehovah’s Witnesses of political theory.… Read the rest

SOOO or OOO

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An ever-present flaw in almost all theology and apologetics–and a flaw that is easily remediable–is the requirement for omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and omniscience (OOO) on the part of the structure of God or the gods. We see this in the argumentative doldrums of the Problem of Evil, with practitioners like William Lane Craig and Richard Swinburne building-out elaborate explanatory theodicies in an effort to justify or, at least, allow for an OOO deity. There are extensional consequences, too, like Paul Draper’s argument that an OOO-deity may be obligated to create more than just a single worshipful species given the known extent of the universe.

And what if we remedy the flaw by simply declaring that the OOO assumptions are unnecessary for deities? What if we simply loosen the requirement to something like “God is super-powerful and super-good?” Let’s call this the semi-OOO god theory or SOOO for short. Does SOOO short-circuit the most problematic issues that arise in placing the gods so far above us that we no longer resemble them at all? (an interesting side note: given Christianity’s obsession with the avatar-like character of Christ, it hardly seems aesthetically wrong to assume a flawed God).

The theological and apologetic problems do seem to evaporate, though philosophical arguments evaporate, too:

  • The Ontological Argument: The premise requiring God to be the greatest possible being (Anselmian formulation) immediately goes away. Therefore, there is no Ontological Argument. God doesn’t exist, but only on the initial premise. God may still exist as an SOOO deity.
  • The Cosmological Argument: No impact; the First Cause could be just about anything, as before. Only pre-scientific societies necessarily associate such a cause with an OOO deity.
  • The Problem of Evil: There are actually many formulations of the Problem of Evil, and it remains debated to this day, yet the primary formulation currently fashionable among apologists requires evil (at least moral evil, but sometimes also “natural” evil) in order to provide a proving ground for our moral character.
… Read the rest

Mental Religious Math

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The Los Angeles Times reports on an article from Science that shows that analytical thinking and religious belief may be inversely proportional. That may not be news to some, but at least one of the example problems (that the religious failed to complete at higher rates than the non-religious) is quite interesting:

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Here there is an initial intuitive leap that says that $1 more than 10 cents is precisely $1.10. Therefore, the ball costs $0.10 or 10 cents. It is easy and clear, but the math undermines that result:

Bat + Ball = $1.10

Bat = Ball + $1.00

(Ball + $1.00) + Ball = $1.10

2*Ball + $1.00 = $1.10

2*Ball = $0.10

Ball = $0.05

Bat = $1.05

This result makes sense if one considers that the cost of the bat must be greater than $1.00 because it is $1.00 more than the ball (and not $1.00 itself). But it is obscured by the initial intuitive leap based on simple subtraction.

But that example is a pretty hard one to reconcile concerning historical and faith-based judgments. I doubt that there is good reason to suspect that mathematical prowess and intuitive dispositions about the costs of things correlates with faith decisions because I suspect that there are other reasons that the faithful believe what they believe. Specifically, most religious faithful believe because they were told to believe by their parents or community. The fact that they do so doesn’t seem to translate into mathematical prowess or ineptness. They may very well score more poorly on these kinds of results because of other individual differences like that those who are more predisposed to critical analytical skills are less likely to have come from highly religious backgrounds, and vice versa.… Read the rest

The Orchard of Belief

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CherriesOne of the most important impacts of the “new atheists” was to break religious discussion out of its silos. Before their recent rise, it was easy for the sophisticated secularist to laugh at the Pat Robertsons because they seemed absurd caricatures of Christianity in America. It was equally irrelevant to the Catholic theologian what analytical philosophy was up to in worrying over the meaning of meaning. And Muslims largely kept to their mosques. But with the critiques of the new atheism came a new willingness to hold remarkable, frank, and intelligent discussions about religion and modern life.

Take Andrew Sullivan’s article in Newsweek that attacks a range of Christian movements within the US through the critical lens of the Jefferson Bible. Sullivan promotes the sermon-on-the-mount Jesus as a radical guru focused exclusively on love. The surrounding texts and their subsequent grafting onto church doctrines are the source of strife both within Christianity and in its interactions with other peoples down through history.

And so as Andrew Sullivan cherry picks on Jefferson’s intellectual plantation, Gary Cutting of Notre Dame points out that there is not much fruit on the vine in the New York Times:

Read alone, the Sermon on the Mount will either confuse us or merely reinforce the moral prejudices we bring to it.

The moral messaging is just too diffuse for Cutting to be able to render into a ethical road map: Should we try to maximize happiness or focus on individual rights? Is the state the proper vehicle for charity? Is democracy better than totalitarianism? These are all contemporary notions that are beside the point in the orchard of Sullivan’s love.

We can contrast this sparring with Ross Douthat at Slate in his ongoing debate cycle centered on his new book, Bad Religion, that picks at the same line of criticism as Sullivan with regard to some of the current strains of evangelism in America.… Read the rest

Poetry and Imprecision

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But what if the written word is not identifiably personal or about human relations? What if the ideas expressed in the texts don’t bind to any kind of honest analysis of the facts? What if the semantics are so diffuse that they are open to almost any interpretation?

Then we have poetry.

On the Bay Area’s KQED Forum, Elaine Pagels talks about the Book of Revelation and her new book, its influence, misinterpretation, reinterpretation, and the scholarship that surrounds it.

Poetry is hidden and mystical. This makes it great in inspiring interpretation but also great in the breadth of the imaginable interpretations. Imprecision can inspire monumental achievements and horrific human tragedies–likely in about the same proportions. Luckily, we now have the power to parody and deconstruct it all without fear and with the building knowledge that through that deconstruction we can better account for an understanding of the humanity of others.… Read the rest

Teleology, Chapter 26

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Wherein, the protagonist, Mikey, his twin brother, Harry, and a journalist, Jacob, are being physically healed by intelligent nanomachines while their consciousnesses are in a virtual world that appears to be a research ship in the Pacific Ocean.

26

We hovered in our “matrix” of sorts for ten more days. The Lexis reported that the search by US military forces was intensifying. Swarms of unmanned underwater and airborne vehicles were scouring the sea, though the most intense efforts were concentrated several hundred kilometers from our new location. The Lexis believed that the platform was in jeopardy because of the new connectivity that they had achieved to the outside world through the control of the nanobots, but also seemed consigned to whatever fate I dictated concerning their disposition. I chose to wait because our medical conditions were improving day by day—at least according to them—and I saw no reason to emerge until maximally healed.

We relaxed aboard the Recherché in the meantime, eating Cottard’s increasingly elaborate cooking and drinking his exceptional wines. The wines and foods were all familiar to me, I realized; the sensations had been mined from our thoughts and recollections. There was something disturbing about that, though I didn’t feel particularly violated because the Lexis were both a familiar quantity to me and their motivations I suspected were not malevolent.

While waiting I worked with the Lexis to try to understand how they had taken command of the external nanomachines and how they had modified them to improve their functionality. They regarded the entire exercise as something like the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It was an elaborate artistic effort designed to promote the idea of the Creator among their kind by showing my adventures in an almost unimaginable heaven that they saw us living in.… Read the rest

Cosmologies and Theories of Everything

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Zach, fictional though he is, is not the only one interested in cosmological theories. But what form do these theories take? A Theory of Everything or TOE is a theory that intends to explain the entire observable universe using a compact specification of equations and the conceptual arguments that support them. In the modern sense, a TOE is a physical explanation of the large-scale structure of the universe. Later, we can start to expand the TOE to look for “bridging laws” that help justify other phenomena that approach the human scale.

What are our alternatives? The previous post mentioned the Catholic Church’s embrace of Big Bang cosmology as justifying Genesis. Apologist and philosopher of religion William Lane Craig also elaborately evaluates Big Bang theories as substantiating theism by supporting creation at the singularity event.

But do these notions change the underlying TOEs? No, in general. The best that they can do is accept the TOE as an input and make a deductive argument based on assumptions that are not excluded by the TOE. For apologists, that means that the singularity event provides a divide between a non-temporal pre-universe and the current universe–effectively between non-existence and existence. But that is not the only TOE available to us. There are a range of TOEs that have been devised.  The following is derived from Marcus Hutter’s A Complete Theory of Everything (Will Be Subjective):

  1. (G) Geocentric model: Ancient notion that the Earth is at the center of the known universe.
  2. (H) Heliocentric model: Evolution of the model to centralize on the Sun.
  3. (E) Effective theories: General relativity, quantum electrodynamics, and Newtonian mechanics, but without a unifying architecture.
  4. (P) Standard model of particle physics: Beginning of unification that contains numerous arbitrary parameters and has yet to unify gravity.
… Read the rest

Cosmological Interregnum

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Zach, the main character in Signals and Noise, finds himself fascinated by cosmology because it is the only thing that takes him outside of everyday reality into a realm that is alien and mysterious. Biology is reconcilable to our personal lives, law is a linguistic game, computer science is second-hand to Zach, the complex mathematics of the titular “Signal” is discoverable in intent if not details, but cosmology asks questions that cross into a metaphysical realm. Unlike religious feeling, however, there is no requirement of faith and no direct application to human interactions. There is no ethics of cosmology and little human history.

Should we have expected this? Should we have expected a universe that has black holes or neutrinos? We currently believe that the universe is expanding and may expand forever into a cold, diffuse conclusion. Dark matter and dark energy have to be invoked to explain this and the clumping we observe in the universe. But, interestingly, tiny little particles called neutrinos may be a large portion of this dark matter. Neutrinos have tiny mass and behave somewhat like photons passing through translucent materials when they pass through matter, but they change forms during transit according to an interesting interaction with matter known as “flavor oscillations.”

While the Catholic Church uses cosmology to justify ex nihilo creation, there is almost nothing in modern cosmology that justifies or supports religious sentiments, whether Western or Eastern. Indeed, this is just plain weird shit that devolves out of mathematical results and then is confirmed or denied by experimental methods (with a bias towards the confirmed results).

Zach is more than justified. He is right in his fascination and his skepticism about merely human ideologies.… Read the rest

Etruscan Teleology

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I was, somewhat ironically, concocting salmon risotto with a drizzle of white wine while my wife read to me about Etruscan mythology from Wikipedia this evening.  From Seneca the Younger:

Whereas we believe lightning to be released as a result of the collision of clouds, they believe that the clouds collide so as to release lightning: for as they attribute all to deity, they are led to believe not that things have a meaning insofar as they occur, but rather that they occur because they must have a meaning.

Last year we had the opportunity to visit the National Etruscan Museum in Rome during the most unbearably tropical European summer in recent memory.

Seneca the Younger somewhat snidely detected a difference, driven at least partially by a feeling of cultural dominance, that teleological explanations are inferior to naturalistic ones, that one more entity (or a host of them) provides no additional value to the explanatory system.… Read the rest