Unfortunately for me, I’m working my way through a 602-page book published by the Templeton Foundation Press in honor of Sir John Templeton’s 90th birthday (he’s dead now): Spiritual information: 100 Perspectives on Science and Religion. C. L. Harper, ed. (2005). The 100 short essays are infuriating: nearly all mandate a warm accommodationism between science and faith, with not a speck of dissent on view. And, as is so often the case, quantum physics is co-opted into supporting God.
I could pick out many quotes to show the soft and scary underbelly of accommodationism, but here’s one by Anna Case-Winters, a professor of theology at McCormick Theological Seminary here in Chicago. It’s from her essay, “A new relationship between theology and science.” Here she talks about one of the many attitudes we need to develop to create a productive dialogue between science and faith.
“Hope for consonance and an ability to recognize when it happens. For example, speaking theologically, it sometimes is said that all things are utterly connected” in Divine Reality. In this light, it is fascinating to discover that the phenomenon of quantum “nonlocality” implies a kind of transcendent togetherness-in-separation with respect to causal relationships in space and time. This seems prima facie to be a stunning instance of consonance. Theologians talk about how we are created for relation, socially constituted, interdependent, and connected with one another. Hence science appears to demonstrate (something like) relationality at the level of particle physics.” (p. 492).
Quantum nonlocality has nothing to do with human connection: it’s a phenomenon connected with the mysterious “entanglement” of particles at a distance from each other. And it’s no more “a stunning instance of consonance” than is the phenomenon of gravity compared to the mutual attraction between males and females.
This is truly sophisticated theology. But what is really shows is an inability to draw meaningful analogies as well as the desperation of theologians to find parallels between science and religion to validate their faith. (Case-Winters feels that both science and faith are on a “quest for truth” and are forming “a kind of alliance of stubborn truth-seeking”; p. 491).
She got this part correct but not for her silly reason of quantum theory. It has everything to do with millions of years of evolution and the striving for survival by using social connectedness.
She lifted that more or less directly from a Dirk Gently book! (ISBN-10: 0330301624, or something very similar ; there were several).
To be specific, “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” by Douglas Adams. Dirk, the “holistic” detective, speaks about “the interconnectedness of things”…Much better than any theologian book – and I should know, my “Godfather” is a theologian, who is always willing to supply me with huge amounts of Catholic (mostly) literature. heh
Do you have a wood-burning central heating system? Make your Godfather feel goddish, yourself feel warm, and protect vulnerable minds from pollution by virulent memes, all in one sequence of actions.
Then use the ash … actually, paper ash isn’t that good for the garden – best to landfill it.
And it’s no more “a stunning instance of consonance” than is the phenomenon of gravity compared to the mutual attraction between males and females.
That was the premise of an excrable anime that featured Isaac Newton as an evil warlord who was constantly scheming to break up the male and female leads’ romance through the use of his laws of motion.
I’m not joking. Really.
You’re making entirely too much sense of the plot (to use the term loosely) of that anime.
Anime hasn’t really grabbed me – I’ve a friend who keeps on lending me various Japanese animations, and while I recognise the technical quality of some … it doesn’t grab me. Says the Wol who’s going to see the new Wallace and Grommit tomorrow (err, “Captain Jack Sparrow meets Darwin”, or something like that, but I still think of it as a Wallace and Grommit)
There was some Japanese animation I was shown once and … wasn’t that one of PJ’s tentacles?
That paragraph you quoted is astonishing. I sympathize with your task of working your way through the book. I assume it is done to counter any charge that you are unsophisticated in the ways of woo.
I was thinking the same thing. That one paragraph makes my head hurt and my blood pressure go up. I can’t imagine 600 pages of such drivel.
Frankly I would be reaching for my trusty bottle of Ardbeg if I had to read that gibberish …..
What is so saddening is that she pretends to understand it. I had a look at her background and, as far as I could see, she has bugger all professional (or even academic) background in science let alone physics. Most professional scientists outside the field of physics (and even then possibly only quantum theory) would almost certainly out of their depth commenting on such things.
Yes, extremely fortifying and fitting. I’m thinking Super Nova is the obvious choice here.
If I had some it would be.. 10 year old, Alligator and Uigeadail only I am afraid.
Oh, I think I have a bottle of Ardbeg here somewhere… Do I need to be reading theology to justify having a dram? It is Hitch’s birthday, anyway!
/@
She certainly isn’t using words outside of any reasonably well-educated person’s vocabulary, but when I find myself reading the same sentence for the 4th time and still going “What???”, it’s time to reach for the Talisker.
The complex and obscure phraseology speaks volumes. If there were a clear relationship between science and religion then it could be spelled out in simple language. This woman is trying to appear sophisticated as a smoke screen for hiding her ignorance and her poor arguments.
The Gunning Fog index is 16.30 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunning_fog_index
That is not something that the average American High School graduate can understand or analysis for reasonable common senses.
rlwimm, I thought I needed a comparison. A web tool gives your post a 12.6 and it is very clearly written. Thanks for pointing this out. It might be useful as a tool in determining whether a theologian is sophisticated or not. 😎
And with all my qualifications I only write at Year 12 level 🙂
All the talented people tend to write at your level. Keep it that way, qualifications or not. 😎
Please peruse Clarence Wiley, Jr’s sonnet, “Paradox.” The first line: “Not truth nor certainty…” See the 14th line, also. In science, we do not seek truth nor cartainty merely the seemingly best aleatoric approximations of the ACTUALITIES that surround us and ultimately subdue us. How can you test the “hypothesis” about a Triune-God or the resurrection of that Galilean carpenter?D. Reid Wiseman
What?
“Subdue”?
Kinky!
“How can you test the “hypothesis” about a Triune-God or the resurrection of that Galilean carpenter?”
I don’t know, how? Because if such assertions cannot be tested, then belief remains unwarranted. Seems to me people who subscribe to such hypotheses have a lot of work to do before they can call such bald claims “reasonable.”
H. H. The Triune God + The Resurrection are NOT TESTABLE HYPOTHESES. NOT EVEN HYPOTHESES. Again, please read Wylie’s sonnet, “Paradox.” DRW
Sorry, paradoxes does not compute.
But maybe theology is a little like mathematics, and contains truths that cannot be proven. Oh St. Gödel, enlighten us!
Aleatoric? You throw dice?
Why on earth would science want, or need, to form an alliance with ‘faith’ which, as is plain to see, does not converge on a single answer but diverges into as many ‘answers’ as there are faiths?
Theology is the very negation of science in that the conclusion is sacred and the evidence is either ignored or bent into shape around it. Science is about finding reasons to change our minds; theology is about finding reasons not to.
It’s almost laughable to see theology swinging on science’s coat-tails like this and shouting “me too!”.
Quite frankly I’m at a loss as to what financially insecure scientists could possibly see in billionaire grantees like the Templetons.
Dear Theologians,
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
Meme of the day: all theology is bullshit, and so is most philosophy.
There is, I admit, a fundamental mystery about the universe: why is the universe logical? And why do natural phenomena obey mathematical laws? I suspect that the answer may be the anthropic principle, just as it is to the question “why do the fundamental constants have the values they do?”, viz. if the universe weren’t logical, or didn’t obey mathematical laws, or had fundamental constants with other values, mankind would not exist to ask these questions.
I think of it as a quetion: how easy is it to be a world-class B.S. Artist in a specific discipline?
Religion is the easiest. As JAC said to an angered John Haught, theologians just make stuff up. And any sociopath with a fertile imagination and a modicum of swarthy charisma has a good shot at becoming a successful cult leader. Not to mention the routine B.S.-ing that goes on from pulpits every day.
In philosophy it’s a tad harder to be a B.S. artist, but it can be done, evidenced by the sheer volume of award-winning gobbledygook in that discipline. There are of course people in philosophy who think smart thoughts and care about facts, but the field itself is obviously very friendly to a good B.S. artist.
But science is the hardest discipline in which to be a B.S. artist and be well-regarded for your B.S. There’s plenty of scientists who are B.S. artists—like Behe—but what are their reputations within the scientific community? So it’s hard to just make stuff up in the hard sciences and not have your colleagues point out that you’ve done so. Not necessarily true in philosophy.
Andy Dufresne:
And theology is the easiest field too, not just for the production of BS, as you mention, but also to get professionally established.
The material to be mastered is limited, a few dozen books that are the sources for basic information that can serve a lifetime for repetitive use and endless analysis or refutation, with once in a blue moon, a new document or archeological discovery to provide fodder for decades of new discussions. Otherwise, all of the scholarship is about reading your colleagues’ books and articles and adopt a sententious tone in writing your own to support or disagree with them.
Any new publication, like Ehrman’s new book, can feed answers, responses, refutations and rebuttals for every other professional in the field in all kinds of media: books, articles, videos, audios, etc…Each theme can be milked to the death by everybody else. All these scholars feed each other with new material which are only their own reactions to one another.
And the level of sophistication needed is so limited that practically everybody can get his degree in theology. You just needed to check the TV debate of the Australian cardinal archbishop George Pell and Richard Dawkins a few days ago. This is the field where you can write a new book every two years, always rehashing the same basic data and ruminating over the same arguments, the same chapter-and-verse numbers, the same phrases.
The real distinction is in rhetorical ability, writing style and debating performances. But the material required to be mastered is so limited and so easy to acquire that most of the scholarship consists of personal interpretations. All those thousands of books revolve around the same subjects, the same quotations, the same interpretations.
No doubt, this is the easiest field for anybody to achieve mastery and produce BS that passes for profundity.
Look at all those 150 experts, professional scholars and laymen, of the Jesus Seminar and all those years spent discussing the same crumbs of information. And what did they come up with in terms of novel conclusions? That Jesus was not an apocalyptic preacher, but a wisdom teacher, in the Jewish or Greek cynic mode. What level of sophistication is needed to reach such concepts?
Of course priests have even an easier time. They have to know so little, and can repeat it for the rest of their lives. As Eric MacDonald already mentioned. I wish he would tackle your comment and elaborate on it.
Philosophy is a bit harder, and less remunerative. Hard science is certainly the toughest. BS is not easily swallowed there, at least no longer. There was a time when science too could easily produce its charlatans and fakes. In medieval times, it was a free-for-all, what with alchemy and astrology. Medicine men were also BS artists. Charlatanism is always easy when you deal with a mass of uneducated, ignorant people.
So speaks Jerome in his famous letter 52 to Nepotian, ch.8:
” When teaching in church seek to call forth not plaudits but groans. Let the tears of your hearers be your glory. A presbyter’s words ought to be seasoned by his reading of scripture. Be not a declaimer or a ranter, one who gabbles without rhyme or reason; but shew yourself skilled in the deep things and versed in the mysteries of God. To mouth your words and by your quickness of utterance astonish the unlettered crowd is a mark of ignorance. Assurance often explains that of which it knows nothing; and when it has convinced others imposes on itself. My teacher, Gregory of Nazianzus, when I once asked him to explain Luke’s phrase σάββατον δευτερόπρωτον , that is “the second-first Sabbath,” playfully evaded my request saying: “I will tell you about it in church, and there, when all the people applaud me, you will be forced against your will to know what you do not know at all. For, if you alone remain silent, every one will put you down for a fool.” There is nothing so easy as by sheer volubility to deceive a common crowd or an uneducated congregation: such most admire what they fail to understand. “
“There is, I admit, a fundamental mystery about the universe”
That’s like a Christian “admitting” that the Bible is the word of God.
“why is the universe logical? And why do natural phenomena obey mathematical laws?”
Because these are tautologies.
There is, I admit, no fundamental mystery about the universe.
Hey, this is easy!
What do you mean by logical? Having truth/false values? Well, there are other kinds of logics, like modal logic, that can be applied as well.
But I don’t think the universe is very logical. For every model that gives you truth/false values, you can find others that have different values.
And I’m not even thinking of philosophic models here! If you look at general relativity it preserves physical laws by having observers from different frames disagreeing on order of events or in other word they disagree on truth values.
So while facts are absolute, truths are not.
There are then presumably very few absolute logical truth/false values pertaining to the content of the universe. The universe is generally “illogical” (but physical).
Who said they do? Physics is using math, but generally not as axiomatic laws but by heuristic algorithms.
If you mean that we see a) universal patterns of physical laws and/or b) local patterns of structure, they can both be ultimately derived by, yes, environmental aka “anthropic” selection.
The statement that both faith and science amount to a “quest for truth” and “a kind of alliance of stubborn truth-seeking” is a window into this person’s own slavish clinging to the familiar extremists-on-both-sides fallacy. (There are those who will never stop making that assertion. They know how highly effective it is on people: easy to remember; don’t have to think too hard about it; makes the person holding that view feel superior, etc.)I hear “stubborn” and think of someone arrogantly set in his or her ways, like an Archie Bunker-type. Science—assuming she means something coherent when saying “science”—isn’t stubborn. Rather, as the saying goes, facts are stubborn things. And if Case-Winters has a superior tool for establishing facts, let’s hear it.
I was listening to a theist on the radio yesterday. (I have a habit of scanning xtian radio stations when I drive.)
He was explaining how the “signature of god” can be found in the very smallest and the very largest things in the universe.
His example was the spiral shape of galaxies and the spiral shape of DNA. Therefore, Jebus.
A few of the points that caught my attention were that every single galaxy is a spiral. Who knew? And the DNA “spiral” (no mention of the word helix) is very small and can only be seen with a microscope — he didn’t seem to have any idea of optical and electron microscopes.
People hear this shit and think they’re learning science.
I think that’s pretty funny.
But let us remember that in some eras, one of the problems confronting the RCC was that most of its priests were illiterate. Your amusing example suggests that the problem hasn’t gone away, just that the form of illiteracy has changed.
The book should have been called “Fuzzy thinking at it’s worst.” How could anyone read that stuff and not be entirely convinced that the authors are mentally deficient? Unfortunately George Pell doesn’t seem to be the biggest idiot on the planet.
There used to be a website that would automatically generate post-modernist prose at the click of a button. Unfortunately, I lost the url.
I think Anna Case-Winters found it.
+2!!
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
“In this light, it is fascinating to discover that the phenomenon of quantum “nonlocality” implies a kind of transcendent togetherness-in-separation with respect to causal relationships in space and time.”
All the postmodernists out there must be beaming with pride at that one.
Sokal rules!
Without denying any of the above, there is a way of thinking and talking about human relationships that is not reductionist and does not involve evolutionary biology. Women and New Agey men (and if there is a polar opposite to autism/Apergers, people on that end of the spectrum) do it a lot. Because our vocabulary in that area is so limited it relies heavily on analogies and metaphors. It is not “wrong” but nor is it precise or clear – especially to those of us who think scientifically. It is this way of talking that theologians have tapped into – are perhaps parasitic upon.
“The price of metaphor is eternal vigilance.” – Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
So I am belatedly armchair-ing my way to catch up on twistor string theory. It is a marriage of general relativity with string theory to make some sense out of the latter. (Or both, really.) Here non-local entangled particle pairs maps to points in twistor space. Sounds familiar, right?
Handwaving it, this happens because spacetime is emergent, and beyond the general relativity map that enforces spacetime lies a space and time instead. In any case, it means for Case-Winters that:
a) Since there is a math mapping between spaces, you can as well say that non-locality means separation-of-togetherness depending on which way you map. (So called pull back or push out directions.)
b) Since this is a string duality between spaces, while non-local pairs of particles (more precisely, events) maps to a point in twistor space, events in spacetime maps to non-local pairs of points in twistor space. I don’t think this is really about particles actually being strings in string theory, but any of those would put paid to the idea of bringing “togetherness”.
Could we please, please see less desperation and more moves from theology?
Or preferably moar kittehs.
Firstly, I’ve been using ‘Dawn Oz’ for years and now Word Press won’t let me change back to it. They have changed something…..I used to have a choice…… really frustrated……
Thank you for your scholarship in reading through ‘theology’ and giving us a taste of your travails. My main linguistic master was Wittgenstein, and I can imagine what he would say to them if his ire was stirring his logic.
And yes, I voted for kittens – of course!
PS
Voting for kittens was almost as much fun as gayifing one of the Mormons.
Deepak, is that you?
“Hope for consonance and an ability to recognize when it happens. For example, speaking theologically, it sometimes is said that all things are utterly connected in Divine Reality. In this light, it is fascinating to discover that the phenomenon of quantum ‘nonlocality’ implies a kind of transcendent togetherness-in-separation with respect to causal relationships in space and time. This seems prima facie to be a stunning instance of consonance. Theologians talk about how we are created for relation, socially constituted, interdependent, and connected with one another. Hence science appears to demonstrate (something like) relationality at the level of particle physics. ”
Why, that is SO non sequitur that (to borrow from Wolfgang Pauli) it is NOT EVEN WRONG! It is JABBERWOCKIAN THEOBABBLE of the Month.
The mind reels at the prospect that Ph.D.s are granted (and wage-earning careers exist) in theology (hifalutin knownothingism)!
I especially like “Sscience appears to demonstrate (something like) relationality at the level of particle physics.”
“Science” and “particle physics” are real words about real subjects. “Relationality” looks as if it might mean something. So I Goggled it – 200,000 hits – and found some beautfies:
“Relationality is a concept that enables us to intervene controversially in the debate on art institutions and their audiences, restoring political density to a concept used to defend a soft pseudo-articulation of the artistic and the social that creates a simulation of participation by trivialising and making a spectacle of the concept of antagonism as constitutive of the social.” (http://transform.eipcp.net/Actions/discursive/anotherrelationality#redir)
“appears to demonstrate” blends two “show” words to show – what?
“(something like)” is a wonderful weaselification. Do the brackets mean it can be ignored, or not? And if it is not ignored, how significant, if at all, is this similarity?
By this time, it doesn’t really matter what “at the level of” means.
Isn’t it high time to now ask Alan Sokal to write a new book on the obscurantist jargon used by American academics in social sciences? About their demoniac urge to appear profound by sprinkling their text with apparently scientific terms, even if they are expressing only nonsense and pretention.
Alan Sokal did a good job with his masterpiece 1996 hoax of “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, an absurd paper submitted and published in Social Text.
Sokal continued with his acerbic critic of postmodernist logorrhea, “Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science” in 1998, primarily aimed at the nonsensical jargon affected by French “philosophers” who were fashionable in American academia and corrupting good American common sense.
But Anna Case-Winters’s quotation above is a sure sign that the French postmodernist virus has continued infecting many scholars who have not been protected during their education and training by any anti-virus program.
Sokal should come to the rescue, perhaps with the help of Gary Trudeau, and produce another biting satire of the pseudo-scientific jargon emanating from American academics in social sciences, philosophy and theology.
Good find, Shuggy — I’ve added that quote to my Jabberwocky file!
I agree, Roo, you rpopose an excellent challenge for Sokal, and I can’t think who could do it better than Sokal except perhaps the team of Sokal-Trudeau. Indeed I salivate at that prospect!
PS: Don’t compose and type commentary posts when your spellchecker has (…or you have…) been nippin’ at the Old Fitzgerald 100.
— Frnak
Summary:
If the Universe is logcial and deterministic, then God.
If the Universe is illogical and sloppy, then God.
Whoopee! God always wins!