I was taken aback when reader Dom told me that New Scientist had published an article—an accommodationist article—by a theologian. It’s not online, so I had to go digging for it in our e-library, but I found it: “God vs. the multiverse,” by Mary-Jane Rubenstein, published in the December 19th issue. Rubenstein is Professor and Chair of Religion at Wesleyan University and a “core” faculty member in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program.
I’m baffled why New Scientist published what is essentially a discourse on theology—natural theology—but of course I’ve disliked that journal anyway, and have disliked it since it published the “Darwin was wrong” article on horizontal gene transfer. This piece further tarnishes what reputation the journal has. A science journal should not be publishing theology.
It turns out that Rubenstein published a book on this issue last year: Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse, and its contents are summarized on Amazon:
Hence the allure of the multiverse: if all possible worlds exist somewhere, then like monkeys hammering out Shakespeare, one universe is bound to be suitable for life. Of course, this hypothesis replaces God with an equally baffling article of faith: the existence of universes beyond, before, or after our own, eternally generated yet forever inaccessible to observation or experiment. In their very efforts to sidestep metaphysics, theoretical physicists propose multiverse scenarios that collide with it and even produce counter-theological narratives. Far from invalidating multiverse hypotheses, Rubenstein argues, this interdisciplinary collision actually secures their scientific viability. We may therefore be witnessing a radical reconfiguration of physics, philosophy, and religion in the modern turn to the multiverse.
Yeah, right. The radical configuration of religion will be, as it always has been, to contort its theology to harmonize with new findings of science. There is no finding of science, I claim, that would make people like Rubenstein give up her belief in God.
In the New Scientist piece, she implies that multiverse theory was constructed to solve the “fine-tuning” problem,and therefore to push God out of the scientific picture. As we know, though, that’s not true: multiverse theory is a consequence of regular physics theory, and wasn’t designed to obviate God at all. Rubenstein says this:
Modern physics has also wrestled with this “fine-tuning problem”, and supplies its own answer. If only one universe exists, then it is strange to find it so hospitable to life, when nearly any other value for the gravitational or cosmological constants would have produced nothing at all. But if there is a “multiverse” of many universes, all with different constants, the problem vanishes: we’re here because we happen to be in one of the universes that works.
No miracles, no plan, no creator. As the cosmologist Bernard Carr puts it: “If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse”. But is that really our only choice Is there another way to think about divinity?
Rubenstein’s “solution” turns out to be pantheism: the Universe IS god. But she arrives at that solution after a short but tedious disquisition on the ancient Greeks, Nicholas of Cusa, and Giordano Bruno. She touts them as pantheists as well, making some physics mistakes along the way. I’ll quote her. How many physics errors can you find in the following?
Everything is in motion all the time, Cusa suggested, and so “it always appears to every observer, whether on the earth, the sun, or another star, that one is… at an immovable centre of things and that all else is being moved.” If everything is moving, then there’s no particular centre. Start from any cosmic body, Cusa suggested, and the visible area around it is what we call a world.
This starts to sound a lot like the modern version of the multiverse: our “universe” is just the visible portion of a much greater cosmos. Like the multiverse, Cusa’s universe is spatially boundless, having nothing outside itself that might bind it. But unlike modern theorists, Cusa refused to call the cosmos “infinite” because it is dependent on its creator. In Cusa’s terminology, God alone is “absolutely infinite” whereas creation is a “contracted infinity”.
This distinction aside, Cusa is getting close to Stoic heresy, with a universe that looks much like God. Like God, the Cusan universe has no limits. Like God, the universe contains everything that is, as well as the seeds of what will be. As Cusa puts it, “It is as if the Creator had spoken, ‘Let it be made,’ and because God, who is eternity itself, could not be made, that was made… which would be as much like God as possible.”
Traditionally, Christian doctrine has taught that humans are made in the image of God. Cusa disrupted this idea by saying that the universe, not man, bears the image of God. And if humans are not particularly godlike, then God is not particularly humanoid. God doesn’t look like a patriarch in the sky: he looks like the universe.
That’s pantheism, pure and simple. But Cusa got the nature of the Universe wrong, so why is he one of the “solutions” to the problem? It looks as if Rubenstein is just coopting the ancients to support her own pantheistic solution to the “dilemma”.
But you don’t need to rely on theological authority to arrive at that “solution.” After all, there have been lots of pantheists throughout history. But they are in a minority, for there have been many more believers and theologians who see god as a Body-less Mind. To settle on one far from universally accepted conception of God as a way to reconcile the multiverse theory with the divine is simply making a virtue of necessity.
Rubenstein then describes Bruno as a pantheist as well:
In the course of his trial, Bruno made some half-hearted efforts to say that the universe was in some sense different from God, and that Christ was more special than anyone else, but the Inquisition wasn’t fooled. What he really meant was that this infinite universe is the source of all things, the life in all things, and the end of all things – or what everybody means by God. This is, in short, pantheism. Not Stoic pantheism, with its infinite cycles of rebirth, but it’s no less threatening to the theological order.
In fact, such pantheisms are even more theologically threatening than atheism, precisely because they change what it means to be God. Not an anthropic creator beyond the world, but the force of creation within it.
Yes, pantheism threatens to the many people who conceive of God as personlike, or at least some thing that has compassion and feelings. After all, if you believe the Jesus myth, God must have had personlike qualities, for he sent down his son as a sacrifice. You have to have a mind that can make plans to do stuff like that. The Universe itself has no son and cannot create human sacrifices to help us expiate our sins. If you can rename the Universe “God,” then you can rename anything God, and that’s why believers don’t like pantheism. After all, you could rename Earth “God.”
Here, then, is Rubenstein’s “solution”:
So we don’t need to choose between God and the multiverse. Rather, we might rethink what it is we mean by those old godly terms like creation, power, renewal and care. Is it possible that modern cosmology is asking us, not to abandon religion, but to think differently about what it is that gives life, what it is that’s sacred, where it is we come from – and where we’ll go next.
What she’s doing is just forcing God into a box that comports with science, redefining him/her/it as the Universe or the multiverse. If you think that way, then, yes, you can harmonize religion with any finding of science. But most believers won’t go along with you. Remember that between 65% and 85% of Americans believe in the reality of things like Satan, Heaven, Hell, the divinity of Jesus, angels, and so on. And the percentage of literalists is much higher among Muslims. Has Rubenstein considered Islamic theology?
Rubenstein is no dummy. She has as B.A. in religion and English from Williams College, a masters degree in Philosophical Theology from Cambridge University, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion from Columbia University. Them’s weighty credentials! What is she doing wasting her time with this nonsense? She could have been a contender, or at least a productive member of society! And what is New Scientist doing publishing an article on pantheism and theology? The journal should, to paraphrase Hitchens, be mocked and reviled for its stupidity.
Here’s Rubenstein giving a nine-minute lecture on “Asceticosmologies: Modern science as religious practice.” I’ll leave it to readers to comment.
It is interesting that she would mention Bruno, who is often cited as one of the fathers of freethought. His life and death are summarized by Wikipedia:
Beginning in 1593, Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges including denial of several core Catholic doctrines (including the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and Transubstantiation). Bruno’s pantheism was also a matter of grave concern. The Inquisition found him guilty, and in 1600 he was burned at the stake in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori. After his death he gained considerable fame, being particularly celebrated by 19th- and early 20th-century commentators who regarded him as a martyr for science, although historians have debated the extent to which his heresy trial was a response to his astronomical views or to other aspects of his philosophy and theology. Bruno’s case is still considered a landmark in the history of free thought and the emerging sciences.
I have seen Bruno used a few times as a martyr for science as if he was burned for saying heretical things like the sun was but a star and so on, but actually those charges were pretty far down the list of charges. At the top of the list of charges were more standard heresies like saying that Christ was not divine.
True enough, but that only highlights the core issue from a secular protections perspective: that no organization, church or otherwise, should have had the power to burn anyone at the stake, for heresy or any other reason involving mere belief, let alone for the other vaguely scientific speculations Bruno did farther down on his list of deemed offenses.
Unlike witches, those who were behind and carried out slave rebellions were burned at the stake in North America in the 18th century.
Bruno a Pantheist? Reprehensible to lie about him like that!!!
And one can surmise the political and religious inclinations of those squashing the slave rebellions would not fall under the Secular Humanist persuasion.
These simplistic notions of an a priori god can always be countered with ‘what god?”. Without a priori evidence of a god – any god – there is no intellectual justification for ascribing anything to it. Doing so is dishonest circular reasoning – mere self-indulgent wish-fulfillment.
Wait till they find out its name isn’t “God” at all. God means to “invoke a deity, to call to ones self a deity” not a name or even a nomenclature of type. But that seems to be the way the language has developed. Curious.
For them if there is no deity, there is no restraint as far as they are concerned. Why they look upon Atheists as human-beasts that could destroy all the is good at any time.
Like all theologians, she’s trying to find her relevancy in an world that sees her increasingly as irrelevant.
She knows she’s doomed since she has the degrees that are considered held by the stupid so what can she do but what she is now doing?
“Rubenstein is no dummy. She has as B.A. in religion and English from Williams College, a masters degree in Philosophical Theology from Cambridge University, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion from Columbia University. Them’s weighty credentials!”
Yes, the weave of her new clothes is most beautifully detailed.
Oh, nicely put!
cr
Intellect, academic accomplishment, etc, are not the salient factors here (Intelligent Design guru Phillip Johnson got into Harvard when he was 16, remember). Its the ability to not think about things they don’t want to think about that is the lubricant, however bright or dim the mind. In the multiverse game, those who want it as a way to discolve the Uncaused Cause presumption in a sea of infinite regression, may be contrasted to the Rubensteins of the world, who can simply roll the Uncaused Cause goalpost out to the new boundary (or to a metaverse of Multiverses, if you wish, Turtles all the way up).
The core matter is whether the person wants or needs some personal entity lurking behind the curtains of Nature. For those who need that, all manner of rationalization can (and eventually will) be marshalled, much like the Krel Machine in “Forbidden Planet”, supplying the desires with all the energy needed to arrive back at where they were (and need to be tempermentally) to begin with.
Some of the dangers of the human mind is that it can be fooled by it self. That it can weave and create things that have never existed and treat it as a fact—false memory syndrome. Group hallucinations? Maybe. False recollections? Certainly. Why eye witness reports are so suspect, even by police, scientists and experts can still be fooled.
The flip side of imagination. Duplicity.
Quite so. Indeed we can see the Tortucan’s inability to quality check their own recollections and beliefs with Donald Trump (and Ben Carson going me too!) “remembering” the non-event of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the fall of the WTC.
An example from my own memory box I hope shows how such matters need to be covered. I’m a great Thin Man fan (both William Powell & Myrna Loy) and I had recalled very vividly a scene from one of their films involving a rubber donut which Nick Charles had to sit on after getting shot in the ass. I even remembered a specific scene in a kitchen where they bantered this.
So you can imagine my consternation when the full Thin Man series came out on DVD, and I found no such movie, no such scene. If I were too heavily tortucan I might have spun off into conspiracy thinking and suppose a “lost” or “suppressed” Thin Man film had existed, and rant on such things at a website (instead of the anticreationism work I do engage in, at http://www.tortucan.wordpress.com & now http://www.tortucan.com for the htmls).
I thought maybe Powell and Loy had been in another comedy mystery with that plot, but could find nothing on that either. But fortunately, and quite by serendiptous happenstance, only a few weeks after this angst moment, Turner Classic Movies showed a Robert Montgomery/Rosalind Russel flick which was about a bantering husband/wife detective team, with ass shot and rubber donut.
Clearly I had seen that film years before, and my mind had reedited it, interpolating a different cast (one more resonant in my interests) and invented a non-existent kitchen scene (not in the Montgomery film). So now I have a clear track of exactly how my mind had led off into the bramble patch, and a reminder how just because we remember it to be true, doesn’t mean it is.
If only Mr. Trump (and other Tortucans, especially those seeking high, or any, office) could slow down in their diatribes to think about things they don’t think about. But alas, Tortucans don’t do that, which is why they’re Tortucans.
I’ve done one of those. ~40 years ago, I went to a party where the host had a Union Jack as a bedspread – which he ended up wearing (it was that sort of party).
15 years later we met by accident on a bus and he invited me to his wedding in a few weeks time. I said “Last time I saw you, you were walking down the road in a Union Jack”. He looked at me oddly, but I would have sworn on oath I was correct.
Come the wedding reception, and he had photos from his past stapled up on the wall, including one of ME in the Union Jack.
I know what must have happened, my brain remembered the Union Jack and its owner and put the two together.
(If I was paranoid I’d suspect the photo had been faked, but it would have taken mainframe-size processing power in those days.)
See also ‘The Invisible Gorilla’ for the unreliability of memory.
cr
The reason why these memory tricks jolt us so is becase we are, quite literally, who we remember ourselves to be. That’s why Alzheimer’s is so insideous (and more than enough evidence of a theodicy lapse for any Imaginary Friends angling for moral high ground).
I suspect that our minds (or at least the non-conscious “Me” part, to follow Danish science writer Norretranders’ intriguing nomenclature that I go into in “Planet of the Apes” chapter at #TIP http://www.tortucan.wordpress.com) sometimes edits those memories as a way for the “I” part to feel better. And since we only recall what the revised memory says happened, the “I” is non the wiser (unless you bump into old photos or the DVD editions to remind us of the fix).
It doesn’t say much for eyewitness testimony in court does it? Actually, a jury is supposed to obtain information about a witness’s truthiness by observing their demeanor on the stand. Someone who actually believes she remembers an event and is adamant about it could get someone sentenced to die, even if the memory is false. That doesn’t say much for the jury system either.
I’m acutely aware of that. I’ve been on several juries where witness accounts contradicted each other. What disturbed me more was the attitude of one juror – a real self-appointed Sherlock Holmes – who (correctly) picked up a trivial contradiction between the policeman’s evidence and the accused’s, therefore the accused was lying, therefore he was guilty. (It was a trivial point – whether the accused was sitting in the front or back of a car – that had no bearing on the case). I suggested it was more likely the policeman was mistaken and got a diatribe about “how dare I insult the police – fine body of men – blah blah blah”.
I wouldn’t convict anyone on *my* eyewitness evidence!
I can also think of several rape cases locally where the ‘guilty’ verdict was dead wrong. One was overturned some years later (and the guy released) on DNA evidence. Another was occasioned by a girl who complained a year later – by which time no-one could remember the events clearly – the jury found the man guilty (I don’t think I would have) – you could tell from the newspaper account that the judge was extremely unhappy about the verdict.
And one on which I was on the jury – about 50-50 male and female – where the jury added a rider to its not guilty verdict that we thought the charge should never have been brought. Interestingly the most scathing comments (in the jury room) about the complainant were from the women on the jury.
cr
Any thoughts on how her experience differs from how you experience scientists who think the humanities is irrelevant?
Probably the exact same. A woman with a Humanities degree – that’s what the ladies got when they were waiting to find husbands in the olden times. I am a woman with a Humanities degree which is to say a stupid woman who failed in life because she didn’t fulfill her reproductive duty
Still, you brain rather well. That’s worth something, no?
Not in my society who dislikes intelligence, hates science and thinks the Humanities are a waste of time. Women, once no longer pretty things,msnould bow out of view.
I used to cry for being intelligent. I hoped to get s brain injury or something to stop it. Now I’ve decided to play the part. It is a relief to become your stereotype as so many religious women demonstrate.
I can relate to the sometimes awkward social realities of being smart. I skipped three grades as a child–6th (after an IQ test), 11th, and 12th. My mind has always placed me out of synch with my age-based peers. It can be painful. A rabbi in Seattle suggested I hang out with local 30-somethings. My response: laughter. I have tried to be conventional, but the rules for my generation don’t comport with my preferences. Give me a quiet room with people talking about science or film any day over a bar with noise or a sports game.
By a stroke of luck, I did happen upon some other humans near my age recently who were great fun. At the end of the day during a conference on statistical genetics, a Microsoft programmer, three statisticians, and I went out for dinner. We talked about study design the entire time. It was seamless and enjoyable–and not that different than hanging out here on WEIT!!
Many of us have lived through the awkwardness of not fitting in due to perceptions of our level of intelligence. However, there are various kinds of IQ and personality tests that are not consistent among themselves in what they measure. And, IQ tests do not measure all types of intelligences.
I also grew up at a time when children were routinely tested for intelligence and placed in
tracks for learning. I had friends that tested “smarter” than me and friends that tested “dumber”. I met no one who was smart in all subjects and no one who was dumb in everything.
I had smart friends who came to very little, and dumb friends who achieved very much more than expected.
When my children started school in Palo Alto, CA, they were fortunate to be in a non-graded grade school. Children there learned to help each other. Those with better reading skills tutored those with lesser reading skills. Ditto with math and science. Children moved from classroom to classroom based on subject matter and were not stuck in the same group all the time. I thoroughly approved.
I very much appreciate the notion that there are differing kinds of intelligences, that we don’t all have the same kinds, and that we can share what we have with others who can share what they have with us.
Hmm. “Different intelligences” rings in my ears like different ways of knowing.
In my case, the IQ test I had as a child may have saved me from a life of poverty, as it steered me on a path of achievement, when my family was illiterate.
I have no doubt that other types of standardized tests are not perfect, but has anyone suggested a more suitable metric for college admissions?
I read an article about how scoring high for openness is a stringer indicator of success (academic and otherwise) than IQ.
I don’t know my primary school IQ but I bet it was low. I am pretty sure I have dyscalculia because math was and is very hard for me (exacerrabated by the fact that I had really crummy teachers) while language and reading extremely easy. I could read at a very high level at a very young age (which caused my father to have to tell the library not to let me take out certain books because I was bringing home sexually explicit ones by accident and asking him what was going on with the story). I also struggle with reading analog time although I had an analogue watch as a child. I have a hard time with time in general, often screwing up when I have to leave etc.
So, I know what it is like to be the worst and the best but I think my moronic teachers just saw what was the worst in me. My father, who had been pushed ahead in school, refused to let that happen to me and absolutely would not allow me to be considered “gifted”. The whole designation was a farce anyway since many of the kids got into the program through pressure from their parents.
“The whole designation was a farce anyway since many of the kids got into the program through pressure from their parents.”
My parents didn’t have any clout. They were so illiterate, they didn’t have a checking account or credit cards. My father got escorted off my university campus when I was a freshman for refusing to remove his riffles. He had three on him, long, gnarly hair, and no teeth. You could smell him before seeing him. We lived out in the woods and hauled our own water. There were often caucuses hanging in the bathtub and kitchen, dried blood counter crevices, and refrigerator counter grooves.
I had no advantages. Had I not scored well when I was young, I could have ended up as a gas station clerk.
P.S. Your teachers sound like morons. How could they not have recognized and fostered your talent? Your wit is sharp, Diana.
Everyone is an individual. Successful lives probably depends a lot on how our unique talents are nurtured. I was a so-so student but I thrived whenever I was with a teacher who seemed to be aware of my needs. That wasn’t very often, but enough.
Well, my maths is pretty good but I also have trouble with time. It either goes too slow or too fast, I always have trouble estimating how long something is going to take.
Re watches, I always have to laboriously ‘decode’ what the hands are saying. And these days when all watches are digitally driven anyway, I just can’t understand why analog watches are so trendy, since they have to use the digital logic to laboriously propel hands round the dial and then the first thing you do when consulting one is convert the reading back into a (digital) number.
cr
I think you and I convert the numbers to digital but most people don’t. They think in quarters and it’s ok if it isn’t completely accurate. This always leads to a dilemma when people ask me what time it is. How precise should I be? My instinct is to read them the digital, precise time not round up. It isn’t as bad now with digital clocks everywhere but when they weren’t so common, this was a real dilemma for me.
You don’t use it, you lose it. It is a mistake to unless you think what you are doing will fulfill you in ways your cannot with your brain power. Sad really. In preparation for when, and if, the theocrats take over this benighted country and make it a real Empire.
However they would accept any science that helps them fulfill their goals. Biology may suffer as it did in Stalinist Russia. Put them back at least 60 years behind from being leaders in the field.
To hell with them, Diana. You and me, we’ll go back-to-back, two non-science majors taking on the lot of ’em. Our weapons of choice — bon mots at twenty paces, hand-to-hand sentence deconstruction, extemporaneous disquisitions on French symbolist poetry. They wanna talk useless education? Fine, let ’em. We’ll give ’em so much goddamn useless education, they’ll never wanna hear about it again!
🙂
Ken, I came across this the paper other day, I’d love to get your input.
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2_noafterword.pdf
@Ralph, if you are testing him, that’s naughty :–)
@Ken, my words to Ralph are a hint.
Thanks, Charleen.
I don’t think Ralph meant that so much as a test; he was feeding me a straight line to see what I might come up with for a punchline. Playing Dean to my Jerry, Rowan to my Martin, Hardy to my Laurel.
The straight man is a fun role to play because it is very close to the role of instigator, which I so enjoy!
🙂 Oh, how the WEIT crowd doth amuse.
I opened up the link, saw the near-sociopathic use of physics jargon–lacking sense but keyword salady enough to confuse and impress–and left the article to do a search on Sokal to see what had been previously said about him. I came across what Jerry had written last year and felt relieved that I hadn’t been duped.
It is nice to be able to recognize a trick.
Jerry’s post from last year: https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/03/29/alan-sokal-highlights-the-incompatibility-of-science-and-religion/
It hadn’t occurred to me that I was playing the straight man, but yes – I did not think for a moment that Ken would not recognize it immediately.
You all appear to be about two steps ahead of me, perhaps owing somewhat to a cohort effect. I was in high school when Sokal was cooking up the scheme to submit his fake treatise.
He’s tricksy and probably got a good laugh out of it. I used to do similar things informally with friends.
The famous ‘Sokal hoax’. I thought everyone* knew about that.
I’m firmly with Dawkins on that one.
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html in case anyone wants to know.
Disclaimer: I would not apply the ‘po-mo’ slur to the humanities in general, any more than physics can be blamed for Hiroshima.
cr
* To a first approximation.
@infiniteimprobabilit:
Now, that article I recognize, as Richard Dawkins tw**ted it on December 20th and was attacked by a (?)pomo twi**er user named Dock Curie, who threatened him with this: “Heard you’ve been slagging Guattari, come to Vancouver sometime you piece of shit, I’ll put your teeth out with a big rock.”
Thanks for asking me to peer-review Prof. Sokal’s paper, Ralph. I’d strongly recommend that it be published in the next issue of Social Text. You ask me, Sokal is wasting his time with physics; his future clearly lies in the humanities department.
(Sorry, I mistakenly posted this in response to your comment below, Ralph.)
Sometimes I think Sokal writes stuff to deliberately piss off scientists. If I wanted to annoy both scientists and most intellectuals, I think I’d write something like that.
It’s funny that when I was taking a 4th year class on science fiction (there were some horrid choices in what we read) I got annoyed at the lack of scientific knowledge my fellow students had, seeing some outrageous stories as realistic. Yet, when I was in a science class, I was annoyed at my fellow students ignorance about history and language. Maybe it’s just that everyone pisses me off but if I wanted to piss everyone else off as much as possible, I’d write an essay like this.
It must be great to be able to feel superior to both groups.
Not superior, separate. Like never fitting in. Criticized by both. Sort of like being in the middle of the extrovert and introvert scale. You are neither and both and never the same.
It’s like they’re inviting you to think for yourself.
Is this where I eat the peach?
Only if you dare.
Hey Diana, you’re in danger of developing an inferiority complex. Stop it! (And I mean that in a nice way). You’re underrating yourself.
Yours are some of the wittiest and most sensible comments on here IMO. Nobody here can see what your degree was in, all we know of you is from your comments, and you ain’t got nothin’ to feel bashful about.
cr
I don’t feel I’m actually stupid. It’s how others perceive a person and it has been thrust on me so much by now I’m exhausted from it.
Maybe you, Ben Goren and I (both with music degrees) can start a support group. It can certainly be frustrating to witness how differently (that is to say, sloppily) one’s colleagues in the arts or humanities not only do think, but want to think. Many of my musician acquaintances think skepticism is a dirty word.
That is sad. Snow’s 2 Cultures clearly need fresh bridges (or pavement at least), though this has been a recurring cyclic problem, where early Romanticism authors were very pro-science, recall, and many a current rock musician has their geek side that refuses to isolate artistic creativity from rigorous curiosity.
‘Rubenstein is no dummy’
Saul Bellow — ‘A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.’
Painful. Cosmology wasn’t a real science till the discovery of CMB in 1964, wait, what? That statement alone suggests that anything she says can be dismissed as nonsense.
Her whole thesis gets lost in a muddle of definitions, of applying the word “god” to the cosmos, which renders the word meaningless. She has no useful insights. What a waste of time.
Sounds like a pseudoscientific version of the “ground of being” nonsense so beloved (ahem) in these parts!
In their very efforts to sidestep metaphysics, theoretical physicists propose multiverse scenarios that collide with it and even produce counter-theological narratives.
The concept of a multiverse is a prediction based on models of our universe–models that have at least some success in describing our universe. The only mathematical model for religion is to multiply by zero, then add the answer–which doesn’t count as showing your work.
I don’t think the article should be there either (for that matter, neither should speculation about multiverses by physicists unless there is some way to turn flights of fantasy into science by having any opportunity to falsify the hypothesis etc.). However, I do have to raise an eyebrow at the term ‘journal’. New Scientist isn’t a journal it’s a magazine, and that’s not the same thing.
as always religion must play catchup to reality.
the latest Smithsonian is ridiculous too. “The search for Jesus” crap on its cover and then the article is about some new archaeology that shows, surprise, that people lived in Palestine and they believed in gods. Still nothing to show that Jesus Christ Son of God ever existed.
Thanks for the analysis. I just turned the page in disgust when I saw this article and quickly forgot about it.
If such drivel continues to crop up in New Scientist I’ll cancel my subscription.
Current issues of National Geographics has a long article on the importance of Mary, mother of Jesus, and the Smithsonian has an article about Holy Land archeology related to the lifetime of Jesus. Looks like two subscriptions to drop.
I agree. I dropped my new scientist one a while back. It’s a shame what happened to National Geographic. I still like Scientific American but I’m always struggling to find time to read it. Thankfully they are electronic copies so I don’t have to look at an unread like of magazines & feel ashamed.
The more traditional theists that convert to pantheism, the happier I would be.
It is a stepping stone.
Pantheism is sexed up atheism … Richard Dawkins
I endorse Pantheism. There is no proof for it, but those who have expressed some appeal for it, like Stephen Fry, have a personalized aesthetic arrangement with the universe, which is very much like Dawkin’s suggestion: Atheism that’s sexy.
I, too, have no problem with an ineffable ground of all being! Provided that it’s just another way to describe something like finding peace through being close to nature, and there are no objective truth claims that are transparently hinting toward “therefore Jeebus”.
An “aesthetic arrangement with the universe” sounds like a perfect description.
And the ineffable merits fewer words, not more.
Unfortunately, nothing inspires people to eff about something as much as calling it ineffable does.
Well, perhaps also the generous application of social lubricant.
Kevin and Ralph
I think from a secular point of view I would go a step further and allow potential theists to use the training wheels of Sophisticated Theology®.
It has to be way better than traditional orthodoxy. I disagree with Jerry’s take on ST®. I would be promoting it, though this would have to be done carefully.
I think it depends how far along a society has come in shrugging of superstition.
Consider Christianity in the U.S., for example. The problem is, if people water down Christianity to something that makes no truth claims at all, but still LABEL it as Christianity, they are enabling the widespread nastier forms of Christianity. I think we’ve come far enough in the U.S. that we’re ready to challenge the idea that morality comes from religion, and to meet the prejudice against atheism head on. For the many Americans who can now safely do so without social opprobrium, I don’t have a lot of time for functional atheists who won’t stand up and be counted. The more of us that do this, the easier life will progressively become for non-believers in the remaining benighted parts of the nation.
But if you were to consider an atheist in a majority Islamic society? That’s a different story. Practically speaking the most you are ever going to sell is probably functional atheism dressed up as “moderate” Islam, and even that risks death in some places. So, as a practical matter, if in the short term you can market any wooly definition of Allah that doesn’t entail killing gays and apostates, good luck to you.
” they are enabling the widespread nastier forms of Christianity”
I don’t quite buy this argument (it could be true in certain cases, though it is quite easy to find examples of evangelicals claiming Catholics are not real Christians, so how are Catholics enabling these evangelicals?)The Episcopalians are really disturbed by the likes John Shelby Spong, there is a huge sucking sound towards the light.
Things like the Discovery Institute are a response to the success of science; so I could argue while science has won some battles, it has caused a reaction that is enabling these nastier forms of Christianity.
To me there seems to be an increasing polarization, especially in the States. There has to be a safe ground somewhere near the middle so that believers can do their thing in a way that does not draw the ire of people without belief.
“There has to be a safe ground somewhere near the middle so that believers can do their thing in a way that does not draw the ire of people without belief.”
Have you spent time in the U.S.?
The ONE thing that will unite fundie Christians, Catholics and even Muslims in common cause is hatred of atheists. “At least we all have a God, at least we have some basis for morality.”
The behaviors that draw ire are when Christians want to impose their majority religion on government, on the legislature, on schools; when they use their “religious morality” to exercise and justify evil bigotry.
In the U.S. context, to suggest that atheists are the persecutors who will not live and let live is the most preposterous doublethink that I could imagine.
“Have you spent time in the U.S.?”
I live a couple clicks north of the 49th in the Socialist Republic of Canada, so yes I have spent time in the US. But I did get time off for good behaviour.
I am not sure how you got persecution from ire.
Apologies, my “preposterous doublethink” comment was not directed at your perfectly civil comment, it was motivated by the many Christians who act like hateful bigots and then play the “persecution” card when they are called on it. Obviously you were neither doing that nor justifying it.
No problem Ralph
Merry Christmas
Clapton is God.
Yep, there’s one in every crowd.
The “fine tuning” problem seems really muddle headed to me. First, it is obvious that if there really were a fine tuning problem that problem would apply equally to any god or gods as it does to the universe. How did we get a god who wants to create anything, much less the very specific universe we got? So it’s not much of an argument for religion and it takes a particularly willful obtuseness not to see this.
But the bigger problem is that for there to be a fine tuning problem we would need to know a great deal more than we do, for the fine tuning problem is essentially about assigning a probability distribution to the constants of the universe and then declaring ourselves surprised to have drawn the constants we have out of that distribution. But no one knows ANYTHING about such a distribution. For all we know, the constants we have are the only ones possible, or they could be vanishingly unlikely. But to even talk about how likely or unlikely they are we have to at least imagine creating the universe over and over again with different outcomes, but any such exercise is just an exercise in fiction at this point. If there is just one universe, it is pretty meaningless to talk about it’s odds. If it turns out to be meaningful to talk about the probability of our universe, which is far from given, it will only be meaningful in the context of some multi-verse theory anyway.
Fundamentally, the “fine-tuning” problem is not a real problem, it’s a pretend problem. And invoking god as the solution to this pretend problem is just to give in to our subjective illusion that minds are somehow primary (necessary) elemental things rather than, as all evidence makes obvious, derived contingent complex things.
I have neither the physics nor the mathematics to understand properly the reasoning behind the multiverse hypothesis, but two decades ago when learning statistics and probability I came to the same conclusion you’ve expressed in your second paragraph rather more lucidly than I could have put it.
Prior to that, a multiverse seemed plausible on historical grounds: new discoveries in science had expanded our horizons from the world to multiple planets to multiple solar systems to multiple galaxies; perhaps their were also multiple universes.
Doh!! Write 100 times, “There is no ‘their’ in ‘there’.”
I do that all the time. So much of my typing is an unconscious skill that I’m constantly making homophone errors if I don’t carefully proofread what I type. I also make lots of embarrassing apostrophe errors because my typing muscles go with what is most common not what is correct.
I wish a peer-reviewed study would come out showing a strong correlation between high intelligence and homophone errors.
Wood yaw eye queue bee hire?
Years ago, “Little Red Riding Hood” was presented in a local newspaper entirely using homophones. It started out” Ones pawn term, ladle rat rotten hut…” More recently, I read an article in a Mensa magazine that was written entirely in homophones. Somewhere or other, I have a list of homophones I put together while reading and thinking about how a given homophone would alter the meaning of the text. Word games that provide an inner chuckle. Doesn’t have to be intelligence tests, brain f**ts or clumsy fingers.
Gosh darn it, that should have been
“Wood yaw rye queue bee hire?”
Take that homophone-phobes!
Is that what Gertrude Stein meant to say? And here all this time I thought she was mocking Oakland …
There’s a nice verbal account of the inflation-motivated “multiverse” here from Andrei Linde.
http://edge.org/response-detail/25535
As another commenter pointed out, this is nothing to do with Everett’s “Many Worlds” interpretation of QM. There’s a wiki on that.
And, lest anyone misinterpret your comment, of course both of these ideas are much deeper than the notion that we might find more stuff if we “look further” within our own universe.
That’s a helpful link; my non-scientific brain found it quite illuminating.
That reminded me of this video of Prof. Linde
being told that experiments conducted at the South Pole confirmed his theory.
That almost made me cry. For those who aren’t familiar, this is the BICEP2 evidence for inflation, which was soon discredited as a dust anomaly.
But what is his first reaction? It’s not “I am f***ing genius who was just proved right”. It is “What if I am tricked?”
That’s why science works, b*tches.
That’s why the follow-up spirit is so important. Not to assume that the new finding is correct, but waiting for the dust to settle, see how it weathers the test of analysis.
I detect that failure to do follow-up as a pathology of behavior in the antievolution literature I study, and in comparable controversies (such as climate change skepticism, antivaccination groupies, or even wackiloon views like flat earth or moon landing hoaxes). I strongly suspect that the absence of that “follow-up” instinct is a Tortucan trait (as yet there is no cure, with or without a holiday telethon).
I’m sorry, but “Tortucan” is not a word that is in common parlance but appears to refer to your own work. Since nobody uses it here but you, nor understands what it is, use a more common word from now own, please.
Right. That was a perfect moment for confirmation bias, but his scientific brain overrode the impulse. A religiously oriented person, driver more by hope, might have given in to wish fulfillment.
Prezactly.
And I’ve never understood why people harp about the “fine tuning” of the universe when the vast majority of the volume of the universe is distinctly hostile to life. Someone else can do the calculation, but I’d be surprised if even 10^-50 of it is “fine tuned” for us. Indeed, a great deal of our own tiny planet isn’t too conducive to human life. If some sky fairy did some fine tuning for us, it clearly was an afterthought.
LOL. When are we going to stop Divinity schools from corrupting our youth?
I am sure that I do not fully grasp the commitments that one must have to be an academic about religion, but right now I am having difficulty wrapping my head around a dual association with religious studies and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Program. Involvement in any one of these things implies an acceptance of their tenets, and as we all know Religion and Feminism are not exactly BFF’s.
Yeah but neither are physics and religion. She is probably the perfect person to actually jam them together because she has experience trying to jam over things that don’t fit together. Not that she does so successfully.
Feminist theologians have long been engaged in a radical revisioning of Christianity, often with help from Gnostic heresies.
One of the very smartest of feminist theologians (albeit not very scientifically minded), Mary Daley, eventually abandoned Christian belief altogether.
I think they intersect at the “Sacred Feminine”.
Good point. And also the Wiccans, which are further down on your link. Those might represent cases where Religion and Feminism go together, although of course the devil is in the details.
Religious academic requirements:
1. Know how to speak in public.
2. Appear to have ability to convince some people that we cannot discount other ways of knowing.
Oy, the video is far too painful and annoying to watch; I can’t make myself sit through it.
The theological strategy of (unself-awaredly) smugly exegeting a few Greeks to (again unself-awaredly) fulsomely overlay reality with a layer of, in Rubenstein’s case, pantheistic mysticism is troubling.
I’ll just fiercely project from my own experience here and say Rubenstein shouldn’t be a theologian; she should retrain as a physicist. It would be less difficult than straining herself to the point of near aneurysm and would give her insights that she could never get to without diving into the science.
The attempt to secure a divine being in a cosmos with multiverses goes way back. I really like this somehow disturbing illustration from ca. 1750 that tries to do just that (scroll down to the 2nd picture). It depicts multiple universes, each governed by a Perfect Being.
The “pan” in pantheism comes from the Greek word for “all”. This morning I am practicing cacaotheism, a religion which Starbucks still honors even if they have allegedly abandoned Christmas.
More seriously,
Spinoza did all of this with more poetry and elegance, enough to capture the imagination of Einstein, who I don’t think would be as impressed with this material.
It’s only the Amazon summary but I have a BIG problem with
“In their very efforts to sidestep metaphysics, theoretical physicists propose multiverse scenarios that collide with it and even produce counter-theological narratives.”
Collide???
Well, metaphysics buffs are free to engage in thought experiments and put multiverse scenarios and their speculations into a collider device (less expensive but less definitive than the Hadron Collider), but multiverse theory does not in any way on its own steam “collide” with metaphysics.
And to say “this interdisciplinary collision secures their scientific validity” is really rich! No matter what you think of religion, science is an autonomous enterprise, never ever requiring validation from any kind of relgion!!! The sort of religiosity Einstein liked emerged out of a sense of wonder which was entirely independent of science.
Spinoza, Bruno and Nicholas of Cusa did major departures from conventional Christian thinking. Nicholas managed to escape church censure (he was a papal legate), although he prefigured the Copernican revolution in asserting the earth was not the center of the universe and is in motion.
Historians of religion believe Nicholas was somewhat of a panDeist, someone who believes that God first created the universe after which God merged with the universe and no longer exists separately.
Bruno fared less well with the church. He was condemned for believing in infinite worlds, Jesus was not God, the Devil will be saved, and the Holy Spirit is the soul of the universe (a sort of pantheism I guess).
Nicholas of Cusa also discovered how to measure people’s heart rate by taking their pulse, and in spite of being atypically for his era open to the goodness of other religions, advocated that Jews wear a special identifying badge.
caca-o’theism — coffee so shitty you pray for a shot of Bushmills to kill the taste.
You remember that night at the Garden? You came down to my dressing room, said this ain’t your major, kid, we’re going for the degree in theology? You remember that? This ain’t your major! Ain’t my major?! I coulda taken that major apart! I coulda had a real degree, a degree in the hard sciences, in the social sciences, in the humanities. I coulda had class. But what happens? Those degrees get a title shot outdoors at the ballpark. And what does my theology degree get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville!”
That’s uncanny, Ken. I was composing parody along identical lines in my mind, I had the IMDB page open to recall the exact dialog.
I’m glad I didn’t post before I saw this, yours is perfect.
Thanks for asking me to peer-review Prof. Sokal’s paper, Ralph. I’d strongly recommend that it be published in the next issue of Social Text. You ask me, Sokal is wasting his time with physics; his future clearly lies in the humanities department.
Very nice!!! 🙂
An intellectual bum, which is what she is.
Look buddy. You got a beef with that dame? Take it up wit me, see. Just watch it biddy, or yer gonna a get a knuckle samwitch and a shot right in the keister. Hear?
I think you mean a shot in the “kisser”.
That works too.
I like the phrase I learned from The Stooges, “keep walkin’ sister”.
Calling Doctor Howard, Doctor Fine, Doctor Howard …
Incredibly cool, Ken.
And this comes from someone who had that dialog with herself.
Perfect! Well played.
What the hell is “contracted infinity”? Anything less than infinity is finite, and therefore not infinity.
In Cantorian set theory, Aleph-Null is a lower lever of infinity than Aleph-One, but Nicholas of Cusa lived centuries before Georg Cantor, so I really can’t tell you what N of C was thinking.
I think sometimes what he might be understood as having in mind is the distinction between unbounded and infinite (or if one prefers, potential vs. actual infinite).
Yeah, that caught my attention too. It’s all just an exercise in semantics.
A lot of it sounds like gibberish to me too. It’s an abuse of words much like speaking in tongues.
In the video, she seems to conflate the multiple universes of cosmic inflation theory, with Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
These are not the same.
^^^^
An interesting take:
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2011/05/26/are-many-worlds-and-the-multiverse-the-same-idea/
While I am not convinced by either or a combination … if the math fits keep calculating.
“Professor and Chair of Religion at Wesleyan University and a “core” faculty member in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program.”
Where the old woo and the new woo meet.
cr
And I had prayed so that never the twoo should meet …
Theology and gender studies.
‘Nuff said
There is no fine-tuning problem. Every possible individual beginning state of affairs is equally (un)likely. It’s only when it comes to contingencies, when you start with some given, that you can say x, y, or z have relative probability.
Take a lottery with a million people. Somebody wins. Although from the winner’s perspective, they hit a one-in-a-million shot, it’s not reasonable to say overall that a one-in-a-million event just occurred, because somebody had to win, and all were equally likely.
Now take a similar lottery, where the draw takes place on the same day that a tidal wave hits. Somebody wins. It turns out that only one guy survived the tidal wave, and the same guy was drawn as the winner of the lottery.
I think the former is what you are describing; the latter is the fine tuning problem.
But there are a lot of contingencies in that second example. We can ascertain the relative probability of a tidal wave survivor winning the lottery because we already have an idea of the probabilities of tidal waves occurring, of all but one being killed by the wave, and of winning a given lottery. How are we supposed to ascertain the probability of a universe having this or that set of properties, ie, of being a certain way? What makes it possible for us to know that our universe was either likely or unlikely? We don’t have anything to which to compare this universe.
Well, the problem arises from the modeling, right?
String theory seems to admit a vast number of valid solutions to make a universe (and there are no other candidates yet that don’t). Under the model, only a tiny fraction of those possible universes are consistent with life. So, we can either:
(1) Find a better model, where our universe arises naturally without requiring these arbitrary parameter choices.
(2) Accept that the parameter choices are indeed arbitrary, and attempt to explain it.
If the model is right, and (2) is true, we do have a real probability conundrum, analogous to the lottery and the tidal wave, because all of the other possible parameter choices lead to universes that are not compatible with life.
So, with inflation theory pointing to the plausibility of the creation of vast numbers of different universes, all mutually inaccessible, the multiverse explanation arises. The proposal is that all the multiplicity of possible parameter choices do occur and HAVE occurred, all those other possible universes do indeed arise, and only the anthropological principle accounts for the parameter choices that we see in our particular universe.
I don’t know nearly enough of the technical details to know if I buy this hypothesis — but I do think there’s a genuine fine tuning problem that needs to be addressed somehow.
And I suppose I should follow through to complete the analogy for the anthropic principle:
Under the multiverse theory, there are a million lotteries, each accompanied by a tidal wave. In 999,999 lotteries the winner of the lottery is killed by the tidal wave, so he isn’t around to ask “why me?” Ours is the one where the winner of the lottery is also the lone tidal wave survivor, and to him it looks like he got so lucky there must be a God.
sub
Why waste your time critiquing a philosophical article in what must be a minor journal? Stephen Jay Gould was a real scientist and came up with non overlapping magisteria. Isn’t that a bigger problem? When really competent scientists publish such nonsense?
You clearly know nothing of this site. First of all, read the Roolz. You can’t tell me what to write about or what not to write about. Second, I’ve critiqued Gould’s NOMA several times before, both here and in my book Faith versus Fact. Third, your implication that I’m not a competent scientist is out of line. You’re rude and arrogant, and will be posting no longer at this site. Bye.