Snake handling in the U.S.

May 22, 2012 • 9:49 am

This is about the most literal example I have of how religion poisons everything.  The handling of poisonous snakes as a sign of faith is a practice of some Pentecostal churches in the southern United States. It comes, of course from literal interpretation of two verses of Scripture:

And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. (Mark 16:17-18)

Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you. (Luke 10:19).

The practice had led to over 100 deaths and many maimings. This nine-minute documentary, narrated by Billy Ray Cyrus, for crying out loud, seems almost supportive of the practice.

Religion poisons everything.

Andrew Sullivan bashes scientism

May 22, 2012 • 6:11 am

In yesterday’s Daily Beast column, “A life observed”, Andrew Sullivan takes out after “scientism,” defending “ways of knowing” other than science. He first shows a one-minute video of Richard Feyman explaining the methods of science, then quotes Philip Kitcher’s critique of scientism from The New Republic (see my take here), and then gives NPR correspondent Robert Krulwich’s take on Feynman’s video:

Science is our way of describing — as best we can — how the world works. The world, it is presumed, works perfectly well without us. Our thinking about it makes no important difference. It is out there, being the world. … The world knows. Our minds guess. In any contest between the two, The World Out There wins.

Finally, Sullivan goes after me, quoting from my piece on Kitcher:

[Art and literature] function not to find out new things about our world, but to convey to others in an expressive ways truths that are derived from observation.  Of course the arts have other functions as well: they can enable us to see in new ways, for example.  Who can look at a lily pond the same way if you’ve seen Monet’s renditions?  And many of us are moved by Bach or Coltrane. But those aren’t ways of knowing—they’re ways of feeling.

It is indeed “scientism” to dismiss the real progress that has been made in history, archaeology, and other social sciences (though I’d be a bit hard pressed to identify real advances in economics). But few of us would deny that progress, so Kitcher’s form of “scientism” is in many ways a straw man.

I still maintain that real understanding of our universe can come only from using crude versions of methods that have been so exquisitely refined by science: reason combined with doubt, observation, and replication.  As one of my commenters said last week, “there are not different ways of knowing.  There is only knowing and not knowing.”  I would add that there is also feeling, which is the purview of art.  But none of this gives the slightest credibility to religion as a way of finding truth.

Sullivan then defends ways of feeling as ways of knowing:

Being moved by Monet cannot be about discovering something “true” about our lives? Religion ceases to have “the slightest credibility” with respect to the truth of the human condition because it has no scientific basis? History – a discipline with its own methods and questions – is not a pursuit of the truth of how things happened the way they did? To relegate of all these human modes of understanding to the supremacy of science is, well, to junk the whole of knowledge for a slice of it that can only measure empirical patterns. Science is a critical part of our understanding. It simply isn’t and cannot be the whole. If that is all human knowledge is, it is pretty sad, and limited to the last few centuries out of 20,000. It consigns the human experience for the vast majority of our existence to condescending oblivion.

What we have to understand first and foremost is not what is out there, but who we are, with all the immense complexity that demands.

Well, let me first dispel Sullivan’s misunderstanding of my views of history and the social sciences.  The former, and less so the latter, are indeed ways of knowing, as I’ve said repeatedly. (To quote Sullivan’s words to me back at him, “Has he even read the fucking thing?”) In their best incarnations, these disciplines use empirical investigation, reason, and replication to find out the (provisional) truth.  After all, what is going on in the Jesus kerfuffle than a bunch of historians trying to winnow the truth about the man from existing evidence?  So no, human knowledge is not limited to the last few centuries. If it were, evolution wouldn’t be a discipline.

True, the scientific way of knowing—that is, the practice of science as we know it—is a phenomenon that began in earnest in the 17th century, but the empirically-based way of knowing is far older.  Look at how hunter-gatherers hit on herbal remedies, which still form a large basis for our pharmacopoeia. Through trial, error, and observation, they found that the bark of the cinchona tree was a remedy for malaria. (How many people died in that “experiment”?) Ditto for how the early Greeks decided that the Earth was round.

So let’s leave the science behind and get to Sullivan’s real beef—the arts and religion as ways of knowing.  “Being moved by Monet” is an emotion.  What truth does it express? Sullivan doesn’t say. Only that one can be moved.  Delving further, you might be able to realize that you were moved by something like this, “I never saw light in that way before.”  But only in the wildest sense can that be taken as a truth about the world.  It may be a truth about you, but how do we know that? It can’t be verified by others, nor may we even be consciously aware of why we react as we do. Personal experience is not the same a “truth,” as innumerable religious revelations (or drug-induced visions) testify.

I may be moved by The Death of Ivan Ilyich, or The Dead, but that is because those novellas artistically resonate with our own feelings.  We say, “Yes, yes, that is what it must feel like to die.” Or “Yes, Greta was silently moved her whole life by the death of Michael Furey, and her husband didn’t know.” But the former is based on observation and a feeling that an artist has depicted a common human experience (i.e., observation); while the latter is a feeling unique to one person.

Clearly the entire human experience does not devolve to science, nor have I ever believed that. The human experience includes feelings, emotions, and thoughts.  But let us not forget that one day many of those will be scientifically analyzed and dissected. We will discover the parts of the brain, and the chemicals like endorphins, that engender those feelings. Those won’t provide a full explanation of everything that interests us about our species, but clearly our reactions to phenomena, and to other people, are not immune to scientific study. And I doubt that science can tell us, at least not for several lifetimes hence, why one person is moved by Beethoven while another finds his music boring.  Those differences constitute the world’s rich diversity that makes life worthwhile and endlessly interesting.

When someone tells you, “I am hungry,” that is also a feeling. Is it a truth? Yes it is, if she’s really hungry, but that, too, is subject to empirical testing.  Is her stomach full? When did she last eat? Does she tuck into a huge meal? But again, it’s a personal truth, and tells us little about what is out there in the world beyond the experience of a single person. And we know, scientifically if you will, that deprivation of food brings on hunger.  Even the statement, “Fred loves Sue” can be tested, at least according to one’s definition of love.

In the end, though, I think that Sullivan (an observant Catholic) is more concerned with defending religion—at least that’s the pervasive motivation behind attacks on scientism. When he says, “What we have to understand first and foremost is not what is out there, but who we are, with all the immense complexity that demands,” he’s first of all dismissing the entire basis of Western faith, which of course is deeply concerned with what is out there. Maybe theologians don’t care if there’s a god (he might just be a “ground of being,” whatever that is), or what kind of god he is, but most religious people do. And those people want to know if someone is looking out for them, whether they prayers are answered, and what will happen when they die. Those are things that are out there—or rather not out there, for not a scintilla of good evidence exists for those notions.  It all comes down to revelation.  And of course different people have different revelations.

Given the absence of empirical evidence for a divine being, and the disparate nature of personal revelations and of the tenets of different religions, we’ll never know what is or is not out there, god-wise. That ignorance is what keeps theologians in business. For scientists, we have no need of a god hypothesis, any more than we need an elf or a dragon hypothesis, and so we provisionally reject all of them.

“Who we are” doesn’t have a general answer, except in the empirical sense that evolution built the human genome a certain way and society also gives us certain cultural commonalities. Beyond that there are only personal answers, and who we think we are may differ radically from who we really are. (My own observation: nobody thinks he’s a jerk but yet the world contains many palpable jerks. Ergo many people don’t know who they are.)

And what religion teaches us is how we should behave.  Those aren’t truths, but moral strictures, and, of course, many of them are dreadful.  It also may tell us something about humanity, in the same way that any work of fiction can.  But every religious “truth” or revelation about humanity can be derived, and has been derived, from nonreligious considerations.  Religion is among the worst ways of knowing, for it is wedded to false doctrine. Reading good fiction is a far better way to learn about humanity than is reading the Bible.

And what, exactly, is the “religious truth about the human condition” so touted by Sullivan? That women are second-class citizens? That God will send us to hell if we masturbate? That homosexuality is wrong? (Sullivan should pay attention here.) That’s it’s okay to have slaves, and beat them for their own good? That we should give up our family and possessions and follow Jesus? The “truths” that Sullivan gleans from Scripture are, of course, ones like the Golden Rule that he finds morally palatable, not ones handed down from God.  And whether they’re morally palatable depends entirely on non-religious considerations.

It strikes me that most people who claim that there are other ways of knowing beyond empirical observation and reason never list any of the questions supposedly answered by art, music, or religion.  I have labored through one paper addressing this question, “Truth in music” (J. Levinson, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1981, 40:131-144), only to find this dispiriting conclusion:

I have also said little about the bearing of musical truth on the possibility of acquiring extramusical knowledge-for example, about emotional life-from a musical composition. I fear that what can be said here is mainly negative. In order to come to know something from listening to a composition which was true in one of our senses one would have to know that the composition was true in that sense. But in general, one will not know that the composition is true unless one already knows precisely that which hearing the composition and knowing it was true would have illuminated one about.

I have by no means closed my mind on this issue, but I still await the questions that non-empirical ways of knowing can answer about the world.

h/t: Philip

Mencken week, day 4

May 22, 2012 • 4:11 am

Another quote from Mencken (p. 380 in the Notebooks) showing that he was indeed the first New Atheist:

One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. …[This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. that they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest.

The young Henry. Note that he has a pipe rather than a cigar.

OMG: Peanuts is atheistic?

May 22, 2012 • 3:02 am

After seeing the strip below, I wondered whether Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, was an atheist. It turns out that he was, or at least a “secular humanist.”  This is a surprisingly strident cartoon for a family-oriented comic, but was it was actually published—on August 9, 1976.

From an interview with Schulz (link above):

Though his philosophical views evolved over the years–“The term that best describes me now is ‘secular humanist,'” he explained–his characters continued to quote biblical passages, occasionally musing about the darker inconsistencies of religion. These thoughtful reflections were never heavy-handed; rather, Schulz had become the reigning master of the lighter-than-air, spiritually resonant comic-strip koan.

“I despise those shallow religious comics,” he said. “Dennis the Menace, for instance, is the most shallow. When they show him praying–I just can’t stand that sort of thing, talking to God about some cutesy thing that he’d done during the day. I don’t think Hank Ketcham [Dennis‘ creator] has any deep knowledge of things like that.”

h/t: Grania


Eclipse art preview

May 21, 2012 • 12:05 pm

Apparently the viewing conditions were great for yesterday’s eclipse at the Grand Canyon, and the artists and photographers among us were busy painting and snapping. I’ll present the final results soon, but here’s a preview. Ben Goren simply took pictures of the back of his camera with his cellphone; as he says, the real photos will need some “post-production work.” The first one shows Kelly Houle capturing the scene on paper (or canvas), the second the eclipse.

Stay tuned for the final products:

RIP Donna Summer and Robin Gibb

May 21, 2012 • 10:11 am

Both died of cancer within a week of each other . Of the four brothers, only one is left—the tanned one.  Arguably, the Bee Gees and Donna Summer were the efflorescence of disco.

If you had a bone to shake in the 80s and didn’t shake it, you didn’t have ears. This is from 1983:

And an early Bee Gees song featuring Robin, recorded live in Melbourne in 1974:

Is the Bible great literature?

May 21, 2012 • 7:11 am

In Saturday’s Guardian, Richard Dawkins explained “Why I want all our children to read the King James Bible.”  The stimulus for his piece was, as many of us know, Education Secretary Michael Gove’s plan to place a copy of the King James Bible in every state school in Britain.  The initiative will cost £375,000 and the government is seeking private support. I doubt that they’ll have much trouble given the willingness of private organizations to distribute Bibles willy-nilly.

We’ve long known that Richard regards the King James Bible as a touchstone of literature and Western culture.  And indeed it is: I agree with him that anybody who pretends to be educated in our culture should have read the thing.  So many allusions (and illusions), and so much of what we hear, derive from that singular work of fiction.  (Note that it’s the King James version that should be read; other versions are small beer compared. Much of the literary beauty of that Bible, of course, is added value from the committee convened by King James I in 1604, just as the beauties of Omar Khayyam come largely from Edward FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubiyat.  For a wonderful account of how the King James version came about, do read God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible by Adam Nicholson.)

As Richard says:

Ecclesiastes, in the 1611 translation, is one of the glories of English literature (I’m told it’s pretty good in the original Hebrew, too). The whole King James Bible is littered with literary allusions, almost as many as Shakespeare (to quote that distinguished authority Anon, the trouble with Hamlet is it’s so full of clichés). In The God Delusion I have a section called “Religious education as a part of literary culture” in which I list 129 biblical phrases which any cultivated English speaker will instantly recognise and many use without knowing their provenance: the salt of the earth; go the extra mile; I wash my hands of it; filthy lucre; through a glass darkly; wolf in sheep’s clothing; hide your light under a bushel; no peace for the wicked; how are the mighty fallen.

A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian. In the week after the 2011 census, my UK Foundation commissioned Ipsos MORI to poll those who had ticked the Christian box. Among other things, we asked them to identify the first book of the New Testament from a choice of Matthew, Genesis, Acts of the Apostles, Psalms, “Don’t know” and “Prefer not to say”. Only 35% chose Matthew and 39% chose “Don’t know” (and 1%, mysteriously, chose “Prefer not to say”). These figures, to repeat, don’t refer to British people at large but only to those who self-identified, in the census, as Christians.

It’s a very good piece, and of course ends with Richard adding that acquaintance with the Bible teaches a darker lesson: its morality is either dubious, despicable, or derived from earlier cultures; and the central lesson of the New Testament ludicrous.

But is the Bible really great literature?  Well, in parts. I did read it cover to cover a long time ago, fighting my way through the early “begats” to get to the good stuff—only to find that the good stuff was thin on the ground.  When we hear about what great literature the Bible is, we hear about the same parts again and again: some of the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, the Proverbs, and so on.  Yes, many expressions in English parlance come from that book.  But much more of it is the tedious recounting of boring stories, and a slog to get through unless you’re a believer.  In that light, I judge the Bible as a literary curate’s egg: it’s good in parts.

How does it rank as a whole? I discussed this recently with literary critic James Wood, who agrees with Richard (and me) that the Bible is a must-read touchstone of Western culture, purveying valuable insights into human life. (It also, of course, portrays wickedness and sin in the guise of piety.)  But how does it stand as a work of fiction?  That is, as I asked James, if a critic came across the Bible in a world that had never been Christian, and were to rank it as a work of fiction, how would it stand up?  As far as I know (and I may be wrong), that has never been done. Even in a Christian world, one could take the Bible purely on its literary merits and deficits.  If Wood, say, were to review it in The New Yorker, how would he rank it? I suspect he’d find it ineffably beautiful in places and boring and stupid in others—in other words, uneven.

If someone wanted to place a single book in all schools that has not only literary value but a tremendous influence in our culture, let it be Shakespeare—preferably the complete works as compiled in The Riverside Shakespeare.  The Bible is already in most schools, reposing unread in the library; why not ensure that every school also has a copy of Shakespeare’s great works? They have all the beauty and humanity of the Bible with none of the stupidity and superstition. (I suspect that Shakespeare has added as many phrases to our language as has the King James Bible).

By all means have the Bible in schools, but let’s not pretend it’s a uniform literary masterpiece. It’s should be there as a book that was influential in our world, both for good and ill. If you want the Bible as literature, why not redact it, pulling out just the good parts and serving them up as wonderful prose fiction? I can see it now: The Literary Bible, Expunged of the Boring and Invidious Bits.

Mencken week: day 3

May 21, 2012 • 5:13 am

Here’s more of the imperishable Henry’s lucubrations about accommodationism. This passage is from pp. 306-309 of Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks.  I guess Millikan and Eddington were the Francis Collinses of their day.

Mencken’s first sentence is just as true now as it was decades ago.  And the arguments for accommodationism are unchanged as well: note the NOMAism and reference to “god of the gaps.”

“… The only real way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something that is not science and something that is not religion. This is done with great earnestness by Robert A. Millikan, A. S. Eddington and other such hopeful men—all of them bred so deeply in the faith that they have been unable to shake it off in their later years, despite their training in scientific method and their creditable professional use of it. The thing that Millikan describes as Christianity is simply a vague sort of good will to men: it has little more objective reality in the world than abstract justice or the love of God. And the thing that he describes as science is so halting and timorous that it is quite as unreal. The notion that science does not concern itself with origins and causes—that it leaves that field to theology or metaphysics, and confines itself to mere effects—this notion is surely quite unsound. If it could, science would explain the origin of life on earth at once — and there is every reason to believe that it will do so on some not too remote tomorrow. To argue that the gaps in knowledge which still confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity. When a man so indulges himself it is only to confess that, to that extent at least, he is not a scientist at all, but a theologian. This is precisely what Millikan, Eddington and their like come to. They reconcile science and religion by the sorry device of admitting, however cautiously, that the latter is somehow superior to the former, and is thus entitled to all territories that remain unoccupied. All they really prove is that a man may be a competent astronomer or physicist and yet no scientist, just as Blind Tom was a competent pianist without being a musician.

“Nor is there any more validity in the position of that other school of reconcilers (it is led at the moment by J. Arthur Thomson, the English zoologist, but really goes back to Max Muller), which teaches that science and religion address themselves to quite different faculties, the former to the intellect and the latter to the emotions, and that they are thus independent, and equally entitled to respect. Here, unfortunately, the psychology is very dubious. It must be manifest that even the most instinctive of emotions, in adult human beings, owes something to the intellect, and it must be equally manifest that no intellectual process can ever be wholly devoid of an emotional element. So much, indeed, is a commonplace to every schoolboy: the Freudian gospel has carried it, along with a great deal of racy nonsense, from end to end of the world. The evidence of the emotions, save in cases where it has strong objective support, is really no evidence at all, for every recognizable emotion has its opposite, and if one points one way then another points the other way. Thus the familiar argument that there is an instinctive desire for immortality, and that this desire proves it to be a fact, becomes puerile when it is recalled that there is also a powerful and widespread fear of annihilation, and that this fear, on the same principle, proves that there is nothing beyond the grave. Such childish “proofs” are typically theological, and they remain theological even when they are adduced by men who like to flatter themselves by believing that they are scientific gents.”