Yesterday’s debate on the value of religion, and participants’ comments

November 16, 2011 • 5:06 am

Yesterday in New York City, Slate and Intelligence Squared sponsored a debate on the question “The world would be better off without religion.” The participants were Anthony Grayling and Matthew Chapman (Darwin’s great-great grandson) versus the strange duo of Rabbi David Wolpe and Dinesh D’Souza.

It wasn’t online but I’ll put it up if a video appears.  If any reader went, please post a report below.

Slate also has a pre-debate interview with David Wolpe (you’ll remember him as one of the two rabbis who debated Chistopher Hitchens and Sam Harris) on whether religion makes people behave badly. Three of his answers are of interest:

Slate: This idea that the world would be better off without religion seems pretty modern. Is it? Or has there simply been a wave of anti-religious sentiment recently?

DW: The idea is a modern. It’s one that shows a certain charming obliviousness and dangerous naiveté about human nature, as though it’s religion that makes people do bad things when in fact it’s being people that largely makes people do bad things. Religion is one of many different attempts to get them to be a little bit better than they would be if left to their own devices.

This itself seem extraordinarily naive. If there hadn’t been the Catholic church, what on earth would have impelled some sort of secular Inquisition? And so on. But then he immediately retracts what he says above, admitting that religion can make people do bad things:

Slate: Earlier this year, you wrote a story articulating the four reasons that atheists are angry in the Huffington Post. You also noted, “No one can seriously deny that religion has been guilty of wickedness in this world and has provided cover for wickedness. … While as a believer I think there is much more to be said about this topic, it is certainly reasonable for people to be angry at religion for its abuses, particularly people who have themselves been victims.” What more should be said about the topic?  

DW: It’s true that people in the name of their religion sometimes do terrible things. And if religion is supposed to make people better, I understand why it doesn’t always have the best reputation in this world. It doesn’t always work the way it’s supposed to. The flip side of that is that the “supposed to” also comes from religion. Like, why would we expect that religion would make people better? Religion does have and promote standards. So when religious people do bad things, we’re disappointed in them because they’re religious people [and] they’re supposed to do better. In some ways, the condemnation of religion is a tribute to religion, otherwise you wouldn’t condemn it.

What?  And is the condemnation of the Holcaust a tribute to the Nazi Party?  Something is worthy of opprobrium if it inspires bad acts, irrespective of whether it’s supposed to inspire good ones.

Finally,

 Slate: What would a world without religion be like?

DW: I once kiddingly said if you want to know what a world that was run without genuine faith and only with goods [would look like], you don’t have to imagine it because there’s Hollywood. A world without religion would be Nietzsche’s world. It would be a world in which ultimately the only value is power. If there isn’t a transcendent value, then the strongest wins. The only thing that militates against power is the sense that there’s something higher. Without religion, I don’t know what the sense of that something higher could be. For me, it would be a very frightening world.

Umm. . . or you could look at Sweden.  Although a fair number of people in that secular states formally belong to a church, only 23% of them believe in God.  And do the “strongest win” in Sweden? I don’t think so. Thanks to state-sponsored services, the weakest, poorest, and sickest there have a much better chance than they do in the God-fearing United States.

Slate also has a similar interview with Dinesh D’Souza.  Not much new there, though he argues that secular Europe is moral because “Christian morality is embedded in the bones of Europe.” For the atheist side, there’s a largely autobiographical interview with Matthew Chapman, though so far nothing from Grayling that I see.

Man eats world’s hottest pepper; vomits, hallucinates, and is generally laid low

November 15, 2011 • 11:10 am

In Charlotte, North Carolina, a man named Ed Currie is on a quest. What gives meaning to his life is his attempt to produce the world’s hottest pepper.

Here’s how Ed Currie knew he was getting somewhere with his potentially record-breaking hot pepper:

“The first time we tried it, out of the six of us…four puked. So I knew I was on the right path, you know,” Currie says. . .

Currie tests different combinations of food, water, and mineral intake to see which one creates the hottest pepper. And he thinks he’s found it. Right now he calls the pepper HP22B. Guinness World Records officials are looking at the pepper to see if it is indeed the world’s hottest.

Currie works as a banker by day, but peppers are always on his mind. He even has security installed in the backyard.

“We’ve got all sorts of motion stuff. We’ve got dogs. We’ve got everything,” Currie says.

This is srs bzns!

A pepper’s heat is measured in Scoville units. The one Ed has to beat, the Trinidad Scorpion “Butch T” from Australia, measures 1.4 million Scoville. Dr. Calloway says Ed’s Guinness pepper, on average, measures 1.5 million Scoville. For comparison, a regular jalapeño is somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500-5,000 Scoville.

Here’s Ed’s contender, HP22B:

The stuff that makes peppers hot is the compound capsaicin, here from the Wikipedia entry:

It’s thought to have evolved in wild chili peppers as a deterrent to mammalian predation, which destroys the seeds (bird predation doesn’t do that since the birds pass the seeds, dispersing them, which is what the plant “wants”).  Ed, of course, is simply increasing the content of capsaicin by artificial selection, demonstrating once again that nearly every trait in animals and plants has genetic variability.

According to Wikipedia, capsaicin binds to sense receptors that produce the burning sensation:

The burning and painful sensations associated with capsaicin result from its chemical interaction with sensory neurons. Capsaicin, as a member of the vanilloid family, binds to a receptor called the vanilloid receptor subtype 1 (VR1). First cloned in 1997, VR1 is an ion channel-type receptor. VR1, which can also be stimulated with heat and physical abrasion, permits cations to pass through the cell membrane and into the cell when activated. The resulting depolarization of the neuron stimulates it to signal the brain. By binding to the VR1 receptor, the capsaicin molecule produces the same sensation that excessive heat or abrasive damage would cause, explaining why the spiciness of capsaicin is described as a burning sensation.

The “heat” of peppers has traditionally been measured in “Scoville units,” a rather subjective procedure in which pepper extract is diluted in sugar water by various amounts, and then the dilution in which the heat can just be detected is its Scoville rating.  So, for example, the hottest peppers in this table below can have their extract diluted five million times and still have the heat detectable. The garden variety jalapeño, in contrast, has a Scoville rating of only 3500-8000.

Now, however, science can do a much better job, measuring capsaicin via liquid chromatography.  Still, pepper aficionados adhere to the Scoville scale.

The climax of this post is a video of Marshall Terry, a radio personality at WFAE in Charlotte, eating just a slice of Currie’s überpepper.  WARNING: it has scenes of vomiting and general debility.

Why are the young abandoning Christianity?

November 15, 2011 • 7:32 am

According to Wikipedia, the Barna Group is a polling firm run by evangelical Christians. Their self-stated “ultimate aim” is  “to partner with Christian ministries and individuals to be a catalyst in moral and spiritual transformation in the United States. It accomplishes these outcomes by providing vision, information, evaluation and resources through a network of intimate partnerships.”

And the Barna group carried out a five-year project to determine why so many young people are leaving Christian churces. The preceding link gives the results:

Overall, the research uncovered six significant themes why nearly three out of every five young Christians (59%) disconnect either permanently or for an extended period of time from church life after age 15.

Five of the reasons involve the church being overprotective, affording young people only a “shallow” Christian experience, being too simplistic and judgmental in sexual matters, being intolerant of other faiths, and being unfriendly to doubters.  These are all good reasons to abandon faith completely, and bode well for secularism.  But the most interesting reason is this one:

Reason #3 – Churches come across as antagonistic to science.
One of the reasons young adults feel disconnected from church or from faith is the tension they feel between Christianity and science. The most common of the perceptions in this arena is “Christians are too confident they know all the answers” (35%). Three out of ten young adults with a Christian background feel that “churches are out of step with the scientific world we live in” (29%). Another one-quarter embrace the perception that “Christianity is anti-science” (25%). And nearly the same proportion (23%) said they have “been turned off by the creation-versus-evolution debate.” Furthermore, the research shows that many science-minded young Christians are struggling to find ways of staying faithful to their beliefs and to their professional calling in science-related industries.

Of course, this is all the fault of atheists and scientists themselves.  As accommodationists always tell us, we’re the ones who turn the faithful away from science with our stridency and unfriendliness toward faith. Clearly, the “anti-science” attitudes of Christian churches are simply a reaction to atheism . . .

h/t: Scott

Another philosopher redefines free will so we can still have it

November 15, 2011 • 5:56 am

Now that materialism is the dominant paradigm in all the sciences, what on earth do we do about free will?  If all of our “free” decisions are really predetermined—perhaps long in advance—by a combination of our biology and our environment, and our brain is simply a concatenation of cells that must obey the laws of physics and chemistry, how can any of our decisions be “free”?  And if what we do for the rest of our lives has already been determined by the laws of physics—absent, perhaps a tad of quantum indeterminacy—how can we be held responsible for our actions?

The free-will issue is exacerbated  by recent studies showing that when we make “choices”—say, to press a button on the left or right side of a computer—the “decision” has already been recorded in our brain’s activity at least ten seconds before we’re conscious of having made a choice.  That, of course, further supports a deterministic view of behavior, and the absence of what most people think of as “free will.”

How do people conceive of free will, though?  My own definition, which I think corresponds to most people’s take, is that if you could rerun the tape of life back to the moment a decision is made, with all the concatenations of molecules at that moment, and the circumstances leading up to it, remaining the same, you could have chosen differently.  If you couldn’t, then determinism reigns and we’re not free agents, at least as most people think of them.

Philosophers don’t like that notion—the idea that we’re all puppets on the strings of physics. So they do what theologians do when a Biblical claim is disproven: they simply redefine free will in a way that allows us to retain it.  Like the story of Adam and Eve, it becomes a metaphor, with a meaning very different from how it was once used.

This is what Eddy Nahmias, a philosopher at Georgia State University, does in an “opinionator” piece in Sunday’s New York Times: “Is neuroscience the death of free will?”  And his answer is a resounding “no”.

Nahmias doesn’t like definitions of free will like mine, which involve a “soul” or “ghost in the machine” that can override the laws of physics, because they define free will out of existence:

We should be wary of defining things out of existence.  Define Earth as the planet at the center of the universe and it turns out there is no Earth.  Define what’s moral as whatever your God mandates and suddenly most people become immoral.  Define marriage as a union only for procreation, and you thereby annul many marriages.

What he doesn’t seem to realize is that we haven’t defined it out of existence, but rather science has shown that earlier “dualistic” views of free will, in which a spirit overrules matter, are simply wrong.  If free will as most people understand it rests on a misconception, then correcting that misconception eliminates the common notion of free will.  Our brains are our minds, our minds are what “appear” to make decisions, our brains are subject to the laws of physics, and there is no way to override those laws with some nebulous “will”.  Q.E.D.

But philosophers, acting like theologians, say, “Wait! That definition was naive to begin with! Few modern philosophers adhere to that kind of dualism!  Let me give you a more sophisticated definition of free will that does hold for humans.”

And here is Nahmias’s definition, which comports with the ideas of many “compatibilist” philosophers who see free will and determinism as compatible:

Many philosophers, including me, understand free will as a set of capacities for imagining future courses of action, deliberating about one’s reasons for choosing them, planning one’s actions in light of this deliberation and controlling actions in the face of competing desires.  We act of our own free will to the extent that we have the opportunity to exercise these capacities, without unreasonable external or internal pressure.  We are responsible for our actions roughly to the extent that we possess these capacities and we have opportunities to exercise them.

These capacities for conscious deliberation, rational thinking and self-control are not magical abilities.  They need not belong to immaterial souls outside the realm of scientific understanding (indeed, since we don’t know how souls are supposed to work, souls would not help to explain these capacities).  Rather, these are the sorts of cognitive capacities that psychologists and neuroscientists are well positioned to study.

This, of course, is a definition that allows pure determinism to create “decisions.”  But all it does is describe the workings of our complex brains, which take in many different inputs before producing an output—a “decision.”  We aren’t really free to “imagine future courses of action”: the fact that we do this is purely a result of our evolution, our personal history, and the structure of our brain.  Even if we can do this kind of imagining and planning, that doesn’t mean that we could have decided otherwise.  Having a complex brain that absorbs many inputs is no more “free will” than is the output of a complex computer, say a chess-playing one, that weighs all possible strategies before making a move. Does that computer have “free will,” too?

There is a continuum in animals from simple ones who make binary decisions based on only one input (i.e. swim toward the light and away from the dark) to ones that make decisions based on more inputs (“Did I hurt my knee the last time I ran?”).  At what point does the complexity of input constitute a form of “free will”?  To me it seems totally arbitrary.  Yes, humans can weigh factors in a way that rotifers can’t, but if the course of action is predetermined in both cases, in what meaningful sense do we have free will but rotifers don’t?

I find it curious that philosophers don’t simply abandon the term “free will” because of its heavy historical baggage involving dualism and souls.  Why do they keep redefining the term in a way that allows us to maintain the illusion that we can choose?

At least in the case of Nahmias, it seems pretty obvious: he wants to keep the idea of moral responsibility.  And then there’s the bad side effect that people exposed to literature on determinism tend to cheat more often, and show fewer prosocial behaviors.

Indeed, free will matters in part because it is a precondition for deserving blame for bad acts and deserving credit for achievements.  It also turns out that simply exposing people to scientific claims that free will is an illusion can lead them to misbehave, for instance, cheating more or helping others less. So, it matters whether these scientists are justified in concluding that free will is an illusion.

My response to this is: “the truth is the truth, and if knowing it affects our behavior in undesirable ways, then we simply have to deal with that.”  We can still have the idea of responsibility under my definition of free will, but simply have to re-conceptualize what it means.  We hold people responsible for bad actions, and punish them, because it’s an environmental intervention that protects society and may, as an influence on the criminal’s neurons as well as the neurons of onlookers, reduce the incidence of bad behavior.  The same goes for rewarding people for good deeds: that’s something that also affects brains and neurons, and increases the likelihood of those deeds.  What is not justified under my scheme is the notion of punishment as retribution.

A kid who holds up a liquor store with a gun is no more “responsible” for his actions—in the sense of being able to freely refrain from them—than is someone with a brain tumor who becomes aggressive and attacks another person.  The only difference is that the physical influences on behavior are more obvious in the second case.  Choices come from minds, minds come from brains, and brains are collections of molecules that obey physical laws.  Given the appearance of a “choice,” I argue that we could never have decided otherwise than we did.   So when Nahmias says this:

If we put aside the misleading idea that free will depends on supernatural souls rather than our quite miraculous brains, and if we put aside the mistaken idea that our conscious thinking matters most in the milliseconds before movement, then neuroscience does not kill free will.  Rather, it can help to explain our capacities to control our actions in such a way that we are responsible for them. It can help us rediscover free will.

what on earth does he mean by “our capacities to control our actions”?  We can’t control our actions, for crying out loud, because there is no “we” there that can override the laws of physics. We could not have done otherwise.

I conclude that philosophers should abandon the term “free will” and use some less freighted term.  How about “the appearance of having made a decision”?  I don’t like the notion that philosophers, like theologians, try to turn scientific necessities into philosophical virtues.

And of course I had no choice about writing this post, nor you in whether you agree with me. . . .

Great video: Earth flyover from the ISS

November 14, 2011 • 9:58 am

Several readers sent me this: it’s a series of time-lapse photos, made into a video, taken from the International Space Station from August to October of this year.  Kudos to Michael König, who put the video into hi-def format and edited it for smoothness.

Take five minutes and look at our pale blue dot from about 200 miles above. The auroras are fantastic, as are the lightning storms and city lights.  Wouldn’t it be nice to be up there, at least for a couple of days?  And be sure to click through to get this on full screen.

König lists the shooting locations in order of appearance in the video.

1. Aurora Borealis Pass over the United States at Night
2. Aurora Borealis and eastern United States at Night
3. Aurora Australis from Madagascar to southwest of Australia
4. Aurora Australis south of Australia
5. Northwest coast of United States to Central South America at Night
6. Aurora Australis from the Southern to the Northern Pacific Ocean
7. Halfway around the World
8. Night Pass over Central Africa and the Middle East
9. Evening Pass over the Sahara Desert and the Middle East
10. Pass over Canada and Central United States at Night
11. Pass over Southern California to Hudson Bay
12. Islands in the Philippine Sea at Night
13. Pass over Eastern Asia to Philippine Sea and Guam
14. Views of the Mideast at Night
15. Night Pass over Mediterranean Sea
16. Aurora Borealis and the United States at Night
17. Aurora Australis over Indian Ocean
18. Eastern Europe to Southeastern Asia at Night

From Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy:

I’m so overwhelmed by the beauty and coolness of this video I’m not sure which part I like best! The cities streaming by underneath; the instantly recognizable outlines of familiar places like the Great Lakes or the boot of Italy; the incredible flickering thunderstorms — giving you an understanding that there are always thousands of such storms all over the planet at any one time; the incredible 3D view of the green and red aurorae which you can actually see as towering structures dozens or even hundreds kilometers in height; the stars rising and setting and spinning over the horizon; the reflection of the Moon on the Earth below following along our point of view at 2:50 into the footage; or the thin glowing arc above the horizon:airglow, caused by molecules in the upper atmosphere slowly emitting light as they release energy accumulated during the day.

h/t: Richard vis Diane G., Matthew Cobb

Andrew Sullivan explains his spirituality, with a bonus psychoanalysis by Sigmund

November 14, 2011 • 7:11 am

Maybe I’m overly concerned with Andrew Sullivan, but he seems to me a fascinating example of how and why an intelligent person accommodates the acceptance of science with the belief in fairy tales. And Sullivan documents his struggles publicly, which makes them fair game for analysis.

On yesterday’s “Ask Andrew Anything” feature at The Beast, a reader asks: What have been your most significant spiritual experiences?  It’s a ten-minute cartoon video, and the link was sent to me by alert reader Sigmund, who also provided an astute analysis.  Rather than reanalyze what Sullivan says here, I’ll just post Sigmund’s email to me (quoted with permission):

I think it is useful to watch to get a feeling of how he sees religion in his life but for the main part it will probably confirm your suspicions about him.

When I had previously wondered about Sullivan’s life story and his relationship to religion, I came to the conclusion that someone raised a Catholic who is gay and diagnosed HIV+ during a time when the disease was a death sentence, may have, in desperation, prayed to God for his life.

Sullivan’s luck is that he got the disease at just about the time effective HIV treatments were developed that extended the lives of HIV+ patients by decades. I suspect he sees it as a question of honor to uphold his promises to his God that ‘saved’ him.

He doesn’t quite put it in such stark terms in the video (talking of visions and voices speaking to him) but it’s fairly clear that this is the likely scenario and as such I doubt that we will ever get him to change his mind— he’s simply too emotionally bound up by the whole thing.

As for him being a ‘Catholic’— well, despite the fact that his version of the religion doesn’t in any way seem related to the official Vatican-approved version, it’s my experience amongst Catholics that his Catholicism IS close to that of educated Catholics – who, for the most part, have no problem with family planning, divorce, evolution, homosexuality etc.

It’s really a form of deism with the added guest appearance of a magical superhero called Jesus.

I think Sullivan is personally a lost cause but arguing with him is useful to expose the fallacy of his arguments to a larger audience.

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