Faith and science: a conversation between Sam Harris and Robert Winston

April 18, 2011 • 6:23 am

“Science will win because it works.” –Stephen Hawking

Saturday’s Guardian features an online “conversation” between Sam Harris and British doctor, television presenter, and House of Lords member Robert Winston (he’s also a Baron!). Winston has shown sympathies for religion, and the topic of the conversation is “Is there any place for religious faith in science?”  Here are a few extracts:

SH: Religious language is, without question, unscientific in its claims for what is true. We have Christians believing in the holy ghost, the resurrection of Jesus and his possible return – these are claims about biology and physics which, from a scientific point of view in the 21st century, should be unsustainable.

RW: You talk as if science is an absolute, and I don’t think it is at all. It isn’t the truth either, because I don’t believe there is such a thing as “the truth”. You rail against the ultimate truth of what some people believe – ie religion, God, Jesus, whatever. I don’t, because I don’t think it makes any more sense than railing against scientific truths. I say “truths” in inverted commas, because truths have a habit of being altered as we develop our knowledge.

No such thing as “the truth”? I wonder if Baron Winston rides in airplanes.  Does he give antibiotics to his patients with infections? (He’s a doctor, for crying out loud!) If so, doesn’t he think that there might be something to the notion that those drugs kill bacteria?  And if he does see that, well, then, is there also something to the notion that prayer works, or that Jesus came back to life after being crucified, or that we all go to heaven or hell after we die, or that Mohamed went to Paradise on the back of a white horse?  This postmodern stupidity, in which religious “truth” is equated to scientific “truth” (in this case both with quotation marks) simply gives unwarranted credibility to the unevidenced claims of faith.  And now that we’ve “developed” our knowledge that humans can’t come back to life when they’re dead for three days, or be born parthenogenetically, can we expect an “alteration” of faith claims about Jesus? I doubt it: those are bedrock claims of Christianity.

In contrast, during my lifetime I’ve seen an alteration of the scientific view that the continents didn’t move.  Scientific “truth” is indeed not absolute, but subject to change with new evidence.  Religious truth changes only when it’s forced to by secular pressures or the advance of science.  It has no independent way of checking its own claims.

Oh hai, here’s a familiar trope:

RW: I suppose I really wonder why you’re so angry.

SH: [laughs] Do I sound angry?

RW: Yes. You write angrily, too.

SH: I’m more worried than angry, and perhaps impatient. I don’t see any reason to believe that we can survive our religious differences indefinitely. I am worried that religion is one of the forces that has balkanised our world – we have Christians against Muslims against Jews.

RW: But the irony is that books like yours and [Richard Dawkins‘s] God Delusion balkanise the world a good deal more, because they polarise views. The God Delusion has caused very aggressive reactions from [people who] previously weren’t aggressive. In my book, I try to talk about our responsibility as scientists, one of which is to indulge in dialogue with people who are not scientists. One of the ways [atheist science writers] make dialogue is by being aggressive or angry with people who don’t agree with your view.

What a jerk Winston is!  He really doesn’t care about truth; he cares about “tone”.  What he really wants is for atheists to simply stop criticizing religion. I can’t imagine a way that Sam—or any of us—could make our serious points about faith without people like Winston complaining about “anger” and “aggression.”

The two then get into it about Francis Collins, whether he should go around lecturing and writing about Jebus and Frozen Waterfalls, and whether that detracts from his science.  Sam makes a good—and obvious point:

RW: I think he’s entitled to believe it [Collins on Jesus and God] as a human being. I think it’s important for scientists to be a bit less arrogant, a bit more humble, recognising we are capable of making mistakes and being fallacious – which is increasingly serious in a society where our work may have unpredictable consequences.

SH: I agree with all that. I just think you have humility and arrogance reversed in this case. Humility is very much on the side of science and honest self-criticism. The arrogance is claiming to be certain about truth claims of Iron Age philosophy, which someone like Collins does.

Here’s a nice exchange, which typifies the piece.  I do think that Sam gets the better of Winston, though of course I’m biased.  Winston comes off as a soft-headed guy who thinks that if we just listen to the faithful, they’ll come over to the side of science.

SH: You’re suggesting that a scientist can practice his science in isolation from the rest of the scientific worldview. In the States you find biochemists who are young-earth creationists, who think that Genesis is a literal story of cosmology.

RW: I think they’re entitled to their view. I think they’re wrong, but so what?

SH: You wouldn’t say that a doctor is entitled to believe his patients were sick from the evil eye, or voodoo. You wouldn’t say Francis Collins is free to deny the germ theory of disease. You’re recommending he practises his science in a walled garden. That’s an intellectual problem. Every scientist has to admit what is offered as true in the context of religion is scientifically unjustified.

Winston seems to feel that the debasement of evidence-based reasoning by America’s most famous scientist is a matter of little concern.  He’s taking the “I’m-bored-with-it” attitude toward accommodationism, seemingly oblivious to the real problems attendant on faith.  Does he not see how creationism (which of course comes directly from religion) is a constant danger to science education in our country, at least? Or that homeopathy (also based on faith) is a danger to medicine in his country?

Movie take: Somewhere is nowhere

April 18, 2011 • 5:34 am

Spoiler alert:  If you’re planning on seeing this piece of dreck—and Ceiling Cat help you if you do—then be aware that I describe some of the plot below.

I guess I’m one of the few people who isn’t blown away by director Sofia Coppola’s movies.  I thought that Lost in Translation was a good movie, but not a great one.  Nevertheless, the critics loved it, and it was nominated for three Oscars: best picture, best director, and best original screenplay (it won in the last category).  I wasn’t keen on The Virgin Suicides, either, and I haven’t seen Marie Antoinette—though I can’t imagine that Kirsten Dunst could be credible in the title role, even if it were a farce.

Yesterday I went to see Coppola’s latest movie in second run, Somewhere (2010).  I won’t mince words: it’s one of the worst “art” movies I’ve seen in a decade. In short, it’s a long self-indulgent whine on the loneliness that comes with fame, and on the lack of real connection between humans (a theme recycled, of course, from Lost in Translation).  That point, however, is adequately made in the first 15 minutes of the film.  The rest is tedium. Nevertheless, it’s garnered considerable accolades, including the top prize at the Venice Film Festival and a 72% rating on the TomatoMeter.

Short summary:  a young American movie star, Johnny Marco (played by Steven Dorff) goes about his lonely business, driving his Ferrari around Los Angeles, hiring pole dancers, having transitory flings with groupies, drinking heavily, interacting with his ex-wife, and trying to connect with his daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning, the one really bright spot in the film).  He goes to press conferences about his new movie (where his co-star disses him) and flies to Italy with Cleo to promote his movie there.  He takes Cleo to her ice skating lesson (texting on his phone as he watches her: Coppola’s heavy-handed way to show that he’s not fully engaged with anything), and deposits her at summer camp.

Finally, after an hour and a half of this, Coppola gets to The Big Moment.  Johnny has a tiny breakdown in his hotel, crying on the phone and calling an ex-girlfriend, asking her to come over (she can’t).  He confesses to her that he’s a stuffed man, a hollow man. What an epiphany!  And then he drives his Ferrari into the California foothhills, abandoning it on the road and walking away—clearly an abnegation of his fame and present life.

Nowhere in this movie is there any lesson beyond “fame can be lonely.”  You don’t care about Johnny, nor are engaged with his plight.  I suppose the lesson is that rich and famous people can be lonely, too, but we understand that ad nauseum in the first half hour.  And if Coppola’s intention with the long scenes is to “show and not tell,” she blows it all in the scene in which Johnny weeps on the phone and bewails his emptiness.

I bitched over voicemail to my cinemaphilic nephew Steven about this movie, for I had gone to see it on his advice.  Here’s his dissenting email response:

In fairness I warned you that Somewhere was typical Sofia Coppola, but how could I dissuade you from seeing something I, myself admired?  That would be like saying “I love this book but it’s not right for you”—patronizing, no?  So, okay, the main character is a vapid prick.  That’s fine, you don’t have to like him, just understand that like a lot of people who find fame young, he took advantage of the perks, not counting on someday approaching middle age with no real connections and no idea how to change.  Coppola doesn’t cheat us there—when he looks up from texting to observe his daughter on the ice, he rebukes himself for the gaps in his parenting but then goes back to his phone—no phony epiphanies, just a sad situation for all concerned.  Elle Fanning was sublime as the daughter, precocious but lacking the creepy “miniature adult” quality of her sister Dakota.  And the camerawork, while self-aware, was gorgeous.  There’s too little beauty in film today, and I’m not talking about scenery (female or otherwise). With her long takes and formalist compositions, Coppola is among the most painterly of directors, one of the few to favor mood over incident.  To say she makes self-indulgent movies about spoiled rich people is to refuse to engage with stories that aren’t sprinkled with tenderizer; Never Let Me Go (fine film though it was) had the easier project of evoking sympathy for innocent victims.  Coppola, like Antonioni before her, gives us characters who perhaps deserve their unhappiness, but were once like us and then said yes to money, sex and comfort without counting the cost.  It’s ignoble but it happens all the time, as Coppola has every reason to know.

But I get the last word. The only good thing about all this is that, as you’ll know if you saw her act in Godfather III, Coppola is at least on the right side of the camera. But if you want to see a really great movie on the lack of connection between people, go rent Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, which I still consider the best movie to come out in my lifetime (it gets 100% at Rotten Tomatoes).

Sin of the day: Blasphemy

April 17, 2011 • 9:37 am

For Holy Week we’re having a parade of Catholic sins. Here’s a really, really bad one—in fact, a mortal sin that, if unconfessed, will take you to Hell.  It’s blasphemy.  The Catholic God is a jealous god—in fact, a horrible megalomaniac—and nothing pisses him off more than slurring his good name. The Catholic Catechism, the official doctrine of the Church, defines blasphemy like this:

2148 Blasphemy is directly opposed to the second commandment. It consists in uttering against God—inwardly or outwardly—words of hatred, reproach, or defiance; in speaking ill of God; in failing in respect toward him in one’s speech; in misusing God’s name. St. James condemns those “who blaspheme that honorable name [of Jesus] by which you are called.” The prohibition of blasphemy extends to language against Christ’s Church, the saints, and sacred things. It is also blasphemous to make use of God’s name to cover up criminal practices, to reduce peoples to servitude, to torture persons or put them to death. The misuse of God’s name to commit a crime can provoke others to repudiate religion. Blasphemy is contrary to the respect due God and his holy name. It is in itself a grave sin.

2162 The second commandment forbids every improper use of God’s name. Blasphemy is the use of the name of God, of Jesus Christ, of the Virgin Mary, and of the saints in an offensive way.

And here from the Catechism—more official current dogma of the Catholic Church, is what happens if you disrespect God and don’t confess it:

1035 The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity. Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, “eternal fire.” The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.

From Summa Theologica, here’s the sophisticated theologian most loved by accomodationists, Thomas Aquinas, asserting that blasphemy is a sin far greater than murder.

Reply to Objection 1. If we compare murder and blasphemy as regards the objects of those sins, it is clear that blasphemy, which is a sin committed directly against God, is more grave than murder, which is a sin against one’s neighbor. On the other hand, if we compare them in respect of the harm wrought by them, murder is the graver sin, for murder does more harm to one’s neighbor, than blasphemy does to God. Since, however, the gravity of a sin depends on the intention of the evil will, rather than on the effect of the deed, as was shown above (I-II, 73, 8), it follows that, as the blasphemer intends to do harm to God’s honor, absolutely speaking, he sins more grievously that the murderer. Nevertheless murder takes precedence, as to punishment, among sins committed against our neighbor.

It’s beyond belief that Catholics see their god as kind and loving, and yet also see him as someone who, if he’s not given proper respect, will send them down to boil for eternity in molten sulfur.  Even the worst boss wouldn’t do that to someone who didn’t show proper deference.  The Catholic attitude towards blasphemy is immoral.

Blackford: What is New Atheism?

April 17, 2011 • 6:22 am

Over at Metamagician, Russell Blackford has a nice two-part post on what he sees as the defining traits of New Atheism, as well as his perceived reasons for its success (part 1 is here, part two here).  I won’t repeat his analysis, for his pieces are short (for Russell!) and you should read them. I’ll offer only two tiny dissents.  Brother Blackford claims that “there are some books published every year advocating one or another form of traditional religious belief. These far outnumber books by the New Atheist writers and some of them outsell even Richard Dawkins.”  I’m not sure about that; which such books outsell The God Delusion, for instance? Is he thinking of The Purpose Driven Life?

More important is Blackford’s argument that one reason religion is bad is because (in the case of Christians), they “[want] to get governments to impose their ideas on others who may not be Christians.”  I think that’s not so much an objection to religion itself as to the fact that religions engender bad political and moral ideas.  After all, we have no objection to those who have nonreligious moral views “trying to get governments to impose their ideas on others who may not agree with them.” Think of opponents to abortion, the death penalty, and so on.  This is what we all do, using the political process to foist our morality on others.  The reason why I object to religion is not so much because religious people try to enact their morality per se, but because religiously inspired morality is much worse than secular morality.

Beyond this, I’d like to touch on two issues.  The first is why there’s such strong opposition to New Atheism among fellow atheists.  Blackford appears somewhat puzzled by this, but actually offers what I see as correct explanation:

Again, I can understand people wanting to disagree with specific New Atheist thinkers about specific points—such as my disagreement with Sam Harris about certain issues in moral theory. What I don’t understand is all the resentment. Apart from the unattractive emotions of envy, jealousy, and spite, the only explanation is that some of these folk who had established philosophical and historical theories are disappointed that what they see as incorrect theories are gaining greater popularity with the public.

. . . I haven’t descended to naming names here – the specific names are pretty obvious, but not all that relevant to the point I want to make. He (and it usually is a “he”) that hath an ear, let him hear.

But by all means let us name names, since I always think that if we’re singling out a group for disapprobation, it’s incumbent on us to give examples.  After all, we’re not McCarthyites with a secret “list”.  Here are some professed atheists who have been unusually (and I’d add unreasonably) critical of Gnu Atheists: Julian Baggini, Jacques Berlinerblau, Andrew Brown, R. Joseph Hoffmann, Jean Kazez, Chris Mooney, Massimo Pigliucci, Josh Rosenau, Michael Ruse, and Jeremy Stangroom.  Several of these have admitted, explicitly or implicitly, that they’re jealous of Gnu Atheist success. (This animus often comes, as in the case of Hoffman and Pigliucci, from those who feel that they’re smarter and more sophisticated—or have more Ph.Ds—than the rest of us, and that we simply refuse to bow to their superior wisdom.)

And of course there are reasonable disagreements about whether some Gnu Atheist tactics are productive, or make us seem “strident”.  But to me those arguments don’t explain the unusual vitriol heaped upon the Gnus by people like the above.  There’s something in there beyond simply disagreement about tactics. And as for tone, well, check out the “tone” of Hoffmann, Rosenau, or Ruse.  It’s often as strident as the tone they decry in New Atheists.

Finally, one thing that really peeves me about the anti-atheist atheists is their pose of Weltschmerz: “Oh this debate really wearies me; it’s just so boring!”  Just this week I’ve seen it twice. Here’s Rosenau, for example:

While I was somewhat incommunicado, Templeton gave its award to Martin Rees, the gnu atheists pitched six sorts of fits, and various other inane things happened in the world. The tremendous opportunities for science outreach and education that I saw last week made all the petty BS that goes on between gnus and “accommodationists” (whatever that term means) look especially silly, so blogging has taken a back seat.

And Jean Kazez:

In the atheosphere, I notice much tussling these days, but it’s all pretty much putting me to sleep.  Have there ever been martyrs to atheism….(see here and elsewhere)?  Quick, someone tell me why it matters?  All the inter-atheist warfare reminds me of Spy vs. Spy from Mad Magazine.

Ophelia Benson has translated this into regular English:  “May I just say that I am better than these Gnu Atheists, so much better that I simply can’t stoop to mention them, except of course to point out that I’m too good to mention them, except of course to—wait—help. . . ”  It’s curious that although New Atheists seem to bore these people immensely (Rosenau has made a cottage industry out of repeatedly saying he is too bored to mention them), they keep coming back to the issues over and over again, like a dog returning to his vomit (Proverbs 26:11).

Well, I don’t consider these differences trivial. Contra Kazez, I think they do matter, for they speak to the very things that have made New Atheism a success: our willingness to speak openly and honestly to the public about the evils of faith, and our unwillingness to pretend that we “respect” religion.  And clearly, as Brother Blackford shows, the public is hungry for that kind of discourse.  It’s also about whether we lie or dissimulate to the public, or cozy up to a faith that we don’t hold, to achieve aims like selling evolution to school children.

In short, the disagreement is about whether to speak a necessary truth.

The Boston Globe on kin selection

April 17, 2011 • 4:51 am

The Big Kerfuffle about Kin Selection (i.e., Nowak et al. versus The World) has finally made the papers: today’s Boston Globe has a piece about it called “Where does good come from?: Harvard’s Edward O. Wilson tries to upend biology again.” I’m not going to reiterate the whole debate, but simply want to give and comment on a few quotes from the paper.  I thought the piece was pretty fair; when I talked to the writer, Leon Neyfakh, he seemed pretty much at sea about what kin selection and group selection really were, but he’s done a creditable job on the article.

But of course the whole controversy isn’t really a fit subject for a newspaper article, for it’s not a controversy at all: it’s simply two guys and a woman deeply misunderstanding evolution and trying to parlay this misunderstanding into fame.  Had an identical paper not borne the names of Martin Nowak and E. O. Wilson, Neyfakh wouldn’t have written this piece.

Some quotes:

On a recent Monday afternoon, the distinguished Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson was at his home in Lexington, talking on the phone about the knocks he’s been taking lately from the scientific community, and paraphrasing Arthur Schopenhauer to explain his current standing in his field. “All new ideas go through three phases,” Wilson said, with some happy mischief in his voice. “They’re first ridiculed or ignored. Then they meet outrage. Then they are said to have been obvious all along.”

As one of my colleagues said dryly when he read that, “Wilson seems to have missed the point that you need a new idea before you can get to go through those phases!”

“Kin selection is wrong,” Wilson said. “That’s it. It’s wrong.”. .

Over the course of subsequent decades, Wilson came across evidence that made him doubt the connection between genetic relatedness and altruism. Researchers were finding species of insects that shared a lot of genetic material with each other but didn’t behave altruistically, and other species that shared little and did. “Nothing we were finding connected with kin selection,” Wilson said. “I knew that something was going wrong — there was a smell to it.”. . .

Saying that kin selection doesn’t feed into eusociality (societies in which a sterile worker caste tends one or a few reproductive individuals) because some haplodiploids aren’t eusocial and not all eusocials are haplodiploid is like saying that smoking isn’t associated with lung cancer because some smokers don’t get lung cancer and some people who get lung cancer didn’t ever smoke.   The question is whether there is an apparently causal association between relatedness (i.e., via inclusive fitness) and altruism.  And there is.  We’ve long ago realized that haplodiploidy may not be the key factor in the evolution of eusocial insects, but relatedness certainly is.  The ancestors of all eusocial insects, including non-haplodiploids like termites, mated only once rather than multiple times, which increases relatedness among their brood; this is exactly what you’d predict if relatedness were important here.  Further, “cooperative breeding” in birds, in which the young stay at home and help mom and dad rear the next batch of their brothers and sisters, is correlated with lower promiscuity of the parents. That’s again explained by inclusive fitness, for you’d have less “genetic interest” in rearing future siblings if they had a different father from you (that would reduce your relatedness to future siblings by half).

Anyone who says that “kin selection is dead” is deeply muddled.  What is parental care, after all, but a special case of kin selection?  Why do Ma and Pa Eagle stay at home and tend the eaglets until they fledge?  Why don’t they just go off and build another nest? The reason, of course, is because each parent is related by half (50% sharing of genes) with each chick, so their genes for parental care will be carried in those chicks.  This is simply the most obvious case of kin selection, but the principle surely applies to lesser degrees of relatedness.

Dawkins makes strong judgment on the paper:

Richard Dawkins, who played a crucial role in popularizing kin selection with his 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene,” said last week that he has “never met anybody apart from Wilson and Nowak who takes it seriously.” . .

I think the other Wilson—David Sloan Wilson—takes it seriously.

Wilson is not arguing that members of certain species don’t sacrifice themselves for the benefit of their relatives. They do. But it’s his position that kinship and relatedness aren’t essential in causing the development of advanced social behaviors like altruism — that the reason such behaviors catch on is that they’re evolutionarily advantageous on a group level. That socially advanced organisms end up favoring their kin, Wilson argues, is a byproduct of their group membership, not the cause.

“It’s almost universally regarded as a disgrace that Nature published it,” Dawkins said. “Most people feel the reason they published it was the eminence of Wilson and Nowak, not the quality of the paper.” . .

Dawkins is right, of course.  As I’ve said before, if the paper were published by three schmoes from Unknown University, it would have been rejected out of hand.  Nature screwed up badly on this one, but of course the editors are rubbing their hands and chuckling over all the publicity they’ve gotten—at the expense of good science.

And yay for me and Dave Queller:

For Wilson to reject kin selection this late in his career has bewildered his many admirers. “It’s sad — he’s already an enormously famous and respected scientist, and it just sort of tarnishes him in people’s eyes,” said Jerry Coyne, the University of Chicago biologist who has written disapprovingly of Wilson’s latest work on his blog. Yet Wilson said he doesn’t have a choice in the matter. “I think that’d be a pretty poor scientist, who couldn’t reverse his view from new evidence,” he said. . . .

Many biologists find these assertions baffling. Said David Queller, a biologist at Rice University who spearheaded the letter to Nature that was signed by 136 other scientists: “At some really fundamental level I don’t understand what Ed Wilson is trying to get across, and I think that’s the response of most of the community.”

Nowak arrogantly responds:

That’s exactly the problem, according to Nowak, whose new book, “SuperCooperators,” co-written with Roger Highfield, summarizes his work as a mathematician on the origins of advanced social behavior. “They don’t know what they’re arguing against,” Nowak said recently at his office, where an oversize print of the Nature cover hangs on the wall. Specifically, Nowak explained, the critics don’t understand the math, and moreover, they don’t realize that the math is the most important part. . .

Yeah, right: 140 biologists, many of whom are mathematical biologists or deeply involved in theory (Dave Queller and Stuart West are just two among many), all fail to grasp what they’re arguing against! Well, those who have vetted the math realize that Nowak et al.’s model says absolutely nothing about a possible connection between relatedness and the origin of eusociality. That’s because their own model does not explore what happens when one varies the degree of relatedness!  It therefore can’t say anything about whether relatedness is important in the evolution of eusociality.  Responding to this, my colleague remarked, “This is like making three types of jam, where two are nice and one is gross (strawberry, gooseberry and oak leaf), and then saying that because the amount of sugar used wasn’t varied in these three jams (all were about 50% sugar) that sugar doesn’t matter to whether the jam tastes nice.”

Re whether kin selection is, as Nowak et al. assert strongly, something completely different from natural selection, Richard and I had something to say. I’m particularly proud of my analogy:

At a very basic level, critics feel Wilson and his coauthors are wrong to treat kin selection as something separate from natural selection. As Dawkins explains it, kin selection is not a distinct process but a necessary consequence: a subset, rather than an add-on. “What they’re missing is the logical point that kin selection is not separable from neo-Darwinian natural selection,” Dawkins said. “To separate them off would be like talking about Euclidean geometry without talking about the Pythagorean theorem.”

Coyne put it even more simply: “It’s like saying that Chardonnay is not wine.” . . .

Wilson again argues for the non-importance of relatedness:

Wilson is not arguing that members of certain species don’t sacrifice themselves for the benefit of their relatives. They do. But it’s his position that kinship and relatedness aren’t essential in causing the development of advanced social behaviors like altruism — that the reason such behaviors catch on is that they’re evolutionarily advantageous on a group level. That socially advanced organisms end up favoring their kin, Wilson argues, is a byproduct of their group membership, not the cause. . .

Well, if you want to see if kinship is a causal factor in the evolution of any trait, you must make a model in which group sizes and dynamics are the same but the degree of kinship varies. That is exactly what Nowak et al. did not do.  Wilson has no idea what he’s talking about here.

And watch out for more evolutionary psychology to come!

So far, Wilson has stopped short of extending his new ideas about the evolution of social behavior to the human race. But that’s not going to last. Asked last week whether group selection happens in humans, Wilson said, “Yes, emphatically.”

“Human beings have an intense desire to form groups, and they always have,” Wilson said. “This powerful tendency we have to form groups and then have the groups compete, which is in every aspect of our social behavior…is basically the driving force that caused the origin of human behavior.”

Wilson will elaborate on this view in his next project, a book he’s tentatively calling “The Social Conquest of Earth,” which he said will be published by W. W. Norton next year. In it, he said, he will explain how socially advanced species have come to dominate the earth, and will lay out a “reexamination of human evolution” informed by his recent turn towards group selection.

It is possible that some kind of group selection for altruism occurred in early human lineages, based on differential reproduction of groups with different degrees of “morality.”  But it could also have involved kin selection if, as is likely, members in early human social groups were related.  And the evolution of moral codes and behaviors could also have involved individual selection: individuals who behaved nicely could have reaped reproductive benefits since groups were small and individuals intimately acquainted with each other, so they could remember and reward those who were nice, with the expectation of getting the same by behaving the same.  Regardless, most animals don’t live in such small groups nor have a memory for interpersonal dynamics.  And of course we know, from other observations (evolution of sex ratio, preferential care for relatives, cooperative breeding, etc.) that kin selection certainly does operate in nature.

God tells Michele Bachmann that he doesn’t like gays

April 17, 2011 • 3:20 am

Via The Wonk Room, we learn that Michele Bachmann—who is now being touted as a Republican Presidential candiate in 2012—was told by God to introduce a bill in the Minnesota legislature to make marriage legal only between a man and a woman.  After hearing in 2003 that Massachusetts courts had allowed same-sex marriage, a distraught Bachmann asked her Lord for advice. God answered her as she went for a walk. She recounts that fateful stroll to a radio station:

Part of her answer:

BACHMANN: When that happened, I heard the news on my local Christian radio station in Minneapolis, St. Paul and I was devastated. And I took a walk and I just went to prayer and I said Lord, what would you have me do in the Minnesota state senate? And just through prayer I knew that I was to introduce the marriage amendment in Minnesota.

Her amendment failed.  Clearly God isn’t omnipotent.

But I pray to mine: O Ceiling Cat, please keep us from having this woman as our President.

Forgive me, Father, for I have touched myself

April 16, 2011 • 9:28 am

Tomorrow is the start of Holy Week, a time when it’s especially important for Catholics to confess their sins and do penance. Let’s take this week to briefly examine some of those sins—sins that are part of the dogma of what is considered a “liberal religion” in America. (Remember that Catholicism is the biggest single faith in our country, with 68 million American adherents. And in 2008 there were 1.166 billion baptized Catholics worldwide.)

Today’s sin is masturbation. I was just talking to a friend who is an ex-Catholic, and was surprised to learn (yes, I’m theologically ignorant) that the Catholic Church still considers masturbation as sin.  Not necessarily a mortal sin, mind you, for those will send you straight to hell if you don’t confess them and are absolved, but a venial sin, which will land you in purgatory if you die without having confessed it. (There seems to be some understandable consternation among Catholics about this ambiguity, since masturbation, like divorce, is considered a “grave sin,” and such sins, if committed willingly and with full knowledge of how bad they are, become mortal sins.)

I believe it was Hitchens, in God is Not Great, who pointed out the fortuitous juxtaposition in standing human mammals of the hand and the genitals.  Their natural conjunction is what is forbidden to Catholics.  It’s not clear to me where this dictum comes from.  The story of Onan, who spilled his seed on the ground, referred not to masturbation but to coitus interruptus, which is still a sin.  But Aquinas, one of the great heroes of accommodationists, certainly considered masturbation a very grave sin—more sinful, in fact, than rape.  (Aquinas lovers always neglect this, of course.)

The official dogma of the Catholic Church, as embodied in the Catholic Catechism, is clear on the seriousness of wanking:

2352 By masturbation is to be understood the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure. “Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.” 137 “The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose.” For here sexual pleasure is sought outside of “the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved.” 138  To form an equitable judgment about the subjects’ moral responsibility and to guide pastoral action, one must take into account the affective immaturity, force of acquired habit, conditions of anxiety, or other psychological or social factors that lessen or even extenuate moral culpability.

The context dependence of sin makes for interesting confessions.  As Wikipedia notes in describing how to confess these sexual sins:

However, many sins are described as “grave sins” or “grave offenses” in the Catechism such as extramarital sex,[4] divorce[5] and masturbation.[6] These sins must be specifically confessed and named, giving details about the context of each sin: what sin, why, against what or whom, the number and type of occurrences, and any other factors that may exacerbate or lessen one’s responsibility and culpability that the person confessing remembers. Roman Catholic belief holds that mortal sin can vary somewhat in seriousness, and thus canon law only lists some of those that are more serious.

Now, imagine having to go to a priest and not only say that you’d “touched yourself,” but then hearing the old pervert inquire as to how many times, where, when, and whether you were looking at Playboy or thinking about a good Catholic girl.  This seems more like an excuse for priestly masturbation than for the exculpation of sinners.  Why on earth would the circumstances make such a difference?

All of this shows the total folly of Catholic dogma.  Masturbation harms nobody and yet it’s considered a moral matter—one so severe that unless you confess (and experience the shame that goes with that), you’ll fry for eternity.  And note that this is still the prevailing dogma of the Church—it has not changed, even though most rational people now see masturbation as harmless.

Conclusions:

  • For those faitheists and accommodationists who bridle at seeing religion as child abuse, consider what it means to tell a child that masturbating is a grave sin, and that unless you fully confess every act, with all the juicy details, you may wind up in hell.  For some vivid testimony about the effect of such policies on children, read Miranda Hale’s post, “A dirty little girl, hanging her head in shame.”  She is just one among thousands who have spent much of their lives tortured by Catholic dogma. Yes, it really is child abuse.
  • For those who, like William Lane Craig, say that morals come from God, let them justify the prohibition of masturbation. “God says so” is a very lame reason for that. Sam Harris is right in saying that “sins” like that having nothing to do with true morality. They are simply ways for the religious hierarchy to control its flocks.
  • Catholicism, though a “liberal” faith, still has the power to torture and abuse its adherents.  So much for those who tell us that while species of religion like militant Islam or fundamentalist Christianity may be harmful, that’s simply not true of the cozy, liberal, and mainstream faiths of America.  And, of course, we know about the other Catholic “sins” like condom use, divorce and the like.  Liberal faiths often do have their harmful aspects!
  • For those who, like Clergy Letter Project, or Peter Hess, (the Director for Religious Outreach of the National Center for Science Education) parade the Catholic Church’s official (but hedged) acceptance of evolution as something in which we should rejoice, let them remember the other things that are also official policy of the Catholic Church.  I find it hypocritical to praise the Vatican for its stance on evolution while keeping mum about all the other dogma that is far more destructive than simple creationism (cue Nick Matzke here).

I conclude that, even considering its policies on masturbation and birth control alone, the Catholic Church is one of those religions that poisons everything. In fact, if there really were a just and loving God, he would see the Catholic Church as evil.