Continue reading »]]> Human beings seem to like to think in binary.

“If not A, then B.”

“If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” (A statement that, ironically, has multiple meanings.)

“It’s an either/or situation.”

We answer “yes/no” questions.

We decide if we want this or that.

We think in ones and zeroes—literally, if we program computers down to the machine language level.

Yet, in the squishy world of reality, binary thinking is one of the most significant obstacles that we place in the path of human progress. There are issues in which this is glaring apparent.

One is EITHER pro‑choice OR anti‑abortion. That is, either one believes abortions should be available for any reason from dire necessity to “oops” and that it is just another form of birth control OR one believes that no woman should, under any circumstances, have an abortion. Ever.

One is EITHER a gun‑lover OR a gun‑grabber. You are pro‑gun or anti‑gun. You are for the Second Amendment, or you are against it. You either respect gun rights OR you want to take them away from everyone.

One is EITHER a liberal (aka progressive) OR one is a conservative. One EITHER believes in the welfare state OR in individual sovereignty.

One is EITHER a hero OR a villain (or believes someone else is either a hero or a villain).

If you are one side of any of the above binary pairs, you are all that is good; if you are on the other side, you are unmitigated evil. Which is which depends entirely on which side you are on.

It is a zero sum game—there must be an absolute winner and an absolute loser.

This sort of binary thinking is supported by the media in all its forms. For every behavior on the part of a newsworthy individual or group, journalists speculate about and offer opinions on which of two sides they come down on. If the behavior is nuanced in any way, the media cannot allow it to remain so because eyeballs are attracted and ad space sold by conflict. Conflict requires two distinct, opposing sides. Hence, they must determine which column they should sort the individual to: ones or zeroes.

This reached a truly head‑scratching point in a recent article I read that began thusly: “When it comes to his relations with Congress, President Barack Obama, is a man of two minds.”

How so? I thought, and read the article hoping to find out. What was the particular behavior of the POTUS that had puzzled the journalist?

It was—I kid you not—that the President praised Congressional efforts to get things done and criticized obstructionist behavior that led to not getting things done. The journalist didn’t understand why the President should praise his opponents for progress on an immigration bill, say, yet criticize them for a filibuster on another issue. Clearly, he was torn in his feelings for Congress and therefore did not have a consistent attitude toward it. (Which begged the question as to what the journalist expected someone of ONE mind to have done.)

I read the article twice on the theory (and in the hope) that I was missing something. Was the journalist being ironic or satirical? No. The tone of the article was perfectly serious. He saw the president’s behavior (praising effort toward progress; critiquing lack of progress) as anomalous.

I have three kids. I had parents. From both angles, I have observed that generally when teaching a child, one critiques or disciplines for unproductive, obstructive and destructive behavior and praises and rewards productive, cooperative, constructive behavior. In this case, the one and the zero are part of achieving a single positive goal: to encourage productive, cooperative, constructive behavior and to discourage unproductive, obstructive or destructive behavior.

The binary behavior the journalist seemed to expect of Mr. Obama, in this case, was an attitude that he was a one and Congress a zero (or vice versa). Ergo, if Congress were to win (merit praise), the White House must lose. Any merits Congress received gave the President demerits and vice versa. So it seemed puzzling to this journalist that the One should compliment the Zero for a job well done when it detracted from his Oneness … or something like that.

This is a cultural artifact, this binary style of thinking. The culture that preceded ours on this continent did not adhere to it as strictly as we do. During the period of time when Western Europeans were invading America, there were at least three different opinions among the native population as to what should be done. These points of view were espoused by different chieftains. Three of the most influential were Crazy Horse, American Horse and Red Cloud and their solutions to the problem ran the gamut from fighting back to negotiating the sharing of the continent to simply depending on the good will of the invaders. As we have seen in our own recent political history, men who hold diverging opinions are loved by some and hated by others. One is a hero to the group that shares his views and a villain to those who don’t. But our Native American predecessors did not share that binary thought which is why I found the 1939 book Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains by Charles Eastman eye-opening and refreshing. Eastman—a Sioux who acquired a Western medical education and served on the reservations—treats each of the nine native leaders he writes of as heroes, even when their beliefs diverged radically from each others’ and from his own. Reading Indian Heroes, I understood how it was possible for two tribes to fight each other for grazing or hunting land in the summer, yet come together in the winter to share resources. How they could, in fact, come together to form a Federation whose articles greatly influenced the framers of the US Constitution.

From a Bahá’í point of view, if we are to achieve real oneness, real convergence, real progress toward a common goal, if we are to stop living in armed intellectual camps, we must be able to grasp nuance—to see it, understand it and speak it. We must see more colors than black and white, count higher than one; even see that 1 and 0 can equal 10 (which is far greater than the sum of its parts), ask questions that do not accept only yes or no answers.

What does that look like on the ground? It may require that we stop prejudicing our own thinking by framing multiple choice (or essay) questions as if they were true or false. It may mean realizing there are people who are pro‑choice AND anti‑abortion. That there are those who support the rights of gun ownership AND recognize that this right burdens one with an awesome responsibility that not everyone is competent to bear. It may mean that there are those who believe in individual responsibility to contribute to society AND society’s responsibility to contribute to the welfare of the individuals that comprise it.

Binary thinking is easy—okay, I’ll call a toad a toad—it’s lazy thinking. It spares us the effort of forming opinions based on fact, reason and values by insisting that if not A, then surely B. It spares us the embarrassment of admitting that we don’t have a grasp on the nuances of every situation or issue. It saves us the trouble of wading through the facts (and knowing when we have enough of them at hand), weighing the complex issues, understanding the dynamics, weeding out the distractors, and applying the relevant values and principles that go into comprehending what is going on around us.

Binary thinking means never having to say, “I don’t know.” Because you always do know: If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

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Bertrand Russell

“The belief that what is ultimately real must be immutable is a very common one: it gave rise to the metaphysical notion of substance, and finds, even now, a wholly illegitimate satisfaction in such scientific doctrines as the conservation of energy and mass.”

This commentary of Bertrand Russell, with which he begins his Mysticism and Logic essay segment on Time, contains a number of mind‑boggling ideas: 1) that what is ultimately real must be immutable (whatever that may mean to such malleable creatures as human beings), 2) that a cardinal concept of science—such as the conservation of energy and mass—would grant an illegitimate satisfaction and 3) that these concepts are scientific doctrines.

At the time Russell was writing, the term “scientism” had yet to be coined. Scientism—for readers who may not have heard the term before—refers to the belief that science can prescribe even moral behavior and decide social issues. In other words, it treats science like a belief system that has, as its ultimate goal, a clear truth in which human beings can take satisfaction (or have faith). Contrast this with the idea that science is a tool the ultimate goal of which is the discovery of physical laws and the understanding of physical reality.

Russell’s particular emphasis here is on immutability. That is, that there are physical laws that are constant and eternal. He singles out the concept of Time in context with this “scientific doctrine”, but here, he examines the mystical point of view that Time is NOT immutable, but illusory. This is an oft‑debated concept in religious philosophy as well. God, the scriptures suggest, is beyond Time and Place. He is no more bound by the physical laws of the universe than I am bound by the laws I create for one of my books. For this reason, some metaphysicians maintain that Time is an illusion because that ultimate reality, (or God), does not bow to it.

Writes Russell:

“It is difficult to disentangle the truth and the error in this view. The arguments for the contention that time is unreal and that the world of sense is illusory must, I think, be regarded as fallacious. …A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is. Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom….

“…Whoever wishes to see the world truly, to rise in thought above the tyranny of practical desires, must learn to overcome the difference of attitude towards past and future, and to survey the whole stream of time in one comprehensive vision.”

I’ve been doing much thinking about evolution for some time now. The evolution of the cosmos, of mankind, of religion, of culture, of my own character … of everything. Evolution, of course, is something that occurs over time, and I know that I, for one, failed to grok the significance of that from my own past world view. A world view in which I did NOT try, as Russell puts it, “to survey the whole stream of time in one comprehensive vision.”

My attitude toward mankind as a species changed when I strove to consider the entire stream of human evolution and recognized that we are still young as a species. At best, we are still grappling with pimply, rebellious adolescence—a time at which, in the life of the individual, the brain is not fully connected, giving us a false sense of invincibility. This, in turn, causes us to indulge in risky behavior at a time when we are largely incapable of gauging risk realistically.

I was raised with the dogma that Time was something that worked against us, not for us. That we had been created in utter perfection but—owing to our naivety and credulity (or ignorance and rebelliousness)—fell into spiritual entropy because a spirit being disguised as a serpent whispered those insidious words, “You will not surely die.”

Don’t get me wrong—the words are insidious, and we whisper them among ourselves and eagerly take them to heart whenever we would behave in ways that, at some level, we know are destructive in trivial and/or hugely significant, earth‑shaking ways. But in some ways we’ve got it backwards: we are not devolving toward an animal state, we are evolving out of one. And that takes Time.

“Something of Hellenism, something, too, of Oriental resignation, must be combined with its hurrying Western self-assertion before it can emerge from the ardour of youth into the mature wisdom of manhood. In spite of its appeals to science, the true scientific philosophy, I think, is something more arduous and more aloof, appealing to less mundane hopes, and requiring a severer discipline for its successful practice.”

The words “arduous” and “discipline” are not favorites with a great many people in our mainstream American culture. In contrast to the prevalent philosophy that effort given to a pursuit increases the value of the outcome—which is captured in the phrase “easy come, easy go”—I observe a great many people who really don’t want to have to put a lot of effort into anything: study, work, relationships, their own behavior. They prefer what my mom would have called “the path of least resistance”.

I sing and I write. I love both pursuits, but I love writing more and value it more deeply because it’s harder. Singing is easy. I open my mouth and notes come out. The less I think about singing, the better I am at it. When I’m really on a roll, it’s effortless. Even when I practice the craft of singing, it seems effortless. I hear harmonies instinctively and unconsciously. Harmonizing with whatever music is happening at a given moment is a reflex; an autonomic response. (So when my 10 year old says, “Mom, don’t sing!” when I do it in public, she might as well be saying, “Mom, don’t breathe!” In contrast, every word I write I weigh and hold and hear and sniff and taste as it comes out onto the page. Singing pumps me up; writing drains me. And I pursue it with ardor and discipline. That is what I hope will cause me to evolve into a better writer.

Russell also takes up the relationship between Time and evolution and relays the thoughts of some philosophers:

“The difference between man and the lower animals, which to our human conceit appears enormous, was shown to be a gradual achievement, involving intermediate being who could not with certainty be placed either within or without the human family.

(The philosophy of evolution) A process which led from the am[oe]ba to Man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress—though whether the am[oe]ba would agree with this opinion is not known.”

It is not clear from context, at first, whether Russell accepts the idea that the intellectual gulf between animals and humans is not as vast as it obviously is, or believes in the existence of a “missing link”, or actually credits the amoeba with the capacity for forming an opinion, but here we confront the Question: What capacity makes a human being human, and toward what is that human capacity evolving?

I’m not going there in this post, simply because I’ve covered it elsewhere and it would take us far afield of a discussion of Time.

Time is real. Or at least it is a real necessity for anything that evolves, whether that thing is an organism or an organization, a thought process or a belief system. The very concept of a process is time bound; without Time a process is not a process, it is an event.

It has been said that we are spiritual beings having a physical experience. Krishna likens the soul to the rider of a horse, where the horse is the physical body—including the brain which is, after all, only a mechanism. I know I have been struck repeatedly with the sensation that my mind and my brain are not at all the same thing. The one seeks to control the other in a process—an evolutionary process—that takes Time to unfold. I am not the same person I was when I first committed to become a Bahá’í, for example, and made a decision to consciously evolve in a particular way. It took time for me to evolve to this state from that.

I guess the really cool thing (and the really scary thing) is that while early in human evolution our physical environment shaped our evolution even as we were largely unconscious of it, now we shape our own evolution and can, if we wish, do it consciously—manipulating both our inner and outer environments toward a goal.

Ah, but here’s the catch: because we’re still physically animals, it is frighteningly easy to conflate mind and brain and body and simply bow to the impulses of physical nature: selfishness, greed, lust, envy, anger. “They” say you are what you eat. This is as true of what you put into your head as it is what you put into your stomach. We are sometimes slow to realize that—but then, we are still evolving.

But toward what?

Russell examines the ideals of a philosophy of evolution that holds that:

“Not only the aspiration, but the ideal too, must change and develop with the course of evolution: there must be no fixed goal, but a continual fashioning of fresh needs by the impulse which is life and which alone gives unity to the process.

…The beliefs of to-day may count as true to-day, if they carry us along the stream; but to-morrow they will be false, and must be replaced by new beliefs to meet the new situation. All our thinking consists of convenient fictions, imaginary congealings of the stream: reality flows on in spite of all our fictions, and though it can be lived, it cannot be conceived in thought.”

Religion, in contrast, proposes that there is a fixed goal. Fixed, at least, in the sense that it insists we should strive to be better human beings—more just, more empathetic, more wise. That we are on an upward spiral. The philosophy Russell spotlights in his essay on Time, however, proposes literally going with the flow.

This is not to say that the teachings of religion are fixed. They are not. They, too, evolve, but they evolve with respect to that “fixed goal” of becoming human. But here, too, we impose “fictions” and attempt “imaginary congealings” around the parts of our beliefs we desire to remain stationary. We wish to only make a decision about what is true or false once for all Time, though surely experience shows us this is a chimera.

Alas, Reality does not play nicely with our fictions. Time and evolution march onward and upward and Reality will leave us behind if we do not adapt to it. There is a difference, of course, between being adaptive to reality and being an easy push‑over for every impulse that pops out of the brain. And therein lies the stuff of life.

Russell proposes that such extreme relativism as is implied by this idea that all our beliefs are only situationally true is not real philosophy:

“I do not propose to enter upon a technical examination of this philosophy. I wish only to maintain that the motives and interests which inspire it are so exclusively practical, and the problems with which it deals are so special, that it can hardly be regarded as touching any of the questions that, to my mind, constitute genuine philosophy.”

“…Philosophy is not a short cut to the same kind of results as those of the other sciences: if it is to be a genuine study, it must have a province of its own, and aim at results which the other sciences can neither prove nor disprove.”

Russell’s primary concern here, really, is history and our penchant for believing that the present is more important (or more real) than the past or future—that the past may be safely forgotten and the future unlooked for, because it will eventually catch us up whether we think about it or not. Oddly, this makes me think of Pete Townshend’s “My Generation”—specifically, the line “I hope I die before I get old.” He didn’t, and neither did millions from that generation for whom an uncontemplated future was suddenly an unprepared‑for present.

If neurologists are correct, the realization that the future is real and approaching day by day dawns upon most of us sometime in our twenties. Townshend seems to have adapted to this reality quite well and (who knows) may look back upon his youthful lyrics with an embarrassed “oops” or at least a philosophical, “Eh!”

At any rate, Bertrand Russell concludes his study of philosophies that deny there reality of Time this way:

“…I wish only to preserve the mental outlook which inspired the denial, the attitude which, in thought, regards the past as having the same reality as the present and the same importance as the future.”

I think his caution is warranted. If we assign Time a station of unreality, relegate the past to the dust bin, and refuse to contemplate what either the past or the present affects the future, then we will fail to evolve consciously. I think it would be a shame for creatures endowed with the capacity to contemplate the past and the future to fail to use that capacity; that beings given the power to evolve consciously would prefer to abdicate that right and privilege in favor of simply being carried unresistingly along the stream of Time.

Or, as I have often heard it put philosophically: What‑ever.

(All Bertrand Russell quotes are from Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays, Time)

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As I often seem to do these days, I have once again started a blog series, then found cause to interrupt it for a moment of introspection that only tangentially relates to science and religion. But in the spirit of inclusiveness evinced by my one‑time editor at Analog magazine (Stan Schmidt, who retired this past year), I will maintain that psychology and sociology are, too, science! And that what I’m about to say involves both faith and reason.

I want to consider adulthood.

In a culture where teenagers fight wars and the “mature audiences” warning label really means the content is probably the sort of sophomoric, elementary school bathroom humor that makes even my ten year old daughter cringe, what is adulthood?

There is a nineteen year old boy lying in a hospital bed in Boston right now, under arrest and heavy guard because of the havoc he and his older brother wrought, the death and hurt that they caused a major American city. All week, the authorities have referred to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as a man. When I commented in a writer’s group that I didn’t consider a nineteen year old to be a man, a friend responded that when her son was nineteen, he hated being called a “boy” because guys younger than he were fighting and dying in wars.

The question that immediately struck me was: So, which situation needs changing—the idea that a nineteen year old is not yet an adult, or the idea that a nineteen year old should be called upon to fight and die as a matter of course for any cause?

There are days my ten year old insists she’s no longer a child. “I’m not a little girl, Mom,” she says, then moments later, is curled in my arms bewailing the fact that she’s growing up. She is comforted in that moment, by the realization that she still fits in my lap.

When I watch the moment of silence that NPR observes while showing photos of our war dead, my overriding thought is that these kids old should be home with their moms doing  college homework or helping in the kitchen (maybe even cooking dinner), or being nagged to practice the guitar, or debating whether the family will watch Dr. Who or Grimm or Castle tonight, not out dying in a war. Don’t even get me started about what happens to someone at that impressionable age who is repeatedly subjected to the atrocities of war and then is expected to come home and just glide back into what is now an alien reality. I have a dear friend who counsels vets and their families, and the wreckage is horrific.

In this culture, we force our children to grow up suddenly and with few, if any, coming‑of‑age milestones. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard parents say they can hardly wait for their kid to turn eighteen so they are no longer responsible for them and can kick them out of the house. Often it’s said jokingly, but the joke is thin. One author (whose name I have forgotten) wrote a book about how the recent recession has caused families to have to take their kids back in and how rotten that is for the parents who’ve spent all this time working to obtain freedom from their kids. A number of high‑profile magazines (such as Forbes) have run articles on the trend of adult kids moving back in with their parents. There’s even a TV show dedicated to this part of the “American Dream” that tends to view it more as a nightmare. We consider a man who lives at home after eighteen “odd”, weak or a failure, we make slacker jokes about these guys.

Other cultures don’t have this shared obsession about independence. My son (27) and his wife live with us, and I wouldn’t have it any other way, recession or no. As I write this, he sits across the room, doing his homework, having just returned from school where he’s studying to get a teaching credential. My daughter‑in‑law is studying to become a nurse. My middle child is off at college back east and lives with us when she’s off from school. We Skype almost daily and she is not shy about voicing the opinion that while being on her own is okay and all that, she’d rather be home with us. When she is home, she works as a personal assistant for a PR firm CEO. She is not dependent, neither is my son. They have activities and responsibilities outside the family that sometimes make juggling our schedules a challenge.

What they are is interdependent. All of us understand that this model of interdependence is one that works and is, in microcosm, what our communities, our nation, and our world could be in macrocosm if we were not so focused on the American model of independence. A model which seems, in many ways, to have backfired and created a society in which the government is trying to figure out how it can replace the frayed elements of our social structure that we have—for reasons too complex to go into here—severed.

Part of my skepticism about the American model of adulthood and coming‑of-age is that we seem to expect our children to be children until ping! the Coming‑of‑Age Fairy bops them with a high school diploma and confers upon them instant adulthood. There are few, if any, coming of age rituals in this culture and the ones that exist seem to speak to the most ephemeral aspects of growing up (one can drink, drive, and see “adult” movies (oh, baby!). That high school diploma, or a high school pregnancy, or having to get a job because your family can’t survive without it, seem to be the extent of our maturation rites.

From my observations and discussions with other parents, I think a large part of the problem is how casual we are about our children’s education. Oh, not about math or science or other things you can learn by reading or going to school, but about how to think, and behave, and feel like an adult. My ten year old is following in my footsteps by fancying herself a social activist. She has recently moved from chatting with kids her age and younger about characters for their role playing games, to discussing topics such as spirituality, religion, and social issues with kids 12 to 16. She is very happy to share with me everything everyone says and what she says in return—indeed, she even discusses the issues with me—so I’m not too concerned that she will get in over her head. She has a very strong sense of her own identity and that, I think, is something that parents must work at cultivating and, too often, do not.

I think this is why parents are so shocked to discover their child is attending drunken parties, or smoking, or doing drugs, or have committed a crime that they would have thought impossible. Having kids isn’t for the faint of heart, or the uncommitted, or the hedonistic, or the merely distracted. If you want your child to have values, if you want them to value cultivating virtues such as honesty, kindness, empathy, courage, patience, wisdom—in a word, if you want them to have a strong sense of self and personal goals that will serve them no matter what curveballs the material world lobs at them—I believe you have to consciously teach them those things. You cannot assume they will learn it by watching you, or by going to school, or by reading, or by osmosis.

Remember, you are part of a culture that does not believe kids absorb violence from violent entertainment, or sexism from pornography, so if kids aren’t going to pick up vices by osmosis, then why would you expect them to pick up virtues that way, let alone be strongly disposed to prize them? With all three of our kids, we made a concerted and open effort to teach them to be—to be aware of what’s going on inside and outside, to take responsibility for what’s going on inside, to have goals that are focused on what sort of person they want to be, not on what sort of things they wanted to have. We have had a bedtime ritual of reading (fiction and non‑fiction), discussion and prayer with each of our kids and I have been very blunt in letting them know that I was doing it because I wanted them to have the tools to make good decisions and set goals in later life and because it was my job to do this.

It’s a small thing, but we have a series of coming of age rites in our family, starting with the Coffee Ceremony. At age twelve, you get your first cup of real coffee and can thereafter partake of adult conversation (and, in my childhood family, play cut-throat pinocle with the grown‑ups). At fifteen, you get a party at Feast (the Baha’i worship gathering), a Baha’i ring or necklace, a welcome meeting with the Local Spiritual Assembly, and a welcome letter and official Baha’i card from the National Spiritual Assembly. You are now a mature youth. Congratulations. After that, high school graduation and college, learning to drive, getting to vote in your first elections, and possibly being elected to a Baha’i Local Spiritual Assembly are just part of the natural upward spiral. Somewhere in there—at least in our family—you have your first filk and your first filk concert at a convention.

Each of these steps includes more empowerment in the family and community and a new set of privileges and responsibilities. Through it all, the family is there so that, at no point, does the child feel alone in the world … or alone against the world. He or she does not fall through the cracks.

Our eighteen year old children suddenly being expected to be completely independent adults is in some ways uniquely American and of fairly recent vintage. The need for young, vigorous bodies to march into war necessitates viewing boys and girls this young as fully‑fledged adults.

This cultural “norm” has ramifications in other aspects of society that we may not connect to it. Consider, for example, the fact that women in developing countries are finding it easier to juggle motherhood and career than women here in the US. They are not penalized for motherhood as we are by having to make “tough choices” that necessitate putting off childrearing or losing career equity. The reason? In these less modernized countries, the extended family unit has not been shredded as it has here. Women in these countries have a built-in support network that women in the US have to purchase.

This, of course, cascades into the way we structure government-run programs geared to aid the children of working parents. It cascades into the choices that women and married couples have to make about having children as opposed to having careers. It cascades into the fate of the elders in our society and how well or how poorly we care for them and avail ourselves of their hard‑earned wisdom. In fact, I wonder if there is any aspect of society that does not feel the impact of our expectation that young adults—just coming out of the most chaotic years of their lives in terms of bodily and emotional change and disruption—should be ready to be alone in and against the world.

And this brings me back to a hospital room in Boston, where a 19 year old boy, who should be doing his homework and arguing about what movie to go to this weekend, is instead alone against the world and struggling with the reality that he contributed to the deaths of four innocent human beings.

Here is my prayer: that parents will be conscious of their children, and conscious of what they are teaching them every single day.

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Bertrand Russell

One of the most convincing aspects of the mystic illumination is the apparent revelation of the oneness of all things, giving rise to pantheism in religion and to monism in philosophy. — Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays, “Unity and Plurality”

Thus Bertrand Russell begins a chapter on Unity and Plurality in which he explores the metaphysical or mystical concept of “oneness”.

The words “unity” and “oneness” are much-used in both religion (or mysticism) and philosophy, but are also prominent in science. As Baha’is believe in the unity of God and the oneness of mankind, physicists seek a “grand unified theory”, a principle of everything, as they seek the origins of the Universe we inhabit. It would be easy to argue that these two related terms do not mean the same thing within these disciplines. Easy, but possibly inaccurate.

Russell comments that:

An elaborate logic, beginning with Parmenides, and culminating in Hegel and his followers, has been gradually developed, to prove that the universe is one indivisible Whole, and that what seem to be its parts, if considered as substantial and self-existing, are mere illusion. The conception of a Reality quite other than the world of appearance, a reality one, indivisible, and unchanging, was introduced into Western philosophy by Parmenides, not, nominally at least, for mystical or religious reasons, but on the basis of a logical argument as to the impossibility of not‑being…. (ibid.)

The first sentence of that comment seems to me self-evident and leads, inexorably, to a place where several blind men sit arguing the reality of an elephant. To suppose that any part of the Universe is self‑existing is to suppose that one can have a trunk or a leg or an ear without the rest of a living elephant being present. It seems to me that the semantical tangle occurs around the word “illusion”.

I am told that my name, “maya”, means “illusion.” But when I research the word in Sanskrit, I find it to be far more nuanced that that simple English word implies. It refers to the creative power through which God (the first Cause) created Life, the Universe, and Everything. The illusory quality of this (like the illusory quality of the independence of an elephant’s trunk) is relative. The trunk seems to have a mind of its own, but it doesn’t; the elephant’s massive brain is driving its movements, in addition to the movements of the rest of the elephant. Our galaxy seems to be doing its own thing off in its splendid little corner of the cosmos, independently of other galaxies, but “seems” is the operative term. Its independence is limited and relative. It is responding to the larger movements of the rest of the Universe—the Milky Way is not not dancing alone.

Krishna’s warning about mistaking His “divine maya” as the substance of reality has to do with mistaking the external manifestation of a thing as its ultimate reality. In practical terms, it’s like assuming the candy shell on the outside of the M&M is the substance of the candy. To bring this point home in as visceral a way as possible, imagine that a candy-seeking mammal—assuming the exterior of his M&Ms to be their ultimate reality—licks off the shell and tosses the creamy chocolate interiors into the trash.

‘Nuff said.

Humans make this mistake in much more significant ways all the time. We chronically judge books by their covers or human beings (including ourselves) by our external appearances or lowest commonalities. We assign worth to people based on how physically pretty or sexually attractive they are, how much wealth they command, how well they dress or on credentials that proclaim them to be well-versed in certain disciplines.

Russell notes that:

Belief in a reality quite different from what appears to the senses arises with irresistible force in certain moods, which are the source of most mysticism, and of most metaphysics. While such a mood is dominant, the need of logic is not felt, and accordingly the more thoroughgoing mystics do not employ logic, but appeal directly to the immediate deliverance of their insight. But such fully developed mysticism is rare in the West. (ibid.)

I guess so, because in writing that paragraph above about the movement of our galaxy, I employed reason to explore the intuition that the galaxy—which seems to be a self-contained whirligig floating in the emptiness of space—is a separate, independent, self-existing entity. Reason, by walking into the room with the blind dudes and the elephant and circumambulating them, reaches a different conclusion: that the seemingly diverse bits of elephantine splendor are part of one indivisible Whole. Ditto, the galaxy.

My question is, why do we attach such dogmatic zero sum score‑keeping to the concept of unity and  plurality? Why is this even a binary question: Is the Universe / God / mankind one OR is it a collection of federated parts / aspects / units?

If that’s the question, then it seems to me the answer is “Yes, it is.”

Krishna is quoted in the Bhagavad Gita as saying that:

“Others follow the path of jnana, spiritual wisdom. They see that where there is One, that One is me; where there are many, all are me; they see my face everywhere.” — Bhagavad Gita 9:15, Easwaran translation)

The Gita describes the mystical Moment in which Arjuna intuits (or sees through jnana) that “within the body of the God of gods, Arjuna saw all the manifold forms of the universe united as one” (ibid 11:13)

This Moment—which is expressed in a rapturous metaphor—leads the Avatar’s cousin to exclaim: “You are the Lord of all creation, and the cosmos is your body.” (ibid 11:16)

To a Baha’i, this oneness is a given, but it should not cause the believer to become “malicious” (a word that Russell borrows from philosopher George Santayana) of the “divine maya” or the physical cosmos that results from it. Nor, I should add, is there reason for the believer to be malicious of the study of that physical reality; in a word, science.

Krishna speaks of a God that pervades and upholds Its creation. Likewise, the Torah asserts that:

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their sound has gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. — Psalm 19:1-4

The Baha’i sacred texts echo this:

“Whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth is a direct evidence of the revelation within it of the attributes and names of God, inasmuch as within every atom are enshrined the signs that bear eloquent testimony to the revelation of that Most Great Light. Methinks, but for the potency of that revelation, no being could ever exist. How resplendent the luminaries of knowledge that shine in an atom, and how vast the oceans of wisdom that surge within a drop! To a supreme degree is this true of man, who, among all created things, hath been invested with the robe of such gifts, and hath been singled out for the glory of such distinction. For in him are potentially revealed all the attributes and names of God to a degree that no other created being hath excelled or surpassed.” — Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh

It is not surprising that the impulse to acquire knowledge about our universe and ourselves has been felt so strongly in the religious community or that religious sacred texts propose a rigorous detachment. We should, Krishna says, approach this knowledge with neither “attachment or aversion.” To this, Bahaullah adds:

“He must so cleanse his heart that no remnant of either love or hate may linger therein, lest that love blindly incline him to error, or that hate repel him away from the truth” — idid. 

By now it is no surprise that Russell concurs. He writes, thusly, of the “defects which are inherent in anything malicious.”

“The logic which thus arises is not quite disinterested or candid, and is inspired by a certain hatred of the daily world to which it is to be applied. Such an attitude naturally does not tend to the best results. Everyone knows that to read an author simply in order to refute him is not the way to understand him; and to read the book of Nature with a conviction that it is all illusion is just as unlikely to lead to understanding. If our logic is to find the common world intelligible, it must not be hostile, but must be inspired by a genuine acceptance …” — Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays

Russell is speaking specifically of the hostility that “metaphysicians” and mystics show toward reason, logic, and the sciences, but his wisdom applies to any subject—whether from the lips of a religious Prophet or an atheist philosopher.

Next time: Russell on Time

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Bertrand Russell

Of the reality or unreality of the mystic’s world I know nothing. I have no wish to deny it, nor even to declare that the insight which reveals it is not a genuine insight. What I do wish to maintain—and it is here that the scientific attitude becomes imperative—is that insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth, in spite of the fact that much of the most important truth is first suggested by its means. It is common to speak of an opposition between instinct and reason… But in fact the opposition of instinct and reason is mainly illusory. Instinct, intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but the confirmation, where it is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of agreement with other beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical realm, it is insight that first arrives at what is new. — Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

Anyone who has ever heard or seen Neil DeGrasse Tyson speak on astrophysics or has read Einstein holding forth on relativity would not doubt, for a moment, Bertrand Russell’s  assertion that “much of the most important truth is first suggested” by insight or intuition. The above sentence, which kicks off his chapter on reason and intuition, about sums up my own sense of the relationship between mysticism and logic, reason and intuition. It also pretty accurately sums up the teachings of the Bahá’í Faith as voiced by Abdu’l‑Bahá.

Every subject presented to a thoughtful audience must be supported by rational proofs and logical arguments. Proofs are of four kinds: first, through sense perception; second, through the reasoning faculty; third, from traditional or scriptural authority; fourth, through the medium of inspiration. That is to say, there are four criteria or standards of judgment by which the human mind reaches its conclusions. — Abdu’l‑Bahá, Promulgation of Universal Peace, Talk from 16 August, 1912

Consequently, it has become evident that the four criteria or standards of judgment by which the human mind reaches its conclusions are faulty and inaccurate. All of them are liable to mistake and error in conclusions. But a statement presented to the mind accompanied by proofs which the senses can perceive to be correct, which the faculty of reason can accept, which is in accord with traditional authority and sanctioned by the promptings of the heart, can be adjudged and relied upon as perfectly correct, for it has been proved and tested by all the standards of judgment and found to be complete. When we apply but one test, there are possibilities of mistake. This is self-evident and manifest. — Abdu’l‑Bahá, Promulgation of Universal Peace, Talk from 16 August, 1912

Where Instinct and Reason Conflict

“Where instinct and reason do sometimes conflict,” Russell continues his thoughts on the matter, “is in regard to single beliefs, held instinctively, and held with such determination that no degree of inconsistency with other beliefs leads to their abandonment.”

Russell continues, echoing Abdu’l‑Bahá:

Instinct, like all human faculties, is liable to error. Those in whom reason is weak are often unwilling to admit this as regards themselves, though all admit it in regard to others. Where instinct is least liable to error is in practical matters as to which right judgment is a help to survival: friendship and hostility in others, for instance, are often felt with extraordinary discrimination through very careful disguises. … It is such considerations that necessitate the harmonising mediation of reason, which tests our beliefs by their mutual compatibility, and examines, in doubtful cases, the possible sources of error on the one side and on the other. In this there is no opposition to instinct as a whole, but only to blind reliance upon some one interesting aspect of instinct to the exclusion of other more commonplace but not less trustworthy aspects. It is such one-sidedness, not instinct itself, that reason aims at correcting. — Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

In advocating the scientific restraint and balance, as against the self-assertion of a confident reliance upon intuition, we are only urging, in the sphere of knowledge, that largeness of contemplation, that impersonal disinterestedness, and that freedom from practical preoccupations which have been inculcated by all the great religions of the world. Thus our conclusion, however it may conflict with the explicit beliefs of many mystics, is, in essence, not contrary to the spirit which inspires those beliefs, but rather the outcome of this very spirit as applied in the realm of thought.  — Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

Practical Preoccupations

Thus, Russell sums up the real problem with dogmatism—it saddles us with “practical preoccupations”. The context in which he makes this observation is interesting to me, as a person of faith. Freedom from these preoccupations, Russell asserts, as well as “impersonal disinterestedness” (detachment), and a “largeness of contemplation” have been inculcated by religion. To underscore the point, he then considers the philosophies in contemporary philosopher Henri Bergson’s volume Introduction to Metaphysics. 

Of Bergson’s theory that intellect is a purely practical faculty, developed in the struggle for survival, and not a source of true beliefs, we may say, first, that it is only through intellect that we know of the struggle for survival and of the biological ancestry of man: if the intellect is misleading, the whole of this merely inferred history is presumably untrue. If, on the other hand, we agree with him in thinking that evolution took place as Darwin believed, then it is not only intellect, but all our faculties, that have been developed under the stress of practical utility. — Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic  

What Russell has dug down to, in essence, is that the thing we are studying (the human intellect) and the tool we are using to study it are one and the same. We are using a tool to study itself. And, as Russell posits, if that intellect is misleading, then our appeal to reason alone can only mislead us. It is only by applying all of our evolved faculties to explore our world that we may arrive at anything approaching reality.

In the final analysis, atheist, Bertrand Russell, and faith leader Abdu’l‑Bahá come to the same conclusion: that we are more likely to arrive at a truth consistent with reality if we carefully apply all of our faculties to an issue—even, Abdu’l-Bahá suggests, to religion.

Religion must be living, vitalized, moving and progressive. If it be non-progressive it is dead. The divine institutes are evolutionary; therefore [their] revelation must be progressive and continuous. ..Sciences of former ages and philosophies of the past are useless today.  Ancient laws and archaic ethical systems will not meet the requirements of modern conditions…

       In view of this, shall blind imitations of ancestral forms and theological interpretations continue to guide the spiritual development of humanity today? Shall man gifted with the power of reason unthinkingly adhere to dogma which will not bear the analysis of reason? — Abdu’l-Bahá, Foundations of World Unity p. 83

I’ve quoted Bahá’í mathematician William S. Hatcher before on this subject, but I feel his summary of the relationship between reason and intuition—or as Abdu’l-Bahá puts it, the four kinds of proofs—is especially cogent.

It would be a mistake to say that we hold such a statement to be true because of reason, or because of intuition, or because of experience. In the final analysis, we hold something as true only because of everything else which we accept as true, that is, because this something is consistent with our experience and understanding of life as a whole. — William S. Hatcher, The Science of Religion, Association of Bahá’í Studies

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Maya Bohnhoff

Today’s blog is a departure in a number of ways. First, though it has to do with faith and reason, it is not a matter of science—unless one considers the science of ballistics or perhaps the divine science of building union between human beings. Second, it is not part of the series I started last week. I apologize for the interruption, but since the subject of this blog woke me up early on a morning after a West Wing marathon (important safety tip: never watch a season ender with a cliff hanger when it’s followed by a two part season opener). So, with apologies to readers who prefer strictly science‑related content, I’d like to talk about the human face of ballistics.

I frequently discuss issues surrounding gun violence with friends and other correspondents. Something that comes up repeatedly is the assertion that the face of crime is the face of the career criminal. Such gun legislation as universal background checks and registration will fail to have any impact because criminals are the ones committing the sensational crimes and the “ordinary” ones as well and they will simply not submit to background checks and will find illegal ways of getting guns. So, since no criminals will actually be affected by laws, there is no point to enacting laws. (Which begs the question as to why we have any laws at all, but that’s a different blog.)

Yes, certainly there are shootings perpetrated by career criminals during the commission of a crime of acquisition gone wrong. There are drug‑related crimes and gang‑related crimes, and these, too, take their toll. But we comprehend these crimes to a degree. They happen in the pursuit of a material goal. They are perpetrated by criminals—by THEM not by US.

But there are other shootings that defy comprehension—we cannot make sense of them in any way—in large part because they are not committed by criminals. They are committed by our neighbors—by US.

Many of us see the face of gun crime as young, criminal, possibly a gang member, often black. But that is not the only face of gun crime.

Henry

This is also the face of gun crime.

This is Henry, who last year killed a 13 year old neighbor boy who had lived next door to him with his mother and brother for about a month. The youth was black and, while racial stereotyping may have been what led Henry to assume that his young neighbor, Darius, was guilty of breaking and entering, that is not an established fact of the case.

Darius, who was described by those who knew him as a “good kid”, was in school at the time Henry’s house was broken into, but when Henry sat down for breakfast with his alderman one morning, he did not realize that—or perhaps simply didn’t believe it. In his mind, Darius was guilty. Henry told his alderman that he was upset the police were doing nothing, but that there were other ways of dealing with such things. The method Henry chose was to confront Darius as he was taking the trash cans to the curb for his mother. Henry  pointed a 9 mm handgun at Darius and accused him of breaking and entering. Darius raised his hands to show he was unarmed and denied the accusation. Henry shot him in the chest from five feet away—while his mother watched.

The epilogue to this case isn’t pretty either. Darius’s mother was held in a police car and questioned for two hours while her son’s body lay on the sidewalk and police tore her house apart looking for Henry’s stolen property. They also arrested an older son for a year-old truancy. I have a son. I can’t even imagine what she must have felt. But that’s a different blog.

Here’s a reality check: Darius wasn’t the only victim of this shooting. His mother was a victim, his other family members are victims, the neighbors who witnessed the murder—indeed, their entire neighborhood—are victims. And lastly, Henry is a victim of his own paranoia, anger, and the ease with which he used a gun to deal with a crime committed against him—and reasoned that it was his right to do so.

Henry’s gun was legally purchased. Meaning he had passed a background check. He had no criminal record. He was, until the moment he pulled the trigger, a law‑abiding citizen. Now he is a criminal.

I found the story of Henry and Darius while I was looking for a particular neighbor‑on-neighbor shooting that I recalled from several years ago in which a man shot and killed his next-door neighbor because of where he habitually placed his trash cans. I never did find that story; instead, I found Henry and Darius and many, many others. While the story I was looking for was several years old, these were all fresh—within the last year or so.

I found several stories of folks who shot neighbors because a dog pooped on a lawn (more in which they simply shot the dog), or because the neighbor pulled that old prank of depositing dog poop on their front porch for some perceived offense, or because the neighbor was having a loud party (that one involved two volunteer firefighters), or because rowdy teenagers were hanging out in the street and tipping over trash cans (which one gentleman felt required the use of a Bushmaster 5.56 with which he wounded several of the miscreants). I did find a shooting that transpired because of trash, but it wasn’t the one I was looking for. In this case, the shooter was an ex-policeman.

One of the stories I found was about Jonathan and Donnie. Jonathan was a 23 year old combat veteran from Albuquerque. Donnie shot him because—for unknown reasons—he was observed standing in a neighbor’s driveway holding a handgun. The neighbor called 911, then asked Donnie—who lived on his block—for help. When Jonathan went home, Donnie got in his car and pursued him, though the police were on their way. The two exchanged fire. Jonathan was killed.

Probably the most unexpected story came out of our own neck of the woods—the San Francisco Bay Area. This was the story of Martin, Mike and Doug. They were buddies who stood on different sides of national politics, but who were still close friends. They hung out and watched sporting events together, bickering about everything and nothing. Martin was an ex‑Marine whose wife had died the year before and who had been befriended by Mike. But one day, as they hung out in Mike’s garage, the bickering became serious enough that Martin went back to his house, returned with a gun and shot his two best friends dead on Mike’s front lawn.

Only Martin knows what they were arguing about that was so important it could only be settled with violence. Like the other stories, the effects of this one go beyond the deaths of two men. The act broke their families, destroyed Martin’s life, and shattered the neighborhood.

When we think of gun violence, we tend to think in terms of two affected parties—one random criminal and one victim. We think of them as strangers. But the ripples from these crimes are incalculable.

These cases are also remarkable for the closeness of the shooter and the victim—the man across the street, the one next door, a best friend—saddest of all, a family member. NPR did a piece on medical professionals in Colorado, which state is in the process of working out new gun legislation. There are doctors on both “sides” of the issue. According to polls of medical professionals in the state, about two‑thirds of them are in favor of stronger gun‑related laws; about one‑third are against them. In one of the interviews a doctor told a story of his own about a the human face of ballistics. Several months ago, he treated a woman and her husband. They’d had a fight; the husband accused his wife of cheating. Angry, he grabbed the pistol he had purchased to defend his family, and shattered that family irretrievably: he shot his wife. The doctor couldn’t save her. Her husband, the doctor said, “…made a snap decision, and he realized his life will never be the same, and hers was gone.”

The doctor made a comment that should give all of us pause: He was struck by how often the people he meets in these situations are surprised at the consequences of their actions. They do not expect the outcome of their rage to be permanent. If they had not picked up a gun in that moment of anger, or if they had aimed that gun at a paper target or a tin can, or even the wall, it need not have been.

“I see patients every day,” one doctor said, “that are right on the edge of being unstable and are out there in the environment, and they describe problems with access to medications, problems with access to psychiatric care or substance abuse care, problems with access to homes or to shelter. But they don’t describe problems with access to guns.”

Consequences.

Everything we do, everything we say, everything we think has consequences. It shapes us, our relationships with the people in our lives, and our environment. It determines how people react to us and what they do, say and think in response to what we do, say and think. Sometimes the consequences are mild and we can work them out. A disagreement, an argument, a fight—the consequences might be a frosty night or two in the dog house, the necessity of an apology, possibly—worst case—a broken nose, friendship or marriage. But, when there is a gun in the equation, the consequences can easily be terminal. They cannot be mended, taken back, or apologized for. There is no way to make restitution. And the ripples from those consequences—sudden and awful—reach far beyond the shooter and the victim or victims.

If we were able to divorce ourselves from the emotional baggage and look at this as a case of risk management, what conclusions might we draw? We’ll probably never know. But we need to at least attempt a rational discussion of what constitutes a reasonable, effective, compassionate, just and holistic response to gun violence. A discussion that recognizes the many faces that it wears. A discussion that recognizes that sometimes the consequences of accepting the status quo are too great.

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Heraclitus

Ways of Knowing

I meant to blog about Ian Hutchinson’s book Monopolizing Knowledge, in which he explores the proposition that science is the only valid tool for acquiring knowledge and knowing what is worth knowing about ourselves and our world. Somehow, in the process of researching the article, I found my thoughts about the subject widening to include other sources.

Ultimately, what I want to consider in this article is the core question: What is the nature of scientific thought as a way of knowing things and how does it relate to other ways of knowing things?

“The things that can be seen, heard, and learned,” says Heraclitus (died 475 BCE), “are what I prize the most.”

About this, Bertrand Russell, celebrated 20th Century philosopher and a personal hero, remarks:

This is the language of the empiricist, to whom observation is the sole guarantee of truth. “The sun is new every day,” is another fragment; and this opinion, in spite of its paradoxical character, is obviously inspired by scientific reflection, and no doubt seemed to him to obviate the difficulty of understanding how the sun can work its way underground from west to east during the night. — Bertrand Russell, “Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays.” (Mysticism)

“This theory, though,” Russell concludes, “no longer one which science can accept, is nevertheless scientific in spirit.”

That idea of something being scientific in spirit snagged in my synapses for a couple of reasons. One was the realization that observation does not always yield truth. Something more is necessary to arrive at that. Another was that something that was not, itself, scientifically true (such as Heraclitus’s conclusion that the sun is new every day) could be true to the spirit of science. That is, it could be an honest attempt to apply observation and reason to a subject to arrive at a truth. The philosopher fails to reach his destination not because his reason is faulty, but simply because he does not have sufficient information to work with.

Zen and the Art of Lightbulb Replacement

Heraclitus, according to Russell, was not merely an empiricist who believed only in what he could see, hear, or touch. Yes, he did say that “You cannot step twice into the same rivers; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.” But he also said that “We step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not.”

How very Zen! And, indeed, Heraclitus’s statement reminds me of a joke told to me by a Zen Buddhist. (Ahem)

Q: How many Zen Buddhists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Two—one to change the lightbulb and one NOT to change the lightbulb.

Russell’s point in picking out these seemingly disconnected statements about rivers is that one is scientific and the other mystical—yet both came from the same mind. He uses these and other statements by Heraclitus to show …

… how intimately the two tendencies are blended in the system of Heraclitus. Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe; and this kind of feeling leads Heraclitus, on the basis of his science, to strangely poignant sayings concerning life and the world…  (ibid.)

What does Bertrand Russell conclude about this blending? He was, after all, an atheist. One that my college philosophy professor employed with the intent of pointing out to the religious members of his class (several Bahá’ís, two followers of Yogananda, and a handful of Christians) the falsity of our theistic world view. (More on that later.)

Russell summarized his thoughts on blending science and mysticism this way:

In such a nature we see the true union of the mystic and the man of science—the highest eminence, as I think, that it is possible to achieve in the world of thought. (ibid.)

Yow. Not what I would have expected from someone my college professor assured me would skewer the irrational ideas inherent in religion (such as he’d learned from his fundamentalist father) on sharp, pointy logic.

This would seem to fit Russell’s concept of a blending of science and mysticism—this idea that there is an “upper world”, as Plato calls it. Not so fast, Russell seems to say, and comments:

An Attitude Toward Life

Russell’s subject in the essay I’m quoting from is mysticism, and he has words to say about that as well. He does not pooh‑pooh it as navel gazing (although he justifiably questions some of its premises). He says of the traditionally—or perhaps radically—mystical path that it holds a “belief in insight as against discursive analytic knowledge: the belief in a way of wisdom, sudden, penetrating, coercive, which is contrasted with the slow and fallible study of outward appearance by a science relying wholly upon the senses.” (emphasis mine)

Further, Russell explains that ”The definite beliefs at which mystics arrive are the result of refection upon the inarticulate experience gained in the moment of insight.”

I find his use of the word “reflection” interesting, because it suggests that the mystic—even though he may be decrying the use of reason and logic—is employing both to consider and meditate upon his moment of insight, thereby to arrive at his beliefs He is, in essence, working in a spirit of science, whether or not he wishes to admit it. This finds a parallel in the idea that scientists work in a spirit of belief, whether or not they wish to admit it.

The mystic must employ reason to study his inarticulate experience; the scientist must believe the universe to be a place that is knowable through sense and reason in order to confidently employ those tools to study it.

Russell takes a moment to throw the mystic’s experience into contrast with the scientist’s:

“The first and most direct outcome of the moment of illumination is belief in the possibility of a way of knowledge which may be called revelation or insight or intuition, as contrasted with sense, reason, and analysis, which are regarded as blind guides leading to the morass of illusion.” (ibid., emphasis mine)

Russell continues to discuss some of the perils of radical mysticism—its view of plurality and division as illusory, the unreality of time, the equality of good and evil. But, in the end, he concludes:

“I yet believe that, by sufficient restraint, there is an element of wisdom to be learned from the mystical way of feeling, which does not seem to be attainable in any other manner. If this is the truth, mysticism is to be commended as an attitude toward life, not as a creed about the world.” (ibid.)

Marriage with the World

A Marriage Made in Heaven

Bertrand Russell thus arrives close to my destination at the conclusion of my last blog. He sees that Mulder and Scully—the scientist and the mystic, the skeptic and the true believer—must somehow come to coexist in the same mental universe in order to have the most holistic, beneficial effect on how human beings view their world. In his concluding paragraph of his opening segment on mysticism, he speaks of “the genuine scientific temper”.

“After Socrates has explained that there is an idea of the good, but not of such things as hair and mud and dirt, Parmenides advises him “not to despise even the meanest things,” and this advice shows the genuine scientific temper. It is with this impartial temper that the mystic’s apparent insight into a higher reality and a hidden good has to be combined if philosophy is to realise its greatest possibilities. And it is failure in this respect that has made so much of idealistic philosophy thin, lifeless, and insubstantial. It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit: divorced from it, they remain barren. ” (ibid.)

I swear I’ve heard something like that somewhere before. Oddly enough, it was in a sacred text.

It is incumbent upon every man of insight and understanding to strive to translate that which hath been written into reality and action…. That one indeed is a man who, today, dedicateth himself to the service of the entire human race. — Bahá’u'lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u'lláh, p 250

Bahá’u'lláh’s son, Abdu’l‑Bahá, explains what the Prophet means in more detail:

The admission that scientific attainment is praiseworthy does not confer scientific knowledge. … Knowledge of human conditions and the needed remedy for them is not the cause of their betterment. To admit that health is good does not constitute health. A skilled physician is needed to remedy existing human conditions. … His mere knowledge is not health; it must be applied and the remedy carried out. The attainment of any object is conditioned upon knowledge, volition and action. Unless these three conditions are forthcoming there is no execution or accomplishment. — Abdu’l‑Bahá, Foundations of World Unity, pp 99‑100 (emphasis mine)

Of course, this reminds me of a parable the Buddha tells (most things do), but I shall here decide that to NOT tell the story is the better part of Zen.

I promised I’d say something more about my philosophy professor and his use of Bertrand Russell to quash the believers in his class. He gave a … er …. impassioned lecture about the inherently destructive nature of religious ideals. Then he played a tape of a Bertrand Russell speech. In the speech, Russell made the point that if everyone actually lived by Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, the world would be a far better place. My professor glanced up at us, startled, frowned mightily, then left the classroom. We listened to the entire tape, then—when he failed to return—went to our next classes.

I ended up having a very amiable and mutually respectful relationship with this professor, and he mellowed significantly during that year. I will always remember him with fondness for introducing me to Bertrand Russell’s thought-provoking work.

Next time: A further look at the relationship between mysticism and science.

Continue reading »]]> This is the last installment of my exploration of the Intelligence Squared debate between four stars in the firmament of science and commentary (scientists Ian Hutchinson and Lawrence Krauss and writers Dinesh D’Souza and Michael Shermer). I’d like to close by taking a look at one of the central ideas that was addressed (though unsatisfactorily, in my opinion) during the debate: the nature of God.

Shermer:

If God is supernatural, that is, outside of the space and time, there’s no way for us to know it. Therefore, whatever God is, it would have to be a natural being or at least some kind of a being that reaches in to stir the particles, and if he does, then we should be able to measure it, because that’s what we do as scientists. We measure the motions of particles. And so far we have no evidence of that. 

Shermer may not be aware of the evidence that God stirs the particles, but that may simply be because he is one of the particles being stirred. I would submit that the very intellect that allows us to ask these questions and attempt to answer them is, itself, evidence of the particles being stirred. The history of science is replete with examples of scientists observing things and describing them erroneously because they didn’t know what they were looking at. There’s an old aphorism that when one has a hammer, everything looks like a nail. How one interprets information one receives depends in large part on context.

This is true of something as simple as a word or phrase. Take this headline: “Island Boy Taken by Sharks.” Horrific, right? Not really. The headline was about a Hawaiian youth who was drafted onto the San Jose Sharks hockey team. Context is important because it sets up our expectations for what comes next. Fortunately, the weight of evidence for something can overcome this tendency.

Further evidence of this stirring (shaking, whipping whatever) is in the experience and teachings of such subject matter experts as Krishna, Buddha, Christ, Bahá’u’lláh, etc. Their teachings and the transformation they bring to human lives are a parallel to the motions of particles. Science deals in physical reality; religion deals in spiritual reality. But the two intersect, and the audience question about what we derive from a belief in God (which Donovan didn’t submit to be answered) is apt. In effect, D’Souza answered it when he related that while science can tell us animals feel pain it doesn’t suggest what we should do with that information.

Asa Gray

D’Souza’s closing in part reframed the question about science refuting God:

American botanist Asa Gray wrote Darwin a letter in which he said, “As a Christian, I was very inspired upon reading your book, because I have read in the book of Genesis that God made the world and God made man, but there’s no information about how this might’ve occurred. And when I read your book, I understood not only why God made humans, but why there’s so much suffering in the world. Evolution helps to account for the reason why there’s suffering both for humans, but also in the animal kingdom.” 

Now, we’re debating here has science refuted God? And at some senses, we’ve been talking past each other. If I take a pot of water and put it on the stove, what am I trying to do? I’m trying to make a cup of tea. Now, Lawrence Krauss would come along and say that the molecules are heating up, he could give a full scientific account of what’s going on, but he would’ve completely missed the purpose behind what I’m doing. Scientific explanation doesn’t refute the purposeful explanation, it coexists alongside it, and so it is with God. 

This is the point, I think. And I’d like to take this to a more real-world level. I write books. If you asked me how I did that, I can give you two different types of answers. I can talk to you about inspiration, about characters that talk to me and dictate their behavior. I can talk about how the ideas come together in my head, about ‘aha’ moments and epiphanies and about how when that all comes together, I feel as if I’m doing barrel rolls in an airplane and how the words pour out onto the page with lightning speed and seemingly little effort on my part. Or I can talk to you about sitting down at the computer and typing 100,000 words or so and how the MS goes to my editor and passes back and forth between us before galleys are sent for the final book, and how the book is printed from an electronic file. I could talk to you about what sort of ink is used and what font and size. I can talk to you about the fabrication of the paper, the printing press, the cover art and how the books are packed into boxes and shipped to bookstores.

One explanation is about the how of the physical manufacture of the book you hold in your hand. The other is about how the content was generated. One explanation isn’t right and the other wrong. And indeed, they’re interdependent. That book can’t have come into physical existence without both parts of the process. But here’s the deal: the absolutely critical part of that process is the first one—the imagining and writing of the book. Without that creative act, all the paper and ink in the world would be meaningless. No one would derive any benefit from the ink and the paper without the creative act that preceded it of necessity.

Consider the lady beside me who is writing in this little book. It seems a very trifling, ordinary matter; but upon intelligent reflection you will conclude that what has been written presupposes and proves the existence of a writer. These words have not written themselves, and these letters have not come together of their own volition. It is evident there must be a writer.

And now consider this infinite universe. Is it possible that it could have been created without a Creator? Or that the Creator and cause of this infinite congeries of worlds should be without intelligence? Is the idea tenable that the Creator has no comprehension of what is manifested in creation? Man, the creature, has volition and certain virtues. Is it possible that his Creator is deprived of these? — Abdu’l-Bahá, Promulgation of Universal Peace, p115 (from a talk at the Hotel Plaza in Chicago, IL, 1912)

When we look for proof that God stirs the particles, I think we often neglect to look at ourselves. This is a puzzling oversight, given how many sacred texts insist that we are created in the spiritual image of God. As Bahá’u’lláh puts it: “He hath known God who hath known himself.”

Continue reading »]]> If you’ll recall, during the last episode of our exploration of the Intelligence Squared debate on the proposition that “science refutes God”, Lawrence Krauss summed up his position by saying that:

“…human beings are also inevitably programmed to ask, “Why?” as we’ve heard it.  But the “Why?” question is ill-posed, because it presumes purpose; it presumes the answer to the question before you ask the question. … And science tells us there’s no evidence of purpose.  …and, therefore, science, by telling us there’s no need for purpose, has refuted the need for God, and that’s why you should support our position.”

Krauss’s purposeless existence, like many human constructs, only works if one does not think about it too deeply or ask the sort of questions that humans tend to ask (programmed by what?), but cows—in their infinite wisdom—never do. In the end, he seems to advocate the idea that we create meaning with the full knowledge that it is imaginary. I have to ask, in what way is an imaginary purpose any better than none at all? He also does not explain what it means to say that, through a random and purposeless evolution, this one life form—mankind—is programmed to do anything, much less see patterns.

There are areas in which even Krauss and company do not carry their questions or consider the consequences of their purported appreciation for reality. Some of these are areas of critical importance to our daily existence. It’s fine to philosophize about purpose and meaning and determinism where it relates to the substrate of physical laws, but that’s just mental masturbation (you will pardon the phrase) if it has no impact—much less a beneficial impact—on human existence.

Krauss might argue that worrying about having a beneficial impact on human existence is to instill false purpose and therefore a false ideal. This harks back to that form of environmentalism that completely separates mankind from nature as if he is something superimposed arbitrarily on it from the outside and is a pernicious interloper that Nature would be better off without. Krauss, though, does not argue that man is unnatural as much as that he is irrelevant. Practical human application seems to have no place in the dialogue.

That is what I find the most disappointing about Krauss’s talking points. They fail to yield practical consequence for my life or any other.

I would ask Krauss for two things:

1. To show some evidence to support his various contentions about life, the universe and everything, including that science refutes God and says there is no evidence of purpose.
2. To illustrate how his philosophy of reality informs, benefits or transforms life on this planet.

All in all, he fails to show how his idea of reality impacts the reality in which any of us actually live. If we all believed life to be without purpose, and human beings to be marginally smarter animals, in what way does that make our lives more livable, valued, happier, fulfilling or productive?

In response to Krauss and Shermer’s reductionist ideas, Ian Hutchinson offered an argument against scientism that I wish he’d enlarged upon:

Ian Hutchinson

Claiming more for science than is warranted by its competence does not promote science; it damages it. Talking as if science is all the real knowledge there is, that — as this scientistic motion does, alienates from science people who know better than to accept such an unjustified metaphysical extrapolation. It alienates intellectuals, particularly from other nonscientific disciplines, and so gives rise to the culture wars that have roiled the academy for the last few decades. And it alienates nonintellectuals whose opinions are more intuitive and practical but who know that their life is more than some reductionistic description in terms of atoms and molecules.

I think he’s right. I think that scientism—as a dogmatic outgrowth of science—is as damaging to real science as religious dogmatism is to real religion.

What do I mean by “real religion?” Abdu’l-Bahá, I think, makes this clear in a talk he gave at the Temple Emmanu-El in San Francisco in 1912.

“…when we speak of religion, we mean the essential foundation or reality of religion, not the dogmas and blind imitations which have gradually encrusted it and which are the cause of the decline and effacement of a nation. These are inevitably destructive and a menace and hindrance to a nation’s life…”

The Other Side of the Mountain

Except for that brief excerpt above, I have given the religious side of the debate short shrift other than to critique the (to me) dubious choice to play defense using specifically and sectarian Christian doctrine as equipment. I appreciated a number of their points. For example, Dinesh D’Souza’s response to the question of faith:

Dinesh D’Souza

If I can add a big thought to that, it is — you ask if [faith is] scientific, and I would say no. Faith is not scientific. But faith is completely rational. Why? Because where empirical evidence can’t go, it’s not unreasonable to believe on faith. Let’s say, for example, you’re making any kind of a decision, whether to invest in Brazil or whether to propose marriage. You bring in all the evidence you can. And yet if you’re asking the question, will I make money? Or what will life be like with this woman over the next 30 years? You’re never going to have a full answer. Now, you can say, “I’ll be an agnostic and wait for the data to come in.” But the data will never come in. She’ll marry someone else, and you’ll both be dead. So you put in all the knowledge you can, and the leap of faith is a completely rational bridge from knowledge to action. 

While I would disagree with D’Souza that faith is unscientific, I completely agree that it is a rational response to the human reality. I disagree with the first point because the model of faith suggested by the sacred texts uses the principles of the scientific process—hypothesize, test, assess and adjust. This is most clearly expanded upon in the writings of Bahá’u’lláh, but Christ also advances the idea, a number of times, that one must apply reason to observation to inform spiritual decisions about what is true or false. (Matthew 7: 15-18 et al)

His second point is well taken: We are often called upon to act in the absence of empirical data or foreknowledge of the results (fruits) of a decision. If we wait for certitude based completely on empirical facts, life will pass us by. Buddha gives a marvelous allegory about this involving a man who’s shot by a poisoned arrow and insists on knowing everything about the arrow, the poison and the shooter before he will allow the physician to heal him. Buddha’s summation: “Well, that man would die. But he would die without knowing any of these things.”

But not only will we not progress without the faith to act, the scientific process itself would be hamstrung if scientists had to base everything on empirical fact and leave the rational process of inference out of the equation. Some of the most important scientific statements are not proven facts, but rationally inferred “truths”. Take E=mc2, for example. It is a far more important statement, scientifically, than “the this screen is white”, but it is an inferred statement, not one that can be directly observed through the human senses.

And this is something else that disappoints me about the A Team’s presentation: they neglect to acknowledge that, even within the realm of science, there is more than one way to “know” things. They perpetuate the myth that science is about provable facts and only provable facts and moreover, that science can prove anything worth proving. This, as Ian Hutchinson notes above, does not promote science, it damages it.

Next time: Episode, the last: Stirring the Particles

Continue reading »]]> The setting for the conversation is an Intelligence Squared debate in which we have two teams: Team A, composed of physicist Lawrence Krauss and writer Michael Shermer, arguing the motion that “science refutes God” and Team B, composed of political commentator Dinesh D’Souza and physicist Ian Hutchinson, arguing against the motion.

During his promotion of the proposition that science refutes God, Lawrence Krauss made the following remark:

Human beings were clearly programmed by evolution to impute intentionality to the world around them.  Meaning and purpose was infused in all everyday events to make sense of a dangerous, difficult, and uncaring world, so we had rituals behind the sun, the moon, the planets, the wind, the earth, the oceans, in all societies. The rise of our physical understanding has slowly caused us to do away with those many gods; we no longer have Mars, the god of war, Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea, Thor, the god of storms.  As Michael has said, everyone here, or maybe everyone, is now an atheist with respect to those gods, and there’s a reason for that.  Science has taught us that instead of capricious beings, there’s an order to nature, and that order does not appear to involve a divinity.

Programming is an act that itself requires intention. Programming does not randomly occur. Krauss asks us to believe that a process with neither a rational and abstract intelligence nor intention somehow imbues one type of creature out of the billions on the planet with both. He puts this idea in passive terms (“purpose was infused”) so that there seems to be no infuser, but logic dictates that if purpose was infused someone must have done the original infusing. The fact that human beings are the only creatures who infuse their lives with meaning—and whose thoughts, words and actions actually have meaning—is not explained by the simple expedient of claiming that we were programmed without a programmer or learned to infuse meaning without a faculty that does the infusing and someone to give instruction in its use.

I appreciate his invoking a “rise in physical understanding”. I think the distinction is important because it draws into question a key assumption that Krauss makes. This is that a physical understanding of the universe is the only understanding either possible or valuable. The very fact that we’re having a discussion about non-physical realities seems to undermine that supposition. Those non-physical realities are where a great many of us live. We spend more time considering intangibles than we do our most critical physical needs such as what we will eat or when. For most people, these things have become secondary to the activities they use food to fuel—chiefly, thought about non-tangibles.

Krauss continues:

Skeptic

There’s no need for a divinity; laws of nature describable by mathematics make predictions that allow us to — not only to predict the future, but control it, without the need for any supernatural shenanigans.  And, in fact, it amazes me that asking the question, “Is God necessary?” is somehow an evil thing.  When we stop asking questions, that will be an evil thing.  Science has taught us also that we want to believe, in the words of Fox Mulder.

Wow, that’s quite a claim: that we can predict the future and control it. I’d love to see evidence of that. If we could, indeed control the future, I doubt we’d be staring down the barrel of so many seemingly intractable problems. And here I cannot stress enough that these problems can be controlled only by the marshaling of attitudes and the application of forces that are, according to Krauss, unscientific, based as they are in religious teaching. Whether we’re talking about poverty, gun violence, war, racism, or climate change, the mere application of mathematics or scientific principle will not allow us to control the future. There is an element missing that is not a scientific truth, but a spiritual one. As I’ve commented before, science may be able to at last confirm what religion has told us for millennia—that we are all members of one human family—but it cannot tell how to act on that knowledge. That must come from elsewhere.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that Krauss knows this, too.

And that brings me to his point about asking the question about the need for God. The question itself is not evil. Questions are good; and if we answer them honestly, they help us clarify the world within and around us. What is evil is the dogmatic assertion that God is not necessary and that, therefore, we need pay no attention to anything that comes to us from a religious or spiritual sphere. With an attitude that intractable, all the math in the world is just a meaningless pile of numbers.

Going further with his Fox Mulder connection, Krauss continues:

And we should be skeptical of those desires.  As the physicist Richard Feynman told us, the easiest people to fool are ourselves.  As scientists, we have to train ourselves to be skeptical of wanting to believe.  And we should try and overcome our natural tendency to assume special significance to events.  And human being are also inevitably programmed to ask, “Why?” as we’ve heard it.  But the “Why?” question is ill-posed, because it presumes purpose; it presumes the answer to the question before you ask the question.

What if there is no purpose?  Does there need to be purpose?  And science tells us there’s no evidence of purpose.  So the “Why?” question is ill-posed.  Our opponents want to keep the clock from ticking by avoiding the evidence of reality; and, therefore, science, by telling us there’s no need for purpose, has refuted the need for God, and that’s why you should support our position.

Dogmatist

Despite his seemingly arbitrary assertion that “science tells us there’s no evidence of purpose”, Krauss makes a good point about belief and skepticism. But this applies equally to his own cherished beliefs. The parallel to the X-Files is ironic in that context, because ultimately, most viewers understood that Mulder was the real skeptic, while Scully was the dogmatist. Scully was a poster child for the idea that we should be equally skeptical of the desire to make science (or ourselves) god. Bahá’u’lláh, Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, in one of His most oft-quoted passages notes that the true seeker after knowledge:

 “ …must so cleanse his heart that no remnant of either love or hate may linger therein, lest that love blindly incline him to error, or that hate repel him away from the truth.” — Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p 282

Krauss suggests that there is no answer to the “Why” question and that even asking the question is, if not evil, at least wrong-headed. If there is no purpose, then human philosophers really are, as Abdu’l-Bahá suggests, not nearly as wise as cows, who have come to their contentment with a lack of purpose without study, thought, or angst.

In fact, I think Abdu’l-Bahá’s comments on this (made at a meeting of free-thinkers in 1912) seem to answer Krauss directly.

If it be claimed that the intellectual reality of man belongs to the world of nature—that it is a part of the whole—we ask is it possible for the part to contain virtues which the whole does not possess? For instance, is it possible for the drop to contain virtues of which the aggregate body of the sea is deprived? Is it possible for a leaf to be imbued with virtues which are lacking in the whole tree? Is it possible that the extraordinary faculty of reason in man is animal in character and quality? On the other hand, it is evident and true, though most astounding, that in man there is present this supernatural force or faculty which discovers the realities of things and which possesses the power of idealization or intellection. It is capable of discovering scientific laws, and science we know is not a tangible reality. Science exists in the mind of man as an ideal reality. The mind itself, reason itself, is an ideal reality and not tangible.

Notwithstanding this, some of the sagacious men declare: We have attained to the superlative degree of knowledge; we have penetrated the laboratory of nature, studying sciences and arts; we have attained the highest station of knowledge in the human world; we have investigated the facts as they are and have arrived at the conclusion that nothing is rightly acceptable except the tangible, which alone is a reality worthy of credence; all that is not tangible is imagination and nonsense.

Strange indeed that after twenty years training in colleges and universities man should reach such a station wherein he will deny the existence of the ideal or that which is not perceptible to the senses. Have you ever stopped to think that the animal already has graduated from such a university? Have you ever realized that the cow is already a professor emeritus of that university? For the cow without hard labor and study is already a philosopher of the superlative degree in the school of nature. The cow denies everything that is not tangible, saying, “I can see! I can eat! Therefore, I believe only in that which is tangible!”

Then why should we go to the colleges? Let us go to the cow. — Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 451

Human beings without purpose are the most dangerous, destructive and self-destructive creatures on the planet. The evidence of this is incontrovertible. But I think the issue here isn’t that Krauss and company believe that there is no purpose in the universe or in human life (and therefore in their own lives), it’s that their disbelief is only skin deep. Their behavior indicates a belief in both purpose and human uniqueness that is so immersive, they fail to recognize it.

Biologists assert that we are programmed genetically to reproduce and continue the existence of our species—which is a purpose we share with all life. But it IS a purpose. It is a purpose acknowledged by every biologist I’ve read or spoken to. So when Krauss speaks of natural laws having no purpose, I have to ask how that applies to genetics and evolution. If purpose exists at so basic a level, how can it not exist at the level of human consciousness? Indeed, where did that unique consciousness arise from in a purposeless universe that is governed deterministically by natural laws? And if natural laws are deterministic, whence the randomness Krauss would assert is a property of evolution? The very determinism of certain laws implies purpose.

But let’s look at the idea of purposelessness in the realm of human consciousness—the place where all of us actually live. If there is no purpose, why do science at all? Why build human communities? Why have families, schools, hospitals, medicine, governments? Why give a rat’s hiney about the environment, or cruelty to other humans—much less to animals, some of which we use for food? Why create laws of human conduct if there is no purpose to them but to allow us to imagine ourselves in some way superior to other creatures? Why should we educate our children or protect them from such things as sexual predators—other animals don’t make the distinctions we do between “healthy” sex and abusive sex, why should we? Indeed, why invest so much in the care and feeding of children since it only serves to distract us from the purely animal pleasures that a purposeless existence would afford (and actually does afford) many?

A Marriage Made in Heaven

Being human is exponentially more complicated than being a cow, and while I appreciate the impulse behind Krauss and Shermer’s need to simplify and order human existence by assuming it is only a matter of a “rise in physical understanding”, it seems to trivialize that existence. We may now blame our genes and laws of physics for our estate, and need not concern ourselves with the sorts of nonsense that religious teaching asks us to embrace—such as a need to evolve spiritually as we have physically so that we can put all that mathematic and scientific truth to good use.

Next time: Wrapping up with a look at purpose and determinism.

Continue reading »]]> No time to ‘splain. Let me sum up…  The setting is an Intelligence Squared debate in which we have two teams: Team A, composed of physicist Lawrence Krauss and writer Michael Shermer, arguing the motion that “science refutes God” and Team B, composed of political commentator Dinesh D’Souza and physicist Ian Hutchinson, arguing against the motion.

The debate moved to a secondary subject, which was the nature of physical laws. Team A (spokesman Laurence Krauss) opened the dialogue this way….

– so I want to just make it clear.  The laws of physics are deterministic.  The Schrödinger equation which is the basis of quantum mechanics is a second order differential equation, and, therefore, the laws are deterministic.  Our observations aren’t deterministic, but the underlying laws are deterministic.  Nothing’s changed in 400 years.  And so it’s really important – You start with an initial condition for the equations of quantum mechanics, and the evolution of the system is determined unambiguously – It has no uncertainty.  Your measurement of the system has uncertainty, but the evolution of the underlying system is completely determined.

This argument seems circular to me. Essentially Krauss is saying that since we have chosen to order quantum mechanical equations in this way, and label them thusly, therefore the laws are deterministic. The argument that it is our observations and not the underlying laws that are ambiguous is a satisfying one, and I would say obviously applies to mechanistic physical structures, but it doesn’t account for intervention by competing systems and sub-systems.

To illustrate, gravity pulls objects down along a pre-determined trajectory … unless another system or object intervenes, then the trajectory is changed. That new trajectory may be determined by laws of physics, but it can be upset yet again by another intervention. That these other objects or systems can intervene is, itself, an evidence that though its laws may be deterministic taken alone, as a system, they are not.

Moreover, this is an argument given by the same limited consciousness that is making the ambiguous observations. If we are to have any external knowledge of the “water” in which we swim that is not filtered through that same water, it must come from an external source … a God.

Abdu’l-Bahá spoke at some length about the role of the senses and reason in the formation of human philosophy and scientific views before an audience of agnostics, atheists and free-thinkers in San Francisco back in 1912. I’m going to let him debate Krauss on this point:

The criterion of judgment in the estimation of western philosophers is sense perception. They consider that which is tangible or perceptible to the senses to be a reality—that there is no doubt of its existence. For example, we prove the existence of this light through the sense of sight… The opinion of these philosophers is that such perception is reality, that the senses are the highest standard of perception and judgment, in which there can neither be doubt nor uncertainty. In the estimation of the philosophers of the Orient, especially those of Greece and Persia, the standard of judgment is the intellect. They are of the opinion that the criterion of the senses is defective, and their proof is that the senses are often deceived and mistaken. That which is liable to mistake cannot be infallible, cannot be a true standard of judgment.

Among the senses the most powerful and reliable is that of sight. This sense views a mirage as a body of water and is positive as to its character, whereas a mirage is nonexistent. The sense of vision, or sight, sees reflected images in a mirror as verities, when reason declares them to be nonexistent. The eye sees the sun and planets revolving around the earth, whereas in reality the sun is stationary, central, and the earth revolves upon its own axis. The sense of sight sees the earth as a plane, whereas the faculty of reason discovers it to be spherical. The eye views the heavenly bodies in boundless space as small and insignificant, whereas reason declares them to be colossal suns. … Briefly, there are many instances and evidences which disprove the assertion that tangibilities and sense impressions are certainties, for the senses are misleading and often mistaken. How, then, can we rightly declare that they prove reality when the standard or criterion itself is defective? — Abdu’l-Bahá, Promulgation of Universal Peace, p 356

 Krauss continues: 

 I told you if the stars moved around today, I’d be really thinking there’s some intelligence in the universe. There’s just never been such an observation. So until there is, I’ll assume the reasonable logical thing, since there’s never been such an observation, there’s unlikely to be one. That’s all. As a scientist, I can say what’s likely and what’s unlikely. I don’t believe anything. I can say, is this likely or unlikely. That’s all. 

I have to ask why the stars moving would imply there’s some intelligence in the universe. Why would a rational intelligence arbitrarily move things around? Wouldn’t rather, the existence of order and a rational creature that insists on infusing life with meaning imply the existence of such a rational intelligence in the universe as a whole?

Krauss’s construct seems both arbitrary and non sequitur. It’s as if one said, “If a red rose grew on my white gardenia bush, it would imply there’s love in the universe.” The two things aren’t congruent.

His contention that he doesn’t believe anything is disingenuous at best. His entire performance here has been about what he believes to be true based on his personal experience and perception of the universe as filtered through—well, through his beliefs and perceptions. What he states here: that if stars moved around arbitrarily he’d believe in a God is a statement of the belief that God must be arbitrary and lack of arbitrariness in the universe means there’s no God.

Speaking to that same group I mentioned above, Abdu’l-Bahá spoke to the subject of reason, as well:

The philosophers of the East consider the perfect criterion to be reason or intellect, and according to that standard the realities of all objects can be proved; for, they say, the standard of reason and intellect is perfect, and everything provable through reason is veritable. Therefore, those philosophers consider all philosophical deductions to be correct when weighed according to the standard of reason, and they state that the senses are the assistants and instruments of reason, and that although the investigation of realities may be conducted through the senses, the standard of knowing and judgment is reason itself.…

Man is distinguished above the animals through his reason. The perceptions of man are of two kinds: tangible, or sensible, and reasonable, whereas the animal perceptions are limited to the senses, the tangible only. The tangible perceptions may be likened to this candle, the reasonable perceptions to the light. Calculations of mathematical problems and determining the spherical form of the earth are through the reasonable perceptions. The center of gravity is a hypothesis of reason. Reason itself is not tangible, perceptible to the senses. Reason is an intellectual verity or reality. All qualities are ideal realities, not tangible realities. For instance, we say this man is a scholarly man. Knowledge is an ideal attainment not perceptible to the senses. When you see this scholarly man, your eye does not see his knowledge, your ear cannot hear his science, nor can you sense it by taste. It is not a tangible verity. Science itself is an ideal verity. It is evident, therefore, that the perceptions of man are twofold: the reasonable and the tangible, or sensible. — Abdu’l-Bahá, ibid. pp. 356-7

All of the above leads me to ask a perfectly serious question: As it is possible to be blinded by strong emotion, dogmatism or wishful thinking, is it possible (as several songwriters have suggested) to be blinded by science? Can our belief in or trust of our ability to know ourselves and the universe we inhabit blind us to mistaken perceptions?

Seems to me the answer is obvious: if we can be blinded by one thing, we can be blinded by another. As Abdu’l-Bahá suggests, it is through a concerted application of reason to the things we observe—both tangible and intangible—that we arrive at a clearer perception of ourselves and our environment. But that perception can never be perfectly objective. We live in the environment we are trying to study and cannot see it from a different perspective. We live in our own heads, which makes study of same problematic, at best. This makes me think of Heisenberg and his Uncertainty Principle which posits that it is impossible to observe certain pairs of attributes of a thing or, more broadly, that by observing something, we alter it in some way. In physics, this is often illustrated with the impossibility of measuring the speed of something and its location.

But when the thing we are trying to measure is our own thought, our own perceptions, our own intangible, insensible rational workings, the task becomes even more impossible. We can map the path of a neuron, measure the speed of a synaptic interaction, or measure the volume of a human brain—we can even determine the nature of the electrical and chemical makeup of the physical evidences of the thought process—but we can do all that and still not have touched the thoughts themselves.

Which is not to say we shouldn’t try to understand all of it. In fact, I would suggest that what those beings who claim to speak for the Divine have told us is that understanding ourselves and our universe is the purpose behind our very existence as rational beings. “He hath known God,” writes Bahá’u’lláh, “who hath known himself.”

This begs the question: Which Self is it that we know? Do we know ourselves by what we hold in common with other animals, or by what distinguishes us from them?

Next time: Krauss argues against purpose in the universe.

Continue reading »]]> The story so far…  The setting is an Intelligence Squared debate in which we have two teams: Team A, composed of physicist Lawrence Krauss and writer Michael Shermer, arguing the motion that “science refutes God” and Team B, composed of political commentator Dinesh D’Souza and physicist Ian Hutchinson, arguing against the motion.

Lawrence Krauss continued his discussion of the inhospitable universe with this ramble:

And if it were much bigger than we measure, it’s true that galaxies couldn’t form, and planets couldn’t form, and Intelligence Squared Debates couldn’t happen.  So the universe appears to be here because Intelligence Squared is here.  Now, that suggests religion perhaps, but the point is not that that claim of fine tuning is ridiculous because, in fact, if the energy of empty space was zero, which is a — by far a more natural value, the universe would be a better place for life to live in.  We all thought it was zero when I was a graduate student, because that was a natural value.  If it was zero, the universe would be a better place.  In fact, you can show the value that it has now makes the universe the worst of all possible universes to live in for the future of life.  So, so much for a universe created for us. 

 Okay, I got the vague, tongue-in-cheek reference to the logical error of assuming causality where there may only be coincidence, but after an equally vague reference to the “value of empty space” not being zero and zero being “better” for life, he arrives at a shrugging “so much for a universe created for us” as if he has given some real hard evidence.

I expected the moderator to call him on it. Barring that, I expected a sophisticated response from the physicist on the opposing team. Neither of these things occurred.

Krauss continues:

Now, once Darwin had removed the apparent need for God in evolution of life, the last bastion for God was the creation of the universe, how you can get something from nothing.  And what — we’re in a remarkable situation of being in is precisely the same situation that Darwin existed in 150 years ago, namely, we have a plausible explanation of how a universe could precisely come from nothing.

Hold the phone, ET. Darwin did no such thing. Darwin’s seminal work in evolution no more removed the need for God in the creation of life than the existence of my word processor or the evolution of alphabets and words removes the apparent need for a human writer.

The explanations for how a universe can come from nothing that I’ve read so far rest upon a redefinition of “nothing” and they are not considered plausible by a majority of physicists. There’s a parallel for this in the religious world—the idea held by certain religionists that their conception of God as a glorified human being living in a physical heaven is the only plausible conception of God.

Krauss went on:

If you asked, “What would be the characteristics of the universe that came from nothing by natural laws?” it would be precisely the characteristics of the universe we observe, and it didn’t have to be that way.  It could have been another way.  And by nothing — and it — the — my opponents will say that by nothing, I’m not talking about nothing, but I’m talking about nothing, no particles, no radiation, no space, no time, and even no laws of physics.  Our — [unintelligible] my opponents might argue that the multiverse, which our universe might have spontaneously been created in, was created by physicists because they don’t like God, because it’s eternal and exists outside our universe, those same characteristics that God is supposed to have.  But it wasn’t created because we don’t like God, although I don’t like God.  It was — we’d been driven to it by measurements.  In fact, I don’t even like the multiverse, but I’ve learned to force my beliefs to conform to the evidence of reality.

This is a fascinating segment because Krauss wades through an explanation about what his “opponents” will say and what he means by nothing, and then makes a peculiar admission: he doesn’t like the multiverse explanation (although he likes it more than he does God) but feels he is forced to believe in it. He cites the evidence of reality for this, but has yet to offer any idea of what this evidence is.

What his argument seems to come down to is that he prefers the idea of a multiverse beyond this universe as we know it to a God that exists as Krishna suggests in a progression of statements, beyond the universe as we know it.

There is nothing more fundamental than I, Arjuna; all worlds, all beings, are strung upon me like pearls on a single thread. — Bhagavad Gita 7:7

All the visible universe comes from my invisible Being. All beings have their rest in me, but I have not My rest in them, And in truth they rest not in Me. Consider my sacred mystery: I am the source of all beings, I support them all, but I rest not in them. — Bhagavad Gita 9:4

Know that with one single fraction of my Being, I pervade and support the entire universe, and know that I AM. —Bhagavad Gita 10:42

I also have to question his assertion that a universe that arose only from randomly occurring natural laws would have the characteristics of the universe we actually live in. First of all, what is the provenance of these natural laws? Where did they come from? How did they become “laws”? Given how little we actually do know about the universe, how swiftly that knowledge is revised and how many different opinions there are about what it means, how can Krauss speak so definitively about the characteristics of the universe and what we know about it?

More fundamentally: In what way does the existence of natural laws refute the existence of a lawgiver? Krauss speaks of the “characteristics that God is supposed to have,” but misses the most primal quality—the quality of intellect and invention, a quality which various scriptures insist is the reflection of God in man. If the components of the universe manifest the characteristics of that universe, why would it be irrational to expect to find intellect in that universe or connected to it in some way?

And given the evolving state of human knowledge, is it logical to assume that we would recognize that intelligence when we encountered it?

But Krauss does not answer these questions, nor does he delve any deeper into what he means by “nothing” or how something came from it. Instead he draws his conclusions:

That’s where science differs from religion.  There do remain deep philosophical and seismic questions that are unanswered, but God is not required or useful to explain any of them.  And, therefore, to conclude, science has taught us that we don’t need God to create a universe, that there’s no evidence for God, that the specific sides of the claims of those who require God disagree with empirical evidence, and it’s irrational.  Science refutes God, so clearly you should vote for our side.  

Krauss stated his conclusions without offering any evidence as to the following:

1. What he means by nothing and how something arose from it.
2. In what way the universe is inhospitable to life and what he means by saying that it is.
3. Where natural laws came from and how they became laws.
4. Why God is an irrational proposition to explain certain empirical observations about the universe and human consciousness.
5. In what way science refutes God.

This was disappointing. It was also disappointing that Krauss presented the audience with the sense that all physicists agreed with his assessments. He failed to engage with the reality that they do not, as evidenced by the fact that the man sitting across from him was not only a world-class scientist, but a scientist who had drawn different conclusions from the same set of empirical evidence and theoretical inference.

My greatest disappointment was that I would love to have seen these two scientists examining their scientific worldviews as co-equals. That didn’t happen.

Next time: Krauss claims that the laws of physics determine everything.

Continue reading »]]> No, not that Trinity. I refer to Lawrence Krauss’s trinity of claims about God that he feels must be refuted in order to refute God. A trinity of ideas he claims are based on faith rather than evidence.

First, let me remind you of the story so far. There are two teams: Team Atheist is composed of physicist Lawrence Krauss and writer Michael Shermer, arguing the motion that “science refutes God”. Team Believer is composed of political commentator Dinesh D’Souza and physicist Ian Hutchinson, arguing against the motion. Here is Dr. Krauss’s statement about the trinity:

Now, to refute God means refuting several claims.  One that are all based on faith, not evidence.  One, that God is necessary, two, that there is evidence for God; and three, that that belief is rational.  And the point is that the progress of science has shown over and over and over again that the answers to all those three questions are no.  No, no, no.  Now, my own scientific field is cosmology.  And that’s the study of the origin and evolution of the universe as a whole.  And it’s where science and religion sort of confront each other.  And creation myths have abounded throughout human history, and science confronts those creation myths.  And we’ll talk about that, I’m sure, at some point in the debate.  But I want to point out that our opponents, I’m pretty sure, are going to argue first that one aspect of science that supports perhaps the belief in God is this notion that the universe is apparently fine-tuned for life.  I hear that a lot, and because it was fine-tuned so life could exist.  That is a remarkable and, in fact, cosmic misunderstanding, because it’s the same kind of misunderstanding that led people to believe in special creation for life on earth before Darwin. 

Okay, so the trinity of claims Krauss aims to refute are:

1. God is necessary.
2. There is evidence for God.
3. Belief is, ergo, rational.

As Krauss laid out his argument that science refutes God, I thought I was at last going to get something to sink my teeth into. I was disappointed. It’s not the first time I’ve had that reaction. The huge claim that science not only refutes God, but replaces God and faith, is potentially earthshaking to a person of religious faith.

I admit that I entered the debate with anti-theists several years ago with some trepidation. I was, in a word, intimidated. I knew why I believed and I could articulate it fairly well, but so far I’d really only been called upon to defend my views to fundamentalist Christians. The idea of discussing faith and religion with anti-theists must surely be a vastly different experience and therefore alien. I expected to be out of my depth, in terra incognita. But once I’d read Hitchens, Harris, Dennet, Myers, and Dawkins, trepidation turned to disbelief. I remember finishing “God is Not Great” and thinking, “Really? That’s it?” It was, in its essentials, no different from the arguments I’d been fielding from fundamentalist clergymen: assumptions based on expectations and couched in emotional and often mocking or condemning terms. The overall message—repeated throughout the works of these philosophers is—”you’d have to be stupid, irrational, and delusional to believe anything but what I’m proposing”.

No one wants to be thought stupid, irrational, or delusional, and the fact that some of these men have stellar street creds in their chosen disciplines—Hitchens is (or was, if you prefer) a world-class analyst of political history; Harris has a degree in neurology from Stanford—only increase their persuasive power. These are very smart people and much is made of that. You are supposed to be intimidated by them because they’re smarter than you are. If they’re smarter than you are, and they don’t believe in God, what’s wrong with you?

But here I have pause to puzzle over a paradox. We are asked to be impressed with the scientific credentials of the A Team, and the fact of their extreme intelligence. What of the noble opposition? Aren’t these also very smart people with impressive credentials—people who not only have great intelligence but know how to use it?

Beyond D’Souza and Hutchinson, we’re also talking about people like Francis Collins (the scientist in the forefront of the effort to map the human genome), and mathematician William S. Hatcher. Yet it’s been repeatedly brought to my attention that their intelligence does not have the same cachet that the intelligence of their anti-theist opponents does. The intelligence of the anti-theist, we are asked to believe, is evidence that really smart people (Futrell and Geisert’s Brights) don’t believe in God. The intelligence of the theists, meanwhile, is evidence that, as the French say, “tout le monde peut se tromper”—anyone can be fooled.

The assumption is that people who do not believe in God are incapable of being mistaken in their views, are not prey to irrational ideas and are proof to dogmatism or wishful thinking. I leave it to the reader to consider how logical is that premise.

Krauss assures the listener that the idea that the universe is fine-tuned for life is a “cosmic misunderstanding”—one that his fellow physicist, Ian Hutchinson, has somehow fallen victim to. I waited for evidence that this was so, but none followed. He simply made the assertion. But that, in itself, is interesting. Krauss and others seem to seize on the “fine tuning” of the universe as a critical “proof” of the existence of God, whereas it is only a single piece of evidence that, taken with all other evidence, implies the existence of God in the same way that the light shining on the surface of the moon at night is a piece of evidence that implies the existence of an invisible light source. Krauss continued:

It looked like everything was designed for the environment in which it lived.  But what Darwin showed us was that a simple proposition, namely that there’s genetic variation among a population combined with natural selection meant that you didn’t need supernatural shenanigans, that in fact all the diversity of life on earth could arise from a single life form, by natural law.  And he didn’t know — what he showed was it was plausible, based on the evidence — he didn’t know about DNA.  He didn’t know about the details of genetic replication, but he showed it was plausible.  And as I’ll say, that’s where we’re at now as far as the understanding of the universe is concerned.  

Now, our — my opponents, I suspect, will argue the universe is equally fine-tuned for life, and they — in fact, they will point out that certain fundamental parameters in nature, if they were different, we couldn’t exist.

Or they may boldly assert that, in fact, certain of these parameters are so strange and unnatural that they must have been established with malice aforethought to ensure our existence.  This too is an illusion.  Just as bees need to see the color of flowers but they’re not designed to do it, if they couldn’t see them, they couldn’t get the nectar and reproduce.  So what we’re seeing is a version of cosmic natural selection.  We would be quite surprised to find ourselves living in a universe in which we couldn’t live.  In fact, that might be evidence for God. (emphasis mine)

An argument I hear frequently, and which Krauss seems in jeopardy of making, is that the theory of evolution explains the genesis of life in total. It does not. The missing piece of the puzzle is where that single life form came from and what caused it to begin its upward spiral. Mere physical environment cannot account for some of the twists in evolution—especially the peculiar evolution of human beings. His opponents might actually point to evolution as one of the evidences of the existence of a God. And the discovery of DNA seems not to have caused Francis Collins (Dr. Human Genome) to believe less. In fact, he seems quite gleeful about the role of DNA in the genesis of life. Simply saying something is an illusion is not the same as proving that it’s an illusion or even giving significant evidence that it is. I found myself hoping there was more to the argument.

Our Inhospitable Universe

Finally, Krauss got down to it. See those last two bold sentences above? Keep those in mind as you read Krauss’s next contention.

But I want to point out that in fact the universe isn’t particularly fine-tuned or conducive to life.  Most of the universe is rather inhospitable to life.  And in fact — perhaps the biggest fine-tuning problem in my own field of cosmology, something I’m, in fact, very proud to have proposed in a sense is that the energy of empty space is not zero.  The weirdest thing you can imagine, that empty space weighs something, but remarkably the energy of empty space is 120 orders of magnitude smaller than we would naïvely predict.

Pardon? Let’s walk back through that.

1. Team B might propose that the universe is fine-tuned for life and suggest that is evidence for God.
2. But Krauss argues that if it weren’t fine-tuned for life that would be the real miracle and, therefore, “might be evidence for God.”
3. He then states, “Most of the universe is rather inhospitable to life.”

What was almost as surprising about this sequence of ideas as their contradictory nature was that no one (not even D’Souza and Hutchinson) seemed to catch it (or if they did, they didn’t comment on it). Heck, I didn’t catch it until my second reading of the transcript as I was highlighting the two statements. Here, too, Krauss’s argument does something that tickles my irony bone. Back in the day when we were beginning to realize that our lovely blue marble wasn’t the only planet in the only solar system, atheist philosophers suggested that religion would be undermined by the discovery of other planets with other life on them. Two points here: 1) I write science fiction for a living and 2) I believe absolutely that there is life on other planets in part because … wait for it … the sacred texts of my faith say that there is and made that claim long before any evidence of this presented itself. However, Team A has taken a narrowly defined Christian doctrine about creation as the proxy for all religion and proposed that the fabric of all faiths would be undone if life is not found elsewhere. Krauss’s argument then seems to flip the notion on its head—he proposes that the less life is found in the universe, the worse it looks for religion and God … well, except for the previous assertion that it might actually provide evidence for God. I haven’t fully digested this wonderful anomaly, but I’ll let y’all know what happens when I do. I have to say, too, that I find this claim of the inhospitable nature of the universe an odd one. We are discovering more and more planets in the “sweet spot” for life and discovering the elements for life even in such seemingly inhospitable places as Mars and our moon. What sort of universe would Krauss consider “fine-tuned for life”? One that was completely uniform?

Most of the Universe…

But here’s something even more basic: the contention that “most of the universe is rather inhospitable to life” assumes the speaker has knowledge of most or all of the universe. Such is not the case. It also assumes that we would recognize all forms of life if we saw them. A colleague once asked how one would register a sunset if the only sense one possessed was hearing. If our way of measuring the energy of space (or any other universal element) is limited by our own senses, how can we presume to have measured it accurately? The scriptures of the Bahá’í Faith comment on this as well. One of my fellow Common Ground bloggers sent this quote out this morning:

“As to thy question whether the physical world is subject to any limitations, know thou that the comprehension of this matter dependeth upon the observer himself. In one sense, it is limited; in another, it is exalted beyond all limitations. The one true God hath everlastingly existed, and will everlastingly continue to exist. His creation, likewise, hath had no beginning, and will have no end. All that is created, however, is preceded by a cause. This fact, in itself, establisheth, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the unity of the Creator.” – Baha’u'llah

I find Krauss’s contentions somewhat hubristic. This does not make them wrong, but it does mean they are not the product of empirical knowledge, but of an emotional assumption that our knowledge—or more specifically, his knowledge as a cosmologist is complete enough to assert as fact his opinion about “most of the universe”. The fact that one of his opponents is a physicist of equal credibility does not seem to give him pause. I find that bemusing. When I encounter very intelligent people whose beliefs differ from my own, it always gives me pause. I am intensely curious about why they are so different.

Christopher Hitchens

Case in point—Christopher Hitchens. He and I had very similar experiences within the Christian community as children. We both encountered dogmatism, meanness, irrationality, ignorance and hypocrisy. Of course, I also experienced a profoundly Christian family, a keen sense of relationship with Christ, and a church in which the individuals had bonded deeply. I don’t know if he ever experienced that. And perhaps that is why our reactions to the negatives were markedly different. He imputed the vices of individual Christians to Christianity itself (“Mine is a Protestant atheism.”) and concluded—on the basis of the behavior of some believers and their interpretations of doctrine—that religion poisoned everything. He did not, according to his own testimony, investigate the scriptures himself to see if they were supportive of the dogmas he found so disturbing. I did. And that led me to impute vices to the individual believers and conclude—on the basis of the actual teachings of Christianity and the other faiths I studied—that human beings were capable of incredible flights of self-deceit. They could even poison the sacred and beneficial. They could profess a faith, then behave in ways that were tantamount to a rejection of its teachings. Had I read the Qur’an at that point in my life, I would have seen that Muhammad remarked on this propensity when He said:

Hast thou observed him who belieth religion? That is he who repelleth the orphan, and urgeth not the feeding of the needy. Ah, woe unto worshippers who are heedless of their prayer; who would be seen (at worship) yet refuse small kindnesses! — Qur’an, Surih 107:1-7

As it was, I did have the words of Christ who, after describing the behavior of those who followed Him, noted that “many shall arise in that day, teaching for doctrine the commandments of men”. More painful yet, He foresaw a time when those who considered themselves believers would say to Him “Lord, Lord” and He would reply, “I never knew you.” Here’s the irony: If Chris Hitchens had applied the test of reason to his experiences with professing Christians (as Christ suggested in one of His most oft-quoted talks), he might have noticed that those Christians who caused him to reject faith had already turned away from it themselves. That is the nature of hypocrisy, after all; a person’s behavior belies what they claim to believe. What I have yet to work out, logically, is how reason would lead one to call faith itself into question rather than the hypocritical behavior. Next time: A Trip Down the Rabbit Hole

Continue reading »]]> This is part two of my “class report” on a recent Common Ground Group homework assignment, specifically, to read the transcript of the Intelligence Squared debate of the proposition that “Science Refutes God”, consider its implications and comment on it.

The motion (Science refutes God) was argued by two teams. The A Team (A is for Atheist) was composed of Michael Shermer—American science writer, science historian and founder of The Skeptics Society—and Lawrence Krauss, Canadian-American theoretical physicist, cosmologist and professor of physics.

On the B Team (B is for Believer) were Dinesh D’Souza—Indian American conservative political commentator, author and former President of The King’s College, NY—and Ian Hutchinson, Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Both are Christians, but neither was raised in that faith.

In part one, we looked at the motion itself: Science Refutes God. Krauss and Shermer based their arguments on:

1. The irrationality of their opponents.
2. The definition of refute as not being synonymous with disprove.
3. The unreasonableness of certain Christian doctrines.

Hutchinson and D’Souza countered by saying, essentially, that there is no scientific proposition that refutes God. However, they also commented on the Christian doctrine of the Sonship of Christ, which begged questions unrelated to the motion.

Krauss further contended that:

“…there’s no way to disprove the notion that God didn’t create all of us 15 seconds ago with the memories of the amusing comments we heard before that.  There’s no way we can disprove that, okay.  And that’s really important to recognize that those kind of unfalsifiable notions are unfalsifiable, as I say.  But we can ask, is it rational to expect that that’s likely.  And tonight I want to emphasize that 500 years of science have demonstrated that God, that vague notion, is not likely.  It’s irrational to believe in God. (emphasis mine)

Again, we have an argument based on a questionable assumption. God may be a vague notion to Krauss, but He is not a vague notion to Bahá’u’lláh (Founder of the Baha’i Faith) or to any of the other Avatars who claimed to represent God. Nor is He a vague notion to the people who believe in God in part because of the testimony of these individuals. Krauss seems unaware of the long line of Avatars and Prophets who have proposed very specific teachings about (and from) this “vague” God that billions of people put into daily practice. Even those who do not consciously associate themselves with a particular religious tradition (the so-called “nones”) put many of those principles into practice out of habit, instruction, and rational and emotional sensibilities—that is, because they work Those practices form part of an experience that is not testable in any laboratory except the laboratory of life.

Which brings up a salient point: the reality in which most of us live day to day does not adhere to scientific paradigms. We experience too many things moment by moment that cannot be tested in a lab, and make too many decisions that cannot be decided by mathematical equations or Bayesian logic. In fact, the things that are most important to human beings in daily life are not material, physical things at all, but intellectual and emotional constructs. We live less and less in the world of natural laws and more and more in the world of the intellect, which is a marvelous place to exist if one has developed the intellectual faculties to do so.

But I digress. Krauss concludes that the belief that God created us and all our memories 15 seconds ago is irrational. The B Team would come to the same conclusion, based on the same criteria. The implication of Krauss’s words is that they would not come to that conclusion (perhaps because they are incapable of using logic) and his evidence of this is his opinion that believing God created the universe 15 seconds ago is no less irrational than believing that He created it billions of years ago along with the natural laws that make it work.

So far, all Krauss has done is make absolute pronouncements based on his opinions. “It is irrational to believe in God,” he says. But throughout the debate, neither he nor his teammate, Michael Shermer, substantiated the pronouncement in any way. They simply repeated it in different forms as if by repeating it, they made it real.

And they did make it real for a subset of their audience. Real enough that those people came out of the debate believing that science does, indeed, refute or disprove God.

Thoughtful Theism

I’d be remiss if I didn’t include some B Team commentary. Ian Hutchinson, author of Monopolizing Knowledge (which I just purchased) began his presentation of the believer’s point of view somewhat differently than his anti-theist colleague…

Let’s agree that this motion is not about whether, for example, the latest sociological theories disprove the gods and goddesses of ancient Greek mythology. No, it’s about whether modern natural science exemplified by things like physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and so on rule out thoughtful theism.

So far so good. He continued:

Our job is just to show that Christianity’s God is not refuted by science. Now, obviously there are some religious beliefs that are ruled out by science, for example, the belief that the earth is stationary and orbited by the sun, moon, and stars. That is disproved by science, and perhaps prior to the 17th century, most Christians held a belief like that, as did most other people. But that stationary earth belief is not in the least central to the Christian message and doctrine. (emphasis mine)

And here is where I think the B Team first gets off message. Hutchinson states the goal well—to show that science does not rule out thoughtful theism. But then I think he goes off into the weeds. First of all, the centrality of the earth is not only “not in the least central to the Christian message”, it’s not part of the Christian message at all. Neither Christ nor Moses (nor any other Prophet prior to Baha’u'llah) said one word about how the planets aligned, though Muhammad did note that the Sun was a fixed star.

Oddly, this made me wonder not how much Dr. Hutchinson knew about physics (presumably lots) but how much he knew about the contents of the Bible and how closely he equated those contents with the sectarian dogma of a particular congregation.

More important still, Hutchinson narrowed the target of the motion down to “Christianity’s God” and set up a challenge.

To establish the motion, what our opponents have to do is to show that some central tenet of what Christians believe about God is impossible or at least highly implausible in the light of science, and that’s a tall order. Actually, they can’t even come close.

A Doctrine of Science

What the A Team did was to open the door to the argument about the irrationality of a God who punished all of humanity for the sins of a long dead progenitor and then required a further death to redeem humanity (either His own or His son’s depending on the particular doctrine). A humanity that continues, by the way, to commit its own sins.

This was unfortunate for the B Team because they made some very cogent arguments in other areas.

For example, Ian Hutchinson said:

But let me dispense with a couple of the most plausible sounding arguments. I’ll illustrate one common argument from the writing of an MIT colleague, Alan Lightman, who wrote in the Salon magazine last year, he said, “The central doctrine of science is the view that the laws of nature are inviolable.” He said, “Science and God are compatible as long as the latter, God, is content to stand on the sidelines once the universe has begun.” 

Now, I certainly shall not shrink the God that I advocate down into a deistic, non-interventionist first cause. No, the God I’m interested in is personal and active in the world. So the question is, “How do I answer Alan Lightman?” It’s straight forward. The presumption that the laws of nature are inviolable is just not a doctrine of science. Alan and a lot of other people are just wrong about that. Science’s method and its program is to describe the universe insofar as it is repeatable and follows universal laws, but science hasn’t got the slightest need to extrapolate that method and program into a presumption that everything that happens must be so describable. And the majority of the scientific heroes of history did not make that presumption.

I found Hutchinson’s phraseology interesting and I think it is apt: “The presumption that the laws of nature are inviolable is just not a doctrine of science.”

A doctrine of science. I leave it to the reader to decide if science ought to have doctrines or if, as Professor Hutchinson says, “Science’s method and its program is to describe the universe insofar as it is repeatable and follows universal laws, but science hasn’t got the slightest need to extrapolate that method and program into a presumption that everything that happens must be so describable.”

I must also leave it to the reader to decide which of these eminent scientists is “doctrinally correct” and what that correctness means. However, when one of the most significant charges against religion is that it is absolutist, and one of the chief virtues alleged of science is that it evolves, I have to question the logic of the Doctrine of Inviolability.

As far as we can discern, everything in nature evolves, up to and including the universe, itself, to say nothing of our understanding of it. The idea that the laws of nature are inviolable seems to fly in the face of that. Moreover, it leads to the hubristic idea that once we have understood a law of nature, we need question it no further.

And that made me think of this passage from the writings of Abdu’l-Bahá, in which He says that, “Religion must be living, vitalized, moving and progressive. If it be non-progressive it is dead.” He concludes his comments with a question—a pertinent one in view of the subject of this blog: “Shall man gifted with the power of reason unthinkingly adhere to dogma which will not bear the analysis of reason?”

Next time: Refuting the Trinity (no, not THAT Trinity)

Continue reading »]]> Recently the crew here at Common Ground Group assigned ourselves some homework—to read the transcript of the Intelligence Squared debate of the proposition that “Science Refutes God”, consider its implications and comment on it. Since I was unable to attend the gathering at which the debate was discussed, I forwarded my impressions to Stephen Friberg (a co-founder of Common Ground Group) and he asked me to share them with our general readership in a series of blogs. Those of you who know me are probably not surprised to hear that I was compiling my notes into a blog even as Stephen and I were chatting about it.

The Setup

Michael Shermer

Lawrence Krauss

The motion (Science refutes God) was argued by two teams. The A Team (A is for Atheist) argued for “Science refutes God” and was composed of Michael Shermer—American science writer, science historian and founder of The Skeptics Society—and Lawrence Krauss, Canadian-American theoretical physicist and cosmologist and professor of physics.

Dinesh D’Souza

Ian Hutchinson

On the B Team (B is for Believer), arguing that “science SO does not refute God”, were Dinesh D’Souza—Indian American conservative political commentator, author and former President of The King’s College, NY—and Ian Hutchinson, Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Both members of the B Team were Christians, but neither was raised in their faith.

General Impressions

My general impression of the debate, which the two Christian scientists lost by several points in an audience vote, was that the theists undermined their position by trying to argue specifically Christian doctrine as opposed to making rational arguments for the existence of God, the evidences of whom go far beyond a singularly Christian context. That context, in fact, may make some of the most significant arguments for the existence of God difficult to access—as I hope readers will appreciate later in this post.

In bringing Christian doctrine to the table, Hutchinson and D’Souza got hoist by their own petard. At one point in the middle of a back-and-forth dialogue Ian Hutchinson said, “Of course, you know Christians think that Jesus was the son of God.” This simple sound bite opened up an unanswerable area of questions that were tangential but critical to an understanding of who God is. The chief question being, “What does it mean to say that a seemingly human man 2000 years ago was the only progeny of an non-corporeal, super-natural entity?”

The B Team, having brought the specificity of their belief in a particular doctrine of salvation into the discussion, did nothing to either remove it or argue it. In fact, I’m not sure they could have done either. And this observation opened the door further to the subject of original sin and salvation and allowed the A Team to close their argument by asking the audience to bear in mind that the B Team believed that Jesus Christ

“…is your savior, and you accept him for redeeming us for sins we never committed. Somebody else in the past committed them. So as I understand this, God sacrifices himself to himself to save us from himself. If that sounds as incomprehensible to you as it does to me, I urge to you vote for our side.”

It does sound incomprehensible, and I’ll be blunt: If I were given the false choice between God or science based on the caricature of God that came out of this debate, and if that caricature was the only portrait of God I was offered, I would have to vote against such a God. And I would do it for both scientific and religious reasons.

BUT, the point no one raised—not the A Team, not the B Team and not the neutral moderator—was that this very specific God is not the only portrait of God available for consideration. It is not even a majority viewpoint in the world of religion. The motion, after all, had nothing to do with salvation or Christology. The motion was that science refutes God, not that science refutes a specific sectarian Christian doctrine about God. Yet that was, in essence, what Krauss and Shermer were set up to refute. And I think Hutchinson and D’Souza helped them do it, in part, by failing to speak a common language—that of science and reason.

The problem is, the A Team and those who accepted their motion, believed that by refuting (or at least rejecting) this sectarian doctrine, they were rejecting God and/or any human conception of God. A nice, neat conclusion, but one that does not logically follow.

So, let’s get down to it—here is the A Team’s motion, in their own words:

Science Refutes God

The motion is science refutes God.  And Michael and I have the distinct advantage here of arguing in favor of the motion because in fact we have evidence, reason, logic, rationality, and empirical methods on our side, whereas the opponents have vague hopes and fears, and they’re arguing in favor of a motion that’s hanging on for its existence by mere shreds of emotional and ideological spaghetti, much like this type provided by the flying spaghetti monster, one of the equally irrational gods which science provides no support for. (emphasis mine)

Where to start …

This opening statement is interesting in that it does not so much summarize a strategy by which the A Team means to prove that science refutes God, but instead demonstrates a strategy by which they denigrate their opponents’ capacities and question their methods before actually speaking to the motion. Even if the moderator disallowed this ad hominem volley, the audience could hardly unhear it. The emotive portrayal of their opponents as irrational beings who have only “vague hopes and fears” prejudices the audience. In using this strategy, Krauss creates a filter through which he asks the audience to hear whatever the opponent may say as unreasonable, illogical, irrational, fact-free and motivated by fear and wishful thinking. The B Team, I note, refrained from characterizing their opponents in this way.

In reality, either side can avail themselves of evidence, reason, logic, rationality, and empirical methods if they so choose. Those options are not the province of the A Team alone, as the B Team clearly illustrates several times during the debate.

Krauss also makes what my colleague Ian Kluge would call a category error when he likens the Flying Spaghetti Monster to the God of historical faiths. The FSM is the brainchild of a single human being—it is a construct in which no one actually does believe. It is a parody of God and a lovely diversion. I’ve sat on Spaghetti Monster panels at SF conventions. They’re fun, but the FSM has no place in a serious discussion of science and faith.

Were God a human invention, He at least would have the virtue of a long history of alleged interactions with people from every age, every region, and a wide array of cultures. Not to mention multiple, reaffirming genesis stories that convey some cosmological information in metaphorical language suited to the capacity of the audience.

That God is not a human invention is supported by a collection of easily obtainable evidence. For one thing, His existence and nature are confirmed across widely diverse cultures and through millennia of revelation by individual Avatars-Prophets. These individuals (who come from every walk of life) make the same claims and teach the same basic spiritual principles while flexing social teachings to fit the cultural context. They even describe their own role in strikingly similar terms (“the Way”). They are also, notably, cultural misfits. (As I indicated earlier, this is an area of evidence that a dogmatic viewpoint may not be able to access.)

Certainly, one might contend that this is entirely coincidental, and suggest that the Avatars have a peculiar form of madness. A madness that manifests itself in the same manner across cultures and centuries, and that is so intoxicating to those exposed to it that it causes millions or even billions to accept the delusion unthinkingly, regardless of their level of intelligence or the application of their rational faculties. But I think Occam’s Razor would come down sharply against the likelihood of coincidence on such a grand scale.

In any event, the two genesis scenarios are not parallel. If Richard Dawkins can show historical provenance for the concept of the Flying Spaghetti Monster that is genuinely and sincerely held by a large population, then we can talk. Otherwise, the FSM is merely a diversion from the real dialogue.

Disprove or Refute—What is the Motion?

At this point, I’d like to take a closer look at the motion as stated by Lawrence Krauss:

But I first want to begin by clarifying the nature of the motion, because the motion isn’t science disproves God.  It’s science refutes God.  And that’s very important because you can’t disprove a notion that’s basically vague and unfalsifiable.  

Krauss is right, this is important. Semantically, this argument sets forth a paradox—the A Team cannot disprove God scientifically, by their own admission, but they can refute Him.

Can they?  To “disprove” is (according the the Oxford American dictionary) “to refute, prove false, falsify, debunk, negate, invalidate, contradict, confound, controvert, discredit; poke holes in, blow out of the water, shoot down; confute“. To “refute” means “to prove (a statement or theory) to be wrong or false; disprove“. The words are synonyms, so Krauss’s distinction is, itself, false. If science does not disprove God, it does not refute Him either … unless one decides that the word “refute” means something else in this instance, which I think changes the rules of the encounter.

Krauss next offers a simple statement of opinion: that God is a “notion that’s basically vague and unfalsifiable”. I could argue that the existence of the Higgs boson is equally vague and unfalsifiable; after all, the existence of such a boson, much like the existence of God, was posited through inference, defined by its attributes, and described only by experts in the field. The Higgs boson (ironically referred to as “the God particle”) is not directly knowable, it is measured by its effects on particles that are knowable.

Mr. Krauss would argue that inference is a perfectly good scientific tool (and I’d agree) and that though neither of us has ever seen nor is likely to ever see a Higgs boson, we must trust that the specially trained and outfitted subject matter experts have measured its mass. We must believe their testimony about the existence of the “God particle” if we have faith that they do, in fact, possess the expertise to give that testimony.

Sound familiar?

Krauss may opine that subject matter experts in physics proposing the existence of a particle is different than subject matter experts in meta physics proposing the existence of God. But that is merely his opinion. The Avatars-Prophets claim a rather more direct experience with God that Higgs with his boson. Even I have a better chance of fact-checking claims of divine subject matter expertise than I do most scientific claims. And I can do it by applying the same tools that Krauss would use: observation, experience, experiment, logic and rational inference.

What is ironic, in this context, is that Krauss himself wrote an article on the finding of the Higgs boson that lays out the problem the find entails. I take the liberty of including a brief and pertinent excerpt here:

In physics, too, we are uncomfortably close to what many of us would consider the nightmare scenario. The initial buzz of the Higgs discovery has faded, and now we face a monstrous hangover: What happens next? Briefly, the Higgs is an elementary particle predicted 50 years ago during the development of the standard model of particle physics. The standard model beautifully describes three of the four fundamental forces in nature and is one of the most remarkable theoretical constructions in the history of science. Specifically, the Higgs was predicted in order to provide a natural mechanism to explain what now appears to be an amazing cosmic accident: the fact that some particles have mass and others don’t. (emphasis mine)

So, the existence of the “God particle” was predicted (that is, inferred) to provide an explanation for something for which there was seemingly no other explanation—a “cosmic accident”. But that is precisely what Krauss would be among the first to denigrate religion for—predicting God as an explanation for things we don’t get about natural laws … such as, where did they come from and what caused them to begin operating?

Moreover, Krauss refers to the Higgs as a “remarkable theoretical construction”. What this means is that the existence of the Higgs is not an empirical fact. Scientific propositions that are highly theoretical are often among the most important ones in the field, but they are also among the least supported by empirical knowledge.

Later in the debate, the A Team tries to make the case that there are many faiths but only one physics. This is true—there is only one real set of physical laws that we know of, but the interpretations of them by different “sects” of scientists vary widely. This is so much a parallel to the situation with religion that I was surprised not one of the panelists noted it.

The Buddha commented that “there is one truth, not two or three” and that all things were operating according to one law. Muhammad observed further that: “Knowledge is one point, which the foolish have multiplied.”

The reality of the universal laws and/or the universal Lawgiver likely are one; it is our conceptions of them that vary.

The essentials of the divine religion are one reality, indivisible and not multiple. It is one. And when through investigation we find it to be single, we have a basis for the oneness of the world of humanity. — `Abdu’l-Bahá, Promulgation of Universal Peace, p437

Next time: That vague old notion called God.

Continue reading »]]> This is a belated and brief commentary on Bahram’s last post. I think we can agree that the “ek velt” (end of the world) scenarios were both unscientific and irrational, but commentators, including Bahram, have noted the idea that humanity as a species is beginning to see itself as in a spot of trouble. 

Maya Bohnhoff

I think it’s true that there’s a rough consensus that humanity is, in some ways, going off the rails. We’re like the rebellious teenager being dragged, kicking and screaming into adulthood—we desperately want the liberty we think maturity is supposed to bring without the responsibility. Somehow we imagined adulthood would let us keep recess, summer vacations and trips to candy land without us having to sacrifice anything.

And that, in a nut shell, is where I see one of the sticking points when it comes to the maturing of humanity as we move from the animal state to a truly human one. We may all (or most of us, anyway) see the problem. but we lack consensus on the solution.

As I talk to people about this, one idea emerges: it’s the other guys business to fix things. “I’m fine,” the respondent seems to say. “I should be able to do what I want, but those guys over there (the government, liberals, conservatives, immigrants, religious people, atheists, gays, the military—just plug in your “them” group here—need to change their ways.”

The tough reality is: we all need to change our ways. We all need to sacrifice things and ideas that we’re attached to because they’re pleasurable or fun or whatever in order to bring about … order. And peace. And kindness. And justice.

So, with that thought, I’m off to rehearse for an upcoming concert hopefully I’ll be back on track next week.

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Maya Bohnhoff

As with many of my blog posts, this one grew out of a conversation that I had with someone about the subject of faith and reason.

In this case, I raised the point that I felt many of the anti-theists of my acquaintance had noble goals (promoting reason and fighting ignorance) but were fighting the wrong enemy and doing it in a way that furthered neither of those goals. That were, in fact, counterproductive.

I called into question the rhetoric I and other “believers” are subjected to—rhetoric that is sarcastic rather than informative, condescending rather than responsive, demeaning rather than exploratory.

Many of the atheists who post in the various online forums and on Facebook and Twitter spend a lot of time telling believers what they believe. Literally. The discourse goes something like this: “You (religious people) believe X, Y, and Z, and that’s irrational.”

Often, when I state that I do not believe X, Y, or Z, I am informed that this cannot be so. I must believe these things because I am religious and this is what religious people believe.

This means that I spend a fair amount of time pointing out what, to me, seems obvious —that not all believers or beliefs are created equal.

I find it ironic that a narrow, and inescapably irrational, set of beliefs is being extended to every religious person who dares wander into the discussion and so, it becomes necessary to wade through the polemics, the generalizations and the condescension to be able to say: “Er, excuse me, but I don’t believe that. Will someone talk to ME directly?”

But that rarely gets heard. It’s much easier to hold onto one’s treasured assumptions about the other guy’s beliefs than it is to grapple with the possibility that religious belief, like any belief, has many variations—rational, irrational, logical, illogical.  One correspondent acknowledged this anomaly, saying: “Indeed, not all people who call themselves religious exhibit the same X behavior, however since the atheists’ crusade is against religion, the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ would be valid in this case—by definition of the word ‘atheist’.”

Bearing in mind that “atheist” simply means one who does not believe in God and has no necessary addendum “and crusades against those who do,” I have to ask how much sense this statement makes. If religious belief and believers are indeed that varied, isn’t it irrational for the atheist’s crusade to be against “religion” as a mo

nolithic entity THAT DOESN’T EXIST? Doesn’t it make more sense to crusade against dogmatic thinking, against irrationality itself, no matter where it makes its home?

I submit that anti-theists are fighting the wrong crusade. And if they would target dogmatic thinking instead, a great number of religious people would join them in their crusade as willing allies.

We will have found common ground.

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Maya Bohnhoff

Last time I posed a question about what exactly we (believers and non-believers alike) are professing when we claim adherence to the Golden Rule: “do to others as you would have them do to you.”

In that context, I’d like to examine the reasonableness of the assumption that because some believers consign non-believers to Hell (whatever they imagine that to be) ALL believers do so. This is an assumption that arises frequently in my dialogues with self-identifying atheists (or anti-theists to distinguish them from people who simply don’t believe in God but who aren’t attached converting others to their non-belief). To me this assumption seems neither rational nor beneficial.

Even if we set aside the fact that not all belief systems include a concept of a physical Hell, there is enough variation within the adherents of a single denomination of a single faith to render that proposition utterly false. In Mythbuster lingo: Busted.

Asking a believer why they’d send “all those people to Hell” is a lot like asking someone you’ve just found out is from Germany why he killed those millions of Jews and Catholics … perhaps as you crack sarcastic jokes about German oven technology.

I think you SHOULD ask why “an otherwise cool and rational person” (George’s description) can believe certain things. I’ve asked a number of my Christian friends how they can reconcile their church’s particular doctrines with the teachings of Christ or with the reality of science or with the way the world really works. But I try my utmost do so from a position of knowing what they actually believe and asking about those beliefs in an atmosphere of trust and in words that are humble and respectful. In other words, in an attitude of inquiry, not mockery.

I may be wrong, but I think there’s a difference between asking someone to explain what they believe and, based on their response, engaging in a rational dialogue, and mocking beliefs I assume they hold. As pop philosophy suggests, when I ASSUME I make an ASS out of U and ME. I heard this first from Felix Unger of the Odd Couple, and it’s stuck.

George commented that “religions always insist on flocks, on child-like belief… in the voice of the shepherd.” I think the message is far more complex than this assumption implies. Look at the Gospels. Jesus repeatedly gives his hearers scenarios and asks them to ponder them. He tasks them to reason through different sets of propositions—to judge based on evidence and observation. Later, Thomas Aquinas bemoaned the state of a Christian laity that did not inform itself about the way the world worked. It was appalling to Aquinas that a Christian should be ignorant of reality.

The sacred texts of the Bahá’í Faith further posit that each believer must acquire knowledge and independently investigate reality. That we learn to take responsibility for our own spiritual state. No blaming the devil or God or religion or irreligion or whatever scapegoat wanders by. The Baha’i writings make the point that if asked why we believed such-and-such our excuse was, “Tradition!” that excuse for failing to “see with our own eyes and not the eyes of others” would be unacceptable to God.

The buck stops with us.

Why is this emphasis on knowledge and rational, logical thought process as a part of faith not more generally understood—even by believers? There are a lot of reasons, I think, but assumptions rank pretty highly. There is an assumption that the revealers of the world’s religions trade on ignorance and “insist on … child-like belief”—in other words, uninformed belief based on emotion rather than reason. The assumption is false, but widely believed to be true.

This leads to—among other things—a blanket demonization of religion, belief, and believers. The late Chris HItchens summed this sentiment up pretty well in the title of his polemic God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. There is no room for nuance in such dogmatic hyperbole, and it encourages us to believe (or take as fact) that there is something we can blame for all our ills rather than taking responsibility for them ourselves. That thing is religion.

How much easier it is to say,  ”Wow. Look how religion screwed us up,” and simply turn our backs on religion than it is to say, “Wow. Look how we screwed up religion.” and then dig in and find solutions that come from within us.

My forum friend George told me that: “As an atheist, every believer attacks me because I don’t believe. It’s always looked upon as somewhat unnatural, absurd, evil.” (italics mine)

I was a believer, I noted, and I was not attacking him. I didn’t see him as unnatural, absurd or evil. I wouldn’t want to send him to Hell if I had a Hell to send him to. What purpose would that serve, after all? What I did find absurd, was the assumption that I would do any of those things. At this point, a Christian in the group piped up to say that he was not in the habit of attacking atheists either (and he could point to a long line of commentary to prove his point).

Every believer attacks him? He is always viewed as evil? This sort of hyperbole stands side by side with assumption as a proof against rational, open discussion of just about anything.

I am a believer, but my belief is not Pat Robertson’s or Junipero Serra’s or the Pope’s. George is an atheist, but his atheism is not Pol Pot’s or Joe Stalin’s. We are both rational human beings. We have a means of distinguishing between beneficial, rational belief and unfounded or blind belief that cause us to assume things that are not true. The scriptures George scorned as irrational and primitive recommend the application of reason to these situations and propose further, that the truth of a person’s professions be judged their behavior—by the fruits they produce in the world.

These same religious documents also recommend that we not display hostility toward one another on the basis of divergent beliefs.  As Muhammad put it:

“O ye who believe! Be steadfast witnesses for Allah in equity, and let not hatred of any people seduce you that ye deal not justly. Deal justly, that is nearer to your duty. Observe your duty to Allah. Lo! Allah is Informed of what ye do.” — Surih 5:9

Or, to quote Bahá’u’lláh:

“O son of man! If thine eyes be turned towards mercy, forsake the things that profit thee, and cleave unto that which will profit mankind. And if thine eyes be turned towards justice, choose thou for thy neighbor that which thou choosest for thyself. Humility exalteth man to the heaven of glory and power, whilst pride abaseth him to the depths of wretchedness and degradation.” — Epistle to the Son of the Wolf

I question that mockery, sarcasm, and belittling of others is just or that it will profit mankind in any way, though it feels darned good to the slinger of said sarcasm.

Let’s look at the logic of the case: IF the goal of a dialogue between non-believer and believer is to educate and bring believers in irrational ideologies to reason AND IF mockery and vitriol only push them further away from those who wish to educate them, THEN the mockery and vitriol are undermining, not serving the goal. They are not profiting humanity, but only giving the mocker a momentary sense of release.

So, here’s what I proposed to George: Let’s you and I, for starters, decide that we are not going to use those tactics. And that instead, we’re going to encourage others on both “sides” of the belief issue to abandon them as well. Let’s spread the message that if we really want to see an increase in reason and cooperation and a decrease in hostility and alienation in this world we share, we need to be willing to spread reasonable behavior—regardless of who we’re talking to.

In other words, lets practice the Golden Rule.

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Maya Bohnhoff

When I dare to tread the electronic byways of forums intended for laypeople interested in science or humanism, and mention that I believe in God, it is generally assumed that I’m defending beliefs that are irrational and inimical to science and reason. I’m not. As a Bahá’í, I understand the consequences of irrational thinking only too well. There are now over 100 Bahá’ís in prison in Iran for simply being Bahá’í. Historically, over 20,000 of my co-religionists have died in that country—200 of them since the revolution in 1979. Seven of them were recently given 20 year sentences for “spreading corruption in the earth.” In other words, because they are Bahá’í’s.

The Iranian government claims there is no religious persecution here, that these people have committed actual crimes of espionage, though by law they are not allowed to work in any capacity that would bring them into contact with government agencies. It’s difficult to see, then, how a simple recantation of faith could expunge these acts of espionage and result in the criminal’s release and reinstatement to full citizenship.

But I digress. I am a person of faith. I believe in a God. This very fact causes some atheists (or anti-theists) of my acquaintance to treat me as if I were a card-carrying member of the Westboro Baptist church or I had given my personal stamp of approval to witch burnings, the Holocaust, pedophile priests and the destruction of the Twin Towers. The rhetoric is at times sarcastic, sophomoric, insulting and downright nasty. It fails to deal with faith in a realistic or rational way and it is often delivered in the same breath with the serious contention that “we don’t need God to be moral” but can follow the Golden Rule just fine without divine guidance.

The Golden Rule, for those who are uncertain of its text, is part of every religious revelation, but in the West we are most familiar with the Gospel wording in which Christ says: “do to others what you would have them do to you”.

Groovy. In the words of a favorite literary maxim: Show me, don’t tell me.

Now, to be sure, it’s easy to see the application of the Golden Rule when it comes to offering someone a seat on a crowded subway, or letting someone with a small child cut ahead in a line. But the application seems very hazy in other circumstances—such as when we’re discussing the very religions from which the Rule derives.

Often, the revelation that I am a believer results at least one rant about the inhumanity of sending people to hell. The assumption is that all religious people believe in a Hell and are personally going to send others there, or at the very least that their sacred texts prescribe a vacation in a physical Hell to all non-believers. One correspondent (I’ll call him “George”) angrily informed me that the only reason I wasn’t forcing my beliefs on others was that my group lacked the power to do so. If we had that power, he assured me, “You’d be out there gleefully forcing your beliefs down people’s throats with the rest of them.”

When I questioned his assumptions and asked why he had chosen to make what had been a rational discussion of principles very personal and emotionally fraught, he back-pedaled. His remarks hadn’t been aimed at me, personally, he said. Clearly, he had used the rhetorical “you” not the personal “you.” I was the one who had assumed too much.

If, in responding to my earlier comments, he had not been speaking to me, I asked him, to whom had he been speaking? (I was gratified when one of the other humanist participants also called him on his semantical dodge and asked how else I might have taken his words if not personally.)

George chose not to answer my question, but his contention was that his mockery was justified by the behavior of professed believers. I’d like to examine that premise.

If the point of his mockery was that all believers don’t follow the Golden Rule, he’s right. They don’t. But here’s my contention: that a believer who violates the Golden Rule is more blameworthy than a non-believer because that Rule exists in the body of teachings the believer professes to follow. The believer professes faith that this Rule is not just a rational nicety, but a divine commandment.

I further propose that how well someone else observes the Golden Rule should have no effect on how well I do it. I’M responsible for my own adherence to my code of ethics, whether I believe it is divine (and therefore non-negotiable) or whether I believe it is intrinsically or relativistically moral. “Yeah, well, that guy broke the rule first” doesn’t cut it in the first case and the second it amounts to a demotion of the Golden Rule to more of a Gold-plated Tin Rule: “Do unto others as they do unto you.”

So, which Rule are we (believers and non-believers alike) professing? Are we saying that we will model a behavior by treating others as we would ideally like to be treated, or simply return tit for tat? And regardless of what we say, what is it we are actually doing?

My question for pondering is: Which of the above bodes best for our relationships, our families, and our communities—including this global one we all live in?

Next time: Part 2: Passing the Demon Buck

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Maya Bohnhoff

Tradition, Law, Belief and Reality

Last week I posted about the spread of misinformation by way of getting into a discussion about the complexities surrounding the practice of Islam and the role tribalism plays in what seem to be purely religious attitudes.

At issue was a comment I found on another blog site to the effect that “In Saudi Arabia, all citizens are rqurieed (sic) to be Muslims, and the public practice of other religions is forbidden. Private practice of other religions is sometimes allowed and sometimes persecuted; there is no law protecting even this.”

I stated that this was not strictly true … which is not strictly true, as a commenter (thank you, Zia’od) pointed out. This is one of those situations in which I and the writer of the article I featured in my post are both right … and wrong … and neither.

How is that possible? As with many things, the situation is complex enough that seemingly conflicting facts apply.

In reading those two sentences, what I failed to appreciate was the nuanced language the writer used. It may be correct that Saudi citizens—born and bred—are, by definition, Muslim of one sort or another. They are born into Muslim families and Muslims are not supposed to become non-Muslim. Although, presumably there are Christian citizens of Saudi Arabia whose families are of long duration. There is also some gray around one of the sects of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia which is considered by some to be an independent religion. Thus a citizen of Saudi Arabia—as opposed to someone from another culture living in the country—is, if not required to be Muslim, at least assumed to be Muslim. How safe that assumption is depends in part on what criteria are actually required for citizenship. I have been unable to find that information.

Another semantical nicety that I missed was the phrase “the public practice of religion” as opposed to the private practice of it in what are called “house churches.”

And therein lies my error. I read these statements as “everyone living in Saudi Arabia is required to be Muslim” and “the practice of non-Muslim faiths is forbidden” (meaning outlawed, illegal, not allowed under any circumstances). The fact that there was a substantial non-Muslim minority in the country seemed in conflict with the idea that other faiths were “forbidden”.

But here’s the thing: my response to that reading was to question said statements and go out seeking more information about it. What I found confirmed my belief that the situation was more complex than the essayist’s series of bald statements indicated.

Others of my acquaintance would read the passage in the same way that I did, but their response would be quite different. They would leap from “…all citizens are required to be Muslims, and the public practice of other religions is forbidden.” to “Islam considers all other religions apostate or false and Muslims hate people of other faiths”. These are not hypothetical acquaintances, by the way, but flesh and blood folks who are convinced that Islam and Shari’a law are a mono-dimensional threat to religious freedom everywhere.

They demonstrably also assume that the Qur’an forbids the practice of any “other” religion since the Qur’an is supposed to form the text of the Saudi constitution. In addition, Zla’od’s statement that “Islam forbids apostasy” (taking another faith) is also more nuanced than the statement implies (more on that in a moment).

The sources of information I found presented a somewhat more complex picture of the situation than the words “required” and “forbidden” (at least as I understand them) described. One such source was a straightforward statistical analysis from Wikipedia of the number and diversity of the religious population, two were travel sites (which I considered somewhat biased, since their intent is to get “foreigners” to travel to Saudi Arabia), and the third was the US State Department site.

This last source notes that the state of the laws pertaining to freedom of religion in Arabia are inconsistent, ambiguous, and sketchy. And they do not necessarily match practice—which was, of course, what the women using Islamic law to claim their civil rights were taking good advantage of. The law they were applying is written down in the Qur’an; the traditionally based practices of the society are largely assumed and are not documented.

As I noted above, the text of the Qur’an is declared to be the constitution of the country, which means that by law, the freedom of Jews, Christians and others should be protected (along with the rights of women). Why? First because Muhammad did not consider these faiths to be “other”, but rather earlier manifestations of the same eternal faith of God.

Lo! Those who believe (in that which is revealed unto thee, Muhammad), and those who are Jews, and Christians, and Sabaeans—whoever believeth in Allah and the Last Day and doeth right—surely their reward is with their Lord and there shall be no fear come upon them, neither shall they grieve. — Quran, Surih 2:62 

 Say ye: “We believe in God, and the revelation given to us, and to Abraham, Ismá’íl, Isaac, Jacob, and the Tribes, and that given to Moses and Jesus, and that given to (all) prophets from their Lord: We make no difference between one and another of them: And we bow to God (in Islám).” — Quran, Surih 2:136  

Second, Muhammad clearly stated:

Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from Error: whoever rejects evil and believes in God hath grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold, that never breaks. And God heareth and knoweth all things.  — Quran, Surih 2:256

That these principles are not always or even predominately in practice is obvious from the US State Department’s observations. The State Department notes, for example, that while legally  (that is, under Qur’anic law) the practices of non-Muslim minorities are not forbidden, the freedom of religious practice is often “neither acknowledged nor protected” (their wording). Further:

“The government claims to provide for and protect the right to private worship for all, including non-Muslims who gather in homes for religious services. This right was not always respected in practice and is not defined in law.”

This has caused Saudi Arabia to be designated as a “nation of concern” by the US State Department and targeted for sanctions. The US has pressed the Saudi government to define, acknowledge and protect those practices that they currently claim to protect. The problem, as I think I conveyed in my post, is that there is a lack of definition. Much is left to traditional and tribal views and practices (and momentary political expediency) rather than Qur’anic jurisprudence.

But there is cause for hope. The State Department’s 2010 statement says that:

“Although overall government policies continued to place severe restrictions on religious freedom, there were incremental improvements in specific areas during the reporting period, including increased scrutiny of and training for the CPVPV (Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice); somewhat greater authority and capacity for official human rights entities to operate; legal reform to broaden the officially sanctioned interpretations of Shari’a (Islamic law) to include other schools of Sunni jurisprudence; selective measures to combat extremist ideology; and encouragement of leading clerics to preach tolerance in their sermons. The king’s Interfaith Dialogue Initiative (IDI) launched a large-scale media campaign to promote tolerance and moderation.”

On Our Shores

I should add that our culture here in the US. is not monolithic in its practice of religious freedom, either. I think most readers would agree that the statement “freedom of religion is protected in the United States” is correct, but it oversimplifies that reality.

We Americans take for granted that our religious practices are protected, and are perplexed by the fact that the separation of church and state is not a tenet of most other nations—even some we think of as highly secular. Yet, even here, what happens in practice differs from what we may think “protection” means. Some schools, interpreting the “separation of church and state” strictly, confiscate students’ religious materials—holy books, religious jewelry or clothing, etc. Some do not allow religious books to be read on school grounds and will scold a child caught praying. In some situations, even here, public worship is prohibited through legislative or judicial intervention. Lawsuits prevent the building of mosques, there are legal battles over religious monuments, religious groups are denied use of public facilities.

I do not believe these incidents (some of which I experienced first hand) are systemic in nature, but they do point to the “fuzziness factor” in an area many of us assume is clear as glass.

In fact, let’s take the phrase “separation of church and state”. One hearing that phrase may assume that it is recorded in a foundational document—the Declaration of Independence, say or the US Constitution. It isn’t. It’s an extrapolation on Article 1 of that document, which reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. 

One Size Does Not Fit All

I admit to being a bit over-sensitive to pronouncements about Islam because they often encourage us to think Islam as monolithic, which it is not. For one thing, Islam has no central authority—such as a Pope or House of Justice—so each administrative unit (country, principality, tribal unit, etc) interprets the Qur’an as they will and refers to the resulting set of assumptions as Shari’a law. The importance of this in the current atmosphere of distrust and fear of radical Islam cannot, I think, be over-emphasized.

So, the article I “riffed on” was correct and the sources I then discovered were also correct. Taken together, they might produce a complex picture of the reality on the ground. But, as I alluded to in my original article, we are creatures who, in large part, favor simplicity over complexity and stark contrast to nuance. The reality on the ground in Saudi Arabia (and other Muslim nations as well) is both complex and nuanced in a way that the bald statements in the embedded article only hint at.

And those complexities are what allow (for example) a population of over a million Roman Catholics to exist within Saudi borders.

In the breath after the statements about Saudi Arabia, the essayist comments that, in Iran: “The Bahai faith is not allowed at all.” This, too, is far to vague a statement to meet an absolute standard of truth. It certainly would dissuade a reader from believing that there are around 300,000 Bahá’ís in Iran and that their situation is ambiguous, precarious and of some concern to the global Bahá’í community, our State Department and the UN alike.

The takeaway from this for readers (I hope) is that it is easy to come away from any news story, article, or other reading with a “sense” of absolute facts about a subject when the reality is ever so much more complicated. It is upon this sense of absolutes that suspicion, fear and, ultimately, prejudice are founded and spread.

Which leads me inexorably to this statement by Bahá’u’lláh:

O SON OF SPIRIT! The best beloved of all things in My sight is Justice; turn not away therefrom if thou desirest Me, and neglect it not that I may confide in thee. By its aid thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others, and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbor. — Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh, vs. 2 (Arabic)