There’s a movement afoot to frame science/religion discussions in such a way that those of who believe that the two are incompatible are labeled as extremists who can be safely excluded from grownup discussions about the issue. It’s somewhat insulting — to be told that people like you are incapable of conducting thoughtful, productive conversations with others — and certainly blatantly false as an empirical matter — I’ve both participated in and witnessed numerous such conversations that were extremely substantive and well-received. It’s also a bit worrisome, since whether a certain view is “true” or “false” seems to take a back seat to whether it is “moderate” or “extreme.” But people are welcome to engage or not with whatever views they choose.
What troubles me is how much our cultural conversation is being impoverished by a reluctance to face up to reality. In many ways the situation is parallel to the discussion about global climate change. In the real world, our climate is being affected in dramatic ways by things that human beings are doing. We really need to be talking about serious approaches to this problem; there are many factors to be taken into consideration, and the right course of action is far from obvious. Instead, it’s impossible to broach the subject in a public forum without being forced to deal with people who simply refuse to accept the data, and cling desperately to the idea that the Earth’s atmosphere isn’t getting any warmer, or it’s just sunspots, or warmth is a good thing, or whatever. Of course, the real questions are being addressed by some people; but in the public domain the discussion is blatantly distorted by the necessity of dealing with the deniers. As a result, the interested but non-expert public receives a wildly inaccurate impression of what the real issues are.
Over the last four hundred or so years, human beings have achieved something truly amazing: we understand the basic rules governing the operation of the world around us. Everything we see in our everyday lives is simply a combination of three particles — protons, neutrons, and electrons — interacting through three forces — gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. That is it; there are no other forms of matter needed to describe what we see, and no other forces that affect how they interact in any noticeable way. And we know what those interactions are, and how they work. Of course there are plenty of things we don’t know — there are additional elementary particles, dark matter and dark energy, mysteries of quantum gravity, and so on. But none of those is relevant to our everyday lives (unless you happen to be a professional physicist). As far as our immediate world is concerned, we know what the rules are. A staggeringly impressive accomplishment, that somehow remains uncommunicated to the overwhelming majority of educated human beings.
That doesn’t mean that all the interesting questions have been answered; quite the opposite. Knowing the particles and forces that make up our world is completely useless when it comes to curing cancer, buying a new car, or writing a sonnet. (Unless your sonnet is about the laws of physics.) But there’s no question that this knowledge has crucial implications for how we think about our lives. Astrology does not work; there is no such thing as telekinesis; quantum mechanics does not tell you that you can change reality just by thinking about it. There is no life after death; there’s no spiritual essence that can preserve a human consciousness outside its physical body. Life is a chemical reaction; there is no moment at conception or otherwise when a soul is implanted in a body. We evolved as a result of natural processes over the history of the Earth; there is no supernatural intelligence that created us and maintains an interest in our behavior. There is no Natural Law that specifies how human beings should live, including who they should marry. There is no strong conception of free will, in the sense that we are laws unto ourselves over and above the laws of nature. The world follows rules, and we are part of the world.
How great would it be if we could actually have serious, productive public conversations about the implications of these discoveries? For all that we have learned, there’s a tremendous amount yet to be figured out. We know the rules by which the world works, but there’s a lot we have yet to know about how to live within it; it’s the difference between knowing the rules of chess and playing like a grandmaster. What is “life,” anyway? What is consciousness? How should we define who is a human being, and who isn’t? How should we live together in a just and well-ordered society? What are appropriate limits of medicine and biological manipulation? How can we create meaning and purpose in a world where they aren’t handed to us from on high? How should we think about love and friendship, right and wrong, life and death?
These are real questions, hard questions, and we have the tools in front of us to have meaningful discussions about them. And, as with climate change, some people are having such discussions; but the public discourse is so badly distorted that it has little relationship to the real issues. Instead of taking the natural world seriously, we have discussions about “Faith.” We pretend that questions of meaning and purpose and value must be the domain of religion. We are saddled with bizarre, antiquated attitudes toward sex and love, which have terrible consequences for real human beings.
I understand the reluctance to let go of religion as the lens through which we view questions of meaning and morality. For thousands of years it was the best we could do; it provided social structures and a framework for thinking about our place in the world. But that framework turns out not to be right, and it’s time to move on.
Rather than opening our eyes and having the courage and clarity to accept the world as it is, and to tackle some of the real challenges it presents, as a society we insist on clinging to ideas that were once perfectly reasonable, but have long since outlived their usefulness. Nature obeys laws, we are part of nature, and our job is to understand our lives in the context of reality as it really is. Once that attitude goes from being “extremist” to being mainstream, we might start seeing some real progress.
“Belizean, my standard for whether a belief, and specifically a religious belief, is acceptable is that it provide a net objective benefit.”
Mark P,
I suspect that the net benefits of Christianity aren’t obvious to you, because you’ve probably yet to appreciate that civilization is impossible without some means of suppressing the inherent human tendency to commit violence against strangers for personal gain or for the benefit of one’s kin or close associates.
This means of violence-suppression occurs through the induced absorption of religious ethical taboos by youth. It was formerly better known as civilizing one’s children. [Note: You cannot build a civilization (large-scale cooperation between strangers) on a tribal religion. Tribal religions do not suppress violence against strangers.]
Christianity Pros:
Western civilization.
Christianity Cons:
Pogroms, forced conversions, debauched clerisy, child molestation, persecution of adulterers and homosexuals, retardation of the growth of science (but less than in any competing religion), oppression of women (but also less than in competing religions), etc.
For comparison, consider the pros and cons of having a nervous system.
Nervous System Pros:
Your life.
Nervous System Cons:
Headaches, toothaches, burn pains, cancer pain, back pain, muscle pain, various persistent injury pains, etc.
If both cases, the pros far outweigh the cons.
@ DaveH #59
So you’re saying that such a beginning is subjective rather than objective? OK, in that case, someone, or some government can come along and say that a newborn baby, or a fetus which is 8 months old is not yet a “new human life”. Now suppose a vast majority of the people in this country think the same way, and a law gets passed that says such “beings” can be killed if they get to be too inconvenient.
Is that OK with you?
Why do you think the notion of an objectively fixed beginning to a “new human life” does not exist? Let’s reason one out, shall we? No religious references or reference to God.
@ Steve #84
“Do human zygotes have a special place in your belief system ?”
It’s not my “belief system”. What is a zygote? It’s a living cell with its own complete human genome, and will continue to grow, from that point on (under the right conditions) into a baby ready to be born. I say that’s pretty special.
“Do the same questions apply to non human zygotes, or do they lack some essence that does not appear to exist in nature?”
Non human zygotes are not human beings. They will not grow to a human baby ready to be born. Only a human zygote will. That’s why I think a human being has their start at conception.
When do you think a human being has their start? What is your evidence?
“…civilization is impossible without some means of suppressing the inherent human tendency to commit violence against strangers for personal gain or for the benefit of one’s kin or close associates.”
That’s begging the question. There is no evidence that religion suppresses the dark side of human nature. In fact, there is ample evidence that religion simply institutionalizes it and supports the power structure that carries it out. Sometimes religion is directly involved, and sometimes it is simply used as another weapon in the arsenal. Second, and most important, there is no evidence that the premise (human nature must be suppressed in order for civilization to exist) is true. And there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the western religious practices (Greco-Roman-Christianity) are any better at it than any other religion, including the native American religions as practiced before Western christians committed genocide against the natives.
@ Paul #102,
If we were naive, we might take the concept of an organism being “alive” as it applies to Biology, which even there is very difficult to pin down, and try to thread it across other domains, through and beyond our ‘folk biology’, into the moral domain, to guide us authoritatively on the very difficult issue of abortion. Even a brief consideration of the various states of health, ages, social conditions, and physical and emotional circumstances under which a person can become the carrier of a fertilized zygote would tell us that “human zygote is a living organism” is obviously insufficient.
There isn’t that much special about a fertilized zygote, no. Far more zygotes have been aborted naturally without the woman even being aware than have ever been born. If there were a god who valued the zygote, they would be curiously wasteful.
An arbitrary cut off point for termination would be morally abhorrent, indeed. The issue of a potential life is worth some consideration, but the inflexible slavery of a human adult to a dumb ball of cells would also be abhorrent. Which is why we must take the issue seriously and consider it deeply rather than, for example, cobbling together some quaint folk biology notion of vitalism with a definition of organism with theological pronouncements from an ignorant age and deluding ourselves that that monstrous failure of imagination and empathy has anything to do with Love.
@ DaveH #105
You mentioned abortion. I wasn’t talking about abortion. All I was trying to argue for was that human life begins at conception. Abortion and whether it should be legal is another matter. Although I think abortion is wrong (because I think human life begins at conception), lots of wrong things are not illegal (eg., being unfaithful to your spouse).
True, lots of zygotes are aborted naturally without the mother ever knowing. But that doesn’t imply that human life does not begin at conception. Many fully adult people die naturally without us knowing about it. Also, if I suddenly get propelled into outer space without a suit, I will surely die because the conditions were not right for me to continue living. Similarly, if conditions aren’t right, a human zygote will die as well. But in either case, that tells us nothing about the humanity of the fully adult human propelled into space, or the zygote. You mentioned God in your reply to me. Why? Do you think that holding the view that human life begins at conceptions is a religious one? It’s not, as I am trying to explain.
You referred to “a dumb ball of cells”, presumably about a very young fetus. Well, what if a fully adult human were unconscious. In a coma. Would you also consider that a dumb ball of cells? The “dumb ball of cells”, although not intelligent, is an organism continually growing and organizing itself into a baby ready to be born. That tells me that the “ball of cells” is alive and a growing organism. What KIND of organism? A human, of course. What other possible organism could it be?
I never mentioned any notion of “vitalism” or anything theological. I don’t know if a precise definition of “living” exists, but I find it obviously that a zygote (a cell) is definitely living. Just as one of my skin cells is living. But my skin cell will never grow into a baby unless you drastically alter its genetic makeup. A zygote will (under the right conditions in the mother’s womb), just as a human newborn will continue to grow under the right conditions (i.e. having people around to feed him/her and generally care for him/her).
Paul, it’s utterly possible that you spew out this stuff reflexively due to an emotional attachment to the whole shebang, so you might not even be aware of your own lies. Still, I have little patience for it. Yes, in #102 you were talking about abortion.
The assertion that “human life begins at conception” trivially conflates the moral with the biological. It is implicit in the statement.
Well, what if a fully adult human were unconscious. In a coma. Would you also consider that a dumb ball of cells?
Having been party to the decision to turn my father’s life support off, that is a difficult reality I have had to face.
I never mentioned any notion of “vitalism” or anything theological.
No, but it’s amazing – I know what you are thinking before you do.
DaveH,
Fine, if you don’t want to have a civil conversation about this, then I’ll stop. You don’t know me, and I wasn’t talking about abortion. I was trying to have a conversation about when human life begins. If you don’t have patience to talk about this then there’s no sense in continuing.
I am sorry about your past experience with your father.
DaveH
I looked at my comment #102 and, in all honesty, I did not have abortion in mind. I was trying, in the style of physics, to give a sort of “thought experiment”. Although it sounds like I was talking to or alluding to abortion, the similarly really was not intended.
I was trying to have a conversation about when human life begins.
Of course. The theme of the blog post being “Where human life begins” and your point of insertion being neither the soul nor anything else from theology…
Oh well, it was good talking with you, DaveH! Take care!
there is no moment at conception or otherwise when a soul is implanted in a body.
Indeed, and that’s an interesting link!
Caruso: “…Also, some people (not you mr. Carroll, of course) spend too much time and effort treating religion as silly fairy tales and religious people as mentally challenged cows.’
Hmmm, its tempting 🙂
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@Peter Morgan, 26: You dismiss by omission — I hope not by ignorance — many alternative accounts of the methodology and epistemology of Science. Realism has too many troubles, delineated already in the 1950s in terms of the critique of Positivism, to be able to make this statement hold absolutely.
I’m confused. Positivism is not a realist account of science. How does a critique of positivism demonstrate the problems of realism?
I think you should read this before making any comments about life after death. Many academics including several NASA scientists witnessed these phenomena. This is a dense report of scholarship. Read about the remarkable light phenomena if nothing else. Perhaps these phenomena can be explained by taking multiple dimensions seriously. Life finds a way, perhaps?
You may know that here in the UK several universities teach parapsychology as a research subject and Ph.D’s are regularly awarded. Come on guys wise up!
The Scole Report, by Montague Keen, Arthur Ellison & David Fontana, Society for Psychical Research (SPR), 1999.
Abstract. This report is the outcome of a three-year investigation of a Group claiming to receive both messages and materialised or physical objects from a number of collaborative spirit communicators. It has been conducted principally by three senior members of the Society for Psychical Research. In the course of over 20 sittings the investigators were unable to detect any direct indication of fraud or deception, and encountered evidence favouring the hypothesis of intelligent forces, whether originating in the human psyche or from discarnate sources, able to influence material objects and to convey associated meaningful messages, both visual and aural.
Sean states that not to believe that human cause global warming is not to face reality. It is well known that CO2 at 4/10,000 of the atmosphere cannot by itself cause harmful warming even if its concentration doubles. Believers in global warming have posited that CO2 has positive feedback effects on more powerful drivers of climate such as water vapor. However Richard Lindzen’s (MIT) research has demonstrated that there are NO positive feedback effects of CO2 on major greenhouse gasses like water vapor. Lindzen’s data shows such feedback effects are actually NEGATIVE. Without positive feedbacks to the effect of CO2 on the major greenhouse gasses there absolutely is no harmful warming from increases in CO2 levels. Listen to this talk by Lindzen to get the reality on “global warming:”
http://www.heartland.org/bin/media/dc09/audio/Richard_Lindzen.mp3
Lindzen is widely regarded as one of it not the top atmospheric scientist on the globe.
In addition, believers in global warming have consistently denied the role of changes in solar activity on climate, saying that CO2 overrode any such effects. This view has also been proven wrong. Listen to this great talk by Willie Soon (Harvard):
http://www.itsrainmakingtime.com/_recent/climate_part2.html
Bills in Congress that push our carbon emissions per person to 1867 levels will do nothing but collapse our civilization and put us all in poverty.
As Sean sees as irrefutable “reality” things which are completely unsupportable and ludicrous, why trust his perspective on religion or anything else?
Sean greatly overestimates the scope of human knowledge (“we know what the rules are.”) This may be true for simple physical processes. There are many, many areas where our knowledge is sketchy, at best.
Re: #91: “Science is not a philosophy and demands no particular philosophy.”
I think this is at the heart of this misunderstanding.
In fact, science does require a particular philosophy — empirical rationalism.
The scientific method depends upon empiricism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism
The conclusions drawn from the scientific method depend on Rationalism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalism
Another philosophy, for example, solipsism, would be at odds with science. More importantly, empirical rationalism would be unable to disprove solipsism since both philosophies are, essentially, mutually exclusive.
If we don’t believe in the same set of axioms, the proofs we construct for each other are meaningless.
Mark P.:
“There is no evidence that religion suppresses the dark side of human nature.”
Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on advertising each year, because it’s known to affect adult behavior. But somehow religious indoctrination from infancy does not even slightly reduce a person’s tendency to murder or rape?
“…there is no evidence that the premise (human nature must be suppressed in order for civilization to exist) is true.”
If you’ve ever raised a child, you know that they don’t emerge from the womb fully versed in our cultural taboos. Killing an animal or murdering a stranger for personal gain is not only perfectly natural for an uncivilized human being, it’s completely rational. Study the habits of any primitive tribe with regard to out-groups.
“…there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the western religious practices (Greco-Roman-Christianity) are any better at it than any other religion…”
So science developed in the West by sheer chance. It had nothing whatever to do with Greco-Roman-Christianity being less oppressive than other religions. All religions are equally oppressive. Just like all political ideologies. Nazism, libertarianism, Islam, Unitarianism – makes no difference. Why don’t you try to do some cutting-edge scientific research in Saudi Arabia, and get back to me.
“…native American religions [are no better than that of the] Western christians [who] committed genocide against the natives…”
Except that Christianity was one of the religions capable of supporting a large-scale civilization (which enabled a vast division of labor that supported technological advances that allowed the Europeans to cross an ocean and conquer the aboriginal Americans). One of the numerous tribal religions indigenous to current U.S. territory could have eventually evolved into a civilization-supporting religion (as indeed happened for the young civilizations of the Aztecs, Mayans, Incans, and, to a lesser extent, the Chaco Canyon dwellers). Even if one these had evolved (by shedding its provincial tribalism to become more inclusive), it — like the Aztecs, Mayans, etc — would probably have been more oppressive than Christianity and therefore less technologically advanced. It would still likely have been conquered.
The properties of religions matter. You don’t have to believe in Christianity to acknowledge that there are other religions that have been far more inimical to the growth of human knowledge.
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religious indoctrination from infancy does not even slightly reduce a person’s tendency to murder or rape?
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Why don’t you try to do some cutting-edge scientific research in Saudi Arabia, and get back to me.
Of all the places to pick. An architecture, engineering and petroleum technology hotspot, to begin with.
You might check out this too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdullah_University_of_Science_and_Technology
But really, there’s no place like home, as Dorothy said. Did Kansas pass you by?
Perfect. Should be made mandatory reading for everybody by the time they reach 15, so that a great deal of the misery they would otherwise visit upon themselves and others in later life, owing to their irrational beliefs and superstitions and shibboleths, could be avoided. Unfortunately, there are no limits or geographical boundaries to human gullibility.
Would it help to reconceptualize religion as a mental disorder? At its mildest, religious thought is defective and irrational. As the disease progresses it veers toward obsession/compulsion before becoming full blown psychosis. “Pious” folks are usually just out-and-out nuts. Those who characterize themselves as devout whatever (Jew Muslim Christian etc) are either terribly sick or, worse, self-righteous phonies. That goes for the namby-pamby new-agers who try to get away with saying they are not religious, but “spiritual”. I would only allow for exceptions in the case of funerals and the occasional Bar-Mitzvah I guess, but for the most part, trying to reconcile science with religion is like trying to ask can one be healthy and sick at the same time.
I know this view is insulting to most people, but why is there so much emphasis on “respect” to the point where there are riots over perceived slights such as Danish cartoons?
Kudos to those who don’t want to waste time trying to assuage peoples’ mentally ill delusions.