Two technical points first. Quodlibeta now allows comments. The congregation of regent masters voted that comments should be allowed and, as a humble clerks, we can do no more than execute their collective will.
Also, if you are as behind the times technically as I am, you may not have yet discovered the delights of feeds. If not, I can only recommend setting up an account on something like Google Reader and pressing the little orange button on the right of the screen on this blog. This means that you don’t have to check back to see if Quodlibeta has been updated since your last visit as any updates will, thanks the magic of feeds, be brought to you.
Finally, some news which anyone interested in medieval science will be extremely saddened to hear. John D. North has died at the age of 72. He was the leading scholar in the field of medieval mathematics and astronomy for the last thirty years. He will be best remembered for his work on Richard of Wallingford, recently repackaged for a popular readership as God’s Clockmaker.
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Thursday, November 13, 2008
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Creation Myths
At the heart of the modern day science and religion debate is the conflict between the creation passages of Genesis and Titus Lucretius Carus’s poem ‘On the nature of things’, two competing visions of the meaning and the value of human existence. Both are in a sense cosmogonical myths, yet to recognize them as such is not to diminish their significance or truthfulness. Myths are not lies or detached stories. Rather they serve as imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that can present particular ways of interpreting the world and its meaning. As the British philosopher Mary Midgley argues, the myths we live by ‘shape our symbolism, our metaphysics and our understanding of what is real’. This is a point often missed when referring to Genesis which has come to be regarded as an inerrant repository of scientific truth. Yet to hold its message as literal is to ignore the reality of how we use language and literature in many different ways; as Origen puts it in 'On First Principles' :‘What man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without the sun and moon and stars?....I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual events’
Polanyi in ‘Personal Knowledge’ similarly reflects that:
'The book of Genesis and its great pictorial illustrations, like the frescos of Michelangelo, remain a far more intelligent account of the nature and origins of the universe than the representation of the world as a chance collection of atoms. For the Biblical cosmology continues to express - however inadequately - the significance of the fact the world exists and that man has emerged from it, while the scientific picture denies any meaning to the world, and indeed ignores all our vital experience of this world. The assumption that the world has some meaning which is linked to our calling as the only responsible beings in the world, is an important example of the supernatural aspect of experience which Christian interpretations of the universe explore and develop.’
On the nature of things is an epic which moves in lofty and conversational language through such themes as the universe, human beings, the soul, death and the Gods. Lucretius’s pretext for writing the poem is to convert his friend Memmius to Epicureanism; but also to strike a blow against antiquity’s teleologists, the Platonists, the Aristotelians and most of all, the Stoics. He chooses to do so in verse in order to sweeten this bitter pill of his rather dismal and dispiriting philosophy in which life is accidental both in the everyday and in the genesis. To Lucretius, his mentor Epicurius is the spiritual and moral savior of himself and mankind; a man whose teachings have the power to free humankind from the fear of the gods by demonstrating that all things occur by natural causes. The poem seeks to grandly proclaim the reality of humanity’s role in a universe ruled by chance, a cosmos in which we are decoupled from any cosmic master plan. It is a statement of personal responsibility in a world in which everyone is driven by hungers and passions with which they were born and do not understand, an expression of both defiance and hope in the face of philosophical despair. For Lucretius, one of the chief obstacles to the tranquillity of mind is the fear of death, the fear of punishment after death and the fear of the gods. By showing that the mind and spirit are mortal, and that they therefore cannot live on after we die, the poet seeks to banish these concerns;
‘Death..is nothing to us: when we exist death is not present; and when death is present, we do not exist. Consequently it does not concern either the living or the dead since for the living it is non existent and the dead no longer exist’
Phillip Larkin certainly didn’t find any scrap of consolation in Lucretius. As he stared into the abyss, the abyss stared back into him. In his great poem ‘Aubade’ he remarked:‘This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says
No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round..’
If non existence is indeed the eventual state of affairs then Larkin presumably never had to experience the embarrassment of looking down from upon high as his friends and family discovered he had amassed the largest collection of hardcore pornography in the northern hemisphere. Nor did he have to watch on in horror as his biographers poured through his diaries to find he had written of the joys of ‘WATCHING SCHOOLGIRLS SUCK EACH OTHER OFF WHILE YOU WHIP THEM". Perhaps Lucretius was right and eternal annihilation has its plus side.
Of perhaps the most significance in the poem is its depiction of Epicurus’s version of atomism, in which the universe originates at some indefinite point in the past as an infinite number of small, hard, indestructible particles moving downward through void space in parallel. Ours is a world in which bodies composed of many atoms entangled with one another, then move in a variety of ways and interact with one another through collision. Superficially the depiction of reality contained in ‘On the Nature of Things’ would seem to be anathema to the picture contained in Genesis of an orderly Cosmos created and ruled over by an Omnipotent God, yet it was the creative tension between the two which gave birth to the mechanical philosophy of early modern science. The atomistic picture succeeded when it was wedded by Gassendi, Mersenne and Descartes to the purposive understanding of the cosmos derived from Genesis and biblical notions of God’s power. Descartes for example, expressed motion as follows:
‘From the mere fact that God gave pieces of matter various movements at their first creation, and that he now preserves all this matter in being in the same way as he first created it, he must likely always preserve in it the same quantity of motion’.
What we now recognize as a scientific principle was therefore formulated through a theological concept of divine immutability. The universe ran like a clock, but not autonomously; divine preservation shaped it and held it in being . Later theorists such as Boyle recognized the atomistic picture as an ally to Christian belief, divesting nature of all inherent powers and making brute matter subservient to God’s immediate Will, controlled in motion by laws externally imposed. In such a universe God’s sovereignty could be celebrated. Genesis and ‘On the Nature of Things’ appear strange bedfellows but molded together they provided a powerful interpretive framework capable of gaining great insight.
At first glance, the world around us is much as it was described in De Rerum Natura, which has become something of a creation myth for metaphysical naturalism, minus the magnificently indifferent Gods whom the materialists have long since evaporated with their animosity towards the supernatural. In the atomistic picture, the soul is just a collection of particles animated by blind chance, the discovery of the evolutionary process shattered Paley’s watchmaker argument, Laplace eliminated God from the heavens and natural theology retreated into talk of process.
And yet, as Francis Bacon was to write on the difference between the Aristotelian and Epicurean world pictures:‘Nay, even that school which is most accused of atheism doth most demonstrate religion; that is, the school of Leucippus and Democritus and Epicurus. For it is a thousand times more credible, that four mutable elements, and one immutable fifth essence, duly and eternally placed, need no God, than that an army of infinite small portions, or seeds unplaced, should have produced this order and beauty, without a divine marshal’.
The God has been eliminated by enlightenment doubt, yet the rational ordered universe remains as an inexplicable brute fact, its laws and regularities curiously permitting of our existence. As Bacon would say ‘It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism’. But when one steps back from creation and looks in wonder at the whole majestic sweep, at the finely balanced atomic structures, the infinity of stars across the night sky, a universe of mathematical beauty, and the unlikely emergence of Einstein, Newton and Michelangelo from the blind algorithmic workings of evolution and the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules; then one gets a dim sense of the mind behind this universal frame. We are nothing but atoms, but we are much more than just atoms. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
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Monday, November 10, 2008
Does religion make you nice?
If you want to see an example of academic double-think have a look at this article in Slate. It discusses whether religion makes us behave better or worse than we would do otherwise.
This is a complicated question which I don’t want to delve into too deeply here. Rather I am interested in the conclusions drawn by Professor Paul Bloom, the psychologist from Yale who wrote the article. He notes surveys report that, in the United States, atheists give less to charity and are less happy than religious people. However, in some secular countries (which he weirdly calls atheist countries) like Denmark and Sweden, people are generally as generous and happy as believers in the US. Bloom notes that although most people in Denmark and Sweden are not believers in an afterlife or a personal God, they nonetheless describe themselves as Christians. The Church regulates their lives through baptism, marriage and funerals.
He suggests, on this basis, that it is not religious faith that makes us charitable and happy, but the support of a religious community (this is an arguable point although it fails to ask how long a religious community can survive without any believers). Thus, says Bloom, American atheists are not miserable tightwads because they don’t believe in God, but because they are lonely and isolated. But then, he concludes that this is the fault of religious people! He claims,
I was just about keeping up with him until this point, but fell off my chair at how ridiculous his final sentence was. Bloom is actually saying that it is the fault of religious communities that Christopher Hitchens, PZ Myers and the head bangers at Internet Infidels are not part of their group. Wow.
I’ve heard religion blamed for all sorts of things that it bears no responsibility for, but this takes the biscuit.
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Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.
This is a complicated question which I don’t want to delve into too deeply here. Rather I am interested in the conclusions drawn by Professor Paul Bloom, the psychologist from Yale who wrote the article. He notes surveys report that, in the United States, atheists give less to charity and are less happy than religious people. However, in some secular countries (which he weirdly calls atheist countries) like Denmark and Sweden, people are generally as generous and happy as believers in the US. Bloom notes that although most people in Denmark and Sweden are not believers in an afterlife or a personal God, they nonetheless describe themselves as Christians. The Church regulates their lives through baptism, marriage and funerals.
He suggests, on this basis, that it is not religious faith that makes us charitable and happy, but the support of a religious community (this is an arguable point although it fails to ask how long a religious community can survive without any believers). Thus, says Bloom, American atheists are not miserable tightwads because they don’t believe in God, but because they are lonely and isolated. But then, he concludes that this is the fault of religious people! He claims,
The sorry state of American atheists, then, may have nothing to do with their lack of religious belief. It may instead be the result of their outsider status within a highly religious country where many of their fellow citizens, including very vocal ones like Schlessinger, find them immoral and unpatriotic. Religion may not poison everything, but it deserves part of the blame for this one.
I was just about keeping up with him until this point, but fell off my chair at how ridiculous his final sentence was. Bloom is actually saying that it is the fault of religious communities that Christopher Hitchens, PZ Myers and the head bangers at Internet Infidels are not part of their group. Wow.
I’ve heard religion blamed for all sorts of things that it bears no responsibility for, but this takes the biscuit.
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Saturday, November 08, 2008
Debating God
On my other blog I wrote recently that, while I enjoy debates, I don't really trust them. My childhood experiences taught me that not being able to come up with a snappy retort off the top of your head in front of others does not mean that you're in the wrong.
However, perhaps a bit perversely, I do enjoy watching and listening to debates on Christianity. One of the most prolific debaters of the last two decades or so has been William Lane Craig, one of those annoying people who has two Doctorates. I recently discovered a link to nearly all of the debates he's taken part in. Some you can listen to, some you can watch, and for a few you can read transcripts. The two most common debate subjects are the existence of God and the historical Jesus. There are also others on meta-ethics, and a few more on Islam. It's worth checking out.
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However, perhaps a bit perversely, I do enjoy watching and listening to debates on Christianity. One of the most prolific debaters of the last two decades or so has been William Lane Craig, one of those annoying people who has two Doctorates. I recently discovered a link to nearly all of the debates he's taken part in. Some you can listen to, some you can watch, and for a few you can read transcripts. The two most common debate subjects are the existence of God and the historical Jesus. There are also others on meta-ethics, and a few more on Islam. It's worth checking out.
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Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.
Thursday, November 06, 2008
A Time to Dance, A Time to Die
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” So begins L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, with a first line that is both punchy and true. Historians always have to accept that we can never see the world through the eyes of the characters we study. But sometimes we do feel we can come close. I enjoy the connection I can feel with someone who lived five hundred years ago by reading their letters or just enjoying the doodles they’ve drawn in the margin of their books.
Every so often, though, things happened which were just so weird that it is extremely hard to make sense of them. One such occasion was the dancing plague that struck Strasbourg in 1518 and forms the subject of John Waller’s new book A Time to Dance, A Time to Die. The plague affected dozens if not hundreds of people, several of whom died as a result. The idea that people could dance themselves to death seems shocking and it is a relief to find that the people of Strasbourg were no less horrified than we would be.
Waller’s first task is to convince us that the dancing plague actually happened. He convincingly achieves this by lining up the sources and also showing that similar events had occasionally occurred over the previous three hundred years. His other task – to explain the plague – is far more difficult. He attributes it to extreme spiritual anxiety brought about by a series of disasters that afflicted the Strasbourg poor. While the sources rarely concern themselves with the common people, Waller is able to tease out a picture of their life from information on grain prices, chronicles of popular revolts and the sermons by the city’s preachers. He leaves us in no doubt that existence for the poor was always precarious and frequently became dire. Their material wants were exacerbated by the common belief that the disasters that befell the faithful were evidence that God had turned his back on them. It is easy to see how the radical theology of Martin Luther found so many ready listeners even if Strasbourg itself remained essentially Catholic through the Reformation.
Perhaps less convincing is the last chapter where Waller ventures into psychology. While he effectively debunks earlier the attempts to explain the dancing plague and similar phenomena, psychology itself is not yet able to provide the explanation that he seeks. Furthermore, at a distance of five hundred years, we do not have sufficient facts to make an accurate medical diagnosis of the victims of the dancing plague.
Overall, this book helped me understand the lot of the common people just before the Reformation. For historians like me who concentrate on high literary and scientific culture, this is a powerful and necessary corrective. I'd recommend it for anyone interested in the Reformation or religious practice in general. It also has the virtue of being a quick read.
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Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.
Every so often, though, things happened which were just so weird that it is extremely hard to make sense of them. One such occasion was the dancing plague that struck Strasbourg in 1518 and forms the subject of John Waller’s new book A Time to Dance, A Time to Die. The plague affected dozens if not hundreds of people, several of whom died as a result. The idea that people could dance themselves to death seems shocking and it is a relief to find that the people of Strasbourg were no less horrified than we would be.
Waller’s first task is to convince us that the dancing plague actually happened. He convincingly achieves this by lining up the sources and also showing that similar events had occasionally occurred over the previous three hundred years. His other task – to explain the plague – is far more difficult. He attributes it to extreme spiritual anxiety brought about by a series of disasters that afflicted the Strasbourg poor. While the sources rarely concern themselves with the common people, Waller is able to tease out a picture of their life from information on grain prices, chronicles of popular revolts and the sermons by the city’s preachers. He leaves us in no doubt that existence for the poor was always precarious and frequently became dire. Their material wants were exacerbated by the common belief that the disasters that befell the faithful were evidence that God had turned his back on them. It is easy to see how the radical theology of Martin Luther found so many ready listeners even if Strasbourg itself remained essentially Catholic through the Reformation.
Perhaps less convincing is the last chapter where Waller ventures into psychology. While he effectively debunks earlier the attempts to explain the dancing plague and similar phenomena, psychology itself is not yet able to provide the explanation that he seeks. Furthermore, at a distance of five hundred years, we do not have sufficient facts to make an accurate medical diagnosis of the victims of the dancing plague.
Overall, this book helped me understand the lot of the common people just before the Reformation. For historians like me who concentrate on high literary and scientific culture, this is a powerful and necessary corrective. I'd recommend it for anyone interested in the Reformation or religious practice in general. It also has the virtue of being a quick read.
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Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Skepticism and Blind Faith
Dallas Willard is a philosopher at USC who's an expert in Husserl's phenomenology. His popularity in Christian circles, however, is due to his excellent books on spiritual living; I highly recommend them. In one of these books, Hearing God, he makes an interesting point near the end regarding skepticism.
It seems to me that skepticism is essentially blind faith that something is false, and any form of blind faith is not rational. Of course, someone could come up with an ad hoc proposition that no one would believe, like Russell's orbiting teapot or a flying spaghetti monster. The rational response to such suggestions is not to remain undecided; it's to not believe them. Doesn't this prove that skepticism, doubt, is the fallback position in terms of rationality?
The problem with this is that we do have a reason to disbelieve such claims: they are ad hoc, and the more ad hoc or contrived a claim is, the less likely it is true. The degree to which it is ad hoc is the degree to which it is implausible. This is particularly evident with the absurdly ad hoc propositions mentioned above: we react against such suggestions because they are completely contrived. It's not merely that we have no reason to think they are true; we think, for whatever reason, that they are just "made up," and this is a specific reason to think they are not true.
However, this gets into burden of proof issues, and my understanding is that these issues are notoriously difficult to resolve. It's food for thought, though.
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The test of character posed by the gentleness of God's approach to us is especially dangerous for those formed by the ideas that dominate our modern world. We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character. Only a very hardy individualist or social rebel -- or one desperate for another life -- therefore stands any chance of discovering the substantiality of the spiritual life today. Today it is the skeptics who are the social conformists, though because of powerful intellectual propaganda they continue to enjoy thinking of themselves as wildly individualistic and unbearably bright.This is an interesting point. Skepticism is the refusal to believe; how exactly is this intellectual? How is it rational or wise? As he says, an unintelligent person can doubt something just as easily as an intelligent person; so how could doubting be a sign of intelligence or of rational method?
It seems to me that skepticism is essentially blind faith that something is false, and any form of blind faith is not rational. Of course, someone could come up with an ad hoc proposition that no one would believe, like Russell's orbiting teapot or a flying spaghetti monster. The rational response to such suggestions is not to remain undecided; it's to not believe them. Doesn't this prove that skepticism, doubt, is the fallback position in terms of rationality?
The problem with this is that we do have a reason to disbelieve such claims: they are ad hoc, and the more ad hoc or contrived a claim is, the less likely it is true. The degree to which it is ad hoc is the degree to which it is implausible. This is particularly evident with the absurdly ad hoc propositions mentioned above: we react against such suggestions because they are completely contrived. It's not merely that we have no reason to think they are true; we think, for whatever reason, that they are just "made up," and this is a specific reason to think they are not true.
However, this gets into burden of proof issues, and my understanding is that these issues are notoriously difficult to resolve. It's food for thought, though.
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Thursday, October 30, 2008
The New Charles Simonyi Professor
The new Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford is the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy. Judging by his website, he has done lots of worthy media work to promote mathematics and he is colour-blind (if you doubt that, click on the link but make sure you are wearing shades). The website isn’t terribly up-to-date but he does appear to have plenty of experience communicating with the public. He is also an A-list academic.
And that, folks, is the last you will ever hear about him, on this site or anywhere else, unless you watch educational programmes on British television. To prove my point, consider what you know about the other Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, Kathy Sykes at Bristol University. She works hard to make fun programmes about science that pull in a niche audience on the box. But the press have no interest in her and none of her books have troubled the bestseller lists. I mean no disrespect to Professors Sykes or du Sautoy when I say this. But for the wider public and those who thrive on controversy, they provide thin gruel.
The fact is, it was Dawkins who created headlines and not the post he occupied. He was, and is, a much bigger fish then the Charles Simonyi chair. When Dawkins speaks, the press take notice. So do we at Quodlibeta. The same will not be the case for Professor du Sautoy. It appears that he is an atheist but is bored by religion. As he is a mathematician, a subject that simply lacks media appeal, I suspect we will hear little from him.
Luckily, Richard Dawkins is still going strong. We must wish him a long and productive retirement.
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And that, folks, is the last you will ever hear about him, on this site or anywhere else, unless you watch educational programmes on British television. To prove my point, consider what you know about the other Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, Kathy Sykes at Bristol University. She works hard to make fun programmes about science that pull in a niche audience on the box. But the press have no interest in her and none of her books have troubled the bestseller lists. I mean no disrespect to Professors Sykes or du Sautoy when I say this. But for the wider public and those who thrive on controversy, they provide thin gruel.
The fact is, it was Dawkins who created headlines and not the post he occupied. He was, and is, a much bigger fish then the Charles Simonyi chair. When Dawkins speaks, the press take notice. So do we at Quodlibeta. The same will not be the case for Professor du Sautoy. It appears that he is an atheist but is bored by religion. As he is a mathematician, a subject that simply lacks media appeal, I suspect we will hear little from him.
Luckily, Richard Dawkins is still going strong. We must wish him a long and productive retirement.
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Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Once upon a time...
I was excited to hear in the weekend’s telegraph that Richard Dawkins will be retiring from his post at Oxford to write a book aimed at youngsters, in which he will warn them against believing in "anti-scientific" fairytales. He was quoted as saying "The book I write next year will be a children's book on how to think about the world, science thinking contrasted with mythical thinking. As anyone who has tried to read the manuscript of Francis Galton’s ‘Kantsaywhere’ will know; the foray of scientists into fiction writing can often be disastrous. What would a children’s book by Dawkins look like?. Here is how I think he would tackle a rationalist version of Snow White and the 7 dwarfs.Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Once upon a time, as a queen sat sewing at her window, she pricked her finger on her needle and a drop of blood fell on the snow that had fallen on her ebony window frame. As she looked at the blood on the snow, she said to herself, "Oh, how I wish that I had a daughter that had skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony". Soon after that, the queen gave birth to a baby girl who had skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony. They named her Princess Snow White.
As all the courtiers at the Queen’s palace knew from reading ‘Ye Olde Scientist’, although Virgin birth has been proven in some bony fish, amphibians, reptiles and birds, and has been suspected among sharks in the wild, it is impossible in human beings - and presumably fairy tale queens - without the sex cells of both the male and the female. Both a sperm and an egg are required to create a zygote and the most rational explanation is that the queen entered into sexual intercourse with a man with the genetic features she desired in her wish. This is therefore an intriguing example of sex selection in human beings, the theory proposed by Charles Darwin that states that certain evolutionary traits can be explained by intraspecific competition.
Soon after, the king took a new wife, who was beautiful but very vain. She possessed a magical mirror that answered any question, to whom she often asked: "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in the land is fairest of all?" to which the mirror always replied "You, my queen, are fairest of all." But when Snow White reached the age of seven, she became as beautiful as the day, and when the queen asked her mirror, it responded: "Queen, you are full fair, 'tis true, but Snow White is fairer than you.
Of course the mirror did not actually reply to the Queen, since a mirror does not possess consciousness, not does it have the descended larynx needed to produce sound, and manipulate its pitch and volume to create language. The most rational interpretation of the facts was that the queen had been infected by a memetic mind virus, which convinced her that the mirror was her imaginary friend. Children often develop this tendency and this psychological paedomorphosis may have continued into the Queen’s adulthood. Of course there is no law in nature against there being a mirror that might communicate through non verbal means. Perhaps all the atoms of the mirror just happened to move to spell out the message - a low-probability event to be sure, but possible, and a far simpler explanation than magic (As I explained in 'The Blind Watchmaker', the same also applies for waving statues of the Virgin Mary).
The queen became jealous, and Snow White was forced to run away to the forest. In the forest, Snow White discovered a tiny cottage belonging to seven dwarfs, where she rested. There, the dwarfs took pity on her, saying "If you will keep house for us, and cook, make beds, wash, sew, and knit, and keep everything clean and orderly, then you can stay with us, and you shall have everything that you want."
Snow White was not convinced by the specious argument which circulated amongst some of the forest's more deluded inhabitants that the dwarfs had appeared by magic. From reading the manuscripts of Daniel C Dennett she knew this was a ‘skyhook’. Instead she knew that the dwarfs had evolved through a process of natural selection acting on heritable genetic variation. Either the men in the cottage were suffering from the condition Dwarfism, which can be caused by more than 200 different medical conditions, the most common of which is achondroplasia ; or intriguingly, they could have been a microcephalic modern human or a subspecies of hominid similar to the recently discovered Homo floresiensis in the Indonesian Archipelago. What they most certainly were not, was the products of ‘intelligent design, which Snow White knew was….. Kids?, are you still listening?, Kids?!?
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Tuesday, October 28, 2008
I Was Wrong
Richard Dawkins successor has been announced. Not who I predicted.
And no, I've never heard of him either.
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And no, I've never heard of him either.
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Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
The Tale of a Comet
It is well-known that people who lived before the Enlightenment were hopelessly superstitious. They believed, for example, that "odd" occurrences in the sky were omens signifying that odd occurrences would soon happen down here on Earth. The most blatant example of this took place when Halley's Comet appeared in 1456. While it was still visible, the siege of Belgrade by the Turks began; thus it was feared that this portent in the heavens had some relevance to the battle. Halley's Comet so upset Pope Callistus III that he resorted to drastic measures: he excommunicated it.
For years, this story was repeated as an example of how absurd and superstitious religion is, especially when contrasted with science. Carl Sagan referred to it in his book on comets. But of course, you know where I'm going with this: it didn't really happen. The story appears to have been popularized by Pierre-Simon Laplace at the end of the 18th century; Laplace, in turn, apparently got it from Vitæ Pontificum, a 15th century work, by Bartolomeo Platina. The Catholic Encyclopedia article on Platina dutifully translates the relevant text as follows:
Laplace took Platina's account and suggested that Callistus sought to exorcize Halley's Comet -- and I can't help but wonder if he intended this as a metaphor. Regardless, subsequent writers took it literally, and replaced "exorcize" with "excommunicate" since all those religious terms mean the same thing anyway. The final paragraph of the afore-mentioned article summarizes this development well.
Of course, no doubt there were people who thought Halley's Comet had something to do with the siege of Belgrade. That's the kernel of truth in this story. For that matter, it may very well be true that people in the 15th century were in general more superstitious than people today tend to be. But we still have astrology. Most newspapers print the horoscope every day.
What interests me is how people who hold themselves up as skeptics were taken in by such a ridiculous story as this. Carl Sagan was, by any account, a brilliant man. Yet he uncritically repeats an urban legend in order to show how other people are gullible. What this shows, I think, is that there are no true skeptics. People are only skeptical of things that they want to be skeptical about.
For example, in his book My Life Without God, William Murray describes how his mother Madalyn Murray O'Hair would tell groups of atheists that religious people were so stupid that nobody realized sex led to pregnancy until the 19th century. This is difficult to write without chuckling, but her throng of skeptics bought it. O'Hair herself attended seances, and believed she could talk with dead people. Murray wrote that, as far as he knew, his mother never tried to reconcile this with her belief that there is no afterlife. The skepticism with which she and her fans approached religion was obviously not consistently applied.
The point of all this is that we should be skeptical of our skepticism. The reason why an intelligent person like Carl Sagan could be taken in by such a silly story as a Pope excommunicating a comet is because it fit with his views on the nature of science, the nature of religion, and the relationship between the two. Madalyn Murray O'Hair and her followers were completely contemptuous of religion and religious believers, so any claim that justified this attitude, no matter how insane, was plausible to them.
I have different biases: I am skeptical of the claim that science and religion are opposed to each other. This makes me prone to accept stories that seem to affirm this bias without showing them the same level of critical analysis that I would show to a story that contradicts it. I have to examine myself to determine, as far as possible, what my biases are, and how they might be influencing my beliefs.
(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)
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Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.
For years, this story was repeated as an example of how absurd and superstitious religion is, especially when contrasted with science. Carl Sagan referred to it in his book on comets. But of course, you know where I'm going with this: it didn't really happen. The story appears to have been popularized by Pierre-Simon Laplace at the end of the 18th century; Laplace, in turn, apparently got it from Vitæ Pontificum, a 15th century work, by Bartolomeo Platina. The Catholic Encyclopedia article on Platina dutifully translates the relevant text as follows:
A maned and fiery comet appearing for several days, while scientists were predicting a great plague, dearness of food, or some great disaster, Callistus decreed that supplicatory prayers be held for some days to avert the anger of God, so that, if any calamity threatened mankind, it might be entirely diverted against the Turks, the foes of the Christian name. He likewise ordered that the bells be rung at midday as a signal to all the faithful to move God with assiduous petitions and to assist with their prayers those engaged in constant warfare with the Turks.Now there are a couple of things to note right away. First, there is no mention here of the Pope excommunicating the comet. Second, while the Pope had indeed issued a papal bull calling upon people to pray, and while Halley's Comet did appear in the sky at about the same time, there was simply no perceived link between the two. The bull doesn't even mention the comet. Platina just tied two events together that had no connection.
Laplace took Platina's account and suggested that Callistus sought to exorcize Halley's Comet -- and I can't help but wonder if he intended this as a metaphor. Regardless, subsequent writers took it literally, and replaced "exorcize" with "excommunicate" since all those religious terms mean the same thing anyway. The final paragraph of the afore-mentioned article summarizes this development well.
Of course, no doubt there were people who thought Halley's Comet had something to do with the siege of Belgrade. That's the kernel of truth in this story. For that matter, it may very well be true that people in the 15th century were in general more superstitious than people today tend to be. But we still have astrology. Most newspapers print the horoscope every day.
What interests me is how people who hold themselves up as skeptics were taken in by such a ridiculous story as this. Carl Sagan was, by any account, a brilliant man. Yet he uncritically repeats an urban legend in order to show how other people are gullible. What this shows, I think, is that there are no true skeptics. People are only skeptical of things that they want to be skeptical about.
For example, in his book My Life Without God, William Murray describes how his mother Madalyn Murray O'Hair would tell groups of atheists that religious people were so stupid that nobody realized sex led to pregnancy until the 19th century. This is difficult to write without chuckling, but her throng of skeptics bought it. O'Hair herself attended seances, and believed she could talk with dead people. Murray wrote that, as far as he knew, his mother never tried to reconcile this with her belief that there is no afterlife. The skepticism with which she and her fans approached religion was obviously not consistently applied.
The point of all this is that we should be skeptical of our skepticism. The reason why an intelligent person like Carl Sagan could be taken in by such a silly story as a Pope excommunicating a comet is because it fit with his views on the nature of science, the nature of religion, and the relationship between the two. Madalyn Murray O'Hair and her followers were completely contemptuous of religion and religious believers, so any claim that justified this attitude, no matter how insane, was plausible to them.
I have different biases: I am skeptical of the claim that science and religion are opposed to each other. This makes me prone to accept stories that seem to affirm this bias without showing them the same level of critical analysis that I would show to a story that contradicts it. I have to examine myself to determine, as far as possible, what my biases are, and how they might be influencing my beliefs.
(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)
Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum
Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.
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