One of the so-called anthropic coincidences is that in order for a planet to be capable of supporting life it has to have a moon the size and distance of our own in order to stabilize its axis. Some scientists have argued recently that this claim is exaggerated. Specifically, they argue that the larger planets in the solar system would have had a similar effect on the earth, preventing the earth's axis from fluctuating more than about 10 degrees, and that is not significant enough to prevent the existence of life. The earth -- and by extension, any potential life-site -- does not require a moon like the one we have. The article, unfortunately, does not cite a scientific study showing this, only that "astronomers at the University of Idaho have shown" it. Regardless, this is an interesting claim, since most of the studies on the anthropic principle have been in the direction of showing more numerous and more extreme examples of anthropic coincidences, so to have an example going the other way is intriguing. I mentioned this criterion in my series on the anthropic principle (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4), but my focus on it was in the final entry where I pointed out that having a moon the particular size and distance of our own allows for scientific observation rather than the possibility of life.
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Monday, August 22, 2011
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Toby Huff's Dangerous Curiosity
Toby Huff’s last book The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West was a brave attempt to answer one of the most difficult questions that the history of science presents. Why, asked Huff, did the scientific revolution happen in the West rather than in China or the Islamic world? You might add ancient Greece and India to the list of places the scientific revolution didn’t happen.
Asking this and then answering it too made Huff wildly unpopular with some historians. He’s a sociologist himself which provided one convenient stick to beat with which to beat him. Other reviewers variously implied he was an imperialist or even a racist. His real crime was to suggest that there was something culturally important about the West that made its science more effective than anyone else’s. Huff, in other words, is an anti-relativist.
As someone who is quite comfortable with the idea that western civilisation is the best thing that has ever happened to human beings, I think Huff deserves serious attention. He asks a question that you are not supposed to ask and gives answers that enrage his opponents. I’m not going to deal here with where I agree and disagree with Huff on specifics. But I wholly support his project of a comparative sociological approach which asks what cultural features make a difference to the way that each civilisation does science. And he is absolutely right to say that modern science is the only science that gives us consistently accurate theories about nature.
Unfortunately, because The Rise of Early Modern Science was a book of grand themes and broad sweep, it also contained too many factual errors. Huff prepared a second edition that dealt with many of these, but the feeling remains that he did not lay sufficient empirical foundations to carry his thesis. Neither did Said, Frazer or Foucault (let alone Marx), but we’ll let that pass.
So Huff’s new book, Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective (Cambridge 2011), is far more factual then his last one. In the first part, he looks at how the telescope was received in China, India and the Ottoman Empire. The story of the Jesuits’ effort to demonstrate the superiority of western science at the court of the Chinese Emperor is particularly fascinating. It was also amusing to hear that the first recorded instance of the telescope being used in Constantinople was to spy on the Sultan’s harem! Huff’s point is that the telescope did not kick off a new era of scientific research in other civilisations in the way it did in Europe. He puts this down to a lack of scientific curiosity, but wisely doesn’t try to explain what might have caused this.
The second part of the book compares the course of different sciences through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe and elsewhere. A lot of the European material is very familiar, but it is enlivened by stories from elsewhere. But the central theme that European science cracked on at an increasing pace while the rest of the world showed little interest is forcefully made.
Its more modest ambition probably makes Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution a better academic monograph than The Rise of Early Modern Science. But it is surely a lot less fun. Sacred cows litter the pages of the earlier book and it is so bracing to read a sociologist who is not caught in the headlights of political correctness. The combative Huff is less visible in the new book. It remains essential reading for all historians of science, but most of them will probably ignore it and hope that they can continue to avoid the difficult questions that Huff insists on asking.
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Asking this and then answering it too made Huff wildly unpopular with some historians. He’s a sociologist himself which provided one convenient stick to beat with which to beat him. Other reviewers variously implied he was an imperialist or even a racist. His real crime was to suggest that there was something culturally important about the West that made its science more effective than anyone else’s. Huff, in other words, is an anti-relativist.
As someone who is quite comfortable with the idea that western civilisation is the best thing that has ever happened to human beings, I think Huff deserves serious attention. He asks a question that you are not supposed to ask and gives answers that enrage his opponents. I’m not going to deal here with where I agree and disagree with Huff on specifics. But I wholly support his project of a comparative sociological approach which asks what cultural features make a difference to the way that each civilisation does science. And he is absolutely right to say that modern science is the only science that gives us consistently accurate theories about nature.
Unfortunately, because The Rise of Early Modern Science was a book of grand themes and broad sweep, it also contained too many factual errors. Huff prepared a second edition that dealt with many of these, but the feeling remains that he did not lay sufficient empirical foundations to carry his thesis. Neither did Said, Frazer or Foucault (let alone Marx), but we’ll let that pass.
So Huff’s new book, Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective (Cambridge 2011), is far more factual then his last one. In the first part, he looks at how the telescope was received in China, India and the Ottoman Empire. The story of the Jesuits’ effort to demonstrate the superiority of western science at the court of the Chinese Emperor is particularly fascinating. It was also amusing to hear that the first recorded instance of the telescope being used in Constantinople was to spy on the Sultan’s harem! Huff’s point is that the telescope did not kick off a new era of scientific research in other civilisations in the way it did in Europe. He puts this down to a lack of scientific curiosity, but wisely doesn’t try to explain what might have caused this.
The second part of the book compares the course of different sciences through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe and elsewhere. A lot of the European material is very familiar, but it is enlivened by stories from elsewhere. But the central theme that European science cracked on at an increasing pace while the rest of the world showed little interest is forcefully made.
Its more modest ambition probably makes Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution a better academic monograph than The Rise of Early Modern Science. But it is surely a lot less fun. Sacred cows litter the pages of the earlier book and it is so bracing to read a sociologist who is not caught in the headlights of political correctness. The combative Huff is less visible in the new book. It remains essential reading for all historians of science, but most of them will probably ignore it and hope that they can continue to avoid the difficult questions that Huff insists on asking.
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Saturday, August 06, 2011
Maverick
You should be reading Maverick Philosopher if you're not already. It's written by Bill Vallicella who grew tired of academia and now expresses his masterful metaphysical musings online. For the neophytes, try starting with his posts on eliminative materialism.
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Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Age Issues
I just finished a short series of posts on my other blog about the Bible and the age of the universe. In retrospect, I think I could have cross-posted them here. If anyone's interested in reading them, here are the links: part 1, part 2, part 3.
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Monday, July 25, 2011
Maimonides was a Muslim ...
... according to UNESCO. Who knew?
(Plus, from the comments, "Maimonides is not their monides.")
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(Plus, from the comments, "Maimonides is not their monides.")
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Saturday, July 16, 2011
On writing history of science for the general reader
Rebekah Higgitt’s new blog, Teleskopos, has a post about popular history of science writing. She asks for some thoughts on the tricks required to communicate academic history of science to a wide audience. I am, of course, a writer of popular science history so I thought I’d flatter myself into thinking that I might be able to provide Rebekah with some thoughts from inside the bubble. Just treat the below as random musings on lessons learnt the hard way…
Firstly, Rebekah quotes scholars who found it hard to write for a http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifgeneralhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif audience because they were required to be direct. They had to say what they thought “without the customary allusion to the way in which the same evidence could possibly be interpreted in different ways.” Now, I think this is a fault with academic writing rather than with popular books. The two best books by academics I’ve read over the last few years are Bad Medicine by David Wootton and The Fall of the Rome and the End of Civilisation by Bryan Ward-Perkins. Both are arguments that present the evidence and knock down the opposition. Both authors have the confidence to believe they are right and their opponents are wrong. Some editors advise that each chapter you write should have a key message that you can summarise in a single short sentence. If you need more than one sentence, use shorter chapters.
Second, there is the question of writing style. The first draft of God’s Philosophers never got shown to anyone. I made the mistake of thinking the second draft was quite good. It got me an agent and some friends said they really liked it. But no publisher would touch it. The third draft found a publisher (thank you Icon, thank you) and the fourth got published. You might say each rewrite was more “dumbed down” than the last but even so, many people find the final product is still too difficult to enjoy. I found this extremely frustrating, but books for the general public are to be enjoyed. People won’t read something for pleasure unless it gives them pleasure. Academics completely over-estimate the level of writing that they must use for trade books. So you should not test your book on your colleagues or friends. You should find someone who not only knows little about the history of science but has also never shown the slightest interest in it. And if they politely say it was OK but a bit hard going, you are going to have to rewrite from the start.
Third, if you are like me and don’t have some amazing literary talent, you will need to learn how to write for a general audience. I think the best way to find out how is to read loads of the books that non-academics read. And that does not mean literary fiction or those general histories of the Thirty Years War or early Middle Ages that only Penguin can get away with publishing. For trade non-fiction, the best exemplars are rarely historians. They are more likely to be journalists. Recent books that I’d suggest anyone would do well to model their style on include Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist, Freakonomics and Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist (techno thrillers by the likes of Frederick Forsyth are also good). The reason these books sell is that they explain concepts simply, clearly and entertainingly. Yes, Richard Dawkins can do this too, but most people will be extremely hard-pushed to pull off his technique. The same goes for writers of the calibre of Simon Schama. So I think it’s best to aim for clear and simple.
Fourth, trade books do need anecdotes, narrative and human interest. Personally, I’d like to see more of this in academic books too. Partly this is because history is made by people. So, books about history need to be books about people too. But it is also far easier to tell a story through people than through ideas. For popular writing, a key technique is to show, not to tell. You need to show the reader your characters doing things, saying things and achieving things. That way you can get a historiographical message across through the medium of narrative.
Finally, don’t make the mistake of believing that the market for history of science is very big. God’s Philosophers is probably in the top five bestsellers in this genre over the last couple years but that was achieved with total sales that barely reach five figures. The really big sellers in history of science, Dava Sobel and Bill Bryson, are genre-busters which broke out of the narrow market. Unfortunately, they are no more likely to make their readers more widely interested in history of science than I was going to become a fan of chick-lit because I once read Bridget Jones (another genre-buster).
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Firstly, Rebekah quotes scholars who found it hard to write for a http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifgeneralhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif audience because they were required to be direct. They had to say what they thought “without the customary allusion to the way in which the same evidence could possibly be interpreted in different ways.” Now, I think this is a fault with academic writing rather than with popular books. The two best books by academics I’ve read over the last few years are Bad Medicine by David Wootton and The Fall of the Rome and the End of Civilisation by Bryan Ward-Perkins. Both are arguments that present the evidence and knock down the opposition. Both authors have the confidence to believe they are right and their opponents are wrong. Some editors advise that each chapter you write should have a key message that you can summarise in a single short sentence. If you need more than one sentence, use shorter chapters.
Second, there is the question of writing style. The first draft of God’s Philosophers never got shown to anyone. I made the mistake of thinking the second draft was quite good. It got me an agent and some friends said they really liked it. But no publisher would touch it. The third draft found a publisher (thank you Icon, thank you) and the fourth got published. You might say each rewrite was more “dumbed down” than the last but even so, many people find the final product is still too difficult to enjoy. I found this extremely frustrating, but books for the general public are to be enjoyed. People won’t read something for pleasure unless it gives them pleasure. Academics completely over-estimate the level of writing that they must use for trade books. So you should not test your book on your colleagues or friends. You should find someone who not only knows little about the history of science but has also never shown the slightest interest in it. And if they politely say it was OK but a bit hard going, you are going to have to rewrite from the start.
Third, if you are like me and don’t have some amazing literary talent, you will need to learn how to write for a general audience. I think the best way to find out how is to read loads of the books that non-academics read. And that does not mean literary fiction or those general histories of the Thirty Years War or early Middle Ages that only Penguin can get away with publishing. For trade non-fiction, the best exemplars are rarely historians. They are more likely to be journalists. Recent books that I’d suggest anyone would do well to model their style on include Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist, Freakonomics and Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist (techno thrillers by the likes of Frederick Forsyth are also good). The reason these books sell is that they explain concepts simply, clearly and entertainingly. Yes, Richard Dawkins can do this too, but most people will be extremely hard-pushed to pull off his technique. The same goes for writers of the calibre of Simon Schama. So I think it’s best to aim for clear and simple.
Fourth, trade books do need anecdotes, narrative and human interest. Personally, I’d like to see more of this in academic books too. Partly this is because history is made by people. So, books about history need to be books about people too. But it is also far easier to tell a story through people than through ideas. For popular writing, a key technique is to show, not to tell. You need to show the reader your characters doing things, saying things and achieving things. That way you can get a historiographical message across through the medium of narrative.
Finally, don’t make the mistake of believing that the market for history of science is very big. God’s Philosophers is probably in the top five bestsellers in this genre over the last couple years but that was achieved with total sales that barely reach five figures. The really big sellers in history of science, Dava Sobel and Bill Bryson, are genre-busters which broke out of the narrow market. Unfortunately, they are no more likely to make their readers more widely interested in history of science than I was going to become a fan of chick-lit because I once read Bridget Jones (another genre-buster).
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Thursday, July 14, 2011
I was told there would be no math myth
In two earlier posts I argued that the stories of Jesus in the New Testament cannot be explained (or explained away) as either mythological or as urban legend. I should clarify some of the issues involved as well as the difference between the two, bearing in mind that I'm not an expert.
Mythology has many elements to it, but here I'll focus on two. First, it develops over a long period of time. It's sometimes compared to the game of telephone, where one person whispers something in someone else's ear, the second person whispers to a third, etc. After several people, the story has become mangled. This, however, is incomplete. A closer parallel would be the same game where every third or fourth person has to say what he heard aloud, and allow himself to be corrected by the first person. So with mythology: it takes a long time for it to replace the original story because the original is still available and has more credibility.
The telephone game analogy suggests that mythology evolves slowly over time. It should be noted, however, that the inaccurate ideas may arise quickly. What takes a long time is the replacement of the original with the myth. The collective memory of the actual events simply takes a long time to dissipate. A. N. Sherwin-White argued in Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament that two or three generations was too short a time to have the original story replaced by a myth. Indeed, when it was first suggested in the 19th century that the accounts of Jesus in the Bible are mythological, it was assumed that none of them were written until the late 2nd century, since that's how long it would have taken for a myth of that magnitude to arise and be widely accepted. At least there aren't any known examples of it happening faster. Indeed, were this not the case, we would virtually have to abandon the field of ancient history, since almost no ancient historical writings were written close in time to the events they narrate. Since all but a few of the books of the New Testament are dated by scholars to within the first century, the time necessary for them to be mythological simply isn't there. In fact, there is no competing story other than the one found in the gospels until you get to the mid to late second century. As William Lane Craig writes:
A second element of mythology is that it functions as a literary genre. This is a very important point: as the story changes, so does the way it is told. To suggest that the ancients could have written mythology but not in the genre of mythological writings is simply incoherent; these were two aspects of one thing. It is only in the Modern era that we have classified these literary genres and how they function. So in order for someone in the ancient world to write a mythological story but not in the mythological genre is to suggest that he foresaw the development of Modern literary criticism and adjusted his style of writing in order to trick his future readers -- two millennia in the future -- into thinking that the stories he was telling were not mythological when they really were. This is about as conspiracy theory-ish as you can get without spontaneously combusting.
One aspect of the process of mythologization is that it tends to eliminate irrelevant details -- either by simply erasing them or by ascribing some meaning to them (thus eliminating their irrelevancy). In a myth, every element has a role to play, but historical writings record things that are "messy", that don't have some meaning to the overall story. The biblical accounts of Jesus are replete with such little details. Several times before Jesus would speak to people, Mark records him sighing deeply (7:34; 8:11-13) or gazing at them intently (3:5, 34; 10:23). When a crowd brings an adultress before Jesus, he stoops down and doodles in the dust with his finger (John 8:2-11). A few copies of the New Testament several centuries later tried to accommodate this by adding that Jesus wrote down the sins of the woman's accusers to show that they were not without sin. That's exactly how mythology works, by changing the details so that they have some relevance to the story.
Gregory Boyd gave several examples of this in John 20:1-8 in a letter he wrote to his non-Christian father, later published as Letters from a Skeptic (I should note that I disagree with Boyd on some of the points he makes here):
The presence of little details like this should not be understood as absolute. Fully mythological stories can have irrelevant details, and historical writings can show how little details were actually relevant to what was going on. The point is that in general, the more such details there are, the less mythologized the story is. This gives us the ability to test how far along the mythologization process a story is.
Here's a non-biblical example: The Voyage of Saint Brendan is an early medieval text describing an Irish monk who built a small leather boat and, essentially, sailed it around the North Atlantic Ocean. Tim Severin, in The Brendan Voyage, relates how his wife, an expert in medieval literature, thought that The Voyage of Saint Brendan was a partially mythologized story of something that actually happened.
Severin decided to build a leather boat out of the same material that would have been available in that particular part of Ireland at that particular time and sail it across the North Atlantic (à la Kon-Tiki). Not only did he successfully sail from Ireland to North America (via the Faroes and Iceland), he learned that a leather boat had great advantages over wooden ones: at one point, they struck an iceberg strong enough that it would have punched a hole in a wooden boat, big enough to sink it. A leather boat, however, can be sewn up en route.
Anyway, the point is that no scholar has ever suggested that the gospels are written in the genre of mythology. Those who have argued that they are mythological (primarily in the late 19th century) said they should be understood this way despite the genre in which they are written. In fact, this is so blatant, so screamingly obvious, that you can verify it yourself: simply read the gospels side-by-side with actual mythological writings -- not modern retellings of mythological stories, but the actual myths themselves. It's obvious that they're not in the same genre. Until fairly recently, it's been a contentious point what genre the gospels belong to, other than that they were roughly historical writings. But in the last few decades, scholars have accepted that they are written in the genre of ancient biography, similar to Diogenes Laërtius's Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. As I pointed out here, that doesn't mean that they are historically accurate in every detail, but it certainly makes it very difficult to claim that they are inaccurate in their central claims.
I've spent an inordinate amount of time on mythology. Urban legend is simpler: it basically lacks many of these elements. An urban legend is not based on a long process of mythologization but on someone telling a false story. Thus, in contrast with actual mythology, urban legends do not replace the original story, they are, in a sense, competing with it. Having said that, urban legends are similar to mythology in that they will often lack the irrelevant details that we find in veridical accounts. Urban legends are trying to make a point, and so simply ignore the details that don't play a role in this. In my post on this, I argue that the people who originated an urban legend either a) simply made it up (i.e. they lied); b) hallucinated; c) experienced something they mistook for something else (such as nondescript lights in the sky which are mistaken for alien spacecraft); or d) were insane (didn't really experience anything, but now actually think they did). The biblical accounts of Jesus cannot fit into any of these categories. Rather than rehearse them here, I'll just commend you to my earlier post.
Incidentally, if you haven't read The Brendan Voyage, I strongly recommend it.
(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)
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Mythology has many elements to it, but here I'll focus on two. First, it develops over a long period of time. It's sometimes compared to the game of telephone, where one person whispers something in someone else's ear, the second person whispers to a third, etc. After several people, the story has become mangled. This, however, is incomplete. A closer parallel would be the same game where every third or fourth person has to say what he heard aloud, and allow himself to be corrected by the first person. So with mythology: it takes a long time for it to replace the original story because the original is still available and has more credibility.
The telephone game analogy suggests that mythology evolves slowly over time. It should be noted, however, that the inaccurate ideas may arise quickly. What takes a long time is the replacement of the original with the myth. The collective memory of the actual events simply takes a long time to dissipate. A. N. Sherwin-White argued in Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament that two or three generations was too short a time to have the original story replaced by a myth. Indeed, when it was first suggested in the 19th century that the accounts of Jesus in the Bible are mythological, it was assumed that none of them were written until the late 2nd century, since that's how long it would have taken for a myth of that magnitude to arise and be widely accepted. At least there aren't any known examples of it happening faster. Indeed, were this not the case, we would virtually have to abandon the field of ancient history, since almost no ancient historical writings were written close in time to the events they narrate. Since all but a few of the books of the New Testament are dated by scholars to within the first century, the time necessary for them to be mythological simply isn't there. In fact, there is no competing story other than the one found in the gospels until you get to the mid to late second century. As William Lane Craig writes:
The letters of Barnabus and Clement refer to Jesus’ miracles and resurrection. Polycarp mentions the resurrection of Christ, and Irenaeus relates that he had heard Polycarp tell of Jesus’ miracles. Ignatius speaks of the resurrection. Quadratus reports that persons were still living who had been healed by Jesus. Justin Martyr mentions the miracles of Christ. No relic of a nonmiraculous story exists. That the original story should be lost and replaced by another goes beyond any known example of corruption of even oral tradition, not to speak of the experience of written transmissions. These facts show that the story in the Gospels was in substance the same story that Christians had at the beginning. (emphasis mine)
A second element of mythology is that it functions as a literary genre. This is a very important point: as the story changes, so does the way it is told. To suggest that the ancients could have written mythology but not in the genre of mythological writings is simply incoherent; these were two aspects of one thing. It is only in the Modern era that we have classified these literary genres and how they function. So in order for someone in the ancient world to write a mythological story but not in the mythological genre is to suggest that he foresaw the development of Modern literary criticism and adjusted his style of writing in order to trick his future readers -- two millennia in the future -- into thinking that the stories he was telling were not mythological when they really were. This is about as conspiracy theory-ish as you can get without spontaneously combusting.
One aspect of the process of mythologization is that it tends to eliminate irrelevant details -- either by simply erasing them or by ascribing some meaning to them (thus eliminating their irrelevancy). In a myth, every element has a role to play, but historical writings record things that are "messy", that don't have some meaning to the overall story. The biblical accounts of Jesus are replete with such little details. Several times before Jesus would speak to people, Mark records him sighing deeply (7:34; 8:11-13) or gazing at them intently (3:5, 34; 10:23). When a crowd brings an adultress before Jesus, he stoops down and doodles in the dust with his finger (John 8:2-11). A few copies of the New Testament several centuries later tried to accommodate this by adding that Jesus wrote down the sins of the woman's accusers to show that they were not without sin. That's exactly how mythology works, by changing the details so that they have some relevance to the story.
Gregory Boyd gave several examples of this in John 20:1-8 in a letter he wrote to his non-Christian father, later published as Letters from a Skeptic (I should note that I disagree with Boyd on some of the points he makes here):
Early on the first day of the week (when? does it matter?), while it was still dark (who cares?), Mary Magdalene (an incriminating detail, see the next criteria) went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved (John's modest way of referring to himself -- another mark of genuineness) and said, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have put him!" (note her lack of faith here) So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. They were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first (John's modesty again, but who cares about this irrelevant detail?). He bent over (the tomb entrance was low -- a detail which is historically accurate for tombs of wealthy people of the time -- the kind we know Jesus was buried in) and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in (why not? irrelevant detail). Then Simon Peter, who was behind him (modest repetition again), arrived and went into the tomb (Peter's boldness stands out in all the Gospel accounts). He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus' head (irrelevant detail -- what was Jesus wearing?). The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen (could anything be more irrelevant, and more unusual, than this, Dad? Jesus folded one part of His wrapping before He left!). Finally the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went inside (who cares about what exact order they went in?).
The presence of little details like this should not be understood as absolute. Fully mythological stories can have irrelevant details, and historical writings can show how little details were actually relevant to what was going on. The point is that in general, the more such details there are, the less mythologized the story is. This gives us the ability to test how far along the mythologization process a story is.
Here's a non-biblical example: The Voyage of Saint Brendan is an early medieval text describing an Irish monk who built a small leather boat and, essentially, sailed it around the North Atlantic Ocean. Tim Severin, in The Brendan Voyage, relates how his wife, an expert in medieval literature, thought that The Voyage of Saint Brendan was a partially mythologized story of something that actually happened.
"There's something odd about the Saint Brendan text," remarked my wife Dorothy one evening. Her casual comment immediately caught my attention.
"What do you mean by 'odd'?" I asked her.
"The text doesn't match up with much of the other literature written at about the same time. The best way to explain it is that it doesn't have the same feel. It's a curiosity. ... The story has a remarkable amount of practical detail, far more than most early medieval texts. It tells you about the geography of the places Brendan visits. It carefully describes the progress of the voyage, the times and distances, and so forth. It seems to me that the text is not so much a legend as a tale that is embroidering a first-hand experience."
Severin decided to build a leather boat out of the same material that would have been available in that particular part of Ireland at that particular time and sail it across the North Atlantic (à la Kon-Tiki). Not only did he successfully sail from Ireland to North America (via the Faroes and Iceland), he learned that a leather boat had great advantages over wooden ones: at one point, they struck an iceberg strong enough that it would have punched a hole in a wooden boat, big enough to sink it. A leather boat, however, can be sewn up en route.
Anyway, the point is that no scholar has ever suggested that the gospels are written in the genre of mythology. Those who have argued that they are mythological (primarily in the late 19th century) said they should be understood this way despite the genre in which they are written. In fact, this is so blatant, so screamingly obvious, that you can verify it yourself: simply read the gospels side-by-side with actual mythological writings -- not modern retellings of mythological stories, but the actual myths themselves. It's obvious that they're not in the same genre. Until fairly recently, it's been a contentious point what genre the gospels belong to, other than that they were roughly historical writings. But in the last few decades, scholars have accepted that they are written in the genre of ancient biography, similar to Diogenes Laërtius's Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. As I pointed out here, that doesn't mean that they are historically accurate in every detail, but it certainly makes it very difficult to claim that they are inaccurate in their central claims.
I've spent an inordinate amount of time on mythology. Urban legend is simpler: it basically lacks many of these elements. An urban legend is not based on a long process of mythologization but on someone telling a false story. Thus, in contrast with actual mythology, urban legends do not replace the original story, they are, in a sense, competing with it. Having said that, urban legends are similar to mythology in that they will often lack the irrelevant details that we find in veridical accounts. Urban legends are trying to make a point, and so simply ignore the details that don't play a role in this. In my post on this, I argue that the people who originated an urban legend either a) simply made it up (i.e. they lied); b) hallucinated; c) experienced something they mistook for something else (such as nondescript lights in the sky which are mistaken for alien spacecraft); or d) were insane (didn't really experience anything, but now actually think they did). The biblical accounts of Jesus cannot fit into any of these categories. Rather than rehearse them here, I'll just commend you to my earlier post.
Incidentally, if you haven't read The Brendan Voyage, I strongly recommend it.
(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)
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Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Practicing what you preach
Is religion about belief or practice? Most of us would answer “both” without much hesitation, especially if our main experience was of Christianity. But it may not be quite so simple. Sociologists of religion have long noted that while religious practices can be openly shared, beliefs are private and more difficult to get at. Many Christians are not really sure how much of the Creed they actually believe, at least in the solid everyday way that they believe that their car is a Ford Escort.
Peter Lipton, the fondly-remembered professor of the philosophy of science at King’s College Cambridge, called himself a practicing Jew. And, given that he took his family to synagogue every Saturday and observed the relevant festivals with enthusiasm, it was hard to contradict him. But he was also an atheist. He admitted that it was probably harder for a Christian to separate the practical from the faithful side of his religion. But he proved that “religion as practice” is a real phenomena and one that new atheists have never really got a handle on.
Unlike Dawkins and Co, archaeologists and sociologists prefer religion to be defined as a set of practices because these can be observed. Frankly, we haven’t a clue what the ancient Greeks really thought of their gods. And I fear if we did, it might disappoint our conception of the Greeks as a particularly rational tribe. But it is an academic commonplace to state that ancient Greek religion was a matter of performing the rituals properly rather than buying into the theology. Ramsay MacMullen’s Christianising the Roman Empire 100AD to 400AD is expressed in this mode. MacMullen tries to explain pagan conversion to Christianity without any reference to theology. Beliefs are completely irrelevant to his account. Clearly, this is not a very convincing tale but it is not clear what choice he has. Even Rodney Stark, in his far more sympathetic account of the rise of Christianity, concentrates on practice and not belief.
(By the way, there’s another reason MacMullen’s book should be treated with caution. He has a chapter on Christian persecution of pagans in the late fourth century. But his main example of such persecution is the description of the deadly force used against the pagans of Gaza in an account called the Life of Porphyry. This is odd because MacMullen is well aware that the Life of Porphyry is a fictional account written perhaps two hundred years after the events it purports to describe. Yet without it, MacMullen’s evidence of deadly Christian attacks on pagans is extremely thin.)
Peter Harrison’s chapter in Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives (edited by Thomas Dixon, Geoffrey Cantor and Stephen Pumfrey) tries to explain where we got the idea of religion as belief instead of ritual. Harrison suggests that, just as modern science did not exist until the early nineteenth century, so “religion as faith” is also a modern category. Our modern definition of a religion as a bundle of beliefs dates, he says, from the Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century philosophers created “religion” by trying to force Christianity into the same boxes that they had used to understand science. While this almost works for Christianity, it becomes wildly inappropriate for most other kinds of ritual behaviour.
That, suggests Harrison, might be where the conflict between science and religion comes from: both are defined as a collection of beliefs and as those beliefs are not the same, you could say that there is a conflict. But if it is more correct to say that religion is a series of practices, there is nothing very much for science to conflict with. Appealing though this idea might be, I don’t buy it. It seems clear to me that Christianity does have a Creed and a set of core beliefs. Whether these beliefs are more often inimical then conducive to science is an interesting question. But science and religion do interact at the level of what they both have to say about reality. We can’t spirit away any conflict by claiming religion is about what you do rather than what you think.
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Peter Lipton, the fondly-remembered professor of the philosophy of science at King’s College Cambridge, called himself a practicing Jew. And, given that he took his family to synagogue every Saturday and observed the relevant festivals with enthusiasm, it was hard to contradict him. But he was also an atheist. He admitted that it was probably harder for a Christian to separate the practical from the faithful side of his religion. But he proved that “religion as practice” is a real phenomena and one that new atheists have never really got a handle on.
Unlike Dawkins and Co, archaeologists and sociologists prefer religion to be defined as a set of practices because these can be observed. Frankly, we haven’t a clue what the ancient Greeks really thought of their gods. And I fear if we did, it might disappoint our conception of the Greeks as a particularly rational tribe. But it is an academic commonplace to state that ancient Greek religion was a matter of performing the rituals properly rather than buying into the theology. Ramsay MacMullen’s Christianising the Roman Empire 100AD to 400AD is expressed in this mode. MacMullen tries to explain pagan conversion to Christianity without any reference to theology. Beliefs are completely irrelevant to his account. Clearly, this is not a very convincing tale but it is not clear what choice he has. Even Rodney Stark, in his far more sympathetic account of the rise of Christianity, concentrates on practice and not belief.
(By the way, there’s another reason MacMullen’s book should be treated with caution. He has a chapter on Christian persecution of pagans in the late fourth century. But his main example of such persecution is the description of the deadly force used against the pagans of Gaza in an account called the Life of Porphyry. This is odd because MacMullen is well aware that the Life of Porphyry is a fictional account written perhaps two hundred years after the events it purports to describe. Yet without it, MacMullen’s evidence of deadly Christian attacks on pagans is extremely thin.)
Peter Harrison’s chapter in Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives (edited by Thomas Dixon, Geoffrey Cantor and Stephen Pumfrey) tries to explain where we got the idea of religion as belief instead of ritual. Harrison suggests that, just as modern science did not exist until the early nineteenth century, so “religion as faith” is also a modern category. Our modern definition of a religion as a bundle of beliefs dates, he says, from the Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century philosophers created “religion” by trying to force Christianity into the same boxes that they had used to understand science. While this almost works for Christianity, it becomes wildly inappropriate for most other kinds of ritual behaviour.
That, suggests Harrison, might be where the conflict between science and religion comes from: both are defined as a collection of beliefs and as those beliefs are not the same, you could say that there is a conflict. But if it is more correct to say that religion is a series of practices, there is nothing very much for science to conflict with. Appealing though this idea might be, I don’t buy it. It seems clear to me that Christianity does have a Creed and a set of core beliefs. Whether these beliefs are more often inimical then conducive to science is an interesting question. But science and religion do interact at the level of what they both have to say about reality. We can’t spirit away any conflict by claiming religion is about what you do rather than what you think.
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Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Basil Mitchell, RIP
Basil Mitchell, one of the most important contemporary Christian philosophers, passed away a few days ago at the age of 94. You can read his Gifford Lectures online, entitled Morality, Religious and Secular.
(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)
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(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)
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Saturday, June 25, 2011
Quote of the Day
The first argument in favour of physical determinism is that from the success of science. Scientists have been singularly successful in explaining, predicting and controlling events in the last three hundred years, and it is claimed that it is a plausible extrapolation to suppose that they will go on being successful until they have explained all there is to explain. "But" as a leading physicist has cautioned, "one must beware of supposing that one can extrapolate indefinitely the range over which reasonably accurate predictions can be made. The original evidence for predictability was experimental; other experimental evidence can, and in company with most other physicists, I believe has, disproved such an indefinite extension." We may also, on a different tack, complain that scientists achieve their success in answering certain questions at the price of not addressing themselves to other questions. Many problems are ignored by the scientist on the score of their not being scientific problems. The canons of irrelevance are widely drawn. And therefore the success of science, although real, is limited.
The point is conceded, in practice, by most scientists. They admit that there are many questions they cannot answer, and that there are things they can learn from art criticism, moral philosophy, theology or politics. But the physicalist, who believes that everything can be explained in terms of physics, regards this as only a temporary imperfection. When all the laws of physics are known, and all predictions can be calculated, then all questions that can be properly asked will be answerable, and all that cannot be answered in his terms will be said to be unaskable, or mere coincidence. It is a Procrustean programme; but cannot be rejected simply because of that.
More telling still is the consideration that many forms of scientific explanation are not of the Hempelian form, of covering laws and initial conditions. Hardly any biological explanation is of this form, nor any geological one. Nor are most chemical ones, nor even many physical ones. Chemical explanations are very often time-independent. They show why some configuration is stable, rather than calculate how it changes with the passage of time. They are in terms of symmetries and group operators, not initial conditions and laws of development. So far as the practice of scientists go, there is little reason to fix on regularity explanation as the paradigm form of scientific explanation. Nevertheless the physicalist does so, and brushes off all other forms of scientific explanation as derivative and subsidiary. He does not disallow the questions from being asked, but is sure that he will have the answers, when his own physicalist scheme is complete.
Physical determinism is thus not a simple extrapolation from the success of science. It selects one pattern of scientific explanation in preference to others, not because the others have been found to be less sucessful in practice, but because the one is felt to be more explanatory in principle. There is a rational appeal about regularity explanation which makes us feel that it must be the paradigm of explanation, quite apart from any practical success it has had. Moreover, materialism has great metaphysical charm. We often feel that it must be true, not because it has been borne out by science but because it seems the only possible world view. Much of the pressure towards determinism is generated by a metaphysical materialism which we find compelling on its own account, quite apart from its determinist implications. In order to understand physical determinism we therefore need to appreciate the metaphysical pressures in favour of materialism.
J. R. Lucas
The Freedom of the Will
(footnotes omitted)
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The point is conceded, in practice, by most scientists. They admit that there are many questions they cannot answer, and that there are things they can learn from art criticism, moral philosophy, theology or politics. But the physicalist, who believes that everything can be explained in terms of physics, regards this as only a temporary imperfection. When all the laws of physics are known, and all predictions can be calculated, then all questions that can be properly asked will be answerable, and all that cannot be answered in his terms will be said to be unaskable, or mere coincidence. It is a Procrustean programme; but cannot be rejected simply because of that.
More telling still is the consideration that many forms of scientific explanation are not of the Hempelian form, of covering laws and initial conditions. Hardly any biological explanation is of this form, nor any geological one. Nor are most chemical ones, nor even many physical ones. Chemical explanations are very often time-independent. They show why some configuration is stable, rather than calculate how it changes with the passage of time. They are in terms of symmetries and group operators, not initial conditions and laws of development. So far as the practice of scientists go, there is little reason to fix on regularity explanation as the paradigm form of scientific explanation. Nevertheless the physicalist does so, and brushes off all other forms of scientific explanation as derivative and subsidiary. He does not disallow the questions from being asked, but is sure that he will have the answers, when his own physicalist scheme is complete.
Physical determinism is thus not a simple extrapolation from the success of science. It selects one pattern of scientific explanation in preference to others, not because the others have been found to be less sucessful in practice, but because the one is felt to be more explanatory in principle. There is a rational appeal about regularity explanation which makes us feel that it must be the paradigm of explanation, quite apart from any practical success it has had. Moreover, materialism has great metaphysical charm. We often feel that it must be true, not because it has been borne out by science but because it seems the only possible world view. Much of the pressure towards determinism is generated by a metaphysical materialism which we find compelling on its own account, quite apart from its determinist implications. In order to understand physical determinism we therefore need to appreciate the metaphysical pressures in favour of materialism.
J. R. Lucas
The Freedom of the Will
(footnotes omitted)
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