Mike’s Meandering Mind

Well, money comes and money goes. The day I got two months worth of grant funding, my computer broke. It works, but with the Airport dead, the casing battered, the battery dead, the power cord bent, I just decided to invest my newfound fortune into a Macbook Pro. It came yesterday — I saved about $500 by getting the 2.4 Ghz model off Amazon rather than the 2.5 Ghz model from Apple.

Of course, it was a while before I could enjoy the thing. Before even typing my first letter, I had to:

All of this was interspersed with the wife poking her head in the door every half hour and starting the following conservation.

Sue: So how do you like it?

Me: I’ll let you know when I’m done updating it.

Sue: Still?

I eventually went out into the living room to watch John Adams with her while the Mac churned away.

I finally finished everything after about six hours. And after one day, I’ll just say that it’s sweet. The installed iSight rocks. None of my applications stall or die. I haven’t seen the spinning beach ball of death yet. I’m even enjoying Spaces and Front Row. And it’s nice at work, since it’s a 17″ model and I no longer have to hunch over it.

Why does it seem that stuff that interests me on the internet comes in waves? I’ll got three days with nothing to talking about. And there are 1600 articles I want to blog on. I wonder what the specific blog frequency is. Anyway…

It’s been a while:

I have to wonder if this chatter about Obama nominating Hillary for SCOTUS is a trap laid by the Senator. If she gets nominated, the Republicans will throw all the pent-up mud they’ve been building for 16 years at her. She not only won’t get the post, she’ll be finished politically.

I forgot one aspect of the God Delusion that is probably the most controversial. Dawkins spends an entire chapter ranting about the foisting of religion upon children. He fumes about a child being described as a “muslim child” or a “christian child” and thinks they should be left out of religion until they are old enough to choose.

First, one suspects that Dawkins supports this point of view because he knows or thinks that children raised in such a way will not be religious at all. It’s a back-door means to a different sort of indoctrination.

You have to wonder who is supposed to keep religion away from children. It can only be government. Because the only people who will voluntarily keep children away from religion are not the kind of people who will abuse their children with an extreme brand of faith.

Second, the extreme examples he cites do not reflect the majority of Americans or religious people in the 21st century. Yes, it’s horrible that some parents instill their children with a terror of hell and tell them their friends are going there. But they would probably be abusing their children in other ways if religion were banned for kids. There is a certain mindset that goes along with that brand of family religion.

Third, what if they’re right? Dawkins argues that the probability of a biblical God is low, but he does not argue that it is zero. There’s no fundamental reason not to believe, for example, that the scientific world is an illusion and God is cruel and judgmental (see Heinlein’s Job). Maybe the crazies are right. I’m not so sure of my position that I’m willing to outlaw crazy theology.

Fourth, religion isn’t the only identity we attach to children. National identity and ethnicity is given as well. How many children have been killed because they were French or Croatian or Apache compared to those killed because they were Jewish or Protestant. We raise our children learning the language, culture and traditions of our nation and ethnic group. Should we refuse to have children say the Pledge of Allegiance? Should Native Americans not pass on their culture, which is clinging to life by a thread? I suspect Dawkins would say no.

I too feel rage when I hear of parents enculcating their children with absurd or even dangerous fundamentalist religious beliefs. But it is the price we pay for freedom. And the privilege of being a parent. It’s not pretty, but it’s the only way to let the world be run.

Much of Dawkins’ section on the evils of fundamentalism is, like his attack on the Bible, recycled from other authors. I didn’t find much worth blogging about — other than the specious contention that there is no moral difference between aborting an innocent fetus and killing a convicted murderer. But Dawkins closes by claiming that moderate religion enables the extremism and so is equally guilty.

I wonder if he would agree that, by that logic, socialists bear responsibility for the crimes committed by their extreme brethren in national socialism or communism. Granted, he’s claiming faith encourages people not to think — apparently having never met a conservative rabbi or a Jesuit teacher. But most socialists don’t think about their views either. They buy into the nonsensical mantra that an egalitarian society can be created by the force of government despite ample evidence to the contrary. They base a lot on feelings and intuition — especially guilt. It’s no accident that clergy tend to be very socialist.

A refusal to think is not the exclusive domain of religion.

Again, there are other ways to pursue faith than blind obedience to a doctrine. And indeed, we are moving in that direction. In the most dogmatically religious country in the west — America — the vast majority of religious people believe that others faiths can be equally valid. I’m sure the idea of deeply religious people being tolerant must stick in Dawkins’ craw.

The evolution of religion gets to heart of the entire “religion is cruel and evil argument”. I strongly suspect that religion reflects society more than it drives it. As the wag once said, we tend to make God in our image. When we were a cruel people, we made a cruel God. When we were an intolerant people, we made an intolerant God. Now that we are moving forward — a subject (The Changing Moral Zeitgeist) that Dawkins devotes a lot of time to — religion is following. it’s a trailing indicator, but an indicator nonetheless.

The history of science follows a similar intellectual pattern moving from the deterministic world if Newton to the uncertain world of quantum mechanics. But he world didn’t change; our understanding of it did. As we have moved from a cruel and jealous God to a tolerant one, God hasn’t changed. Our understanding has.

—-

Overall, as you can tell by my putting up of eight long posts on one book, I found The God Delusion to be stimulating. The section that deal with biology and intelligent design are outstanding. The sections that attack faith less so. And while some of my arguments are addressed in the book, they aren’t addressed very well.

Atheists like Dawkins like to believe they are open minded. To use his phrase, their consciousness has been raised above that of us unenlightened folk. But I have a final thought. Early in the book, Dawkins asks if there is any scientific evidence that would ever make a theist abandon their belief in God. I have to wonder: is there any evidence that would cause an atheist to accept belief in God? I can’t think that there would be.

If that tenet is agreed to, then the God question moves beyond science. Science can tell us what God isn’t. But I’m not convinced that it tells us that God isn’t.

I know I’m blogging about the God Delusion non-stop but it is stimulating a lot of thought. Today, I’ve been reading the worst part of the book, in which Dawkins tries to show that religion is immoral. I blogged earlier about the specious claim that certain violent conflicts wouldn’t be happening without religion. Dawkins also takes some time to bash up the Bible itself, pointing out how jealous its God is, how immoral its characters are, etc.

The problem is, this is territory that has already been trod — and better — by people like Robert Heinlein or Mark Twain. And the really real problem is that you can’t analyze the Bible in a vacuum (this applies to biblical literalists as well).

First, any analysis of the Bible has to take into account the thousands of years of commentary and interpretation that has been layered onto it. Dawkins is nastily selective in his analysis, which makes me thinks he’s merely quote-mining from other atheists. But thousands of years of thought have produced an interpretation that is modern, humane and rational. As my rabbi said to me, the Bible is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.

Religion evolves too, Dr. Dawkins.

Second, you have to consider the context in which the Bible was written. The hebrews were a savage, illiterate people to whom the injunction not to throw their kids into a bonfire to make a stone god happy was revolutionary thought. In its time, the Bible was incredibly liberal.

For example, Dawkins goes on about how many Biblical crimes merit the death penalty, failing to note the Bible later requires two witnesses for execution — a requirement that exceeds that of present-day America. He ignores the later commentary that effectively outlawed the death penalty and ignores the Jewish and Catholic leaders that today oppose the death penalty even for murder.

Also ignored in his selective analysis of the Bible: humane restrictions on slavery, restrictions on criminal punishment, demands to treat strangers fairly and justly, the edict of one law for everyone (Dawkins is completely wrong when he claims the ten commandments only apply to how you treat other Jews), inheritance rights for women, protection for accidental killers, an organized system of justice, etc., etc.

For a much more sympathetic and intelligent view, I recomend Blogging the Bible in which David Plotz reads his way through the book for the first time.

Bible-bashing is the ultimate straw man. It’s fun. Hell, I do it whenever some right moron starts yammering about killing gays. It’s a great way to respond to the legions of Highlighter Fundamentalists, who site the Bible as their justification for whatever narrow viewpoint they’ve wedged themselves into. But it is not a reasonable approach to mainstream religion or to religious history. You can’t prove God doesn’t exist or that religion is bad by analyzing what it was doing 3000 years ago. It doesn’t work that way.

Let me turn this around. Suppose I were a religious nut who hated science. What would Dawkins think if I dismissed the entirety of modern scientific thought by noting that:

Dawkins would laugh. If I were to try to discredit science by attacking discarded ideas that were even ten years old, he’d say that I was being unfair. That I have to account for all the work, research and advancement that has taken place since then. And if I dragged out Aristotle and pointed out how wrong he was?

You can’t disprove religion by bashing a document that is at least 3000 years old. It is unfortunate and stupid that a recent wave of Christian fundamentalism has elevated the Bible back to inerrancy. But you don’t win the argument by playing the lunatics’ game.

I’m now at the point in The God Delusion where Dawkins is arguing that religion causes violence and bloodshed that otherwise wouldn’t exist, such as in Northern Ireland. This is a common argument for the vileness of religion.

Two problems:

1) It is a classic cost-without-benefit analysis. Zero credit is given to violence that religion might be preventing. An enormous amount of pacifism is inspired by religion (think Buddhists or Quakers) and religion unites nations that might otherwise have strife (such as Saudi Arabia). Maybe the bad outweighs the good. But it’s hard to tell when you’ve only weighed one side and are dividing by zero.

2) I’m pessimistic about human nature. Without religion, people would find something to fight over. In Northern Ireland, it would be the purity of their Irish decent or, more likely, class and wealth.

I just don’t think you can point to religious conflict, claim that religion was the only cause, not give any credit to violence prevented by faith and proclaim faith to be evil. It’s a standard argument. It’s a straw man. It’s bullshit. And it’s unworthy of the rest of an otherwise well-reasoned book.

The height of silliness is argument about how religion uniquely spurs violence because it labels children, segregates schools and forbids marrying out. Gee, Dr. Dawkins. Can you not think of anything else that does all three of these things? Something that is responsible for bloodshed and violence than faith? Maybe … is it … race?

Oh, and for the record? My mother never warned me about blonde shiksas lying in wait to entrap me. She probably likes the one I did marry better than she likes me.

One of the best parts of the God Delusion is Dawkins’ systematic destruction of the notion that Darwinian evolution is inherently amoral or immoral. In fact, he argues persuasively that most of our moral precepts can be traced to evolution.

The problem is a misunderstanding of what “selfishness” means in the evolutionary sense. Evolution is not about the individual trying to survive and dominate and therefore push everyone else down. Evolution, in fact doesn’t really care about individuals at all because every individual is going to die. Evolution is about the species. It’s about the group.

Cooperative behavior and altruism are absolutely essential to the survival of any species. If we were to ignore the suffering of those in the Indonesia tsunami or the Louisiana floods, we as individuals might be better off. But the species is worse off. For one thing, there are fewer of us.

Some will say this takes the morality out of morals, that it reduces it to some cold calculation of what is best for humanity. Perhaps. But I can’t see that thinking morality only arises from the fear of hell fire is any better.

I said earlier that Dawkins is good when he’s on his home turf. I just read the section where he is talking about religious belief as a by-product of evolution — i.e., the unfortunate offshoot of a useful aspect of humanity. In this case, he believes our tendency to believe what we are told.

I disagree with him. For one thing, a significant fraction of humans refuse to believe what they’re told as anyone who has worked with kids can tell you. For another, the Jesuit line about “give me the child for seven years and I will give you the man” is demonstrable bullshit. The communists believed this and would educate kids in the glories of communism from the time they were two months old.

Didn’t work. The human mind is too mushy and flabby to be programmed like that.

I think, if anything, religious belief flows out of our comfort with ritual, with familiarity, with generational continuity. When I go to synagogue, I feel a kinship with my younger self, with my dad, with my dead-grandfather. There is comfort in knowing that I’m reciting the same Aleinu prayer or the same levitical blessing that Jews all over the world have recited for the last 2-3000 years. That’s powerful. And if you want to put it Darwinian terms, there is a survival value in doing what previous generations did, since it obviously worked for them — they bred us. There is survival value in doing the things we’ve done before, since it obviously worked for us — we’re still here.

I also think there’s a connection to our almost pathological need for explanations, our refusal to believe in randomness. We don’t want to believe that crops failed or someone died because … it just happened. Humans are biologically programmed to look for a cause to every effect — see the recent green vaccine controvery. A lot of the time, we lump that cause under the aegis of God.

Of course, that doesn’t mean He doesn’t exist. In physics, certain phenomena were or are lumped under electromagnetic effects because you can use E+M to do whatever you want. That does not mean it doesn’t explains some things.

Ha.

Dawkins should stick to biology. He’s now supporting the multiverse theory to explain why we live in a universe so finally tuned to the needs of life. The idea is that there are many universe, all with different physical properties and we happen to occupy one of those suitable to life.

Problem: the multiverse theory, while pretty, is not scientific. It’s just not. It sounds scientific. It speaks the language and does the dance. But it’s not scientific at all because it is not testable. A lot of evolutionary psychology is unscientific as well by virtue of being untestable.

Well, maybe I just need to have my “consciousness raised” so that I can be an uberman like Dawkins.

He can really come across as arrogant on that account.

Dawkins’ most convincing anti-God argument is the complexity argument — that any God who controls the Universe must be more complex and difficult to explain than the Universe itself.

This is only true if you believe in a God who controls the path of every electron and the fall of every sparrow. However, a God who set the Universe in motions and guides it from time to time is not very complex.

Thinks of it this way. Let’s say I start an avalanche in the mountains. Thousands of boulders crash into the town below. According the Dawkins, a thousand boulders means at least a thousand people throwing them. But it was only one person doing something simple.

Suppose, in the future, we were to figure out how to start evolution on a lifeless planet. Occasionally, we would go in and adjust. Change some genes, wipe out a useless creature, save a good one. It doesn’t even take God to do that. Because comparatively simple acts — starting life, adjusting a gene — become massive complex operations once the machinery of evolution grinds them.

We see complexity growing out of simple process in nature all the time. In fact, the entire fucking universe is the outgrowth of a set of very simple principles. From crystals to nebulae to galaxies of billions of stars to life itself, we see dazzling complexity being guided by very simple, sometimes singular events.

So yes, a God who makes sure that the gravitational constant is always the same is too complex. But a God who laid down the laws of the Universe and set them in motion does not have to be very complex at all.

The apotheosis of this line of reasoning is Dawkins’ argument against prayer, in which he says that God hearing our prayers would require he be the most sophisticated computer ever built. This is a *slight* exaggeration in the age of the internet and Moore’s Law. But is also assumes that God and humanity are two different things. The entire idea of an immortal soul is that it is a piece of the divine within our flesh. I don’t need a sophisticated computer to sort and interpret the millions of signals I am receiving from my body every day. My brain is sufficient to take care of that, without my higher brain functions even being aware of it.

I’m not advocating a religious view here. I’m just saying that Dawkins, like most dogmatic atheists, fails to understand that there are ways of thinking about God that are different from the fundamentalist garbage. Ways that incorporate science. A simple God who creates a Universe on simple principles. He evolves with it, growing more complex. His own divine spark begins to grow in the form of evolving life.

There are other ways to think. Other ways to go. Yes, it is time for us to put away some of our myths and legends. But it’s not yet time, if it will ever be, to assume that we know everything. That there is nothing beyond the physical world. We just don’t know that much yet. Maybe, we never will.

One thing I will say about Dawkins’ book. His deconstruction of Intelligent Design is outstanding and very entertaining. You would expect this, since biology is his field.

Intel is refusing to upgrade to Vista. Hell, I won’t buy a new PC because they come with that piece of shit pre-installed.