So there’s going to be a seminar series on religion and neuroscience at McGill. Given that it’s being hosted by the religious studies group, I don’t have high hopes. I’m kind of wiped now, but please anticipate some ranting on the misuse of neuroscience, neurorealism and neurofetishism, and just generally why I get annoyed with this kind of thing.
As provided by Sean Carroll on Cosmic Variance, using formal logic.
I’ve never really talked about this proof for the existence of God, provided originally by St. Anselm of Canterbury, but essentially it goes like this:
When we hear the words “that than which a greater cannot be thought”, we understand what the words convey, and what we understand exists in our thoughts. This then exists either only in our thoughts or both in thought and reality. But it cannot exist only in our thoughts, because if it existed only in our thoughts, then we could think of something greater than it, since we could think of something than which a greater cannot be thought that exists both in thought and in reality, and it is a contradiction to suppose we could think of something greater than that than which nothing greater can be thought. Hence, that than which a greater cannot be thought exists both in thought and in reality. Therefore, that than which a greater cannot be thought really does exist, and in later chapters of the Proslogion Anselm argues that this being has the traditional attributes of God like being the omnipotent creator.
I’ve always thought this was kind of dumb, since it seems to fit well into the internet meme that goes like this:
1. We all know there is something of which a greater thing cannot be thought.
2. Something which exists in reality is better than something which exists in our thoughts.
3. ???
4. Therefore god.
Now, it’s possible that others have a more mature take on this, as below.
It’s instructive and fun to see this in terms of formal logic, especially because the proof requires modal logic — an extension of standard logic that classifies propositions not only as “true” or “false,” but also as “necessarily true/false” and “possibly true/false.” That is, it’s a logic of hypotheticals.
Check it out.
So I’ve been having a discussion on Facebook with some people about the issue of schools, and state schooling vs. religious, or what could be termed ‘viewpoint schools’.
This was all provoked by this story about the Catholic School Board in Ottawa refusing to allow GSA clubs. They do say that they will be accepting and inclusive, but as a friend of mine says, “They said they tackle these issues via anti-bullying groups instead. They aren’t saying that queers don’t have issues, they’re saying it’s inappropriate to address them in a queer space. That’s as good as a ban by any stretch.”
Now, my major response to this sort of thing is to promote what I’ve promoted for a long time, namely, the abolition of the Catholic School Board in Canada. They’re the only religious group to have their own, separate school board (despite the existence of some private religious schools). There are historical reasons for this, and I could see how they would be considered valid at the time, particularly as up until the 1980s the state school board was essentially the Protestant school board. But it’s not really tenable now – apart from anything, it violates a number of principles of equality (as noted under ‘Controversies’ on the linked page).
Now, here’s where the discussion really got going. Most people I know agree that it is, in principle, not kosher for the State to fund a school board for a specific religious group to the exclusion of other religious groups. I’m not sure I could have a useful discussion with someone who disagreed with that.
But. There are people who disagree with my proposal solution of a single, secular school board. They suggest, because State schools often teach things that members of minority (or, presumably, majority) belief systems find objectionable, that the State fund schools for every religious or political group: Christians, Muslims, Baha’i, Wiccan, Communist, Anarchist, and presumably varieties of authoritarian political philosophies as well.
Now, the discussion has centred more on social issues like history or politics, and how the State teaches these in a way which gratifies the majority and marginalizes the minority. I can’t really disagree with that, but I’ll point out a few reasons why I don’t think it’s a feasible solution.
Evolution and sex-ed come to mind right away. There are lots of groups which find the topics objectionable, especially when taught in schools, but the one is a factual matter and the other is a matter of public health and safety. I’m not sure parents have a right to keep their children ignorant, particularly of facts or of information which will keep them safe and healthy.
There are some subjects, like music or math or chemistry, which are relatively uncontroversial and would be much more efficiently taught by a single teacher than by many different ones in different schools. But even there, I can conceive of π = 3 fundamentalists, or anti-rock-Satan-is-pop-music types who would wants separate teaching for those subjects.
Now, one cogent issue brought up is, as I mentioned above, that secular State schools come with their own set of values, particularly Statist and Capitalist (or Communist in a few places), and in many cases their own religious values, as seen in small towns everywhere.
For the religious parts, there is an existing solution. Because schools are legally secular, the sort of proselytizing that goes on in state schools is not official, and can be challenged legally. I see this issue as being more of a social and enforcement issue, where it’s not seen as a problem by people of the major religion in that region, and social pressure and outright intimidation are enough to prevent challenges to the status quo. But I don’t think that’s a flaw in state schools – I think it’s a social flaw.
And on a practical level, even ‘within’ viewpoint groups there are large disagreements. Take Pagans – would a Pagan school teach Wicca? Gardnerian or Alexandrian? Traditional, eclectic, or reconstructionist? Would it teach to the standards required by universities? You can’t require the same thing at the level of universities, because people there are adults and expected to make their own judgments, and the topics discussed there are often on things which are pretty settled – you can’t do a degree as an evolutionary biologist after going to a creationist high school, not without a lot of remediation. Or take political schools. Would a Communist school teach Marxism? Leninism? Trotskyism? Maoism? There are not-insubstantial disagreements at stake.
Ultimately, I think the only real option is to have a single public board, secular and state-funded, and if the parents object to something being taught they can contradict it at home like everyone does now.
So, it’s been a couple weeks. I submitted my official thesis proposal just before the holidays, and had a good chat with my inestimable third committee member, who turned me on to some excellent papers. I’ve mostly spent the holidays catching up with old friends and spending time with my family, which has been nice. The next six months or so promise to be pretty busy, but also pretty science-y since I’ll be finishing my analyses, writing my thesis, and figuring out what I’m doing next year.
Christmas is an interesting time as an white, Christianishly-raised atheist in Canada. People assume, for example, that you’re Christian much more often during the season, in a way that can at times be reminiscent of this. It’s sort of what happens when someone talks to me about how they get so jealous when their SO flirts with someone else – a general assumption that you side with them because you aren’t visibly different. But you’re still very much a part of that culture, so Christmas feels like a fairly secular holiday to me, despite it being a religious holiday, just because it’s so normal for me to participate in it.
But the war on Christmas stuff doesn’t make it too far north of the border. Aside from a few poorly-informed people wearing “Keep the ‘Christ’ in Christmas” buttons and “You can say ‘Merry Christmas to me” t-shirts, we’re usually okay at recognizing that Canadian =/= Christian. The ‘Happy Holidays’ thing is pretty normal, especially since for many people the only significant thing between December 23rd and January 1st is a couple days off and a new secularized calendar year. Oh, and a lot of annoying music piped in over loudspeakers on the local high streets. I could do with less of that.
Sometimes, I wonder if I’m sort of parasitizing on the whole ‘sacredness’ of the Christmas holidays. Not doing much work, spending time with people, eating lots of food and lazing about… “It’s Christmas” is often a good enough excuse for behaviour that would get me in trouble otherwise, even on other holidays. I suppose I can thank Charles Dickens for that more than the Bible, though.
So, a rare religion post.
Tony Blair, who ought to be best known as the Labour leader who thought he could best help the working class by carrying on Thatcher’s legacy, and Christopher Hitchens, who I’d like more if not for the whole ‘supported the invasion of Iraq’ thing, had a debate in Toronto last Friday on “Religion is a force for good in the world”. You can see the first part below, and the other parts from there.
Essentially the entire debate goes like this:
Hitchens: Religions encourage all sorts of bad things, and religious believers do all sorts of bad things.
Blair: Well yes, religions have done bad things in the past, but there are religious people who do good things.
Hitchens: But they could do good things without all the baggage religion carries, or the supernatural or faith-based beliefs.
Blair: Well, no one really believes in those things. And it’s true, they could well have done those things without religious beliefs.
Hitchens: Wait, which side are you arguing again?
Blair: And look at all the good religious people are doing to bridge the religious divide in Northern Ireland.
Hitchens: …wtf, really? What do you think caused the religious divide in the first place?
Blair: Well sure, religions have done bad things in the past, but there are religious people who do good things.
Hitchens: We’ve been over that.
Moderator: Well, the point is that it’s good to have these discussions. Man, wasn’t Tony Blair awesome? I imagine his time in parliament gave him such an great command of oratory.
The annoying thing about liberal believers like Tony Blair is they rarely let themselves get pinned down by things like ‘facts’ about their ‘religion’ or ‘beliefs’. Blair claimed that bad things in religions happened because people just searched through Scripture to justify their own evils, but that a proper reading of Scripture, which showed the core of what was being said, could not justify evil. True religion, he said several times, doesn’t involve hatred.
He was pretty vague in general, and spent pretty much no time talking about God or Heaven or doctrine or anything that was identifiably religious. It could be a British thing, or a former CoE thing, but he didn’t seem to think his religion was about anything other than an ill-defined ‘faith’, which guided his actions and would lead to mutual understanding and compassion. Which seems like a strange view for a Catholic, one of the few major religions in which one can officially be a heretic.
Anyways. A lot of it was liberal Christian bingo, which while it’s more fun to play than fundamentalist Christian bingo, which is pretty scary, is perhaps more frustrating. They refuse to say what they believe in definite terms, to provide a mechanism whereby their faith or that of others actually promotes good, and you find yourself wondering if they’re religious just for cultural or nostalgic reasons.
I suppose “not getting it” is part of being an atheist, but it’s weird to think that this guy is considered a big player in the faith field.
So I’ve having a bit of trouble banging out this post on David Ferrier’s take-down of vitalism. In the meantime, some sports.
So I’m fairly tired and don’t have something on my mind, so here’s some Stephen Fry answering a question about the supposed sterility of a secular society.
I might have alluded to this in previous posts, but I should address it firmly. I am an atheist.
It doesn’t seem like a particularly courageous declaration in my time and place (2010, Montreal). There are other countries, or other regions, where it would cause me trouble. Most certainly there are other times; the theocratic empire of Theohoplon, circa 2245-2378 would be a very bad place indeed.
But even given today’s declining numbers of self-identified religious believers, the word ‘atheist’ still carries connotations of willful denial, anger, and nihilism. When telling a non-believing co-worker on evening that I was going to a meeting about how to live a fulfilling life without God, she told me that it sounded ‘angry’. When I mentioned to a professor that I help run a club devoted to ‘skepticism, rationalism, and free inquiry’ she said it sounded ‘scary’.
So. Where do I stand vis-a-vis God/gods? In general, I don’t think about it much. On a daily basis, sure, but that’s mostly because I’m active. But it’s not as though I notice my lack of prayer before meals, or when friends are hopeful for a break. I think, if anything, it makes me a little embarrassed when swearing, because there aren’t many useful curses that are both non-religious and non-obscene.
God, so far as I can tell, doesn’t exist. It’s not provable, but it seems unlikely. I know this could theoretically make me an agnostic, but I prefer the term ‘atheist’ because it’s less ambiguous. Even if I have to preface arguments by stating I can’t absolutely reject the possible existence of some deity-like thing, I feel it’s worth it to have people know where I stand.
My atheist is tied in strongly with my rationalism (in the colloquial sense, not the strict philosophical sense). Thus, I tend to look askance as atheists who are also supernaturalists, with beliefs in ghosts and Atlantis and magic and alien abductions (though I admit the probable existence of aliens, there are good reasons to believe they’re a bit too far away to pop over for a cup of sugar and some livestock). This is another reason to call myself an atheist – agnosticism has a way of being associated with a certain fuzziness towards all sorts of daft notions, and so calling myself an atheist means I’m less likely to be pestered about guardian angels or the healing powers of crystals.
While this isn’t intended as a comprehensive look at atheism, here are a couple arguments I’ve found pretty persuasive on my side.
One is Epicurus’ paradox of evil, as restated by David Hume:
“Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”
This is a question of theodicy, the question of why evil exists. There is a solution, as noted by Epicurus himself. God might be distant and uncaring, or actively malevolent. There are a number of theological solutions to the question (free will, mysterious ways, etc) but they have all been pretty unsatisfactory to me.
Another is an argument about morality, put forth my Plato. I’m divorcing it a bit from the context, because it’s the statement I’m concerned about. “”Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious? Or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?”
Replace ‘pious’ with ‘good’. Thus, if a thing is good and therefore loved by the gods, it would be good regardless. And if it were good only because the gods loved it, then it’s goodness is fairly shallow, determined only by the liking of a powerful figure. If, say, patricide were right because Caesar willed it so, would that make patricide alright?
Both of the above are more arguments about specific things – they don’t really address God’s existence itself. For me, I find the most persuasive argument is this: everything that happens, can happen without God. God, therefore, is unnecessary. In the interest of parsimony and getting on with things without having to worry a lot about what He hypothetically thinks, let’s assume He’s not in the picture.
There’s a bunch more to it, of course. People have been arguing over these things for millennia, and a fair body of work has built up. But that’s some of it, above. Maybe not the core, even, but some important bits.
Every once in a while, whilst looking up papers on PubMed, you come across the strangest things. Sometimes it’s an article title, or the article itself.
Sometimes it’s the journal.
I just found that J Relig Health (Journal of Religion and Health) is listed on Medline when I found the article “Finding a way back home: a spirituality of exile after Hurricane Katrina.” For fun, here’s the abstract:
“Three years ago breath took the form of Hurricane Katrina and passed through our bodies and our lives, leaving us forever changed. We all breathed her, but for those of us living on the Gulf Coast our encounter with Katrina was more intimate, our breathing more conscious, our memory more charged, our lives forever changed. My story takes me from the winds of Hurricane Katrina blasting through the Gulf Coast, through the tube of a machine that helped keep my son’s lung expanded, through the Sinai dessert and the valley of the dry bones, through the in-between spaces of grounded groundlessness, to the forests and rivers of the Berskhire Mountains, where I have relocated and started my life over. My spiritual journey “home” is a dynamic story of Earth, wind, fire, water, flesh, and Spirit.”
Yeah, that’s just the sort of hard science we need. Not saying stories like this don’t have their place, but that place is not the NIH or Library of Medicine. Mind you, they also list Medical Hypotheses.
