are science and religion compatible? preliminary remarks

I'll begin my exploration of this theme with an elaboration from my previous post. The Australian Christian propagandist Greg Clarke has written: 'Christianity teaches us that we are all people who have fallen from grace'. By and large, this is an accepted Christian claim. I say 'by and large' because, in my reading, I've encountered Christians who don't accept the virgin birth, who don't accept the resurrection, who don't accept the miracles in either the OT or the NT, so it wouldn't come as a surprise to me that some Christians reject the doctrine of the Fall and original sin. Christianity's almost infinite flexibility must be one of its star attractions. But probably a majority of Christians see this as a central doctrine.
So, to narrow things down, let's ask if this 'doctrine' [some would call it a dogma] is compatible with science. To ask this is to ask how we are to understand the claim. Is it empirical? Is it testable in any way? If not, how then are we to understand it?
The doctrine of course originates in the book of Genesis. Adam and Eve, the first humans, were made in the image of God and lived in an earthly paradise, until they ate of fruit forbidden to them by their creator, and were cast out of this paradise and condemned to a 'fallen' existence, along with all their descendants, the entire human species. It's a doctrine common to the Judaic, Christian and Islamic traditions.
Nowadays, though, most educated 'liberal' Christians agree that Adam and Eve never 'literally' existed. They accept that Homo sapiens evolved from earlier species of Homo, and that chimps and bonobos are our closest living relatives. This is not to say that they reject the Adam and Eve myth as a load of rubbish. They feel that it should be retained as a story symbolizing what we might be, or might have been, and what we can and should strive to be. Others, of course, take a more dim view. After all, Adam and Eve's fall was the result of disobedience, indeed an act of disobedience which might seem minor to an outside observer, which seems to suggest that the price of this state of grace or bliss is total obedience to the creator. And there are a number of other questionable assumptions in the story.
In any case, given the symbolic nature of the story, isn't it reasonable to assume that it's compatible with science, or at least that it operates in a different field, while science only deals with matters of fact?
I think there are real problems with this assumption. First, while many Christians reject the literal truth of Adam and Eve, the idea of a 'fall from grace' is very real to many of them. This leads, of course, to much confusion, as evidenced by the mess of official Catholic doctrine, which tries to reconcile the Adam and Eve story with modern evolutionary understanding, and still tries to claim our fallenness as a 'fact'. This site of the Global Catholic Network, which strives to provide readable accounts of Catholic doctrine, offers ample evidence for why the Catholic Church is in serious trouble in the scientifically literate nations of the world. It is full of factual claims about the soul, original sin and 'sanctifying grace', as well as claims about the state of evolutionary theory [e.g. 'the scientific evidence for bodily evolution is almost non-existent'] which seem to make a mockery of claims, by Francisco Ayala and others, that science and religion occupy mutually exclusive realms [usually identified as 'factual' and 'moral' realms]. Somebody may have forgotten to inform the Catholic Church of this 'fact', though it's clear that the Catholic Church isn't the only religious organization to make many claims of fact based on 'revelation' or holy texts. Alongside the history of modern science can be read the history of implacable opposition to scientific findings, invariably driven by religious conviction - be it in relation to the shape of the earth, the age of the universe, or the origin of our species. So, on the face of it, it's hard to argue that religion and science occupy these entirely different spheres, to say nothing of the way that greater factual knowledge informs our values. And a major problem here is that the great themes of Christian belief - original sin, the soul and the afterlife, being made in God's image, the idea of being 'saved' - these are felt as real truths about the world and human existence. To water them down into mere metaphor is to destroy what is religious about them. Yet when claimed as truths they inevitably clash with our understanding of human life and human history as revealed by scientific investigation.
However, Ayala has apparently written about epistemology and how it can be used to shed light on the differences between science and religion, and Chris Mooney has tried his hand at revealing the limitations of methodological naturalism, and of course Plantinga and others have tried to show that science and religion need not be at odds with each other [not to mention the Reverend Michael Dowd as shown above], so I'll try to look at some of their arguments over the next few posts.

some explorations of the definition of faith

Greg Clarke - defender of the faith

Endless distractions and matters of interest.
I was going to have a look at philosophical and methodological naturalism and the apparent debate between Chris Mooney and Jerry Coyne on accommodationism, but someone has sent an email letting me know that, via the public library system here in South Australia, I can now now gain full access to Australia's and the world's best known [and some not so well known] newspapers. So I've been exploring that this morning and with my interest in religious apologetics, I couldn't go past a new Christian paper, non-affiliated apparently, called Eternity. It comes out of Sydney, unsurprisingly, the home of Arthur Stace and his 'eternity' scribblings, and it first appeared late last year. The most recent issue has the irresistible headline article 'Taking on the new atheism.' Have just glanced through a mildly interesting piece on Marcion, the murderous Old Testament god, and the soi-disant 'true gospels', by Michael Jensen [don't know if he's related to the unpleasant Anglican Jensen brothers]. It's a typical mixture of history, dogmatism and propaganda. Now I'm onto the main piece, by one Greg Clarke, who along with John Dickson - remember him? [also here] is a director of the Centre for Public Christianity, in other words a Christian propagandist writing for a Christian propagandist newspaper. The title of his piece is 'the f word', and that's faith. Which reminds me that in my own 'big work', The Faith Hope, there's a big essay missing, one making an attempt to define 'faith' from the perspective of believers and of non-believers.
Clarke himself gives definitions of faith provided by Harris, Dawkins and Grayling, and unsurprisingly, says he doesn't recognise any of these definitions. The Grayling one, which provides as good a start as any, is 'a commitment to belief contrary to evidence and reason'. Clarke then counters with a more positive definition. Faith is 'a conviction that grows out of an 'encounter' with God'. By 'God', Clarke means the 'the god called God', or 'the god formerly known as Ywh', one of many many deities worshipped by people, past and present, on this planet. Clearly, his preliminary definition of faith doesn't contradict Grayling's, as claims of personal 'encounters' with deities, or ancestor spirits, or fairies, have never yet been backed up with evidence of the kind generally recognised, and the faithful generally see no point in trying to provide such evidence.
Clarke tries to elaborate this 'encounter' further, as an encounter with the Biblical god, an encounter with Jesus, either personally or through the revelation of scripture, but it all amounts to the same thing, some kind of subjective experience that supposedly reveals some kind of objective truth. He tries to smuggle in the idea that this constitutes 'knowledge' of some kind, thereby blurring if not obliterating any boundary between knowledge and belief. His claim that 'this fits remarkably well with contemporary theories of epistemology' is ridiculous. No theory of knowledge worthy of the name counts belief per se, no matter how fervently held, as knowledge. Clarke invokes good ol' Al Plantinga to back up his claim. As Plantinga describes it, these kinds of revelatory encounters involve 'no leap in the dark, not merely because the person with faith is wholly convinced but also because, as a matter of fact, the belief in question meets the conditions for rationality and warrant.' Unfortunately, Clarke doesn't elaborate on this extraordinary and dubious assertion, but I'm confident, in spite of not having read Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief, that it won't stand up to much scrutiny. In fact, we can get a taste of Plantinga's attitude to the calls for evidence from this quote:

Must my criteria, or those of the believing community, conform to their examples? Surely not. The theistic community is responsible to its set of examples, not to theirs.

This might be termed the 'we're taking our bat and ball and going home and inventing our own game with our own rules' theory of knowledge. Or the 'self-serving claptrap' theory of knowledge.
Clarke goes on, as if he's somehow clarified the meaning of faith, - as if by mentioning words like 'reasoning' and 'reliable testimony' he has shown that believers employ these things, which he manifestly has not - to shake his head at critics' misunderstanding of the faith concept. In doing so, he entirely misrepresents the critics of faith. Non-believers, new or old, do not argue that believers are wrong in claiming their beliefs are logically or evidentially true. Their arguments are more or less entirely devoted to the unlikeliness - that's to say unreasonableness - of any particular version of revealed religion being true, bearing in mind that these beliefs contradict each other and have particularities that make them irreducible to mere deism. Not that there aren't sound arguments against deism too.
The rest of the Clarke piece contains no philosophical arguments to speak of, it simply asserts that people of faith are called on to do this, that, or the other - presumably whatever your interpretion of scripture, or your local holy person's interpretation of scripture, calls you to do. This, of course, gets us nowhere. I will mention one more claim, though - a well-known one. 'Christianity teaches us that we are all people who have fallen from grace...'
Of course, Christianity doesn't really teach us this, it tells us this. The difference between teaching and telling is essentially the difference between encouraging people towards insight, and indoctrination. I can't accept that we are people who have fallen from grace. I love the word 'grace', it's one of my favourite words, but it holds no religious connotations for me. Homo sapiens sapiens are the products of a long process of evolution. We have never been perfect, and whatever grace we have attained has never been other than fleeting and all the more precious for that. The best we can do for ourselves is to go on working at working out who exactly we are and how we can strive to make ourselves and our world better, whatever that might mean exactly.

Is religion dying?

A C Grayling dares to hope so. I suppose I dare to hope so too, though I don't dare to hope too much. The Catholic Church, in spite of its continuing strength in Latin America and its massive encroachment into Africa, is not the political power it once was near to its own home, and its grip on the African populace is not going uncontested as might have been the case a couple of centuries ago. Islam, in spite of the concerns of European and American xenophobes, is unlikely to make serious inroads in the west. And as Grayling points out, the numbers of the professedly religious are dropping in Britain, Europe, Australia and even the US. However, the picture is enormously complex. Pentecostalism is still trending upwards, and the still-religious seem to be digging ever deeper into their positions. Outside of the multinational religions, regional cults are perhaps thriving every bit as much as they did before Christianity came on the scene. These cults or belief systems may well be strengthening a sense of local, tribal or group identity, but they also can do great harm to the innocent with their promulgation of notions of witchcraft and good and evil spirits and the like. It's always a vexed question how much these belief systems should be tolerated. Some anthropologists and analysts become very defensive on behalf of these local and often threatened religions, but you can be sure they never go so far as adopting the belief systems for themselves.
On second thoughts, it's clear that these local religions aren't thriving. As with the Australian Aborigines, and the many tribal believers of one sort or another in Africa, Christian mission work has made serious inroads. Africa, by and large, seems to be a battleground between Islam and Christianity. It's not surprising that atheists are most concerned with these religions - they are two of the most politically powerful forces on the globe. The new atheist movement, if it can be so called, has emerged, I think, because we have become concerned over the spread of insidious falsehoods and practices that threaten people's freedom and even their lives. Homophobia, the oppression of women, the indoctrination of children, attacks on science and 'modernity', these are features of Islam in general, and of Roman Catholicism and of fundamentalist Pentecostalism, that rightly alarm non-believers. Much of the dogma emanating from these purveyors of 'revealed truth' is in direct contradiction to the human rights developments that have been such a feature of the late twentieth century.
We know more about human nature than ever before. We know, for example, that homosexuality will always be with us, that there are no such things as 'demons' that inhabit and corrupt people, that there is no 'fundamental role' for women or for men, and we know that human nature isn't static, that we are evolving physically and culturally, to a point where we understand that there have been many religions, most of them now extinct, having passed away with the cultures that gave them life. Yet people lived by those religions and those gods, they killed for them and they died for them, and they worshipped them as fervently as any modern Moslem or Christian worships her version of deity. With this understanding comes scepticism about the truth of any religion as well as wonder about the function of religion and the need for it. In any case, once we've eaten from the tree of knowledge, we can never return to the state of innocence.
So I do think that religion will continue to recede as an option for the more reflective and speculative members of society, though that set of society has always been a small one. I don't think religion is going to die in the near future of course [and neither does Grayling] but I do think it's going to find it increasingly difficult to justify itself intellectually. It will continue to try to do so though, and so the flaws in the arguments of religious apologists will have to be pointed out again and again - a painstaking and often boring task, but a necessary one.
This is important. We shouldn't be sentimental about religion. This doesn't mean we should be vicious and vitriolic - though sometimes moral outrage is justified. We should be lucid and logical and firm in our criticisms. There is, as we know, a lot of argument, in the blogosphere and elsewhere, about whether non-believers should 'play nice' with believers, especially those believers who are liberal and open-minded and acceptors of evolutionary theory. This is a real issue for me personally, as there are some people quite close to me who are believers, and I've had clashes with them. My attitude is that I will not go out of my way to challenge them, but if they make claims about the world which are religiously based and in my opinion false, I'll try not to let it pass. For religion is not just a personal, private matter. Religions are social constructions through and through, and they distort the world in ways that I find damaging and unfruitful. Religious people have children who they take to their churches and educate in their religious schools, and they congregate together in groups that support each others' beliefs and effectively shut out alternative understandings. As for liberal and open-minded believers, clearly their beliefs limit that open-mindedness. I agree with Jerry Coyne, for example, that where believers are also pro-science, they tend to water down their science to fit their beliefs. It is pretty essential, for example, for Christians to believe in humans as 'made in God's image', as his special creation, and so their attitude to evolution tends to be something like the Catholic Church's official attitude - that evolution is compatible with Catholic belief, but that, truth is, humans are special to God, his 'favoured creatures'. A belief that is really really hard to square with evolution as we know it. It raises questions for example about when humans, or their ancestors, became 'favoured'. Were Neanderthals favoured? Any of the Australopithecus species? Homo erectus? And what about other species, such as sperm whales, which have evolved in an entirely different way to be highly sophisticated?
We live in interesting times, and I look forward to the continuing struggle between believers and non-believers in understanding what our world really is like. And I hope I can contribute to it in some teensy way.

more argy-bargy

John Adams, early Unamerican President

One Karl Giberson, sometime physicist and now heavily involved in the Biologos website discussed earlier, has been trying to defend an accommodationist view of science and religion with some energy round the traps of late. Jerry Coyne has rebutted a recent Giberson offering here.
A Giberson statement that's getting a lot of stick is this:

There is something profoundly un-American about demanding that people give up cherished, or even uncherished beliefs just because they don't comport with science.

One commentator on the Coyne site countered with this bit from a letter to Thomas Jefferson, by US founding father John Adams:

They all believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe, Newton's universe and Herschell's universe, came down to this little ball, to be spit on by the Jews; And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.

With due consideration for the context [the science is a bit outmoded, there might be a hint of anti-Semitism, and the term 'blasphemy' presupposes religious belief] it's a great response.

recycling revealed

bounce conveyor

I've been at a CANH [Community and Neighbourhood Houses, and Centres - soon to get a name-change, much-needed, IMHO] conference over the past few days, trying ineffectively to network - I'm the world's worst networker. The best seminar, for me, though, apart maybe from a fun one on bush tucker, was delivered by Simone Cunningham, Waste Education Officer for Marion and other councils here in South Australia, and also attached to KESAB. It provided the latest lowdown on recycling in this state, and clarified many questions for the average confused but wannabe conscientious consumer, comme moi. So for my own edification, and that of others, here's my summary - and for more info, visit this site.

In SA we're apparently well ahead of most other states with recycling. Our deposit on cans, for example, means that we recycle more of our drink cans than any other state, and the ban on plastic bags has proved surprisingly effective. A while back, a state government organisation, Zero Waste SA, was created to provide an integrated waste management service. This involves the fortnightly collection of recyclable waste [yellow-lidded bins], the fortnightly collection of organic waste [green bins], and the weekly collection of other waste [blue-lidded bins].

Recyclable waste is taken to a Materials Recycling Facility [MRF], also known as a Materials Recovery Facility or a Materials Reclamation Facility, where a bounce conveyor separates paper from other waste. Paper makes up some 70% of residential recyclable waste. Further along the line trommels and sorters separate different materials according to weight, size and type.

What to recycle and how to recycle it.
Paper - put in flat, and don't tie it up. Flatten cardboard boxes, and don't worry about removing staples, paper clips etc. Coloured or glossy paper is fine. Remove plastic wrappers from paper. Cartons [milk, fruit juice etc] are all recyclable, but rinse and flatten. Paper plates that have been used for food should be thrown in the bin unless they're still quite clean. Otherwise they're too contaminated. And they can also stink out your bin.

Plastics - The logo on plastic items [the triangle with the arrows and the number in the middle] doesn't mean that the item is automatically recyclable. It's just an indication of the type of plastic. The rule of thumb for plastics is - if it's hard and rigid [all bottles, marge containers, yoghurt containers, etc] then it's recyclable. If it's soft and scrunchy [plastic bags, plastic wrap] put it in the bin. Always rinse containers - it doesn't have to be thorough, but foodstuffs can contaminate. Remember also that much of this is being sorted by hand, so think of the workers. Also remove lids. With current technology, lids get separated and treated like paper, causing no end of trouble. Best to just put them in the bin.  

Glass - It's 100% recyclable, clear or coloured. Don't chuck in broken glass though, as it's a hazard to workers. Again, remove lids. Metal lids are recyclable, but keep them separate. Ovenproof glass, though, should be binned.

Aluminium and steel - All cans of course, rinsed. Keep the lids with the cans where possible. No gas cylinders or hazardous stuff. Paint tins should be clean [as if]. Foil trays, pie trays, etc should be clean. Remember 'one contaminated bin ruins a whole truckload'.

Other products - hazardous waste, e-waste, batteries
Almost everything that goes into a PC can be recycled. What's more, a lot of e-waste contains precious materials that we're running out of, not to mention plenty of noxious chemicals. The government has plans, apparently, to ban most e-waste from landfill.
The system of e-waste collection is currently rather ad hoc. There's a place called E-cycle Recovery at 365 Glen Osmond Road, which will presumably take stuff off your hands for free. Alternatively, ring [and badger] your local council for information.
Used motor oil should never be thrown in the bin. It's even worse if you pour it down the sink. Oil-polluted stormwater and sewage is the biggest contaminant of our waterways, much worse than the big news item oil spills. Oil should be, and can be, recycled. Every council has recycling locations where you can deposit your oil - old or new, clean or dirty.    
Other hazardous waste can be taken to the household hazardous waste depot in Dry Creek, open on the first Tuesday of every month. More details are here.
Car batteries, other batteries, paint, tyres, and miscellaneous items you're not sure about - check out this site. It will provide details of the closest recycler to your house.  

Of course the key to waste reduction is to consume less and to consume more wisely. Currently we throw out 30% of the food we buy. That's a staggering figure when you think of it.

gymnastic thoughts

what it's all about

I always have half a dozen books on the go at once, and I must say that, unlike my younger self, my teen self, who devoured Hardy [and really inhabited Hardy's world for a time, which all things considered wasn't the most pleasant experience, though obviously it appealed more than my own world at the time], and Keats, and the Brontes, before going on to the continent to devour much French and Russian literature [all nineteenth century, strangely] - anyway, unlike that past self, my current self reads non-fiction almost entirely.
I've been trying to force myself to read some fiction, though, so it amused me yesterday to read a passage from the charmingly idiosyncratic O Henry. I recently joined a gym, a daunting place full of athletic, tattooed and largely youthful bods, and naturally I'm keen to turn my envy into scorn. Lines from a poem called 'Gym Junky', by a friend of mine, keep playing through my head, but it's never enough.
In his story 'The Coming-out of Maggie', Henry gently mocks the gym junkies of an earlier age. His members of the Clover Leaf Club, a social club attached to the gym, are local toughs constantly brushing against the law.

The young men of the Clover Leaf Club pinned not their faith to the graces of person as much as they did to its prowess, its achievements in hand-to-hand conflicts, and its preservation from the legal duress that constantly menaced it. The member of the association who would bind a ... maiden to his conquering chariot scorned to employ Beau Brummel airs. They were not considered honorable methods of warfare. The swelling biceps, the coat straining at its buttons over the chest, the air of conscious conviction of the super-eminence of the male in the cosmology of creation, even a calm display of bow legs as subduing and enchanting agents in the gentle tourneys of Cupid - these were the approved arms and ammunition of the Clover Leaf gallants.

Not really that much like my gym, where the female clientele possibly outnumber the male, and where I receive a modicum of low-key, scientifically based personal training in a thoroughly professional atmosphere,  but I can't help but be aware, given the sexual being I am, of the underlying sexual nature of all that whipping up of testosterone, the hope of gaining some slight advantage in the gentle tourneys of Cupid. My own hopes in such an arena, are of course, pathetic as well as quite possibly illegitimate. I was reminded of this, as if I needed it, when my personal trainer informed me that the stretching routines she taught me would come in handy in everyday life - 'for example, when you want to lift up your grandchildren'. So much for Clover Leaf gallantry. She's a kind and very likeable girl, but I'd never mentioned to her that I had grandchildren, which I don't, or even children, which I don't. I suppose one could do worse, though, than to be thought of as a kindly doting grandad. It doesn't help of course to have a body like hairy blancmange.

cetaceans, rorquals, belugas...

I'm having a lot of fun reading Leviathan, by Richard Hoare, all about whales and our relations with them over the years, with particular attention to Moby Dick. Fun perhaps isn't the word - it's a sad tale of cruelty and exploitation by and large, and a store-full of almost gossipy titbits. For example, the awful Aristotle Onassis [I do find business tycoons boring - dull, narrow exploitative types mostly] was very into the whaling industry for a while:

His vessels were purposely registered in Honduras and Panama, countries beyond the IWC's membership, and plundered protected waters, taking whatever whales they met, 'be they endangered species or newborns'. Only when Norway publicized his actions - and after the Peruvian navy and air force had opened fire on his ships for hunting whales within their territorial waters - was Onassis forced to stop his slaughter, finding it more financially viable to sell his fleet to the Japanese. 

A few other random titbits:

Rorquals are the largest group of baleen whales [as opposed to toothed whales or Odontoceti], with nine species in all, including the Blue, the Humpback, the Fin, the Sei, and the Common Minke. The term 'rorqual' comes from a Norwegian word that describes the longitudinal grooves from the mouth to the navel, which enable the mouth to open more widely.

The sperm whale is toothed, the largest toothed creature on earth [it also has the largest brain]. An adult male sperm whale weighs up to 20.5 metres and weighs up to 60 tonnes. The blue, the fin, and the southern right whales are all bigger on average. Sperm whales are the most sexually dimorphic of all the whales, with the males being 30% longer and considerably more massive [with baleen whales, incidentally the females are all larger than the males]. One of the foremost experts on the sperm whale, Hal Whitehead, has suggested they may practice religion. For their sakes I hope not, but they certainly have some of the most elaborate social structures of any mammal, and to talk of them in terms of 'culture' may not be amiss. They certainly exhibit altruism, like dolphins and other cetaceans. Of all the whales, the sperm whale probably most repays study - though all are magnificent and fascinating creatures.
Speaking of which, the beluga or white whale [no relation to Moby Dick, he was a sperm whale] is a real beauty of nature [look at any pics], a member of the Monodontidae family - the only other member of which is the narwhal. They go about in large pods, though they are slow swimmers. They're also called sea canaries because of the squeaking noises they make. They're small as whales go and have long been popular in commercial aquariums - unlike narwhals, which have always died quickly in captivity.

Whales grow so big because they can; they don't have the gravitational constraints of land-dwellers. We have fishy ancestors, and I suppose if you go back far enough, so do whales, but their more immediate predecessors were land-dwelling mammals. The hippo is the closest living land-dwelling relative of whales.

Whales can be identified by the shape of the spray that comes out of their blow-holes [amongst other ways of identifying them of course]. Ambergris comes from the sperm whale and is still used commercially. Not all sperm whales produce it - it seems to be produced as an aid to digestion of certain kinds of food, most notably squid. The preciousness of ambergris as a perfume has much to do with its lingering aroma. This is an element of all fishy smells of course, but it's particularly true of whale smells.

The lifespans of whales is still a subject of speculation. Not surprisingly, sailors' tales give a much longer lifespan than would seem credible but new evidence suggests that some species of whale, if only they were left alone by humans, would live for a lot longer than your average human, though no species has been known to breed beyond the age of forty.

I could go on and on with bits and pieces, it's never-ending, but the book's real strength is the sense it gives of these creatures as complex and still vastly mysterious to us, and the future possibilities of understanding and communication, after so many centuries of damage and suffering. Melville's great novel's livingness is a testament to their perennial fascination.