2013

Robust Knowledge Versus Flimsy Knowledge

Creationism purports to be a rival of evolution, an explanation of where we come from that deserves to be given respect comparable to the respect that Darwin’s explanation enjoys. It’s hard to argue facts with creationists because they come equipped with their own facts. But even if we set aside the facts, we can still see that creationism is a pseudoscience. We can judge these two bodies of knowledge, creationism and evolutionary theory, by how robust they are. Knowledge is robust when it is dense, thorough, useful, interconnected, predictive, teachable, measurable, falsifiable, and growing. Creationism and evolutionary science present a clear case where one side’s knowledge is robust and the other side’s is slim.

Consider, first, everything that evolutionary scientists have learned in the last 100 years. Their discoveries incorporate new evidence from genetics, paleontology, game theory, and more. What have the creationists discovered in the last century? If the creationists are right, they should be able to use genetic analysis to trace the races of humanity back to Noah’s three sons and their respective wives. That would be exciting confirmation of Noah’s flood and useful information for understanding humanity’s origins. But creationists aren’t even trying to do link human genetics to the Flood. Instead, secular scientists have traced humanity’s genetic lineages back to our evolution in Africa about 200,000 years ago. The theory of evolution also proves itself by being useful to people other than evolutionary scientists. People use evolution to understand the spread of viruses, the control of agricultural pests, and the nature of living things in general. If you ask a creationist why birds have feathers, the answer is that God created them that way. A biologist, however, can tell you a detailed story about scaly dinosaurs evolving feathers and eventually flight. The right paleontologist could talk you to sleep with what we know about the evolution of birds, far more than a creationist can tell you about all of creation. Evolutionary scientists also demonstrate that their theories are based on evidence when they debate each other. As new evidence comes in, it gives scientists new information to disagree about. For instance, consider the question of whether humans have evolved into five or more distinct “races,” or whether evolution has resulted in a single, basically homogeneous human race. Scientists are studying genes to find out, and in the mean time, there’s heated debate. Creationists don’t debate each other. There’s a split between “new earth” and “old earth” creationists, but there’s no public debate over the issue. Old-earth creationists think the new-earthers are blind to science, and the new-earth creationists think that the old-earthers are blinded by Satan, but both factions work happily together on the “Intelligent Design” team. The amount of intellectual work being accomplished with the theory of evolution swamps the work being done with creationism. You don’t even have to look at the facts that each side proclaims. The two bodies of knowledge aren’t comparable, and creationism isn’t even in evolution’s league.

Naturally, other bodies of knowledge besides creationism also fail the test of robustness. Compare, for example, everything that astronomers have learned about the stars in the last 100 years to everything that astrologers have learned. Is there a correlation among genes, star signs, and personality? Do animals have star signs, too, or just humans? Or maybe just humans, apes, and whales? These are interesting questions, but no astrologers are looking into them. Astronomers learn countless new things every year while astrologers reiterate traditional ideas. Furthermore, the only people who use astrology in their businesses are astrologers. Astronomy, on the other hand, is useful for understanding tides, getting to the moon, and putting satellites in orbit. And what about debates? You never read about a hard-hitting debate between astrologers. Twentieth century astronomers, on the other hand, hotly debated whether our Milky Way was the whole universe, or whether it was just one cluster of stars among many others. Astronomers were able to resolve the debate with cold, hard facts because their body of knowledge is based on evidence. For another example, let’s consider Mormon archeology. The Mormons claim to have secret knowledge of past civilizations in the Americas, but this knowledge doesn’t help them do archeology better than anyone else. No one takes anomalous archeological finds to the Mormons for their inside knowledge and superior perspective. In one field after another, the people who are doing real research have robust, growing bodies of knowledge, and they offer useful expertise. By comparison, fringe theories are flimsy.

A personal interest of mine is Jesus scholarship, where you might not be surprised to find a similar split. A few scholars say Jesus didn’t exist at all, and the world-renowned experts, most of whom are agnostic, say he did. The skeptics make simple judgments and blanket statements, such as dismissing all the written evidence equally. Mainstream scholars, on the other hand, differentiate minutely between evidence that’s more reliable or less. Of the four gospels, for example, they regard John as not useful on the subject of the historical Jesus and the gospel of Mark less touched by authorial bias than Matthew or Luke. The mainstream scholars also have an ever-growing body of historical information about Jesus and his time, while scholarship that counts Jesus as mythical peaked about a hundred years ago and has declined since then. If Jesus didn’t exist, then there are a number of exciting historical problems that could have been explored over the last century. Who was it who first said, “Blessed are the hungry”? The phrase appears in different contexts in Matthew, Luke, and Thomas. Someone must have said or written it first. Who was it? And where did the baptism and crucifixion stories in the gospels come from? Both events are exactly the sort of thing that a first-century Jew would never invent because each event was embarrassing in its own way. Jesus’ baptism made him look like a follower of John the Baptist and a sinner. His crucifixion marked him as a failure of the worst sort. If there wasn’t any Jesus getting baptized, blessing the hungry, and getting crucified, then there are remarkable historical discoveries to be made about the origins of these gospel accounts. But there’s no such research being done. The scholars who say Jesus didn’t exist just stop there and have nothing else to show for their perspective. No iconoclastic graduate student is using unorthodox scholarship to promote a bold new vision of Christian origins, one in which Jesus didn’t even exist. Instead there’s more and more research that ends up in line with the well-established view that Jesus was an historical Jewish prophet, albeit one who never claimed to be God and didn’t intend to found a new religion.

I like using the robustness argument because it works regardless of the facts of the case. Ideally it’s a neutral perspective, looking at each body of knowledge from the outside and getting away from each side’s debating points. Everyone in the debate can see for themselves how one body of knowledge stacks up against another. Fans of any given fringe theory will always be able to find reasons that the robustness test doesn’t apply to their particular perspective. Reason is notoriously ineffective at making people admit that they’re wrong. Still, in the scope of centuries reason seems to be winning out, one winning argument at a time.

(The thinking in this post is inspired primarily by similar observations made by Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate. It is similar to earlier posts about magic not working and about Intelligent Design lacking controversy.)

2013

War flag of al-Shabaab

Islam and Terror

With another terrorist attack by Muslims in the news, this time in Nairobi, people are ready to criticize Islam or to defend it. On the left, people like to say that the terrorists are driven by geopolitical pressures and that Christians and other non-Muslims can be terrorists, too. On this side of the debate, it’s important to know that the iconic bomb-laden suicide vest was invented not by Muslims but by the secular Tamil Tigers. On the right, people point to the lines in the Quran that call for violence against infidels and that promise heavenly rewards for martyrs. Given the long history of attacks that Muslim terrorists have made against Western targets, it doesn’t take much evidence to get Westerners to associate Islam with terrorism. Human brains are good at pattern-matching, and people are quick to spot the pattern in these attacks. As is often the case, both sides are right.

The liberals are right that Islam itself doesn’t explain the motive for these attacks. There are countless regular people who happen to be Muslim but are no more prone to terror that you or I. Christians have considered Muslims their enemies ever since they expanded into Christian territory in the 600s. Today’s right-wing hostility to Islam is simply more of the same. Far from being a source of terror, Islam was instrumental in bringing stability, peace, justice, and learning to a culture that spanned continents and centuries. Americans as diverse as Thomas Jefferson and Joseph Smith admired Islam, which ironically is closer to Jesus’ unitarian religion than Christianity’s trinitarian theology is. If Islam isn’t a font of terror, where do these attacks come from? Nonreligious motives for terrorist attacks are easy to find in the history of the West’s mistreatment of Muslim people and nations. Muslims see their countries being threatened by the West on one level or another: by military force, through covert manipulation, or by Western media and culture. As the Tamil Tigers, the KKK, and other groups have shown, Muslims aren’t the only people who resort to extremism when their way of life is on the line.

That said, I can’t support the common liberal assertion that religion plays no role in these attacks. From the modern day all the way back to the dawn of humanity, religious behavior seems to establish tribal identity, especially to prepare the tribe for battle. Historically, religious rites have helped unite larger and larger tribes, then larger and larger nations, and finally entire empires. Religion helped warriors love the “tribe” so much that they would die for it. Sometimes warriors have been explicitly promised rewards in the afterlife, as with the Norse berserks, Christian Crusaders, Japanese kamikaze, and Muslim suicide bombers. The light side of religion is that it brings people together. The dark side is that in-groups often oppress or attack out-groups. If there is a religious motivation to a terrorist attack, that should come as little surprise.

If religion in general includes an element of warlike tribalism, Islam in particular is no exception. While Muhammad was known as a peacemaker, and he was merciful in victory, he was after all the commander of a conquering army. From Muhammad’s lifetime on, the doctrines of Islam have been used to bolster the courage of soldiers, inspiring them to fight the enemies of the faith. If Islam is being used to motivate revenge attacks against infidels, that’s partly the sort of thing that Islam was designed to do.

Like government, religion is a way that people coordinate their behavior, sometimes on a continental scale. As with government, people sometimes use religion for good, use it sometimes for evil, and usually use it for themselves. It would be simplistic to paint an entire religion as evil, but it would also be simplistic to consider it entirely innocent.

Welcome Ceremony at Burning Man

The Baggage Check dome in 2009. My friend and I
slept in the rental truck on the far right.

Penn Gillette is an outspoken atheist, but in his book God, No he speaks highly of the time that the guests at his party all sang “Kumbaya” together. God might not exist, but “Kumbaya” is real. My atheist “Kumbaya” moment happened at Burning Man this year. At Camp Baggage Check, we performed a welcome ceremony that I had invented for us. It was a little dorky, but it went over well.

Here’s how I introduced the ceremony to the camp, as we were gathered in a circle in our central dome. “Camp Baggage Check is a place that we set apart. Here we come together intentionally, and we behave differently toward each other from how we would in the everyday world. One way that we designate this space as a special is by sharing a welcome ceremony together. For this ceremony, we use three things that humans have used in community-building ceremonies for a hundred thousand years: shared vocalization, shared music, and shared gesture.”

During the ceremony, each camp mate in turn says, “Hi, my name is BLANK,” and then the other forty people in the circle chant in unison, “Welcome home, BLANK!” The chant has a simple melody, just enough to count as music. We included arm gestures, first throwing the arms wide open and then pantomiming a hug. For laughs, I call that the “astral hug." This simple ritual is a far cry from singing and dancing all night around a fire like our ancestors did, but it has vocals, music, and motion. Some researchers say that we evolved particular mental adaptations that help us use these shared activities for group bonding, and I think they’re right.

This year was the first time we did the ceremony with the melody and the astral hug, and I was worried that my campmates would find it too dorky. Frankly, it sounds pretty dorky. But it went over well. People respond warmly to everyone else in the camp chanting a welcome for them. Now we're talking about adding a brief ceremony to do each evening before our shared dinner. It will be an original Burning Man version of saying grace before a meal.

Link

Singing Changes Your Brain, by Stacy Horn, 2013

The Burning Man Temple

The Burning Man Temple is different each year.
This is 2011's Temple.

New Atheist Sam Harris says that if we all magically forgot our religious traditions, we would find no use for our churches, mosques, and other places of worship. In his mind, we would go about our lives without whatever it is that happens in churches and never miss it. It's easy to find fault with organized religion, but I suspect that there is something of value going on in a church or other sacred space. The story of the Temple at Burning Man is an interesting case in point, in which a sacred space insinuated itself into a raucous festival.

In 2000, artist David Best lost a close friend just two weeks before he was scheduled to erect a wooden “Temple of the Mind” at Burning Man. Instead of cancelling their plans in grief, Best and his friends turned their temple into a memorial to their friend. In true burner fashion, they encouraged other people to use the temple to memorialize their own dearly departed, and since then the Temple has been a fixture at Burning Man, rivaling the Man itself in its power. Best is a professional artist with work in museums, but his “Temple” built of waste wood touched people in a way that none of his previous works ever had. To this day, burners gather at the Temple to write messages of loss on the surfaces of the wooden Temple. The Temple and the memorials left in it go up in smoke one day after the Man itself burns. The Temple is a beautiful place where a full-on atheist like me can leave a memorial alongside someone who expects to be reunited with their lost loved ones on the astral plane. It seems as though a spiritual place like the Temple is serving such an important role that it appeared spontaneously in the middle of a wild festival and immediately became part of the culture.

Most people are surprised to hear about Burning Man’s spiritual side, but there are many sides to Burning Man.

Here’s a story about a memorial by law enforcement officers at 2013’s Temple (click).

And here is an online paper that describes the Burning Man Temple (click).

A previous post about my own experience with grief (click).