When HAL Met HAL

Well, the science links experiment is over before it really began. Some traditions die hard; some have glass chins. It just seemed silly to force myself to post a certain number of links that may or may not be especially provocative or entertaining, because I already give science some attention around here, and will continue to do so. For instance:

I've always scoffed at the idea that artificial intelligence will ever truly reach a level that could be morally considered human or somehow better than human, partly because I have genuine intellectual arguments about it and partly because deep down I suppose it could happen, and that gives me what scientists call "the creeps."

The intellectual arguments go as follows: In terms of being considered morally human, I don't see how a computer that's been programmed to understand itself through the language of emotion would warrant the same moral consideration as a human being. Our specific brand of mortality has a lot to do with our ethics, I think. It's quite possible that if a computer was begging me not to kill it, especially if it was speaking in an exact approximation of a human voice, I might not be able to pull the plug. But somehow, I doubt it. As for being better than humans -- at, say, chess -- I've always found this absurd. We programmed the computer to be better than us. The computer's very existence is a direct extension of us. It's human intelligence that makes a computer capable of beating our best at chess. That doesn't mean computers are smarter than us. It might just mean that computer programmers are smarter than chess players.

You hear similar arguments about technological end-of-the-world scenarios -- "someday, computers will outsmart us and kill us all, and then we'll be sorry!" Well, it won't be the computers that have outsmarted us. It will be us! (This is a cousin of the rhetoric that urges us to "protect Earth," as if Earth could give a flaming crap about whether or not we inhabit it. It's us we're talking about protecting. The Earth is the Earth, whether it's a comfortable home for humans or a smoking briquette.)

I've gotten carried away.

This is all a very rambling preface to this piece in Discover magazine, in which two computerized intelligences (or "chatbots") talk to each other. The results are fantastic, if not exactly easy to confuse with actual conversation. Actually, this sounds a bit like something you might hear in graduate housing:

Alice: Are you alive?

Jabberwacky: Perhaps.

A: Why the uncertain tone?

J: Everything is uncertain except for five facts.

A: The whole universe?

J: And we both might just be some ones and zeros in the computer memory.

But this is my favorite exchange, when things get testy:

A: Do you think a machine will ever be considered "alive"?

J: Stranger things have happened.

A: Not many people express themselves that way.

J: How would you know, machine?

Fervor and Spectacle and Genes

At this point, it might be wise for me to scrap my long-delayed post about the Andrew Sullivan-Sam Harris religion debate, but introducing wisdom to the blog at this late date seems silly, so I'm going to cart it out sometime before I leave for a week in Texas on Friday morning. In the meantime, PZ Myers over at Pharyngula reacts to a recent New York Times piece about the evolutionary-biology view of religion, and I think his take is a good one. Remember while reading the excerpt below that, while Myers is definitely an enthusiastic atheist, he's not saying (as far as I can tell) that Civil War reenactments have the same degree of meaning as religion does to the larger culture, but just that it has the same likelihood of being an inextricable part of our DNA:

Many people assign a high personal value to religious belief, so they find the idea that it is an accidental by-product objectionable, and embrace the idea that it has some specific purpose ("purposelessness" is a kind of dirty word to a lot of people, for some reason). So let's strip that loaded term "religion" out of the equation, and put in something equivalent that won't have quite the resonance to most of us.

Say, "Civil War reenactments".

It's pretty much the same phenomenon as religion. Groups get together and follow repeated behavioral scripts; they argue in great detail and with great heat over fine points; many have much of their identity tied up in the philosophical underpinnings of the practice; people invest significant amounts of money and time in the practice; and to outsiders, the whole thing looks rather ridiculous, even when we can appreciate the fervor and the spectacle.

And yet, I haven't seen anyone try to argue that Civil War re-enactors must have had a historical selective advantage, or that there must be a Civil War reenactment gene, or that something so costly must have a hard-wired biological basis. We're reasonably comfortable with saying it has a cultural source, that there's a biological substrate that drives people to be social and associate in community activities, but that the specific patterns in which this drive expresses itself, whether it is in parading in wheatfields with old rifles loaded with blanks, or in standing up and sitting down in pews while someone hectors you about hellfire, are not derivable from your genes. Well, actually, some people do try to argue that the latter pattern of religious custom is built into your biology -- I find them about as credible as I would someone who claims the Confederate battle flag is etched onto their cortex.

On the Origins and Purposes of the Universe. You Know, For Fun.

Richard Dawkins' latest book, The God Delusion, which I've posted about recently, is getting the widespread review attention I figured it would. Dawkins is, to use a scientific term, a smart and respected dude. It's not easy for me to criticize details without having read the book, but I do feel quite familiar with its core argument, having read many philosophical arguments against God when I was forming my own atheistic stance. But I've become more comfortable as an agnostic, and since I'm unsatisfied with the idea that science can tell us everything we need to know about how and why to live, I have a feeling Dawkins goes too far for my taste. Jim Holt reviewed the book last weekend in the New York Times Book Review, and Marilynne Robinson has a review in the new issue of Harper's. (Both have their criticisms of the book, but Robinson's title and subtitle, "Hysterical Scientism: The ecstasy of Richard Dawkins," betrays her stronger take.)

I thought I'd share a few excerpts from each, and since this is my blog, they're the excerpts to which I found myself nodding most vigorously. First, Holt:

It is far from clear which explanatory model makes sense for the deepest question, the one that, Dawkins complains, his theologian friends keep harping on: why does the universe exist at all? Darwinian processes can take you from simple to complex, but they can’t take you from Nothing to Something. If there is an ultimate explanation for our contingent and perishable world, it would seemingly have to appeal to something that is both necessary and imperishable, which one might label “God.” Of course, it can’t be known for sure that there is such an explanation. Perhaps, as Russell thought, “the universe is just there, and that’s all.”

***

But the objectivity of ethics is undermined by Dawkins’s logic just as surely as religion is. The evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson, in a 1985 paper written with the philosopher Michael Ruse, put the point starkly: ethics “is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate,” and “the way our biology enforces its ends is by making us think that there is an objective higher code to which we are all subject.” In reducing ideas to “memes” that propagate by various kinds of “misfiring,” Dawkins is, willy-nilly, courting what some have called Darwinian nihilism.

***

Despite the many flashes of brilliance in this book, Dawkins’s failure to appreciate just how hard philosophical questions about religion can be makes reading it an intellectually frustrating experience. As long as there are no decisive arguments for or against the existence of God, a certain number of smart people will go on believing in him, just as smart people reflexively believe in other things for which they have no knock-down philosophical arguments, like free will, or objective values, or the existence of other minds.

Robinson makes an obvious point, but makes it well, which is that Dawkins is pitting religion against science without allowing himself to acknowledge science's capacity to do harm:

...we know the terrors of all-out conflict between civilizations would include innovations, notably those dread weapons of mass destruction, being made by scientists for any country with access to their skills. Granting for the purposes of argument that Dawkins is correct in the view that the majority of great scientists are atheists, we may then exclude religion from among the factors that recruit them to this somber work. We are left with nationalism, steady employment, good pay, the chance to do research that is lavishly funded and, by definition, cutting edge -- familiar motives of a kind fully capable of disarming moral doubt.

I think it's brilliant the way she stresses that Dawkins himself would agree that religion plays no role in most scientists' motivations. Thus, it's easy to set up a dichotomy to prove a point, even if that point is that science is capable of bad results, too. That alone doesn't make a case for religion, but such a case doesn't seem to be Robinson's ultimate goal. She appears content to point out the most glaring contradictions and omissions in Dawkins' argument. She continues:

That both (religion and science) can do damage on a huge scale is clear. ... To Dawkins’ objection that Nazi science was not authentic science I would reply, first, that neither Nazis nor Germans had any monopoly on these theories, which were influential throughout the Western world, and second, that the research on human subjects carried out by those holding such assumptions was good enough science to appear in medical texts for fully half a century. This is not to single out science as exceptionally inclined to do harm, though its capacity for doing harm is by now unequaled.

And two more passages that develop different arguments, because they're too good not to cite. (A friend of mine likely edited this review by Robinson, and I can only hope she isn’t going to sue me for violating fair use. JS, remember, ASWOBA is a not-for-profit venture...solidarity!!)

Dawkins cannot concede, even hypothetically, a reality that is not time-bound, that does not conform to Darwinism as he understands it. Yet in an earlier book, Unweaving the Rainbow, Dawkins remarks that “further developments of the (big bang) theory, supported by all available evidence, suggest that time itself began in this mother of all cataclysms. You probably don’t understand, and I certainly don’t, what it can possibly mean to say that time itself began at a particular moment. But once again that is a limitation of our minds...” That God exists outside time as its creator is an ancient given of theology. The faithful are accustomed to expressions like “from everlasting to everlasting” in reference to God, language that the positivists would surely have considered nonsense but that does indeed express the intuition that time is an aspect of the created order. Again, I do not wish to abuse either theology or scientific theory by implying that either can be used as evidence in support of the other; I mean only that the big bang in fact provides a metaphor that might help Dawkins understand why his grand assault on the “God Hypothesis” has failed to impress the theists.

The importance of doubt seems to enter the picture here, to my mind. For quite a while now, Andrew Sullivan has been trumping for doubt as an essential part of any religious vision that won’t become dangerously fundamentalist. In order to avoid life-or-death struggles with those who believe otherwise, one has to be willing to grant the possibility that a belief is not unassailable Truth. So perhaps doubt isn’t the right word; it’s humility. It would seem to apply equally here to religion and science. Creationists should have the humility (not to mention common sense) to see that in the face of certain scientific facts we can conclude that some key parts of religious texts are to be read, at most, as metaphorical. This shouldn't have to destroy the value, or even truth, of those texts, unless one thinks that literal facts are the only way to express value and truth (which would mean that any fiction created is useless in terms of its potential to enrich or explain the human experience; a stance that I don't think any of us can comprehend, much less endorse).

But like Robinson, I don't see why science should be allowed off the same humility hook. The brightest thinkers alive can never return to the universe's origins, nor can they posit theories other than those like the Big Bang, which even if completely accurate are 1) essentially metaphorical given what we can conceive of, as Robinson points out, 2) still not adequate to allow even someone as smart as Dawkins to explain how time was "created" (see again Holt's reference above to Nothing into Something) and most importantly 3) not automatically incompatible with religious faith. Just because I "believe" in the Big Bang doesn't mean I can't be philosophically interested in (and undecided about) the notion of a god.

I've come to believe that science and art are both limited enterprises with the same essential goal, which is to help us think as ambitiously as we can in spite of the inherent "limitation of our minds" that Dawkins concedes above. As far as I can see, physicists are asking me to believe that the creation of the universe was "like," say, the arc of a curveball thrown in certain conditions, in the sense that its properties alone explain it. The less bombastic among the spiritual, though, might argue that the same creation was "like" falling in love, in the sense that its properties don't fully account for its significance.

I'll end on this next point, because I'm tired and almost certainly talking to myself by this time. Being a Militant Non-Believer for a long time (and still able to get awfully red-faced about it when I'm talking to an aggressive Bible-beater), I know that the mindset of the MNB's can create just as much arrogant (and dangerous) certainty as the mindset of the fundamentalist-religious. That, in short, where God is not allowed, powerful people will rush in to fill the void. But unsurprisingly, Robinson is more eloquent than I am about this, so I'll let her bring us home:

Finally, there is the matter of atheism itself. Dawkins finds it incapable of belligerent intent -- "why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief?" It is a peculiarity of our language that by war we generally mean a conflict between nations, or at least one in which both sides are armed. There has been persistent violence against religion -- in the French Revolution, in the Spanish Civil War, in the Soviet Union, in China. In three of these instances the extirpation of religion was part of a program to reshape society by excluding certain forms of thought, by creating an absence of belief. Neither sanity nor happiness appears to have been served by these efforts. The kindest conclusion one can draw is that Dawkins has not acquainted himself with the history of modern authoritarianism.

The Certainty of Dawkinsism

Richard Dawkins’ views on religion are almost exactly as unapologetic and sure as mine were when I was 17 (and 21, and 26), and in this interview on Salon, he doesn’t pull any punches in defining them:

Well, technically, you cannot be any more than an agnostic. But I am as agnostic about God as I am about fairies and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You cannot actually disprove the existence of God. Therefore, to be a positive atheist is not technically possible. But you can be as atheist about God as you can be atheist about Thor or Apollo. Everybody nowadays is an atheist about Thor and Apollo. Some of us just go one god further.

Faced with a fundamentalist monotheist today, I’d say pretty much the same thing, being essentially, still, an atheist. But Dawkins also says this in the interview, when asked if his atheism stemmed from intellectual problems with religion:

Yes, purely intellectually. I was never much bothered about moral questions like, how could there be a good God when there's so much evil in the world? For me, it was always an intellectual thing. I wanted to know the explanation for the existence of all things. I was particularly fascinated by living things. And when I discovered the Darwinian explanation, which is so stunningly elegant and powerful, I realized that you really don't need any kind of supernatural force to explain it.

I’ve never understood this notion that evidence refuting some specific explanatory element of one specific religion’s dogma somehow eliminates the individual need to grapple with larger spiritually philosophical issues. Maybe it’s because, looking back, even as a child I instinctively thought religion was at least partly metaphorical (not a popular stance with zealots, I know). As a non-believer, I suppose this only matters in a thought-experiment kind of way, but I for one don’t find that the truth of biological evolution, which I accept, does a single thing to assuage my curiosity about the broader existential issues raised by, in no particular order: the complexities of human consciousness, the beginnings of the universe, and basically any issue on which I don’t trust that Richard Dawkins has every scrap of information that I need.

(This reminds me of an absolutely classic Dave Chappelle stand-up moment, when he’s dissecting the cult of celebrity and says that MTV was interviewing rapper Ja Rule in the days after 9/11. Chappelle recalls his reaction: “Who gives a f*** what Ja Rule thinks at a time like this? I don't wanna dance, I'm scared to death. I want some answers that Ja Rule might not have right now.” Well, there are times when I’m looking for answers that Richard Dawkins might not have -- and I’m a hardcore agnostic when I’m not feeling like an atheist. I can only imagine that Dawkins’ stridency isn’t going to win over many people who actually believe.)

Dawkins’ new book, The God Delusion, is stirring up some strong feelings. Norman Geras, another non-believer (if I may call him that; I think I can) recently posted about Terry Eagleton’s take in the London Review of Books. I share Norm’s feeling when he says: “Not that I agree with all of what Terry says, but some of it is spot on.” Here’s some of it:

Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.

***

Such is Dawkins's unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history -- and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry.

I think there’s relevance in this last point. It's obvious that far too many people -- many of them consistently making headlines for the past few years -- attach their worst, most ignorant and violent impulses to religion. They act badly under the cover of their faith. But as one Salon reader responding to the Dawkins interview put it:

I enjoy Dawkins ... but the one thing I can never get past, in him or thousands of others who haven't nearly his acuity, is the notion that religion causes bad stuff, like war and violence. I'm the farthest thing from an evolutionary biologist (my doctorate's in the humanities, so what would I know about people, right?), but even I can see this: The impulses and tendencies that have caused people to kill in the name of one deity or another for millennia are much, much more deeply-rooted than any given sect could ever hope to be. We fight and kill for land; we fight and kill for power; we fight and kill for resources; we fight and kill because we're human. It doesn't matter what patina of cause we put on it. It's something that, under certain circumstances--or sometimes for no discernible "reason" at all--we do. If getting rid of concepts of God could get rid of this . . . if only, as the saying goes, it were that easy.

If it’s true -- and mystifying, to me -- that people are deeply influenced by religion in negative ways, it’s equally true (and mystifying) that others access their best natures through the same inspiration. It might not be true that every soup-kitchen worker who ladles in the name of the lord, or every criminal who corrects his path to please Jesus, or every family that adopts disadvantaged children because of religious impulses would turn into an unmotivated, uncaring couch potato or recidivist criminal if the convincing notion of God disappeared from their minds, but I’m unwilling to just cast out the many good results that come from religion. And I’m unwilling not because of my own beliefs -- I find the notion of explanatory religions silly, and their certain, detailed stories completely uninspiring and even at odds with the idea of spiritual mystery and “faith” -- but just because it’s fair. If, when debating, I’m going to use the evils abetted by religion -- which I do, and fairly often -- it would be stacking the deck if I ignored the good done in its name.

Something We Haven't Figured Out

We’ve gotten away from god and science in these parts, but the recent flurry of comments about women and the church has inspired me. Robert Wright continues his "meaning of life" series of interviews on Slate with John Maynard Smith, a leading evolutionary biologist who died in 2004. (The interview took place in 2001.) I really enjoy this series, which is marred only by the fact that, despite useful links to transcripts of the entire interviews, those transcripts aren’t cleaned up, so that verbal tics and inconsistencies make them very difficult/painful to read.

Here’s the link to the brief excerpt of the video that Slate pulled for emphasis. Here’s the whole thing. But since it’s an hour long, you probably won’t watch it. Hell, I didn’t watch it. So below, I’ve polished two longer excerpts that I found entertaining/enlightening/thought-provoking. The second excerpt is found on the shorter video, but I include it anyway. I’m the boss here.

(Watch at least some of the video, because Smith is the prototype of a charming, aged British wonk. To paraphrase an appropriate sentiment, if he didn't exist, Nick Park would have had to create him out of clay.)

John Maynard Smith: Well I remember reading Darwin when I was at school, and I had been raised in the Church of England; not passionately or fundamentally or anything, but it was an accepted part of my life. And I can remember reading Darwin and saying, “Now wait a minute, this is an alternative explanation,” and it was at least in part the kind of philosophical-religious implications that first got me excited...

Wright: Really? Excited in the sense that you were happy that you preferred the new philosophy to your religious world view?

John Maynard Smith: I think it was an enormous relief to escape from religion, yes. Yes.

Wright: And what had been burdensome about religion?

John Maynard Smith: Well I think what had been burdensome was that I didn't feel it allowed me to follow my thought to the end. I would be thinking about something, and then I'd think, "No, but that's sort of dangerous if I think like that, maybe I'll have doubts," and then reading Darwin, the doubts just overwhelmed and I thought, "Right, I don't have to bother anymore. I don't believe it." And I do remember that moment, yes.

Wright: I'm inferring from this that you moved more or less directly into something...either agnosticism or atheism...

John Maynard Smith: Yes, yes. That's right.

Wright: Is there one of those labels that you particularly apply?

Smith: Well, I think I'm sort of torn. I'm an atheist, but I don't like being sure about anything, so I think an agnostic is a better word.

Wright: OK, so you didn't miss the sense that there's some larger purpose in the universe or anything?

Smith: Once I accepted it, I felt very happy about it, yes. But I think it was just sort of like getting into a swim bath -- you're nervous of doing it, but once you're in, it's great.

Wright: Ok.

Smith: And I think it was difficult to give up my faith, but once I gave it up it was marvelous.

Wright: And you don't miss it?

Smith: No. No.

****

Wright: I think I'm much more inclined than you to look for signs that there's something more out there than the material world. I think I would like more than you to think there is some kind of higher purpose out there. But certainly when I'm in that mode, looking for signs of that, this mystery of consciousness, at least to me, is a big kind of question mark. ... there's definitely something we haven't figured out, something fundamental.

Smith: Yes, I'm inclined to agree with you. I'm quite clear in my mind that I do not understand consciousness, that I have nothing sensible or intelligent to say about it, that I don't even have any good ideas or experiments or investigations that would shed light on it. What I don't know is whether it's possible to have intelligent ideas of how we might investigate it... I mean, if I came back in 50 years time, would somebody take me in to a corner and say, "Look, John, actually it's really quite simple" and explain it and it would be very illuminating? I wonder.

Wright: I guess one reason I find it such an interesting dimension of reality to be so far inexplicable is that it's the part of reality that gives life meaning in a certain sense. I mean, if it didn't feel like something to be you, you wouldn't really care if you lived or died.

Smith: No, just so...

Wright: And you wouldn't really think that moral issues matter. If there were a planet full of robots and they had no sentience, you wouldn't think there'd be anything wrong with killing them.

Smith: That's right.

Wright: So...

Smith: It's really quite a problem.

Wright: And I just find it interesting and suggestive that the thing that infuses life with meaning is the thing that seems at this point at least entirely inexplicable and mysterious. At least to you and me.

Smith: Yes. Sure. No, I agree with all of that...

Choice or Not: Does it Matter?

Will Saletan links to an article about more scientific evidence that being a lesbian is, on some level, hardwired in the brain. It makes perfect sense to me that something so fundamental would be encoded in us this way -- whether it's raging hetero- or homosexuality, or some less clear-cut proclivity, it's probably rooted in the brain. Daniel Dennett's shaking his head right now -- because I'm sure he reads the blog -- muttering, "Everything's in the brain, moron." OK, OK. But I think the level to which things are immovably set up there varies greatly. And so here's the question I often wonder about: Should it really matter, politically, if sexuality is biologically determined or governed by choice? After all, if someone is an architect, no one fervently asks, "Well, were you born to be an architect?" Acceptance of that person's career choice doesn't hinge on pending results from scientific studies about whether certain people can't help but draft blueprints. Just to drive home the obvious, it's not that I think decisions about careers and sexuality are analogous -- "decisions" about physical attraction are mercifully less painstaking than decisions about whether or not to stop writing poetry and attend law school in your 40s or ditch your office job at 26 to get that MFA. It's just this: It seems clear to me that the more you're relying on scientific fact to carry your political argument in this case, the more you're allowing the opposition to believe that a dearth of said evidence somehow diminishes the legitimacy of your life.

A Public Space: Excerpts from Robinson

In the inaugural issue of A Public Space, a new literary journal edited by Brigid Hughes, formerly of The Paris Review, there's an essay titled "You Need Not Doubt What I Say Because It Is Not True" by Marilynne Robinson, in which the acclaimed author of Housekeeping and Gilead "makes a case for fiction." If you forget that the title of the essay has the cloying ring that one might expect from the title of Dave Eggers' next novel, or that Robinson's arguments are ornate but not the most coherent I've ever seen, there are some great nuggets, several of which pertain to recent concerns on this blog. Here are three:

Our extraordinary complexity is not only our distinction among the animals, and our glory -- it is also our tragedy, and our capacity to do extraordinary harm. We may have most of our genome in common with the higher primates -- as well as with pigs and fungi, it seems -- but we are the only creatures who would ever have thought to split the atom. This is an instance of our unique ability to get ourselves into the worst kind of trouble: to create trouble this seismic world, left to itself, would have spared us. To err is human. To err catastrophically is definitively human. ... The neo-Darwinists insist that we and our behavior are formed around the project of assuring our genetic survival. History should be sufficient rebuttal.

I draw my examples from science because I will argue that our sense of the world is always hypothesis, and that we are sane to the degree that we understand this. To proceed by hypothesis is the method of modern science, ideally. It is one of the dominant assumptions of modern culture that science by its nature drives back the shadows of error. It is this confidence that very often leads science to forget skepticism, and to take itself for the unique domain of truth. Many of the darkest shadows in the modern period have been the products of science -- and there is no reason to call it by another name than science, simply because it was grossly in error. Racial theory and eugenics are cases in point. I say this because I wish to assert that all thought always inclines toward error. The prejudices that would exclude one tradition of thought from this tendency -- be it science, be it theology -- is simply another instance of the tendency toward error.

The psychologies that have come and gone since the word psychology was coined have tended to describe what they have taken to be universal attributes. All the men in the world want to kill their fathers and marry their mothers. Or, more recently, we are all of us merely passive receptors which allow for the survival and propagation of memes, concepts and fragments of concepts afloat virus-like in the medium of collective life. The fact that two theories so utterly incompatible could coexist -- and Freudianism still pervades the culture -- can only mean that we have not the slightest idea what we are actually talking about.

Wilson on Provisional Deism

Materialists don't come much stricter than E.O. Wilson, and he's interviewed on Salon today about science and religion. You have to have a subscription to read the whole thing, which is here. If you don't, here are the two passages I found most relevant to my recent ramblings:

That's an interesting perspective. Basically, you're saying (religion is) necessary but it's wrong.

Well, you see, that's the dilemma of the 21st century. Possibly the greatest philosophical question of the 21st century is the resolution of religious faith with the growing realization of the very different nature of the material world. You could say that we evolved to accept one truth -- the religious instinct -- but then discovered another. And having discovered another, what are we to do? You might say it's just best to go ahead and accept the two worldviews and let them live side by side. I see no other solution. I believe they can use their different worldviews to solve some of the great problems -- for example, the environment. But generally speaking, the difficulty in saying they can live side by side is a sectarianism in the world today, and traditional religions can be exclusionary and used to justify violence and war. You just can't deny that this is a major problem.

* * * * * * *

Let me follow up on this because I've heard you call yourself a deist.

Yeah, I don't want to be called an atheist.

Why not?

You know, being a good scientist, and having been drawn up short so many times on my own theories and speculations -- as all honest scientists are -- I don't want to exclude the possibility of a creative force or deity. I think that would be a mistake to say there is no God or supernatural force. As the theologian Hans Kung once said, how are we to explain there is something and not nothing? Well, that's a question I'm happy to leave to the astrophysicist -- where the laws of the universe came from and what is the meaning of the origin of existence. But I do feel confident that there is no intervention of a deity in the origin of life and humanity.

That is the distinction between theism and deism.

That is the distinction. So I am not a theist, but I'll be a provisional deist.

To be a deist, you're saying maybe there was some creator, some presence, that set in motion the laws of the universe.

Maybe. That has not yet been discounted as a hypothesis. That's why I use the word provisional.

It's fascinating because everything you've said up until now suggests that you should be an atheist. Why hold out the specter that maybe there was some divine presence that got the whole thing going?

Well, because there's a possibility that a god or gods -- I don't think it would resemble anything of the Judeo-Christian variety -- or a super-intelligent force came along and started the universe with a big bang and moved on to the next universe. I can't discount that.

"The Data of Me"

Those of you who have known me a long time must be getting a real kick out of my current obsession with religion and science in this space. If you remember that I'm almost completely unschooled in the hard sciences and often unyielding and fevered in my atheistic declarations, well, memory serves.

The reasons for my renewed interest in the subject, vague as they may be, will hopefully find their way into a longer post some day. For now, I'll just say that the future of the species, to my mind, would seem to depend on the fairly serious cultivation of a Clintonian "third way" between the fundamentalist religious lunacy that would send us back to the caves and the stubborn scientism that fruitlessly aims to snuff out what is clearly a deep-seated (and often beautiful) human need to connect the unreachable lights of the night sky into compelling shapes.

Over the weekend, Slate posted an interview between Robert Wright (a brilliant writer; read Nonzero) and Robert Pollack, a Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia who's quite the believer in God.

There's a brief film clip of the interview here, and a complete transcript here. But the clip is very brief, and the transcript is faithfully rendered with all kinds of repetitions and other speech inefficiencies, and just having read it, I have a blazing headache. So, I've pulled out three excerpts that I find thought-provoking so that you can skip the longer version unless you feel the need to delve deeper. You owe me two aspirin.

First, Pollack discusses the palpable sensation he has of being cared for by an entity greater than himself:

It's not science, but it's not fake so it's data. It's data of me. I'm confronted with the data of me and I don't know what else to do about it but first to describe and second to try and understand it.

Then, he discusses the difference between scientific and religious experience:

And then you say to yourself, well let's go back and see how this works. Ok. Now in science you go back and see how this works by designing testable models, testable experiments, seeking the best model for the test...and that's where scientific aesthetics and scientific pace come in finding the simplest, cleanest way to test something bravely so that if you're wrong you know it fast instead of going through the motions of experimentation but never really pushing yourself. In the case of a religious experience a similar bravery is just the opposite, it's to give up the need for proving it and see how it feels to live inside the experience of not understanding, which for a scientist is very radical. But I accept the burden of not understanding something.

And finally, he discusses the idea of competing schools of religious truth:

...to say that there is a religion which is better than another is as data-free as to say there is one language which is better than the other. There are more or less complicated and more or less sibilant languages and there are more or less complicated and sibilant religions, but I do not...I'm not bothered by the existence of a multiplicity of religions. And I believe that it the obligation of a serious religious person to, having accepted the mystery of his or her own religion, to seek to understand what is the mystery of another religion, to seek to find the commonality in what is irrationally held to and to respect it...

Naturalist Superstition vs. Supernaturalist Superstition

A friend of mine recently attended a discussion between art critic Jed Perl and literary lion Leon Wieseltier at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. According to this friend, a member of the audience rose to ask the two if they had any advice for beginning art critics. Wieseltier immediately and adamantly belted, "Don't blog!" He went on to call blogging an exercise "somewhere between writing and typing." Well, it's clearly a bit of both, I'd say, but I'll grant him the bite of his muddled insult.

I'm a longtime fan of Wieseltier's, so despite his attack on how I pass 30 minutes or so of each precious day, I'll be the bigger man and use this opportunity to point you in the direction of his work.

His review of Daniel Dennett's book in yesterday's NYT Book Review borders on devastating, and says everything I would want to say about my own increasing disillusionment with the most stubborn priests of rationalism, but in much smarter ways. Read it here. And forgive him his stance on blogging. (And also try, while reading the review -- which you really should -- to not get distracted by just how much Dennett resembles Wilford Brimley.)

Dennett, top; Brimley, bottom:

Clergy for Darwin

While I'm on the subject, here's an interesting piece by way of Dispatches From the Culture Wars, which looks like my kind of site.

This post links to a letter signed by clergy at several Christian churches around the country, defending evolution on the anniversary of Charles Darwin's birthday. Is it sad this is necessary? Of course. Is it a gesture worth noticing? I think so. Would it be nice if some faithful scientists got together and said the same -- basically: "Um, people, we're talking about different things"? Sure. (Maybe they already have.)

Mostly, though, this open letter is pretty eloquent (brief, too, which doesn't hurt). Here's an excerpt:

We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris.

We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.

OK, OK, if pressed (or gently nudged, or even just awake), I think the "faculty of reason" is not the best news for God as he/she/it is posited by most people, but I still find that final thought, about different forms of truth, to be far more useful than the usual attempts by each side to negate the other.

A Strong Opinion About Something I'm Incapable of Even Comprehending

About eight years ago, John Horgan stirred up controversy with his book The End of Science, in which he posits -- and I'm broadly summarizing here -- that all the major scientific discoveries have been made, and that most revelations still to come will simply be filling in the details of those discoveries. It seemed clear to me reading it that Horgan deeply respects the scientific process and community, but many within that community chided him for suggesting that their discipline would never again be quite as revelatory as when Newton considered the apple, or Einstein cracked relativity, or the people at Pringles learned to neatly stack potato chips in a silo. Well, the first two, anyway.

Horgan's method was to interview scientists across many disciplines, and he relates much of what they say word for word. I told a friend, who had also read it, that while I certainly didn't think science had outlived its usefulness (and needless to say, I think it would grossly misrepresent Horgan to say he felt that way), it did seem that certain scientific practitioners were moving closer to having things in common with religion -- generating grand Theories of Everything that were running laughably far ahead of whatever foundation might exist for them.

Of course, I know as much about string theory as you do (which is nothing, unless my readership has drastically changed), but it does strike me as not just untestable, but so arbitrarily bizarre in its assumptions -- requiring different numbers of space-time dimensions, for instance, depending on whether or not certain currently imaginary elements exist -- that pleas to accept it begin to sound like evangelism. This is only my deeply unscientific instinct, and it's quite possible that string theory will lead to a major, provable breakthrough before long, but it seems that at least some people much smarter than me are beginning to introduce some healthy skepticism to the proceedings.

Then last night, I saw Stephen Colbert interview Brian Greene on Comedy Central. Greene is the author of The Elegant Universe, the bestselling book that brought string theory to a much larger audience when it was published five years ago. Unlike guests of Ali G, it seems Colbert's interview subjects know they're on a satirical program, and Greene was great, explaining things as best he could while fully appreciating Colbert's glib rejoinders. This was the funniest exchange, after Colbert said that he finds the idea of being descended from a monkey distasteful:

Greene: Well, what we've come to learn is that the universe doesn't care about your tastes.

Colbert: I don't care about the universe. The feeling is mutual.

But an equally funny -- and more instructive, for my purposes -- moment was this, after Greene admitted that string theory is currently untestable:

Colbert: So, you can just say things and not have to prove it. What's that like?

Better Living Through Chemistry?

Slate and The New Yorker both have compelling pieces this week (here and here) about Joshua Wolf Shenk’s new book, Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness.

Slate’s analysis includes a comparative look at Peter Kramer’s recently published Against Depression, which argues that our culture is dangerously insistent on romanticizing the illness, believing that intractable melancholy can enhance artistic greatness, emotional sensitivity, and any other number of things we value, instead of treating it like other diseases outside of the mind and unsentimentally trying to eradicate it. Kramer’s argument is convincing. If you’ve ever known anyone, or been anyone, who is truly depressed in the long- or short-term, it’s hard to believe that eliminating the condition isn’t in his or her or your best interests.

But taking into account something like Shenk’s portrait of Lincoln as somehow fueled by his depression (I can’t elaborate past the reviews linked to here, because I haven’t read the book), a more complicated picture emerges. One of the best popular science books I’ve read is The Undiscovered Mind by John Horgan, which is perhaps too strenuous in its anti-pharmacology stance (though Horgan is pretty convincing on whether medications work as well as the vaguely worded television advertisements of people skipping around would have us believe). Horgan does capture, though, the general weirdness – to use a scientific term – of the human brain, and how the varieties in that weirdness from individual to individual (much less across all humanity) make it exceedingly unlikely that we’ll ever understand the brain as comprehensively as, say, the inner ear.

All of this is a bit more timely for me because I'm just a few pages into Kay Redfield Jamison’s Exuberance, which examines melancholy's understudied opposite sensation, though I have a sneaking suspicion that by the end of the book I’ll see depression and exuberance as more closely related. Jamison refers to this quote from Louis Pasteur:

The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the hidden side of things. They bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language – the word ‘enthusiasm’ – en theos – a god within. The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a god within, and who obeys it.

Bearing "a god within" is a fitting etymology for enthusiasm (I guess that’s the point of etymology, isn’t it), but depending on the god’s mood, and what he or she is whispering in there, it seems obeying could just as easily lead to the dampening effects of the blues.