Edge Question: Which science concept would make everyone think better?

Here is the "Edge World Question Center", a leading materialist think tank, with 2011's Question:

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER

James Flynn has defined "shorthand abstractions" (or "SHA's") as concepts drawn from science that have become part of the language and make people smarter by providing widely applicable templates ("market", "placebo", "random sample," "naturalistic fallacy," are a few of his examples). His idea is that the abstraction is available as a single cognitive chunk which can be used as an element in thinking and debate.

The Edge Question 2011

WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY'S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?

The term 'scientific"is to be understood in a broad sense as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great people in history, or the structure of DNA. A "scientific concept" may come from philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence, or other analytic enterprises, as long as it is a rigorous conceptual tool that may be summed up succinctly (or "in a phrase") but has broad application to understanding the world.

[Thanks to Steven Pinker for suggesting this year's Edge Question and to Daniel Kahneman for advice on its presentation.]

164 contributors, many whose names you will recognize, participated.

Any thoughts of your own? Go here to comment.

Note: Interesting, how many key words from medicine easily come to mind, yet medicine has slowly been moving away from a materialist paradigm, as Mario Beauregard and I noted in The Spiritual Brain.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Neuroscience and popular culture: How much are journalists to blame for pop science culture?

Don't blame journalists, says Jonah Lehrer here on the reporting of science. He makes some excellent points:

Scientists are almost never subjected to critical coverage in the mainstream media. Quick: name the last newspaper or magazine article that dared to criticize or skeptically analyze a piece of published research. If you had trouble thinking of an article, it's because it almost never happens. And this isn't because science is perfect. As a JAMA study reported last year, almost a third of medical studies published in the most prestigious journals are wrong. Flat out false. These are the same studies that get that get faithfully recited in our daily newspapers day after day. This gullible reporting stands in sharp contrast to the way scientists actually perceive things. When I talk to scientists, I'm always impressed by the way they criticize the research of their peers. To take a recent example: a few weeks ago I spent over an hour listening to a neuroeconomist elegantly dissect a very influential fMRI study. (Other scientists subsequently echoed his criticisms.) And yet this same study has been covered extensively in the press, with nary a hint of skepticism. The fact is, science journalists suffer from an excess of politeness. We are intimidated by all the acronyms, and forget to ask difficult questions. But this is our duty. Most researchers, after all, are funded by tax dollars. They have an obligation to explain their research to the public.

He recommends that we stop letting science journals control the flow of news. I agree, except that in areas like "evolutionary psychology," public funding usually means a licence to propound whatever you want, and call it science. Anyway, assuming we all agree that this situation is a disgrace - in the phrase of the old folk tale - who will put the bell on the cat?

Look, I am a science journalist myself, and I say yes, blame science journalists. Too many of us just do not even think to ask enough of the right questions about too many stories.

In fairness, when we do ask, as Lehrer implies, we run into problems. Recently, I offered a piece to a peer reviewed science journal, on why most people do not believe atheistic materialism, as it is represented in popular culture. That's my specific beat.

I warned the editor that I write like a journalist, not like an academic. My offer was accepted, but when I got the peer review, I was dismayed.

It was full of pettifogging demands for definitions of stuff no one needs defining in the context.

Like, for example, when Dean Hamer says that we are a bunch of chemicals running around in a bag or Steve Pinker explains how infanticide "helps" evolution – what’s not to understand? Hundreds of millions of people read this stuff in the popular press - and they understand. It is a series of overlapping circles whose core is materialist atheism.

I withdrew the paper and found another home for it. From that experience, I realized two things:

1. I could never write anything they would want.

2. They would never want anything I could write. (Even though I know stuff they don't.)

Meanwhile, I wrote the lead editor, and said, “If a story rolled through the science press saying that “Sex with dogs helps evolution, study finds”, would anyone really be surprised?”

Would anyone question it? Would anyone ask, is this really science?

That would be nice. But be still, my heart! That train she be a long time comin'.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

Does religion protect us against pseudoscience?

A recent study from Baylor University suggests that the answer is yes. In "Look Who's Irrational Now" (Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2008), Mollie Ziegler Hemingway notes,

"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

Now, that in itself should not be a surprising finding. For one thing, traditional religious groups tend to oppose occult practices, so the regular attender is likely to be aware of the group's negative view.

One can't help but recall King Saul and the Witch of Endor in 1 Sam 28:

When Saul saw the Philistine army, he was afraid; terror filled his heart.

6 He inquired of the LORD, but the LORD did not answer him by dreams or Urim or prophets.

7 Saul then said to his attendants, "Find me a woman who is a medium, so I may go and inquire of her."

"There is one in Endor," they said.

8 So Saul disguised himself, putting on other clothes, and at night he and two men went to the woman. "Consult a spirit for me," he said, "and bring up for me the one I name."

9 But the woman said to him, "Surely you know what Saul has done. He has cut off the mediums and spiritists from the land. Why have you set a trap for my life to bring about my death?"

Saul's original view, however "non-diverse", was the normal one for traditional Western monotheistic religion. The image here at Wikimedia Commons features Saul and the Witch, and - I think - pretty much captures the terminal goofiness of all that stuff.

Another interesting Baylor finding: Higher education does not affect whether people believe in ghosts, psychic healing, haunted houses, demonic possession, clairvoyance, and witches.

I am not sure what to make of this finding, as reported, because the beliefs are not all equally ridiculous. As Mario Beauregard and I noted in The Spiritual Brain, there is some laboratory evidence for telepathy as a consistent low-level effect.

And demonic possession is an especially difficult case for surveys. Traditional religions assume that possession is possible in principle, so adherents may say that they believe in it in principle. But they may almost always seek other explanations in practice, believing that God would not permit possession to happen to believers. That does not mean that they literally deny the possibility.

The haunted houses I will simply pass by ...

In any event, as for late night comic Bill Maher - the inspiration for Hemingway's Wall Street Journal piece - and the sponsor of Religulous, an anti-religious documentary:

it turns out that the late-night comic is no icon of rationality himself. In fact, he is a fervent advocate of pseudoscience. The night before his performance on Conan O'Brien, Mr. Maher told David Letterman -- a quintuple bypass survivor -- to stop taking the pills that his doctor had prescribed for him. He proudly stated that he didn't accept Western medicine. On his HBO show in 2005, Mr. Maher said: "I don't believe in vaccination. . . . Another theory that I think is flawed, that we go by the Louis Pasteur [germ] theory." He has told CNN's Larry King that he won't take aspirin because he believes it is lethal and that he doesn't even believe the Salk vaccine eradicated polio.

Wow. I am old enough to have been in the long line of people getting the Salk vaccine at my local elementary school in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1956, and I remember the general disappearance of the polio scare in the following years.

Anyway, it turns out that traditional religion is an excellent prescriptive against many superstitions and much pseudoscience

Note: With "psychic healing," we need to define our terms carefully. There is massive evidence for the placebo effect (in research studies, people often get better because they believe they will). Is that psychic healing?

This qualification probably did not affect the surveys of religious folk because they would attribute the healing to the power of prayer and would not use the word "psychic" to explain matters. The main research question in recent yeas has been to distinguish between the effect of prayer for one's own health and prayer for the health of others - intercessory prayer - which, for many, is a religious duty.

Can we trust other people's spiritual experiences? Why should we?

In a discussion of C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, Kathleen Lundquist references Fr. Luigi Giussani on the question of whether we can trust the spiritual experiences of others. That is, why should we believe it if it didn't happen to us?

Fr. Giussani writes that of the two ways of gaining knowledge (1: empirical observation/sensory input and 2: indirect knowledge through a mediator, i.e. through persons, parents, teachers, books, etc.), it is indirect knowledge, i.e. that which comes to us through trust in a witness, which is at the core of human culture and foundational to our existence: “Listen, what’s more important: the evidence or this knowledge mediated through a witness? Get rid of this knowledge through mediation and you wipe out all human culture, all of it, because all human culture is based on the fact that one person begins with what another person has discovered and then goes forward from there. If you couldn’t reasonably do this, the ultimate representation of reason, which is culture, couldn’t exist… Culture, history, and society are based on this type of knowledge called faith, knowledge through faith, indirect knowledge, knowledge of reality though the mediation of a witness“[iv] (emphasis mine).

Fr. Giussani thus radically reorganizes the categories of the faith vs. reason debate. Since faith is the foundation of our knowledge about the world, faith is the most reasonable choice to make when evaluating the testimony of someone you know and trust — especially if the encounter is exceptional in some way. He continues: “From a rational point of view, it’s clear that if you become certain that another person knows what he or she is saying and doesn’t want to deceive, then logically you should trust, because if you don’t trust you go against yourself, against the judgment you formulated that that person knows what he or she says and doesn’t want to deceive you.

Should we trust even our own experience?

Interestingly, naturalist (materialist) Gordy Slack notes in a recent article in science, "What neo-creationists get right: An evolutionist shares lessons he's learned from the Intelligent Design camp"(free registration):

Millions of people believe they directly experience the reality of a Creator every day, and to them it seems like nonsense to insist that He does not exist. Unless they are lying, God's existence is to them an observable fact. Denying it would be like insisting that my love for my children was an illusion created by neurotransmitters. I can't imagine a scientific argument in the world that could convince me that I didn't really love my children. And if there were such an argument, I have to admit I'd be reluctant to accept it, however compelling it appeared on paper. I have too much respect for my own experience.

So here is someone who thinks that your (and his) experiences are not factual saying that it isn't wrong to treat them as factual. (That by the way just shows how mixed up he and all materialists are but ... a story for another day.)

Personally, I think that if a person genuinely becomes more loving and caring toward others and maintains that change over a number of years, that is powwerful testimony that they encountered a spiritual reality.

Hat tip to The Sheepcat for Catholic Exchange.

See also Fr. Luigi Giussani. Is It Possible to Live This Way? Volume 1 - Faith. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008.

Atheism: Its attractions for science bigwigs

Mathematician and author of The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (and of much irrepressible mischief) David Berlinski explains for Pajamas Media the attraction of atheism for science bigwigs,

It takes no very refined analytic effort to determine why Soviet Commissars should have regarded themselves as atheists. They were unwilling to countenance a power higher than their own. Who knows what mischief Soviet citizens might have conceived had they imagined that the Politburo was not, after all, infallible?

By the same token, it requires no very great analytic effort to understand why the scientific community should find atheism so attractive a doctrine. At a time when otherwise sober individuals are inclined to believe that too much of science is too much like a racket, it is only sensible for scientists to suggest aggressively that no power exceeds their own.

Many might be tempted to dismiss such a view from a clergyman but Berlinski is an ironic agnostic. Here’s a sample of his approach from his book page at Amazon:

Has anyone provided a proof of God’s inexistence?
Not even close.

Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here?
Not even close.

Have the sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life?
Not even close.

Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought?Close enough.

Has rationalism in moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral?
Not close enough.

Has secularism in the terrible twentieth century been a force for good?
Not even close to being close.

Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy of thought and opinion within the sciences?
Close enough.

Does anything in the sciences or in their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational?
Not even ballpark.

Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt?
Dead on.

Berlinski does not dismiss the achievements of western science. The great physical theories, he observes, are among the treasures of the human race. But they do nothing to answer the questions that religion asks, and they fail to offer a coherent description of the cosmos or the methods by which it might be investigated.

I found his book both hilarious and sobering, and will link to the review (when I write it - soon).

Why science without God destroys itself

Recently, a commenter asked me if I would post my recent ChristianWeek column, "Why science without God destroys itself," and here it is (with a couple of links):

Why science without God destroys itself

by Denyse O’Leary

In recent columns, I have looked at the big promotion campaign for materialist atheism, based in part on the claim that atheism is supported by science. The claim is without substance, so far as I can see. On the contrary, the fine tuning of the universe in which we live so much testifies to a divine Mind that great scientists who conspicuously lacked orthodox piety have been compelled to admit that. Yes, many deplore the obvious inference, and try to find a genuine loophole (Arthur Eddington’s term). But admit the problem they must, for they can hardly deny it.

Besides, as University of Waterloo chair of physics Robb Mann recently pointed out to my adult night school class at the University of Toronto, discoveries about the nature of our universe made during the last few decades have only confirmed and strengthened the case for the Creator. Not only that, but the most promising candidate for emptying the universe of God - string theory - is in crisis, if not in ruins. And its companion theory - cosmic inflation - if it were to succeed, would demolish science.

We’ve hardly space here to unpack a complex debate, enlivened by public squabbles between prominent scientists. But here are a couple of key points:

One good candidate to replace God was string theory. Briefly, it pictures the elementary particles of our universe as similar to notes resonating on a guitar string. These strings - if they exist - originated in weird, exotic events that occurred before the Big Bang. And how does that dispense with God? Because string theorists hope to show that there was never really any beginning to the universe, such as the Big Bang. Think about that: It means that, even if God exists, God is superfluous to the existence of the universe. You can still believe in God if you want, but God is not part of the explanation of how the universe came to exist. The universe originated in perhaps unknowable prior events. However, the mathematics underlying string theory has come under severe criticism recently, for generating all possible values (like the results you get when you try dividing by zero).

Many scientists have been working hard to find evidence for an infinite number of universes (a multiverse). Their bottom line argument: Our universe happens to look fine-tuned or designed. But infinitely many others look different. So our universe could be the way it is randomly. The movie What the Bleep Do We Know? introduces one version of the multiverse.

Cosmic inflation theory is an increasingly popular multiverse theory. It holds that our observed universe (which is currently expanding only slowly) is a tiny part of a much more rapidly expanding structure. That structure's existence and its different rates of inflation (rather than God) explains both the Big Bang and fine tuning of our universe. In fact, our universe is simply one of an arbitrarily large number of tiny parts that happen to expand more slowly than the whole. The other parts are infinite additional universes. Welcome to the multiverse!

Many arguments against the multiverse involve complex physics reasoning, but Dr. Mann offered my students one that is much more basic: In a multiverse, everything that we can self-consistently imagine - objects appearing by magic, for example - can actually happen. We can no longer rule out events as impossible. Remember, “impossible” means “not possible according to the laws of this universe.” But there are no longer any limits to that. You don’t believe in magic? But how do you know that another universe, where magic exists, has not overlapped ours and thus created magic? Getting rid of God by arguing for a multiverse - far from advancing science - destroys science!

The older philosophers knew this, I think. That is why even thinkers who imagined that they had “seen through” popular piety still believed in the “God of the philosophers”. Their remote God’s self-consistent reality and unvarying laws underwrite the possibility that we can come to understand our universe. A multiverse is incomprehensible by definition.

And - will this become a trend? - just this month, philosopher Antony Flew, who abandoned a half century of atheism on account of design in the universe, published There IS a God (Harper One 2007). I'll have more to say about Flew’s book in my next column.


Journalist Denyse O’Leary (http://mindfulhack.blogspot.com/) is the author of By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy and co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Just released!: How the Catholic Church Built Science

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization by Thomas E. Woods, Jr., may be a revelation to many:

By far the book's longest chapter is "The Church and Science." We have all heard a great deal about the Church's alleged hostility toward science. What most people fail to realize is that historians of science have spent the past half-century drastically revising this conventional wisdom, arguing that the Church's role in the development of Western science was far more salutary than previously thought. I am speaking not about Catholic apologists but about serious and important scholars of the history of science such as J.L. Heilbron, A.C. Crombie, David Lindberg, Edward Grant, and Thomas Goldstein.

It is all very well to point out that important scientists, like Louis Pasteur, have been Catholic. More revealing is how many priests have distinguished themselves in the sciences.

[ ... ]

In the sciences it was the Jesuits in particular who distinguished themselves; some 35 craters on the moon, in fact, are named after Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.

Actually, I can see where priests and brothers who wouldn't necessarily be suited to parish life might get on well in astronomy, actually.

It's also worth mentioning 19th century Austrian monk Gregor Mendel, whose laws of inheritance are considered standard today, Fr. Georges Lemaitre, the Belgian priest who developed the Big Bang theory and the somewhat more controversial Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

There was a most interesting discussion Teilhard's theories at the Post-Darwinist recently. I am glad that it is becoming "mainstream" to acknowledge the Catholic Church's role. Maybe we can start getting more correct histories of science for once.

Note: Lots of myths about Christians in science are debunked here.

Palliative care doctor on The Spiritual Brain

He kindly writes,

Just wanted to let you know that I just finished reading the latest book you co-wrote and found it to be dynamite.

My favorite was at the bottom of p.99 where you pointed out that if the materialist view is right then we'll just have to accept it despite it going against all of our observations about human nature and that we'll just have to live with "cognitive dissonance" due to materialism's assumptions. But the best part was the materialist's need to deny that the human brain could have evolved in a way that made us believe in materialism.

I'm not sure if you've heard this quip by C.S. Lewis when he was told that a belief in God is "only a creation of the mind". He said "so is the belief in materialism" The corollary of the materialist argument being that if one can believe in there being a "God gene" then logically there must also be the possibility of an "Un-God gene" and that explains why materialists "believe" as they do. - palliative care doctor, friend of co-author Denyse O’Leary

Thanks, Doc! Mario and I really hope that The Spiritual Brain will be just the sort of crossover science and religion book that can communicate with people in science who are also people of faith! - d.

Atheism and popular culture: Why science, not faith, is now often the enemy of reason

In "Arrogance, dogma and why science - not faith - is the new enemy of reason", the Daily Mail's Melanie Phillips points out that current sicence can be an enemy of reason, as much as blind faith:

The heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief in the concept of truth, which gives rise to reason. But our postreligious age has proclaimed that there is no such thing as objective truth, only what is "true for me".
That is because our society won't put up with anything which gets in the way of 'what I want'. How we feel about things has become all-important. So reason has been knocked off its perch by emotion, and thinking has been replaced by feelings.

This has meant our society can no longer distinguish between truth and lies by using evidence and logic. And this collapse of objective truth has, in turn, come to undermine science itself which is playing a role for which it is not fitted.

Worse, many scientists such as genome mapper Francis Crick ended up insisting that our brains have not evolved to understand scientific truth, but only to leave fertile descendants. (The Spiritual Brain, p. 111.) If they were right, we would be fools to heed anything they said, as if it had meaning. Fortunately, they are wrong.

Freud, again: Freudian analysis "not science"

In "Freud's Will to Power," medic Ronald Dworkin, reviewing the latest book on Freud by Dr. Peter Kramer (November 29, 2006), remarks,

In real science, things are given names because they have value- hence the words "atom" and "molecule." In Freudian psychoanalysis, things have value because they are given names "Oedipus complex," "castration anxiety" - and only because enough people have been convinced of their value. If scientists ignored atoms and molecules, these particles would still exist and exert vital effects. If Freudian concepts are ignored, their value, their very existence, is gone forever. Freudian analysis is not science; it is fashion, totally dependent on public acclaim.
Freud did not discover the unconscious. Other doctors had written on the subject before him. Nor did he discover phenomena like Freudian "slips," "displacement," and "transference." What he did was give these mental phenomena names, turn them into symbols, and then use these symbols to create road signs and boundaries in the vast infinite of the human mind. He was just one more man of letters who tried to tame that monster of energy: life.

Order out of chaos. Will to power. These may be the only truisms about human nature in the whole Freud saga.

Kramer's book addresses "Freud's irritating tendency to generalize whole theories of human nature from a handful of personal observations."

Actually, many lay people have noticed and commented on that very thing for decades - and were told that they did not know what they were talking about or that psychological problems caused them to think as they did. Remember that, any time you are being asked to believe anything that ignores or defies evidence known to you.

Funny thing, they keep having to dig up the old boy and sock him around again. But, in fairness, an enormous amount of damage was done by Freud's theories, and surprisingly little good. I mean, if you compare him with Pasteur or Jenner or Paul Brand, for example. (Brand either discovered or made widely known the fact that the main cause of loss of digits in leprosy is the fact that the leper is insensitive to pain, and is heedlessly permitting serious damage. He was widely quoted as wishing to give lepers the "gift of pain," for this reason.)

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, which keeps tabs on the intelligent design controversy.