nature a bit too nice to god?

A funny letter to Nature ($$) from Sam Harris, of Letter to a Christian Nation fame:

(searching for that book link I stumbled upon Amazon's "Christian" page. Rather a bad turn for the retailer; and I can't find a Muslim, Mormon, or Buddhist page...)

Sir

It was genuinely alarming to encounter Ziauddin Sardar's whitewash of Islam in the pages of your journal ('Beyond the troubled relationship' Nature 448, 131–133; 2007). Here, as elsewhere, Nature's coverage of religion has been unfailingly tactful — to the point of obscurantism.

In his Commentary, Sardar seems to accept, at face value, the claim that Islam constitutes an "intrinsically rational world view". Perhaps there are occasions where public intellectuals must proclaim the teachings of Islam to be perfectly in harmony with scientific naturalism. But let us not do so, just yet, in the world's foremost scientific journal.

...

An Editorial announcing the publication of Francis Collins's book, The Language of God ('Building bridges' Nature 442, 110; doi:10.1038/442110a 2006) represents another instance of high-minded squeamishness in addressing the incompatibility of faith and reason...

The Language of God should have sparked gasping outrage from the editors at Nature. Instead, they deemed Collins's efforts "moving" and "laudable", commending him for building a "bridge across the social and intellectual divide that exists between most of US academia and the so-called heartlands."

At a time when Muslim doctors and engineers stand accused of attempting atrocities in the expectation of supernatural reward, when the Catholic Church still preaches the sinfulness of condom use in villages devastated by AIDS, when the president of the United States repeatedly vetoes the most promising medical research for religious reasons, much depends on the scientific community presenting a united front against the forces of unreason.

There are bridges and there are gangplanks, and it is the business of journals such as Nature to know the difference.

(emphasis mine)

are cows better off eaten than wild?

Just for fun:

Vegetarian and vegan arguments against eating meat often try to make the case that the animals have horrible lives (and deaths). But do they? Aside from the question of whether, say, a chicken consciously feels anything, how bad are things for them while they're alive and clucking? I think the basic grounds of this argument are rarely if ever explored. We must think about how bad these animals would have it if man hadn't domesticated them in the first place!

Lets think about cows, because they're amusing creatures, and imagine they have feelings.

- no fear of being chased and brutally eaten by lions, tigers, or bears (imagine the ulcers that caused)
- no worries about dying of dehydration
- no worries about finding food and avoiding starvation
- no mating competition (though this could be a con)
- travel the world; better landscapes than arid savanna
- really low infant mortality rates
- little to no death due to diseases because of full vaccination and heathcare

All in all, I think life as a domesticated cow really rocks compared to living the life of their feral ancestors. I'd rather much prefer it - someone brings me everything I need, mates me when I'm ripe, and takes complete care of my children. I don't get sick, and I get to see a nice green countryside. It's like a vacation, a socialist's dream. Instead of a Hobbesian world, artificial selection has made cow's lives social, rich, leisurely, and, well, short, but quickly ended.

Meat isn't murder, it's welfare - tasty, tasty welfare.

history as a science?

This article on religion and government in the Times is all well and good:
The Politics of God, by Mark Lilla (excerpt from the upcoming book The Stillborn God)

But I find myself really doubting that historians are equipped to prescribe solutions to current problems. It is based in a distrust of the human mind's automatic ability to generate a coherent story to explain past events (and this "instinct" is quite magnified in cases where storytelling is one's vocation), e.g. Hobbes drove things that way and Rousseau that way. Psychology has shown that we generate spurious stories all the time to explain our own actions, and we understand complicated events better when couched in a social story - we love to find interpretable patterns in uninterpretable events. These "just-so" stories are fictions however, especially when describing the forces driving civilization (you might as well assign many causes of historical events to a butterfly flapping its wings in the Congo).

So the next step of the historian is hard to believe: having proven that the spun story is the driving force behind past events, this shows that we should do X in our current situation. This is a theory like any other in science, where based on proven past observations, we find new relations, and these new relations predict a, b, and c. I just don't think historical storytelling counts as any kind of reliable observation, let alone proof! It can't predict.

I'm being as extreme here (I might even disagree with my own argument). But I wonder how much the opposition to trashing history as a guide to the future arises because we value the neat understanding that comes from reading these stories (myself included), and we also value stories about the future - the natural reaction to an attack on something you like is hostility, especially if without this thing the world is nigh uninterpretable. By stepping back from this emotional response, this value found in stories can be discounted as an artifact of the human mind.

There are other tools, scientific ones, that should be used in guiding the encounter with the undead "political theology" that is the focus of the article. Scientists working on complex systems are applying these methods to social systems, for one example, possibly providing insight into the million places to set levers that will displace extremist ideas. Small things can make a big difference. Perhaps one day we can create a very detailed historical simulation, test different strategies, build theories, and use those predictions to inform action in the real world (this work is already beginning with social scientists testing theories of city evolution and resource use in online multiplayer game worlds). That would historical science.

The article is interesting, ignoring its conclusions about today. The full book may be amusing as well when it comes out.

why so many atheism books?

A Harvard professor of government speaks up in the Weekly Standard about the recent spate of atheism books. The article is an academic and off-point attempt at a critique, but worth airing a response anyway! (now, to read the rest of these books - or do something better with my time?)

This is the article: Atheist Tracts. God, they're predictable. by Harvey Mansfield

Here's my submitted letter:

The author's critique is entirely irrelevant. The issue at hand is that billions of people have demonstrably erroneous beliefs about the world. These beliefs lead to behavior that infringes on the rights of others. This, simply, is the grounds for a more active atheist movement.

The author's conception of the motivations and ideas of "atheists" is a straw man, including the assumption that the target of all "atheists" are individual believers and no longer the church. Obviously, the constant indoctrination of the church is the primary environment that must be countered to turn the tide of the organized religion epidemic, particularly if ideas are often accepted not by "free will" but by simple acts of reinforcement. Even among the few current books, cited by the author, which shouldn't be mistaken for arguing for atheists everywhere, there is a great diversity of approach - for example, the first book, by Dennet, is primarily not about angrily confronting believers but instead about finally treating religion as the natural phenomenon it is.

The author tries to slip in some scientific support for the idea that atheists may not be great people anyway, but this argument is obviously flawed.
"We know from behavioral studies that, to the embarrassment of atheists, believers, or at least churchgoers, are better citizens--more active and law-abiding--than those who spend Sunday morning reading the New York Times."
But this study didn't have an atheistic group at all - and simply examining the base rates of belief and nonbelief in the population shows that those non-churchgoers are overwhelmingly believers themselves! A controlled study would use a group involved in non-religious gatherings, meditation, or even regular art and music appreciation, though it is unfortunately a rare study that can find a sufficient group of atheists for statistical comparison.

And come now, even in the tangent of justice that the author almost exclusively follows, the atheist alternative need not be Kant's unfortunate conception of a categorical imperative. We are just beginning to understand how decisions are actually made in the brain, and such a naturalistic understanding will have much yet to say.

Is the author an atheist angry that he has missed out on influencing the current national discussion, or a man who never outgrew the child's monotheism* to escape the contagious environment of ideas he happened to be born into?

*see the research of Paul Bloom at Yale,
Science 18 May 2007: Vol. 316. no. 5827