Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Conversation-stopper

    And some more serendipitous reading that makes the same point I’ve been making. I happened to pick up a collection of essays by Richard Rorty and found ‘Religion as Conversation-stopper.’ Just so – my point exactly. And Rorty takes issue with Stephen Carter’s The Culture of Disbelief.

    The main reason religion needs to be privatized is that, in political discussion with those outside the relevant religious community, it is a conversation-stopper. Carter is right when he says: ‘One good way to end a conversation – or start an argument – is to tell a group of well-educated professionals that you hold a political position (preferably a controversial one, such as being against abortion or pornography) because it is required by your understanding of God’s will.’

    Yup, it sure is. Rorty actually lets Carter off much too easily at that point. Because note what Carter has done – note how easy he’s made it for himself. Note how he’s helped himself to the moral high ground while sort of kind of pretending not to (that weasel-word ‘controversial’). Let’s do a little thought-experiment, shall we, and replace the items in his parenthesis with some different ones. Like, oh, I don’t know – how about slavery, or stoning to death, or forbidding women to vote or work or drive or leave the house, or flying loaded airplanes into tall buildings full of people. All of those items represent some people’s – quite a lot of people’s, in the first three cases – understanding of ‘God’s’ will. So why the hell does he make it a matter of reproach that educated people, whether professionals or amateurs, don’t leap and clap their hands for joy when people announce that they hold a political position because they think it’s God’s will? Why should we? Why does he think we should? Even apart from the obvious objection that imaginary beings shouldn’t be telling us how to make political decisions – even apart from that, what about the issue of what terrible creatures those imaginary beings so often are? Humans invent them, humans invest them with their own nasty hatreds and sadistic urges, and then humans triumphantly point to them as authority for their nasty hatreds and sadistic urges. And we’re supposed to not mind that? Not going to happen!

  • Proof of Astrology?

    The British astronomer Percy Seymour has recently published a new book entitled The Scientific Proof of Astrology (2004). Two reviews of the book were published in the mainline press—Ian Sample’s “Written in the Stars” (The Guardian, May 18, 2004), and Johnathan Leake’s “Top Scientist Gives Backing to Astrology” (Sunday Times, May 16, 2004). Both articles are misleading in some ways in which they present the information.
    For a start, Seymour’s recent ideas aren’t overly different from those he published in Astrology: The Evidence of Science (1988), revised edition (1990), and The Scientific Basis of Astrology (1997). Seymour is not interested in star -sign horoscopes so popular with much of the astrological community. You will also look in vain in his books for surveys of the hundreds of tests conducted on astrology by researchers. His main interest is the results of the French researchers Michel and Francoise Gauquelin, notably the Mars Effect. Those ignored or played-down studies have consistently failed to produce results commensurate with astrological claims. Even the Gauquelin findings involve weak effects.

    • Sample notes that Seymour contends that he does not believe in horoscopes, which means that much of what he says does not fit with what the majority of astrologers believe. They unlike him, contend that the moment of one’s birth is related to all one does in the future. Oddly, in the next sentence in the article by Sample we read, “Could it be that countless devotees ranging from Charles de Gaulle to Ronald Reagan had it right when they kept one eye on the stars?” But Reagan and others were involved with horoscopes, which Seymour rejects! Seymour would not be impressed with the typical claims that astrologers would have us believe (e.g see Star IQ).
    • All Seymour’s theory would illustrate is that the position of the moon and some planets could be another speculative (and weak) factor to be taken into account in explaining human behaviour. But the links between geomagnetic resonance and personality are not as straightforward as made out. For example, important aspects of behaviour such as aggressiveness are determined to a large extent by hormone levels, and it is difficult to see how a hormone level could resonate. The induced voltages would be around a billionth of a microvolt, which (given that brain activity is commonly around 100 microvolts) seem very unlikely to say the least, to have any effect., especially as planetary frequencies are some six octaves below the normal 3-50 Hz range in brain frequencies. It is hard to see how such weak and disparate planetary influences could override the neural pacemakers that control brain function, especially when neural networks differ between people, change quickly over time, and are highly individual. Real neural networks do not seem to have the properties required by Seymour. The word ‘Proof’ in the book’s title is also hardly a term that will endear scientific or philosophical readers. Talk of proof may be understandable in geometry or logic or even religion, but even a cursory awareness of the history of science should make any scientist wary of the p-word.
    • Sample’s article mentions studies about effect of season findings. But these have nothing to do with astrology. For example, the seasons are reversed in the southern hemisphere, but the zodiac signs of people remain unchanged. Furthermore, astrology is based not on causal connections (as occur in seasonal effects which could change in the future given climate change) but on symbolic connections. For example, when Chiron was discovered, astrologers consulted mythology books and determined that Chiron was a satyr associated with healing. And its connection with healing is a part of its role in those who use it in horoscopes. The same occurred when Pluto was discovered. In neither case was the astrological meaning of the planet determined by large scale studies, it was determined by library research and armchair exchanges among astrologers. Indeed, many astrologers claim that causal effects are by definition not astrology, but they enjoy the positive publicity (unless the findings are negative, in which case they are automatically wrong). Unlike biological rhythms and social and psychological factors, astrological relationships are not affected by age, or gender, or socioeconomic background, and people don’t differ in their susceptibility to astrological ‘influences’ as they do with everything else in the social and physical sciences.
    • Leake says, “Astrologers were delighted with Seymour’s claims”. He cites astrologer Richard Grant who tells us, “If the moon is connected with the ebb and flow of the tides, and humans are 70% water, then why can’t the moon be affecting us? So we have good moods or bad moods depending on the position of the moon?” Some real problems here, Richard. For a start, tides occur because the gravitational pull on the oceans is sufficiently different between the near and far sides of the earth. People would have to be huge to be similarly affected. Also, moon phase does not usually play a role in horoscopes, rather it is the moon sign, which is quite different. Regarding published studies on the relationship between the moon’s position and human behaviour, the results are not clear cut enough to reach such conclusions anyway. About half of the studies give negative results, and half positive. And unfortunately the positive studies are not in agreement regarding which position or phase is statistically significant. Finally, the positive studies give such small effects that they would hardly justify talk such as “we have good or bad moods depending on the position or phase of the moon.”
    • Leake further tells readers that “Several years ago it emerged that the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development was using astrology to help manage it’s 5 billion pound investment portfolio…”. One might ask, did the bank do better than it would have without using astrology? How would they find out? We aren’t told. George Bush consults the Bible for guidance. What follows? Other institutions may consult all sorts of sources for investments, including psychics and spiritualists—perhaps some comparative studies are needed.
    • We are further told by Leake that “This year’s Sunday Times Rich List included an analysis of the star signs of Britain’s 1,000 richest people—finding significant differences with 110 born under Gemini but only 73 under Pisces.” Is this astrologically significant? Would most astrologers have predicted this result in advance? Actually the numbers (via Shermer), if correct, add up to 1067, and by chi-squared test (df=11, expectancy =1067/12, i.e with no corrections for demography and astronomy), p= . 26, so the results are not even marginally significant. So on what basis are they seen as “significant”? To be sure, something has to come top and something has to come bottom, but so what? Would not ANY other differences have been equally reportable as “evidence for astrology”? One might point out that studies with star signs which produce negative results (which is most of them, and almost all of them when artifacts are controlled), have been roundly criticized by members of the astrological community for violating the basic astrological dictum that astrological factors should never be studied alone.
    • Is astrology science as Seymour suggests? Given its connections are determined symbolically, along with the majority of astrologer’s expressing disinterest in promoting large scale studies and abiding by the results (unless they are positive), it is difficult to think so. While scientists continually re-evaluate their basic assumptions and constantly revise basic theories on evidential grounds (consider the theories in astronomy and physics before and after the 20th century), astrology remains basically the same as two millennia ago. Does any reader believe it possible that headlines similar to “ The universe could be a billion years older than we thought” (BBC News), will ever surface in astrological periodicals? News flash, “Top astrologers contend Mars has been determined to have the astrological characteristics of Neptune and vice-versa” or “Astrologer’s determine that Saturn is an astrologically insignificant planet after all.” Whatever Seymour finds, it won’t change the way astrologers conduct their business and erect horoscopes. No astrologer whose results Seymour’s are at variance with are going to change their minds.

    I.W. Kelly, Department of educational Psychology & Special Education, University of Saskatchewan, Canada.

    Readers wanting more information will find the following critical reviews pertinent:
    Modern concepts of astrology: A critique.

    Are scientists undercover astrologers?

  • Hari on Galloway on Saddam

    Describing mass murder as civil war.

  • David Aaronovitch on ‘Honour’ Killlings

    And facile moral equivalency.

  • What Has Theology to do With Homosexuality?

    Nothing, but theologians weigh in all the same.

  • What Has a Bad Survey to do With Paleontology?

    Nothing, but paleontology sounds impressive, so stick on the label.

  • Ideas via Import-Export, not Creation

    People with cohesive social networks tend to think and act the same.

  • A Basic Tension

    The discussion continues. Norm Geras continued it with a post yesterday.

    Twice during recent years I tried to engage people I know well, and whom I also like and respect, in a discussion about religion – this with a view, not to challenging their beliefs, but to trying to see if my own assumptions about the way in which they held them were even half-way right. Both conversations ran, pretty well immediately, into the ground…I don’t report this as proving that all conversations between the religious and the irreligious must go the same way. I hope not, in fact. My own reason for embarking on these two conversations was to explore what levels of mutual understanding are possible across the boundary that divides religious belief from atheism. But that is my limited, and so far unsuccessful, experience.

    No, not all conversations between the religious and the irreligious must go the same way, as people have been pointing out in our comments. But at least in my experience and observation they often do, and I think it’s a reasonable inference to think that a great many potential conversations of that type simply never happen because the parties involved know or expect that they would go that way. That’s one way the taboo on such discussions works – it makes people reluctant to get into them in the first place, as well as limiting what they’re willing to say once the discussion begins. Because the subject is somehow ‘special’ and an exception, because it’s seen as not like talking about politics or other sets of ideas, because there is a circle around it, because it is sacred or holy or sacrosanct, it is also Forbidden. Not formally, not legally, not officially, but de facto. The internal censor warns us not to hurt people’s feelings or make them feel foolish or threaten beliefs that comfort them, so to a considerable extent we don’t. We remain silent on the subject.

    This might be all right in some senses, or in some settings. But in other senses and settings it’s not all right at all. For one thing, there is a massive tension between this polite silence and forebearance and the part religion expects to play in public life. Religion wants a voice, religion bristles when anyone suggests that the public sphere ought to be secular rather than religious or sectarian, religion arrogates to itself the right to pronounce on public issues. But if religion is going to do that, surely it’s a problem that religion itself can’t be discussed on the same terms as other ideas can? Surely this automatic, deeply-entrenched, habitual politeness and tact and abstention from criticism, is somewhat dangerous? Religion can issue moral pronouncements, but secularism can’t ask how it knows what it claims to know? Does that work? I don’t think so.

    I was thinking about all this earlier today, and writing a few notes for this N&C, and then I read a section of The Flight From Science and Reason that makes exactly the same point. First in the editorial introduction to the section (page 491):

    …the studied obsequiousness toward all religious truth claims, no matter how extreme…this attitude reigns in the media and is unchallenged by those – including liberal religionists and intellectuals – who should know better.

    And then in Paul Kurtz’ article ‘Two Sources of Unreason in Democratic Society: the Paranormal and Religion’ (page 500):

    In present-day America it is usually considered to be in bad taste to question the claims of religion…Clearly, liberty of thought and conscience and the right to profess and to practice one’s religion is not at issue; what is at issue is the reticence to criticize religion in the public square or to subject its basic premises to scrutiny…This posture is especially questionable given the constant effort by militant religionists to apply their doctrines in the political process, thus seeking to impose their views on others.

    That seems to me to be incontrovertible. If religion is going to play a part in public life – and it obviously is – it can’t at the same time demand or expect immunity for its basic assumptions, and the rest of us really ought to learn to steel ourselves and challenge those assumptions, or at least inquire into them.

  • Sign-up now, OB!

    I’ve just received a bit of Spam email that really should have been sent to OB, so I’m reproducing it here.

    —————————

    Become a legally ordained minister within 48 hours

    As a minister, you will be authorized to perform the rites and ceremonies of the church!

    Perform Weddings, Funerals, Perform Baptisms, Forgiveness of Sins
    Visit Correctional Facilities

    Want to start your own church?

    Click here to sign-up!

    —————————

    I wonder what’s involved in performing forgiveness of sins?

  • The Hot Air Never Stops

    Carlin Romano reviews a stiflingly ethnocentric take on Pushkin.

  • The Nation on The New York Review of Books

    Radicals and liberals, politics and literature, dangerous and safe, trends and ends.

  • Time, Time, Time

    One side effect of all this blathering I do at B&W is that I get a lot of correspondence, and get tangled up in protracted email discussions and debates. In fact, having said that, I’m reminded that Jerry S told me that would happen, a couple of years ago, after he’d thought of B&W and invited me to participate but long before he’d created it. There was an interval of a few months when B&W was an Idea but not yet a Reality – and sometime during that interval he had an amusing exchange with some indignant reader of TPM Online (someone in Prague, it seems to me, but that could be wrong – my memory isn’t up to much). He told me about it and then added something like ‘Just think, soon you’ll be having amusing exchanges like this too!’ And he was right.

    Some are more amusing than others though. Some just get tedious, like trying to escape from underneath a duvet the size of Delaware. That’s especially true, obviously enough, when they’re entirely futile – which is one reason I avoid discussions with religious zealots. Because they tend to be futile, and time and energy are so very finite, and I have so very many other things to do. And yet – strange to say, I still have correspondents who try to convince me that such discussions are not futile. That discussion, any discussion, is always and invariably healthy and useful and productive, and the source, ultimately, of truth. I don’t believe a word of it.

    The reason I don’t believe a word of it is that not everyone knows how to argue and discuss, and that trying to discuss things with people who don’t know how and refuse to learn does not produce truth, it only distorts. PZ Myers talked about this problem at Pharyngula last week, in a post on a debate between Michael Shermer and Kent Hovind.

    I heard from someone who attended…that the recent debate between the skeptic Michael Shermer and the creationist fraud Kent Hovind was a debacle, and that Hovind walked all over Shermer…Shermer is right that if the debate were judged on technical merit and accuracy and logic, all the sorts of things scientists are good at, he was a winner. There is no logical, accurate creationist science. If you read any account of any of Hovind’s talks, you have to conclude that the man is freaking insane and dishonest, but—and this is the scary part—that doesn’t matter.

    Then he quotes Shermer on the matter:

    The problem is that this is not an intellectual exercise, it is an emotional drama. For scientists, the dramatis personae are evolutionists v. creationists, the former of whom have an impregnable fortress of evidence that converges to an unmistakable conclusion; for creationists, however, the evidence is irrelevant. This is a spiritual war, whose combatants are theists v. atheists, spiritualists v. secularists, Christians v. Satanists, godfearing capitalists v. godless communists, good v. evil…Thus, I now believe it is a mistake for scientists to participate in such debates and I will not do another.

    So at least I’m not the only one who thinks the whole thing is at best futile and at worst a train-wreck. Because the two parties do not play by the same rules. To put it bluntly, one side feels some obligation to the truth and the other feels none, but just yells out any old thing that pops into its head, no matter how dishonest. Then it wonders what on earth you mean when you talk about asymmetry. That’s when it’s time to remember how finite time is and how many other things there are to do.

  • Christie’s Should Have Been Less Certain

    Questions about evidence and doubt arise even at art auction houses.

  • Probability not Worth Two Million Pounds.

    Epistemology at the auction house.

  • GM Food Could Help Poor If

    If biotetech focused on staple crops rather than cash crops.

  • Faith

    So there’s this new show on US public tv, ‘Colonial House,’ another in the series that included ‘Pioneer House,’ ‘1901 House,’ and ‘Manor House’ (though that one was called something else in the UK, wasn’t it…). At least I think it’s all the same series, but I could be wrong. I must say I find them all highly compelling – the combination of interpersonal tensions, acute discomfort and exhaustion, and missing shampoo and hot running water and supermarkets – fascinating.

    The conceit of this one is that it’s a group of settlers on the coast of Maine in 1628, and the governor of the colony is (in real life) a Baptist minister from Texas. He seems like a very decent guy in many ways, but he’s also a little scary, in the way that Texas Baptists can be scary.

    At one point in the first hour the minister’s college-age daughter addresses the Sabbath meeting and talks about her idea of god – she can’t really understand what it’s like not to believe in god, she says, she wouldn’t know how to get through everyday problems without his support. But that’s not very surprising, is it, for the daughter of a Baptist minister in Texas. One imagines (I could be wrong) she hasn’t been exposed to much in the way of alternatives. She’s probably heard a vast amount, both at home and at church (which she loves, she’s already told us), about the goodness of belief and the goodness of god, and very little if anything about either 1) the badness of belief (i.e. that there could be anything wrong with it, and what that might be) or 2) the goodness of non-belief, of skepticism or secularism let alone atheism. It seems reasonable to think (highly reasonable given the sort of things her father says) she’s never really thought about it, she’s only been urged, encouraged and trained to believe.

    Her father gives an interesting muse on the harshness of life in the colony and how it has deepened his admiration for the original 17th century colonists and the strength of their faith. He does seem, as I said, an admirable man in some ways (less so in others), which makes it easier to think one’s way into a kind of imaginative sympathy with such a view. And yet it’s all wrong. It’s wrong because faith itself is wrong – in the sense in which he’s using it, that is. Faith in peace or a friend or art or ideals can be a good thing, if often over-optimistic, but faith in an immaterial supernatural omnipotent benevolent entity that is our Higher Authority – that is not a good thing.

    But, as so very often with religion, it doesn’t do to say so. In fact it’s nearly verboten to say so. One can just about get away with avowing one’s own disbelief, but saying faith or belief itself is a bad thing – now that’s going too far. But it is. It’s bad for one’s capacity to think clearly, to judge, to reason, to argue, to follow arguments, to discriminate. Those are all useful capacities. In fact one could argue that in a democracy, they’re essential capacities. The trouble with ‘faith’ is that it’s the exact opposite of all those capacities. That is, in a way, why it is considered a virtue at all. It’s not considered partcularly admirable to believe the obvious, is it – to believe 2 + 2=4. That’s no more admirable than breathing or eating – it’s just what you do. No, the admiration only comes in because the whole matter is in doubt. So thinking faith is a virtue amounts to thinking it is good to believe something there is good reason not to believe, or a lack of reason to believe, or both. This is normally not considered a good thing. Some examples of it are considered a symptom of mental illness; others are considered a symptom of ignorance or stupidity or both; others are considered foolhardy. It’s hard to think of a great many cases where it’s considered either useful or virtuous. Parents believing in the goodness of their children no matter what, possibly, but other than that…not too many. Except in the case of religious belief. And yet we don’t really confront the possibility that this habit of thought can do harm. That’s unfortunate, I think. I even believe it.

  • Shaun Williams – AKA STAMP

    OB mentions below that Shaun Williams, aka STAMP, long-time cartoonist of The Philosophers’ Magazine, has died.

    Here are a few examples of his work, including the Hume, constant-conjunction cartoon I told her about.

    Cartoon 1

    Cartoon 2

    Cartoon 3

    Cartoon 4

    He really was a good cartoonist. The major academic Waterstone’s bookshop in London liked his work so much that on one occasion they decorated their front window with his TPM cartoons.

  • Thinking too much with my wrong head

    As some of you will know, at The Philosophers’ Magazine we have a number of online interactive type things which are designed to flag up some of the possible difficulties with religious belief (problem of evil, that kind of thing).

    And since it is always amusing to tease the religiously afflicted, I thought I’d post an email I received yesterday about one of the activities. It kind of teases itself, so I won’t say any more.

    ——————————————-

    Your message is stupid as well as your test. There is a all loving, all caring, all knowing and all every where at one time God who truely exists. You think too much with your head and it is the wrong head. You should think about this…if there was not a God as you say there is not than why does He, not she, show you so much mercy every single day of your life. You must be one more miserable person to develope such an idiot of a test and pass it along out there into Internet space. You are not as smart as you want to think that you are and one day you will see just how dumb you really are when you ask such stupid stuff.

    God is a God of mercy and total love but He is also a God of judgement. The reason there are famines and earth quakes is because people just simply refuse to serve and trust Him and it was also forewarned in the Holy Bible that such things would happen. If people obeyed the Lord with all their heart, soul, mind and strength than they would see in this world a whole lot less evil.

    It was man who got us into all this mess, not God.

    If you read the Word of God you will find that it states that Satan has power over the air. Which means that a whole lot of the problems with the weather has to do with his doing…a fallen angel from Heaven.

    You people are duped!!!!! You are so deceived that you are the blind leading the blind with your ridduculous tests.

    The reason you don’t want to believe in a Supreme being is because you want to be God and you think that you could do a much better job than what He does but if you really look over the last part of your life, you will see that you have a trail of messes that you have caused on yourself.

    You are persumptious to think that there cannot be a God who can be everything to anyone who choses to live for Him. If you read the Bible, you will find that it predicts all this clamaity that is going on around us.

    Oh foolishness that you, a human being will whip up to start conflict in a world already sufferring with more conflict than it truely needs.

    I feel sorry for you, whoever you are on the day of God’s White Throne Judgement.

    The problem with you is that you do not know how to have faith in someone you do not understand. It is painfully obvious to me as well as many others that you lack faith and are a very sad, sad person.

    Sincerely,
    Katie
    ——————————————–

    Well, thanks for that Katie.

    I just love the “You think too much with your head and it is the wrong head” bit!

  • Can We Do Anything Without a Cause?

    Tom Clark considers David Brooks a moral levitationist.

  • A New Way to Annoy

    Turner Prize abandons rubbish for the sake of dull virtue.