Author: Ophelia Benson

Why is it taking so long? There are relief supplies there, we’re told. Why can’t they get them to the convention center? I can see why it would be slow to take them to widely scattered areas – but they can’t even take them to the convention center?

Which has quite a few dead bodies in it now. Well – it will have a lot more in the morning. After four days with no water…

A reporter on ‘The World Tonight’ told us about an elderly man with diabetes who asked if he could buy some water from the reporter – and that there were a lot of requests like that. It’s just a nightmare.

Bush explained this morning that things were moving slowly because nobody foresaw that the levees would break. Really – then why was everyone foreseeing exactly that on Sunday? Isn’t that why the Mayor issued the mandatory evacuation order? Isn’t that why the possibility of a category 5 hurricane hitting New Orleans directly is one of the top items on the list of potential national disasters, along with terrorist strikes and earthquakes? Yes, as a matter of fact, it is. But Bush didn’t realize that. Now that’s what I call doing your homework, and your job.

I’ve transcribed some of that chat with Salman Rushdie on ‘Today’ last Monday, because he said several excellent things, worth preserving.

First he was asked his opinion of Muslim ‘leaders’…

Well for a start I’m not sure how much of a ‘leader’ these people are – it’s interesting – sort of a moot point about how many people actually follow them. But I think the mistake is to see these people as being somehow the voice of moderation. Sacranie and his deputy Banglawala have been very very vociferously hard-line on a range of issues for a long long time, and I think the Panorama programme kind of exposed that.

Then he said he wasn’t very confident that people like Sacranie would change much:

I think what really needs to happen is that the very large majority of British people of Muslim origin who don’t want to be just defined in terms of their religion start speaking up and creating a genuine voice which represents the majority rather than these kind of minority figures claiming to be…claiming to be important.

Today: But how does that happen? It doesn’t just happen spontaneously does it.

Rushdie: No it doesn’t. I think it’s quite encouraging that there are beginning to be voices speaking up saying ‘We don’t accept these leaders’ – there needs to be an organization but I don’t see it happening, but, you know, that’s not for me to organize.

Today: You’ve also been quite critical of the Prime Minister for relying on people of that kind in the fight against terrorism.

Rushdie [earnestly]: Yeah, I think it’s a very bad mistake – I think if you look in the papers right now, you have a two thirds majority of the British people objecting to the introduction of faith-based schools and yet that’s an absolutely central plank of the government’s policy. If he thinks that more religion is going to solve the problem, then not only is he in my view wrong, but he’s also seriously out of step with the country.

Today: Change has to come from within the Islamic community.

Rushdie: Yeah I think that’s right, but the point I’m trying to make is that even to describe it as ‘the Islamic community’ is in a way to go down the road of communal politics. It’s important to see that for most people of Muslim belief or Muslim origin in this country, they have a range of political and social interests which have nothing to do with whether or not they’re religious, and it’s that ordinary political agenda which needs to emerge amd be concentrated on, rather than this kind of faith-based approach.

Another passage from Haack’s book that is relevant to Ruse’s argument.

The commitment to naturalism is not merely the expression of a kind of scientific imperialism; for supernatural explanations are as alien to detective work and history or to our everyday explanations of spoiled food or delayed buses as they are to physics or biology. And the reason is not that supernatural explanations are alien to science; not that they appeal to the intentions of an agent; not that they rely on unobservable causes. The fundamental difficulty (familiar from the central mystery of Cartesian dualism, how mental substance could interact with physical substance) is rather that by appealing to the intentions of an agent which, being immaterial, cannot put its intentions into action by any physical means, they fail to explain at all.

Just so. Which is why it’s so irritating when religion-symps say, or jeer, that science can’t explain everything. Meaning religion can? Or meaning religion can explain the bits that science can’t? But religion can’t explain anything – not anything at all. Not really. It can pretend to, but it can’t actually do it. Answering ‘magic’ to every question really doesn’t explain anything whatever, does it. Well, answering ‘God’ for all questions that science can’t answer amounts to the same thing. If science can’t answer it, that means it’s the kind of question which can’t be answered by means of inquiry. Well – what else is there? Is there some other kind of epistemic endeavour that genuinely does find out things, but does it with completely different (yet still reliable, testable, coherent, logical, repeatable) methods? Some kind of science+++? Some kind of >science? No. No, what people mean when they say ‘science can’t explain everything’ is that there are some things that can only be explained by making up the explanations out of our own dear heads, without checking them against anything. And that isn’t an explanation. It’s a story, or an aphorism, or a pretty thought, but not an explanation.

It’s irritating in the same way when people say, as Michael Ruse did in a review of Dawkins’ A Devil’s Chaplain last year, that religion asks ultimate questions.

People like Dawkins, and the Creationists for that matter, make a mistake about the purposes of science and religion. Science tries to tell us about the physical world and how it works. Religion aims at giving a meaning to the world and to our place in it. Science asks immediate questions. Religion asks ultimate questions. There is no conflict here, except when people mistakenly think that questions from one domain demand answers from the other. Science and religion, evolution and Christianity, need not conflict, but only if each knows its place in human affairs – and stays within these boundaries.

I pitched a fit about this at the time – but that’s no reason not to pitch another. There is a conflict here – unless one is content to accept empty answers to questions, and ‘meaning’ based on the empty answers to those questions. It’s just way too easy to think we can be rational in one ‘domain’ and out in the ozone in the other ‘domain.’ Of course lots of people do that, but it doesn’t follow that philosophers ought to encourage the practice. It’s a dereliction of duty, if you ask me.

And here it is.

We take it for granted, you know, the comfortable safe manageable world we live in – those of us who do live in a world like that. That seems (to us) like the natural way of things, the normal state of affairs. In many parts of the world, normal life is more like the inside of the New Orleans Superdome, but we think normal life is less hot and crowded and smelly and unsafe and miserable than that. We think it’s normal to be able to get drinkable water and eatable food whenever we want them, to be able to take a shower and use a toilet whenever we need to, to have clean clothes, lights, a place to live. We forget how fragile, how precarious all that really is. It can be gone in a second. We’re used to that thought for China, Bangladesh, Niger – but we’re not used to it for ourselves. Or we haven’t been. But it wouldn’t take much. A global drought, for example, that ruined the wheat harvest in the US as well as everywhere else. Food shortages – higher prices – a war of all against all. Hobbes, meet Malthus.

It’s pretty unsettling to see how badly things are going in New Orleans. They (the officials) can’t even distribute drinking water, apparently – even though people die after three days without water, and it’s been more than three days now. Civilization is a very, very fragile thing. As is life.

Susan Haack takes issue with Paul Davies in Defending Science – Within Reason.

In The Mind of God, Paul Davies, also a physicist, but a believer (and winner of the million-dollar Templeton prize ‘for progress in religion’) concludes that ‘belief in God is largely a matter of taste, to be judged by its explanatory value rather than logical compulsion. Personally I feel more comfortable with a deeper level of explanation than the laws of physics. Whether the use of “God” for that deeper level is appropriate is, of course, a matter of debate.’ This, from the idea that explanatoriness is just a matter of taste, through the play on ‘deeper,’ to the insouciance about the meaning of ‘God,’ sounds to me like – well, a million-dollar muddle.

Same here. That ‘deeper’ is rich. Why are made-up ‘explanations’ considered deeper, more profound, more admirable than the other kind? And then, explanation is strange too – common, but strange. What explanation? What explanation? Why do people find it explanatory to say ‘God’ to questions like ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ or ‘why is there life?’ or ‘why is there Mind?’? Why is the word ‘God’ considered an explanation? Why doesn’t it sound like what it is – either a silly refusal to say ‘I don’t know’ or a dressed-up translation of ‘I don’t know’ or both. ‘God’ is not explanatory. If you say ‘who ate the last brownie?’ and the answer is ‘God’ do you feel as if your understanding has been increased?

Gotta go. The sun is about to set spectacularly over Puget Sound and I have to rush out to get the whole panorama (I can see it from here, but I like the sweeping view from The Wall). Who made the sun to set? God. Or not.

More on the return of polio and why it has returned. Allen Esterson did some research and found this article at News-Medical.

Almost two years after radical Islamic preachers in Nigeria influenced parents against having their children vaccinated against polio for fear it was part of a U.S. plot against Muslims, a Nigerian strain of the virus that causes the crippling disease has occurred as far away as Indonesia. Many residents in Kano, northern Nigeria’s largest city still refuse to have their children vaccinated, not just against polio but against other childhood diseases such as measles. Mustafa Balarabe a 37-year-old father of four said his children wouldn’t be vaccinated, citing “the general Western plot against Muslims worldwide” as the reason. An imam in Kano, 50-year-old Ibrahim Abubakar, was unapologetic and said that the boycott of the polio vaccine in Kano was necessary to fulfil the religious injunction, which tells them to find out about a thing when they have doubts…

Good ‘religious’ injunction. Doubts of course are often highly useful and to the purpose – even without religious injunctions. There are certain email messages one may receive, for example, that one may seriously and correctly doubt contain any electronic information one wants to look at. Similarly, if a frenzied and not altogether clean stranger sitting next to me on the bus pulled a half-eaten sandwich out of a pocket and offered it to me, I wouldn’t say ‘thank you’ and eagerly wolf it down. I would have doubts. But – there are other factors, other variables. If I were on the verge of death from starvation, my doubts about that sandwich and its provenance might be outweighed by my urge to survive. So with polio vaccine. There is, for example, room for doubt about the existence of a ‘general Western plot against Muslims worldwide.’ There is also compelling motivation to avoid polio. Thus doubt about the vaccination was in competition with potential doubt about other matters, in this case; the imam seems not to have taken those other matters into account.

Fifteen other countries where polio had been eradicated have been re-infected from Nigeria since 2003, when northern Islamic leaders led a vaccine boycott, claiming the immunization campaigns were part of a U.S. plot to infect Muslims with AIDS or render them infertile. American officials have repeatedly said there is nothing to the allegations. Regional governors blocked U.N.-backed vaccination drives for several months, until they were satisfied in May 2004 by the purity of a vaccine, imported, ironically, from Indonesia. The preachers said supplies from a Muslim country could be trusted.

Really. The same way Iraq could be trusted not to attack Iran in 1980 for example? Where does this blithe trust in ‘Muslim’ countries (Indonesia does contain non-Muslims, after all) come from? Selective attention, apparently.

Since 2003, the paralysing, waterborne illness has spread from Nigeria to Sudan, where it has infected 149 people. Along with 10 other west and central African nations, it has also spread to Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia, but vaccination campaigns have averted major outbreaks in those countries. Nigeria poses the most serious risk, with its population of around 130 million, many of whom travel widely. The spread of the disease to Yemen last month was considered by WHO as “a major epidemic,” with 22 cases confirmed in a country that had previously been considered free of polio.

Well…those countries would seem to have some reason not to trust Muslim clerics giving advice on vaccinations, at any rate. Nice going, guys. Polio was nearly gone, and you’ve brought it back. Clever.

Allen also found this article in The Scientist.

The outbreak of the disease marks reappearance of wildtype polio in Indonesia for the first time since 1995. Molecular epidemiologists working for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have in the past few days clarified the likely route the virus took from Nigeria to Indonesia…Some press reports have suggested that Saudi Arabia or the Sudan might be the immediate source, Kew said, but “the genetic data suggest that most likely pathway was Nigeria to Chad to Sudan to Saudi Arabia to Indonesia.”…A recent CDC study demonstrated that at least 14 previously polio-free countries had importations of strains from the Nigeria-Niger endemic strains of 2003 and 2004. “Nigeria is a highly endemic country; it’s the heart of the poliovirus circulation in Africa,” said Christopher Maher, chief epidemiologist for the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) polio eradication group. Unfounded rumors the inoculation was made unsafe as part of a Western plot to make Muslim children infertile caused several northern Nigerian provinces to stop vaccination campaigns in 2003. The suspension, lasting 12 months in some areas, seeded polio outbreaks across central Africa countries.

What a depressing mess.

Michael Ruse is another. Funny, strange, puzzling; something like that. There’s this interview in Salon – which means you have to page through an irritating pictorial (therefore slow to load) ad to read it, which is why I hardly ever link to Salon, but there it is in case you want to read the whole thing. It’s about his latest book and the usual subject – ‘evolutionism’ is religion blah blah.

But he thinks evolutionists must purge themselves of reflexive anti-religious fervor, and acknowledge at least the potential validity of the classic Augustinian position that science and theology can never directly contradict one another, since science can only consider nature and God, by definition, is outside nature. Without this consciousness, Ruse suggests, evolutionism is in fact a secular religion, a church without Christ. And if that’s what it is, what is it doing in biology class?

Okay – science and theology can never directly contradict one another, since science can only consider nature and God, by definition, is outside nature. Fine – but then what is theology, exactly? The study of something that can’t be studied? Inquiry into something that can’t be inquired into? Research in a subject that is incapable of being researched? An ology that has no ology? It has to be. Because if ‘God’ is by definition outside of nature, then we (who are well and truly inside nature) don’t and can’t – by definition – know anything or find out anything about it. Obviously. So then what is the upshot of this position that science and theology can never directly contradict one another? Surely it’s just that one is a field of inquiry and the other is…an empty postulate. A gesturing at something that – by definition, remember – is outside nature and therefore completely inaccessible and unknowable. Well, fine – I’ll buy that. God is outside nature therefore nobody (since all the anybodies we know are part of nature, not outside it) knows anything at all about it and therefore there is nothing whatever to say about it. So why talk about it at all?

But of course that’s not what people mean by God, is it. People mean something they do claim to know a lot about. Well, you can’t do both, as Kingsley Amis so wisely though belatedly said. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say God is outside nature just long enough to shut up the pesky scientists, and then go blithely back to talking bollocks about God when the scientists have gone back to their petri dishes and statistics.

I’m all in favor of social prescriptions, and I’m not knocking anybody for being an atheist…But I want to see what grounds you have for saying that, and whether or not your positions follow from one another. If they do, maybe you should ask yourself, “Am I not being a hypocrite in teaching evolutionary biology in American schools?” Given the fact that it’s clearly illegal. You’re not allowed to teach religion in biology class. I can’t understand why I can’t get through people’s thick skulls on this one. If in fact Darwinian evolutionary theory implies atheism, then you ought not to be teaching it in schools! It’s not good enough to say, “Well, I’m a National Socialist. But the fact that that meant a lot of Jews were hauled off to Auschwitz, that’s not my worry!” It bloody is! If your theory leads to 6 million Jews being made into soap, not only is there something deeply troubling about your theory, but you’ve got a moral obligation to face up to its implications. If this theory leads to atheism, then it’s got religious implications.

I beg your pardon? Thinking evolutionary biology hasn’t turned up any sweet little god-things curled up inside acorns or flying around bottle-brush trees is analogous to making Jews into soap? Is that the best analogy he could think of? Is that a good analogy? Is that even a coherent analogy?

Plus there’s the peculiar argument that if evolutionary theory implies atheism then teaching evolutionary theory is teaching religion. Eh? What he means seems to be something like ‘evolutionary theory does not need or draw on the God hypothesis to explain it therefore it is religion’ – which makes no sense. Besides which, since God is – by definition, remember – outside nature, God can’t have any role to play in evolutionary theory, because that would be dragging something outside nature into something inside nature, thus immediately making it part of nature, therefore no longer God. So…Ruse seems to be claiming that you can’t teach anything except theology in US public schools. If you’re not allowed to teach anything that doesn’t use ‘God’ to explain it – because that is atheism, which is religion, which is not allowed in public schools – then you can teach only theology. Which, we have already found, on Ruse’s own terms, means teaching nothing.

I must be missing something. Ruse isn’t silly. But this whole argument looks to me like just pure having it both ways. Making God transcendent as long as that’s convenient, and then making it part of nature when that is. But it has to be one or the other. It’s either outside nature or inside it, it can’t be both.