Alone and Unobserved

If you follow the accommodationist debates at all, you know that one defense both religious and non-religious folk give for the compatibility of religion and science is that each is a different “way of knowing,” or a different way of “reaching truth.” So let’s talk about religion as a “way of knowing,” and about the “truths” that religion nets us.

Imagine you had never encountered a “religion” before, and someone told you that they were a member of an organization that had been founded by a benevolent, all-knowing, all-powerful being, and that this being had imparted teachings to its followers that explained certain things about the natural world and about the human condition. What would you expect to be true about this organization, and about those teachings?

1. You would expect the claims this organization makes about the natural world to be more correct and more descriptive of reality than the theories and claims of mere humans, since the former claims are based on the teachings of an benevolent, all-knowing being, and the latter are based on empirical evidence at best and on guessing, lies or storytelling at worst.
2. You would expect any claims this organization made about the future to come true more often than future claims made by a mere human.
3. You would expect members of this organization to have a better understanding of human relationships, human happiness and human ethics than could be arrived at by a mere human.

Let’s look at how religion stacks up.

First, are the claims religions make about the natural world even minimally true? Not usually. Religion gave us creationism, after all, as well as various bizarre and often harmful theories of disease. If a religion truly were inspired by some all-knowing deity, you would expect its adherents to have known about the true age of the earth before science discovered radiometric dating, and about the germ theory of disease centuries, if not millennia, before science even imagined it.

Second, how good is religion at predicting the future? Uh, not good. All of the “true” prophecies I’m aware of can either be attributed to chance, to revision of history after the fact, or to creative reading of the prophecy.

Third, science has shown that religious people are happier in a certain sense than non-religious people, so this is potentially a point in religion’s favor. However, I remain skeptical about this, because I don’t feel there have been enough studies to control for all the variables—for instance, whether this greater feeling of well-being is due to a placebo effect of sorts (religious people often feel they are expected to be happy, after all) or to the sense of community religion fosters rather than to some ineffable blessing from god that non-religious communities cannot duplicate.

But whether or not religious people are happier themselves, I feel that religion has a terrible track record on pretty much every other aspect of the human condition. Traditional religious marriages are sexist, oppressive, and heteronormative. Religion is currently the most vocal proponent of homophobia, sexism, racism and xenophobia in the world. You’d think that organizations inspired by a benevolent being would be ahead of the love-and-tolerance curve, not behind it.

I grew up in a religion that makes some very strong claims about its own nature and about reality. I was taught that God had pronounced himself on any number of subjects, through living, inspired prophets that were alive and led his church today. God was very interested in what my family looked like, what people I was sexually attracted to and had sex with, whether I got married, whether I had kids. Furthermore, he had opinions on all those subjects, and I was promised that if I followed his advice I would be happy.

Well, guess what. The Heavenly Father I was taught about is apparently a raging homophobe, and doesn’t even believe homosexuals exist. I am gay, so you can imagine how well his advice for worked out for me. He also apparently knows a great deal about health. For instance, drinking tea, ever, is damaging to one’s health. More detrimental, apparently, than drinking cola, because he’s never mentioned that. The religion I grew up in also believes in a literal interpretation of most of the Bible, including the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (a tale that plays an integral role in the secret ceremonies that take place in Mormon temples), Noah and the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and on and on and on.

All of these truth claims are false. All of the special truth claims I’ve investigated in other religions have either turned out to be false, unverifiable, or incoherent. A couple months ago, Jerry Coyne (author of Why Evolution Is True, and one of those “strident New Atheists” accommodationists are always going on about) announced a little contest on his blog, with a signed copy of his book as a prize. Here was the solitary rule:

Using the Oxford English Dictionary definition of truth given below, please name one truth about the world and/or universe that has been arrived at by faith alone, could not be arrived at by secular reason or science, and that is true in that it is in principle verifiable by all people.

OED: Truth: Conformity with fact; agreement with reality

No one won.

I encourage you to read Coyne’s full blog post for a few addenda, and then to read the comments for all the many suggestions people made of truths they thought were revealed uniquely by religion. And then, if you think you can top all of those suggestions, I encourage you to email your contribution to Jerry Coyne. You might not get an autographed copy of Why Evolution Is True out of it, but you might get a reply, explaining why your suggestion is insufficient, and that is EDUCATION. Which is yet another thing science is better at that religion.

Al Gore has asked everyone on his mailing list to invite their friends to join the Alliance for Climate Protection. Since I prefer not to forward things, I’m posting the letter here.

Dear Friend,

Climate change is an urgent issue that requires immediate solutions. That’s why I’ve joined with Al Gore and others across the country and around the world who want to halt global warming.

We’re on the verge of being over one million strong and I’m asking you to join us. Please click here today to become part of the solutions to global warming: http://wecansolveit.org/alliance

If leaders in business and government are going to make stopping climate change a priority, we need to send a loud message that we want action now. That’s why I’m asking you to get involved today: http://wecansolveit.org/alliance

Together, we can stop global warming.

I realize that signing up for petitions like this is what Snopes.com would call “slacktivism,” and slacktivism is a poor substitute for actual activism—but even slacktivism is better than do-nothingism. Or at least that’s my rationalization.

Mormons don’t believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. It’s actually one of their articles of faith:

We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.

Don’t read too much into this apposition; Mormons do still believe in the Bible, and, apart from the Song of Solomon (“biblical pornography!”), they believe that it was inspired, in its original form, before it was translated and changed and altered over the centuries. In fact, towards the end of his life, Joseph Smith was involved in redacting the King James Version of the Bible, allegedly returning it, via revelation, to its pure, unadulterated state.

Notice the assumption that at one point there existed a “first version,” if not of the Bible, then of each of the individual books. Not only that, but Mormons see the Bible as a unit, a self-consistent document that (while written at different times and in different places) has a unified message and point of view. In other words, the Old Testament is a prefiguration and foreshadowing of the New; the four Gospels are four different accounts of the same actual event, and ought to be read and correlated with each other; the authors of the various books are who they say they are; and on the whole, the Bible is the word of God, aside from a few scribal errors and alterations. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is funny that way; one minute, they’re breaking the Christian mold by throwing open the canon and accepting the Book of Mormon and other books as Scripture, and the next minute they are advocating such a traditional approach to the Bible.

I didn’t realize how much this view still influenced me until I began reading Bart D. Ehrman’s beginning textbook The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. Did you know, for instance:

• The four Gospels were written anonymously, and it is extremely doubtful that the authors were actually Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
• It is almost certain that Matthew and Luke were partially based on Mark, and partially on another, unknown source (usually referred to as Q).
• When the books of the New Testament are read without no previous assumptions, it becomes clear that each of the authors of each of the books had his own personal agenda and his own personal theology, and these agendas and theologies do not always mesh well or at all.
• A large part of the epistles traditionally attributed to Paul were almost certainly written by other people. When those epistles are subtracted out of the theological discussion, Paul’s theology becomes very different indeed.
• It is very unlikely that the John who wrote the Book of Revelation/Apocalypse was the same person who wrote the Epistles of John or the Gospel of John.
• The story found in John of the woman taken in adultery and the description found in Luke of Jesus sweating blood were both most likely added to the gospels much later.
• The Old Testament prophecies cited by New Testament authors such as Matthew to support Christian doctrine are taken out of context or simply misquoted.

It’s funny that I had never really thought about most of these points before. But then, like Mormon faith and doctrine, my atheism does not stand or fall by the veracity of the Bible.

Thanks to Milkflower for this clip about spiders in an altered state of consciousness.

Altered Consciousness

. . . just think how I feel about the death penalty.

[The following is a description of various methods of killing a human being. Be warned.]

Imagine that, for whatever reason, you felt that it was time to end your life, and you wanted to pick the surest, least painful and least traumatic method. Razor blades and bullets, while fairly fatal if used properly, might leave you scarred and handicapped for the rest of your natural life if you mess up, so you search for another solution.

—A bottle of sleeping pills will work, you say. I’ll just drift quietly off to sleep.

You might. On the other hand, you might be found choking on your own vomit and live, but with aspiration pneumonia and brain damage. Ditto to asphyxiation with car exhaust.

—What about that good old three-punch combo, the lethal injection? you ask. Hasn’t it been used for decades to execute prisoners because it’s surer and more humane than older, grislier methods?

Unfortunately for you, more than one study has indicated that in an unacceptably high number of cases, lethal injection may cause a fairly prolonged and agonizing death. A couple of recent studies have shown that the short-acting anaesthetic can wear off too soon, leaving the individual conscious but paralyzed for several minutes, unable to breathe or communicate the intense pain caused by the chemicals.

This CNN article is incomplete, but it has some delicious quotes.

“You wouldn’t be able to use this protocol to kill a pig at the University of Miami” without more proof that it worked as intended, said Teresa Zimmers, a biologist there who led the study.
…
“The person would feel either asphyxiation [from the paralytic] or the burning sensation associated with the potassium,” said Dr. Leonidas Koniaris, a surgeon and co-author at the University of Miami. “The potassium would cause extreme discomfort, something like being put on fire.”
…
“It doesn’t matter a whole lot to me that someone may have felt some pain before they were administered poison as a method of execution.” [Steve Stewart, prosecuting attorney in Clark County, Indiana]

Um, Steve, it may not bother you, but it should legitimately bother people who care about the Constitution. And about basic human decency.

The thing is that there really is no known way to “humanely” kill a human being. This is bad news for would-be suicides, but it’s also bad news for death penalty advocates, since our constitution specifically forbids “cruel and unusual punishment,” a reasonable description of death from equal parts suffocation and excruciating pain. Furthermore, the Supreme Court has ruled that death row inmates do indeed have the right to challenge the constitutionality of their state’s lethal injection protocol. As a result of such challenges, multiple states have suspended use of lethal injection while the process is being evaluated. Which is a good start, but not quite enough, I say. Until it is shown that there is some truly humane way of killing people (which we hopefully won’t discover anytime soon), the death penalty should be suspended, or abolished.

And those poor chickens . . . don’t let’s get started on them.

Head on over to my friend Craig’s blog for a Darwin Day salutation.

We held our peace while the Kansas Board of Education held its farcical evolution hearings, but now it’s time to make our voices heard. Down with Kansas!

Kansas Outlaws Practice Of Evolution

TOPEKA, KS—Any living being that undergoes genetic modification favoring survival could face jail time under the new law.

To those who lack a background, or at least faith, in the scientific method, the claims and arguments of intelligent design (ID) may seem persuasive and convincing. So why shouldn’t science classrooms give time to ID? Evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne respond in this 2005 Guardian article.