The Science-Humanities Split

Perhaps you've heard: STEM -- Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics -- and the humanities -- art, literature, history, music, etc -- have split apart from one another.

Perhaps you've just read the previous sentence, and asked: Whaddya talkin' about, Steve? Was there some time when science and art actually got along?

Oh yes. The time was up until the eighteenth century, and can perhaps be seen most dramatically in Western civilization -- I really don't have much of a clue about non-Western civilizations, but I'm trying to catch up -- in the example of philosophy, and of individual philosophers. Up until a few centuries ago, the leading philosophers were also the leading mathematicians and scientists, and people generally took for granted that this was so. Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz were the leading philosophers and the leading mathematicians of their time. Newton was a leading scientist and mathematician, but he left scarcely a mark in what today is generally considered to be philosophy. The split seems to be beginning already in Newton's time. Kant, Schopenahuer, Marx, Nietzsche and the other most prominent 19th-century philosophers are not, to my knowledge, enthusiastically read today by most scientists. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead were prominent 20th-century mathematicians and philosophers, but they were very unusual in being both at the same time. In the 21st century, Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse and Lawrence Krauss Tyson have said that philosophy is worthless, without causing much of an uproar among their fellow scientists, which shows you how little you can know about philosophy today and still be a brilliant scientist.

My brother, an engineer, goes probably even farther than Hawking and deGrasse Tyson and Krauss in his ignorant dismissal of philosophy -- and that's all this is: ignorance. If Hawking or deGrasse Tyson or Krauss or my brother knew very much at all about philosophy, they wouldn't say such things.

This unfortunate split, this destructive antagonism between two vital types of human endeavor is not, of course, all the fault of the scientists. Those who have objected to the dismissal philosophy by prominent scientists have included other prominent scientists. And it's certainly not as if all philosopher, artists, musicians, poets etc, have a decent appreciation of STEM. There is plenty of fault on both sides of the split.

I've tried to bring the sciences and the humanities back together, but I could've done much more. I stopped studying math in school just as soon as I was allowed to stop studying it, after completing 10th-grade geometry. I usually had the best math grades in my class -- the only exception I can remember was in 9th-grade algebra. The teacher posted a constantly-updated list of the members of the class by our current grade. I don't remember whether A was 90% and up, or 94% and up, or what exactly. I do remember that it was possible to score above 100% with extra-credit work, and that the 2 of us at the top of the list were over 100%, and that I wasn't on top. That felt very strange, not being the best math student in sight.

That 9th-grade algebra teacher, and some other math teachers I had, talked to me very excitedly about how far I would be able to go in math. They didn't realize that I didn't enjoy math at all. It was my undiagnosed autism which allowed me to make those grades without trying and without being interested.

The 9th grade was 45 years ago. Since then I've made a few feeble attempts to make more progress in math, which, it seems to me, would amount to developing an interest in and enjoyment of math. I was talking to a math teacher the other day, and he said, You have to enjoy math to go far in it.

My brother was valedictorian in high school and got 2 degrees from MIT. He enjoys math. During one of those periods when I was trying to develop an enjoyment, my brother gave me his copy of the 5th edition of Calculus and Analytic Geometry by Thomas and Finney, one of his former MIT textbooks. He's a good brother, even though he is an appalling philistine when it comes to the arts.

Pages 355 through 362 of this book are missing. Did my brother remove these pages before giving me the book? Are there things on pages 355 to 362 which, my brother decided, must remain hidden from librul artistic types such as me?

I still haven't made that big breakthrough, to where I enjoy math. Although, in the past year or so, chess, mildly interesting to me already for decades, has become much more interesting, and a large part of chess, or maybe all of it, is math. (Well, no, not all of it. There's also psychology in sizing up one's opponent.)

And when people like Melvin Schwarz -- co-recipient of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics -- are writing about things like vectors, I actually understand part of it. So, hey, lookit that, I actually have learned some calculus! Schwarz also writes things like: "Electromagnetic theory is beautiful!" And I believe him even thought I still don't understand it.


And I still want to understand. So that I can enjoy math at last, and for many other reasons.

Who knows: maybe, if I understand things like advanced physics, I'll become much better at helping people like Neil deGrasse Tyson appreciate things like existentialism.

Science, Art and the Coronavirus

Perhaps you've heard: the unfortunate conflict between scientists and artists is still going on. This conflict is not always such a big deal, but, perhaps you've heard, there's a deadly worldwide plague going on.

Not every scientist is in conflict with every artist. Some scientists are deeply knowledgeable about and appreciative of the arts, and some artists are deeply knowledgeable about and appreciative of science. These people -- I don't know how large a group they represent, I can only hope the group is large and growing quickly -- have grasped that neither science nor art by itself can address all human needs. They realize that art and science can compliment and help each other.

Then there are people like Frank Castorf, an idiot and perhaps Germany's most famous living theatre director. He's become even more famous in the past couple of days by publicly complaining that he doesn't like being told by Angela Merkel to wash his hands, and that he resents not being able to shop and dine out as he is accustomed to do.

And so, since he is one of Germany's most prominent representatives of art, he's causing a lot of damage. Who knows how many deaths he will be directly responsible for.

I wonder, does Castorf resent Merkel telling him what to do because she's a woman? If Germany had a male Chancellor at the moment who was passing along the advice of scientists -- that's all that Merkel is doing, of course: passing along the advice of scientists about how we can best hope to survive this epidemic, not exercising any sort of personal authority over Frank Castorf -- would Castorf enthusiastically support social distancing and masks and hand washing? I suspect he might. He might think of it as a paramilitary sort of discipline. He has some stupid macho tendencies.

Castorf is also, like Donald Trump, making this worldwide crisis all about him. He claims that before the coronavirus outbreak, young people in the theatre wanted old men in the theatre to die as soon as possible. (Castorf is 68 years old.), and that now they want to save every old man they can, even with such allegedly fascist measures as compulsory hand-washing.

No sensible person I know agrees with Castorf that young theatre people were ever wishing old men dead. I suspect the truth may be more something such as that now and then, some big-mouthed, wise-assed young people have said that they wish that Castorf would retire, and Castorf is blowing that way out of proportion and using this particularly thin excuse to wallow in self-pity, at a particularly bad time and in a particularly destructive way.

This conflict between art and science comes from artists and scientists not appreciating what the other group can do. Some scientists think that science can solve all of humanity's problems, some artists think that art can solve all of humanity's problems, and, of course, they're all mistaken. We need both.

Social distancing, masks and hand-washing will save lives. Science has told us that, and there is no doubt at all that science is correct about that. We still have a problem, though, because many people are not listening to this very simple and important message from science. Scientists know how people should best respond to a pandemic, but they don't know how to convince people to respond in the best way. Convincing people to take scientifically-sound, live-saving advice is something that artists are good at -- or, at least, something they can be good at, if they're not completely infantile self-pitying idiots.

Ancient History Deserves More Respect

In the following essay, I have used the terms "historian" and "Classicist" as if they were somewhat interchangeable. This may distress some historians and Classicists, to whom the distinctions between their disciplines are extremely important. To them, I apologize. Those distinctions are quite simply not as important to me.

Along with countless smaller shocks, three major ones have brought me to the conclusion that the study of ancient history is in a dire state of neglect:

First, a few years ago, I became aware of the New Atheists. One of the first things I learned about them was that their most prominent and well-respected member -- indeed, their widely-acknowledged leader -- is Richard Dawkins. I had read read two books about biology by Dawkins, The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale. I had heard about his more recent book The God Delusion but hadn't read it. However, I assumed, on the basis of the other two books, that it must be brilliant, and that any atheist movement with him at its head must be out there actively making a lot of good sense.

An atheist since childhood myself, I eagerly joined New Atheist communities online, but soon became very impatient with people repeating, ad nauseum, ridiculous memes such as calling the authors of the Bible "Bronze Age goat herders," or: "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." I wondered when I was finally going to get to some well-educated New Atheists, when some of them besides me was going to try to correct some of the more dopey memes.

Then came the first of those above-mentioned three major jolts: I learned that those two memes and a lot of other oft-repeated New Atheist slogans were direct quotes of, or paraphrases from, Dawkins himself. I heard or read about Dawkins saying shockingly racist things in the guise of an enlightened critique of Islam. Dawkins, who'd called the Old Testament God "jealous and proud of it," but reserved most of his most poisonous comments for Islam, has never read the Koran, and never will, and is proud of that.

Despite the good advice of Alcoholics Anonymous, that when we assume we make an ass of you and me, I had assumed, on the basis of The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale, that Dawkins was incapable of writing a bad book or saying a horrid thing, although, in order to make this assumption, I had had to ignore a jarring clue right there on the first page of the first chapter of The Selfish Gene, "Why are People?" where Dawkins approvingly quotes GG Simpson to the effect that all attempts to describe human nature made before 1859 are worthless and should be ignored.

As a matter of fact, all sorts of eminently-sensible things written before 1859 point out the hazards of people telling you to ignore entire eras while simultaneously telling you non-stop about those very eras, about which they are proudly ignorant.

The second major shock came from Stephen Greenblatt's inept book The Swerve, which claims that Poggio was solely responsible for saving the text of Lucretious from oblivion, that Lucretius was solely responsible for rescuing Epicurian philosophy from oblivion, and that Epicurian philosophy, via Lucretius, via Poggio, ushered in the Renaissance and the modern world, three ridiculous assertions. After having heard so much praise of the book that I finally decided I had to read it for myself and see if it was as bad as it descriptions of it sounded, I found that it was actually worse. The shock was not that such a bad book was written, nor that it was a bestseller. There are books far worse on the bestseller lists all the time. The shock was that this book had won so many awards and gotten such high praise from so many people who, I would have thought, were well-educated.

Or should I say: these people are well-educated, of course they are, and the shock was in perceiving how small a role a knowledge of history could play in a good education.

And most recently, the third shock came when I learned that the story of Christians having willfully destroyed the great library at Alexandria had been passed along, and perhaps greatly popularized, by Carl Sagan on his TV series Cosmos.

Thanks to people like Dawkins and Sagan, the general public is now in touch, to some degree, with cutting-edge science. That is an immense and laudable achievement. But very often, cutting-edge scientists, working at the West's greatest universities, are not in touch with the bullet-points of the current study of history. (I don't know whether historical illiteracy is as widespread in the science departments of the great non-Western universities, and I won't pretend as if I know. Dawkins does enough of that sort of pretending for himself and me both.)

I believe that history is every bit as important as science. I can't prove this as directly as a scientist explaining climate change and what can be done about it, but perhaps I can persuade the reader to give it some thought. (Some readers won't need much convincing: for instance, if they're familiar with one of the non-English languages which call history a science.)

Science deals with how things work, and history with what happened. If we don't know what happened, we're in no position to know how things work, or to know much of anything at all. If we're satisfied with any old account of Greek philosophy, or ancient libraries, or the Renaissance, or with a version which matches our political agenda or the axes we wish to grind, then, in effect, we're content not to know what happened. There are specialists working full-time on uncovering these subjects, uncovering them figuratively and also literally in the case of the ancient libraries, and if we don't consult them and see what they've made of the texts and other artifacts of the times they study, before we ourselves make pronouncements on related subjects, then we're acting very much in the spirit of Richard Dawkins and GG Simpson and Stephen Greenblatt and Henry "History is bunk" Ford.

(That seemed much more impressive in my head before I actually wrote it down. But perhaps it's a start.)

What can historians themselves do in order to introduce more of their work into the public consciousness? There's one thing I can think of, which the historians might very much not want to do: they might become a little less polite. How have most Classicists reacted to Stephen Greenblatt's book The Swerve? With one of the most fearful weapons in their arsenal: they mention Greenblatt's name more seldom. If one has become familiar with the community of Classicists and their mores, this shunning is chilling indeed. To the general public, however, it's almost entirely as good as imperceptible, and there's almost no way of learning that Greenblatt's assertions do not conform to the findings of current research. The few who've ventured further outside of the ivory tower in Greenblatt's case, to plainly state the distance between The Swerve and current scholarship, are solitary needles in the haystack of rapturous reviews of The Swerve by laypeople. And then there are those Classicists who've written reviews of The Swerve which are negative, but so polite that to many laypeople they may seem positive.

(We could make a game of this, and see which readers can guess which very famous Classicist I have, in a searing rebuke, deliberately avoided mentioning in this essay. But how would we discuss this? Not publicly, surely not.)

There are non-specialists selling millions of books, scientists reaching television audiences of tens of millions, who sometimes get things entirely wrong when it comes to ancient history or ancient texts. If historians and Classicists want to do anything about this, they might not have to become rude, but they will certainly have to speak up much more emphatically. The historians and Classicists who work on the same campuses as scientists who are wont to spread public misconception on historical topics could, perhaps, be so bold as to speak to those scientists about such things. Perhaps even face-to-face and out loud.

They could ask to be heard. They deserve to be heard.

A Short Manifesto

Whether or not someone believes that God or gods exist is much less important to me today than before I met a lot of New Atheists who proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that atheism is no guarantee that a person is even a little bit bright. I'm pro-environment, pro-multi-culture, pro LGBT rights (which are just human rights, no more and no less), I'm in favor of universal health care and helping homeless people and refugees. Where people stand on issues like those is much more important to me than their religious beliefs. And despite what some New Atheists and some right-wing Christians will try to tell you, a person's religious beliefs or lack of them is no indicator of where they stand on any of those issues.

I'll admit that I tend to think of theology as worse than useless, but I've read enough philosophy to know that theology and philosophy aren't synonymous, even though many theologians and New Atheists seem to disagree. I think that studying history and philosophy is as important as studying science, and for similar reasons. (And history includes the history of religions, plural.) I like Nietzsche's statement (he was a philosopher, kiddies) that life without music would be a mistake. All the arts do is make life bearable. Many New Atheists are very strong in science, but they tend to cultivate the antagonism between science and the humanities, and that antagonism is very unfortunate -- and only a few centuries old, and much more pronounced in the US than in, for example, Germany. Milton wrote about science and Galileo wrote sonnets, and of course there was Leonardo da Vinci. You don't have to choose between science and the arts; in fact, it's very unfortunate when anyone is antagonistic toward one in the supposed name of the other.

Philosophy -- My Kind Of Philosophy -- And Science

There is no strict, precise definition of philosophy which is generally agreed upon, and as a philosopher, I'm fine with that. Philosophers often contradict each other, and there's not necessarily anything wrong with that, because, unlike physicists, philosophers are not always concerned with objective and quantifiable things.

However, if a philosopher contradicts the science which is current in his time, then that's just bad philosophy and ignorance of science. A philosopher is not required to stay current with physics, but if he's not current about something, he shouldn't comment on it. ("Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen." -- Ludwig Wittgenstein) ("When one isn't qualified to speak on a certain topic, one really ought to STFU about it." -- my translation)

Occasionally a famous and well-respected scientist will diss philosophy. Recently I discovered that back in 2011, Stephen Hawking had declared that philosophy is dead. And my first response was very negative. But, again: there is no strict, precise definition of philosophy which is generally agreed upon. So it's kind of hard to tell just exactly what Hawking was declaring to be dead. And until and unless I know exactly what Hawking meant -- what exactly is there to get upset about?

I realize that by reconsidering my attack upon Hawking, and by many other things I've written in this blog, I may have lost any hope of the support of many contemporary philosophers. And you know what? I'm fine with that too, because most of those philosophers who will be inclined to denounce me and call me names are not doing the same sort of thing I am. I'm the sort of philosopher I've often described in this blog: someone who reads a lot of other philosophers, plus fine authors in other genres, and is very interested in the arts, and defines himself by being very specific about where he agrees and disagrees with earlier philosophers. And the philosophers I read -- Sartre, Wittgenstein, Russell, Nietzsche, Hume, Spinoza, etc, etc -- were the same kind of philosophers. Which is far from the only kind of philosopher there has ever been. Which is just fine with me.

Bollinger's Axiom

Just recently I learned that back in 2011 Stephen Hawking declared that philosophy is dead.

Speaking at Google’s Zeitgeist Conference in Hertfordshire, Hawking said, "Almost all of us must sometimes wonder: Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics."

And that doofus Lawrence Krauss shot his mouth off around the same time, saying that philosophy had made no progress in 2000 years, and then wrote an entire article in Scientific American in which he sort of apologized. Sort of. Krauss' case is somewhat more annoying because he claims to have a solid knowledge of philosophy.

Then again, to put that into perspective: Sam Harris claims to be a philosopher.

For as long as I can remember thinking about it I had always assumed that everybody was stupid about something. Then in 2007 I learned that I am autistic. Then just recently I started to wonder whether the dumb-in-some-areas, smart-in-others paradigm was not universal, but applied especially to me because I'm autistic.

Then I hear about what Hawking said in 2011, and I reflect on him and Krauss and Dawkins, all brilliant in their own fields and occasionally quite shaky indeed when they wander outside of them -- and the New Atheists in general, most of whom, unlike Harris, are actually competent in some field or other -- and it seems to confirm that I was on to something all along:

Don't assume, because someone is brilliant in one field, that they have useful insights about -- anything else at all.

I like that. How about if we call that Bollinger's Axiom, so that people can start mis-quoting it and mis-applying it right away and claiming that I think all sorts of things which I don't?

Arts & Humanities & Sciences

Some people will tell you that in the Renaissance in Europe, there were some people who were both artists and scientists, and that these glorious individuals were what we now call "Renaissance men." But the truth is even more delicious than that: up until the Renaissance, in Western "civilization," it never even occurred to anyone to separate the arts from the sciences. People thought it was only natural for someone gifted in one area to be gifted in the other. And of course, it only is. Only after the Renaissance did this ugly and unnatural separation and antagonism between the arts and the science begin to grow and fester. I want no part of that split, and I'm hardly the first to reject it.

As long as I can remember I've been artistically-inclined. As a small child, unfortunately, I shared an attitude toward science which was widespread among artists and ranged from indifference to hostility. Then in the 1970's I read Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, which helped me to several big breakthroughs, mentally. It greatly eased my paranoia, for one thing, by explaining to me what paranoia is: namely, a great over-estimation of one's own importance to others. More than 9 times out of 10 they're not only not out to get you, they rarely give you a thought one way or another.

For another thing, the novel made me interested in science and technology, and refuted my notion that these were in opposition to the arts & humanities. Gravity's Rainbow's author, Thomas Pynchon, had studied engineering physics at Cornell from 1953 to 1955, then dropped out and spent 2 years in the Navy, then returned to Cornell and switched his major to English and for the most part concentrated (for the next 58 years so far) on writing fiction -- fiction which refers to scientific and technical topics as well as to poetry and music and the visual arts and so forth, as if that were the most natural thing in the world.

Which of course it is. Pynchon is not the only one who behaves as if there were no rules against liking both the sciences and the arts. Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso come to mind, each a great admirer of and great influence upon the other. It seems that for nearly 4 decades, ever since first encountering Gravity's Rainbow, I had been living in a state of grace, removed from that stupid, ignorant opposition between art & science of which I had been a part as a child. Somehow managing to not to pay a lot of attention to how many scientists continued to be abysmally ignorant of the arts and how many artists continued to be abysmally ignorant of the sciences.

To be sure, I had noticed for a few years already that there was an entire group of scientists ignorant of the arts & humanities: the New Atheists. But then just very recently it came home to me that there had been an abysmally equivalent counterpart to the New Atheists infesting the humanities departments of many universities for decades before the New Atheists were so called. I'm talking about the postmodernists. And I don't think that many of them have ever been able to get any sort of jobs outside of the humanities departments of universities. (Nota bene, humanities departments are far from entirely Postmodernist and there have always been many academic historians, philosophers and critics who couldn't stand this PoMo crap in the slightest.) The Postmodernists despise what they think is the entire group of scientists, but which is actually only the group of New Atheists -- who should be despised for their ignorance of art and history and philosophy. Conversely, the New Atheists look with contempt at the dopey postmodernists, worthy of contempt with their contempt for science -- except that the New Atheists mistake the postmodernists for the whole of the arts & humanities.

They walk among us to this very day: New Atheists who think that "modern art is a fraud," and Postmodernists who think that all scientists are right-wing reactionaries. If that were not enough, and it certainly would be, it seems that Postmodernists also tend to claim as their own all sorts of perfectly sensible people who would've wanted nothing to do with them, from the Dadaists to Heidegger to the Abstract Expressionists to Borges to Nabokov to Gaddis and, yes, even Pynchon.

So it seems that all we need to do is to get all of the New Atheists together with all of the Postmodernists. (New Atheists very often reject that label, but that's okay, they're still easy enough to spot. On the other hand, only someone who describes him- or herself as a Postmodernist, is a Postmodernist.) Then they can expend all of their energy against one another, and leave the rest of us much more free to accomplish things and hopefully even enjoy life now and then.

Science And Western Philosophy

In what follows, as in my blog generally, the term "philosophy" refers to Western philosophy. This is not because I have anything against philosophy from China or India or the indigenous cultures of the Western Hemisphere or from anywhere else on the planet; on the contrary, it's merely because I know so little about non-Western philosophy.

Every now and then someone who knows a bit about physics or biology or geology and remarkably little about a lot of other things will answer the question "What is philosophy?" by saying that philosophy was what very weakly and incompletely plugged a few gaps in things before Francis Bacon formulated the scientific method and the Scientific Revolution got underway, and add with a condescending smirk that of course this answer doesn't sit well with philosophers. And of course he or she (usually he) is right, that answer does not sit well with philosophers. Or with anybody who actually knows what philosophy is, or knows that the scientific method actually was used now and then -- by philosophers -- for thousands of years before Francis Bacon formulated it.

Western philosophy is the pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and their pals, and Russell, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Rorty, Sloterdijk and their pals, and all the people in between who studied Plato and Aristotle and the people in between up until their own time, however you want to describe them, and whatever their attitude toward their illustrious predecessors was.

Within Western philosophy, up until and including Galileo and Francis Bacon, the terms "philosopher" and "scientist" mean pretty much the same thing, and since then, by and large, with a few exceptions, philosophers have tended to know a shitload more about science than scientists have known about philosophy. People generally these days have a healthy appreciation of and respect for science, and philosophers are very rarely an exception to this rule. It's a shame that some prominent scientists don't know jack about philosophy, or history, or art or literature or music or psychology, and yet publicly hold forth on their special area of ignorance as if they had a clue. That's really a shame.

I am notorious for my unwillingness to describe philosophy any more exactly than by saying that it's been what has been written by those people known as philosophers: the pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Zeno, Boethius, Roger Bacon, William of Occam, Machiavelli, Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Pascal, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Russell, Sarte -- you know, all those guys plus the handful of gals which they, unfortunately very misogynistic, very many of them, have let into their club. What it is is what those people have done, however you choose to describe it. I don't define it any more exactly than that because I happen to think that that is exactly what it is. If you have something intelligent to say about Plato and Hume, because you've actually read and understood them, there's a good chance you could reasonably be called a philosopher. If you can't, because you haven't, then chances are you can't be. Just as I think that a religion is that group of people who identify as belonging to that religion, and not a set of beliefs, so I think that philosophy is the above-described group of people, and not something they all have in common which can be abstractly described in several dozen words or less. Philosophers, including the famous ones, have been brilliant and stupid, gregarious and misanthropic, nationalistic and enemies of cultural boundaries, polyglots and bigoted haters of all but one language (although more usually polyglots), world travelers and agoraphobes, sometimes not misogynistic at all, sometimes women, and so on and so forth. As we all know, "philosopher" means "lover of wisdom," but it's not as if there's anything close to a consensus among philosophers about what actually is and isn't wise, or who's wise and who's a fool.

I suppose I actually can think of one characteristic which philosophers generally share, just one: we like to read the works of other philosophers, even the ones we disagree with intensely. We read the latter so as more soundly to refute them and overturn the influence of their folly. It's not as if we're doing it for the money.

Often, Bill Maher Sounds Almost As Intelligent As Ben Affleck

And then there are times like last night's "Real Time," marred by Bill's ant-vax screeds. To be sure, Bill insisted that he's not anti-vax, but just a "vaccine skeptic." Well, those are the same thing. Just as criticizing people's religious beliefs is the same thing as criticizing the people who hold the beliefs..

A moron like Jenny McCarthy or Sam Harris is one thing. But Bill sounds perfectly intelligent most of the time, offering cogent and precise evaluations of morons who deny climate change and vote Republican and think that the Affordable Care Act is a tragedy. But when the topic is Islam or vaccinations, it's as if someone changed the channel to Fox News.



Bill points out that the overwhelming majority of scientists agree that climate change is happening, is caused by human activity and is big, big trouble for life on Earth, and that there is a clear fix: green energy, wind, solar, plug-in electric cars and so forth. The thing is, the very same scientists also overwhelmingly agree that vaccines have nothing whatsoever to do with autism, or kidney disease, or any of the other things the anti-vaz nuts link it to, and that not vaccinating children risks re-creating the very same plagues which vaccines eradicated a century ago. So it's quite surreal to hear Maher spouting unscientific bullshit to support his "vaccine skepticism," and concluding, "[...]and it's not like global warming, cause that's real!" and chillingly, last night Bill's audience cheered him for that, instead of booing him as any well-informed crowd would have been expected to do.

It's not just backwoods rednecks who have an anti-vax problem in the US: prosperous, liberal Hollywood has that problem too. Does Hollywood's anti-vax bullshit have something to do with Scientology, and with charlatans preying on movie stars and peddling holistic treatments and magic crystals and pyramids and other such garbage? How could it not have everything to do with those things?



(Some of you may be old enough to remember when Ben Affleck and Matt Damon suddenly became huge stars on the strength of Good Will Hunting, which they wrote and in which they starred, Damon playing a genius and Affleck a sympathetic but not particularly intelligent schlub. Maybe you remember the rumours following Damon and Affleck's spectacular Oscar win for the screenplay, rumours to the effect that Affleck, like his character in the movie, was not particularly bright, and that he owed his Oscar mainly to his good friend Damon's generosity in sharing the writing credit with him. In light of the screenplays Affleck has written since then, and the movies he's directed, those rumours now seem kind of dumb. Not that I see any reason to suspect that the rumours got it exactly backward and that Damon is dumb.)



I really hate to say it, but I see no reason to suspect that Maher is going to brighten up any time soon, either about vaccines or about Islam. I can only plead with his fans -- I'm a fan too -- to think for themselves when listening to Maher, and realize that sometimes he knows what he's talking about, and sometimes he doesn't have a clue, and that when he sounds like he's on Fox News, it doesn't mean that Fox News is sometimes right about something.

What Is Science, What Is Philosophy?

To all of you who are so obsessed with precisely determining what is and what isn't science, be aware that science is defined quite differently in different languages, and that the Latin word for "science," "scientia," was in use over 2000 years ago, long before Francis Bacon and Galileo were born, long before there was an English language. In German, the word for "Science," "Wissenscaft," is applied much more broadly than in English. Not only is history a Wissenschaft to ze Chermans -- they even have things like "Literaturwissenschaft," "the scientific study of literature," which sounds very silly even to me, and will presumably make your head explode if you're one of those English-speakers currently very much at pains to label as incorrect all definitions of "science" but the most narrow.



Is philosophy scientific, is science philosophical? Again, it's partly a matter of semantics. The term "φιλοσοφία (philosophia)" is even older than "scientia," and the ancient Greeks who were called philosophers in their day, from Thales to Pythagoras to Plato to Plotinus, we still call philosophers today -- which leads me to suspect that the present-day English-speakers squabbling about the definition of "science," and defining it very narrowly, don't know very much about those ancient Greeks, or they'd be disturbed that one of them who's always been referred to as a philosopher, Thales, acted very much like someone they'd call a scientist, using mathematical principles to determine things such as the height of Egyptian pyramids, the distance of ships seen from the shore, and the size and shape of the Earth. Then there's Pythagoras, whom these strict categorizers today call a mathematician, but in his time was known as a philosopher along with Thales and Plato. The present-day categorizers call Plato a philosopher, but how many have heard that Plato is believed to have put a sign at the entrance to his Academy which asked all those unfamiliar with geometry to go away? But wait, there's still more bad news for those would have clear and clean distinctions between one academic discipline (Did you notice where the term "academic" comes from?) and the next: Although Plato called geometry "γεωμετρία, geometria," it's not at all clear that he or his contemporaries restricted the use of the term anywhere nearly as English-speakers do today. If you break the word into its parts you see "geo" and "meter," "Earth" and "measurer." To the ancient Greeks this could have meant all sorts of things including the study of history and literature and art botany and all other things in categories as diverse as the Earth. Could have, and in the practical everyday use of the word, probably did.



And, finally, to really make the New Atheists swallow their gum: in Medieval universities, theology was often referred to as the "Queen of the sciences."

Except of course that New Atheists are not swallowing their gum: since I'm rambling on about stuff that happened a long time ago when everybody was ignorant, they're impatiently asking, as they impatiently ask whenever I point out that one of their own has said something wildly inaccurate on an historical subject, "So what?"

So Thales and Pythagoras and Euclid and Bacon and Galileo and Einstein and Heisenberg and many others (Many, many others. It's a long time from Euclid to Francis Bacon, and 1 person who knew that science didn't stop in the meantime, and wasn't waiting to be invented, by Francis or by Galileo, depending on which New Atheist yahoo you talk to, was Francis Bacon. I know this because I've read some Bacon and noticed all of the earlier scientists he mentions and praises. He knew he was building on their work, as opposed to having sprung fully-formed from the brow of Zeus.) did what they did while entirely un-plagued by this English-language mania, particularly virulent right now, to section science off from mathematics and and philosophy and history and linguistics and music and art all the other things which have gotten us out of the trees eating grubs and berries and trying in vain to fight off panthers with sticks and made life somewhat more bearable. Yes, science when extraordinarily narrowly defined has helped with that, too. Yes indeed it has, it's helped greatly. But Einstein didn't cordon himself off from the rest of the world. He played the violin, he loved the visual arts and philosophy. Galileo wrote a treatise on Dante. You think that's odd? His contemporaries would have found it odd if an Italian as learned as he had not done so. (Milton published some scientific works.) You want to talk about this supposed division between science and art -- can you say "Leonardo da Vinci"?

Sometimes It's Hard To See The Forest For The Trees

A striking example of this occurred recently during debates I've had with apologists who point out that Charles Darwin's books were never put onto the Index, and claim that this is one of many things which proves that the Catholic Church is the greatest supporter of science of all time. The obvious, forest-for-the-trees answer to that is that THERE WAS SUCH A THING AS THE INDEX, from the 16th century to the 20th. Here's a webpage listing every author who was ever on the Index. That webpage is a little misleading: it claims to be the Index in 1949. Actually, many authors were put on the Index and then later taken off. I happen to have a copy of the official Index as it stood in 1854. Charles Darwin was never on the Index, but in 1854, when Charles turned 45 years old, his father, the eminent, world-famous biologist Erasmus Darwin, was on the Index. (Yes, Charles' very own Dad. No one can speak for Charles now, but is it really very far-fetched to imagine that Charles might have gotten just a little bit annoyed if someone tried to tell him that an organization which had banned his father's books was the greatest promoter of science of all time?) So were Bruno (opera omnia, of course: the complete works), Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and, oh yes, also... Wait for it... Francis Bacon! ("We're the greatest supporters of science of all time! Don't read Francis Bacon, generally credited with the formulation of the scientific method, often called the 'father of modern science,' or you'll go to Hell!") And of course also Pascal and Diderot and Voltaire and Luther and Hume (opera omnia) and Bentham and Locke and Heine, and so many other illustrious writers that it is no exaggeration to say that it was a bit of an insult to an illustrious modern European writer if he or she were not put onto the Index. It is a Who's Who of the intellectual community of Europe. (Why not Charles Darwin? Why not Goethe or Feuerbach or Schopenhauer or Marx or Nietzsche? Didn't each of them deserve that distinction as much as Zola [opera omnia.]? Maybe because the people composing the Index rightly suspected that such authors would only be overjoyed and encouraged by being Indexed. Maybe because there's not much rhyme or reason here.) Over 400 pages long, the Index in 1854. Several thousand entries.

People who actually promote science don't ban books they dislike. It would never occur to them to do such a thing. They say: this book is terrible. Go ahead, read it for yourself and you'll see what I mean.

Albert Schweitzer And My Kittycat George, And Science And Religion And Art

I gather that Albert Schweitzer claimed that science cannot tell us why we love our children. Some scientists would disagree. Some years ago I wasted a part of my life arguing with a particularly unpleasant theologian, who at one point claimed that science's explanations were robbing life of its wonder. I said I disagreed, and used the example of the big beautiful lazy silly wonderful loving cat I had at the time, George, who would often sit in my lap and purr while I sat at my computer and engaged in these Internet fooferahs. I said that the fact that I had learned that George's DNA was very similar to mine had increased my sense of wonder and awe about life, and about how amazing George and other living things were, not decreased it at all. My point is that I think that people, possibly including Schweitzer, who are afraid of losing something precious and beautiful if science makes them lose their religion, are simply underestimating science.

(I say "possibly including Schweitzer" because it's not clear whether or not he actually believed in God. I'm coming more and more to the position that if a person lived in the 20th century or later in Europe or the Americas, and therefore had the option of announcing that he or she didn't believe in God, and it's not clear whether or not he or she did, as in the case of Schweitzer, and the case of Einstein -- then it's not particularly important what he or she believed in regard to God. Because if it had been terribly important, and essential to understanding other things he or she had said, he or she would have made his or her position clear. If, that is, it had been possible to do so. Quite often such a thing is not possible, simply because a person is a true agnostic who leans neither one way nor another, has no clear position on God's existence, and simply doesn't know what to think about it.)

These fooferahs rage, with atheists such as myself on one side insisting that there is an inherent conflict between science and religion, and on the other side believers, who either are scientists or claim not to be completely ignorant of science, insisting that that there is no such inherent conflict. You know, if they just said "science and art" instead of "science and religion," and made all the claims for art which currently they make for religion, I'd completely, enthusiastically agree with them. Religion and art have one very big thing in common, of course: in both pursuits it's essential to constantly make things up. In both pursuits make-believe is an irreplaceable part of the process. Grasp that, and suddenly it makes perfect sense why one is so much more likely to encounter religious believers among great artists than among great scientists.

The huge and essential difference between art and theology, of course, is that artists have the common decency to admit that they're making things up, and theologians don't.

But just change one word, say "art" instead of "religion," and I'm on board, 100%: Yes, people with no feeling for art are dead inside. Yes, art makes life worthwhile. Art gives life meaning. It offers essential comfort. It offers joy. Yes, there is no inherent conflict whatsoever between science and art, in fact, there's a lot that they can do for each other. All of the things which these yutzes keep claiming for religion, if they'd make those claims for art instead, boom, suddenly I'd have no problem with them anymore.

One word, guys. That's all I'm asking for.

It's Interesting That The Phrase "Bronze-Age Goat Herders" Was Coined By A Highly-Respected Scientist

That phrase, which has become a hugely-popular meme, was coined to describe the authors of the Bible by Richard Dawkins, one of the world's most highly-respected biologists, perhaps the single most highly-respected biologist in the world. (Or perhaps he still was before he started devoting more time to religion than to biology.) It's interesting because when the subject is biology, Dawkins, like any competent scientist, is at great pains to be as accurate as possible. For example, he has devoted more than a little energy to combating the popular meme that "humans are descended from apes." He points out that humans and apes share common ancestors, and that the most recent of those shared ancestors, several million years ago, were neither humans nor apes, but rather species which have a great deal in common with both. The inaccurate "humans are descended from apes" meme leads to all sorts of other inaccurate notions, such as that some creatures evolve to a certain state and then stop evolving. The false conception here would be that, millions of years ago, apes existed, and stopped evolving, except for those apes who were our ancestors, who continued to evolve. But the truth is that those primates millions of years ago had some descendants who evolved into apes while, at the same time, other of their descendants were evolving into humans, and also that apes, humans and other species are continuing to evolve. The "humans are descended from apes" meme and others like it tend to distract from the fact that evolution is continuing.

The difference between the popular meme: "humans are descended from apes," and the truth, that humans and apes descended from common ancestors and are continuing to evolve, may seem small to someone who knows very little about biology. The more one knows, however, the bigger the mistake looms which is contained within the popular meme. The more one cares about the study of biology, the more interested one is in sharing the excitement of that study with the broadest possible audience, the more intolerable such popular memes will become, and the more urgent it will be to remove such misunderstandings from the collective consciousness.

The term "science" is defined differently in English than the closest corresponding term in some other languages, and in English, some people define "science" much more narrowly than others. In German, history is a "Wissenschaft" as much as biology is. Perhaps such matters of linguistics sometimes lead English-speaking scientists (in the more narrowly-defined sense) to regard other academic disciplines such as history with an undue lack of respect.

Perhaps some biologists don't realize that strict accuracy is every bit as crucial to the competent study of history as it is to biology or physics. The Bible wasn't written by Bronze-Age goat herders, it was written by urban people in the Iron Age, and even among rural ancient Israelites, many more sheep were raised than goats. To believe that the bible was written by Bronze-Age goat herders requires a very profound ignorance of the dates of the Bronze and Iron Ages in the Middle East, of the dates of the earliest-known writing in Hebrew, of the distribution of the rates of literacy among urban and rural ancient Israelites, and of the types of animals domesticated and raised by those ancient Israelites. It's actually harder to imagine any 4-word phrase which could betray a more complete ignorance of the history of ancient Israel than referring to the authors of the Bible as "Bronze-Age goat herders."

It's odd, it's just so damned odd that so many of the people leading the way in the spread of this spectacularly-inaccurate "Bronze-Age goat herders" meme are scientists, scientists who constantly -- and accurately -- are pointing out that science advances by constantly correcting itself and changing its views in the light of new information, and that this gives science a huge advantage over religion, which clings to revealed "truths." Very damned odd indeed, because of their own approach to a certain segment of ancient history, where it seems they're deaf to some information which would cause them, for instance, to modify their outlook and refer to the authors of Genesis as "Iron-Age temple scribes." Instead, regarding this area of history, they're just as deaf as any fundamentalist Christian is to information about evolution -- and/or they simply don't care about being accurate. It's just downright odd. And as the study of history, it sucks. But maybe we don't even need to call it the study of history. Maybe it's much more accurate to describe it as a stubborn resistance to studying history.

Oh well, the anger and disgust these people arouse in me with their "Bronze-Age goat herders" meme gives me lots of energy and incentive to write. Thanks, you schmucks!

PS, 31. January 2015: I'm sure I've mentioned it somewhere on this blog already, but since writing this post I've found out that the term "meme" was invented, ironically, by Richard Dawkins.

Human Exceptionalism Is An Outmoded Religious Concept

It's not unusual these days to hear someone say in the same breath both that humans are distinct from the rest of the "animal kingdom," and that we must keep in mind that we are part of the continuum of life on Earth, two statements which directly contradict each other. The fact that it's not unusual, that even respected academics can still say such things without immediately being shouted down or risking their tenure, demonstrates that we are in a period of transition from religion to science. As recently as Charles Darwin's lifetime, the assertion that humans are no more or less than animals, although it was no longer particularly eyebrow-raising within biology departments, could still encounter great resistance in general in even the most progressive universities, because even then most of them were still dominated by religion. Very few universities founded more than two centuries ago were founded as other than religious institutions, and very many since have been founded as religious institutions, whose very purposes for being are based on holy texts which are thousands of years old, not on insights gained more recently which conflict with what those texts say. And, of course, universities which have been explicitly, declaredly secular cannot be expected to have been entirely immune from religious mindsets and agendas which permeate our very existence. And the notion that humans are distinct from the rest of nature is a religious notion, not shared by all religions by any means, but a central tenet of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which teach that God put man in charge of everything and that man has a soul which is lacking in other species.

This human exceptionalism is deeply ingrained in people's minds. But biology says something completely different. It has shown us that we are not different from other animals. We're all carbon-based and we all grow and function on the basis of DNA, and humans share the majority of their DNA coding with, for example, cats. We're the same.

It's also only religiously-based thinking which causes anyone to find such plain facts insulting and/or to reject them. The religious concept of humanity being "higher" than all other life forms causes a remarkably one-sided assessment of human accomplishments when making comparisons between species. Yes, there are a long list of wonderful things which are unique on Earth to our species, the information technology by means of which you and I are now communicating being just one example. But there are also a long list of horrible things which only we humans have accomplished. No other species has produced smog or acid rain. (Not yet, anyway. We mustn't forget that all species are continually evolving, not just us.) And besides thoroughly tangible things like computers and pollution, there are assumptions made about things we don't know, such as what other species are thinking. (It's iffy enough when we claim to know something about the internal lives of other members of our own species.) Even among biologists who are atheists the assumption than no non-human species think at all, based on nothing at all but the vestiges of religious human exceptionalism, is still amazingly widespread. How do we know that dogs don't think in ways very similar to us? How do we know, for example, that they have no religious beliefs? The only rational answer is that we don't know, that such assumptions rest on primitive human mental habits and upon no firm evidence. And that we should stop making such assumptions and approach such subjects with more open minds.

Habits of thinking develop not just in individuals but also in groups, and this habit of regarding humans to be exceptional and apart from the rest of life -- again, I must emphasize, NOT shared by all humans, although it has been dominant in Western and Islamic civilizations -- this mental habit has been engrained and reinforced for thousands of years, and so perhaps it's not at all to be expected that it will vanish quickly. But we can start by recognizing where it came from, and that it has not come from science.

I don't think that there should be anything at all insulting or otherwise disappointing in seeing ourselves as animals like other animals. If adapting this attitude is a negative thing for you, perhaps you don't know non-human species as well as you could and don't love them nearly as much as you could.

An Open Letter To Richard Dawkins

Hey, Dick!

I regret having stood up for you for some time in your capacity as a leader of New Atheism before having properly informed myself about your statements on various religions. Doubly so since I'm always chiding others for weighing in on topics about which they haven't first informed themselves. Which is pretty much what this post is about.

Let's concede for the sake of argument that you're correct in stating that science in the "Muslim world" is in a sorry state -- you've got a huge microphone and a towering podium, you've got some power: what are you going to DO about it? Beside repeating your mantra, "Religion is bad!"? Yes, Richard, religion is bad, but "Religion is bad!" is extremely oversimplistic, and extreme oversimplification is bad, if you will pardon my oversimplifying the case.

I'll tell you some things you can do:

Read the Koran, and until you're finished with that, enjoy a nice steaming hot mug of STFU about Islam.

But I see I'm far from the first to propose this to you. Oh well. Onward:

Visit some majority-Muslim countries, if you haven't already. If you have, pardon me, but it's hard to imagine that you have. In the course of researching whether or not you've ever been to a majority-Muslim country I came across someone posting on the Internet behind the anonymous safety of a handle, claiming to have been in the Middle East and to know that it amounted to suicide to be there and admit to being an atheist. I was immediately reminded of some other Internet pussies who claimed to live secretly as atheists in the US South, because coming out of the atheist closet there, they were certain, would be career suicide.

I lived in the middle of the Bible Belt for 10 years, during which time it never occurred to me to try to hide the fact that I was an atheist, and I knew people who were bolder than I, and we all were employed.

Admittedly, simply being an atheist, and being Richard Dawkins His Dangself, are two different propositions. But assuming that your personal security could somehow be arranged, would you consider going to Damascus University, say, or the University of Jordan, and meeting face to face with scientists working there, so you'd have a better idea of whom you're dissing? Visiting their labs, discussing their research?

If for no other reason, then to give yourself a shred of credibility on certain topics, as reading the Koran would?

I think your problem here is prejudice, Richard, and prejudice consists of assuming things about people rather than getting to know them as individuals. If "Muslim science" were represented in your mind by some people you'd met, whose labs you'd seen, maybe you'd be less inclined to say such stupid hurtful things about them. If those scientists in Jordan or Syria were not faceless to you, perhaps you'd be inclined to actually say, or even to do, things which could help them perform scientific work better. Of course, if you saw them for yourself, there's also the possibility that you'd see that you had been wrong about "Muslim science" being in such a sorry state, and instead begin wondering -- aloud, and in front of hot mikes, could one hope? -- about things such as why those scientists haven't received more attention from Western institutions such as those folks from Nobel.

Realistically, I don't see any reason to think that you'll do any of these this: read the Koran, go to the Middle East, meet "Muslim scientists" or tour "Muslim universities," or anything else which might open your mind a crack on the subject. (I'd be so glad if you'd prove me wrong.) And so instead, we atheists who are not as completely stupid about religion and culture and history as you -- have you met Salman Rushdie? If so it doesn't seem to have done you any good -- are just going to have to do a much better job of distancing ourselves from you. For so many reasons, including this one: it's true that not every atheist who is critical of Islam needs to have read the Koran, but the leader of a movement of millions of them should know it forward and backward, in Arabic. (Or at least for crying out loud be able to refer us to someone who does.) That's not very much to ask at all. There are plenty of atheists who fulfill that job requirement, including some you've probably never heard of because, you know, they live in the "Muslim world."

Deleted From Huffington Post's Readers' Comments, Reconstructed From Memory

Frank Schaffer writes:

Where is God when a child is shot in Newtown or hung in Auschwitz or killed in an American drone air strike or for that matter dies of cancer? I don't know. There is no answer.

There's a very clear answer, Frank, believers just don't want to hear it: He's all in your heads. People made him up to try to explain things and to help them cope. God is obviously still a great coping mechanism for many people, but science has been explaining things better for a long time now, and coming up with all sorts of ways to solve problems, undreamt of in earlier eras when religion still represented the intellectual cutting edge (thousands of years farther back in the past in my opinion than in yours), problems which therefore don't have to be coped with by means of flights of fancy and escapes from reality. For example: we haven't completely eradicated cancer yet the way we've eradicated many other diseases, but we're getting closer, and in the meantime we're getting better and better at treating it, and we haven't eradicated those other diseases nor made that progress with cancer by praying or interpreting Scripture, we've done it with science. Science, with which religion is still constantly interfering. (Pushing the HP Religion party line that neither fundamentalism nor literalism nor a conflict between religion and science goes back further than the 19th century is a blatant interference with the study of history, as blind and counterproductive as insisting that the world is 6000 years old.)

By the way, HP mods? Deleting perfectly reasonable comments phrased in a civilized manner just because they express points of view at odds with your own does not make HP look modern and enlightened and progressive and tolerant. HP Religion constantly pushes an image of itself as modern, enlightened, progressive, tolerant believers -- plus a couple of token docile atheists -- and it's constantly deleting perfectly reasonable comments. I can see the comments posted by my friends which have been removed. Of course, if which comments are removed is not decided by the moderators' judgement at all but is just a matter of how many flags a comment receives, that would be even worse. That would mean, in effect, that what we have here are not moderated comments at all, but flame wars.

So You Think You've Got All The Answers?

That was a silly and deliberately provocative question. How many are "all the answers," anyway? I don't think very many people really think they have "all" of "the answers." Someone mentioned people ceasing to look once they felt they had all the answers. Let me try to tweak that proposition a bit and make it more precise: people stop looking once they have all the answers THEY WANT, ON A CERTAIN SUBJECT. Theologians and academics declined to look through Galileo's telescope because Aristotle and Church doctrine had already told them that either they wouldn't see what Galileo said they would see, or that Galileo was a trickster. Some Christian apologists today find it convenient to believe that critics of Christianity are ignorant of history, and so they claim that these critics have erroneously spread tales of Galileo being held for years by Church authorities in horrible dungeons, instead of a much more comfortable house arrest. I myself had never spread any such tales of Galileo confined in any dungeon, had never heard such a thing until very recently when I came across apologists refuting such tales, which they alleged were widespread. Of course, one need not be religious in order to be tempted to find convenient answers and then stop looking: I would be comfortable believing that the apologists are just as ignorant as the critics they denounce, and that those ignorant critics and the tales of Galileo confined in dungeons are figments of the apologists' imaginations. But I do not know for certain that no atheists have spread such tales. (Although I am still waiting for a reference to such an utterance by an atheist.)

If one is more comfortable with propagating the worst possible opinion of the Bible than with understanding it, then one tends to stop investigating things once one hears that the Biblical authors all thought of the Earth as flat, and that the Christian assertion that Jesus' virgin birth fulfilled Old Testament prophecy relies on the misunderstanding of an Old Testament text which refers not to a virgin, but simply a young woman giving birth. One may not want to hear that the passages in the Old and New Testaments which they say describe a flat Earth do not look like descriptions of a flat Earth to every single scholar who's read the bile in Hebrew and Greek; likewise, one may be quite uninterested in the argument that in many languages, one and the same term can mean either "young woman" or "virgin." In English, for example, there's the term "maiden."

I have to constantly remind myself that in such discussions, the overriding concern of very many disputants is actually not history or science or etymology at all, although those subjects may be the ostensible object of debate at a given moment. Rather, very often both the apologists and the atheists are concerned with theology, and not much else.

Well, I'm not concerned with theology, in the sense of wanting to debate theological subjects. As I've said before, I believe that debate was over long ago and the theologians lost. More than a few times some of my fellow atheists have mistaken me for a Bible-thumping Christian because I don't toe the entire party line: I'm not certain that the authors of the Bible believed the Earth was flat, I think that Isaiah probably was prophesying that a virgin would give birth to a savior, I'm absolutely certain that very few of the leading Christian scholars from late antiquity to the present believed that the Earth was flat. Such etymological and historical considerations do not shake my atheism in the slightest. I sometimes wonder whether some of those other atheists are quite shaky in their rejection of religious faith. Why else would they insist on bolstering their case for atheism with so many premature conclusions and flat-out mistakes? (Not to mention the very obvious consideration of how much such mistakes can weaken their case in the eyes of anyone who doesn't already agree with them.) They give the impression of being afraid of learning more about the history of religion, of considering information from outside of their (at best) half-educated echo chamber of approved sources.

Come to think of it, they resemble believers in some significant ways to me. Okay -- I hate to admit it, but some atheists really do resemble fundamentalists in the way in which they investigate things and process information. I hate to admit it because I really despise most of the people, mush-minded smirks with legs they are, and influential obstacles to learning and common sense, who use phrases like "fundamentalist atheists" most often, and of course because I object to the phrase being applied to me.

Of course, some Christian apologists are going to triumphantly point to my refusal to even debate the existence of God, and say that I am violating my own principal of not ceasing to investigate things once I've found an answer which I find convenient. They may be very impressed with themselves for making this point, but I will not be impressed until they've produced a convincing case that, say, Jesus' resurrection deserves more serious consideration and investigation and debate as a possible historical event than, say, the effect of disputes between Zeus and Hera on the course of the Trojan War, or the metallurgical composition of Thor's hammer. And of course pigs will be flying long before then. Not every silly proposition deserves serious debate.

Don't Show Me Your Credentials, Please!

Your academic credentials, that is. Just speak your piece. What you say won't become more impressive than it was by your informing me that you are a Full and Distinguished Professor with several long titles, appointments, fellowships, etc, etc. In fact it might actually become less impressive to me. It seems to me that people tend to trot out their creds at points in debates where they are losing. When they have run out of actual substantive things to say. "I'm a bigshot, dammit! Listen to me!" Your creds might work at that point with someone who has had no idea what you've been talking about. Or who has had very little contact with higher education and therefore has an inflated estimation of everyone connected with it. (Or who him- or herself has a long list of imposing-sounding academic credentials and very little of interest to say.)

It's a tricky thing with such credentials. Lord (Settle down. It's just an expression.) knows I'm no anti-intellectual. It appalls me to learn how many Amurrkins would not vote for someone for President of the United States because he or she had a PhD. In fact, I'm very similar to an academic. Most of the people I feel most comfortable talking with have PhD's. My reading habits are very similar to those of an academic, an historian or a philosopher. It's mostly due to my autism, I think, that I don't have a PhD myself. I once had thought that there was a substantial group of autodidacts who resembled academics as much as I do, except for the lack of advanced degrees and jobs in academia. Apparently not. There are some disputes currently raging with mostly academics on one side and mostly autodidacts on the other (*cough* New Atheism *cough* *cough*) and although the academics haven't convinced me that Jesus existed, they have convinced me that the autodidacts are mostly more uneducated than self-educated.

Still, let me be convinced, or not, by what you have to say, and not by your credentials. Of course, this is all the more the case if we know each other only as pseudonyms on the Internet, and I don't even know for sure if you really are the PhD, or employed chemist, or professor who you claim to be. Hopefully I won't shock anyone when I say that I'm pretty sure some people make up some things about themselves when they're anonymous Internet pseudonyms.

There's been one striking case recently in which one anonymous Internet handle has been claiming over and over again that he is a scientist, while not sounding very familiar at all with even very basic tenets of science, logic or math, while debating with several other people who sound very much like professional scientists and/or mathematicians. It also strikes me as suspicious that he keeps saying, "I'm a scientist." That's just odd. Actual academics I've know, when asked about their occupations or backgrounds, usually say something like "I'm a biologist" or "I'm a physicist" or "I'm a mathematician." If, that is, they're not even more specific than that and say, "I'm a molecular biologist," or "I'm a theoretical physicist," or something like that. And they generally don't repeatedly state their real or imagined qualifications, they just talk to you, like regular folks, but more science-y. "I'm a scientist," just flatly stated without anyone having asked what he is, sounds very unusual indeed. Special, as it were. And as he sounds so very far from scientifically literate, I've been asking myself just what sort of scientist he could be, what his field is.

And then I remembered that some theologians actually still refer to theology as science. 800 years ago, not only was theology still referred to as a science: in Western universities, which were all run by theologians, theology was referred to as the primary science, and all the other fields of study -- grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, philosophy -- were called the "handmaids" of theology, the "queen of the sciences." I would have to guess that this guy is either a pathological liar, making up a biography for himself out of whole cloth, or one of those theologians who regards theology as a science, and whose worldview generally is about 800 years old. (Like science, theology has something which they call peer review, but, of course, it bears scant resemblance to scientific peer review. Google "peer review in theology," in quotes.)

Nota bene: I said that 800 years ago, in Western Europe, people "referred to" theology as the primary science, to which all other fields of study were subordinate. I did not say that people "believed that" theology was the highest science, or even a real science at all. No doubt some people believed this, including some professors and rectors of universities with doctorates and long and imposing-sounding lists of other titles. But in times when conformity of expression and speculation was so rigidly enforced with the aid of torture -- the "good old days," to apologists -- who knows what the mass of people actually believed, or said in private, away from the damning evidence of the writing which has come down to us?

Trust Me, There Are Trees in Forests

The Huffington Post is at it again, attacking "the idea that there is a conflict between religion and science." Alan Lurie, in his usual passive-aggressive way, admits the idea that such a conflict exists "is often presented by well-intended, educated individuals;" nevertheless, "the idea that religion has historically been opposed to science is simply an erroneous and unsupported construct that was created in the late 19th century, primarily as an anti-Catholic polemic. And it is an idea that all (yes, all) knowledgeable historians categorically reject."

I'll just bet that Lurie has a foolproof method for determining just exactly who is and who is not a "knowledgeable historian."

It's so absurd. Lurie is in effect categorically denying that there are any trees in forests, and claiming that all competent specialists in such matters agree with him. I think it's time to take a survey of tenured professors in History departments at leading universities and ask what they think of this. I think many of them might be quite surprised that people publishing in such a prominent outlet of the Huffington Post are asserting that "the idea" of a conflict between science and religion is "an erroneous and unsupported construct." As opposed to a fact of life known to just about everyone who's half-educated or better. How to go about proving that there are trees in forests? One obvious response to Lurie didn't occur to me for a while: the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. For many people -- for instance, me -- the very existence of the Index is a refutation of Lurie's thesis, as if a refutation were necessary. Forbidding people to read certain texts is the opposite of the freedom of thought which is an essential part of the conditions necessary in order for science to thrive. (But who even needs to be told such things? Well, Lurie needs to have such things pointed out to him, apparently, as do many of his colleague at Huffington Post Religion. Many, or most, or actually all of them. Can you imagine such a state of affairs?) In case some people actually need a little more, let me just provide the names of some people who have been on the Index: Maimonides. Johannes Scotus Eriugena. Copernicus. Bruno. Kepler. Francis Bacon. Galileo. Descartes. Hume. Kant. Erasmus Darwin. Comte.

Of course, I'm not actually addressing Lurie or his colleagues. I've pretty much given up on them on this point. In order to have arrived at such a position, they have had to be thoroughly immune to reason or plain fact concerning this point. I don't know how to debate such belief. All I can do is denounce it to third parties who might have been in danger of taking these guys seriously. Lurie writes:

"Over most of its existence, in fact, the Catholic Church was the center of open scientific investigation, supporting mathematicians, physicists, botanists and astronomers."

That's one way of putting it. Another way, of course, would be: between late antiquity and the Reformation, all Western European institutions of learning were controlled by the Catholic Church, and anyone who wanted to be a mathematician, physicist, botanist or astronomer had to do it on the Church's terms. Not that Protestants and Protestant institutions of learning have been consistently more pro-science: they've been sometimes more pro-science, sometimes less than Catholics, and they've always presented much less of a unity in this regard, as in others, than the Catholics. And of course the assertion that stating that religion and science are in conflict reflects anti-Catholic bigotry is another red herring: there are anti-Catholic bigots, and they may chime in against the picture of the Catholic Church in harmony with science, but that doesn't mean you have to be a bigot in order to point out that the picture is inaccurate.

And speaking of inaccurate pictues: Lurie writes: "the popular image of Galileo brought to trial in chains to face a sadistic Inquisition, where he uttered his defiant statement 'but it moves,' before being thrown into the papal dungeon, is a dramatic 19th century fabrication" This is not the first time I've read this business about chains and a dungeon in an article in Huffington Post Religion. Only problem is, I don't know who's asserting that Galileo was put in chains and thrown into a dungeon. I thought most everybody knew that Galileo was politely threatened with torture (which Lurie doesn't mention), recanted some of his scientific theories (which Lurie doesn't mention), spent the rest of his life under house arrest, during which time he wrote his magnum opus, which reversed the recantations (which Lurie doesn't mention) and was smuggled into Holland after his death, where, unlike in Italy at the time, it could be published (which Lurie doesn't mention).

This article is a perfect example of why you need to know your sources, know how reliable they are, and not simply trust someone because they're published in the Huffington Post, or TIME magazine -- or anywhere at all -- or because they're on PBS talking to Bill Moyers, and why ideally you'll familiarize yourself with the primary documants in the original languages, as well as knowing something about the people who edited those documents -- if you don't bypass the editions and go straight to the manuscripts.

Or, of course, if that's too much bother, you could simply trust me, hehe.

Conflict?! Ha! What Conflict! (Shut Up! I Said There's No Conflict!)

Once again, the Huffington Post has dug up a prominent scientist to laughingly poo-poo the notion of a conflict between science and religion. Max Tegmark, in this case, an astrophysicist at MIT. Dixit Tegmark:

"So is there a conflict between science and religion? The religious organizations representing most Americans clearly don't think so. Interestingly, the science organizations representing most American scientists don't think so either"

Kudos, Professor Tegmark, a lot of people agree with you. However, the soundness of a proposition is not a matter of popular vote. If you had always settled questions about physics by popular vote, your career as a legitimate physicist never would've gotten very far. (Although who knows how far you might have gone as a Christian clergyman and apologist.) If you'd asked the same question 500 years ago, the agreement would have been unanimous or nearly so. At least publicly. But then, you might have gotten killed just for posing such a question publicly, depending on how you phrased it and how clear it was that you were not going to accept any answer except "No, there is no conflict." The fact that such questions could be fatal could conceivably have meant that people's private opinions about them were much different than their public statements. We may never know how great such differences between public and private were. And never mind 500 years ago, 321 years ago Puritans killed some witches in Salem. And I think it was about 263 years ago that Hume was denied a chair in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh because of his positions on religion. (And Hume never publicly admitted to being an atheist.) And the Spanish Inquisition wasn't shut down until 177 years ago. And never mind all of that -- go to Texas or Mississippi or Pakistan today and talk to some scientists there -- off the record, for their sake -- and ask them what they think of the relationship between religion and science right now.

I have a feeling that Tegmark either doesn't want to hear any of that, or that he would laugh in an infuriating way and tell me that I have a twisted and inaccurate conception of history, somehow. But wait a minute, is Tegmark's assertion about organizations representing most Americans and most scientists even correct to begin with? It's not impressively presented. He continues:

"For example, the American Association for the Advancement of Science states that science and religion 'live together quite comfortably, including in the minds of many scientists.'"

Presumably some person affiliated with the Association said that. Which person? Where, when? What reason have we to believe that this statement reflects some sort of popular vote conducted within the Association, or its leadership, or sumpin? If Tegmark knows, he doesn't seem to care. And that's the only example he gives of scientists seeing a conflict-free relationship between religion and science. And as far as the the religious organizations representing "most Americans" are concerned, he provides more unsourced quotes. For a physicist? Not so much with the details!

But he continues, and this is why his article is in the Huffington Post, because this is the Huffington Post party line:

"This shows that the main divide in the U.S. origins debate isn't between science and religion, but between a small fundamentalist minority and mainstream religious communities who embrace science."

All is well! Pay no attention to those fanatical atheists trying to tell you that science and religion are in conflict! (How can you tell which ones are fanatical? They're the ones saying that there is such a conflict!) There is no typhus in Moscow! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

For a conflict which doesn't exist, and which furthermore only a small fringe group of wild-eyed fanatics believe exist, some people spend an extraordinary amount of time and energy insisting that it doesn't exist. For a handful of people at the Huffington Post, and some of their favorite contributors, and the Templeton Foundation, for example, it seems to be their full-time job.

PS, February 19: ThinkCreeps, an HP reader, informs me that Tegmark ran a grants program for Templeton for several years. So strictly speaking it was perhaps not that Tegmark reminded me of Templeton so much as that Templeton has closely resembled Tegmark for a while. Thanks for the tip, ThinkCreeps!