Einstein and God

It's been a while since I posted in this area.  In 2016 (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2016/04/faith-versus-reason.html) I touched peripherally on this area.  Before that you have to go back to late 2014 (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/12/faith-based-conflict-resolution.html) where I again touched on the subject peripherally.  Before that you have to back to early 2014 (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/02/ken-ham-creationism.html).  In that post I discussed Creationism at length.  But you have to go all the way back to late 2011 (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2011/10/science-versus-religion.html) for a post that is directly on point.  And I spent a lot of time on the subject back in November of 2010.  (See http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2010/11/evolution-of-relationship-between-god.html and http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2010/11/scientific-perspective-on-religion.html and http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2010/11/is-science-religion.html).  So it's time to revisit.  And I have an excuse (actually two).

I was given a wonderful biography of Einstein ("Einstein:  His Life and Universe" by Walter Isaacson) for Christmas.  People forget how articulate Einstein was.  And over the span of his life he opined on many subjects.  One of them was God and religion.  I also got some other books for Christmas.  I am currently most of the way through "The God Argument" by A. C. Grayling.  You can get a good feel for the subject under discussion by consulting the subtitle:  "The Case Against Religion and for Humanism".  I'll get back to this latter book later.  But let's start with this question:  Was Einstein religious?

Most people would say no without spending much time thinking about it.  He was a hard nosed scientist and everyone knows they are a pack of atheists, right?  But "everyone" would be wrong.  That is if you pay attention to what Einstein actually said about his religious beliefs.  Isaacson scatters this information throughout his book.  But he also devotes a chapter ("Einstein's God") to the subject.  I am going to focus on the contents of that chapter.  But, where appropriate, I am also going to bring in information from other parts of the book.

Let's start with the Big Bang.  Jews, Christians, and Moslems share the Old Testament.  And the first book of the Old Testament is Genesis.  And Genesis contains the whole "and God created the world in six days" story.  For "people of the book" this is the religious equivalent of the Big Bang.  Boiling Genesis and the Big Bang down the world came into existence at a certain specific point.  Genesis and a large contingent of Christian literalists say it was 6,000 years ago.  Scientists say it was 13.7 billion years ago.  But both takes on the question agree that there is a key question:  How did it all get started?

There is a sound scientific answer to this question:  insufficient information.  There are lots of possibilities and not enough information to pick between them.  One possibility is that the whole thing was kicked off by some very powerful space alien.  So what do you call this space alien?  How about God (with a capital "G").  People of the book cut straight to the chase.  They go with God and do not admit the possibility of other explanations.  But an unjustified leap is encapsulated in the above.  I started with "space alien" and ended up with God.  Where's the justification for that?  The answer is:  There isn't one.

But this is a leap that Einstein made.  He knew the difference but decided to go with God instead of "space alien" (or some other formulation less strongly associated with religion) for convenience.  It is true (see below) that he knew the distinction.  But he was comfortable using "God" or not contradicting others when they used "God" on his behalf.  And this sort of fuzzing the details is all too common in religious discussions.

Scientists have learned that it is extremely important to as a first step define your terms.  The history of science is littered with examples of situations where one person is talking about apples and the other person is talking about oranges.  This leads to unproductive disagreements.  Once the confusion is sorted out there may or may not be a disagreement remaining.  But even in the cases where a disagreement remains it is now possible to make forward progress.

Einstein was very careful, articulate, and thorough at various points to define what he meant by "God" and it wasn't at all the same thing as what religionists meant.  And it resulted in a lot of initial confusion.  People were happy to find out that Einstein believed in God.  But later when what he meant by "God" became apparent many of these same people were all of a sudden very unhappy with him.  So let me back up and briefly review Einstein's history with religion.

He was born a Jew.  Being Jewish is an ethnic or cultural attribute.  It can also be a religious attribute.  He was born into a family that was not religiously active.  And he was happy to think of himself as not even ethnically or culturally a Jew let alone religiously one.  Unfortunately at that time (early 1900s) and in that place (Germany) it was not possible for Jews to avoid the ethnic/cultural connection.  He was literally not permitted to ignore his Jewish identity.  Over time he came to cherish his cultural identity and was at various times active in Zionism and the pursuit of a Jewish homeland in what eventually became Israel.  But at no time in his life did he embrace the Jewish religion.

For a time he became intensely interested in Christianity.  But he eventually became disenchanted and moved away from Christianity.  He eventually extended that disenchantment to all forms of organized religion.  But, when asked late in life, always characterized himself as religious.  On several occasions he said "I am not an atheist".  What's going on?

I threw that Big Bang stuff in earlier for a reason.  The state of scientific ignorance around what preceded the Big Bang is completely compatible with a number of explanations.  Einstein came to the belief that cosmology and pretty much every branch of science pointed to the existence of a "great architect".  Einstein came to believe firmly in the existence of such an entity and he used "God" or some variant to refer to him.  He also did what any good scientist would do.  He took what he could see of how this entity operated and inferred some of his characteristics.

This led directly to the famous (he never said it exactly this way) quotation:  "God does not play dice with the universe".  He was not speaking metaphorically.  He meant exactly what he said.  His understanding led him to believe that the great architect, who he called "God", operated along certain principles.  And those principles did not permit the kinds of probabilistic shenanigans that are a core attribute of Quantum Mechanics.  This belief in "God" and his understanding of how "God" comported himself was a core component of Einstein's belief system.  But Einstein's "God" was not the God of the bible.

So Einstein was a believer in some kind of powerful external entity.  "Powerful" and "external" are attributes almost universally assigned by many religions, including all flavors of Christianity, to what they call "God".  So Einstein and people who believe this way are in agreement so far.  Where does the disagreement come in?  The parting of the ways came on the subject of what is often called a "personal God".

Does "God" care about what individual humans do or don't do?  Is he interested enough in their efforts to perhaps intercede on their behalf if asked?  If asked does he sometimes actually intercede?  In more conventional religious terms, does God care about good and evil?  Does God care if we pray?  Does God sometimes answer our prayers?  A "personal god" answers "yes" to all these questions.  Einstein's "God" answers "no" to all these questions.  Most religions, and "most" includes Christianity, require the existence of a personal God to justify the religion's very existence.  When various religious types found out that Einstein rejected a personal god they became very unhappy with him.

But perhaps I am getting this wrong.  So let's see what Einstein actually said:

I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the activities of individuals or would sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation.

He defined his religiosity thus:

My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we can comprehend about the knowable world.

Here's his take on the power of prayer:

. . . a scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i. e. by a wish addressed to a supernatural being.

 On the conflict between science and religion he said:

The main source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and of science lies in this concept of a personal God.

He was a very perceptive observer of much, not all of it directly related to science.

Interestingly, Einstein did not believe in free will.  Based on his reading of how "God" operated he believed in what is often referred to as a "clockwork universe".  The laws under which the universe operates are set up.  Then the whole thing is kicked into motion.  From then on the laws uniquely and specifically direct what will happen at each point in both space and time.  This is technically called a "deterministic" universe.  The conditions at any one point determine exactly what is going to happen next.  And that means the behavior of each and every human being is predetermined at every point in their lives.  And if everything is predetermined there is no room for free will.

This creates a fundamental problem.  If everything is predetermined we never actually make choices.  It just looks like we are making choices.  If we never really have a choice then we really are not responsible for our actions.  And that means guilt is an illusion and punishment is unfair.  And that means there is no check on our behavior.  If we do something bad it is not because we are a bad person or have been led astray but because it was always predetermined that we would behave that way.

Einstein did not really have a good answer for this.  Instead he waved his hands.  He said (paraphrasing) "I always act as if I believe I have free will.  Everyone else should too.  That is the way we get good and just people and good and just societies."  It is not a persuasive argument but it is the only one he had.

And if only he had been willing to embrace Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and the rest of Quantum Mechanics the problem would have disappeared.  It provides the perfect mechanism for introducing free will back into the way the universe works.  But he never did.  He fought Quantum Mechanics to the day he died.

He did this honestly and ethically by coming up with theories and tests that could be put into competition with Quantum Mechanics.  Scientists universally respected him.  And the way he comported himself in his tussle with Quantum Mechanics only increased their respect for him.  He fought fair.  And the result eventually was a confirmation of Quantum Mechanics and a better and deeper understanding of it.

With that let me back up and take a wider perspective on all this.  Einstein's conception of "God" is consistent with science.  And his observation that the question of a personal God was key to the continuing conflict between science and religion is also spot on.  But the fact that his position is consistent with science does not make it right.

The argument about whether there was a "master architect" who created the laws the universe operates under and then set it in motion is usually posited as a "one of two possible outcomes" argument.  Either there was a master architect or there wasn't.  I think this implicit assumption that there are only two possibilities is both wrong and demonstrates a failure of imagination.  And the example I continuously fall back on is the tried and true argument about the nature of light.

For a couple of hundred years the assumption was that the nature of light was another one of those "one of two possible outcomes" arguments.  Light was either made up of particles or it was waves.  There were no other possibilities.  Except it was Einstein himself who came up with a third possibility.  Light is composed of something called photons.  Photons sometime behave like particles.  They sometimes behave like waves.  They sometimes behave like both and they sometimes behave like neither.  In other words, they are their own thing.  This "third way" broke the log jam.

We literally don't know enough about the conditions before and during the Big Bang to be able to restrict the possibilities.  So it is premature to say anything about the existence of or lack thereof of a master architect.

But interestingly enough there is something we can say about "God".  If you study the bible you can adduce many characteristics of the entity Christians and others call "God".  Then you can take that list of characteristics and ask "does such an entity exist in the natural world".  The answer is a resounding NO!  And that means there is no God where Capital "G" God means the "God of the bible" God.  If you want to talk about lower case "god" gods then we can have a different discussion.

But you are likely to end up in the same place.  This "god" doesn't exist.  That "god" doesn't exist.  That other "god" over there doesn't exist.  The reason is a simple one.  The gods that interest people and, therefore, result in successful religions are almost without exception personal gods.  And science has studied the question of whether unnatural entities (entities that are capable of operating outside the natural laws as understood by scientists) exist and the answer is No!  There just isn't any room for a personal god.  If there were science would have come up with evidence of the existence of such an entity.

And, as I indicated above, Einstein adamantly denied being an atheist.  He would cop to being an agnostic if pushed.  But I think the problem is definitional.  Einstein adopted the definition of atheist that says "an atheist must believe in no god nor any kind of higher power".  This is a convenient definition for religious types.  Because there are a lot of people like Einstein who didn't believe in God (i.e. the god of the bible) but do believe in some kind of higher power.

But in our society people generally mean "god of the bible" when they use the word "God" (capitalized) or even "god" (lower case).  So my definition of "atheist" is "anyone who does not believe in the god of the bible".  By that definition Einstein was an atheist.  And it turns out that this is the exact same argument that Boston Cardinal William Henry O'Connell advanced in Einstein's time.  He thought Einstein was actually an atheist too.

Finally, if you want to dig into all this business a lot more deeply I recommend Grayling's book.  I have pretty much stuck to one issue.  Religious people and people who are not have fought over a lot of things over the centuries.  Grayling provides a much more complete list of these conflicts and outlines the non-religious take on all of them.  He then spends a lot of time talking about "humanism" a non-religion based ethical and moral system which he thinks is superior to what religions have come up with.  If you are interested, check it out.

Faith versus Reason

This, more than anything else, is what caused me to start this blog.  It is also the subject I return to or circle around frequently.  The conflict between these two approaches to finding truth is at least 400 years old and likely far older.  For the purpose of this post, however, I am going to mostly focus on  the last 50 or so years.  And I am going to approach it through the prism of politics.

I have just started reading "Why the Right went Wrong" by E. J. Dionne Jr.  Since he lays out his thesis in the introduction, I can describe his main thesis and conclusion fairly even though I am a long way from the end of the book.  The book was published in January of 2016.  So a lot of the events of the current Presidential campaign season had not played out yet.  And there is still a good way to go to get us all the way to the election.  But the Trump phenomenon had exploded on to the scene in time to be mentioned in the book.

And the book takes a track that I would characterize as parallel to my thesis but it is not exactly the same as mine.  He makes two main points.  The first one is that the ideas the Republican Party is now wresting with as it tries to decide what it thinks of the Trump phenomenon are not new.  He traces them back to the '64 Goldwater campaign and before.  His second main idea is that Republicans have for a long time been making promises to their base without delivering on them.  This disconnect between promise and execution is Dionne's explanation for the current Trump insurgency.

I generally agree with both ideas.  But I want to take a slightly different approach to the second one.  As Dionne sees it Republicans have been telling their base that they will do A, B, C, etc. and then they don't.  Dionne (at least in the part of the book I have finished so far) provides details on why each specific promise ends up being broken (or at least indefinitely deferred).  It might be for some tactical reason (doing so would alienate voting group X and we can't afford to do that now) but I think the problem has more fundamental root cause.

I think the Republican agenda has been built on faith and flies in the face of reason.  It is this unwillingness to be constrained by reason, the possible, that has led to this consistent failure.  But Republican failures are only a component of what I want to talk about.  I believe that at the societal level faith and reason continually vie for ascendancy.  And I think faith has been ascendant for several decades but that reason is now making a comeback.  I want to use politics as the backbone of my argument but I don't want to restrict myself just to politics.  Politics is a particularly appropriate choice at the moment because politics, and more specifically partisan politics, has now been forced into nearly every facet of our lives by one side of the other in the partisan divide.  It so happens that the time period Dionne covers is a close match for the period I want to primarily focus on too.  So let's have at it.

And I want to start a little further back, with World War I.  To an extent previously unimaginable WW I was a technological battle.  One of the key components was the machine gun.  It, in the guise of the Gatling Gun, had been invented in the Civil War, roughly fifty years previously.  But going into WW I its importance was vastly underestimated by the Generals on all sides.  A machine gun "nest", a machine gun and its operator dug into a position of cover, was nearly impervious to attack by infantry troops across open land.  If overlapping fields of fire, a geometry based setup where multiple nests could cover each part of the field of attack, were set up then the position turned out to be neigh on impregnable.  And this resulted in the trench warfare stalemate the held for most of the war.  Generals ran up horrific numbers of casualties before they learned this fundamental lesson.

So the machine gun was technology, important technology, but old technology.  WW I also saw a substantial amount of new technology introduced as the War ground on.  Perhaps the most spectacular example of this was the airplane.  At the start of the War it was a toy with no obvious military use.  But rapid development produced a very capable machine by the time the War ended.  It was most effective as a photo-reconnaissance vehicle.  But to be effective in this role it had to have offensive and defensive capability.  This was done by adding machine guns whose fire was synchronized with the rotation of the propeller.  The machine guns were initially installed for use against other airplanes.  But they could also be used to strafe infantry on the ground.  A bombing capability was also developed but airplanes of the period were not big enough to carry enough bombs to have much effect on the outcome of the War.

The submarine, another prewar technology, also evolved rapidly from a toy to a deadly weapon as the War ground on.   Another technological development was poison gas.  Under the right circumstances it could be very effective against an unprepared enemy.  But the circumstances were often unfavorable and the enemy quickly learned to be prepared.  Finally, the technological advance that decisively broke the trench war stalemate was the tank.  It represented a weapon that could defeat a set of machine gun nests with overlapping fields of fire.  So that's how things ended.  How did they begin?

They began with faith.  In the excellent Barbara Tuchman book about the run up to and the first six weeks of the War, "The Guns of August", she delves into the attitudes and beliefs of the various players as the War began.  I want to single out the French.  The French believed they could emerge triumphant because of "Élan".  French soldiers were just morally and every other way superior to their opponents (presumed to be the Germans).  This idea did not survive contact with the enemy.  Élan did not take out German machine gun nests.  WW I crushed entire empires before it was over.  And godless technology was the key to victory.

World War II played out along similar lines.  Technology in the form of advanced submarines, radar, sonar, code breaking, newer and better tanks, ships, and airplanes, and ultimately the Atomic Bomb won the day.  Faith was no match for any of this technology.  In the postwar period faith was seen as no defense against long range bombers carrying nuclear weapons or ICBMs or any of the other high tech weapons of the day.  In a straight up match between faith and reason the expected victor was never in doubt, at least when it came to things military.  That is, until Vietnam came along.

Most people have now either forgotten or never knew that the principal architect of the US strategy in Vietnam was Robert S. McNamara.  He was considered a technocrat's technocrat.  He went from the auto industry to the Defense Department.  His idea was to bring modern "scientific management" to military problems and that's what he did with Vietnam.  And it was a spectacular failure.  All the vaunted technological capability of the US military was rendered impotent by conditions on the ground.  This put a big dent in the idea that science and technology can do anything. It opened the door on the idea that there might be another way.

And this other way was first embraced not by Republicans and conservatives but by hippie liberals.  They started talking about eastern religions and meditation and flower power and alternative medicine and crystals and "turn on, tune in, drop out".  In the period running from the late '60s through the late '70s these ideas saturated our media and culture.  And then they all burned out.  But this turn away from rationality and technology was resurrected by the Right a short time later in much modified form as religious conservatism.  And now a short digression . . .

The '60 election pitted two candidates against each other, neither of whom was a member of a mainstream protestant religious denomination.  Kennedy was a Catholic and the fight between Catholics and Protestants had by then stretched back centuries.  Nixon belonged to a fringe religion.  He was a Quaker.  This need to choose between two candidates, neither of whom was a mainstream protestant, turned out to be the beginning of the end of the lock that had long been held on US politics by the traditional protestant religious denominations.  Now mainstream protestant religious denominations have no impact at all on our political discourse.  Romney, the Republican standard bearer in 2012 was a Mormon, a religion long considered even more fringe than the Quakers.  His religious affiliation had little or no impact on how the election turned out.

The reason for this is that Religious Right is dominated by people who belong not to one of the traditional protestant denominations but to a splinter of a splinter denomination.  Most mega-churches and many successful smaller congregations are nominally affiliated with a denomination.  But most of their members couldn't tell you which denomination nor how that denomination differs from a dozen other ones.  In 1960 voters knew Kennedy was a Catholic and Nixon was a Quaker.  But I doubt one in a hundred contemporary voters could name the denomination of any of the five main candidates still in the race.

Returning to the main narrative, the left was the first to turn away from a reason based approach and embrace faith as an alternative.  But the right made the same change a decode or so later.  And a fine exemplar of this, as he is for so many things, is Ronald Reagan.  The Reagan Administration embraced and championed the Religious Right.  But I want to come at all this from a different direction.  Reagan was a maser at being associated with two opposite positions simultaneously.  He would advance one position in his rhetoric and the opposite one in his actions.  I will confine myself to two examples.

He claimed to be a fiscal conservative and promised repeatedly to balance the budget.  But in actuality he did the opposite.  He ran a budget deficit every single year he was in office.  And his smallest deficit was larger than the largest deficit of his predecessor.  The result was that the national debt tripled under Reagan.  No other President has produced a larger percentage increase in the national debt.  No one.  The problem was simple math.  He put through massive tax cuts.  He also put through massive increases in Defense spending.  He left large programs like Social Security and Medicare alone.  There was literally not enough money left in the rest of the budget to bring it into balance.

One of the signature events that helped Reagan win the White House was the Iran hostage crisis.  Reagan was adamant that he would not trade guns for hostages,  He was most adamant that he would not do it with Iran.  But he did.  The details don't mater but it is a fact that what later became known as Iran/Contra involved selling sophisticated military equipment to Iran as part of a larger scheme.  So he did what he said he would absolutely not do.  He was eventually forced to reluctantly and equivocally admit what he had done.

But it didn't matter.  Reagan was wildly popular.  This was initially a mystery to me.  So I asked one of his supporters about various issues.  On one issue he said "I really like what Reagan says about this issue".  It was not important to this supporter that Reagan did the opposite.  So then I asked about something else.  He responded "I really like what Reagan does about this issue".  It was not important to this supporter that Reagan said the opposite.  At that point it was no longer a mystery why he was so popular.  And what's important here is that this is faith based thinking.  You have faith that in spite of the fact that some one says or does the wrong thing, things will work out because he does or says the right thing.  Holding to a position in spite of ample evidence that it is wrong is the hallmark of faith based thinking.

Lee Atwater, a famous Republican operative of this period was the first to figure this out.  If you convince people to have faith in you then you can literally do whatever you want.  Various GOP operatives have taken this insight to heart and used it very effectively.  A more recent example of this is Dick Armey.  The Tea Party arose because of a grass roots anger about key economic issues. 

Supposedly TEA stood for Taxed Enough Already.  So you would expect that Tea Party members would be focused like a laser on making sure that their taxes were reduced.  But Armey successfully gained their trust and redirected their energy away from middle class tax cuts and toward issues that were near and dear to the wealthy people that backed Armey.  So all of a sudden the Tea Party agenda was focused on tax cuts for the rich, a reduction in regulations, deficit reductions, and other issues that were, at best, of peripheral interest to Tea Partiers.

It worked.  A lot of "right thinking" people were elected and a lot of officials who weren't were thrown out of office.  But the amount of middle class tax reduction that resulted was modest at best.  The wealthy backers of the Tea Party got a lot of what they were interested in, however.  I'm sure as I work my way through Dionne's book he will lay out many other examples of "bait and switch" tactics by the right.  My point is you can't keep pulling this off if you don't keep convincing your constituents that you will eventually deliver.  Eventually they will desert you.  It is a tribute to the skill of these Republican operatives that they have been able to pull this trick off so often for so long.

And that brings us to today.  A simple explanation for the Trump phenomenon is that the Republican base is no longer willing to go along with the Republican establishment.  Dionne's thesis is that this is because they have finally caught on to the trick.  And with respect to the Republican establishment he is manifestly correct.  We are far enough along in the process so that all the establishment backed Republican candidates have been forced out of the race.  There is one person who could fulfill that role that is still in, namely John Kasich.  But he has not been able to gain any traction.  The establishment has never lined up behind him in the way they did for Bush and then Rubio.  And the base has consistently relegated him to a distant third.  He won his own state of Ohio.  And, he has just picked up a few delegates in the New York primary.  But the few delegates he is picking up in New York are the first delegates he has picked up since Ohio.  And there have been a lot of contests between the two.

So to that extent I am onboard with the Dionne thesis.  But what do we make of Donald Trump?  The only way to account for his success is to fall back on faith.  Fact checkers have debunked pretty much every claim he has made.  Supporters don't care.  "He's my kind of candidate", they say.  What does that mean in practical terms?  There is a word:  altruism.  It means doing something that helps someone else even if that disadvantages you personally.  A nick name for an elected official is "public servant".  The idea is that you serve the public perhaps to your own detriment.  Elected officials are expected to behave altruistically.  So is there anything that suggests the Trump has a streak of altruism in him?  No!

Trump's has been in the public eye for a long time.  So there is an extensive and detailed record of his activities readily available to anyone who wants to take the time to examine it.  And it is a consistent one of him behaving not in an altruistic manner but rather in a greedy one.  Take his four bankruptcies.  Business deals sometimes go bad.  If you have done as many deals as Trump it is not surprising that several of them have gone bad.  But when this happens there are two basic approaches you can take.  You can share the pain or you can get as far out from under as the law allows.  Trump consistently has selected the latter approach.  Has he donated generously either of his time or of his money to public causes?  No!  He has certainly been involved in many high profile charitable activities.  But these are easily identified as publicity stunts that cost him little but benefit him greatly by increasing the value of his brand.

And then there are the many businesses he has put his name on that sell directly to the public.  Here I am thinking of Trump Steaks, Trump University, Trump branded clothes, etc.  Are these high quality products backed by a "the customer comes first" attitude?  The opposite is the case.  Voters literally have no reason to trust and every reason to distrust Trump when he says he will act on their behalf.  But they have faith so they trust him not because of the facts but in spite of the facts.  The Republican base still has faith.  It has just transferred its faith from the old set of establishment operators to a new and better huckster.

But Trump is doing badly in national polls.  And so is the Republican brand in general.  And I attribute this in part to a turning away from faith and toward reason on the part of the public as a whole.  It wasn't just the Vietnam war that turned people away from reason.  The '60s era represented the beginning of the end of a number of long established trends.  People had been asked to invest in education.  And for a long time they had and they were happy with the result.  The boom that ran for more than 20 years after WW II was attributed in part to the G.I. bill that put higher education within the reach of millions.  But by the late '60s a lot of people saw college students riling things up with their civil rights and anti-war and women's rights agitation.  And over time not just any college degree was a ticket to success.  It had to be the right degree from the right school.  So many started asking what was the point?

The '60s also represented the beginning of the end of a long love affair with infrastructure.  A classic example was the Interstate Highway System.  But by the '70s highway projects were becoming prohibitively expensive and traffic remained bad and pollution was awful so what was the point?  In general, in spite of our wonderful reason based technological superiority we didn't seem to be getting ahead.  Crime was increasing.  Drugs were everywhere.  Cancer was stubbornly resisting a cure.  Reason just didn't seem to be working very well any more.

And so as a society we turned away from reason based technology as the place to find cures to our ills and shifted back to faith.  Good hard working people of faith would pray their way to success.  And "it" was all the fault of godless technology anyhow.

There were enough sins that could be credibly laid at technology's doorstep to lend this narrative some credibility.  Technology brought us the specter of global nuclear annihilation, for instance.  And for a long time faith seemed to be doing no worse and perhaps better than reason based technology.  But part of this was due to the fact that over time we had built generous safety margins into our technological infrastructure.  Our highways are now falling apart.  But they were built well and it took a long time for them for the deterioration to become obvious to the casual observer.  The same is true for our sewer systems, our water systems, out electrical grid, etc.

Meanwhile we have been fed a steady stream of "government is the problem", "we can cut taxes just by eliminating waste and fraud", "all regulations are bad", "it is the fault of [insert name of powerless group here]".  But in the same way that "all technology is good" got threadbare by the late '60s, it is these newer slogans that are now looking threadbare.

Dionne sees the problem the right has as the conservative establishment failing to deliver on their promises.  I see a parallel contributing factor in the idea that the faith based approach that was so successful for so long may have finally run its course.  This is not a situation where only one of the two ideas can be right.  Both ideas compliment and reinforce each other.  The right is now losing credibility in the same way the left lost credibility in the late '60s and early '70s.

Dionne points out that some promises could not be met for tactical reasons.  Cutting Social Security and Medicare, something the establishment right has been interested in doing for decades, will immediately alienate a large segment of the Republican base who depend on the programs.  The right has been able to square the circle by telling the donor class that wants the cuts that they are working on them while at the same time telling their base that they don't really mean it.  For this to work each group has to believe that it is the other group that is getting conned.  But if you can pull this trick off, as Reagan did, then you make two constituencies that want conflicting things simultaneously happy.  And that wins you elections.

But then their are the issues where reason tells up it is literally impossible to do something.  A balanced budget, or the closely related desire to reduce the deficit, are examples of this.  You can balance the budget by keeping taxes low if you also deliver few services.  Or you can deliver a lot of services but pay for them with high taxes.  This latter approach is the one Democrats generally pursue.  Republicans pretend they pursue the former.  But it is only pretend.  They are perfectly willing to cut taxes.  But they are also unwilling to cut government spending sufficiently to make up the difference.  They are consistently on record as supporting high military spending.  Paying interest on the national debt (currently quite a bargain due to low interest rates) is also non-negotiable.  If nothing else, Wall Street holds the paper and expects to be paid on time.

That leaves only one big chunk of the budget, the social safety net programs.  These include Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  But, as noted above, the Republican base depends heavily on these programs whether they know it or not.  ("Please keep the government out of my Medicare" tells us far too much about these people.)  If you don't cut them the entire rest of the federal budget amounts to dibs and dabs.  Foreign Aid, a perennial bugaboo, is effectively a rounding error in the federal budget.  And as you go down the list to say the Highway Trust Fund, or Farm Price Supports, or NASA, or the National Institutes of Health, you find powerful Republican constituencies who benefit greatly from them and are not at all interested in seeing their meal ticket cut back.

So what we end up with is tax cuts that balloon the deficit because they are not matched by comparable spending cuts.  Reagan was not the only Republican who has run up huge deficits.  Both Bushes did it too.  It is an inevitable consequence of the Republican mismatch between what they promise and what reason says is possible.

The current election campaign has seen faith based arguments viewed with much more skepticism than in the past.  A contributing factor has surprised me has turned up to be the "just say no" campaign Republicans in the House and Senate have been waging against the Obama Administration from its first day.  They have succeeded in diminishing Obama's list of accomplishments.  But he has managed to pull some off anyhow.  On the other hand Republicans have nothing positive to show for their efforts.

They have not been able to implement any of their own agenda.  They have not been able to roll back Obamacare.  They have been forced to do various deals on the budget and deficits.  They have lost major ground on social issues like gay rights.  They may chalk up a minor win on Immigration.  But it would come from the Supreme Court and not from the legislature.  After nearly eight years of struggle Obama is viewed as the winner on points.  Importantly, this view is widely held by the Republican base.

For a long time voters would look at Democratic candidates and say "what's the point?"  They just didn't believe a Democrat could deliver.  Republicans were the champions who would do whatever it took to advance their agenda.  Voters would look at a Democrat and a Republican and say "I might as well vote for the Republican.  His policies will prevail in the end either way."  But that analysis is being turned on its head by the results of the battle between Obama and congressional Republicans.  It is now the Republicans that are seen as being unable to deliver anything except gridlock.

There was a story in the local paper recently.  The headline was "We all lie, scientists say, but politicians even more so" (see http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation-politics/we-all-lie-scientists-say-but-politicians-even-more-so-2/).  In my opinion this is a "dog bites man" story.  But, obvious as the point seems to me, it was nice to see it actually make it into print.  All politicians lie.  They lie because we the voters demand it.  We like exciting people who promise us the moon even though at some level we know it ain't so.  A lot of "straight shooter" types have run for office.  On average they lose.  We can't seem to vote for the dull guy or gal who actually tells us like it is.  "Like it is" inevitably involves disappointment and bad news.  We like and vote for the happy talk snake oil salesman instead.

Back in the day Republicans, by and large were the dull people.  They were business oriented and valued a well run operation.  They might be a little reactionary on social issues but they kept the trains running on time.  Democrats tended to be the less practical dreamers.  The two parties complimented each other.  They both over promised and under delivered but there was some connection between the promises and reality.  Then Reagan came along and the tether between Republicans and reality started stretching.  This has left Democrats by default as the party closer to reality.

Democrats frequently stretch the truth.  They even sometimes say something that is completely false.  They need a competing party to bring them down to earth occasionally.  But the current Republican party is incapable of doing that.  They seem to have lost all conception of where reality lies.  They are so good at creating a magical world that their supporters have come to believe over time that it is real.  They have completely lost their ability to recognize when Democrats say something sensible and reasonable.  At the same time they have lost their ability to tell when a Republicans say something nonsensical and unreasonable.  This is not good but I see some signs that things are improving.  I have faith.

Ken Ham Creationism

On February 4, 2014 an uncommon thing happened.  There was a debate between a creationist and an evolutionist.  Any regular reader of this blog will know that I come down on the evolution side of the debate.  But instead of trying to rehash the debate I want to spend some time on the version of creationism propounded by Mr. Ham.  I know nothing about Mr. Ham's beliefs outside of what he had to say at this event so if he has contradicted himself in other forums I am not there to trip him up.  I will, after I have laid out Mr. Ham's vision, make some observations.  But these will not be from the Evolutionist perspective.  Instead I want to give fellow Creationists some things to think about.  But, wait for it, before I get to all that let me take a moment to make some remarks on the event.

The Event

The event took place at the Creation Museum in Petersburg Kentucky.  It was between Ken Ham representing the creationist perspective and Bill Nye representing the evolutionist perspective.  The whole debate is available on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6kgvhG3AkI.  The video runs about two hours and forty-five minutes.  But this includes about 13 minutes of "countdown clock" on the front and about two minutes of filler on the back.  So the actual event ran about two and a half hours.  Each participant got a five minute opening statement and a short time later a thirty minute segment to make his argument at greater length.  The rest of the event consisted of short (two minutes or less) back and forth segments in a number of formats.

There was no formal declaration of who won.  Since both participants left some of the arguments of their opponents unchallenged technically it is possible to declare either the winner.  The debate was moderated by Tom Foreman of CNN.  Both debaters represented their respective sides well and comported themselves in a civil manner.  So there was no shouting, interrupting, name calling, etc.  They also each demonstrated a respect for the other person and their positions and beliefs.  So who are they?

Ken Ham is the CEO of Answers in Genesis, which runs the identically named web site and the Creation Museum.  Bill Nye is well known for his "Bill Nye the Science Guy" TV show and his many activities promoting science literacy.

Ken Ham Creationism

As I indicated above, rather than trying to pick apart Mr. Ham's position I am going to lay it out as clearly as I can.  One thing I want to give Mr. Ham a lot of credit for is that he has a single reasonably well developed theory.  One problem scientists have in dealing with creationists is that it is hard to pin them down as a group to just one version.    I will go into this in more detail in the Analysis section.  If you are looking for a Evolutionist perspective on Mr. Ham's thinking I suggest you listen to what Mr. Nye had to say in the debate and what he and others have had to say elsewhere.

I will try to stick as closely as I can to what Mr. Ham said or to slides he presented at the debate.  I have not (with a single exception noted below) gone out looking for what Mr. Ham has had to say in other places or at other times.  Besides quoting Mr. Ham or his slides I will try to provide a "time hack" to where they occur in the show.  Frequently the time hack points to a few seconds before the quote or to where the slide is displayed.  I am not that good at navigating my way around in the video so I am trying to look out for others who are similarly challenged.

An overview of Mr. Ham's argument can be found in a slide at 53:41.  The history of the world can be broken into "The Seven C's of History".  They are "Creation" (Genesis), "Corruption" (original sin), "Catastrophe" (Noah's flood), "Confusion" (the tower of Babel), "Christ" (his birth), "Cross" (his crucifixion), and "Consummation" (the second coming).  He also pairs them up.  Creation is paired with Consummation.  Corruption is paired with Crucifixion.  Catastrophe is paired with Christ.  (Confusion remains unpaired.)

If this sounds straight out of the bible, that's because it is.  At 43:15 he refers to "the creation model based on the bible".  At 50:40 he says "At the Creation Museum we are only too willing to admit our beliefs based on the bible.".  He makes the same point over and over.  His starting point is the bible.  He believes the bible to be the word of god and to be an unimpeachable source of truth when it comes to the historical record.  At 36:10 he says "My starting point is that god is the ultimate authority" and that the bible is the word of god.  (But see his position on what parts of the bible are literally true below).

At 51:25 he gives an extended description of his beliefs:  "Let me further go on and define 'creation' as we use it.  By 'creation' we mean here at Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum, we mean the account based on the bible.  Yes I take Genesis as the literal history as Jesus did.  And here at the Creation Museum we walk people through that history.  We walk them through creation, where god made Adam and Eve, land animal kind, sea creatures and so on, and then sin and death entered the world so there was no death before sin.  That means how can you have billions of dead things before man sinned?  And the catastrophe of Noah's flood.  If there was a global flood you'd expect to find billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth.  Had to say that because a lot of our supporters would want me to.  And what do you find?  Billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth.  Confusion, the tower of Babel.  God gave different languages so you get different people groups.  So this is the geological, astrological, anthropological, biological history as recorded in the bible.  So this is concerning what happened in the past that explains the present.  And then of course that god's son stepped into history to be Jesus Christ the god/man to die on the cross, be raised from the dead. And one day is going to be a new heaven and a new earth to come."

With a summary description of Mr. Ham's beliefs under out belts, let me get more specific.  And to keep things understandable I am going to lay out a time line.  And to keep things simple there is going to be some rounding.  Mr. Ham believes that the earth was created in 4004 BC.  That makes the earth a little over 6,000 years old.  But we are going to stick with round numbers and call it 6,000 years.  Further, Mr. Ham breaks this 6,000 years down into three 2,000 (again roughly) year periods.  Period 1 runs from Genesis to Abraham.  Period 2 runs from Abraham to Jesus, and period 3 runs from Jesus to the present.

Mr. Ham presents a handy "World History Timeline" diagram at 1:30:11.  But it does not have a usable scale on it.  At 1:30:00 he says "From Adam to Abraham you got 2,000 years.  From Abraham to Christ - 2,000.  From Christ to the present - 2,000 years".  This presents a bit of a problem because the discussion of when things happened does not make reference to Abraham.  Rather it makes reference to the Noah flood.  When did this take place?  The issue is not covered by Mr. Ham.  Bill Nye says several times that from the flood to the present is 4,000 years.  But that's Nye's characterization of Ham's position.  The best I could do was to search the Answers in Genesis web site.  At http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2012/03/09/feedback-timeline-for-the-flood I found a calculation.  That calculation places the flood at 2,348 BC.  This would put it 348 years before Abraham.  I am going to call that close enough and stick with the 2,000 - 2,000 - 2,000 timeline to keep things simple.  This puts everyone in sync with a common time line for a 6,000 year old earth.  With that out of the way, let me get back to the time line.

days 1-6 - God does his "let there be light" thing.  At 28:50 Mr. Ham says "God created the world in six twenty-four hour days, just as recorded in Genesis".  He also says at 1:30:00 "Adam was made on day six."  At the end of this we have the world (heaven and earth, plants and animals, Adam and Eve) all created.  Adam and Eve are in the Garden of Eden and there is no death because original sin has not yet happened.  (See the "millions of years" discussion below for more on this subject.)

A short time later - All the "Garden of Eden" activity happens.  The original sin has been committed so that death enters the world.

2,000 BC (roughly - see above)  - The Noah flood happens.  Millions of animals are wiped out thus populating the earth with lots of fossils of dead things.  Some "kinds" (see the "kinds" discussion below to understand why the word is quoted) are wiped out, presumably including dinosaur species.

1 AD (or maybe 1 BC, I'm not sure exactly how this works ) - Jesus Christ is born.

32 AD - Jesus Christ dies on the cross.

2,000 AD (roughly) the present.

later - the second coming

So that, in summary is his timeline.

Discussion

Here I am going to go into some issues.  I am going to start with issues Mr. Ham spent some time going into.

Kinds

This is an effort to address the "but there are millions of species - they wouldn't all fit on the ark" argument.  Mr. Ham's response is that there is something called a "kind".  It is a kind of super-species with respect to the scientific understanding of "species".  He says at 36:40 "I would say that the 'kind' in Genesis I is really more at the 'family' [a scientific term having a specific meaning] level of classification.  For instance, there is one dog 'kind'.  There is one cat 'kind'.  Even though you have different genera [again a scientific term with a specific meaning], different species [again a scientific term . . .].  That would mean by the way you don't need anywhere near the number of animals on the ark as people think.  You don't need all the species of dogs, just two, not all the species of cats, just two."  At 43:00 he says "you don't see one 'kind' changing to another".

This gets him out of trouble in a couple of different ways.  First, it helps with the "how do you fit everyone on the ark" problem.  After some more discussion he says at 1:41:35 "In fact . . . probably less than actually a thousand 'kind's were on Noah's ark".

Second, it gets him somewhat our of trouble with the "millions of species" problem.  He allows changes within kinds.  You can make lots of different dogs as long as you stay within the dog kind.  Or specifically finches, and more specifically Darwin's finches.  Ham agrees that Darwin found several different types of finches in the Galapagos Islands.  But that's ok because they are all the same "kind" and differentiation within a "kind" is ok.  At 38:40 he says "Actually, when it comes to finches, we actually would agree as creationists that different finch species came from a common ancestor."

At 40:07 he shows a divergence diagram that is similar in structure (on purpose) to standard scientific divergence diagrams.  These are also often referred to as "tree diagrams".  At the bottom you have a single line representing perhaps a single species.  It splits as it moves up the diagram as other species (or whatever) come into existence.  In some cases a line ends.  This is where a species (or whatever) dies off.  Ham's diagrams are two trees stacked on top of each other.  The idea is that we have the usual splitting.  Then Noah's flood happens killing lots of things off.  Then a few branches representing animals saved by the ark continue on upward.  There is more splitting and some additional die off as we reach the present at the top of the diagram.  He even has one diagram at 40:36 where a kind of dinosaur is shown completely dying off.

The only hard and fast rule for all this is no breach of "kind" boundaries.  Or, as Mr. Ham puts it at 40:30 "dogs will always be dogs, finches will always be finches".  At 43:35 he says "Now we don't deny the change.  You see that.  You see different species of finches.  You see different species of dogs."

millions of years

As I have indicated, Mr. Ham believes that the world is 6,000 (in round numbers) years old.  But according to Mr. Ham others, and in particular other Christians, believe that the earth is at least "millions and millions" of years old.  Mr. Ham devotes a significant period of time to this at 1:32:40.  "Yah there are a lot of Christians out there that believe in millions and millions of years.  But I'd say they have a problem.  I'm not saying they're not Christian but, because salvation is conditioned upon faith in Christ not the age of the earth, but there's an inconsistency.  What the bible teaches, if you believe in millions and millions of years you've got death and bloodshed, suffering, disease, over millions of years leading to man 'cause that's what you see in the fossil record.  The bible makes it very clear death is the result of man's sin.  In fact the first death was in the garden when god killed an animal, clothed Adam and Eve, first blood sacrifice pointing toward what would happen with Jesus Christ.  He would be the one who would die once and for all.  Now, if you believe in millions of years as a Christian, in the fossil record there's evidence of animals eating each other . . . .  We weren't told we could eat meat until after the flood."

This is a big deal argument.  And I am skipping over what a scientist would make of it so I can focus on what a fellow religionist would think.  Ham makes two very strong claims:  (1)  There was no death until after original sin, which happened in the Garden of Eden after the "six days" part of creation.  (2)  All men (and women) were vegetarians until after Noah's flood.  This second item.  Maybe he had a slip of the tongue.  All I can say is that's what he said.  Ham and Nye get into a discussion of whether Lions were vegetarians for a while before they were allowed to be carnivores.  Remember, you can't have meat in your diet without requiring the death of animals.  I didn't make a note of where this "Lion" argument is.  If you care, you'll just have to find it yourself.

Bible Literalism

Mr. Ham was asked how literally he takes his biblical literalism.  At 2:24:45 he starts taking about the word "naturally".  Then he says "Yes I take the bible naturally.  What do I mean by that?  Well, if its history, as Genesis is, it's written in this typical historical narrative, you can take it as history.  If its a poetry, as we find in the psalms, then you take it as poetry.  It doesn't mean it doesn't teach truth.  But its not a cosmological account in the sense that Genesis is.  There's prophesy in the bible and there's literature in the bible, you know, concerning future events and so on.  So, if you take it as written naturally according to the type of literature and you let it speak to you in that way, that's how I take the bible.  It's god's revelation to man."

Mr. Ham goes into a little more detail beyond the quotation I have provided above but not much.  It is not clear how large sections of the bible should be treated.  Should they be taken literally?  Apparently from remarks I have not quoted there is a lot of parts of the bible related to laws of the time that we are safe in ignoring now.  And apparently we can just let the "poetry" parts of the bible "speak to us" and leave it at that.  But I have no idea how Mr. Ham thinks many other parts of the bible should be treated.  Apparently you apply the "naturally" rule.  This segments out parts of the bible into "literal history - believe it", "laws - perhaps appropriate to the time (or later found to be wrong - see later parts of the bible) but safely ignored in the present", "literature - let it speak to you", "prophesy - I am unable to figure out how this is supposed to be handled", and maybe some other categories.

A Ham's eye view of Science

Mr. Ham is most definitely NOT a Science denier.  In fact, he sees himself as a scientist.  I don't have any "on point" quotes but over and over Mr. Ham characterizes himself as a proponent of science.  He has no problem with cell phones, GPS, and many other modern wonders of the world.  But he breaks science into two broad categories:  "observational" science, and "historical" science.  He puts modern technology into the "observational" category and unambiguously embraces it.  It is "historical" science he has a problem with.  And here his argument is interesting.  He thinks scientists get this part of science wrong.  In effect, the conflict between creationism and evolution is a result of scientists doing sloppy work.  If they did the work correctly they would get the same results he does and the conflict would disappear.

The only example I can point directly to is a surprising one.  At 2:12;50 he says (speaking about continental drift) "On the basis of the bible of course we believe there's one continent to start with".  But see also the "kind" discussion above where he adopts the "scientific" evolutionary tree and accepts that there are now many species.  He just argues that the "scientific" evolutionary trees are bad science whereas his evolutionary trees are science done correctly.  It's not obvious from the quote itself but he was making the same point when at 43:15 he said (and also showing a slide with the same words on it)  'public school textbooks present the evolutionary "tree" as "science" but reject the creation "orchard" as religion.'  His "orchard" is simply the better science version of the scientific "tree".  It's not that there is no "tree" or "orchard".  It's that his version is more correct than the evolutionary version.

He gets at the same point when he says at 50:40 "At the Creation Museum we are only too willing to admit our beliefs based upon the bible.  But we also teach people the difference between beliefs and what one can actually observe and experiment with in the present."  This sentiment is one that scientists would whole heartedly endorse.  The disagreement is not as to what the proper method is.  Ham and scientists agree that "actually observe and experiment" is the way to go.  Scientists part ways with Mr. Ham because they believe he does not practice what he preaches in this quotation.  They think he substitutes beliefs for observations and experiments.

Conclusion

I think other creationists and other co-religionists will be troubled by some or all of Mr. Ham's version of creationism.  Do you agree with Mr. Ham's timeline?  In other words, do you believe in six twenty-four hour days?  Are you in the 6,000 years camp?  How about the 10,000 years camp?  Or the "millions of years" camp?  Are you on board with his "kinds" analysis?  If so, how about the limited speciation he allows?  Are you a believer in his "naturally" approach to how much of the bible we should believe is literally true?  Do you accept the approach but use a different method for categorizing the various parts of the bible?  How about his view of how science should be treated?  Do you accept that there is "observational" science that can be trusted?  Or do you reject the entire enterprise of science.  If you trust parts of science and distrust other parts, how do you draw the line?  Do you agree with Mr. Ham's thesis that the problem with the parts of science that you disagree with are that the scientists doing the work just did it badly and everything would be fine if they just fixed the stuff they got wrong?  Finally. Mr. Ham believes that the historical parts of the bible are truth and that there is no possibility of them being wrong?  From this it follows that anything, a scientific result, for instance, that is in contradiction with this biblical truth must be wrong.  That seems to be a principal that guides Mr. Ham. Does it guide you?   

Science versus Religion

There are two basic positions on this issue.  One position is that there is no conflict, that they address two different aspects.  Steven J. Gould characterizes the situation as "non-overlapping magisteria".  And no less an authority than Sir. Isaac Newton agreed with this position.  In his time he was more well known as a leading theologian than as a scientist.  He devotes a considerable portion of "Optics", his second most famous work after "Principia", to the relationship between Science and Religion.  He believed that Science could deliver one kind of truth while Religion could deliver another.  He believed that by properly combining these truths a super-truth could be created that was greater and more complete than either lesser truth could provide on its own.  And he believed that there was no contradiction between Scientific Truth and Religious Truth.  Francis Collins, one of today's leading scientists, also sees no conflict between his strongly held religious beliefs and his strongly held scientific beliefs.  But there are few active scientists today that have beliefs similar to Collins.

Some active scientists are in the opposite camp.  They are strong and active atheists whose position can be summarized as "all religions are bunk and hokum".  Most scientists are in a middle camp however.  In religious terms they could be called agnostics.  They just don't want to engage in the battle on either side.  Some go to church regularly.  Some don't.  But most of them just want to stay out of the fight.  They want to be left alone by the religious types to do their scientific thing.  And I think that most religious people are in a similar camp when it comes to scientists.  They want to be left alone in their religious beliefs by the scientific types.  So, since there is a great consensus (according to me), why all the hoopla?

The answer comes down to the most fundamental of questions:  Is there a conflict between Science and Religion?  I believe there is.  In my previous post (http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2011/10/scientific-method.html) I said "Science is the pursuit of truth".  In a fundamental way Religion is also about truth.  Consider for a moment what would happen if God made a great revelation to his current prophet.  But assume the revelation was full of lies.  God would still be God but would it make sense to direct our actions based on revelation?  No!  All believers believe that the word of God, the revelation, is "divine truth", that God does not lie in his revelations.  The word of God is sometimes referred to as "revealed truth" for this reason.

Now, just because God uses what some would characterize as an unusual method to communicate truth, does this necessarily mean that there is some conflict between religious truth and scientific truth?  No!  Scientists believe some truly weird stuff.  Believing that God downloaded true facts directly into the brain of Paul while he was on the road to Damascus would register as "totally normal" on the scientific "how weird is this"-o-meter.  Scientists would have no problem with the process as long as it worked.  But the real question is:  does it work?

I think that many religious people intuitively understand this.  They know that there is "religious truth" and "scientific truth".  They also believe that there is some overlap and that there are some situations where "religious facts" and "scientific facts" are in conflict.  So it is critical to discount the conflicting "scientific facts" so that there is no alternative to the "religious facts".  One technique they use is to say "religious beliefs are a matter of faith and not subject to validation".  You either believe them or you don't.  The problem, as I see it, is that religious people don't believe their own argument.  They believe that, at least in some cases, people will believe the scientific argument, and therefore the scientific "fact", and therefore doubt the religious "fact".  Religious people can disagree with me and say "faith is sufficient".  The problem is that I see a lot of religious people in a lot of places and at a lot of times acting like they doubt their "faith based" argument.

The earliest example of this that most people are familiar with is the fight between Galileo and the Catholic Church in 1616.  The fight was over whether the Earth was at the center of the universe, as the Church believed, or whether it revolved around the Sun as Copernicus had suggested.  Now most people would wonder what Celestial Mechanics has to do with religion and they would be right.  But church people at the time decided that the Bible was a source of reliable information about Celestial Mechanics and that the Bible said that the Earth was at the center of the Universe.  So "the Earth is at the center of the universe" became revealed truth.  And if one revealed truth was determined to be false then the whole edifice of belief in the Bible tumbled down.

A less drastic solution is possible.  One just decides that Celestial Mechanics is not part of revealed truth and the problem goes away.  But somehow there is always a reason why that solution is deemed not feasible by religious authorities.  The modern version of the heliocentricity conflict is the evolution conflict.  Again religious people have decided that the Bible is a good source of information about how plants and animals and people came into existence and how long ago that happened.  Scientists in the form of Evolution and related ideas say that the interpretation of this Biblical information by a number of religious authorities, namely that all plants and animals were created at roughly the same time about six to ten thousand years ago, is wrong.

Again there is a way around this.  Many religious people have long believed that the Bible is not meant to be taken literally.  Instead it should be used as a general guide.  The problem with this, the biblical literalists say, is that you can no longer draw a bright line between what is revealed truth and what is general guidance.  And they are right.  But the alternative, the literalist interpretation, means you are stuck with all the nonsense in the Bible, and there is a lot of nonsense in the Bible.  So Christians are stuck between a rock (literalism) and a hard place (fuzzy general guide with no way to draw a bright line).  Even if you go with the "general guide" school Science represents a problem.  Science keeps evolving.  Scientists keep coming up with more and more scientific truth.  No one worried about Evolution in Galileo's time.  Who knows what piece of new Science will pop up (God particle anyone?) to trouble a currently non-controversial religious belief.

So far I have characterized the issue as being one between Science and Christians.  But there are lots of religions out there.  Many of them are "prophet" based.  God speaks directly to one or more prophets (Mary Baker Eddy, L. Ron Hubbard, etc.).  The prophet then spreads "the word of God" to the flock and off we go.  As I said previously, one of the key foundations of Science is "whatever works is right" and especially it's reverse, "whatever doesn't work is wrong".  Some part of the theology of every religion I am familiar with can be subjected to scientific investigation.  There are lots of religions out there.  And I am only slightly familiar with a few of them.  But Scientists have developed a lot of tools for ferreting out what works and what doesn't.  If just one of these tools ferrets out just one falsity in one particular religion's doctrine then the whole edifice falls down for that religion.  I contend without proof (e.g. you'll just have to take me on faith) that the doctrine of every prophet based religion has a problem that can be found by applying scientific methods.  I leave it as an exercise for the reader to examine non-prophet based religions to see if they have a similar weakness.

It is only necessary for a few people in the community of a faith to be familiar with this weakness.  Over and over these people decide that Science is a threat and therefore that it must be attacked.  It doesn't really matter what most people of faith or most people of science think.  Attacks on Science by people of faith will be made because they must be made.

Science does not have this weakness.  It is normal for disagreements to arise between scientists.  There are conflict resolution mechanisms built into Science.  For those unfamiliar with them they work like this.  A Scientist makes an assertion that others disagree with.  Einstein famously said "God does not play dice with the universe", for instance.  In a faith based environment this would be the end of things.  As an authority, Einstein would be deferred to and the Einstein's statement would become accepted doctrine.  Instead scientists behave differently.  They say "Is there any way we can determine whether it is true or not?"  This actually happened.  Scientists were able to convert Einstein's general statement into testable specifics.  They then devised and executed experiments to examine the testable specifics and determined that Einstein was wrong.  The scientific version of "God does play dice with the universe" is true.  And so it goes.  It is considered normal for accepted ideas in Science to be overturned.  So proving some Scientific statement false does not overturn all of Science.  It only overturns a small part of it.  Such evolution in scientific beliefs is considered to be the normal progress of Science.  That's why most Scientific beliefs are called "Theories".  The possibility must always be entertained that a particular piece of accepted scientific wisdom will prove to be false in whole or, more likely, in part.

This is a classic case of asymmetric warfare.  Religious people must attack Science "by any means necessary" perhaps violating the very standards of morality they purport to believe in (e.g. "thou shalt not lie").  Scientists, on the other hand, do not on the whole feel a need to attack religion.  But there is an asymmetric attribute to warfare.  It is only necessary for one side to want to go to war for there to be a war.  So we have and will continue to have a war between Science and religion.

the evolution of the relationship between God and science

First, some caveats:  (1) Although "evolution" appears in the title I am not going to talk about the creationism/evolution controversy in this piece.  (2) By "God" I mean specifically the Christian conception of God.

Now let me start in the middle with Sir Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727).  Most people are only familiar with him from fable and probably think of him as a confirmed atheist.  But he was, in fact, the opposite.  During his lifetime he was an orthodox Christian and actually wrote much more on religious topics than scientific ones.  He was well respected member of the community of theologians and other religious thinkers.  One of his great works, "Optics", contains a large section at the end laying out his thoughts about the relationship between "scientific" truth and "religious" truth.  He believed both were valid and that they complimented each other.  He recommended combining them to achieve some kind of super truth that was greater than either component alone.  Newton is only the best example of the many scientists who are also noted for their deeply held religious beliefs.

Now let me move to Copernicus (1473 - 1543).  Copernicus is famous in this context for his publication "De Revolutionibus", a work on Celestial Mechanics.  What does Celestial Mechanics have to do with religion?  Good question!  And unfortunately religious people had an answer.  Before Copernicus, the prevailing system was one named after Ptolemy, who was not a Christian, by the way.  The Ptolemaic system posited that there were a series of crystal spheres surrounding the earth in the heavens, one each for the Sun, Moon, the stars, etc.  But pure spheres did not work especially in the case of reproducing the motions of the planets.  So the Ptolemaic system postulated that the main spheres had smaller spheres attached resulting in something called epicycles.  By the time of Copernicus the Ptolemaic system had gotten quite elaborate and still didn't work very well.

Why did theologians care?  Well there were two key ideas in the Ptolemaic system that they ended up invested in.  The first was that the Earth was the center of everything.  The idea was that the earth was the home of "God's people".  They were the most important thing so they must be in the center.  The second idea was that the circle, and its three dimensional extension the sphere, were the most perfect shapes.  So God would naturally put the Earth at the center of things and he would use spheres to create the heavens because God was perfect.  This logical construct eliminated any other possibility so to consider any other possibility was heretical.

As I said, the Ptolemaic system didn't work that well.  So Copernicus came up with a different system.  He posited that although some things like the moon revolved around the Earth, most things revolved around the Sun.  Switching to this system greatly simplified Celestial Mechanics calculations.  And he was careful to say "I'm not saying this is how it is.  I'm only saying this is a way to make the mathematics easier to do".

But it turns out that the Copernican system is no great shakes either.  Tycho Brahe (1546 - 1601) embarked on a series of the most accurate celestial observations done before the advent of the telescope.  These observations demonstrated that neither the Ptolemaic nor the Copernican system worked that well.  Copernicus assumed that the orbits were circular and that the origin of the circle was at the center of the larger body.  In truth, orbits are elliptical and the origin is at the center of mass, which is sometimes significantly displaced from the center of the larger body.  There was a delay of from 3 to 60 years before the reaction of the religious establishment to Copernicus' ideas became heated.  But heated it eventually became.

The next player in this Celestial Mechanics game was Galileo (1564 - 1642).  Copernicus dodged the controversy by dying about the time "De Revolutionibus" was published.  Galileo was not so lucky.  The Galileo affair is complex so I am only going to point out a few aspects.  Galileo was one of the first to build and use telescopes.  One of the uses he put his to was to observe Jupiter.  In the process he discovered the "Galilean" moons of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto).  This Galilean system of a celestial body, not the Earth, with things orbiting it is a perfect counterexample to the idea that everything circles the Earth.  And, to make matters worse, Galileo indicated in a 1610 letter that many of his opponents refused to even look into a telescope to see if they saw the same thing Galileo did.  They were unwilling to examine the evidence Galileo advanced to support his position.  Galileo was censured for his ideas without a fair hearing because they challenged cherished religious beliefs.

All this Celestial Mechanics business now looks comical.  Why did they care?  Celestial Mechanics now looks like a bunch of obscure mathematics that has nothing to do with theology.  But at the time it had everything to do with theology, according to the theologians of the day.  Scientists (that's what we call them now) ended up involved in theological discussions even if they didn't want to.  This is in spite of the fact that the Bible has little or nothing to say on the subject.  Most people have at least heard of the Celestial Mechanics controversy.  Now I want to move on to a couple of subjects most people are not familiar with.  The first one had a much more obvious theological connection.   And initially Scientists were in complete agreement with the religious types as to the correct approach.

Chemistry is divided into two main branches: Inorganic and Organic.  Inorganic materials like rocks had no "life force" in them.  Organic materials like kidneys were parts of organisms like cows that appeared to have a life force in them while they were alive.  And the chemistry of inorganic materials appeared to be different than the chemistry of organic materials.  There seemed to be separate rules for each.  Why even the constituent components seemed somehow different.  You could make, at least in theory, any inorganic material by doing the "beaker, retort, chem lab" thing whereas this did not seem possible with organic chemicals.  Scientists of the time were comfortable with the idea that "only God can create living things".

But that did not mean that organic chemicals could not be investigated.  The idea was that you would end up with two sets of rules, the first set for inorganic chemicals, and the second different set for organic ones.  Now there was some overlap.  It was simple to make carbon dioxide using inorganic techniques.  Yet carbon dioxide was known to be strongly associated with living creatures.  But scientists figured that with careful work they would be able to tease out the rules of these "boundary" situations.

But then a totally unexpected thing happened.  In 1828 Wohler came up with a completely inorganic method for manufacturing Urea.  Until this time Urea was firmly seen as one of those mystical organic compounds that should follow different rules.  And within a short period of time many other compounds that had historically been seen as completely organic were synthesized using strictly inorganic methods.  Now we see organic chemistry as carbon chemistry and, other than its fiendish complexity, see no difference in the rules for inorganic versus organic chemistry.

As part of this "figure out the organic rules" process there were efforts to detect and characterize life force.  There have also been efforts to weigh the soul.  Supposedly it has been determined to weigh 21 grams by Duncan McDougall in 1907.  Modern techniques can easily and accurately measure a weight change in a human that is far smaller than 21 grams but no one has reproduced McDougall's results.  They now get no weight change at death.  Despite a lot of hard looking, scientists have also not found any evidence for the existence of a life force or a soul. A successful detection of any of these would instantly result in fame and fortune for whoever pulled it off.  So there is a real incentive to do it.

Finally, I want to move on to consider something that theologians and religious people have never had any interest in.  But it resulted in a profound change in scientific thinking to the detriment of religious beliefs among scientists.  This is something called the "lumeniferous aether".  There has been a long debate among scientists as to whether light is a particle or a wave.  The modern belief is that in some situations it behaves like a particle and in other situations it behaves like a wave.  So it is neither fish nor fowl.  But let's assume for the moment that we are examining light in a situation where it behaves like a wave.

Waves in sound are oscillations.  Something oscillates (vibrates) and eventually these oscillations reach our ear and we hear the sound.  So sound waves in particular and waves in general seem inextricably bound up in the idea of something vibrating.  And that's the idea behind the lumeniferous aether.  If light is a wave it must vibrate something.  Since we don't know what it is let's give it a name and start looking for it.  And that's what scientists did in the late 1800's.  And, even if you don't know exactly what it is you should be able to determine some of its attributes.  So Scientists started out with a simple idea.  It's everywhere, kind of like air.  Now with clever experiments you can find out how fast air is moving and in what direction using only sound, just by doing the right experiment.  So that's what scientists did.  They came up with clever experiments using light that would tell them the speed and direction of the lumeniferous aether.

One such set of experiments were done by Michaelson and Morley.  The speed of light is so fast it was hard to measure using equipment available at the time.  So they set out to measure the difference in speed of two beams of light.  Using a very clever setup they were able to detect tiny differences in the speed of two beams of light.  Then they set out to measure the speed of a light beam traveling in a North-South direction versus the speed of a light beam traveling in an East-West direction.  Now the earth rotates on its axis.  And it travels through space.  And as it goes around the sun it's direction changes 90 degrees every three months.  So it didn't matter which direction the lumeniferous aether was moving, the beams should travel at different speeds at least some of the time.  In the extreme case, the speeds should be different three months from now than they are now.

Michaelson and Morley did a bunch of experiments.  They did them very carefully.  And eventually others did the same or similar experiments.  Everyone got the same result.  The two beams always went the same speed.  Now it didn't matter what "lumeniferous aether" theory you subscribed to.  Every theory predicted that for at least some of the experiments, the speed of light would be different in one direction than the other.  Scientists could not think up a set of characteristics for lumeniferous aether that resulted in this "the speed of light is always constant" result.

Why does this matter?  Because after many years they concluded that there was no such thing as the "lumeniferous aether".  And Einstein made "the speed of light is always constant" a foundational idea of his theories.  Einstein and other Scientists came to a profound conclusion as a result of the lumeniferous aether episode.  They named this conclusion the "Occam's Razor" principle.  If you have multiple theories to chose from, always pick the simplest one that accounts for all the data.  A corollary of this is "don't assume the existence of anything not necessary for the theory to work".

The Occam's Razor principle leads Steven Hawking in his recent book "The Grand Design" to say "One can't prove that God doesn't exist, but science makes God unnecessary".  Scientists have been looking carefully for hundreds of years for evidence that God exists.  They haven't found anything.  Celestial spheres, life force, and the soul are examples of other things that scientists have carefully looked hard for over a very long time without finding anything.  As Hawking says, this does not mean that none of these things exist but it does mean that science has not found them.  And without evidence of their existence, science deems them "unnecessary".

Over most of the history of science most scientists have had sincerely held religious beliefs.  But the "Occam's Razor" revolution spawned by the failure of "lumeniferous aether" caused scientists to change their way of thinking.  And looked at in this new way there is no "need" for religion.  Without this need, an examination of the tenets of religions finds them not only unnecessary but nonsense.  So most modern scientists have reluctantly become atheists.

A Scientific Perspective on Religion

If you are a religious person and your faith is weak, stop reading!  If you think that Science is some kind of evil plot to hypnotise you into giving up your religious beliefs, be afraid, be very afraid.  I don't want it said that I am the cause of people turning away from their faith.  If you keep reading, the responsibility for what happens to your faith is your fault not mine.  You have been warned.

I have always been fond of the word "epiphany".  It's just a great word.  And, of course, it refers to something that happened to St. Paul on the road to Damascus.  Here's how the Bible (King James, Acts, Chapter 9, verses 3-7 with punctuation cleaned up) describes the event:

And as he journeyed he came near Damascus and suddenly there shined around about him a light from heaven.  And he fell to the earth and heard a voice saying unto him "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?"  And he said "Who art thou lord?".  And the lord said "I am Jesus whom thou persecutest.  It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks."  And he, trembling and astonished, said "Lord what will thou have me do?"  And the lord said unto him "Arise and go into the city and it shall be told thee what thou must do."  And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless hearing a voice but seeing no man.

That's the event that the word "epiphany" was coined to describe.  Now there is a bunch of more business.  And, in fact, it isn't Saul, later Paul, who gets the word, it's a guy called Ananias, but that's all detail.  The idea is that God chooses to talk directly to a mortal.  As a group these mortals are usually called prophets.  And this "epiphany to a prophet" mechanism is common to a lot of religions.

God talks to various prophets and we get the Jewish religion.  He talks to some more prophets and we get Christianity.  (I'm not sure where to slot Jesus into all this business but we're talking about a similar mechanism).  And the third "religion of the book" works the same way.  God talked directly to Mohammad and the result is Islam.  But it is not just religions of the book or ancient times.  God (through the angel Moroni) talks to Joseph Smith and we get Mormonism.  God talks to Mary Baker Eddy and we get Christian Science.  And still more recently God talks to L. Ron Hubbard and we get Scientology.

So is all this "epiphany" stuff unscientific?  Not at all.  Scientists' job is to figure out what the rules are, not create the rules themselves.  So if God created the universe, he can certainly include an "epiphany exclusion" rule.  And, since his is all powerful, he can certainly use this "epiphany exclusion" rule whenever and wherever he wants to.  And, trust me, scientists believe lots of things that are way weirder than an "epiphany exclusion" rule.  So if the "epiphany exclusion" rule is not unscientific (I know, double negative, but justified in this case), does that mean that Science has nothing to say on the subject?  No!  (Sorry for the second double negative but again justified).  Again, Scientists spend a lot of time trying to make sense of things that are a lot weirder than the "epiphany exclusion" rule.

The first thing to say from a Scientific perspective is that this happens a lot.  It is not the foundation of all religions but it is the foundation of a lot of them.  All of the above examples I have cited are what are generally called "western" religions.  But the rule is used in eastern religions too.  Buddhism is founded by the "prophet" (my characterization) Buddha.  There are probably others but I am too ignorant to be able to cite any.  Interestingly, Confucianism does not conform to the model.  Confucius did not claim any extraordinary knowledge.  He just said "we need to get back to that old time religion".  Since that old time religion already existed, he didn't need to create anything new so he did not need divine inspiration.

Getting back to the main point, there sure have been a lot of these prophets.  And they all say something different.  In fact, the general message of all prophets, with the possible exception of some of the first ones is "Those older prophets got it wrong.  Here's the real story."  This is definitely true of the 19th and 20th century prophets.  But Jesus fixed Judaism and Mohammad fixed Christianity, at least according to their adherents.  And with the modern prophets, the amount of doctrine that needs fixing becomes even greater.  The Scientology "origin story" (description of where we came from), for instance, bears no resemblance to the "origin story" of Christianity or any of the other religions of the book.  What can we make of all this?

It turns out that from a Scientific perspective, the situation is far from hopeless.  Christianity and a lot of other religions are "one God" religions.  They believe that there is one God and one world.  So let's assume that this is true for a moment.  Does it make sense that this one God, who created the one universe, would download (this is my shorthand for the whole "epiphany" process, no matter what the specific details are) different contradictory sets of facts into the minds of different prophets?

There is one hypothesis that is consistent with God doing this, that God is a liar and that the data he downloads is not all true.  Its a valid scientific hypothesis.  But if God is a liar then we can't depend on what he downloads into any particular prophet being true.  In fact, there is no prophet whose words we can depend on under this scenario.  If this scenario is correct then we need to develop outside means of verification for whatever prophets say.  And that outside verification system is Science.

Now most believers do not buy this hypothesis.  They believe that whatever God downloads is the truth.  So let's discard our earlier "God is a liar" hypothesis and adopt the alternative, namely "God tells the truth".  We still have the problem that there are a lot of prophets out there and, since they contradict each other, they can't all be telling the truth.  But, in fact, this gets us by a slightly different path to the same point.  Now it's not God who is lying but the prophets.  So we need a mechanism for determining which prophets are lying.  And again, the best mechanism is Science.  We can carefully examine the "revelations" of each prophet and see which ones are true.  And we quickly find problems with all of them.

Now there is a non-scientific approach that can be adopted.  We can "have faith".  Maybe God gave us some "faith based" mechanism that does not depend on Science to ferret out the truth.  Here I observe that no religion, hence no specific prophet, is believed in by a majority of the world's population.  So, at a minimum, we can say that the "faith based" approach is inefficient.  And if you drill down, if you ask not how many people are Christian or Muslim say, but how many people adhere to a specific strain of Christianity (say Methodist) or Islam (say Wahhabi) then the number of people that got it right shrinks to a small population, less than 1%.  And if you drill down further to the subsect level where everyone believes exactly the same thing then no religion claims the adherence of more than a tiny percentage of the population.  So God is very inefficient and he has not provided people with an effective mechanism for ferreting out the truth.  Now why am I supposed to believe in God?

None of the above depends on any specific beliefs in any specific religion.  The epiphany of St. Paul is used merely for explanatory purposes.  The argument does not depend on whether you believe in Christianity in general or in the truth of the epiphany of St. Paul in particular.  It is all the result of applying the scientific perspective to a large general class of religions.  And it does not depend on any specific scientific belief like Evolution.  The whole argument is constructed from a religious not a scientific perspective.  And that is the power of scientific thinking.  I believe that a lot of religious people understand this at a subconscious level.  And so they fear science for the very real reason that scientific thinking is a very powerful tool for undermining the belief in specific religions and religion in general.