@davidsonloehr
Active 5 years, 4 months agoForum Replies Created
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Brandon,
On Eliade, I agree — that’s high school level. What he did that was so helpful was to see all religions as “languages,” dialects, ways of talking/framing life’s questions, rather than taking any of them literally. So it’s not that Biblical religions have God, it’s that they use that symbol as a way of framing life questions — unlike Buddhists, e.g. Just backing off that far from literalism can help students gain a much more fertile perspective.
Where did you have your Religious Studies course? Sounds kind of Chicago-y. (My MA and PhD are both from the U of Chicago Divinity School, where Eliade taught for the last 30 years or so of his life.) When I was there, they had an MARS degree, meaning Master of Arts in Religious Studies — which is why I wonder if you were there, or had a professor who did his work there.
Davidson
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Brandon,
Well, one more. It’s empirically demonstrable that we know what we respect in a person, and what doesn’t rise to that level. Over about a quarter century as a minister, I officiated at a lot of memorial services, and always had an open mike policy so friends and relatives could share memories and stories. On Sundays, I would sometimes tell people I wished they would attend more memorial services — though those are hard to arrange on command. Never once did I hear anyone say things like “He had more money than God!” “He/she laid everyone he/she set sights on.” “They scared the crap out of everyone around them, and intimidated everybody.” “They always had a new car and a really expensive house.” And so on. They might have mentioned some of these as passing comments while painting a picture of the person, but never in any tone of admiration. What people admired, praised, and shed tears over were always the same things: he cared, she touched my life, he was so very understanding, she made people want to be around her, he remembered my name…. The things our culture teaches us to lust after never make the list of things we admire about others. That’s an important lesson to learn! I’m not sure how you can teach this experientially to kids, but imagine there’s a way.
Davidson
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Brandon,
This all sounds very good. Two more offerings. I think etymology is very important. “Scientia” simply means “knowledge,” and “religio” basically means what we bind/tie/anchor ourselves to (the -lig is the same root as in ligament and ligature, and the “re-” means to do it again. I guess the thought is that we were once connected to something wholly lifegiving — in the womb — and yearn for that feeling in our adult lives. So questions are How we know, and what’s Worth binding ourselves to.
You can’t avoid snake-oil sellers in this area, but that’s part of the fun challenge of education.
Davidson
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Brandon,
OK, more on this. One object of this kind of education should be to help students back off from their certainties to test other assertions. Very few people of any age can do this. It’s important to keep from worshiping science — or capitalizing it! There are some excellent examples of scientists being dead certain and dead wrong, in spite of overwhelming empirical data showing their certainty is misplaced. My single favorite is still the story of Ignatz Semmelweiss — a tragic story. In the mid-19th century, he decided that doctors who came from doing autopsies to delivering babies were carrying something that was killing a lot of young mothers on maternity wards. So he made all the doctors in his charge wash their hands in … I think it was bleach, I forget now. As a result, the mortality rate on his wards dropped to around 1/10th of what it was in other hospitals (again, check the story: I think this fraction is about right). He also wrote on it, and lambasted other doctors for killing mothers, etc. (So, no great social or political skills.) But the difference in mortality rates of young mothers screamed that the medical certainties of the time were dead wrong. The response that gets me every time came from one of the most respected obstetricians of the day, who said, huffily, “Doctors are gentlemen. And a gentleman’s hands are always clean.”
Yes, this was before germ theory was developed, so it sounded like Semmelweiss was saying that “unseen forces” were killing young mothers — which sounds pretty silly. At least until powerful microscopes were developed, and Pasteur had done his experiments.
I think the only way to teach what you want to teach is to draw a distinction between literal facts, and metaphors. Stories are metaphors. And to outgrow them means becoming able to say things that would have had you burned alive at the stake not all that long ago: like “You know, ‘God’ isn’t a useful symbol any more.” (One on the other side would be having students realize that science can’t tell us how we should live, so that when we look back in ten or fifty years, we can be glad we lived that way. Of course, many religions can’t, either.)
Davidson
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How should we differentiate between science and religion — or science and traditional stories? Many of the claims of science are true whether you believe the story or not. Gravity, evolution, star and planet formation, for example, have enough empirical data to establish that they are REALLY true (or just TRUE). All stories can give us an attitude of certainty once we’re indoctrinated into them — science, scientism, religion, myth, etc. And we much prefer certainty to truth. In fact, unless we’re certain of something, we can’t believe it’s actually true. (Wittgenstein’s example: “It’s raining outside. Personally, I don’t believe it.” He added, “This is two people.”) And we don’t want truths that can’t make us feel comfortable, at home, special, valuable, and so on. So myths fill in here. But we have a hard time unblurring the line between certainty and truth, and the best method we have today for establishing fact/truth is the scientific method (when it’s followed). It’s advantage is that you don’t have to believe it to see that it’s true.
Yes, there are those who stay so resolutely within their ideology that they can say — without any empirical evidence — “evolution is false, we aren’t descended from apes, the Earth is only 6,000 years old” and so on. But this is a different phenomenon. It’s not concerned with truth, but with maintaining an attitude of certainty about a story into which we have been indoctrinated, and within which we have defined our identity, value and purpose.
And so on….
Davidson
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Brandon,
Nice to have your project going! I would recommend you check out Mircea Eliade’s books, especially The Sacred and the Profane and The Myth of the Eternal Return — though he wrote nearly 20, maybe more. He was one of those nearly unbelievable scholars, who created/invented the field of what most call “comparative religion” but he called “the history of religions.” It’s a great, and profound, understanding of the kinds of needs religions are trying to meet. Fully “demythologized,” but he can make that even more revealing and (again) profound. I think he read around 18 languages, had had his first article published in a scientific journal at age 13, by 17 had had 100 published, and so on. His History of Religious Ideas volumes are permanent reference works.
The goal is to identify the deep needs and questions our species has, without worshiping any particular religion or set of gods. Those are like “brands” (Buick, Ford, etc.) where the subject (in this analogy) is with “Transportation”, independent of any particular brand of getting there.
What you’re doing sounds similar to the Montessori approach. Do you see it that way? Where/how does it differ?
Davidson Loehr
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Duane,
Your last post on intuition seems very wrong to me. What data support your sweeping claim that intuition “knows” something, or is “right,” as opposed to being merely a feeling or hunch that has no necessary connection to truth at all? People bet billions of dollars every day based on their intuitions, and almost all of them lose. Why on earth would you claim that intuition is “a second mode of knowing that is direct…” etc? Most people’s intuitions, most of the time, are wrong. I suspect — but don’t know — that the times they are right fit simple models of chance: once in awhile, we’re going to be right, but we tend to remember only those times, not all the times we “knew intuitively” but were quite wrong. You’re making sweeping claims without any proof. As the experience of gamblers seems to show clearly, intuition is, almost always, wrong. If you think you have a quality of intuition that is anomalously right most or all of the time, there must be a way to subject yourself to some controlled experiments that can measure your intuition. But it’s your cosmic claims, supported only by “many people believe things like this,” that draw so many irate responses. Do you think your intuition is more trustworthy than the intuition of people who think you are wrong? If so, how? How is this about “intuition” rather than just Duane?
Davidson
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Ed,
I just read your last note to Jon, and it reminded me of something that might support your notion of ideas/consciousness that is transferred from one living thing to another. It comes from some experiments done a few decades ago. I think (but am not sure here) that I read it in one of Robert Ardrey’s books — so, 40+ years ago. The experiment had two parts, as I remember it. Electrodes were attached to the leaves of two plants that grew next to each other — but I don’t think their branches touched. First, the experimenter walked up to the two plants, took out a lighter and burned a leaf on one of the plants. The electronics recorded quick responses from the plant, then from both plants. I don’t know whether the experimenter did this just once or several times, though it would be important to know. But the second half of the experiment is where, for me, it got very spooky. The experimenter again walked up to the two plants, but just stood there — no burning, no lighter. Both plants responded to his very presence, making the electronic graph surge. To me, this is spooky because I don’t have a conceptual framework for it. But if others replicated this experiment, or if a considerable number of experiments like this have been done, with similar results, then we would have to find a larger framework within which to understand things like communication, awareness, empathy (or fear), and so on. I imagine there are key works that could let you search for these experiments through Bing/Google.
How would such information be transmitted? biological “radio waves”? We must have the technology to record any such “communication” between plants? or animals? I’m also thinking of the “spread of affect” found in herds of some animals — Thompson’s gazelles, for instance. In some cases, it may be as simple as other gazelles jumping/responding, not to the fear or alarm, but simply to the motion of the first gazelle jumping as they do when they see/sense fear. But other cases seem — to me, anyway — to suggest that we should do experiments, and probably have the technology to do them. How do huge flocks of birds turn and bank together so perfectly when there are only a few inches between them? Same question with huge schools of fish. I’ve read a fairly recent paper saying that each bird is responding only to the movements of the birds next to it, but this seems wrong: there would be some time delay, yet watching huge flocks do this doesn’t seem to show any time delay. Maybe these things are indicative of a whole slew of odd sorts of — communication? spread of affect? instructions? They’re spooky to me, and while it wouldn’t impress me if a thousand people believed a certain “cause” for this, controlled experiments would probably shake up my understanding in disturbing but good ways.
Davidson
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Ed,
I think we may be near clarification. Math is a good example because it’s purely conceptual and mental, not empirical — no claim to experiencing anything like Cosmic Numbers. I’m talking about mental states, imagination, things which, like math, have nothing empirical involved, nothing out in the world. And the fact that lots of people report “experiencing” things doesn’t mean there’s anything actually going on outside their minds: millions of children report bogeymen, monsters under their beds and so on, but I don’t know anyone who wants to suggest that, therefore, there ARE monsters under the bed. And that young woman reported “experiencing” giving birth to ten hybrid alien babies while in “dream time,” but again, no real, physical babies outside of her mind — and the assumptions of people who think that way. That’s the category of feelings of being connected to the universe (what on earth could that mean? How would anyone know what it felt like, or what there was to connect to?) or being part of a cosmic mind, etc. I’m saying these are like the monsters under the bed. In different cultures, these would be called different things. But in every case, they’re internal mental states. Psychology or neurosciences might have the best chance of explaining what’s going on when people feel certain something’s “going on”. LSD and other drugs have triggered similar reactions, with very powerful and persuasive feelings, but again, we’re seduced from inside, not outside. Same with the “nonlocal quantum information.” If something like this exists at a subatomic level, there’s no reason to think it exists at the much larger level of our nervous system, and if it did, it should be detectable by neuroscientific technologies. This desire that our inner thoughts, feelings and certainties have some empirical, outside, even “cosmic” grounding is no more solid than supposing that the monsters under the bed must really exist, maybe in some nonlocal quantum way. We have vivid, often weird, imaginations that can be set off in many ways — LSD as still one of the most widely experienced.
I’m reminded of a story William James told, I think in his Varieties of Religious Experience, which you may be familiar with. He had an absolutely vivid dream one night, in which the meaning of life, the universe and everything was suddenly revealed to him in a crystal clear way. Luckily, he kept a pad and paper by his bed, and in his half-sleep reached over and wrote it down, then returned to sleep. In the morning he grabbed the pad, and sure enough: he had written the message down. The message: “Grass is green.” I can imagine someone spinning this into something very Buddhist: Grass is green, it is what it is, everything is straightforward, don’t complexify things, and so on. But that’s no great revelation from a cosmic consciousness or monster under the bed.
It seems much more helpful to recognize that these sometimes profound and persuasive certainties are, like the monsters, entirely cooked up inside our heads. Same with witches, demons, angels, and all the other such colorful products of our imaginations and cultural imaginations. And I think it’s worth insisting that if people actually think they have access to such cosmic truths, they should be urged to sign up for controlled experiments that might see what’s going on. I remember reading about feelings of Oneness With All, and some neurological experiments showing what and where in the brain the short-circuits occur that we interpret this way. Again, everything’s going on inside, not outside. Schizophrenia’s “voices” are here too — I don’t know that anyone is really wanting to argue that these “voices” are connected with individuals — or nonlocal quantum beings — located outside the heads of those with schizophrenia. John Nash’s story fits here in an interesting way. Eventually, he was able to neutralize the voices in his head by engaging them logically, arguing that what they were saying made no sense, then dismissing them. Prior to that, the voices seemed to have their own crazy logic. But he learned to reclaim them as his thoughts, answerable to his logic. And this “cured” him, by restoring his mental integrity. That seems a more important goal than trying to hold out for an independent existence for our inner voices or imaginations. As people in politics, ideology, advertising, fiction etc. know, we are very easily misled by those who can play upon our needs, hopes, wishes, imaginations or pathologies. Nor is this reducing life to something “less” — it’s helping to make it more whole, more integrated, as I see it.
Davidson
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Ed,
I think I agree with you, with the qualification that science can only admit as “true, for now” things that can be tested and replicated — replicated in controlled experiments by people who do not believe or accept the theories they’re testing. A lot of people’s certainties are not empirical, and don’t exist outside their minds, and perhaps the biases of their social groups. Still, they’re often willing to fight and die for them: witness our wars, suicide bombers and so on. It’s important, I think, to say Yes, some people report some unbelievable things. These things don’t exist outside their minds, as measured by replicable experiments with non-believers, but to the people involved, they’re “real.” (In the same sense that their spouses are beautiful/handsome, their children brilliant, and their political positions absolutely true, their religion the only really true one.) I’m not attracted to words like “delusion” or “hysteria” for these things; “beliefs” will serve.
But it’s important to keep a core of true-for-now things that transcend personal beliefs and private experiences (giving birth to ten hybrid alien babies). People’s private worlds can be pretty scary, and it can be disastrous to treat them as true. The — what was it called, the “repressed memory syndrome”? — that put some parents and daycare operators in prison for a long time, but which was later exposed as unfounded and untrue. The witch-burnings. All the Endtime scenarios that involve people doing scary things, but also a narrow kind of capitalism that deludes people into thinking Stuff can make their lives meaningful. A lot of our certainties should be exposed as private illusions, self-deceptions, bad ideologies, etc. But as long as we’re certain of them, no facts can make much of a difference.
Is the truth always best? No, but the context matters here. I just saw “Mr. Holmes,” which makes this point nicely. I have a friend whose husband died of cancer many years ago. He was a terribly narcissistic man with little love for anyone else — including his 7-year-old daughter who adored him. I talked with her a year or two after her dad’s death, and asked her what that experience was like. She said in some ways it was wonderful and life-giving (!). What? She told me of the day she was alone with her father (her mother overheard it all from outside the room), and misinterpreted his body language and spoken language — which was fairly sarcastic — as expressing a warm and wonderful love for her. She hugged her father and exclaimed something like “Oh Daddy, you love me, you do love me! I am so happy! I knew you loved me, but hadn’t felt it until now!” Her mother told me that after the little girl left the room, her father told her mother “Christ, keep that little brat away from me, will you?” He didn’t love his daughter. He didn’t really love anybody, and was not a nice person. But who would want to tell this little girl the truth? If the belief that you’ve given birth to hybrid alien babies makes you feel special and validated in ways nothing else has been able to, then it’s done a good thing (though, I think, not in the best way). If you’re sure you can really intuit unseen elements (numbers in a box out of sight, hidden patterns of the universe, et al) and that gives you a feeling of being connected to a larger unseen reality — and you want that sort of feeling — then it’s done a good thing for you. If knowing your daddy loved you before he died gives you an emotional and psychological grounding that lasts you for many years, then the truth of the matter — for you — isn’t relevant. Again, the movie “Mr. Holmes” makes this point wonderfully (Ian McKellen and Laura Linney are worth seeing in anything, I think).
So I’m not discounting untrue-but-deeply-cherished certainties. And sometimes I’ll just let the illusion be with friends who need it, as I suspect they let some of my illusions remain unscathed. But we can’t collapse everything into mere feelings — even overwhelming feelings, like finally gaining the desperately-sought knowledge that your daddy loves you. There is still a reality that all of us can share, and that can give us a kind of common reality that lets us communicate, explore, etc. together. And it’s important, as we grow up, to learn that there is a categorical difference between certainty and truth, feeling and fact, desperate need and hard reality. So I think the kind of science best equipped to see the empirical dimension of most of these phenomena is probably psychology: how our wishes and needs can generate assurances that are invisible to others (the daddy’s unconditional love, for example), and what in our history or our make-up created the need met by unreal beliefs in a world where real things don’t comfort us.
I suspect these things happen with other species, as well. Dogs and cats dream, often play alone, imagining a ball to be — what? to represent what? I know you can embarrass a dog by “catching” it in this kind of play. First time I realized it was the last time I tried to “catch” a dog doing this. (I’m not sure you can embarrass a cat, perhaps not any solitary species.) So when we get technologies that let us measure these things across species, this area of imagining what we need will be able to be tested empirically. Not sure that will be welcomed universally….
Davidson
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Ed, Duane, Ursula et al,
It’s hard to pinpoint what seems so fundamentally wrong about arguing from non-empirical opinions that can’t be replicated by those who don’t share those opinions. But a few days ago, I got an unusual video through “ForbiddenKnowledgeTV.com” that seems helpful. Here’s the link:
It’s long — about 30 minutes — but interesting, especially in light of this discussion of what is and isn’t science, what should and shouldn’t be taken seriously as empirical data. The gist of it is simple, but I think the video makes it a lot more persuasive and interesting. This young woman Bridget Nielson — 26 — has given birth to about ten hybrid alien babies, in a ship “up above” the Earth. I am convinced she is completely sincere, and certain. I can’t imagine an argument that could shake her, because she keeps her frame of reference grounded in the community of those who think as she does. And those who think as she does think that yes, humans are having hybrid alien babies a lot. The babies are kept “up there” by the aliens, though she has visited and spent some time with some of her children. The aliens, she reports, don’t choose humans randomly, but work in family lines. So her whole family are among the True Believers. The only way to be convinced of this is to believe as she and they do. No empirical data will ever show it. And she doesn’t date men who don’t share this belief. Why would she? Also, she’s clear that the “up there” isn’t measured in miles; she refers to it as happening in “dream time,” but is clear that the events in this “dream time” are as — or more — real than the events on Earth, and in Sedona, where she apparently lives.
It’s easy for me, and probably for all of you, to think of a dozen things wrong with her argument, but it’s hard to doubt her certainty. This seems to be a parallel to the discussion we’re having about what counts as science and what counts only as certainty, linked to anomalies, the certainties of a few others, and so on. Duane, you have put a tremendous amount of weight on one experience you had 30-40 years ago in an experiment where your data were regarded as anomalous even then. But if you want to demonstrate to non-true-believers that these things are empirical, why not volunteer for a bunch of experiments under controlled conditions today? I’ve read of Randi the magician doing these experiments, showing that when cards or numbers are placed in a box up near the ceiling (i.e., out of sight), not a single person who claimed special powers in this area could tell what they said. I’m sure it would be fairly easy to find people who could set up such well-controlled experiments. That would provide empirical proof that could be replicated by people who don’t share your assumptions — the essence of the scientific method.
Without this, how can we tell the difference between Certainty and what should, for now, be regarded as true? Science depends on this: a way to have doubters test experimental results and theoretical predictions they believe are wrong. The experiment must be able to be replicated by those who don’t believe them, or they should/must be regarded as personal opinions or Certainties, but not facts, not data, not truth. This isn’t impolite at all. It’s saying that there’s a lot riding on what we regard as true rather than merely opinions, idiosyncrasies, or mere Certainties. (The capital is because, though they have no connection to truth, Certainties still trump solid data for many, many people: advertising, ideology and politics depend on it. We’ve all had the experience of being dead certain and dead wrong at the same time: ever fall in love with the wrong person, bet on the wrong horse, become persuaded of nonsense?) We don’t have to like truth, and it doesn’t have to make us feel good, or empowered, or Special: we die, we turn to dust, and are forgotten within just a few generations. As Borges put it, we die twice: once when our body gives out, and finally when there is no one left to tell our story. By this measure, all of my great-great-grandparents are entirely dead, and almost all my great-grandparents. For that matter, so are almost all my great-aunts and great-uncles. One great-uncle still “lives” in powerful and life-changing memories my brother and I have, but when we’re gone, he’s dead. Perhaps I and my cousins have traits that those long-dead people also had, and perhaps we got them from them, in our DNA. But if so, we don’t know it, so while the traits survive, the humans who were vehicles for them are, still, entirely dead. People usually hope there’s something “more” to them and that they’ll somehow continue to “exist” after death — though few hold out the same hope for dolphins, fish, birds or cockroaches — and our imaginations are very good at imagining all sorts of ways in which we’re really more Special than other animals, will somehow “live” forever, are somehow meaningfully “linked” to great things — “we’re stardust!! We’re the whole universe, conscious of itself!”
But this is where this discussion of science and non-science resides, as I’ve read the many comments: between what should be accepted — for now — as truth, and what must be regarded as merely opinions and the attitude of Certainty. I’m certain that young Bridget Nielson is certain she is the mother of ten hybrid alien children. I think if you watch this video, you may be pretty sure of it too (she could just be a fairly good actress, of course. But if she is, there are others who genuinely believe the sorts of things she is saying). And she’s likeable, seems like a good person, and so on. But if we’re going to regard anomalies as true because a few — or thousands — of people are Certain, then we’re saying we don’t want Science at all. We all have a right to our opinions, but no one has to respect our opinions, only our right to hold them — heck, some of you probably wouldn’t even respect the undoubted truth of my political, sartorial or gustatory choices.
Perhaps some in this discussion secretly do agree with this woman in the video (it’s a pretty good interviewer, by the way. He doesn’t scoff, he can enter some of her assumptions for the interview, she feels comfortable with him, he draws her out, and she thanks him for the interview after it’s over — not like Richard Dawkins interviewing someone with whom he doesn’t agree). I doubt that many here would agree with her or her worldview. But how, exactly would you argue that she’s wrong, without referring to bodies of “truth” established by experiments that can be, or have been, replicated by others who don’t believe in them, yet still find similar results? And if you can’t say why you think this woman is wrong, how could you say anyone is wrong, or any opinion? My understanding of science is that it does have a way to make this distinction, and that it must be grounded in theories established by controlled experiments that have been replicated by others who don’t believe the theories could possibly be true.
See what you think I’m missing here?
Davidson
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Ursula,
I think your university is an anomaly in this regard, though my information is anecdotal: some news stories, tales from friends who are professors here at the U. of Texas in Austin, from a few young acquaintances in IT or the sciences who have told me about avoiding humanities and other “soft” courses to be more competitive, etc. But the most detailed story is the oldest, from 30 years ago. It was a Wednesday Luncheon (great weekly event: lunch, with wine, subsidized by the Divinity School, faculty urged to attend the lunch, always a good speaker). The speaker was the psychiatrist who was dean of the university’s medical school (Univ. of Chicago). He talked about a new 5-year pre-med undergrad course they were starting because they were turning out good doctors who were terrible with actual patients, had few people skills, and saw the whole enterprise as one of hard science. This new program had a lot of humanities courses put back into it. I have no idea how that worked, whether they still do it.
I hadn’t thought about it, but maybe medicine is much more vulnerable to this. But there are plenty of cases from hard sciences, including cell biology, aren’t there? I’m thinking of all those who insisted that Lynn Margulis’s ideas about symbiogenesis were wrong, bad, idiotic, etc. But these attitudes should show up whenever scientists get key parts of their identity from a certain theory, which is being challenged. I’m not thinking of many examples from cell biology because I don’t know much about it. But I remember the story of how Arthur Eddington humiliated and effectively ended the career of the young physics genius Chandrashakar — in the 1920’s I think — after inviting the Indian to present his paper to the distinguished crowd at … Cambridge? Oxford? It’s easy for me to confuse them. Chandra’s theory, as everybody knows now, concerned what would happen when a star at least 1.4 times the mass of our sun used up all its fuel. He said it would have to go on contracting and contracting until … he couldn’t see how that could stop. Eddington then followed Chandra, mocking him, laughing about how by this (absurd) theory, the mass would have to keep contracting until, perhaps, not even light could escape. He finished by pronouncing that “I think there should be a law of nature to prevent this.” Chandra could not find a decent teaching position in Europe after this, and wound up at the U. of Chicago, where he spent the rest of his career. Half a century later, Chandra was awarded the Nobel Prize for that early theory, which accounted for the formation of Black Holes, and that 1.4 figure is known as the Chandrashakar Limit. That too is that arrogance, orthodoxy, Certainty, etc. There must be some good books on how this happens in sciences, everywhere? Another anecdote I remember came from architecture (who said “the plural of ‘anecdote’ is ‘data'”?). Who designed St. Peter’s in … London? Wren? Anyway, some regulatory board wouldn’t approve of his plans because they said he needed another big column to support the roof. He disagreed, they had the power, he built the column. But few knew that he stopped that column a couple inches short of the ceiling as a testament to his own certainty. There must be a book with a whole slew of these stories.
Another free association on science/humanities comes from E.O. Wilson, one of his newest books, where he says that it is the humanities that we need most to help save us, rather than the sciences. From stories like these, I’ve formed the idea of a sciences vs. humanities divide — well, also from C.P. Snow’s 1959 book THE TWO CULTURES, about how, even by then, sciences and humanities had become cultures unable to communicate with one another. (Christopher Wren’s story is more about human nature, but a first cousin to the others.)
Well, another anecdote from my own experiences 35 years ago, on the human nature, hubris, where very bright people will not see the very obvious implications of their beliefs. A professor of theology/history had presented a very nice lecture on a figure in Christian history who had been very blunt about there being no “heaven” up above the clouds, siding with science to say such a thing was not possible. With some evident pride, the professor concluded with “So when people say Christians are ignorant of science or logic, they are obviously ignorant of this man.” I raised my hand, and said well, the bigger point was that without a place to live — outside our imaginations — God couldn’t have the anthropomorphic attributes like seeing, hearing prayers, caring, or loving, and it’s not clear why anyone would need to care about such an impotent, non-existant God. The room of maybe 35 got very quiet, as he said — with haughtiness, as I remember it — “I was speaking as a Christian!” I knew when it was time to apologize and backpedal. But it’s the same deal: where a certain orthodoxy and certainty are felt to be essential to one’s personal and/or professional identity, logic can’t get much of a foothold. It’s about human nature, more than about science, religion, politics, or any other area where our Certainty earns the capital letter.
Davidson
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Ursula,
In broadest terms, I mean science curricula devoid of the humanities. It produces a lot of scientists who ignore the question of “How we should live, so that when we look back in ten or fifty years, we can be glad we lived that way.” Without including that question in any calculus of who we are and what we should be doing with our intellectual gifts, it has in places produced fundamentalist anti-fundamentalists — Richard Dawkins as the most notorious example I can think of, or H.L. Mencken from nearly a century ago. These “ultimate concerns” have long been claimed by religion, some philosophy (Kierkegaard as the chief one, Wittgenstein as another I know pretty well), the humanities, etc. But we’ve seen the humanities become an endangered species, omitted from a lot of science education because students need to have more hard sciences courses to remain competitive in finding jobs. Religion, philosophy and the humanities can’t carry our ultimate concerns any more, but sciences are pretty loathe to touch them. (Frans de Waal is a notable exception. As the world’s most influential primatologist/ethologist, he has made it his mission to reclaim the subjects of Who we are and How we should live from religions, as many of his book titles show.)
This accusation of exalting Certainty over Humanity can just as easily be leveled against religions, much philosophy, politics, etc: the attitude of Certainty is our most seductive demon (“seduction” as in “leading us astray”). Religious dogmatism & orthodoxy have done immense harm, on a greater scale than sciences (which are much newer). But the history of science is also filled with examples of a dogmatic certainty about the orthodoxy-du-jour ignoring human costs. One famous example is that of Ignatz Semmelweiss; another is the confidence doctors placed in “bleeding” patients in the 17th/18th centuries (maybe later, I don’t know).
Semmelweiss was the obstetrician who, in the mid-19th century, decided that doctors who came from performing autopsies straight to delivering babies might be carrying something — something invisible — on their hands that was contributing to the high death rate among mothers. I don’t want to look up the figures now, but think it approached 10%. He made the doctors under him scrub their hands with a chlorine bleach before delivering babies, and the death rate dropped by around 90% (as I remember it). He had LOTS of empirical evidence saying that it might at least be a good idea to scrub with a chlorine bleach. But germ theory hadn’t been invented, and scientists were certain that his ideas were spooky nonsense. My favorite quote came from a highly respect obstetrician who dismissed Semmelweiss’ idea as foolishness because “Doctors are gentlemen, and a gentleman’s hands are always clean”. Mothers under this doctor’s care continued to die at rates ten times those of Semmelweiss’ patients. That blindness is what I mean by the “orthodoxy of mechanistic/positivist sciences”. I also think of it as the terrible damage that can be and has been done by “the attitude of Certainty”.
The “bleeding” practice is well known, but I placed it with the Semmelweiss story after reading an article sometime this year about how Mozart died at age 35. He was quite ill with what sounded like bad flu-like symptoms, and was very weak. He went to a doctor who promptly bled him, a lot, to cure his illness. He died during or shortly after being bled. The doctor, I’m sure, was certain that “I had done everything I could do to save him.” Mozart was killed by the orthodoxy of late 18th century European medicine.
I framed it as orthodoxy because the attitude, and the blindness to some of the horrible effects of exalting “the way we think things are” over consideration of what’s really happening in front of our eyes — this reminded me of so many horrible chapters in the history of religion. I’d add the Tuskegee syphilis experiment that ran for forty years to the list, too. Keeping black men with syphilis alive — but untreated — so Science could find out if syphilis affected them differently from white men — which could only be determined by an autopsy — this was a horrid example of Certainty, Orthodoxy, intellectualism over empiricism.
Calling it only orthodoxy was misleading; I could have been more clear. Some of this comes from years of discussions/arguments with both religious fundamentalists and “scientistic” anti-religious fundamentalists, and the deep feeling that the arguments all felt the same: arguing against a brick wall of orthodoxy, certainty, arrogance, etc.
Hope this is more clear, and thanks for asking for clarification, Ursula.
Davidson
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Mike,
I’d like to counter your response as one who is familiar with science, but educated in religion (Ph.D. covered theology, the philosophy of religion, philosophy of science and Wittgenstein’s language philosophy). Analogies — like using words like “living” with very different meanings — can seduce us but not, I think, help us. The notion of our planet as “living” is at best mystical and poetic. There’s an emotional appeal there — especially in this time when religion is fast losing much of an anchor in reality. It would be nice to feel that words like Mystery, God, Salvation, Eternity and so on had some realistic referents, even when at another level we know they don’t. I think it’s more helpful, and more accurate, to see the religious dialect as just that: a way of talking, a way of framing important questions. But we need to keep in touch with what we actually think we’re asking, in down-to-earth, empirical ways. That’s not a reductionistic “positivist” approach at all, just an honest one. We’re past the time when honest religion scholars want to defend God as a Fellow, a Being, or Eternity as a quantity of time, or Salvation as anything other than a healthier kind of wholeness here on Earth, and so on. That’s all good and honest. The question, though, is then of what use ARE the words of religious jargon — and the habit of using words in contradictory ways (like “living,” “conscious” and so on)? Or are these vocabularies we should shelve, while working to put into plain talk — ordinary language — what we think we’re really asking. Built into this is the hard task of tackling our own emotional needs and emotional, psychological, biographical reasons for wanting or needing some sort of beyond-this-time-and-place hope for our “life.” We’ve lost little or nothing if religion is understood as no longer having much to contribute to the questions of who we are or how we should live, as long as we can find other ways of framing those questions that CAN lead us to more solid answers that have integrity and can offer us a fertile way of dealing with those inescapable existential questions.
One shorthand way of stating religion’s cardinal problem today is that “ontology has become an empirical question” rather than philosophical, theological or metaphysical. And as such — as primatologist/ethologist Frans De Waal likes to say — religions don’t have much to contribute to these discussions any longer because “they’re just too new.” But other disciplines — like ethology — do have a lot to offer to these discussions. But while it’s emotionally understandable why people would want to hold on to language that has been soaked in so many centuries of (other people’s) emotional associations … well, I’m reminded of one of Wittgenstein’s many curt insights: “It’s a sad thing when a language dies, just as it’s a sad thing when the love between a man and a woman dies. But there’s nothing to be done about it.” The biggest enemy of religion over the past few centuries has not been science, but the preachers and teachers who speak for religion. By circling the wagons around yesteryear’s orthodoxies and certainties, they have proved the most faithless of all: faithless, not in a moribund dialect/language game, but faithless in the fact that the answers to our existential questions really are to be found in the world around us — even if they don’t support beliefs and habits that have been with us for a long time.
We’re living in a time when knowledge is replacing belief, and science is replacing religion as the source of the most trustworthy revelations about who we are and how we should live, so that when we look back in ten or fifty years, we can be glad we lived that way. The real sadness would be if we forgot to keep asking those deep questions that gave rise to all the gods and religions we’ve created along the way as provisional frameworks: Who are we, and how should we live? I know this puts me outside the orthodoxy of most who preach or teach religion, but we mostly preach or teach what we have been taught. (It also puts me outside the orthodoxy of mechanistic/positivist sciences.) Unfortunately, once we’re certain about beliefs, we also think they’re true.
Welcome to this strange but interesting discussion, Mike. And yes, it covers several fields, and includes some incompatible views. Not a bad thing, to a point. I’ve mentioned this somewhere else here, but here’s a 5-minute video I made recently on these two fundamental questions about what it means to be human: https://youtu.be/jEhQBAVX9hQ
Davidson
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