Defectors from the Islamic State

Thousands of young Muslim have left Europe to join the Islamic state. The good news is that many of them have fled back to Europe:

A small but growing number of defectors from the Islamic State are risking reprisals and imprisonment to speak out about their disillusionment with the extremist group, according to a research organization that tracks former and current militants.

The Islamic State considers defectors as apostates, and most of the hundreds thought to have left the group have gone into hiding.

But 58 defectors, nine of them from Western Europe and Australia, have gone public with their testimonies since last year, according to a report to be published Monday by the International Center for the Study for Radicalization at King’s College London.

According to the report, some of the defectors said they disapproved of the Islamic State’s hostility to other Sunni rebel groups that opposed President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and its indiscriminate killings of civilians and hostages. Others grew weary of what they saw as favoritism and mistreatment by commanders, or were disappointed that the life of a militant was far less exciting, or lucrative, than they had imagined. Two left after they found out that they had been selected as suicide bombers.

Really, the western way of life is better for most people. Many of us fear the appeal of fanaticism, revolution, and totalitarian rule, but we shouldn't.

Metaphysics and Politics

I was reading some conservative Catholic philosophy last night — don't ask why, sometimes I just do that sort of thing — when I came across this:

Only in modern times has it come to be taken for granted that politics is entirely secular. The inevitable result is the demoralization of politics. Politics loses its moral structure and purpose, and turns into an affair of group interest and personal ambition. Government comes to the aid of only the well organized and influential, and it is limited only where it is checked by countervailing forces. Politics ceases to be understood as a pre-eminently human activity and is left to those who find it profitable, pleasurable, or in some other way useful to themselves. Political action thus comes to be carried out purely for the sake of power and privilege.

This is another perfect example of trying to understand politics from philosophical principles, rather than from history. Because that sounds to me like a much better description of medieval than modern politics. Modern politics has tended to be full of moralizing, and medieval politics had a lot to do with ambition and group interest.

Theoretically-minded people -- not just conservative Catholics but libertarians, communists, and others of that ilk -- like to sit down in their studies and reason out how different philosophies ought to work in practice. Conservative Catholics think that their faith sets a much higher value on human life and dignity than secular liberalism does, since they see in their fellow men the image of God, and therefore they think that Catholic societies ought to be more devoted to human welfare and the good of the community and so on. But instead of reasoning, they should look out the window. Actual Catholic societies — medieval Europe, 18th-century Mexico, Franco's Spain — have not shown any special devotion to human welfare. They have at times endorsed slavery, onerous serfdom, wife-beating, genocidal warfare, the torture of heretics, and whatever other governmental sin you care to think of. And then this:

Can we affirm the dignity and equality of individual persons—values we ordinarily regard as secular—without giving them transcendental backing? Today these values are honored more in the breach than in the observance; Manhattan Island alone, with its extremes of sybaritic wealth on the one hand and Calcuttan poverty on the other, is testimony to how little equality really counts for in contemporary America. To renew these indispensable values, I shall argue, we must rediscover their primal spiritual grounds.

Again the assertion is made that since Catholicism sets a higher spiritual value on human souls than secular thought, it ought to be more conducive to real equality. On the contrary, equality is a thoroughly modern and secular idea, not much practiced in any society between the Bronze Age and the 19th century; most of the societies in between, including just about all of the Catholic ones, have been aristocratic, with huge differences in wealth and status.

Right now in America conservative Catholics have worked themselves into a fearful lather over the decline of Christian civilization, the demise of the religious world view, and a coming era of intolerance that will effectively banish religious people from public life. They are filling the internet with essays like the one I quoted from, arguing that without faith in the divine nature of human souls something terrible on the scale of Hitler or Stalin is bound to happen. The level of anger and fear is great and seems to be rising.

At the philosophical level I have nothing to say to this. I can't offer any strong philosophical defense of secular morality, and I can't offer any metaphysical reason why people ought to care about each other. I find, though, both in my own head and in my society, that metaphysics seems not to matter very much. I can't explain why I care about my fellow humans, but I do. There is simply no evidence that believers are more ethical than non-believers (or the reverse). Some modern, secular societies (Denmark, e.g.) have shown a regard for every human life far greater than anything achieved in more overtly religious eras; others (e.g., Stalin's Russia) have achieved an almost complete disregard. Certain Catholic societies (18th-century Haiti) have been as bad as any modern totalitarian state. Of all the factors that go into making a society or a government good or bad, religion seems to be a minor one.

What I want to say to worried believers is to stop fretting about theoretical problems and consider the actual situation. Does America really look to you like Soviet Russia? Instead of worrying that assisted suicide will lead to a devaluation of all human life, look into our hospitals and see that we work far harder to keep dying people alive than anyone else in history. Instead of fretting about religious intolerance, glance at any thriving church and see how freely the people come and go, and how loudly they sing their hymns. At the moment gay marriage is an ugly flash point, but that is partly because certain believers have accorded it an importance far greater than it deserves; it does not represent some sort of watershed transition from a Christian to a secular society. Divorced from all that theoretical superstructure, it is simply a political problem to be worked out, like any other. Yes, our society has problems with inequality and brutality and corporate dehumanization; instead of philosophizing about their deep connection to ideas about the soul, work to make them better. You might find a lot of secular people willing to help.

Dreadful Hammers

As 19th-century geology established that the earth is millions of years old, not 6,000, John Ruskin lamented the impact of these revelations on his faith:

If only the geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.

The Burden of Secularism

David Brooks has been reading about secular people, and he offered some interesting observations in today's column about burdens secular people take on themselves:

Secular individuals have to build their own communities. Religions come equipped with covenantal rituals that bind people together, sacred practices that are beyond individual choice. Secular people have to choose their own communities and come up with their own practices to make them meaningful.

As we have discussed here, some secular people feel this as a great lack, and others (David) don't. Because of a conversation I had the other day I have been thinking about funerals, and it strikes me that they create a particular problem for secular people. Religious funeral services have a traditional dignity that is hard for secular people to recreate. But not impossible; the wake for my father-in-law was a beautiful and moving experience, and it consisted only of a roomful of his friends taking turns telling stories about him.

Secular individuals have to build their own moral philosophies. Religious people inherit creeds that have evolved over centuries. Autonomous secular people are called upon to settle on their own individual sacred convictions.

I think this is a red herring, because I don't know any modern people who really follow traditional moral creeds. Indeed to many Christians the point of Jesus' moral teaching seems to be that it is all but impossible to follow -- give away all that ye own? turn the other cheek? -- which has a certain philosophical beauty but makes Christianity little use in  figuring out how to live day to day. In practice all the Christians, Jews, and Muslims I know decide for themselves, autonomously, which religious rules to follow and which to disregard. To me this makes their moral situation pretty much identical to that of secular people. Belief in god may serve to underpin, in some sense, the existence and importance of morality, but it doesn't tell you whether to use birth control. Anyway as Brooks admits there is no evidence religious people are more ethical than secular people, or vice versa, which says to me that morality ultimately rests on something quite different from faith.

One other burden: Past secular creeds were built on the 18th-century enlightenment view of man as an autonomous, rational creature who could reason his way to virtue. The past half-century of cognitive science has shown that that creature doesn’t exist. We are not really rational animals; emotions play a central role in decision-making, the vast majority of thought is unconscious, and our minds are riddled with biases. We are not really autonomous; our actions are powerfully shaped by others in ways we are not even aware of.

This is true, but I am not sure how it is relevant. Yes, 18th-century rationalism had an inadequate psychology focused too much on reason; but except for Ayn Randians, who thinks that way now? What is most appealing to me about Christianity is its psychology of original sin and redemption, so I simply plunder that and use it in my own thinking.

One of the stereotypes of our age is that we regularly come up against the question, is this all there is? Tedious job, rebellious children, mortgage payments, car repairs, watching television, complaining about Wall Street and Washington? Religion certainly offers an answer to this conundrum. But, really, I have never felt this as much of a problem. I have no trouble imagining the universe as a place of marvels, and human life as an astonishing and beautiful journey. When my own life seems small and boring I reach beyond it to art, history, anthropology, science, the whole vast apparatus of  human knowledge and creativity. This, to me, is the great reward of modernity, the thing we have to make up for losing the identity, community, certainty and faith that were the treasured possessions of traditional peoples. We have free access to all the world's traditions and knowledge, to all of its art, and can pick and choose from this vast banquet the things that delight us most, and the things that most help us through the troubles and tragedies of our lives.

Seeing God in Science (or Not)

Writer and TV personality Eric Metaxas recently penned an essay for the Wall Street Journal arguing that science "increasingly makes the case for God." The argument boils down to saying that since a trillion things had to happen in exactly the right way for us to be here, we are too unlikely to be the product of mere chance. Astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss fired back in the New Yorker, dismissing all of Metaxas' claims as backward reasoning:

It is true that a small change in the strength of the four known forces would imply that stable protons and neutrons, the basis of atomic nuclei, might not exist. (The universe, however, would—a rather large error in the Metaxas piece.) This is old news and, while it’s an interesting fact, it certainly does not require a deity.

Once again, Metaxas confuses cause and effect. The constants of the universe indeed allow the existence of life as we know it. However, it is much more likely that life is tuned to the universe rather than the other way around. We survive on Earth in part because Earth’s gravity keeps us from floating off. But the strength of gravity selects a planet like Earth, among the variety of planets, to be habitable for life forms like us. Reversing the sense of cause and effect in this statement, as Metaxas does in cosmology, is like saying that it’s a miracle that everyone’s legs are exactly long enough to reach the ground.

Whenever I think about these claims that this or that is so unlikely that God must have intervened, I remind myself that whatever the odds, something had to happen. After all, the odds against you sitting in your chair right now reading this would require a page of zeroes to express, even in scientific notation. (Your parents' genes could have combined in trillions of different ways; and their parents'; and their parents' before them . . . ) And yet, here you are. Pleased to meet you. Do you prove the existence of God?

Another thing I notice about arguments like Metaxas' is that he never asks what are the odds against the existence of a God who decides to create a universe exactly like this one, with us in it. He would probably respond that my question is absurd. And I agree.

Some things are mysteries, and likely always will be.

Faith in Technology

Nikolai Berdyaev, 1932:

For the contemporary European all faith has weakened. He is more free from optimistic illusions than the man of the XIX Century, set facing the bare, unadorned and severe realities. But in one regard modern man is optimistic and filled with faith, and this is his idol, to which everyone offers sacrifice. We herein come nigh to a very important moment in the spiritual condition of the contemporary world. Modern man believes in the might of technology, of the machine, and sometimes it would seem, that this is the one thing, in which he still believes.

And there seems to be a very serious basis for his optimism in this regard. The dizzying successes of technology in our epoch is a genuine marvel of the sinful natural world. Man is shaken and crushed by the might of technology, making all his life topsy-turvy. Man himself has created it, it is the product of his genius, of his reason, of his inventiveness, it is a child of the human spirit. Man has succeeded in unlocking secret powers of nature and using them for his own ends, of introducing a teleological principle into the activity of mechanical-physical-chemical powers.

But to master the results of his work man has not succeeded. Technology has come to seem more powerful than man himself, it subjugates him to itself. Technology is the sole sphere of the optimistic faith of man, his greatest achievement. But it brings man, however, much grief and disappointment, it enslaves man, it weakens his spiritualness, it threatens him with ruin.

Scientism vs. Humanism, Pinker vs. Wieseltier

Earlier this year The New Republic hosted a debate between Steven Pinker and Leon Wieseltier about the proper relationship between science and the humanities, and David Brooks gave this one of his journalism awards. I found it fairly interesting, although as much for what is not said as for what is.

Pinker leads off by noting that many philosophers and historians of earlier eras were very interested in science, kept abreast of new discoveries and even offered their own scientific theories (Hume, Descartes, Locke, Kant, etc.) Pinker wants to bring this world back; he wants humanists to know the science of our day as well as Locke or Plato knew that of their own times and to incorporate this knowledge into their work:

One would think that writers in the humanities would be delighted and energized by the efflorescence of new ideas from the sciences. But one would be wrong. Though everyone endorses science when it can cure disease, monitor the environment, or bash political opponents, the intrusion of science into the territories of the humanities has been deeply resented. Just as reviled is the application of scientific reasoning to religion; many writers without a trace of a belief in God maintain that there is something unseemly about scientists weighing in on the biggest questions. In the major journals of opinion, scientific carpetbaggers are regularly accused of determinism, reductionism, essentialism, positivism, and worst of all, something called “scientism.” The past couple years have seen four denunciations of scientism in this magazine alone.

This last gets to Pinker's real motivation for engaging in this debate: he feels aggrieved by all the attacks on science. The title of his first essay is, "Science is not Your Enemy," and he seems offended that anybody should dislike or fear science. But he keeps trying to have things both ways. He says religious people should not think that science is anti-religion, but then he crows that science

requires a radical break from religious conceptions of meaning and value. To begin with, the findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the origins of life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken.

He says that science is responsible for the modern world, but then takes exception when environmentalists or conservatives blame science for the world's failings. It is all a bit confused, but one thing comes through clearly: Pinker loves science, loves the certain knowledge it can give of the universe, and thinks anybody who doesn't appreciate the beauty and power of science is either a reactionary or a fool.

Wieseltier counters by accusing Pinker of assuming that all knowledge is science. If we really know it, says Wieseltier's Pinker, then it is science, because that is the only way we can really know things. To Wieseltier science is an important way of knowing but not the only one; philosophy, literary criticism, and other humanistic studies also produce knowledge. There are whole fields of scholarship, for example ethics and art criticism, about which science has nothing to say, and he easily pokes fun at certain scientists who have strayed into those realms:

What Pinker [and others] deny is that the differences between the various realms of human existence, and between the disciplines that investigate them, are final. For these scientizers, they are not differences in kind; they are differences only in appearance, whereas a deeper explanation, a scientific explanation, will expose the underlying sameness. The underlying sameness is the presumption of scientism. The scientizers do not respect the borders between the realms; they transgress the borders so as to absorb all the realms into a single realm, into their realm. They are not pluralists. With his uniform notion of intelligibility, Pinker rejects the momentous distinction between the study of the natural world and the study of the human world.

So Wieseltier's real goal is preserving the independence of theology, philosophy, and humanistic scholarship in the face of scientific imperialism. In the short term Wieseltier is certainly correct, since even Pinker admits that science has nothing to add to debates over the origins of World War I, let alone debates about what art is. In the long run Pinker expects all such questions to be subsumed into the science of the mind, but I think history will safely maintain its independence for at least the rest of this century.

Wieseltier also plays both sides of some questions in annoying ways. For example he says that science may have refuted the literal meaning of Genesis, but that very few believers have ever taken what that text says literally. This is false, and it also minimizes the extent to which modern scholarship has undermined religious teachings. Modern science denies the possibility of miracles, denies the existence of non-material beings such as angels or ghosts, denies that the self or soul is in any way separate from he physical operations of the brain. Modern Biblical criticism has, I would say, made it impossible to be certain what Jesus said about anything, and shown that several of the alleged letters of Paul cannot have been written by the man who wrote the Epistle to the Romans. Modern anthropology has shown how many different ways there are of organizing human society, making mockery of phrases like "traditional marriage." More broadly, modern scholarship has undermined age-old certainty, replacing firm faith with probability and flux.

I think about these questions all the time. What I believe about science makes it impossible for me to accept vast amounts of what has long passed for human knowledge. This includes beliefs about gods, spirits, magic and miracles but goes far beyond it. Once you know history and anthropology, you understand that artistic taste is a product of a certain time, place and class, and long-raging debates about the eternal forms of Beauty and Art become downright silly. The same goes for many other cultural artifacts: attitudes about marriage, sex roles, war, honor, and so on lose all firm footing and become merely discussions about preferences.

This is the way I think and the only way I have ever been able to think. And yet I worry about a world without traditional beliefs. Not that I think we are in one now; there is a huge amount of traditional baggage still hanging around in our societies. But what if we lost it altogether? Even the resolutely pro-science Pinker does a lot of dancing around the question of what a thoroughly scientific worldview would mean for us psychologically or as a society. Honestly the results so far are not all that encouraging. The freedom we have created for ourselves has led to as much anxiety as celebration. Religion's central place in life has been taken over, not by science or freedom, but entertainment. The new ideologies of our age -- communism, libertarianism, fascism -- have been uniformly destructive, leaving millions yearning for a past world of less freedom, more certainty, and less stridency. I am not at all sure that people can thrive without the guidance of tradition. But if we all come to understand that our own tradition is just one of thousands, its rules either arbitrary or designed to preserve the power of old elites, can we just choose to live in one anyway?

The pre-scientific world was human in scale, and it assigned great importance to us, our needs, and our place in God's plan. The scientific world is vast beyond our imagining, and in it we are smart apes living on an average planet circling an average star in one of a trillion galaxies. Whether we have any more of a role than bacteria or space dust remains an open question. Can we live with that? If we really incorporated that understanding into everything we think and do, where would we be?

Find Something More Interesting to Talk About

Dworkin has always been a frank and unembarrassed non-believer, but in his latest book, Religion Without God, he distances himself from the “militant atheism” that has been making headlines for the past decade and more. He deplores the divisive polemics of the New Atheists, and looks back nostalgically to a time, not so long ago, when people were less keen to sound off about belief and non-belief – a time, as he remembers it, when most educated people, including believers, were happy to pass over the biblical account of creation as simply “too silly to refute”. Atheism, for Dworkin, is uncontroversially true and truly boring, and atheists should find more interesting things to talk about.

-- Jonathan Rée, reviewing Ronald Dworkin's Religion Without God.

I find myself in sympathy with Dworkin's attitude. When I first got online, nigh fifteen years ago, I spent a lot of time searching out secular humanist sites and trying to engage in discussion with secular humanists. I discovered that people using that label wanted to spend all their energy arguing that religion was responsible for most of the evil in history, which I regard as absurd. Not wrong, really, just too ill-defined to be worth attacking or defending. (How could you possibly tease out the role of religion in something like the formation of early law codes and assign it blame or praise for stoning and burning offenders against communal values?) The questions I am interested in, like how nonbelievers can formulate and justify moral codes, were brushed aside by people mainly interested in venting their anger against the mean monks and nuns who taught them in the fifth grade. As for arguing about religion, what could be more pointless?

Is this Religion?

Before he died in February, Ronald Dworkin was working on a book titled Religion without God. The New York Review has an excerpt:

The familiar stark divide between people of religion and without religion is too crude. Many millions of people who count themselves atheists have convictions and experiences very like and just as profound as those that believers count as religious. They say that though they do not believe in a “personal” god, they nevertheless believe in a “force” in the universe “greater than we are.” They feel an inescapable responsibility to live their lives well, with due respect for the lives of others; they take pride in a life they think well lived and suffer sometimes inconsolable regret at a life they think, in retrospect, wasted. They find the Grand Canyon not just arresting but breathtakingly and eerily wonderful. They are not simply interested in the latest discoveries about the vast universe but enthralled by them. These are not, for them, just a matter of immediate sensuous and otherwise inexplicable response. They express a conviction that the force and wonder they sense are real, just as real as planets or pain, that moral truth and natural wonder do not simply evoke awe but call for it. . . .

The above, I think, describes me quite well. But then this:

What, then, should we count as a religious attitude? I will try to provide a reasonably abstract and hence ecumenical account. The religious attitude accepts the full, independent reality of value. It accepts the objective truth of two central judgments about value. The first holds that human life has objective meaning or importance. Each person has an innate and inescapable responsibility to try to make his life a successful one: that means living well, accepting ethical responsibilities to oneself as well as moral responsibilities to others, not just if we happen to think this important but because it is in itself important whether we think so or not.

The second holds that what we call “nature”—the universe as a whole and in all its parts—is not just a matter of fact but is itself sublime: something of intrinsic value and wonder. Together these two comprehensive value judgments declare inherent value in both dimensions of human life: biological and biographical. We are part of nature because we have a physical being and duration: nature is the locus and nutrient of our physical lives. We are apart from nature because we are conscious of ourselves as making a life and must make decisions that, taken together, determine what life we have made.

About this I am unsure. In some moods I feel certain that intelligent life does have some value, but in others I admit that I cannot really know this. Sometimes I feel that people really do make decisions, but other times I think that this is just mystifying language covering the operations of causality and chance. One day I am awed by the power of religious practice, religious language, and religious art, but the next it all seems ridiculous.

I do think of my own convictions and interests as religious in the definitional or legal sense. I do not believe that there is such a thing as a non-religious way to teach biology. Believing that there is some value in discovering and teaching the truth about evolution is in itself a sort of religion. Scientists sometimes justify their ideas as useful, but that is not why they hold them; they hold them because they see a real value in the truth quite apart from whether it has any use at all. What is the use of knowing that dinosaurs were related to birds? None. It is only wonderful.

That is where I always end up. To me, the universe is wonderful, and the opportunity I have had to experience and learn about it is a very great miracle.

Content Free Religion

Karen Armstrong explains again her view that religion should not be about belief, and used to be about something else entirely:

The biblical God is a “starter kit”; if we have the inclination and ability, we are meant to move on. . . . Religion is a form of practical knowledge, like driving or dancing. You cannot learn to drive by reading the car manual or the Highway Code; you have to get into the vehicle and learn to manipulate the brakes. The rules of a board game sound obscure and dull until you start to play, and then everything falls into place. There are some things that can be learned only by constant, dedicated practice. You may learn to jump higher and with more grace than seems humanly possible or to dance with unearthly beauty. Some of these activities bring indescribable joy –what the Greeks called ekstasis, a “stepping outside” the norm.

Religion, too, is a practical discipline in which we learn new capacities of mind and heart. Like premodern philosophy, it was not the quest for an abstract truth but a practical way of life. Usually religion is about doing things and it is hard work. Classical yoga was not an aerobic exercise but a full-time job, in which a practitioner learned to transcend the ego that impeded the ekstasis of enlightenment. The five “pillars” or essential practices of Islam are all activities: prayer, pilgrimage, almsgiving, fasting and a continual giving of “witness” (shahada) in everything you do that God (not the “gods” of ambition and selfishness) is your chief priority. . . . If you don’t do religion, you don’t get it.

“Credo ut intellegam – I commit myself in order that I may understand,” said Saint Anselm (1033-1109). In the late 17th century, the English word “belief” changed its meaning and became the intellectual acceptance of a somewhat dubious proposition. Religious people now think that they have to “believe” a set of incomprehensible doctrines before embarking on a religious way of life. This makes no sense. On the contrary, faith demands a disciplined and practical transcendence of egotism, a “stepping outside” the self which brings intimations of transcendent meaning that makes sense of our flawed and tragic world.

As I have written before, I find this appealing but can't get to it. For me, the words get in the way. Armstrong can say all she wants that religion is a way of life, not a list of beliefs, but go to church and you don't hear anybody talking about getting to ekstasis through practice. You hear that through faith in Jesus you can have eternal life. I regard this as a statement not so much false as incomprehensible. And when people say things that to me have no meaning, I leave the room.

Classical yoga was a practice, but it was a practice based on a baroquely imagined universe full of gods and spirits and vortices of power, all illustrated in the yoga manuals as purple cartoon monsters. Once I see the cartoon, the practice loses its appeal.

The ultimate point of prayer may be that the practice of asking for blessing and giving thanks shifts something in our minds and gives us a better relationship with the universe. But to pray you have to imagine a being that you can address with words. Did anybody ever actually pray to being itself?

How would Armstrong write a hymn? What words could she put it in that wouldn't be affirmations of some particular belief? I know secular people who love Handel's Messiah, which for them is a spiritual experience devoid of religious particulars. But the actual words are quite specifically Christian.

I am also dubious about Armstrong's history. It is very difficult to know what even our close friends "really believe," but to assert, as she does, that people like Confucius, the Buddha, and Jesus had no particular theological beliefs requires ignoring half of what they said. Religion is a mix of many things -- half-understood rituals, ancient stories, moral instruction, and so on -- but particular beliefs about the nature of the universe have always been an important strand.

Museums as Secular Temples

Alain de Botton:

You sometimes hear it said that art museums are our new churches. But, in practice, art museums abdicate much of their potential to function as new churches (places of consolation, meaning, community and redemption) through the way they handle the collections entrusted to them. While exposing us to objects of importance, they nevertheless seem unable to frame these in a way that links them powerfully to our inner needs.

What if modern museums of art kept in mind the example of the didactic function of Christian art? A walk through a museum of art should amount to a structured encounter with the ideas that it is easiest for us to forget but which are most essential and life-enhancing to remember. The challenge is to rewrite the agendas for our art museums so that collections can begin to serve the needs of psychology as effectively as they served those of theology, for centuries. Curators should attempt to put aside their deepseated fears of instrumentalism and once in a while co-opt works of art to an ambition of helping us to get through life. Only then would museums be able to claim that they had fulfilled completely the excellent but as yet elusive ambition of becoming substitutes for churches in a secularising society.

What is Miraculous?

What do we mean when we say that something is "miraculous"? You may not realize it, but the way we commonly use this word annoys many religious believers. They hate to hear this or that new technological toy described as a "miracle"; miracles, they think, are things authored by God, in contravention of the world's normal rules.

Reading one case of this complaint the other day, I started to wonder about the word and what it points toward. I do understand the philosophical implications of miracles: if things we regard as impossible, scientifically, regularly happen in response to prayers, that would be a powerful argument for religion. But are the things that happen in miracle stories really so amazing? It seems to me that our technology has gone far beyond what we used to regard as magical, or divine. Jesus walked on water, but Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Jesus revived a dead man; that happens in our hospitals hundreds of times a day. Jesus turned water into wine; how does that compare to the Internet as a wonder?

Most of the miracles in medieval miracle collections are cures of diseases; by that standard a big pharmaceutical factory easily outdoes all the saints put together. Some of St. Columba's miracles involved his instantly knowing about events hundreds of miles away; today we can watch those events unfold on television as they happen.

The more we learn about the universe, and the more our machines can do, the smaller the aspirations of ancient saints and mages seem to us. This, it seems to me, is a prime reason why the world is becoming more secular. What religion offers no longer seems miraculous to people in an age of technological wizardry. Even eternal life now seems more plausible to many people through downloading than through salvation.

There are things that I find miraculous, by which I mean both astonishing and unexplained: the existence and scale of the universe, the appearance of life, the evolution of intelligence, the beauty of our world. It is in contemplating these fundamental things that I come closest to religion. Yet I approach them, not through revelation, but through science and its machines. It is telescopes and microscopes that reveal the vast scale and age of the universe, paleontology and genetics that explain how we came to be here, history and anthropology that tell the story of our own species. Those are my miracles; there is my church.

Penguin Bubbles, or, Science Uncovers Another Miracle of Nature

Marine biologist Robert Hughes knew nothing about penguins, but he had recently been talking to his wife about the properties of  the new high tech swim suits used by Olympic competitors. So when he saw a video of emperor penguins leaving a trail of bubbles through the water, he wondered what the bubbles were for. Did they help the penguins move faster? So he chatted up a friend, John Davenport, an expert in animal locomotion. But Davenport didn't know either, and when they reviewed the literature they discovered that nobody seemed to know. So they decided to find out for themselves:

With the help of Poul Larsen, a mechanical engineer at the Technical University of Denmark, they analyzed hours of underwater footage and discovered that the penguins were doing something that engineers had long tried to do with boats and torpedoes: They were using air as a lubricant to cut drag and increase speed.

When an emperor penguin swims through the water, it is slowed by the friction between its body and the water, keeping its maximum speed somewhere between four and nine feet a second. But in short bursts the penguin can double or even triple its speed by releasing air from its feathers in the form of tiny bubbles. These reduce the density and viscosity of the water around the penguin’s body, cutting drag and enabling the bird to reach speeds that would otherwise be impossible.

For me, the real significance of this is the sheer astonishment of it. Air lubrication is cutting edge engineering in the twenty-first century -- indeed, we would not have thought to look for it in nature if engineers were not working out how to use it on our own machines -- but penguins were there long ago. To know this reductive scientific fact about penguins does not make them less wonderful, but more so.

Atheist Ex-Pastors and the Problem of Belief

Why do people believe? Why do they stop believing?

I am pondering this because of a long Times piece by Robert Worth about Jerry DeWitt, an ex-pastor who has become an atheist leader. What strikes me about DeWitt's story is the prominence he gives to particular events in conversion both to and away from Christianity:

DeWitt was born again in Jimmy Swaggart’s church thanks to his former elementary-school teacher, who persuaded him to come along with her to Baton Rouge. He later discovered that his teacher almost died while she was being born, and that she had emerged safely from the womb only after a preacher from a neighboring town was roused from sleep to offer a blessing in the delivery room. That preacher was DeWitt’s paternal grandfather. This coincidence had seemed providential to DeWitt, a sign that he was meant to be a preacher himself.

“This story has kept you feeling that God has a destiny for you,” DeWitt said. 

I have seen many similar stories. It seems that most people approach these most general and theoretical of questions through particular, dramatic events. Obviously the ground was well-prepared for DeWitt's conversion, through having grown up in a very religious family and community. He was looking for a sign. But he did not truly convert until he saw one.

For the reverse direction, Worth says that many young atheists cite the 9-11 attacks as the event that turned them decisively against religion in any form.

The habit of reading events as signs seems to be very deeply human. It may be at the core of what it means to have a religious outlook on life:

I heard parallel stories from a number of other participants in post-religion networks. “People have a really difficult time making decisions after they’ve lost their faith,” said Amanda Schneider, who organized a local Recovering From Religion group in Santa Fe (and also helps manage the broader organization). “They used to always base it on ‘What is God’s plan for me?’ They are still looking for something miraculous to guide them.”

I find this example strange. Unless you are hearing voices, how, exactly, is God explaining his plan? In a practical sense, how does pondering God's plan help decide people whether to major in accounting or marketing? However it works, many people seem to feel much better both about their choices and about the various random things that happen to them when they see everything as part of the Plan.

I am also struck by the role suffering plays in both kinds of narratives. Many people are turned toward God by suffering or failure; Chuck Colson's prison conversion comes to mind as the nearest example. On the other hand, many believers have turned away from God after thinking hard on suffering and what it means. Bart Ehrman, one of my favorite writers on early Christianity, renounced the church a few years ago, saying that he could no longer reconcile belief in a good God with the amount of suffering in the world. DeWitt, says Worth,

found it unbearable to promote beliefs that only seemed to sow confusion and self-blame. He recalled how one middle-aged woman in his church who was suffering from heart disease asked him anxiously: “How am I going to believe enough for salvation when I can’t believe enough to heal?”

I suppose one reason I find these dramatic conversions interesting is that I just don't have that sort of personality. I have had the same attitude toward religion – curious but faithless – since I was a child, and nothing that has happened either to me or in the world has given me any reason to change. Angry atheism puzzles me as much as speaking in tongues.

The universe is a mystery. What else, really, is there to say?

Kenan Malik on Morality without God

Kenan Malik was born in India and lives in England. He writes about science and the history of science and has often defended the Enlightenment and its values. This is from an interview he have to The Browser.

Many believers think that the only way to be truly moral is to follow a religion which teaches us morality. How would you respond?

Throughout their history, one of the great selling points of religions – in particular the monotheistic religions – has been their importance as a bedrock of moral values. Without religious faith, runs the argument, we cannot anchor our moral truths or truly know right from wrong. Without belief in God we will be lost in a miasma of moral nihilism. “To remove God,” as the theologian Alister McGrath has put it, “is to eliminate the final restraint on human brutality”.

Looking back on history, one might question just how successful God has been as “the final restraint on human brutality”. What really concerns me, however, is the way that religious concepts of morality degrade what it means to be human by diminishing the importance of human agency in the creation of a moral framework. From a religious perspective, it is the weakness of human nature that ensures that God has to establish and anchor moral rules.

In truth, morality, like God, is a human creation. Even believers have to decide which of the values found in the Torah or the Bible or the Quran they accept, and which they reject. What God provides is not the source of moral values but, if you like, the ethical concrete in which those values are set. Rooting morality in religion is a means of putting certain values or practices beyond question by insisting they are God-given.

Is it just religious believers who look for ethical concrete?

Not at all, secularists often do too. There is, for example, an increasingly fashionable claim that science will decide which values are good and which are bad. I’m as critical of the false certainties of a morality rooted in science as I am of the false certainties of a divinely sanctified moral code. The desire to set moral values in ethical concrete is a yearning for moral certainty – a fear that without external authority, humans will fall into the morass of moral relativism. But there can be no getting away from the fact that as humans we have to stand on our own feet, think for ourselves, create our values and practices, and bear responsibility for them.

11 Points Reads a Creationist Science Textbook

Sam, the blogger at 11 Points.com ("Because Top Ten Lists are for Cowards") read a creationist science textbook and posted 11 highlights. Most of them are what you would expect, but then there is this:

This paragraph is weird on an entirely different level from plain vanilla creationism. Nobody has ever felt electricity? I wager that, in fact, everyone who reads this post has felt electricity, either in the form of the static discharge you get from rubbing your feet on dry carpet, or the 110-volt kind in your outlets that hurts like hell. If, like me, you spend a lot of time on farms, you probably know why cows avoid electric fences.

Electricity comes from the sun? Huh?

Where did they find that picture?

As to whether it is a mystery, well, that depends on what you mean. We know a very great deal about how to control electricity, and we have equations that describe its behavior very precisely. (You can get them on a t-shirt). We can also define electricity in a short sentence, viz., "the flow of charge." Start charged particles moving from one place to another, and you have electricity. But that just changes the question from "what is electricity?" to "what is charge?", and that really is something of a mystery. Charge is a fundamental property of matter, part of the warp and weft of the cosmos. We have, again, very precise equations (quantum electrodynamics) to describe everything charge does, but as to where it comes from, well, it sort of just is. (It doesn't come from the sun, that's for sure.) If I wanted to insert God into a science text book, that would be the place.

The point of this page seems to be mystification for its own sake. "The world is so big and weird that you should forget about understanding it and just have faith," or something like that. You should, in other words, turn off the thinking part of your brain.

And that, if you ask me, is the whole point of creationist education. It is not possible to fully employ your rational brain and end up accepting creation "science." So to believe in the literal word of the Bible, you have to shut off those pesky inquiring, rational centers. Textbooks like this one are designed to help.

Drug-Induced Mysticism for the Dying

Dr. Stephen Ross has some interesting and very old ideas about the relationship between medicine and spirituality:

The sicker patients get, the more they want their physicians to talk to them about spirituality, meaning, and beliefs. The problem is that physicians aren’t educated to have these discussions; there’s a huge gap between what patients want and what we’re able to provide them. Even among physicians who believe in God, the majority don’t have such discussions with their patients. Whether they don’t have enough time or adequate training, they end up leaving these matters to the chaplaincy. But patients want to have these discussions with their physicians. As for the relationship between religion and spirituality and health outcomes, studies show that it is mostly positive but somewhat inconsistent. Spirituality has been associated with positive outcomes in a variety of medical illnesses and mental illnesses, including substance abuse. As an addiction psychiatrist, I’m used to the construct of spirituality in Alcoholics Anonymous and other spiritually based interventions for addictive disorders.

Rationalists sometimes wonder why sick people visit faith healers, since there is no evidence that such people can cure diseases. Here is the answer: sick people visit faith healers because they want to talk about their illnesses in a spiritual way. Coldly rational studies show that people who are optimistic about their lives are more likely to recover from severe illnesses, as are people who have emotionally powerful spiritual or religious lives. Many patients experience illness as a spiritual crisis. Ross wants to offer medicine in a spiritual context, which is exactly what shamans and witch doctors have offered for a hundred thousand years. The purely medical component of modern medicine works better, but that is not the whole picture. Many patients, especially those facing death, want something more.

Ross has begun to study giving psychedelic mushrooms to some of his dying patients. He is excited about the results:

In my fifteen years as a psychiatrist, I’ve seen some profound things. Here I’ve seen decreased death anxiety, decreased depression, greater integration back into daily life, improved family function, and increased spiritual states. Half of our patients had classic mystical experiences, and the other half probably had near-mystical experiences. ... I think psilocybin is a safe treatment modality that can potentially be a paradigm change within psychiatry and very helpful to dying patients. . . .

In another case, we treated a 50-year-old man who worked on Wall Street. Although he was raised Catholic, he had no connection with any meaningful parts of the religion. He was a nonspiritual person. He was diagnosed four years ago with metastatic colon cancer and was told he had fourteen to sixteen months to live. He felt an enormous fear of death and of leaving his wife. He had a birthing experience during his psilocybin session. He was lying down on the couch and reported that something was passing through him. He behaved as if he were in the OB/GYN’s office. Holding the therapist’s hands and putting his legs up as if he were in stirrups, he cried, “Something is passing through me.” And then it came out, and he said, “Oh, it’s beautiful. It’s a cocoon. It’s so warm in here. It’s a cocoon filled with pure love. I’ve never felt anything like it.” Then he had this experience of feeling connected to a transcendental force. Coming out of the experience, he said, “I know I’m going to be okay now. I know I’m going to be okay. I’m ready to go, God. No, no, no—I’m not ready to go. I still have more to do, but now I know it’s going to be okay.” He described an orgasm of the soul and a resolution of his fear of death. Three months later, this nonspiritual man developed a daily mindfulness-based meditation practice, and he reads voraciously about spirituality. He feels better, but unfortunately his disease is progressing. Though he is dying, he continues to say, “I know it’s progressing, but I also know I’m going to be okay.”

I find this fascinating. Suppose Ross is right, and giving psychobilin to cancer patients causes some of them to have mystical experiences that make them feel better about themselves and less afraid of death. Is that a straight out good thing, or does it smack of manipulating the vulnerable toward certain beliefs?

Via Andrew Sullivan.

The Ten Commandments

It seems that the Supreme Court is going to take up, once again, the question of posting the Ten Commandments in public buildings. Given the more conservative nature of the current court, they are likely to approve the Kentucky legislature's creation of

“Foundations of American Law and Government” displays, which included the Ten Commandments along with nine other documents, including the lyrics of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the texts of the Declaration of Independence and Magna Carta. An explanation informed viewers that “the Ten Commandments have profoundly influenced the formation of Western legal thought and the formation of our country” and have provided “the moral background of the Declaration of Independence.”

These "Foundations" displays have spread around the country and were recently endorsed by the South Carolina legislature. Once the Roberts court approves them, they will be sprouting up everywhere.

And I don't care. I have never understood why secular people -- and there is nobody more secular than I am -- get so upset about putting the Ten Commandments on a courtroom wall. Who reads them, or even notices that they are there? The Ten Commandments have nothing to do with either the history of our law or Christianity as practiced in America. They influence nothing. They change nobody's thinking about anything. Hardly anybody in America can list more than three of them. What's the big deal?

A large swath of Americans believes that our nation is in trouble because we are not sufficiently godly. These folks want some things that I think would be deeply pernicious, like a ban on all abortions; some things that I find moderately offensive, like prayers at high school football games; and some things that don't bother me at all, like hanging the Ten Commandments on the wall and leaving "In God We Trust" on our money. For democracy to work, everybody has to get something from the system. If religious Americans feel like the system never works for them -- that secular courts hold some kind of non-democratic power that blocks them at every turn --then they will turn against democracy, with bad consequences for everyone. So why not let them post the commandments, if it makes them feel better about the government?

Besides, if the Magna Carta gets posted in enough public places, there is a chance that I will one day overhear some puzzled person saying, "I wonder what disseize means?" and I can step in and say, "Excuse me . . . ."

Pantheism

Nice essay today by Ross Douthat on pantheism, apropos of its salience in the movies:

The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.

Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.

The "we" here is a bit tendentious, but certainly many people have these strong longings for something beyond the world we can see and touch: for ultimate answers, for an escape from death, for moral laws backed by divine anger. For nonbelievers, the existence of the "god-shaped hole" in the souls of many humans is one of the greatest puzzles. It seems a cruel trick for the universe to equip us with longings for what does not exist.

I would observe, though, that if life among hunter-gatherers is often short, it is not necessarily more brutish or nasty than any other sort of human life. Nor does belief in God do anything to lengthen it; the medieval world was every bit as nasty and brutish as the Mesolithic, and life might even have been shorter. And that is how I also feel about our spiritual situation. For me, religion doesn't really explain anything about the place we find ourselves in. It simply changes the questions. The fact of my existence on this world at this time, born with certain strong inclinations, surrounded by the others beings I have fallen in with, remains an absolute mystery to me no matter how I think about it. The "answers" offered by the religions I know seem to me either evasive or unhelpful. I don't expect any "answers" from science, either, not about the really hard questions.

What I feel is that I can only respond as the person I am to the world I see around me. I was born with curiosity and wonder, in a time when human knowledge is vast and ever-expanding, in a place where I am free to follow my mind wherever it will go. I also have a love of life as I see it. I love to dig my fingers into rich dirt, to watch the trees bud every spring, to see babies born, to watch children grow, to know people in all their madness and complexity. So I marvel at the universe and live the life I have, among the people I love. For me, that is faith.

Angry Atheists

Here's an NPR Story titled "A Bitter Rift Divides Atheists." The title strikes me as overblown, but there is tension between your Christopher Hitchens (Religion is "sinister, dangerous and ridiculous. . . . I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right") types, and people who think that kind of rhetoric accomplishes nothing.

I have personally never seen that anything is gained by insulting people. To me the way to advance reason in public life is to live justly and morally while being honest about what I believe. Most people who hate atheism don't do so because they are afraid of secular ideas, they do so because they believe atheism leads inevitably to immorality. Screaming at them won't change their minds. Insults are not arguments, they just make the world a meaner, less friendly place.