Faith and Reason

As a nearly lifelong devout agnostic I have watched with much interest (and occasionally even participated in) the increasingly rancorous argument between the New Atheists and the many stripes of Faith Apologists who, often bitterly, disagree with them. In the interest of full disclosure, my sympathies usually lie with the NA’s, not least because of their underdog status in these battles. I expect that it is not at all an uncommon experience for those of us living explicitly and purposely outside the FA communities in this country to feel extraordinarily intimidated and marginalized, and there is some vicarious salve of these wounds to be had through the irreverent arguments and anger expressed by the NA’s.

But, much as I’d like it to be for simplicity’s sake, my consideration of the matter is not exhausted at the foot of the NA arguments. I believe in ends as much as means, and I cannot deny that those operating in the name of faith often achieve good ends. Make no mistake: I find utterly repugnant and malign many or even most FA dogma, doctrine, and acts. But I also find that I simply cannot ignore the profoundly good and beautiful and humane acts of some individuals who claim their inspiration or motivation was based in their faith.

I have been wracked for many years about how to resolve this dissonance in my thinking about the FA’s – the dissonance between what I find repugnant in religion and the utter humanity of some of its practitioners. I have recently stumbled across some multiple threads that offer me a glimmer of hope that perhaps the gulf between these can be bridged. The first thread is the neurological/physiological investigation of spirituality, primarily through functional magnetic resonance imaging. Those investigations strongly suggest that spiritual experience is associated with a particular N/P process. A second thread is the nebulous and shifting nature of what many of the FA’s seem to be arguing for in the current skirmishes: variously, faith, doctrine and dogma, ends (as opposed to means), God, spirituality, a specific Messiah, religion or some combination thereof. The clear lack of a universal rallying point for the FA’s (and in many of the FA arguments this shifts inside the space of a sentence) also suggests to me that their experience of faith phenomena is both highly provisional and individual. So far, these threads are consistent with and support significant aspects of the NA critique of faith.

The final thread though, which I recently found through reading and thinking about the tidy little book “Born on a Blue Day” gives me a sense that though faith may simply be a provisional and individual N/P process, yet it might also have value. BBD is the autobiography of an individual with Asperger’s and savant syndromes. (If you are not familiar with these, think high functioning “Rain Man”.) In the context of this essay, the important features of these syndromes is that, though they are not well understood, they almost certainly have N/P origins and the savant syndrome manifests in a range of abilities that are completely and profoundly inaccessible to linear rational mental processes - those championed by the NA’s.

I have several “take aways” from this. First, I strongly suspect the spectrum of experiences and behaviors that we call faith are associated with particular N/P processes and further, that some individuals have intrinsically better or easier access to these processes. This would explain the spectrum of individuals between those who profess the tangible and indisputable nature of their faith experiences and those for whom the evidence and the experience is nonexistent. Second, I strongly suspect that just as the N/P processes of savant syndrome manifest in particular mental capacities, so the N/P processes of faith may give some individuals some valuable capacities that are not easily accessible by linear rational thought. This would explain how, for some individuals, faith can play an important role in their humanity and how it can provide comfort and purpose.

Finally – and this is the resolution I have sought for so long - should my conjectures prove true, this understanding of faith provides a basis for considering its role and the limits of its role in society. If faith is an intrinsic human N/P process then the NA program of eliminating its influence is moot. But it must be recognized that any faith claim is just the product of an individual human mind. Faith N/P processes may produce valuable understanding that is not readily accessible by linear rational thought, but that understanding must be subject to the same skepticism that informs every other assessment of human ideas. When a savant rattles off ten thousand digits of pi, the mathematicians run their computer programs to check them. And when my deeply religious catholic neighbor stands silent vigil in protest of the Iraq War because of her faith, I must also evaluate her understanding.

My Idea

Cooking and Human Evolution – see:

University Of Minnesota (1999, August 10). Light My Fire: Cooking As Key To Modern Human Evolution. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 24, 2007, from http://www.sciencedaily.com¬ /releases/1999/08/990810064914.htm

and

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=cooking-up-bigger-brains

Hey that was my idea! Oh well Easy come easy go. That’s what happens when you’re slow out of the starting gate on a hot scientific hypothesis – AND you’re not working in the right field of science. It occurred to me (as an avid cook and more avid eater, and as extraordinary as it sounds in the 21st century to have to say this, evolution believer) a long long time ago that cooking very likely had a profound and, as the above articles suggest, perhaps THE pivotal role in human evolution.

You know how just about everyone advances their pet aspect of humanity that is displayed by no other species – tool-making, or language, or love, and so on and so on? Trouble is, one by one they’re falling by the wayside. Ask Roger and Deborah Fouts about the whole language thing, for instance. But cooking – with the possible exception of whether or not you count those galapagos marine iguanas that eat seaweed and then heat themselves (and their ingested seaweed) to high temperatures in the blazing equatorial sun – still seems to be limited to just humans. And not just limited to, but universally practiced by all human cultures.

And then there’s the brain case issue – cooking foods reduced the requirement in our ancestors for the huge jaw muscles, anchored into a volume of the skull that once released from that application could be turned over to neural occupancy.

I’ve also wondered about and speculated on the role and importance, the nutritional synergy if you will, of combining nutrients in a single cooked dish with multiple ingredients. Cue the nutritional anthropologists.

Ok, all circumstantial – I know that the hardest work of a scientist isn’t coming up with the brilliant idea – after all brilliant ideas are a dime a dozen - but to obtain the evidence that tests the ideas and, more importantly, to discard nearly all of them. I’ll leave it to Prof Wrangham to do the heavy lifting while I get started on a lemon meringue pie.

The Reason for the Season

In the face of crass and unbridled, if not completely unhinged, commercialization of the winter holiday season we have to admit that we somewhat welcome those infrequent reminders of “The Reason for the Season”; alas, so few of those get it right:

Many of our cultural traditions come from an agrarian culture that developed primarily in the northern hemisphere of an approximately spherical terrestrial planet whose axis of rotation is tilted 23.5 degrees with respect to the axis of its orbit around its parent star. Due to physical principles that govern the motion of celestial bodies, the fundamental symmetry of the universe that gives rise to the conservation of angular momentum, and the geometry and thermodynamics of (approximately) point sources of electromagnetic radiation illuminating distant spheres, this state of affairs produces a highly predictable phenomenon of seasons, significant for its crucial agricultural implications, and dramatically demonstrated twice a year in the reversal in direction of the apparent motion of the parent star with respect to the horizon from a fixed location on the surface of the planet. This latter phenomenon, a solstice, and our understanding of it and our ability to understand it, and our understanding of its place in the unfolding of natural phenomena is exquisitely beautiful and worthy of celebration. This recognition takes nothing – absolutely nothing – away from the metaphor and mythology, the symbolism and legend, and, yes, religion, that has been piled on to the holidays that we celebrate near the winter solstice. Indeed, I propose quite the opposite: that a failure to recognize this as the reason for the season undermines our ability to see and to celebrate the genuine and true majesty and splendor of the world we are so fortunate to inhabit and that we must share with others. Happy solstice

Waterboarding: Everybody Wins

What a wonderful new law enforcement tool our national leaders have made available to us! It’s the dawn of a bright new age in which waterboarding is finally recognized as simply another useful tool in saving lives, and I say it’s about time. We should deploy this new instrument into our law enforcement policies in careful stages, starting exactly as we have, with those who are terrorists, or have been accused of being terrorists, or who might be terrorists, or who might have information about terrorists, or who might be able to accuse someone else of being a terrorist. Cautious and thoughtful introduction of the technique in limited situations like this allow us to more carefully tune it to achieve its greatest utility and to prevent, as it’s been made clear we must, potential targets of the technique from preparing to resist it.

But it’s important to begin considering its next stage of deployment and I humbly propose one I find as perhaps the most compelling: cases involving the report of an abducted child. This scenario perfectly exploits all of the best and most promising features of waterboarding: the speed with which it provides information to interrogators, its potential to save lives in time-sensitive situations, its harmlessness to those who undergo it, and the ease with which it can be applied with limited resources.

We know that minutes and hours matter in child abductions – the likelihood of recovering a child alive after a stranger abduction falls very rapidly as time elapses. We also know that police frequently lose precious hours and days trying to establish whether the parents themselves should be considered suspects. So making sure that police have all the information from parents quickly, makes all the difference in where police resources are directed early on in these situations, ultimately determining the survival potential for many of the children involved.

So here is how I see what should happen: upon reporting a child missing, police should immediately interrogate the childs parents with the technique of waterboarding. No more namby-pamby rapport building or good-cop, bad-cop routintes, or any other tricks of the police interrogation trade that, when they work at all, can take hours or days to generate information. Information extracted from parents by rapid resort to waterboarding will insure that police resources in these time-sensitive circumstances will be most appropriately directed to recovering children who are in mortal danger: no more wasted police time in corroborating a parents account of events, no more wondering if the parents were involved and squandering police resources and effort on lines of inquiry that go nowhere, no more guilty parents sending police off on wild goose chases, and no more coddling of monsters who are responsible for their own children’s deaths.

Indeed, as word spreads of the effectiveness of waterboarding in these situations as inevitably it must due to the blabbermouth liberal media, I think it is likely that criminally involved parents, will soon become less likely to seek out police involvement. This will, over time, give police so much more confidence in the accounts of abduction of those parents who do come forward with a willingness to be waterboarded to get an aggressive investigation underway, and with that confidence will come the resolve and the empathy that will result in many more of these situations ending happily.

Only those who are morally bankrupt beyond redemption could argue against such an approach in these situations. Waterboarding, is recognized by its proponents and practitioners as speedy, harmless and productive. It is inexpensive and so will save precious public resources and most important of all it will save childrens lives. Join me in contacting your representatives to demand WPACEW legislation now: Waterboarding Parents of Abducted Children: Everbody Wins!

Waterboarding = Forced Water Inhalation

In recognition of the extraordinary situation we face in which morally challenged national leaders have generated a “debate” about whether waterboarding is torture, and in which some “reasonable” observers have given credence to the merits of such a debate, and in which a complicit national media in presenting the “debate” has nearly universally adopted the clever and mild euphemism, simulated drowning, perfectly packaged for a population immersed in seeking out virtual experiences (grand theft auto, internet porn, second life, simulated drowning, they sound all of a piece, no?) I propose a modest modification to the language used in referring to this innterrogation/punishment/revenge technique: let’s call it “forced water inhalation”. It serves the same purpose as the euphemism – to briefly and pithily elaborate on the physiological basis of the technique – while more appropriately characterizing it.