AN ATHEIST SCIENTIST SPEAKS OUT

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Dawkins Debates, Life Worth Living ?, Sam Harris, science and religion

I have the privilege of having among my friends five Australian scientists.  Ron Vernon is one of them, but he prefers I not present his academic, professional and publishing credentials.  He had a Protestant upbringing; he is a scientist and an atheist (two of my five scientist friends are not).  After viewing a debate to which I referred him, between Richard Dawkins and British Chief Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sachs (September 12, 2012), he informed me of his reaction to another debate, this one between Sam Harris and Rabbi David Wolpe.  He has kindly allowed me to share his brief e-mail comments with  you.  I am delighted to publish them here, under two separate headings.

CAN THE LAWS OF PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY BE SUSPENDED  ?

“Having just been weaned on Dawkins versus Lord Rabbi, I decided to chance my hand on Sam Harris versus yet another Rabbi, namely David Wolpe (You Tube has a lot to answer for).  I persevered ( Heaven knows I did), but I finally bogged down on Wolpe’s assertion (in relation to Harris’ challenge about virgin birth) that the claim that natural laws (which themselves are an article of faith) can never be suspended is a claim that is unprovable, and there’s no reason why a Christian cannot say that the laws of biology have been suspended or will be suspended some time in the future.  So evidently, if you are a Christian, you can cancel well-studied scientific observations at will.  I guess that’s what miracles are all about.  That’s handy.  Assertions may be convenient and fun, but they are hardly evidence.”

NO RELIGION, NO JOY  ?

“Early in the piece, Sam Harris was asked how people can find life worth living without a religious attitude.  He replied that he operates as though life is worth living, but then went on to discuss all sorts of spiritual approaches, used in order to gradually approach happiness.  This is all very well, but I have never found that transcendental meditation does any good for me.  My attitude is somewhat more pragmatic.  I suggest that because you are alive, you behave instinctively.  That is what we animals do.  It is not a tragedy.  It is just life.  Can this situation be tolerable or even enjoyable ?  Of course it can.  We cannot predict what will happen next, and so each moment is an exciting prospect.  Will it be enjoyable or sad ?  Whatever turns up, it will be at least interesting and possibly even exciting.  Life is an opportunity for most of us, a disaster for some unfortunately, and we will never know into which category we will be suddenly plunged.  The Universe doesn’t care either way.  All we can do is make the most of what we have, right now, and try to be resolute enough to deal with whatever turns up, good or bad.  It’s tough, but it’s life.  The problem is that we humans have evolved to be intelligent enough to appreciate potential shortcomings in the future and therefore to (understandably) develop anxieties about them.  That’s where the dreaded religion comes in, and many people need it.”

(By coincidence, in the final paragraph of my book, I ask the same question addressed to Sam Harris.  For what it’s worth, here’s what I wrote :  “Is life worth living ?  Fulton Sheen’s famous answer was a resounding ‘Yes !’.  So is mine.  Life is worth living, for as long as it lasts.  Believers say, ‘Thank God I’m alive !’.  Atheists can agree that they too feel lucky to have life, but without attributing it to God, nor giving it meaning because of an imagined future life.  WYSIWYG  :  What You See Is What You Get.  Let’s make the most of it, while there is still time.”)

                                         RIDENDA   RELIGIO 

THE B E H BOSON BREAKTHROUGH

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"Goddam Particle", Higgs Boson, science and religion, Theology and Science

Some bozos may know that Boz was the father of Oliver Twist, but would not have a clue as to what a boson is.  Most people have never heard of S.N. Bose for whom the subatomic particle was named.  But if they have any idea what a subatomic particle is, by reading Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, for example, they may have heard of the “GOD – PARTICLE”, alias the equally misnamed HIGGS  BOSON which is, to be fair to the American and Belgian scientists, Robert Brout and François Englert, who shared with the Brit Peter Higgs the speculation in 1964 about  its existence, should be called the BROUT-ENGLERT-HIGGS or B E H boson.

All three physicists hit the headlines in July 2012, when the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN complex in Geneva recreated the conditions of the “boson moment”, one ten billionth of a second after the Big Bang, at one million billion degrees Celsius (some like it hot …), thereby proving the hitherto speculated existence of the boson and demonstrating that energy could give mass to matter.  Four years of research by a scientific staff of 6000 at the LHC, built at a cost of seven billion euros (the Americans abandoned their efforts after spending two billion), resulted finally in the “discovery of the century”.  The boson had been so much talked about for the previous forty-eight years that physicist Leon Lederman had spoken of it as “that Goddam Particle”, a phrase which had no theological implications whatever.  But the name stuck.

The achievement was recognized by the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics awarded to Higgs and Englert (Brout died in 2011, a year too early to witness the confirmation of his and his colleagues’ hypothesis, and two years too early to share the Nobel.)

The impact of the “God Particle” on religious belief and practice will continue to be zero, rather than the theological Big Bang some expected it to be.  But it is already a major milestone in science’s search for understanding our Universe.  We can only admire the brilliance of the minds which imagined its existence and the expertise of the researchers who demonstrated it.  No Conclave of Cardinals or Faculty of Sacred, Sterile Theology will ever contribute an iota to expanding our knowledge of our expanding Universe, which they continue to attribute blindly to a non-existent God.  Goddam religion !

                                                  RIDENDA   RELIGIO 

 

 

 

“ICH BIN EIN BELIEVER !” WE ARE ALL BELIEVERS !

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Belief, Certitude, Climate Change, Credulity, science and religion, Statistics backing belief

“You know what I believe ?  I believe I’ll have another drink !”  If this were true, you would know that what I am about to write is likely to be under the influence, like its author, of a glass or three of Glenlivet.  But you believe me when I remind you that I went on the wagon four years ago – before both the Book and the Blog.

The three most important words in that paragraph are “you believe me”.  Are you sure you can take the risk ?  What if I told you that I have just had a vision of soon-to-be-canonized Pope John Paul 2, and that he told me that unless I stop writing this blog right now, I will die on December 9 on the operating table ?  Why do you believe one statement and not the other ?  Why do we believe anything or anyone ?

1.  I do not believe that 2+2 = 4.  I KNOW they do.  I can PROVE they do.  I can SHOW you why the axiom is true.  We do not take the statement on faith.  It is a verifiable, proven fact.  We are CERTAIN it is true.

2.  “97% of all (!) scientists favor the proposition that the increase in Global Warming is man-made.”  Wow !  So it must be true !  But who made the claim, and on what basis ?  When you discover that the statement is based on a questionnaire to which (only) 3000 scientists replied, and that of those 3000 only 75 were climatologists, climoskeptics have a field day.  Ignorant, naïve, credulous people (and their name is Legion) are often impressed with statements that begin with “Science tells us …”, or “The scientific community is agreed that …”.  The example mentioned should give them pause for thought.  (I offered my own opinion, for what it is worth, favoring the significant contribution of humankind to Global Warming, under “Climate Change and God”, in my book “From Illusions to Illumination”, pages 80 – 81).

3.  I also suggested in the book, under the heading “Credulity Quotient” (pp. 59 – 60), that we should be cautious in giving credence to politicians whose religious beliefs indicate a certain credulity.  Obviously, however, electing non-atheist politicians to office is not counter-indicated — so long as we are sure they would give the right answer to what I have called in that context the “Kennedy question” (What to do in case of conflict between a pol’s personal religious convictions and the laws and interest of the State ?  JFK said he would resign).  But what about non-atheist scientists ?  Are they worthy of the same trust we would have in equally competent atheist scientists ?  I have already, several times in my book and this blog, touched on the subject of the “compartmentalization” in the brains of believing scientists, and on atheist-scientist John Haswell’s suggestion that right-brain/left-brain research may help us understand how, as Susan George puts it (see “From Illusions to Illumination”, page 206) some scientists succeed in leaving their faith outside the door when they enter their laboratory …  But all scientists, just like the rest of us, atheists and non-atheists alike, are obliged to accept vast quantities of information on faith.  We are all believers.  Even scientists have to accept propositions based on research which they have personally neither performed nor verified.  Why do they, why do we, believe what people tell us ?  It depends on what is being said, but also on the person saying it.  The point is too obvious – even coming from me – to be spelled out.  But clearly religious faith is based on the credibility of the holy man, the prophet, the priest who is asking us to believe him and accept the literally incredible claims he makes.  That credibility is usually reinforced by supposed works of wonder, miracles, healings, predictions witnessed by the first generation of his disciples, and taken on faith by subsequent generations in such sheer numbers that current belief is often based on shibboleths like “1.2 billion Catholics can’t be wrong”.

4.  We cannot function without believing many of the things we are told.  But it is up to each of us to decide whether or not it is reasonable and rational to accept them as statements of fact.  We know that we are easily deceived, even by ourselves, and are fair game for the manipulators and exploiters of human credulity.  In everyday life we wisely exercise doubt when there is reason to suspect that fraudulent, or even innocent, claims are unfounded.  Religious beliefs are based precisely on such unfounded claims.

P.S.   If I do not survive my upcoming operation, don’t jump to conclusions about my supposed vision of Pope John Paul 2.  My death will prove it was true, right ?  In fact, I was not telling the truth.  It was not John Paul 2 but John 23.  See how credulous you are ?

                                           RIDENDA   RELIGIO

 

 

 

EVER HEARD OF ANTOINE D’ABBADIA ?

Tags

Astronomy, science and religion

When you come across certain people, living or dead, it’s not hard to be humble.  The Basque-Irish savant (1810-1897) who lived in a Château in Hendaye a few miles south of my modest ‘ouse on zeee beeech in Bidart, is one of those individuals.  Like most people, even in France, I had never heard of him.  But his story deserves to be told, if only because of his brilliance as an astronomer and scientist, and of the depth of his Catholic faith which was not only untroubled by his scientific knowledge but enhanced by it.

“Caeli enarrant gloriam Dei” (“The heavens declare the glory of God”).  Antoine’s extraordinary home, which he left to the French Academy of Sciences, consists of three massive wings : a fabulously furnished family dwelling, a splendid small church, inaccurately termed a chapel, and his library which housed tens of thousands of books, incorporating his observation-tower featuring the impressive telescope with which he patiently scanned the skies, stretched out on the padded plank on which he spent every night, when he was not somewhere in Africa, creating, for example, the first maps of Ethiopia.  The Latin quotation from Psalm 18 is set in stone on the outside wall of the telescope tower.  Antoine never felt so close to the Creator as when he was admiring the wonders of His universe.

If ever you visit the French border-town of Hendaye – perhaps as the starting-point of your pilgrimage to Compostella … – you must take at least an afternoon to discover Abbadia.  The spacious grounds stretch as far as the coast;  to the East, you have a perfect view of the Rhune, the Basque Country’s highest mountain (905 m).  Antoine worried that his patient observations of the stars, on the North-South axis on which his telescope was fixed, were subject to tiny inaccuracies due to refraction.  He set out to discover the necessary coefficients to correct the errors by boring holes in the walls of his Château, beginning with his laboratory, and attempting to note variations by peering through this horizontal quasi-telescope, focused on the Rhune.  Among the many inscriptions found inside and outside the Château (for example, “A thousand welcomes !” in Gaelic over the front door, along with numerous English, Basque, Latin and Arabic quotations all over the walls, the one above the final aperture facing the mountain is a curious play-on-words in Basque.  His experiment in optics was a total failure, and he wanted the world to know it : “Ez ikusi, ez ikasi” – “I saw nothing, I learned nothing”.  One cannot but respect a scientist as honest as that.  Coupled with the fact that he and his wife were fervent believers, such integrity cannot but give pause for thought to an atheist who might expect from such a man a less exemplary dedication to the truth.  Along with our Australian star-gazer, the Rev. Robert Evans of the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, Antoine of Abbadia will remain an enigma and a challenge to lesser minds like mine.

DELENDA   RELIGIO