If somebody asked me, How do I get to Heaven, I would tell them that the only way I personally am aware of is faith in Christ, because I believe the New Testament. That’s the only map I got. Somebody says, Well, I got a different map. O.K.! You know what? If it works, I’m not going to argue with you.

Well, that makes sense. If somebody asked me, How do I get to Mount Rushmore, I would tell them that the only way I personally am aware of is Route 90, because I believe in Google Maps. Somebody says, Well, I got a different map. O.K.! You know what, if it works, I’m not going to argue with you. Unless, of course, I actually care whether you make it to Mount Rushmore or not, in which case I might take the trouble to defend my map.

Or maybe I don’t argue because I know Google Maps is sometimes wrong. (Ask me sometime about how it directed me across a field of boulders in Vermont last year.) But the analogue in Huckabee’s case would be knowing that the New Testament is sometimes wrong, and I don’t think he wants to go there. That leaves us to infer that he really doesn’t care whether you get to Heaven or not. That’s certainly his privilege, callous as it may be. But then, a little farther down in the same New Yorker piece, we get this (on why we should subsidize education in poor districts):

To be truly pro-life means that we should be just as much concerned about the child who is eight years old and living under a bridge or in the back seat of a car.

So there we have it. The governor, who surely considers himself truly pro-life, cares passionately about how things turn out for you at age eight (and, we may infer, at eighteen and at eighty) but pretty much not at all about how things turn out for you in the infinitely many years thereafter.

This sounds so implausible that I am forced to conclude he can’t mean a word of what he’s saying. (And as readers of The Big Questions are aware, similar implausiblities convince me that the same is true of very many ostentatiously religious people.)

Is there any way to spin this that makes any sense at all? Let’s do this as a flow chart (click to enlarge):

All paths, it seems to me, end in questions to which the only possible answer is “He doesn’t really mean it.” Is there a path I’m not seeing?

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Dinesh has done this before; I haven’t. So I’m calling on you guys to help me out here by giving me your best arguments—either on Dinesh’s side, so I can practice rebutting them, or on my side, so I can plagiarize them.

Remember that the ultimate question is whether religion makes the world a better place, not whether religion is true. (On the other hand, truth becomes relevant if you’re arguing that religion makes the world a worse place by making people believe false things.) So what have you got for me?

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[Before you tell me that giving up meat is socially beneficial because it holds the price of meat down, remember that low prices are good for buyers only to exactly the same extent that they're bad for sellers. Changing a price does no net good. The rigorous proof of this is part of the theory of pecuniary externalities, on which the Wikipedia entry is uncharacteristically useless.]

Observing Lent or Passover has much in common with things like running around a track: You push yourself to do something hard, you feel good about it, and you leave the world pretty much the way you found it. What a shame that you didn’t push yourself to do something useful instead. I bet you could have learned to feel almost as good about that.

The two tragedies have very different micro foundations. Athletic events are wasteful essentially because they’re arms races; the winner succeeds only by preventing others from succeeding. (I posted about this here and here.) On Passover, by contrast, we can all be equally successful at sticking to the same ridiculous diet. So athletic competitions and religious observance are tragic for fundamentally different reasons, even though they’re tragic in the same way.

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There are roughly 30 million self-professed fundamentalist Christians in the United States. How many of them really believe what they say they do? New evidence suggests that the number is somewhere around 100. Either that or fundamentalism breeds exceptional callousness toward ones’ pets:

Many people in the U.S.—perhaps 20 million to 40 million—believe there will be a Second Coming in their lifetimes, followed by the Rapture. In this event, they say, the righteous will be spirited away to a better place while the godless remain on Earth. But what will become of all the pets?

Bart Centre, 61, a retired retail executive in New Hampshire, says many people are troubled by this question, and he wants to help. He started a service called Eternal Earth-Bound Pets that promises to rescue and care for animals left behind by the saved.

Promoted on the Web as “the next best thing to pet salvation in a Post Rapture World,” the service has attracted more than 100 clients, who pay $110 for a 10-year contract ($15 for each additional pet.) If the Rapture happens in that time, the pets left behind will have homes—with atheists. Centre has set up a national network of godless humans to carry out the mission. “If you love your pets, I can’t understand how you could not consider this,” he says.

Here is the full article by Mike Di Paola, writing in Business Week.

Edited to add: I shouldn’t have said 30 million fundamentalist Christians; I should have said (at least according to the Business Week article) 30 million who expect the Second Coming and the Rapture in their lifetimes.

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When my sister asked me this question over Thanksgiving dinner, I answered, with the utmost confidence, that it causes (quite instantaneously) an enormous flood. (Note the exact wording. This will be important later.) My sister nodded sagely and said “That’s what I thought, too.” My sister and I had the same mother, you see.

And then she asked, quite innocently, “So. How exactly does that work?”. And I was stunned—absolutely stunned—to realize not only that I had no answer to this question, but that there could not plausibly be an answer. Which somehow had never occurred to me in the half century or so that I’d been harboring this ridiculous notion.

My sister had seen the light just a few weeks earlier when her husband was filling the bathtub. The water level had gotten perilously close to the metal plate, and my sister had frantically cried out that he was about to cause an “enormous flood”. (My mother’s contention that she never taught us any such thing is severely undermined by the fact that my sister and I shared not only the same bizarre misconception, but the same phrase to describe it). Her husband, puzzled, had responded appropriately with something like: “Huh?”. And she’d realized she had no answer.

Readers of The Big Questions will be aware that in my opinion, much religious belief is very like my belief in the mystical power of bathtub hardware. That is, it survives only because it is unexamined. It does not, in other words, run deep. And as a consequence, it doesn’t affect the way most people live their lives—because as soon as it starts interfering with your life (or with your husband’s bath) you set it aside.

Such “beliefs”, it seems to me, do not deserve to be called beliefs at all. In the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “You do not believe; you only believe that you believe”.

I was recently pointed to a wonderful column by the philosopher Jamie Whyte, making the same point so vividly that I rushed to order two of his books from Amazon. As it turns out, they’re both the same book. Crimes Against Logic is the Americanized version of the original and very British Bad Thoughts. I randomly chose to read the British version, and it’s a blast. Whyte lists a dozen logical fallacies so blatant you’d think nobody could ever fall for them, and then gives you multiple examples of people who have fallen for them. Much snarky commentary ensues.

As Whyte documents, people speak a lot of nonsense. (I am one of those people. So are you.) You might be tempted to conclude that people are dumb, but I’m more inclined to conclude that people are busy. We’re all working so hard to be good carpenters, or good taxi drivers, or good teachers, or good parents, that we don’t have the time and energy to think hard about bathtub hardware or God or the consequences of a protective tariff. And most of the time, we don’t suffer for getting this stuff wrong. But every now and then it pays off—in some combination of enlightenment and entertainment—to pull out one of your cherished “beliefs” and ask: “So. How exactly does that work?”

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Although Belief in God in an Age of Science is a very short book, it is too long to review in a single blog post. Fortunately, though, much of the non-lunatic content is concentrated in roughly the first ten pages, so I’ll comment here only on those.

Polkinghorne begins in awe. He is awestruck by the extent to which our Universe seems to have been fine-tuned to support life; this is the subject matter of the much-discussed anthropic cosmological principle. To take just one example (which Polkinghorne does not mention): The very existence of elements other than hydrogen and helium depends on the fact that it’s possible, in the interior of a star, to smoosh three helum atoms together and make a carbon atom; everything else is built from there. But it’s not enough to make that carbon atom; you’ve also got to make it stick together long enough for a series of other complicated reactions to occur. Ordinarily, that doesn’t happen, but now and then it does. And the reason it happens even occasionally is that the carbon atom happens to have an energy level of exactly 7.82 million electron volts. In fact, this energy level was predicted (by Fred Hoyle and Edwin Salpeter) before it was observed, precisely on the basis that without this energy level, there could be no stable carbon, no higher elements, and no you or me.

That energy level is only one of many (apparent) cosmic coincidences that make us possible; change any of the fundamental physical constants (like, say, the strength of gravity) by a little bit in either direction, and the Universe would, as far as we can tell, become completely inhospitable to life. So one does tend to feel that there’s something here that needs explaining.

Some have attempted to dismiss the issue by turning the direction of causality on its head: Here we are, so of course the laws of physics must allow for our existence. Case closed. Douglas Adams, for example, offers this brief and brilliant parable:

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’

But I have some sympathy for Professor Polkinghorne’s refusal to accept this dismissal. Instead, he takes his stand with the philosopher John Leslie:

The fine tuning is evidence, genuine evidence, of the following fact: that God is real, and/or there are many and varied universes.

I agree with that (with the proviso that evidence is not proof). I agree with it to exactly the same extent that I agree with this:

The fine tuning is evidence, genuine evidence of the following fact: Either invisible pink bunny rabbits, created at the time of the Big Bang, fine tuned the physical constants in order to make the Universe hospitable to lettuce, and/or there are many and varied universes.

Or, more succinctly:

The fine tuning is evidence, genuine evidence of the following fact: There are many and varied universes.

Polkinghorne wants to reject this second horn of Leslie’s dilemma, but he manages to do so, I think, only by taking too crabbed a view of what those many and varied Universes might be. First, we have the parallel worlds promised to us by the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory; Polkinghorne is absolutely right to say these can’t be the worlds we’re looking for, because they all obey the same basic laws of nature. Higher on what Polkinghorne calls the “scale of bold speculation” we have suggestions from quantum cosmology that Universes are bubbling up all the time as quantum fluctuations in some universal substrate. But again, Polkinghorne is right to say that this only pushes the mystery back a bit—why do those fluctuations obey laws that have even a chance of producing a habitable Universe? Where do the laws come from?

This is the point where Polkinghorne gives up and falls back on God. But it seems to me that he has given up just one level of abstraction too soon. A Universe is fundamentally a mathematical object—it’s an abstract pattern that might or might not contain subpatterns that might or might not be sufficiently complex in just the right away to achieve an awareness of their surroundings, and might or might perceive those surroundings as physical objects. And of course there are many Universes, because there are many mathematical patterns, including, as just one of a dazzling infinity of examples, the Universe in which we live.

That, in any event, is the best explanation I can come up with, and it’s an explanation that feels completely right to me (which admittedly proves nothing). In The Big Questions, I’ve elaborated on what I mean by all this, how it can be true, and why it is entirely consistent with mainstream physics and the stated views of many mainstream physicists.

Now, Professor Polkinghorne might or might not buy this vision, but my point is that he never even contemplates it. He makes the leap to theism by considering and rejecting all of the weakest alternatives, but ignoring the only one that makes sense. This oversight is all the more remarkable because Polkinghorne devotes his closing pages to a rousing defense of the independent reality of mathematical objects, in clear and convincing language that had me wishing I’d written these pages myself.

The rest of the book is far worse. I might come back to that in a later post.

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When I decided to write a textbook that competed directly with Deirdre’s own, she was my strongest booster. When I decided to follow up with a book for the general public—the book that became The Armchair Economist—Deirdre told me exactly how to sell it to the publishers. Fifteen years later, the Armchair Economist remains one of the bestselling popular economics books in at least six languages, and at multiple levels—intellectual, practical and personal—I owe it all to Deirdre.

So it was with considerable delight that I received Deirdre’s recent email with subject line “Your Splendid Book”. But as I fully expected (having had this conversation with her more than once), her praise was tempered with disapproval of my “adolescent” atheism:

As you know, I don’t think the assault on religious belief is among its charms. You are very indulgent towards the on-going, searching, preliminary character of faith in physics but, in the style of a adolescent who has just discovered that “the stories they’re liable/ To tell in the Bible:/ They ain’t necessarily so,” unwilling to extend the same indulgence to the faith that a lengthy roster of idiots including Galileo and Newton worked on. You need to read, say, Polkinghorne, but haven’t.

With Deirdre’s permission, I’m responding here on the blog:

• Aside from a snarky comment or two, The Big Questions is not, in whole or in part, an assault on religious belief. I do offer a non-religious account of the fabric of the Universe that I find compelling; while this account could be certainly be wrong, I’m not sure that the act of offering it counts as an assault on the alternatives. I do point to inadequacies in several of the standard arguments for belief in God, just as I point to inadequacies in Richard Dawkins’s arguments to the contrary; this is largely equal-opportunity carping. And I do mention in passing that I find all religions to be patent hokum (just as gratuitously as I mention my taste for Diet Coke), but I’ve not attempted to write a sustained defense of that judgment. That’s not what the book, or even any part of the book, is about.
• What I do claim in The Big Questions is that to a large extent, religious believers do not believe so much as they believe that they believe. That is, they “believe” only because they’ve never stopped to think hard about what they really do believe. (This is not a pejorative judgment; none of us has the time to think deeply about more than a small number of things, and there’s no particular reason God should be among them.) Take your average devout Christian, transport him back to the cave where the newly crucified Christ has just been laid to rest, ask him to predict whether this body is going to be resurrected in the next week or so, and somehow convince him that the lives of his children depend on getting the answer right—and I’ll bet that in most cases good old-fashioned materialism will displace religion in a hurry. Obviously I could be wrong about this, but it’s my defense of this assertion, as opposed to any mockery of Bible stories, to which I’ve devoted substantial space in The Big Questions.
• In fact, my expectation that most belief is shallow is precisely the reason I don’t think it’s worth assaulting.
• What exactly is wrong with “adolescent” insights, anyway? Early adolescence is when a lot of people first realize that reindeer can’t fly.
• I have, in fact read Polkinghorne. (That’s John Polkinghorne, the theoretical physicist who keeps writing books defending his simultaneous faith in science and Christianity.) In fact, I’ve read Polkinghorne for the sole and sufficient reason that Deirdre once told me to. And he has, actually, some interesting things to say, though they don’t prove what he thinks they prove. (Indeed, I think they come pretty close to confirming the non-religious vision I offer in The Big Questions.) He also spouts what seems to me like an extraordinary amount of nonsense. I’d meant to elaborate on all this here, but I think this post has gotten long enough as it is. So let’s add John Polkinghorne to the list of topics I promise to blog about soon.
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  ]]> http://www.thebigquestions.com/2009/11/30/lament-of-deirdre/feed/ 19 http://www.thebigquestions.com/2009/10/29/there-he-goes-again/ http://www.thebigquestions.com/2009/10/29/there-he-goes-again/#comments Thu, 29 Oct 2009 06:42:35 +0000 Steve Landsburg http://www.thebigquestions.com/?p=289 I said this in The Big Questions and I’ll say it again: Richard Dawkins is an international treasure and one of my personal heroes, but he’s got this God thing all wrong. Here’s some of his latest, from the Wall Street Journal:

  Where does [Darwinian evolution] leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God’s redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must be at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.

  But Darwinian evolution can’t replace God, because Darwinian evolution (at best) explains life, and explaining life was never the hard part. The Big Question is not: Why is there life? The Big Question is: Why is there anything? Explaining life does not count as explaining the Universe.
  
  Ah, says, Dawkins, but there’s no role for God there either:

  Making the universe is the one thing no intelligence, however superhuman, could do, because an intelligence is complex—statistically improbable —and therefore had to emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings

  That, however, is just wrong. It is not true that all complex things emerge by gradual degrees from simpler beginnings. In fact, the most complex thing I’m aware of is the system of natural numbers (0,1,2,3, and all the rest of them) together with the laws of arithmetic. That system did not emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings.

  If you doubt the complexity of the natural numbers, take note that you can use just a small part of them to encode the entire human genome. That makes the natural numbers more complex than human life. Unless, of course, human beings contain an uncodable essence, like an immortal soul—but I’m guessing that’s not the road Dawkins wants to take.

  Now I happen to agree with Professor Dawkins that God is unnecessary, but I think he’s got the reason precisely backward. God is unnecessary not because complex things require simple antecedents but because they don’t. That allows the natural numbers to exist with no antecedents at all—and once they exist, all hell (or more precisely all existence) breaks loose: In The Big Questions I’ve explained why I believe the entire Universe is, in a sense, made of mathematics.

  So while Dawkins believes that complexity can arise only from simplicity, I believe that complexity arises from even greater complexity. I’m not sure I’m right, but I’m sure he’s wrong.

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