The Questioning Christian

The real meaning of "science" -- Dr. Atul Gawande's CalTech commencement address

Dr. Atul Gawande is one of my heroes. His CalTech commencement address of yesterday should be required reading for any informed citizen of any country.

Excerpt:

If this place has done its job—and I suspect it has—you’re all scientists now. Sorry, English and history graduates, even you are, too.

Science is not a major or a career. It is a commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe through testing and factual observation.

[DCT comment: In other words, "science" is the practice of dealing with the universe as it is — or in another formulation: as the Creator wrought it — and not as necessarily being now what we wish it were.]

The thing is, that [the scientific mindset] isn’t a normal way of thinking. It is unnatural and counterintuitive. It has to be learned. Scientific explanation stands in contrast to the wisdom of divinity and experience and common sense.

Common sense once told us that the sun moves across the sky and that being out in the cold produced colds. But a scientific mind recognized that these intuitions were only hypotheses. They had to be tested.

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

Read it all.

Heresy is necessary in an ever-changing world

Dr. Stanley Aronson, dean of medicine emeritus at Brown University, points out that the world changes; that we don't know everything; and therefore all beliefs must be open to reexamination, so that we can determine which ones remain serviceable: 

[In a purely-imaginary idyllic world, b]eliefs are determined solely by consensus, by common sense and the evidence provided by one’s immediate senses. It is universally believed in this serene world that the sun rotates around the earth, that the major religious texts are inerrant, that professional athletes employ steroids only for post-retirement arthritis and that the moon is composed of Camembert cheese. ...  [In this world, e]motional peace becomes more important than anxiety or the corrosive knowledge of how little is known. Skepticism and curiosity become alien emotions.

The future, in such a pacific environment, would never be feared since the world will remain unchanged. Tomorrow, and all of the days that follow will be the same blissful Eden as yesterday or today. Ugliness, discord, contentiousness — and heresy — would remain as alien experiences confined to story books. And only the looming shadow of utter boredom would threaten this prospect of tranquility.

But imagine now, in this placid community, some rebellious individual, someone with the temerity to question the accepted beliefs of the majority, a person eager to assert that the ultimate enemy is not discord but ingrained bigotry and willful ignorance. The elders of this hypothetical community might initially condemn such a heretic, perhaps even destroy his spirit, but in their hearts they will know that all things but death change; that all beliefs must be tested continuously to determine which are false and which worthy and that it is the occasional heretic — with his provoking postulates — and not the peace-lover who brings progress and understanding to the community.

Read it all. (Hat tip: TitusOneNine; all emphasis added.)

Anglican reasserters could have a learning disability

I enjoy the doctrinal discussions I have with my "reasserter" friends at TitusOneNine. But I continue to be baffled by the tortured logic with which many of them try to justify their views.

A common reasserter syllogism is ridiculous

Some reasserters appear to be literally incapable of grasping that there might be possibilities in life other than the ones that they’ve conceived:

• They like Possibility A;
• Possibility B is unlikely, or disagreeable;
• By process of elimination, A it is; indeed, A it must be; and
• Anyone who wants to take into account Possibilities C, D, etc., is either foolish or malign.

Here's a typical example of this kind of thinking, as argued by some reasserters: 

• The New Testament accounts are either trustworthy, or they’re not;
• We cannot say those accounts are categorically untrustworthy; they're at least as trustworthy as, say, Tacitus's account of Caesar's wars; 
• By process of elimination, it's our duty to reframe our entire lives around at least the "relevant" portions of the New Testament accounts. (Who defines "relevant," and how, is of course another huge argument.)

Here’s another example: If Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t raised from the dead, then our faith is worthless. In other words, if we were to discover compelling evidence that Jesus stayed dead, then (supposedly) nothing he said or did during his lifetime would be of any value to us.

I’m not going to mince words: That kind of reasoning is nuts. We expect better from intelligent middle-schoolers. (And sure enough, that’s about the age when a lot of young people start questioning "The  Faith Once Delivered.")

Sure, in the right circumstances, the process of elimination can be useful. But it’s just one of the tools in the toolbox. It might not always be the one to use — when you need to make a precise cut in a piece of wood, it’s literally imbecilic to insist on using a hammer.

The proof is in the results

But how do we know that the reasserters aren’t right anyway?  Well, we get a pretty good indicator in the observable results:

• Reasserters claim that their view leads to eternal life for those accepting it. But they have exactly zero reliable evidence to support that claim. We hope and trust that there's a life after this one, but we have no idea what really happens when you die. The reasserter claim amounts to so much wishful thinking.

• In contrast, the so-called Enlightenment mindset has, by several orders of magnitude, done a better job of understanding and dealing with the reality that God has wrought. It has thereby helped us to do a better job as workers in (what appears to be) his ongoing project of creation.

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Related post: How to judge the claims of testimony

Emotion makes reasoned decisions possible

"Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux have shown that emotion isn’t the opposite of reason. We use emotion to assign value to things, thus making decision-making possible."

— David Brooks, How Voters Think, NY Times, Jan. 18, 2008

Why people go to church

The Rev David Meara, rector of St. Bride's in London, writes in the Telegraph of the capacity crowds at Christmas time:

People come to church because they want a story to connect with, a guiding narrative that helps them make sense of human existence, and because they have found that unthinking multiculturalism and rampant secularism don't satisfy and don't work.

But if these spiritual needs are to be properly nurtured, then Anglicanism needs to rediscover its quiet, understated confidence in the balance between Scripture, reason and tradition, and to assert this in the face of an increasingly intolerant fundamentalism.

One feature that drew me into the Church of England was its generous tolerance of diverse opinions held together by the beauty of Cranmer's liturgy.

"Thou hast set my feet, O Lord, in a large room," says the psalmist, and I give thanks for the large room that is the Church of England, in which those who seek meaning and purpose can be welcomed, whatever stage of belief or unbelief they have reached. . . .

We rejoice in the Anglican via media, a church which is both catholic and reformed, with a robust outlook that puts dialogue before dogma and practical involvement in the community before theological posturing.

(Hat tip: TItusOneNine)

I guess I'm a fallibilist too

At The Lead, Ann Fontaine points us to a commencement address by philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah at Swarthmore in May 2006:

Often I find myself seated next to a stranger on an airplane who asks me what I do. Sometimes I say I'm a philosopher. The commonest responses are:

(1) An expression that combines boredom and alarm, and the end of the conversation (which leaves you with the pretzels and the soda, and the really fascinating article from the Review of Metaphysics you've been meaning to get to for a couple of years) and

(2) "So, what's your philosophy?"

To that question, I usually reply: "Everything is much more complicated than you first thought." In philosophy at least, that really is my philosophy. So, I can tell the truth and we can both get back to those wonderfully inviting pretzels.

The truth, I said: I happen to be a great believer in objective truth. But one way in which things get more complicated than you thought is that I am also a great believer in what philosophers call fallibilism.  Fallibilism is the idea that our knowledge is imperfect, provisional, subject to revision in the face of new evidence. Fallibilism says: Here's what I know to a moral certainty, know well enough to live by. But I could be wrong.

Does that sound feeble? It isn't. Fallibilism made science possible. For centuries, doctrine had held that there were demonstrative, self-evident truths, as with a Euclidean theorem, and that all else was mere opinion. Today, scientific fallibilism has spread across the globe; it holds sway even in the theocracy of Iran, where scientific and technological knowledge is revered, especially, alas, when it produces new forms of weaponry.

* * *

... [H]ow much evil is done by fanatics who can't countenance the possibility that their beliefs, sanctioned by ideological or religious authority, might conceivably be mistaken! Here, then, is one of the uncompleted tasks of our era: to spread fallibilism - not skepticism about the truth or indifference to it, but just the glimmering recognition that one may not be in full possession of it - from the empyrean of scientific fact to the hardpan of moral conviction: to make it as common as Coca-Cola.

People say that common sense is the ability to see what's in front of your eyes. But even madmen and extremists can see what's in front of their eyes; so, again, I think it's more complicated than that.

Common sense, I'd prefer to say, involves the ability to see what's in front of the other fellow's eyes. That's what makes it something we might have in common.

(Emphasis in original; extra paragraphing added.)

For more about fallibilism, see the Wikipedia article.

Ms. Fontaine suggests that "Perhaps it [fallibilism] applies to Anglicans." And to all of us.

Loving God, without believing in him

British journalist John Humphrys says he wishes he could believe in God the way he did as a child, but his faith was worn away by years of witnessing the evils of the world.  His piece, though, hints that he may well obey the Summary of the Law in his life, even if perhaps he doesn't know it:

• Humphrys seems to recognize and accept that he's not God. That's no small thing — some people seem to think they're entitled to have the world be what they think it is, or what they want it to be, as opposed to what God has wrought;

• Humphrys appears to try to face the facts, to live in the reality that actually exists — or as believers would put it, in the reality that God created — as opposed to living in the fantasy "reality" that we all tend to create in our imaginations;

• We get the sense that Humphrys isn't a totally selfish man; that at least some of the time he seeks the best for others as he does for himself.

That sounds quite a bit like the Summary of the Law, no? Maybe Humphrys doesn't "love" God and neighbor, in the sense of love as an emotional state. But it's not apparent that people have any control over the emotion of love. As far as the Summary of the Law is concerned, maybe Humphrys is doing all that's expected.

And if we're to believe Jesus' response to the lawyer, as reported in Luke chapter 10, then perhaps Humphrys the doubter has just as good a shot at eternal life as the most devout of orthodox Christians.

(Hat tip: TitusOneNine.)

How can people justify intellectual assent to the Trinity, Jesus' divinity, etc.? An email exchange with the Very Rev. Nick Knisely

[Here's an edited version of an email exchange I had this morning with the Very Rev. Nicholas Knisely, a priest and astronomer/physicist who hosts the blog Entangled States, reproduced here at his suggestion.]

Where's the supporting evidence for the Trinity, etc.?

Nick, I enjoyed your essay at The Daily Episcopalian. My attention was drawn to this statement:

Now, should the primatial authority of the Episcopal Church authorize a new Prayer Book that clearly and intentionally repudiates the sovereignty of Jesus, or denies the Doctrine of the Trinity or rejects the Creeds and other historic formulations of the universal Church, then I would agree that the Episcopal Church is no longer a church and that it has come time to leave for a place that is authentically Christian.

I’ve got a serious question that has troubled me for a long time:  How can people who seek to put God first – and, by corollary, to face the facts of the reality he created – justify giving intellectual assent to any of the foregoing?   

Let me borrow the Anglican Scotist’s labeling scheme: I’m sufficiently confident of two assertions, A1 and A2, that I’m willing to make Bet B1.  I won’t here go into why I have this confidence.

• A1:  A Creator exists.
  
• A2:  The Summary of the Law is an expression of two of the fundamental building-block processes by which the universe is being created.  

(I often paraphrase the SOTL as “[A] Face the facts — that is, live in the world God actually created, not in the one ‘created’ by your wishful thinking – and [B] seek the best for others as you do for yourself.”)

• B1: The SOTL is an appropriate guide to living one’s life.

I have no such confidence, however, about the Trinity (let’s call that A3), nor about the divinity of Jesus (A4), nor about any number of other received orthodox doctrines.  I simply don’t see how sufficient evidence exists to persuade reasonable people about these assertions. (I’ve explained my doubts in some detail on my own blog, The Questioning Christian.)

Sure, some of the church fathers apparently believed A3 and A4. But they also believed, for example, that the sun revolved around the earth; that illnesses were caused by evil spirits; and that Jesus would be returning Real Soon Now. The appeal to their authority is hardly persuasive.

In legal terms, the supporting evidence for A3 and A4 doesn’t even rise to the level of “substantial evidence” (i.e., evidence from which a reasonable person could draw the posited conclusion). It certainly doesn’t rise to the level of a preponderance of the evidence, and still less beyond a reasonable doubt.

To put it in scientific terms, A3 and A4 are no more supported by competent evidence than astrology, or the four-humours model of medicine, or cold fusion.

The various defenses I’ve read of A3 and A4 strike me as pure wishful thinking, the equivalent of the old economist joke whose punch line is “first, we’ll assume we have a can opener.”

--------------------------------------------

Now on to your statement about it being time to leave the church. Suppose that two successive General Conventions were to amend the canons and the BCP to declare that one need not profess belief in A3, A4, etc., to be considered a Christian in good standing, and that the Creeds, the Trinitarian formulae, and other language dependent on A3 and A4 could be omitted from the various BCP rites.

How could we, with any intellectual rigor, justify abandoning TEC on that basis? Doing so would seem to be acting on a whim, at least in the absence of modestly-persuasive evidence that A3, A4, etc., are in fact true.

Regards,

--D. C.

Nick's response: Some things have to be taken on faith

Thanks DC. 

Your question deserves more of an answer than I've got time... and for that I apologize. But I wanted to acknowledge it.

I do stand by what I wrote. The moment the Church acts to authoritatively deny the divinity of Jesus is the moment I'm out of here. But I don't know that such a statement is provable logically - rather it's one that has to be taken on faith. [Emphasis mine - DCT] 

What you seem to be arguing for is either a form of Unitarianism (as distinct from Unitarian Universalists) or a form of Arianism (though I'm not sure you'd give Jesus the sort of divine origin that Arius and his disciples gave to Jesus.)

Arianism is probably the more difficult to argue against - at least biblically. The Trinitarian belief that the Church holds is dependent on Arianism not being true - so if it wouldn't make sense to argue against the Trinitarian view if the Arian one hadn't been disproven.

How familiar are you with the patristic writer's arguments against Arianism?

(And I wonder if this is worth posting to a blog and having a more public discussion about?)

A reply: Acting on unsupported faith can be irrational and wrongful

[I didn't email this next part, but instead am posting it per Nick's suggestion.]

Nick, when you referred above to having to accept assertions A3 and A4 on faith, you put your finger on a fundamental issue.

My concern is not primarily whether someone believes Assertion A to be true purely on faith without supporting evidence. I think we have to recognize that we have little if any control over what we believe to be true or not true.

Suppose "Alice" happens to believe in astrology, and that our fates are influenced by the positions of the stars at our birth. I would probably think she's a bit nuts, but that she can't help what she believes. (She might think the same about me.) Without more, good manners would doubtless keep me from saying anything.

My concern comes when someone acts (or omits to act) solely on the basis of unsupported faith. It's one thing for Alice to believe in astrology; it'd be another thing entirely for her to urge others to shun "Bob" on grounds that he was born under the wrong astrological sign. If others were to follow Alice's urging, they would not only be acting irrationally, they would be doing a possibly-grievous wrong to Bob as well.

It's not hard to extend this line of argument to The Current Disputes.

Evidence trumps hunches in medicine - and in theology

The most popular item on the TIME magazine Web site at the moment is a survey of how evidence-based medicine is starting to displace doctors' hunches. The article implicitly illustrates how (to use religious language) we're far better off when we give priority to the reality that God actually wrought, rather than clinging to our limited conceptions of that reality. To paraphrase the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor's definition of 'faith,' it's a Very Good Thing to remain open to the truth, no matter what the truth turns out to be.

Excerpt:

Increasingly, doctors seeking to provide their patients with the best possible care are exploring what is known as evidence-based medicine--a hard, cold, empirical look at what works, what doesn't and how to distinguish between the two. It's not enough to prove that a particular blood test or CT scan really spots cancer, for example. You also need to know whether early detection of that cancer would make a difference in your ability to respond to treatment or it merely means that you would die at the same point but learn about your illness earlier than you would have without the test.

Evidence-based medicine, which uses volumes of studies and show-me skepticism to answer such questions, is now being taught--with varying degrees of success--at every medical school in North America. It has been extraordinarily successful in shooting down some of the most cherished beliefs in health care, like the idea that long-term hormone-replacement therapy would help prevent heart disease in women. And it has clearly saved lives. Many doctors used to give anti-arrhythmia drugs to everyone who experienced irregular heartbeats after a heart attack because severely irregular beats could rapidly prove fatal. But then came the results of a randomized trial showing that patients with only mildly irregular heartbeats were more likely to die if given the anti-arrhythmia medication than their untreated counterparts were. Doctors now prescribe more judiciously, though treatment still saves lives in the case of severe arrhythmias.

[...]  Physicians who encouraged their female patients to take hormone-replacement therapy to prevent heart problems later on were practicing a kind of evidence-based medicine, since the best available evidence at the time--observational studies and the like--suggested a benefit. Of course, when a randomized controlled trial showed otherwise, the advice changed. Even at that, the case is not entirely closed. Some researchers now believe there may be a window of opportunity right around the years of menopause during which hormone-replacement therapy could help the heart. Proving that would, naturally, require another study.

All the same, few people deny that the trend in medicine is increasingly to be guided, if not governed, by the data--an idea that is spreading to other fields as well. Evidence-based practice is now being taught in nursing, general education and even philanthropy, thanks to the influence of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a results-based group if ever there was one. You could see even the political fights over global warming as the birth pangs of the new practice of evidence-based policy.

Christine Gorman, Are Doctors Just Playing Hunches? in TIME, Feb. 15, 2007

We Don't Ask Bishops to Be String Theorists, or Astrologers; Why Expect Them to Be Theologians?

At Jim Naughton's the Daily Episcopalian blog, traditionalist commenter "Widening Gyre" suggests that new Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, in recent press interviews, proved she is no theologian.  He asks whether we really ought to be surprised by this:

... can we agree that not all bishops are great theologians and that (gasp) some of them should not even be considered theologians?   Therefore, we shouldn't be surprised over their answers to extremely difficult theological questions.[1]

This insight leads to another question:  Does it even matter if a bishop, even the presiding bishop, is not a theologian?  I think not, for at least two reasons.

1.  A Bishop's Job is Like That of a Hospital Administrator

Demanding that a bishop be a theologian is like insisting that the chief administrator of a hospital be a leading medical researcher himself.  We'd all agree that medical research is important; many hospitals do a lot of it.  But a hospital administrator's job is to keep the hospital running, so that its staff can carry out the primary mission of treating the sick.  Certainly an administrator needs a basic understanding of medical research to be able to do his job.  But he need not be a cutting-edge researcher himself.[2]

Theology is likewise important to the church, in much the same way that medical research is important to a hospital.  In the church, a bishop certainly needs to have a basic understanding of theology.  But her job isn't to do theology herself; it's to keep the church running so its members can carry out the primary mission of treating the spiritually sick.[3]  The bishop doesn't need to be a cutting-edge theologian to function well in her job, any more than she needs to be, say, a human-resources expert or a civil engineer or a certified public accountant.

2.  (Most) Theology is Like String Theory — or Astrology

There's an even better reason not to get upset if a bishop isn't a theologian:  Like string theory, most theology amounts to speculation and conjecture, lacking any testable evidentiary foundation.[4]   

In fact, most theology might as well be astrology.  Think about the similarities:  In both "disciplines," theorists learnedly debate each other; their discussions are often passionate, even vehement.  But there's seldom any way to assess how well their views stand up to observational evidence from the real world that the Creator actually wrought.   Even worse:  Many theologians, like many astrologers, confronted with evidence inconvenient to their views, dismiss it with an airy wave of the hand, or simply pretend it doesn't exist.[5]

This isn't to say we shouldn't honor past practitioners of theology and astrology for their inquisitiveness; for their urge to try to explain the universe; for their quest for understanding.  These attitudes are all laudable, vital elements of humanity's modest success.  To steal from Sir Isaac Newton, if we moderns have managed to see a little farther, it has been by standing on the shoulders of giants — even though in hindsight those giants themselves happened to be looking in the wrong direction.

But giving theologians and astrologers full marks for effort doesn't mean we should be enslaved to their ways of thinking.  We should hardly be upset that our new presiding bishop spent her early career doing science, not theology.  I wish all our religious leaders had done the same. 

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Notes

[1]   Both the Daily Episcopalian and Widening Gyre referred to ++KJS's recent interview with Time magazine in which she insightfully said, in effect, it's not for us to decree whom God does or does not save:

We who practice the Christian tradition understand him [Jesus] as our vehicle to the divine. But for us to assume that God could not act in other ways is, I think, to put God in an awfully small box.

[2]  I infer that hospital administrators need not be physicians or medical researchers from knowing that a parish acquaintance, who is neither, served as the chief administrator of our diocesan hospital system until his retirement.

[3]  After I thought of the hospital-administrator analogy, I remembered the old saw that indeed the church is a hospital for sinners, not a country club for saints.

[4] For example, it's not clear why we should take the various scriptural authors' word for it, or that of other human authorities, on any of the following points:

• God consists of three persons in one Godhead — not two; not four; not four thousand; but exactly three.
• Muslims who died for their faith are in Paradise.
• Mary was a virgin who conceived Jesus without sexual intercourse.
• God wants Jews to keep kosher.
• The only way to achieve eternal happiness is to accept that Jesus' death on the cross wiped away the sin of mankind.

The question that naturally comes to mind for all of the above assertions, and many more like them, is "And how exactly do you know that?" 

There is a small set of core theological principles that appears to be intellectually defensible.  Those principles seem to be consistent with the available evidence, while not trying to explain too much or go too far out on a limb.  Regular readers will recognize them:

• The universe seems likely to be the work of a Creator. 
• The universe has been taking form for billions of years, and continues to do so before our eyes. 
• On the whole, we like what the universe is becoming.  In part, this is because in fits and starts, and often making terrible mistakes along the way, we've had a hand in making the universe what it is. 
• We seem to be most effective in our universe-building work when we follow the basic teachings that Jesus (among others) stressed:  Face the facts; seek the best for others as you would for yourself; continuously amend your life as you find better directions for it.
• if past trends are any indicator, and they often are, the end result of all this universe-forming activity is likely to be unimaginably wonderful.

[5] See, e.g., some of the postings listed in the left-hand column of this blog, such as:

• Reasons to Question the Reliability of Scripture
• Serious Inconsistencies in the New Testament Writings:
  Six Reasons for Skepticism About the Traditionalist Account
• The Apostles' Teaching Didn't Seem to Include a Divine Jesus
• Is Jesus Coming Again? The Predictors' Track Record Doesn't Inspire Confidence