The Pope on Science and Religion

Today, Pope Benedict warned that the "seductive" powers of science are once again denigrating humanity's spiritual nature, reigniting the old science vs religion debate. Calling for a more interdisciplinary approach, he said that,

the exact sciences, both natural and human, have made prodigious advances in their understanding of man and his universe. [But] there is a strong temptation to circumscribe human identity and enclose it with the limits of what is known. . . .

In order to avoid going down this path, it is important not to ignore anthropological, philosophical and theological research, which highlight and maintain the mystery of human beings, because no science can say who they are, where they come from and where they go. The knowledge of human beings is then, the most important of all forms of knowledge.

Human beings always stand beyond what can be scientifically seen or perceived. To overlook the question of man's 'being' inevitably leads to refusing the possibility of research into the objective truth of being [. . .] and, effectively, to an incapacity to recognize the foundation upon which human dignity rests, from the embryo until natural death.

Science cannot rest on its own, and, despite what "science" would have you believe, it is not value-free, nor should it be. All science (all knowledge itself, perhaps) is value-laden. Science for the sake of science, and progress for the sake of progress should be questioned, examined and harnessed, both in its limits and its potential.

"Man," says the Pope, "is not the fruit of chance or a bundle of convergences, determinisms or physical and chemical reactions." And I have to agree. There is more to a human being than nucleotides, neural transmitters or brain stem functions. In fact, we are much more than the sum total of our entire body and all of its magnificent functionality, including our ability to objectively reason.

Indeed, as the Pope alluded to, our humanity emerges from our biology, our reason and our ability to intuit the world of the spirit. In fact, I might say that our humanity rests of science AND faith. While science cannot even ask spiritual questions, it can foster or destroy human dignity.

Epistemological Subjectivism

One of the most recent epistemological points of view, one that is growing in popularity, is call subjectivism. As mentioned before, epistemological subjectivism is the claim that all knowledge is purely a matter of perspective. The subjectivist may allow that there are knowable basic dimensions (space and time), but we can only know them and the things in them from a vantage point of the intersecting, and completely unique, dimension of our (my?) point of view.

Clearly, everyone has a unique point of view. We come from different backgrounds. We all learn through different means. We can really only know what what we, ourselves, have either thought about (as, generally, per Rationalism), physically experienced (Empiricism), found useful (Pragmatism) or simply believed (Faith). In other words, even if any other theory is correct, we must start with what is knowable from our own unique vantage point. When I was in school, one of the "big" questions running around was whether it was possible to be an atheist in Medieval Europe. On this view, it would have not been, because atheism was not a knowable position for the Medieval subject; his or her upbringing, teaching, culture and worldview precluded atheistic knowledge.

Often, we hear people say they "feel" God's presence or God has "spoken" to them. Of course, this is completely unverifiable. For the subject alone, this is proof of God's existence. In many cases, I imagine, this may be saying that God exists but God's existence can only be knowable through subjective experience. As much as modern Christianity claims to believe in objective truth, this, to me, is an interesting side-track to the debate. Is this what people really mean when they speak of the Holy Spirit as that "quiet voice" we hear in our heart (our subjective self)? Does "Jesus is real to me, because I have Him right here in my heart" mean the same thing?

The problem that these perfectly valid expressions pose is that it reduces God to an inner mood, removing Him from His essential quality of Other. Without denigrating these experiences, for I am convinced that many may be perfectly true and I would not wish to limit God's methods, it reduces Him to the role of Jiminy Cricket (which I suppose was originally a polite way to to take the Lord's name in vain).

Life After People

I have always been fascinated with thinking about what this planet would be like if there were no people on it, or what life would be like for a very small group of humans surviving after the "End of the World". How would the artifacts of our modern life fare? How long would it take before all traces of of our complex, highly-advanced civilization disappear? Books like The Time Machine and The Stand have served in the past to spark my imagination in this regard, but recent scholarship (including a book I'd like to read, The World without Us) on the subject has been equally interesting.

Last night, the History Channel aired "Life after People", a "documentary event" on the fate of life and our material cultural if every last human on Earth suddenly died off or vanished. While never addressing the reason for man's demise (you can fill in the blanks: some kind of hyper-mutative flu virus seems like the most likely candidate in this scenario), the program takes us on a bumpy ride starting only a day after the death of humanity to several thousand years into the future.

In a series of die-offs, several species would find life difficult in that first year or two after people. Of course, those most likely to be effected would be pet, zoo and domesticated food animals who rely directly on human contact for survival. Only if they escape the confines of their cages or homes would most of these animals have a chance. Other animals, such as cockroaches, gulls and rats would temporarily glut themselves on our leavings, but would soon find food difficult to come by and they would have to "earn an honest living" again . . . in the wild.

Other species, most notably plants, would immediately begin to thrive in a post-human world. All of our carefully manicured lawns and tamed green spaces (Central Park and Tom McCall Waterfront Park) would quickly revert to woodland. Every possible crack in the pavement would soon sprout dandelions and clover, and moss and dead leaves would begin to cover every trace of asphalt. Slowly, they would rip into and cover over our abandoned buildings.

For a while, skyscrapers and decaying houses would become “vertical ecosystems” with complete systems of flora and fauna, predator and prey. In time though, even our most enduring structures would burn, corrode, erode and fall to the ground, leaving no trace of our presence behind. In 10,000 years, only Mt. Rushmore, the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids and perhaps a handful of other massive structures would remain to give future intelligent life pause to wonder what came before. Strangely, the program never mentioned plastics, which, to my knowledge, is nearly eternal.

This was a great tour of the earth of the "future". The CGI and science was fair to excellent, grounded in repeatable observation. While all in all, Life after People was a good program, a few questions occurred to me as I watched it. Once I swallowed my general irritation with the History Channel's reluctance to produce programs about, umm . . . HISTORY (they were pushing yet another speculative, goofy SciFi Channel original called "UFO Hunter", a spin-off of it's "popular" "Monster Hunter" series, during the breaks, and, just before "Life after People" they aired for the zillionth time a ridiculous yet straight-faced exegesis of Nostradamus' work *sighs*), I wondered at the paradigm shift from traditional modern science's belief that man is, in some way, the dominate creature on earth, to a eco-New Age (for lack of a better term) view that the world would be just as well off without Homo sapiens. Granted, I am clearly no fan of civilization--it's far too messy, dehumanizing and exploitative not to see its shortcomings. But, there was clearly an ideological message.

But then again, you really can't help that, even in the realm of "pure" science.

At any rate, this got me thinking about what the earth might look like after Jesus returns. My wife has a hard time thinking that heaven can be on earth, with all the junk, pollution, urban sprawl and mess humans have inflicted on the planet. For me, this show only highlights the resiliency of the planet. Despite the warnings of global warming and mass extinctions, it seems to me that this world has seen it all before and that bouncing back and returning to a pristine state would only be a matter of time.

Of course, this brings up many other questions. I don't begin to have a clue how all the people on earth will live in the earthly Kingdom of Heaven without causing environmental damage. If people are here, in whatever state the Millennial Reign finds us in, then I have a hard time believing we'd let the Eiffel Tower rust and turn to dust.

Who knows?

Not I.

Human Cloning: A Viable Reality

Stemagen Corp. of La Jolla, California announced last Thursday that it had successfully created cloned human embryos from donor DNA and eggs. Using somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), a technique whereby the nucleus is removed from a donor cell and placed in a egg cell devoid of its nucleus to be reprogramed by the egg, the company produced five new human embryoic cells. The press release goes on to explain:

In the experiments, the researchers removed the nuclei of mature oocytes from healthy young women who had previously donated eggs for successful infertility treatments. The SCNT technique was then used to insert DNA from an adult male donor into the oocytes. The DNA was derived from a type of cell called fibroblasts, obtained from skin biopsies.

Subsequently, several of the reconstructed oocytes continued to develop as normal embryos, to the blastocyst stage. Extensive and carefully documented genetic tests were performed to confirm the genetic identity of the cloned embryos. In three embryos, tests showed the same DNA as the male fibroblast donor.

In one of the three cases, additional tests showed that the embryo had another type of DNA, called mitochondrial DNA, from both the female oocyte donor and the male DNA donor.

Mitochondrial DNA testing is viewed as an essential proof of successful human cloning -- particularly after previous fabricated reports from a South Korean research group. Amidst this background of controversy, the researchers took extraordinary steps to ensure that their experiments were properly conducted and documented. These included approval by an independent review board and confirmation of the genetic results by an independent laboratory, among other steps.

The primary hope is that this research can be used to combat infertility, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, and spinal cord injury, among others.

According to its ethical principles, "Stemagen's mission is to maintain exemplary standards in human embryonic stem cell research in accordance with the highest ethical and research principles." While I applaud their efforts to alleviate suffering and do so in an ethical manner, consequences of this research for the future needs to be carefully monitored. Creating human life (and despite the fact that we are talking about nuclei, DNA and eggs, we are still talking about a fully potential human being) for the purpose of taking it apart to see how it ticks is questionable. Additionally, there's nothing in this report that tells me that these clones could not be allowed to grow from blastocyst to fetus, from "full term" baby to adulthood.

If so, what then?

Basics of Epistemology

In order to come to any conclusion about whether God exists, we have to examine how we might know that He (she or it) exists. Are we certain of God's existence? Or is there just a probability? How can our finite minds apprehend the concept of the infinite? How do we justify our claims to know anything?

These are the problems of epistemology. The defining questions of epistemology include the following:

1. What is the nature of propositional knowledge, knowledge that a particular proposition about the world is true? Knowing a particular proposition requires both that we believe it and that it be true, but it also clearly requires something more, something that distinguishes knowledge from a lucky guess. Let's call this additional element ‘warrant’. A good deal of philosophical work has been invested in trying to determine the nature of this additional element.
2. How can we gain knowledge? We can form true beliefs just by making some lucky guesses. How we can gain warranted beliefs is unclear. Moreover, to know the world, we must think about it, and it is not clear how we gain the concepts we use in thought or what assurance, if any, we have that the ways in which we divide up the world using our concepts correspond to divisions that actually exist.
3. What are the limits of our knowledge? Some aspects of the world may be within the limits of our thought but beyond the limits of our knowledge; faced with competing descriptions of them, we cannot know which description is true. Some aspects of the world may even be beyond the limits of our thought, so that we cannot form intelligible descriptions of them, let alone know that a particular description is true.

The third item, I imagine, will be particularly important while discussing the reality of God.

Out of these questions, five major camps have evolved: Subjectivism, Rationalism, Empiricism, Pragmatism, Faith.

Subjectivism says that there is only one thing anyone can know exists: our mind (rather, and more to the point, my mind, because I have no real basis for knowing you exist). Sometimes called epistemological idealism, this position holds that we can only understand the world through our own unique perspective and that other perspectives may or may not actually exist. Knowledge, therefore, deeply personal and entirely a matter of opinion.

Rationalism is theory that we acquire knowledge through thinking, using our minds. Rationalism relies on necessary, self-evident and universal truths, as well as syllogism (analytic truth and deductive reasoning). In other words, the real world is only knowable because it has a logical structure that can be analyzed and grasped through reason.

Usually opposing Rationalism is Empiricism, the view that we acquire knowledge by testing things out and using our sensory experience. It relies on synthetic truth, direct observation, induction (indirect empirical knowledge, generalization). A theories about the world must be tested against observations of the natural world, as per the scientific method.

Pragmatism is the view that knowledge is not, strictly speaking, out there waiting to be discovered. Rather, it is mutable and must be considered in relation to the consequences of its acceptance or rejection. There must be some conceptual agreement, practically speaking, about a given term. Essentially, if the theory, belief, or "fact" works, then it is true.

Finally, there is Faith (sometimes called Authority or Fideism). Epistemological faith is the belief that we quire knowledge through inspiration and revelation. There are some things we simply cannot know through our own personal perspectives, reason, experimentation or conventions. Reason is fallible and our sense can deceive. So, we must make leaps of faith toward any kind of knowledge. At the very least, we must suspend our skepticism and accept knowledge even though we cannot achieve certainty. Justification may be necessary for knowledge of this sort, but it is entirely insufficient to determine if something is actually true.

In the end, epistemology is as much about levels of certainty as it is about the way we know. Usually this is arranged from most certain or apodictic, to psychological certainty (does it feel certain?), to conventional ("all bachelors are unmarried men"), to pragmatic (is is helpful to be certain?), finally down to probabilities. For example, people can point to mathematical truths that can, supposedly, be proved indubitably. But is "1 + 1 = 2" a mere stipulative tautology? Is there any probability that this kind of knowledge is simply an useful convention? So, the quest becomes one of using whichever theory and then attempting to justify or examine our certainty.

To prove that God exists--to be certain in the way that many Christians appear to be--seems like a very difficult thing to do. But, throughout the history of the Church, subjectivists, empiricists, rationalists, pragmatists and fideists have, with various degrees of certainty, all taken their turns. Each one has used the tools of epistemology to make their case for (or against) the existence of God.

False Prophesy

I don't usually comment on current events and politics, but this certainly has me thinking.

Last year, Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson announced that there will be an attack, possibly radiological or nuclear, on the United States that would cause "mass killing". The year before, he predicted that the Oregon coast would be hit by a massive Tsunami and that the Republicans would keep control of the Congress. In 2004, he "foresaw" the "landslide" re-election of President Bush. Noting that these events hadn't come to pass in the way he foresaw, Robertson said, "All I can think is that somehow the people of God prayed and God in his mercy spared us." Maybe, God changed His mind?

This year, Robertson claims that God told him that the world will continue to see violence (duh!) and recession will hit the U.S. economy. Oil will surpass $150/barrel as the dollar continues to loose ground. Additionally, "We will see the presence of angels," he prophesied, "and we will see an intensification of miracles around the world."

While I certainly believe and hope that miracles will increase, I am not sure how one might quantify that claim. Perhaps, that's what Mr. Robertson is hoping for. Perhaps, he's just hoping that we forget his mistakes as well. I'm willing to do so, if he stops pretending to speak for God. My Bible tells me that, at the very least, I should ignore people who claim that God told them something, that God Himself has informed the would-be prophet of an impending event, yet that event did not come to pass (Jeremiah 23:16, 1 John 4:1). It's just sound advice; people who don't know enough to question their own "visions" should not be a leader, in my opinion.

I used to enjoy The 700 Club even if I found some of the opinions to be unsound or unjustifiable, but I don't think I can support something that only helps atheism any more.

Proof of God's Existence, A Project

Over the past year, I have written extensively (and privately) about how I came to be a Christian. Mainly, I did that in response to my councilor's suggestion that, perhaps, my conception of faith, reason, God, Jesus, Church life, fellowship, and so on may be contributing to my bouts of depression. This was not an attack on my faith. Rather, it was an attempt to get me to think through some of my own biases and preconceptions and examine them in light of how I process the world at large. Essentially, my councilor wanted me to see if I was sliding unhealthy thinking into my Christianity.

Long story short: I realized that I never really tackled the issue of God's existence during my conversion from atheism and would like to do that this year.

I've avoided the "epistemology of the ontology of God" throughout my philosophical life. Mainly because epistemology is something I've only had passing interest. I really enjoyed Kantian epistemology in school and was glad when The Matrix spurred some interest in the topic, but, for me, how we know what we know is fairly mundane. Either way, that is where I will need to begin.

Secondly, I would like to examine some of the major arguments for God's existence. On the outset, I'm skeptical that any one of them will hold much water for me, so this should be interesting.

Finally, I'd like to form some reasoned response to the question: "Why does Lee believe in God?" by the end of the year based on my examinations of these arguments. This sounds like something I can pull off in one year. Whether or not I am able to articulate my subjective belief (even if I believe there is ample objective evidence all around us) in God remains to be seen.

Related blog entries:

• Basics of Epistemology (1/11/2008)
• Epistemological Subjectivism (1/23/2008)
• Epistemological Rationalism (2/6/2008)
• Knowledge, a Definition (2/12/2008)
• Knowing God Exists (2/28/2008)
• Some Problems with the Standard Definition of Knowledge (2/28/2008)
• The Ontological Argument (9/24/2008)
• Criticism of the Ontological Argument (10/3/08)
• Cosmological Argument (10/10/08)
• The Argument from Contingency (10/11/08)
• Evaluation of the Argument from Contingency (10/16/08)
• Teleological Argument (11/7/08)
• Evaluation of the Teleological Argument (11/12/08)
• Information and the Teleological Argument (12/22/08)

Christianity, Atheism and Occam's Razor

I saw the image to the right the other day (can't remember where exactly now, I think somewhere on Common Dreams) and had to laugh. Basically, it is saying that Occam's Razor demands a verdict toward atheism. Atheism is, according to this view, much more parsimonious. It is simple; it is elegant. Whereas Christianity is messy, conflicted, and "multiplied beyond necessity". In other words, all other things being equal, atheism is the simplest and most likely to be true.

Unfortunately, while I would be a fool and a liar if I did not admit that Christianity is indeed messy and often anything but parsimonious, Occam's Razor cannot be applied the way the author of this chart intended. The problem, of course, is that "all things" are not equal in this equation. The author is not comparing apples with apples, rather he or she is comparing "there is no god" with "there is a god and Jesus is His Son". What kind of Son? That is the "unnecessary multiplication" the historical Christian clades demonstrated in the chart.

If the chart were redraw to expose the true issue (whether or not there is a god), then both solutions would be equally simplistic.

I Am Legend

I've been looking forward to seeing I Am Legend since I first heard it was being shot. Unfortunately, Will Smith's version didn't completely live up to my expectations.

The movie is a pretty good one, if you take it on it's own merits. There's little to no swearing, nudity, excessive gore or post-modern Angst. That is not to say that this isn't a scary movie. It is, but the PG-13 rating is actually quite appropriate considering the subject matter of this film.

Surprisingly, this movie doesn't really play the "God is dead" card. While in a moment of pure frustration and anger, Dr. Neville exclaims, "There is no God!", I can safely say, he doesn't really believe it. It seems to me that Neville is a God-fearing man. I know that because we see him praying with his family and he, rightfully, blames people for the vampire-disease and the subsequent human mass-extinction. Neville also refuses to call the infected anything but human, which is an interesting twist. In the end, he tells us that he's been listening to God's voice. In addition, throughout the film, we can see graffiti scrawled on the wall that reads: "God still loves us." As pointed out over at Christianity Today,

At first, it seems this may be an ironic jab. After all, this is a dark, apocalyptic film about one man left to rot in a seemingly Godless world. But by the end, that poster seems to be a subtle thesis statement.

Toward the very end of the movie, Anna, another survivor Neville meets, insists that God told her to come to New York. "The world is quieter now," She explains. "It's easier to hear God." If you've read Richard Matheson's book (which I have positively adored for almost 20 years), you'll be wary of Anna, so I was prepared for the probability that her religion spiel was just an act. Apparently, in the movie it is not.

What the movie lacked in my estimation (again, I loved the book so I had some expectations that must be forgiven) was a true sense of loneliness. The book's main theme was that we are all really alone. Our friends, neighbors, co-workers don't really give us human contact. We are all just dutiful, lonely slaves in the Kingdom of Means. We use others and others use us. Others just need our sweat and blood, and once they've got what they want, they leave us a hollow, shambling husk. Will Smith does a pretty good job of conveying this gnawing loneliness, but the writers of the movie decided to liven up the pace by inserting the dog in at very the beginning. For some, this might be a great foil for Neville's complete emotional isolation, but not for me.

All in all, this was a good movie, but falls apart in the last act. As is required of any monster movie, machine guns and impossible stunts are absolutely required (right!?). Unfortunately, when you push the action, meaningfulness goes out the door. The themes of salvation (Neville, it might be argued, is a Jesus-figure), humanity and our struggles with emotional isolation in our modern, impersonal world are lost by the end of the movie. Even with that criticism, I can cautiously recommend this movie . . . if you can handle a few boogie men jumping out of closets at you!