Coffee or Tea? A discourse on Discourse.

By now everyone has heard about the Tea Party, but I doubt many are aware of the Coffee Party or their horribly-named “Enough is Enough!” rally planned for October. According to their mission statement: 

The Coffee Party USA believes that the influence of money, and the politics of fear and exclusion, stand in the way of a government of, by, for the people.

I can get behind a lot of their ideas, but more than that I support their focus on process: they advocate civil discourse and believe change can come about by “seeking and spreading accurate information” and providing a place for the “respectful and honest exchange of ideas.”  In a Coffee Party USA video, co-founder Annabel Lee asks some tough questions: “How do we make these really hard decisions? What values do we use?”

Presumably, when deciding which political candidate to support, we are supposed to research what their positions are on the various issues we care about. This is seen as responsible voting, as opposed to being swayed by soundbites or charisma. However, I am more interested in knowing how they make decisions. The process is more important than the eventual result, because a good process has the capability of producing the best results. How do they get their information? What effort is made to understand the facts? Is their reasoning logical, and are they aware of common biases? 

Another important aspect of how people make decisions are their foundational assumptions (whether or not they are viewed as assumptions), because these will influence every decision. These are the starting point, the axioms they take as given, so that even if the logic is sound and there is a good process of making decisions, wrong axioms will lead to wrong conclusions. Optimally these foundational assumptions would also be tested against available facts, but this is not always possible, such as when they represent moral and ethical values (i.e. beliefs about how things should be instead of how they are).

The current political discourse, much of it driven by the Tea Party, is dominated by fear and panic. This is not an environment conducive to a sound decision-making process, but it does get a lot of people motivated and willing to listen to a leader who will tell them what to do. As columnist Mark Shields said on the Newshour:

I think, you know, it's an angry electorate. I mean, if you are angry, Rick Perry is your candidate. If you are nervous, Rick Perry might not be your candidate. But if you are angry, he is. And, I mean, Jon Huntsman is reasonable. He's thoughtful. And I don't know if there is a constituency out there for him to win.

Being thoughtful and reasonable will not win you votes. It is boring, and doesn’t connect with people, unlike anger.

What is fueling this anger-driven discourse? There are probably many complex issues at work, but I learned a few things reading Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker article, “The Transformation of Michele Bachmann.”  On page 4, we learn that one of the people Bachmann was influenced by, Francis Schaeffer, believed Roe v. Wade signified that “they” (The Supreme Court, the federal government, and humanism) are evil, because “now ‘they’ are killing babies.” It goes without saying that abortion is a very emotionally-charged issue, but this way of thinking makes some sort of sense to me. I disagree with both the proposition (they are killing babies) and its conclusion (humanists are evil), but if the federal government were really killing babies, wouldn’t you also think it evil? Wouldn’t it make you angry? And what would you do about it?

Another gem we learn about is Dominionism, which was also recently featured in articles about Rick Perry’s evangelical roots (here, and here; more here and here; another op-ed suggests caution when associating Christian conservatism with political conspiracy here). According to Sara Diamond, the philosophy that resulted from the Schaeffer’s idea of Dominionism, which is the idea that man has dominion over all things of the Earth (Genesis 1:26), is that Christians "are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns.” This is far from a mainstream Christian idea, and it is unclear to what extent (if at all) the candidates themselves believe it, but it is there and it is not going away.

We should be concerned, not with what the articles tell us about Bachmann or Perry, but about the movement they represent. And this movement is not the Tea Party; the Tea Party is merely the latest manifestation of the fundamentalist and evangelical Christian surge for political power. (Also, everyone watch  “Jesus Camp.”) Their ideas may be crazy, and these ideas may be held by a small minority, but they are a loud minority that enjoys lots of national media coverage (perhaps because their craziness is entertaining). We should be concerned. It is one thing to recognize that only a small minority of Muslims want to blow themselves up or crash airplanes into buildings. It is another to ignore the fundamentalist movement in our own backyard.

But that is a horrible analogy! It is incredibly unfair to all the fundamentalists and evangelicals who don’t actually want to blow anything up. It comes out of my own fears about where this country is headed and what kind of people want to lead it. They simply do not share most of my core values, and I worry about their vision of the world that is willfully not based on reality but on a 1600 year-old text. I worry about the thought processes that lead people like David A. Noebel, the founder and director of Summit Ministries, to believe that the “Secular Humanist worldview” is one of America’s greatest threats. My initial reaction is that “they don’t understand what it means to be a secular humanist,” but maybe that’s not it at all. If truth comes from the Bible, then being secular and not acknowledging any god will surely lead away from truth. If we are to put ourselves below God in all ways, then a human-centered worldview is prideful and selfish. I disagree with their foundational assumptions and their unwillingness to question these assumptions, and they disagree with mine.

How are we then to have a constructive dialogue? How is civil discourse even possible when both sides strongly disagree with the other’s foundational beliefs? Especially when one of those beliefs includes a mistrust of doubt and an ingrained sense of rightness? … Okay, most likely all sides have an ingrained sense of rightness. As much as I try to abandon certainty, I also believe that I am right, and that it is the correct way to view the world. I am certain about being uncertain. So perhaps what we could all use is the willingness to be wrong.

 

However, that is harder than it sounds. The other aspect of this discourse on discourse is the psychology of why people reason the way they do (i.e. unreasonably) and the science behind it. I suggest you read this entire article by Chris Mooney (which has lots of scholarly references), but here is one of the key points (emphasis mine):

The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience: Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

This is something that we all do to some degree. It is a challenge to constantly check whether your emotions may be clouding your judgment. But must we completely remove emotions from decision-making? Perhaps then we wouldn’t care about the outcome one way or another. Mooney suggests that we take them into account: “Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.”

A good example of motivated reasoning is how most Republicans don’t believe in evolution or global warming, despite the overwhelming scientific support for both. In addition to Mooney’s book “The Republican War on Science,” famed economist Paul Krugman recently wrote about “Republicans Against Science” in his op-ed. (I almost talked about how even the libertarian favorite Ron Paul has said he doesn’t “believe in evolution” but, according to a post comment, that video was edited, and Paul is actually agnostic on the matter.) The fact that the evolution “debate” has been phrased as something for which people can have different opinions is what makes it so frustrating. This isn’t a choice between being a Christian or believing in evolution! It’s about whether you think the findings of science can be thrown out according to personal preference; it’s about whether you think it’s acceptable to ignore rational conclusions when you don’t like where those conclusions may lead. A lot of people don’t like falling from heights, but if they stop believing in gravity that won’t make it any less true! But the theory of gravity doesn’t challenge anyone’s foundational beliefs, and apparently evolution and climate change do.

I don’t have any answers. I’ve phrased the discussion in terms of Coffee vs. Tea, but the Tea Party is a well-funded political machine with the backing of a major news corporation that is focused on getting its candidates elected, and the Coffee Party is a lone voice saying “why don’t we listen to each other for a change?” Frankly, the current political discourse disturbs me greatly. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity was great but did nothing of the sort. People are still crazy! Even non-crazy people are crazy! According to the motivated reasoning article, we are very resistant to facts we don’t like, and being more knowledgeable only enables us to find counter-arguments to explain away the facts.

Oh well. I guess I can say that I’m glad the Coffee Party exists, however small and ineffectual it may be.

Nature's Wrath

I woke this morning to the sound of thunder. As my alarm was about to go off anyway, this didn't bother me but did what thunder always does, and so I thought to myself, "awesome." I love thunderstorms. I grew up in Florida, which should be called the "Sunshine - except during the afternoon thunderstorm" State, and on many summer nights watching the lightning was our entertainment.

I have always been fascinated by the weather in general, secretly hope to witness a real tornado, and once considered Meteorology as a profession, so crouching under my desk during my first ever earthquake was probably the coolest thing that will happen to me all year. The ground itself was shaking throughout most of the Northeastern United States! Amazing! Much of geology involves slow processes operating over thousands or millions of years, but in an Earthquake, the Earth's crust is disturbed with such force to create pressure waves, like sound waves, that "cause the entire planet to quiver or ring like a bell." How cool is that?!

Such a strong earthquake in this part of the world (the Central Virginia Seismic Zone) is quite rare because the faults are very ancient, having settled down in their old age after spending their wild youth creating the Appalachian Mountains and separating North America from its cross-Atlantic cousins. According to Dr. David Applegate of the USGS (see full transcript here), this is also the reason why these earthquakes are felt so far away from where they occur:

Out in California or in Alaska or where the Earth's plates are grinding against each other, the rock is much more broken up. Here, we have very stable continental crust. It's old crust. It's cold. It transmits the energy very well over long distances.

Additionally, the eroding of the Appalachians has built up thick sediments which amplify shaking. Over 100,000 interested people have weighed-in on what they felt during the earthquake to produce the USGS Community Interest Intensity Map showing that light shaking was felt as far North as Canada.

And now we have a hurricane threatening to make landfall in the same area this weekend. It is another rare thing - hurricanes usually hit much farther South.

Every day, all over the world, Nature shows her wrath. For me, violent weather will always be a reminder that Nature is alive. The forces of Nature are going about their business with complete disregard to how humans are spending their time, but we are not separate from Nature, we are Nature, and Nature is Awesome!

This wine is ethereal

That last post was a bit heavy... sort of chewy, with firm tannins, complex structure, and a lingering finish. The next posts I have planned are similar, so in the meantime why not something a bit more refreshing? Something light, clear, perhaps slightly sweet, and lively in the mouth. (A real wine person said that last one to me once. No joke.)

If you know me, then you know that I enjoy wine, and that it has a tendency to make me philosophical. I also encourage people to describe wines by just saying whatever comes into their heads, not trying to sound like a professional but making things up because that's what the professionals do - except they know what they mean while we think they sound like pretentious assholes. To help in the effort of describing wines, the internet has come to our rescue with a list of wine tasting terms and a more fancy set of wine descriptions. (There are probably thousands more pages but these will do!)

So the next time you are drinking wine, pull out your wine dictionary for a way to put your tasting experience into words. And then make things up! You could call that organic Pinotage from South Africa "earthy," or you could say it tastes like dirt. Congratulations, you sound like a pretentious asshole!

(Full disclosure: I did this exact thing at a wine tasting once, and probably sounded like a (very drunk) pretentious asshole.)

Once you have your wine descriptions set, you can brush up on your philosophical terms for the next time we drink and I inevitably try to be profound.

Hawking’s Curiosity

Stephen Hawking was recently featured in a Discovery Channel Curiosity episode, asking “Did God create the Universe?” Videos of the show, plus the panel discussion which followed, can be found at Discover's Cosmic Variance blog.

It starts with a whole bit about Vikings yelling at an eclipse, with the point being that now that we can explain eclipses using science, we don’t need to scare away the sun-eating Wolf God anymore. Awesome! But this is actually setting up the whole tone of the show: science has replaced God as an explanatory force for the natural world. For example, it is explained that the universe’s total energy adds up to net zero, including positive energy in the stuff and negative energy in the vacuum, so you don’t need anything extra to create it. OK, got it. But at some point Hawking says something like “let’s see what the laws of nature tell us about whether we need a God.” No, let’s not! The laws of nature don’t tell us anything about God because they are laws of nature and therefore of things that exist!

After some Galileo, Einstein, and modern physics, Hawking is basically saying: because the universe works the way it does, i.e. the known laws of nature are what they are, we don’t need to explain its existence using God; they provide a better explanation themselves. The problem here is the implication that the laws of nature could have led us to the conclusion that God must exist, which is patently not possible! The laws of nature tell us about nature. And btw, these “laws” are constantly changing as our understanding grows and as we collect data about the universe. Inserting God as an explanation at any point is giving up in the same way as the anthropic “landscape” explanation for the value of the cosmological constant is giving up. The natural laws don’t always make sense (for example, who really understands quantum mechanics?) but that doesn’t mean they require supernatural explanation, and inversely, to get back to Hawking, our ability to understand the laws of nature can neither prove nor disprove the existence of a supernatural being.

The final point relates to how the Big Bang was a singularity, and like in a black hole, time stops, so with the Big Bang we’ve “found something that doesn’t have a cause because there is no Time for a cause to exist in… no Time for God to create the Universe in.” This argument, which Hawking spends a lot of time with at the end, can be easily refuted by saying that God is outside of the Universe and therefore outside of Time (a common theological idea is of God Eternal), and so God can create Time itself along with the Universe. Hawking doesn’t get any points here.

Overall, what’s wrong with the episode is the same problem I have with Sean Carroll’s "God as a theory" argument, which is the method of positing God as a theory that explains things, then proving how the theory doesn’t work. The problem is, God is not a scientific theory, so the fact that science wins such arguments is meaningless. This is the God vs. Science argument. It is a valid way of talking to people who think the Bible disproves evolution or global climate change, but does nothing for rational theists. To most people, God is not an explanation for why the world works the way it does but a more personal entity.

No, you don’t need God to explain the world, but you also don’t need modern cosmology and particle physics to explain why you don’t need God. In some ways it is embarrassing to have this simplistic, materialistic, and somewhat condescending narrative as representative of both cosmologists and atheists. Most atheists did not reject the God hypothesis only after several years of graduate physics! Most cosmologists don’t go around thinking that the fascinating universe they study also disproves God! The real stories for both are undoubtedly way more interesting, and complicated, than this episode implies. Maybe it has been useful for opening a dialogue for those who are curious, however, because I’m sure everyone can find things in it they disagree with!

Then there is the follow up “Curiosity Conversation” hosted by David Gregory. A lot of it is frustrating as a direct result of the reasons why the show itself was frustrating. Here is the play-by-play:

Paul Davies says what I said, that Hawking’s idea of God as existing in time doesn’t match up with what most theologians talk about. A lot of the early discussion is about how science has now explained God away, that “after years of careful study” Hawking has concluded that God didn’t create the universe. As if! Sean Carroll reiterates that “we don’t need God to explain cosmology,” which is mundane because it’s true. Michio Kaku brings up the multiverse as if to say God must explain that (even though there is no evidence for a multiverse! string theorists….) Jennifer Wiseman brings up that people believe in God for a multitude of reasons other than to explain why the universe exists. Jon Haught says Hawking is redefining what science is capable of, which has traditionally avoided questions of God, morality, meaning, and purpose, and that most scientists would be uncomfortable with Hawking’s treatment. (I think science can and does say a lot, but the questions themselves about what these concepts mean are not scientific in nature.) I like Carroll’s point: if your idea of God interacts with the physical world, judge the scientific merits of that idea, and if God doesn’t interact with the world, go nuts! Then he stands up for skepticism, woot! Haught says theology answers why the universe is intelligible, which is a basic assumption of science. That is an interesting point that could lead to a whole different discussion, but suffice it to say that I don’t think God is the only possible explanation for why the universe is “intelligible” for a reasonable definition of the term.

Near the end there is a nefarious question by David Gregory based on Paul Davies’ comment that religion can let people live better lives: he says to Sean Carroll, roughly, “you are saying to people, you can do that, find inspiration from the Bible and live a better life, but you can’t believe in a creator without denying what science is telling us as of now.” Hold Up! No, religion doesn’t necessarily give people better lives, it can in fact go both ways, depending on the morality of the religious beliefs (yes, I think I know what morality is better than many religions, so there). No, you aren’t denying science if you believe in a creator, but you certainly aren’t justifying your belief through science. And then Carroll responds by saying “I think that’s right”!!! He goes on to say something very true about basing what you believe in on reality instead of imposing what you want on reality, but still! He complained about the editing, though, in his live blog post, so maybe that’s it. 

All in all, despite its faults, at least the show happened at all. Stephen Hawking is popular enough to pull it off, and we shouldn’t be afraid of talking about science and religion in the public sphere instead of theologians and scientists keeping to their respective selves. Now to read Carroll’s “Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists.”