Belief

"Do you believe in evolution?"

No.

But let me rephrase the question:

"Do you believe that the theory of evolution is currently the best way to explain the data?"

Why, yes I do. Thanks for asking!

You can believe in a whole lot of things. You can believe in yourself, in the inherent goodness of humanity, in God, in your friends, in ghosts. If you live in Baltimore, you can just Believe. But it makes no sense to believe IN a scientific theory, or to assume that others do so. Sometimes people may say they believe in evolution and mean they believe the theory fits the data, but sometimes people are sloppy with their language and should know better. It makes no more sense to believe in evolution than it does to believe in electromagnetism.

It may seem like I'm making a minor point here - okay yes, I am, it's what I do - but what I'm getting at is that failing to make this distinction is the cause of a lot of the perceived conflict between science and religion. Believing in something is like having faith, and no one can take that away from you. But evolutionary biologists don't have faith that the theory of evolution is correct - they have data. The key thing about this kind of "science belief" is that new data can prove the theory wrong, thus changing beliefs about how well the theory works. The "faith beliefs" can change too, i.e. I can believe in the goodness of humanity but change my mind when faced with traumatic events; however, "the goodness of humanity" is not a testable theory. It would be odd to believe in a chair, but it is reasonable to believe that a chair exists (perhaps because you are sitting on it). This is what I mean by science belief: it connects a theory to data in an objective way.

A better way to phrase the distinction might be justified vs. unjustified belief. Scientific beliefs are (mostly) justified by data, i.e. they are empirical. Justification can also be rational, i.e. without recourse to data but appealing to logic. Unjustified beliefs can be based on intuition, or on preference (believing something because you want it to be true); or, like religious belief, they could be based on profound personal experiences. They are both legitimate types of belief and we all have them.

Now, you might think that justified beliefs are more strongly held and unjustified beliefs are easier to change. To the contrary, justified beliefs are far more adaptable - the data may change, your reasoning may be shown to be false - and I think most of the time we make no distinction between these types of belief in our own heads. There are just things we know, and we do not constantly ask ourselves how we know them. But the distinction matters. Unjustified beliefs are much harder to change.

To me, believing in something is like having faith in something without empirical or rational justification. And this is exactly why I hate the question, "Do you believe in evolution?"  It is like asking, "Do you believe in gravity?" I'm not floating into space, so, yes? But Newtonian gravity is wrong on cosmological scales, so no? Or did you mean relativistic gravity? What are you talking about?! It is a meaningless question.

Part of the deal of abandoning certainty is a commitment to questioning your beliefs. This gets tedious. Humans are not designed to do this. But, it is irrational to believe, contrary to the data, that humans are rational beings. Being uncertain is uncomfortable, thus abandoning certainty means valuing the truth above personal comfort. Many people place utmost value in concepts like goodness or justice, or in increasing well-being for themselves and others. But valuing truth means asking, "What is good? What is well-being?" and being okay with not knowing the answer. Valuing truth means avoiding untruths most of all. And now that I've slipped from epistemology to morality and totally derailed myself, here's an apt quote from Dune:

My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. "Something cannot emerge from nothing," he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable "the truth" can be.

- Frank Herbert, Dune

I've recently discovered (in the past months or year) that I seem to place a high value in the truth, and I find myself thinking, when I disagree with something on the internet (like ALL THE TIME), "Well, they just don't value truth as much as I do." (Wow, that sounds pretty arrogant after writing it out loud... no one thinks to themselves, "I don't care what is true! La la la la!" Probably. But that's not what I mean...) Perhaps not valuing truth as much means they are less wary of the instability of "truth" or more trusting of sources of information. But whenever someone posts something and comments, "This is unbelievable!!!!!!" I always want to respond, "Then maybe you shouldn't believe it? And also maybe calm down with the exclamation marks a bit?"

Another way people may not "value truth as much" is when there's a disagreement; they may get defensive or take it personally because not having any perceived conflict is more important than hashing out the issues; or, having their opinions heard is more important than finding out whether these opinions conform to reality. I'm not making judgments here; these values are all valid. Part of the difference in what people value may be temperament. Personally, not only am I a professional scientist, but in my free time I read about psychology, epistemology, neuroscience, and other things that address why we believe what we believe and how we know what we know. So, I value truth highly, and others may not, and that's okay.

Getting back to the justified vs. unjustified types of belief... I think it's fair to say that justified belief is more trustworthy. Justification should be found for unjustified beliefs whenever possible, and basic assumptions, facts, and motivations that underlie belief checked often. But, though I value truth, I recognize that some belief can never be justified; further, these unjustified beliefs address some of the most profound and beautiful aspects of human existence.

This distinction is often discussed in terms of the conflict between science and religion. For example, no empirical data can address the question of God's existence, and though there may be reasoned arguments, surely very few people believe in God because they were convinced by the Kalam Cosmological Argument; it is rather something they know, because they have faith. Acting as if data or logic has anything to do with spirituality is a good way for atheists to completely miss the point and convince no one (as if convincing were a worthwhile endeavor, which it is not).

On the other hand, ignoring the overwhelming justification of a scientific theory because it conflicts with unjustified religious belief is a good way to bring the progress of society to a screeching halt. The error lies in failing to recognize those aspects which are justifiable - those which come into contact with data - and failing to separate them from questions of value, rightness, love, spirituality, etc.

Stephen Jay Gould has famously referred to science and religion as "non-overlapping magisteria," such that science deals with questions of fact and religion with morality and meaning. I may have agreed at one time, but now it is obvious to me that of course they overlap! Most religions have in their dogma explicit questions of fact; science, being a human endeavor, is not immune from questions of morality and meaning, and of course religion does not have a monopoly on morality and meaning in the first place. It seems "science" and "religion" are not the correct terms, and I don't know what the correct terms are, which may be why this blog post has been in draft form for years. I guess I will have to live with the uncertainty.

It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can know a thing and still not believe it.

- John Steinbeck, East of Eden

The Christmas Spirit

For some reason this year, I am all about Christmas. I bought a wreath and candles about two weeks before Thanksgiving, and that was it. I held off as long as I could, but I had already listened to Mannheim Steamroller and watched Scrooge before the Season had officially begun.

Perhaps I got into it early because in England they don't have Thanksgiving for a buffer. As early as October, shelves are stocked with Christmas crackers (not for eating) and mince pies, and by November the German Christmas Market is up. Sure, there's nothing particularly Christmas-y about a bratwurst to Americans (though it's a tradition I could get behind!), but there was something about it - the little fake cabins with the fake holly - that put me in the Christmas Spirit.

So what the hell is the Christmas Spirit?

Like all good questions, this has many answers. Anyone who celebrates, or lives in a country that celebrates, Christmas could give you their own answer, and these are all fine by me. I could go on about the things I enjoy... dark red and green together, lighting candles, decorating the mantle in just exactly the right way, cuddling by the fire with hot chocolate, listening to Mannheim Steamroller wrapped in the Christmas blanket, smelling the tree... it's about being warm in the middle of the cold, and feeling good for absolutely no reason.

I'm an atheist and I love Christmas. There I said it. And it doesn't bother me one bit that I'm ostensibly supposed to be worshiping the Sun God. (Do you ever use a word without being certain that you're using it in the right way? Ostensibly that's what I just did.) I don't blog about religion as much as I thought I would. Partly because people can get easily offended, but mostly because I don't care what people believe. For questions of spirituality and faith and love, there are no right answers; for questions that deal with the physical world, such as the age of the Earth and biological evolution, we have science.

But these are complicated philosophical issues, and I digress. I've become more interested not in what people believe, but why. Religions weren't created in a vacuum... there are psychological and sociological reasons for why humans believe what they do and behave they way they do, and that shit is fascinating.

It's no coincidence that the primary holiday of the Northern hemisphere is during their winter, the same as it's no coincidence the Christian church eventually chose December the 25th as the birthday of their savior. Yule, Saturnalia, Solstice... of course Jesus is born when the sun is at it's lowest in the sky, for Jesus is the Son and the Sun. The pagan traditions that Christmas adopted, like bringing a pine tree into your house, are a celebration of life in the midst of death. There is no need to celebrate life in Summer when it is all around you; but Winter is the time for endings. The evergreen tree, the birth of Christ, remind us that life will begin again.

Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall.... let's break the seasons down. You might be thinking that no, Spring is the real time to celebrate life. And you'd be right, too; Easter with its eggs, bunnies, and resurrection celebrates the renewal of life: Spring is the season of Beginnings. Summer follows as the season of Being, and Autumn/Fall as the season of Ending: the trees lose their leaves, and we treasure the last bounty of the harvest.

So where does that leave Winter? What is left after Beginning, Being, and Ending, can only be Non-being. Winter is the season of the Spirit.

The spirit, like the Sun, is constant. The moon symbolizes the cycles of time by its monthly cycle of birth and death, but the sun symbolizes the eternal, which is outside of time. (I will admit that this is from Joseph Campbell, like most of my deep thoughts on symbolism and mythology.) Symbolized by the evergreen tree and the birth of the Sun God, Winter, then, is outside of time; between death and birth; the silence between the sound. Christmas is the time to settle, regroup, reflect, and prepare for the New Year. And eat lots of chocolate.

So that, in a very large nutshell, is what I think about the Christmas Spirit. I didn't even mention how I love the icon and imagery of Santa Clause, with a twinkle in his eye and a deep laugh. To me he is not the fat man in the bright red with white trim, but more of a Mithrandir archetype of the wanderer, doing good where he can, eternally wise and eternally eternal. (Mithrandir is Gandalf, btw. It means the Grey Pilgrim in Sindarin. Do I have to explain everything to you?)

Happy Christmas!

Death

I decided to pull out some Tarot cards today, and the first card was Death.

Don't worry, it's just a metaphor. And a pretty accurate one too. A lot of things are changing right now and a period of my life is ending. I'm in the middle of figuring out what the next stage of my life is going to be like. And before anything new can happen, the old has to become old. It has to die. Only with death can there be birth; only with birth can there be death.

Death is not an evil thing, nor always bad, but it is often scary, and sometimes painful. We become comfortable in the life we have and start to fear that it won't always be so comfortable, that at some point something will be different. Fear of death is fear of change, for death is the first step to change. I mostly mean metaphorical death here, as in ending, leaving, or being destroyed, but physical death too. Physical death is the ultimate change from which there is no changing back (in so far as anything can really be changed back). But we forget we have already gone through such a transition: birth. We come into this world and we go out, there is no escaping this truth, for the nature of life is change. Creation and destruction are the two sides of that change and merely different ways of describing a single event.

I was at a funeral recently and as I listened to the pastor, I became convinced that the nature of religion is to address in some way the fear of death. And in my opinion, most do this the completely wrong way, which is to get rid of death entirely. When you die you go to heaven. Death is not real, you won't really die, the people you love won't die, everything will be perfect in the light of God. "Others have to say 'goodbye', we get to say, 'see you later'." To me that means no growth can occur, no moving forward but always looking back - eternal stagnation and sameness - the absence of change and so the absence of life. The absence of life indeed - the very thing that was feared - but also the absence of death. What is left? No, I would rather say goodbye. I would rather be able to feel loss and sadness and pain. How can one grieve if there is nothing to grieve? How can I rejoice in the new if I never let go of the old?

I don't mean to be too hard on the idea of heaven, though. I don't mind if people believe in what gives them comfort, and I don't mind interpreting heaven as a metaphor even though people take it literally. ;-) But I will continue to say goodbye. And hello! (FYI that means to babies, in this analogy.)

One of my favorite movies is The Fountain and its major theme happens to be death. As the husband struggles to cure his dying wife, he spends less time with her. By trying to have her forever, he loses her now. And the wife instead becomes fascinated with the story of the Mayan creator god, who plants the tree of life from his own dying body: "Death as an act of creation." "Death is the road to awe." (One could say, the road to "awesome!" But one wouldn't.) And in the picture on the Tarot card, the dead one is placed in the fetal position in the womb of the earth. The snake sheds its skin to permit new growth. Or, to put it a little grossly, phallic and wombic imagery come together to create new life. (They make baby imagery.)

Having said all that, I'm not looking forward to my own metaphorical death at all! But I have to remind myself that Fear won't help anything... and then I have to eat some chocolate and calm down.

P.S. Almost forgot to mention another thing about The Fountain. I remember thinking the credits looked a bit like cosmological structure formation, but I didn't take it quite this far. Pretty awesome.

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.

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.”