Larry Wall on religion and Perl culture (1999)

(You rewrote your comment while I was drafting mine, so it looks like I'm replying to something I'm not.)

I don't have to believe anything's inexplicable; in point of fact, I don't. That's not to say I think our puny little monkey brains are (presently) capable of understanding everything, but that's a completely different claim than that those things are inexplicable.

As for assertions, I'm not the party making one. You asserted that religious/spiritual folk "have to believe some phenomena are inexplicable". That's a universal claim, which can be refuted by any existential quantifier to the contrary. In simple predicate logic:

  ∀: All believers hold that some phenomena are inexplicable.
  ∃: I don't.
  ∴: Not all believers believe so.

As for specific examples, name any old thing you'd think a believer would hold as inexplicable. That. I believe it's explicable. Granted, I believe that because I believe the divine wants us to understand our world — to the extent we can anthropomorphize and attribute intent to it, of course. Indeed, it's one of my highest moral duties, according to my beliefs, to learn and understand as much as I possibly can. To do anything less with the incredible, indescribably precious gift of having a mind is to piss it away.

So, net, in a lot of ways, we probably actually agree. I decry ignorance and superstition and the like pretty strongly, too. What I don't do is condescend, or paint with a brush broad enough to cover everyone in a class of humanity I seem not to have taken the time or effort to understand.

"The mark of a true genius is the ability to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas in mind at once." -- attributed to Albert Einstein

I remember, my first week of college, I had lunch with my advisor for the normal "how are things going?" chat. I said that I really liked my physics course, but I thought the psychology/neuroscience seminar was frustratingly vague. I liked that there was always a right answer in physics, but in psychology there're all these competing theories, and some experiments will point one way while others point the opposite. It was all a contradictory mess of evidence, and you seemingly couldn't draw any conclusions from it.

He replied that once you get to the higher levels of physics, it was like that too. (He'd done his Ph.D at Harvard as part of the team that won the 2001 Nobel Prize for discovering Bose-Einstein condensates.) There are not clear right and wrong facts, there's only data, and sometimes the data will point one way and sometimes it will point the other. And in order to make sense of that data, you need to be able to hold all the possible ideas, both right and wrong, in your head at once, so that you can sort them out.

I basically ignored him and then floundered through college. But once I got out and into the working world, I found that pretty much all the leaders I admired had this ability to hold multiple contradictory ideas in mind at once and yet still make a decision. And the authority figures I didn't respect lacked this ability, as did most of the people who never managed to rise into leadership positions. It was a pretty discomforting realization, since I wanted to move into a leadership position and yet my whole life up till then, I'd been seeking certainty in my intellectual life.

When you reach a contradiction, there're a couple of possible responses. You can go narrower, discarding the evidence that doesn't fit your hypothesis. This is the Ayn Rand approach - "Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. One of them is sure to be false." Or you can go deeper, unpacking each idea into its constituent parts and keeping those parts that you can reconcile between the two. This is the Hegelian synthesis.

It's not that one approach is necessarily better than the other, but if you want to have a big impact on the world, your thinking has to encompass the world, including all the parts that don't fit with your preconceptions. If you limit yourself to faith, then the only people who can relate to your ideas are those that themselves believe on faith, while if you limit yourself to evidence, then the only people who can relate to your ideas are those who themselves believe in evidence. You've excluded half the world from being able to hold a dialogue with you.

That's why I mentioned Kuhn and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions above. Kuhn's contribution was to document how prevailing scientific thought shifts over time. And he found that during periods of "normal science", scientists operate under the Randian paradigm - they sweep evidence under the rug that doesn't agree with the prevailing hypotheses. But once in a while, someone will come along that actually looks at the experimental results that have been recorded as anomalies, and instead of discarding them, turns them over in his head until they can be made to make sense with the existing body of evidence. Like Einstein and relativity. And then you have a paradigm shift, and the body of knowledge advances to include both the old laws and the new evidence that has been discovered.

but aren't axioms considered to be self-evident?

usually by observation?

sorry, decided to give examples instead.

*i had originally asked for examples of phenomena

i don't think i need predicate logic notation to get that :D

the reason i said phenomena-inexplicable was because there are a lot of claims made by religions that were later found to be from other natural causes.

ex. in christianity:

- diseases were supposed to be curses and punishments till the germ theory was discovered

- creation story does not hold with modern evidence

- there are contradictions between biblical incidents and historic records(bethlehem census, great flood, etc.)

- the nature of heaven, hell, souls are supposed to be unanalysable

- without an understanding of astronomy, there are implications that heaven was located above the clouds(angels with wings, looking down from heaven, etc.)

- jesus had conducted exorcisms in the bible, they are considered silly now

so, professing to be religious and accept scientific discoveries at the same time seems difficult..

"What I don't do is condescend, or paint with a brush broad enough to cover everyone in a class of humanity I seem not to have taken the time or effort to understand."

there is a reason the debate _has_ to happen:

- accepting religious opinions as respectable has led to a majority of americans to consider evolution as untrue.

- education policies are being influenced to paint evolution as just-a-theory with undertones that it is a fringe group with a political agenda

- religious people who believe in and look forward to an armageddon have been in charge of a massive number of nuclear warheads

- stem cell research has been set back by almost a decade

- abortion clinic doctors have been shot

- the representative of god on earth has said 'child-molestation is bad, condoms are worse'

- the catholic church has systematically protected child-molesters under them

- the islamic world has become more extremised because the clever american government thought it would be a machiavelli move against the ussr. we know how that turned out

if the result is that people think atheists are condescending, small price to pay if we can get fewer people to blow each other up because their imaginary friend says so.

Professor Ehrman's works have been helpful to me in learning more about the historical context of Chritianity and the Church. He has some excellent videos from The Learning Company as well as several books on the subject.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_D._Ehrman

It's pretty easy to realize that all the miraculous tales from the bible are false - unless you've been indoctrinated since you were a child. Ehrman's works helped me to understand how the collection of ideas that became the Christian canon, were able to take root and spread.

The ideology is far from static and has evolved over time to address challenges to its validity and acceptance. I find the history of Christian thought to be a far more interesting topic than Christianity itself.

In understanding the malleability of Christian beliefs over time, it establishes that the roots were not handed down from God and set in stone, but fit nicely into into a very human framework of an adoption of a set of memes that have evolved and become institutionalized over time.