Kabbalah at Harvard

Dr. Howard Smith is an Harvard astrophysicist.  His areas of research interest, according to their website, include: massive star formation in galactic and extragalactic environments; luminous merging galaxies with normal, starburst and /or AGN activity and infrared and submillimeter spectroscopic datasets.  Ya know, basic stuff.  How unexpected and refreshing that he is also a student of Kabbalah and believes that the two disciplines have a natural affinity.

Last month's Octavian Report ran an engaging interview with him in which he lays out his perspective on (among other things) the synthesis of science and Jewish mysticism.  Here are some ideas that stood out:

First, he has some critique for religious types who seem to fear scientific knowledge:

Maimonides says religious people who have no awareness of science — he talks about astronomy in particular — are like people walking around the palace of the king who can’t find the gate. You really need science to enter the gate. In that context, I also tie it to Psalm 92. That’s the Psalm for the Sabbath Day, and it goes something like: ma gadlu ma’asekha, how wonderful are your works; ish-baar lo yeda, a simple-minded person doesn’t understand them. It continues in that vein. The import of that psalm is that these are the works of creation and a person who doesn’t appreciate these works, like the uneducated person, misses out on that splendor, the wonder of the universe. Those are tied together.

No surprise there, that's Rambam's position.  It's good to be reminded of it again though by a person of Dr. Smith's level of accomplishment.

He then goes on to lay out the current state of the conflict between the "Anthropic Principle" - the discovery of the extreme precision that nature requires in order for life to exist and atheistic science's attempt to explain it in the form of the Multiverse Theory.

There are constants like the speed of light and Planck’s constant that control how the world works. We have no idea why these constants take the particular numbers, the values that they do. Why is the speed of light 3×1010 centimeters per second? We don’t know why. It could be anything — much bigger, much smaller. What we do know is that if these many values changed by a little bit — a tenth of a percent, even less —  then intelligent life couldn’t exist.

Intelligent life relies on carbon. Carbon is the only atom that can form complex chains, and no matter what strange lifeform you might imagine out there, I think everybody would agree that if it’s going to be intelligent, it’s going to have to be complex. It’s going to have to be able to make complicated chains of molecules. Right now, only carbon does that. Carbon is essential, and probably any life form will be carbon-based for that reason.

Carbon is made in stars. If the strong force had a slightly different constant, then the protons that come together to form the nucleus of the carbon atom wouldn’t hold together. That’s just one instance of many. Or consider the universe itself. If the universe when it expanded in the Big Bang had expanded more slowly than it did, then eventually the gravity from all of the matter in the universe would have slowed it down and made it collapse. Life takes time to evolve; it took us several billion years here on Earth. If the universe had not lasted a few billion years, life wouldn’t form. On the other hand, if the universe had expanded much more quickly than it did, then in those first moments after matter was created from energy things would have moved apart so quickly that atoms would not have been able to form and neutrons would not have been able to form. The universe that we see, of course, is expanding at a rate that seems to be just right. How perfect is that rate? It seems to be something like 1/10120 — fantastically perfect, much more perfect than any of the other things that I mentioned.

This is also well-known.  The fact is that there is simply no way to scientifically explain this level of perfection.  All parties involved tacitly agree that it looks like a setup - like it was designed to be that way.  There are those who hope to skirt this problem by proposing what seems like a scientific answer (but is really a philosophical one in that it's untestable) that there are a massive, or infinite number of universes and that we just happen to find ourselves in the one with these particular parameters - otherwise how could we even be here to speculate about it.

Dr. Smith is unimpressed by this gambit:

What I say is: what do you think is more rational? That we live in an infinite multiverse or that we live in a purposeful universe? I think that the idea of a multiverse is actually a rather irrational thing to imagine. I tell my scientific colleagues, “You believe in a multiverse in order to explain this fine-tuning of the anthropic principle. You believe in a multiverse, but recognize it’s an irrational belief. You only do it because you don’t want to recognize the alternative — and there’s only one alternative. Namely that it’s not an infinite universe, but that it is a single universe, and it’s purposeful.”

I say that what we’ve learned in the last 20 years — about exoplanets, about quantum mechanics — shows rather the opposite. That it’s much more rational to imagine that we live in a purposeful universe, that we are special, that the Earth is special. That we are not random accidents, and our neighbors are not random accidents. We all have some kind of purpose.

I'm always pleased to discover scientists who don't harbor a hostile and dismissive animus towards theology.  Dr. Smith takes it a step further with this full-throated embrace of what I agree is the most correct and intuitive position - that science and mysticism are simply two sides of one coin - and that the more we are open to both the more we will ultimately discover and understand about the true nature of ourselves and our world.

The Secret Life of Nonsense

It's commonly believed that along with whatever kernels of wisdom the Talmud (and other Jewish scriptures) may contain is a whole mess of silly old folklore and superstition.  On the surface, this assumption is not without merit for the Talmudic Sages apparently believed things like:

"For a fever that strikes daily, one must take a white zuz (coin) and go with it to a salt evaporator, and weigh against it its weight in salt.  He then must tie the salt by the neck opening of his shirt with a strand of hair.  This will cure him of fever."  Or,

"He must sit at the crossroads and when he sees a large ant carrying something he must take the any and place it into a copper tube.  He must then close the tube with lead and seal it with 60 different types of seals.  He must shake the tube and then say to the ant 'your burden upon me and my burden upon you!'"

Seems like a lot of trouble but what do you expect from such ancient and whimsical people?  To those who have a bit of background in Talmudic and mystical exegesis it may be possible to discern the traces of code-words in these "toil and trouble" formulas.  Could it be that they are actually teaching more than they seem to be?  According to several of the great mystics they are doing just that. According to Rabbi Eliyahu Kramer of Vilna, aka the Vilna Gaon:

"It was decreed that the holy secrets of Moses's teachings would be desecrated by being clothed and hidden in forms such as these strange sounding expositions of the rabbis, rather than being clearly evident.  This is turn, would make it possible for the scoffers of each generation to belittle them."

Why that should be is a longer story but suffice it to say for now that "on the surface the 'Aggadot', the exposition of the rabbis, appear as wasted expressions, God forbid, yet all the secrets of the universe are concealed within them."

How about other discredited beliefs of theses sages such as the belief that the stars are fixed in great spheres that rotate around the Earth or that wine is good for pregnant women or that vermin spontaneously generate?  Doesn't that all call into question everything that they believed?  Actually no, and for three reasons.

The first is that these sages never claimed to possess the totality of human knowledge - rather, they only claimed to have the fundamental tenets of Jewish spirituality.  As such, to have accepted the science of the day (much as we do) or commonly held folk-remedies simply isn't a theological problem.  Had more updated beliefs existed, they would have recorded those.

Secondly, their interest in natural phenomena (science) was largely driven by what baring it had on Jewish law.  Just as everyone knows that there's no such thing as a sunset (as the sun remains still) but doesn't care since it seems to be setting, so too, in a case like spontaneous generation of vermin, inasmuch as it looked to the naked eye that they just sprang up from nowhere, that was enough to base Jewish law off of - the actuality of the matter has no applicable relevance in this case.

Lastly, there is the teaching (along the lines of the Vilna Gaon) that the science of the day that was recorded in the Talmud was actually only intended as a vehicle to teach deeper wisdom.  Consider the words of Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto:

"The sages recorded much of the esoteric tradition that they had received in matters relating to nature or astronomy.  In other words, they utilized the knowledge of nature and astronomy that was accepted among gentile scholars of their time in order to transmit something else.  Thus, they never intended to teach physical 'facts' concerning these phenomena, but rather to utilize these facts as vehicles for Kabbalistic secrets.  One should therefore not think that they were wrong because a particular model which they used is no longer accepted.  Their intention was to clothe the hidden tradition in the accepted knowledge of their generation.  That very tradition itself could have been clothed in a different garment according to what was accepted (as scientific fact) in other generations."

Like the music of Schoenberg or the writing of Joyce, to the uninitiated it can all come across as so much gibberish.  Those who have the humility to suspend judgement and have taken the time to investigate beyond a superficial first reading may just discover an unforeseen world of surprising order and insight.

She Blinded Me: the Limits of Scientific Inquiry

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking alongside a real scientist - Harold Gans - formerly a senior cryptological mathematician with the NSA.  His talks on the improbability of the origin of life and a mathematical argument for God's direct intervention in human affairs can heard here.  My presentation on the limits (and of the manifold achievements) of the scientific endeavor can be found at the same link.

Enjoy!

A Religious Scientist - Lo and Behold

The most interesting thing (to me) about MIT professor Jeremy England is that he's so "out" religiously.  With the atmosphere in the academy so toxic for those of the spiritual persuasion it seems remarkable that he survived it - and is even getting positive press! Check out this profile in OZY optimistically entitled "The Man Who May One Up Darwin."  Considering the esteem that Darwin is held in materialist circles it strikes me a doubly remarkable that this piece simultaneously questions the durability of the Darwinian principle while admiringly exploring the musings of an Orthodox Jew - who's research could upend it in time.

For those of us who believe that science and theology are just two sides of one coin - methods of exploring and making sense of the world that we find ourselves in - its awfully refreshing to hear a contemporary scientist reflect on the study of Torah and remark "that studying the Torah provided an opportunity for intellectual engagement that he says was 'unlike anything that I had ever experienced in terms of subtlety and grandeur of scope.'"  Yep.

He has also drawn the correct conclusion vis a vis the inherent limitation that science is subject to - that it cannot tell us anything about the meaning of the discoveries that it makes.  As the article notes "for his part, England believes science can give us explanations and predictions but it can never tell us what we should do with that information.  That's where, he says, the religious teachings come in. Indeed, the man who's one-upping Darwin has spent the past 10 years painstakingly combing through the Torah, interpreting word by word much the way he ponders the meaning of life."

It remains to be seen if Professor England will have the scientific impact that many are predicting for him, but I sincerely hope that he blazes another trail within the scientific community - one that once again makes it scientifically acceptable to take metaphysics as seriously as the physical sciences.

The 50 Smartest People of Faith

Lately I've been getting a lot of comments to the effect of "rabbi, if you would just read an introductory text book on such and such you would see blah blah blah..." as if I had never considered their dazzling points before.  The non-believer generally has an awfully hard time processing that there are still people in this world who doggedly uphold their faith - to them it's all just so backwards and "unenlightened." One way they cope with it is to assure themselves that the persistence of religiosity is simply due to the imbecility of the religious.  No smart (or at least non-delusional) people could possibly continue to believe what science and logic has (in their minds) thoroughly discredited.

It's with this in mind that I share this piece from thebestschools.org called The 50 Smartest People of Faith.  I cordially invite the materialist community to tangle with some of these folks.  Maybe we all might not seem quite so dim after-all.

I'll post the intro and a few profiles here and let you explore the rest through the link:

A few years back, “New Atheist” authors Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett helped to publicize a movement to rechristen atheists as “Brights” (see our feature article on influential atheists here).

This was no doubt mainly because the word “atheist” still has a harsh and aggressive ring in the ears of most ordinary people.

But the corollary—that people of faith are “Dims”—was surely an added benefit, in the minds of the New Atheist publicity men.

Is it really true that most intelligent and well-informed people are atheists, while people of faith tend to be unschooled and credulous?

Far from it.

Unfortunately, in the rancorous debates in this country over the role of religion in our public life, all too often it is simply assumed—by both sides—that religious faith is in conflict with reason (and intelligence). The unspoken assumption is that religion relies exclusively on faith, while science alone is supported by reason.

This idea is utterly mistaken, but because it mostly goes unchallenged, it reinforces the stereotype that atheists are somehow smarter than believers.

One way to combat the erroneous assumption that faith conflicts with reason is by giving greater visibility to living, breathing believers who are also highly intelligent. That is what we are endeavoring to do with this list of “The 50 Smartest People of Faith.”

The qualifications for inclusion on our list are twofold:

(1) Intellectual brilliance, evidenced by a very high level of achievement, whether in the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, literature, the fine arts, or public service; and

(2) Religious faith, evidenced either through explicit personal witness or through publicly professed respect for religion.

By “religious faith,” we mean religion in the monotheistic, or Abrahamic, tradition—which we happen to know best. We do not doubt that a similar list of brilliant and devout Hindus, Buddhists, Daoists, Confucianists, Shintoists, and others could easily be drawn up, and we hope it will be, by those qualified to do so.

Most of the individuals on our list have given explicit public witness to their religious faith. However, in a few cases we infer a faith that appears to be implicit in a person’s writings. Needless to say, we do not pretend to see into people’s hearts. Unbeknownst to us, some individuals may have private reservations. But all have declared their deeply held respect for religious faith through their works and/or their public pronouncements.

This list, then, includes living men and women who are both people of faith and people of exceptional intellectual brilliance and professional accomplishment. It is presented in alphabetical order.

Anyone who is interested in learning more about how reason supports religious faith could hardly do better than delve into their scholarship or other creative achievements, by following the links we provide.

Khaled Abou El Fadl (b. 1963)

Abou El Fadl was born in Kuwait. He was trained in traditional Islamic jurisprudence in Kuwait and in Egypt, and also holds a JD from University of Pennsylvania Law School, and a PhD in Islamic law from Princeton University. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA law school, as well as Chair of the Islamic Studies Program at UCLA. Abou El Fadl is the author of many books on Islamic law and politics, several of which have been widely translated, as well as scores of articles in academic journals. His research focuses on the theme of beauty as a core moral value of Islam, as well as on universal themes of humanity, morality, human rights, justice, and mercy. He has publicly opposed the Saudi-based Wahhabi movement, and is a vocal supporter of democracy, pluralism, and women’s rights in Islamic countries. A sometime consultant for the US government, Abou El Fadl  has received recognition from several universities and international governmental bodies, including the University of Oslo’s Human Rights Award. He has been called one of the world’s most influential Arabs.

Books: Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law (Cambridge UP, 2001); And God Knows the Soldiers: The Authoritative and Authoritarian in Islamic Discourses (University Press of America, 2001); Conference of the Books: The Search for Beauty in Islam(University Press of America, 2001; reprinted, Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); The Place of Tolerance in Islam, co-author (Beacon Press, 2002); Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority, and Women (OneWorld, 2001); Islam and the Challenge of Democracy,co-author (Princeton UP, 2004); The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists(HarperOne, 2005)

Marilyn McCord Adams (b. 1943)

Born Marilyn McCord, Adams was educated at the University of Illinois (AB) and Cornell University (PhD, 1967). She also holds a Master of Theology degree from Princeton Theological Seminary (1986) and a Doctor of Divinity degree from Oxford University (2008). She has taught at UCLA, Yale, and Oxford. Since 2009, she has been Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Adams is an ordained Episcopal priest. She is best known for her work on the Problem of Evil, and more specifically, for her notion of “horrendous” evil—evil so great as to appear inconsistent with any conceivable “soul-building” type of justification (or theodicy) for God’s permitting it to occur. She has also argued in favor of the universal salvation of all souls, no matter how corrupt. Adams gave the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 1998–1999. These were later published as Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology.

Books: The Problem of Evil co-editor (Oxford UP, 1991); Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Cornell UP, 1999); What Sort of Human Nature? Medieval Philosophy and the Systematics of Christology (Marquette University Press, 1999); Wrestling for Blessing (Church Publishing Inc, 2005); Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (Cambridge UP, 2006); Opening to God (Westminster John Knox Press, 2008); Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Gilles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham (Oxford UP, 2010)

Werner Arber (b. 1929)

Arber was born in a small town in the canton of Aargau, in northern Switzerland, into a Protestant family. He studied at the famous Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and received his PhD in molecular genetics in 1958 from the University of Geneva. Afterwards, he continued his research into the genetics of the bacteriophage virus at a number of universities in the United States, including the University of Southern California, Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT. He has been a member of the innovative, multidisciplinary Biozentrum at the University of Basel since its inception in 1971. Arber’s work on the genetics of phage played a crucial role in the development of recombinant DNA technology, sparking the biotechnology revolution and earning him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1978. He has been a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Rome since 1981, and is a member of the Science, Theology, and the Ontological Quest (STOQ) Project. In 2011, Pope Benedict XVI appointed Arber as President of the Pontifical Academy—the first Protestant to hold that position.

Book: Genetic Manipulation: Impact on Man and Society, co-editor (Cambridge UP, 1984)

Benjamin S. Carson (b. 1951)

Carson was born in Detroit, where he was raised in poverty by a single mother. He earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Yale and an MD from the University of Michigan. He did his residency in neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University, where he became the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery in 1984, at the age of 33. Carson is a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In 1987, he made medical history by being the first surgeon to successfully separate conjoined twins joined at the back of the head. He has pioneered many surgical techniques that have become standard in the field of neurosurgery. In 2012, Carson found himself at the center of a national controversy, when he was first invited, then disinvited, and finally re-invited to deliver the commencement address at Emory University. He is the president and co-founder of the Carson Scholars Fund.

Books: Gifted Hands 20th Anniversary Edition: The Ben Carson Story (Zondervan, 2011); America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great (Zondervan, 2012)

Stephen L. Carter (b. 1954)

Carter graduated from high school in Ithaca, New York, in 1972, and earned a BA in history from Stanford University in 1976. He received his JD from Yale University in 1979, after which he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, among others. Since 1982, he has taught at Yale Law School, where he is currently the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law. Carter is a Roman Catholic. At Yale, he teaches courses on contracts, professional responsibility, ethics in literature, intellectual property, and the law and ethics of war. He is also a prolific author, having published eight volume of political and cultural criticism, as well as five novels. His books Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby and The Culture of Disbelief were widely reviewed and discussed. His first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, spent 11 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Carter also writes a regular opinion column for Christianity Todaymagazine.

Books: Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby (Basic Books, 1991); The Culture of Disbelief (Basic Books, 1993); The Emperor of Ocean Park (Random House, 2002)

Simon Conway Morris (b. 1951)

Conway Morris was born in Carshalton, Surrey, and was brought up in London. He studied geology at Bristol University and received his PhD from Cambridge University, where he is currently a professor of evolutionary palaeobiology. Conway Morris was elected a member of the Royal Society at the age of 39, in recognition for his groundbreaking work in paleontology. He has also received numerous other academic awards. In 2005, he gave the Boyle Lectures, and in 2007 he delivered the Gifford Lectures. Conway Morris, who is Anglican, is best known for his field work on the fossil deposits contained in the Burgess Shale formation in British Columbia, which represent some of our best evidence for the nature of the Cambrian Explosion. Conway Morris’s work on the Burgess Shale was popularized by celebrated paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould in his bestselling work, Wonderful Life (Norton, 1989). However, the two evolutionary biologists subsequently clashed over their differing interpretations of the fossils. Conway Morris has published a number of books, including two which present his interpretations of the Burgess Shale fossils, as well as his general theory of convergent evolution, for a popular audience.

Books: The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals (Oxford UP, 1998); Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge UP, 2003); The Deep Structure of Biology, editor (Templeton Press, 2008); The Fitness of the Cosmos for Life, co-editor (Cambridge UP, 2008)

Louise S. Cowan (b. 1916)

Born Louise Shillenburg, Cowan received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. She wrote her PhD dissertation on the poets of the Southern Renaissance of the 1920s at Vanderbilt University. This work was later published as The Fugitive Group (Louisiana State UP, 1959), a classic in its field. Cowan, who is Roman Catholic, taught for over 50 years at the University of Dallas, where she was Chair of the English Department, Dean of Graduate Studies, and University Professor. She also founded and directed the university’s Institute for Philosophic Studies. Cowan is the author of numerous scholarly studies of American and other literature. Together with her husband, Donald Cowan, President of the University of Dallas from 1962 until 1977, she founded the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. In conjunction with the Dallas Institute, she also founded a Teachers Academy for public school teachers, which the National Endowment for the Humanities has designated as a “model for the nation.” Cowan has continued to teach and lecture into her tenth decade.

Books: The Fugitive Group (Louisiana State UP, 1959); The Southern Critics (University of Dallas Press, 1971); Classic Texts and the Nature of Authority, co-author (Dallas Institute of Humanities & Culture, 1993); Invitation to the Classics, co-author (Baker Books, 1998)

William Lane Craig (b. 1949)

Craig was born in East Peoria, Illinois. He obtained his bachelor’s degree from Wheaton College, and two master’s degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He studied under John Hicks at the University of Birmingham, UK, where he received a PhD in philosophy in 1977, and with Wolfhart Pannenberg at the University of Munich, where he received a doctorate in theology in 1984. He has taught at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Westmont College, and the University of Louvain, Belgium. He is currently Research Professor of Philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, in California. Craig, who is a Baptist, is a prolific author, having written or edited some 30 scholarly and popular books. He has made influential contributions to several areas of contemporary philosophy of religion, the best-known of which is undoubtedly his revival of the Kalām Cosmological Argument. He maintains a busy schedule of lecturing and debating on college campuses and in other public forums around the world. In 2011, Craig made headlines when Richard Dawkins refused to appear at a debate with him at the University of Oxford to which both had been invited.

Books: The Kalām Cosmological Argument (Macmillan, 1979); Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, co-author (Oxford UP, 1993); Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time (Crossway, 2001); Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed. (Crossway, 2008)

Jean Bethke Elshtain (b. 1941)

Elshtain was raised in the village of Timnath, in northern Colorado. She received her bachelor’s degree from Colorado State University, and master’s degrees in history from the University of Colorado and the University of Wisconsin. In 1973, she received her PhD in political science from Brandeis University. She has taught at the University of Massachusetts and Vanderbilt University, and has been a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale. She is currently the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School, as well as an Associate Scholar with the Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, & World Affairs. Elshtain, who is a Protestant, has published more than 20 scholarly books on political ethics. She has focused on issues regarding gender roles in politics, just war theory, and relations between religion and state. Since 2001, she has been an outspoken supporter of the U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2006, she delivered the Gifford Lectures, which were subsequently published as Sovereignty: God, State, and Self. Since 2008, she has been a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. Elshtain is also a contributing editor for The New Republic.

Books: Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton UP, 1981); Democracy on Trial (Basic Books, 1984); Augustine and the Limits of Politics (University of Notre Dame Press, 1996); Just War Against Terror (Basic Books, 2003); Sovereignty: God, State, and Self(Basic Books, 2008)

David Gelernter (b. 1955)

Gelernter received his bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1976, and his PhD from SUNY Stony Brook in 1982. That same year, he joined the faculty of Yale University, where he is a Professor of Computer Science. In 1983, his Linda program introduced the concept of “tuple spaces,” which were a seminal contribution to the development of parallel distributed processing architectures, and are the basis of many computer-communication and distributed-programming systems worldwide. Gelernter, who is Jewish, described this breakthrough in his book, Mirror Worlds (Oxford UP, 1991), which also predicted many features of the World Wide Web. Altogether, he has published some dozen technical and non-technical books, the latter on subjects ranging from technology, to cultural and political criticism, to art criticism and aesthetics, to Judaism. He has also published a memoir—Drawing Life (Simon & Schuster, 1997)—and a well-received novel—1939: The Lost World of the Fair (HarperCollins, 1997). In 1993, he was critically injured by a mail bomb sent to him by Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber.” Gelernter is a contributing editor for The Weekly Standard, as well as an accomplished painter.

Books: Mirror Worlds (Oxford UP, 1991); The Muse in the Machine (Free Press, 2002);Judaism: A Way of Being (Yale UP, 2009); Ameri-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (Encounter Books, 2012)

Jerry Coyne: Too Atheist For the Atheists

I happen to have the "distinction" of having been attacked by University of Chicago Biologist Dr. Jerry Coyne on his "Why Evolution Is True" blog during a kind of 6.5 minutes of fame I had online a few years back. Dr. Coyne is the gold standard of militant atheism and speaks with a fervor and certainty that some might associate with religious "fundamentalism." Once in a while, the atheist community comes to recognize that some of their representatives are so utterly disdainful of anything that smacks of theology and so intolerant of any views that diverge with their own accepted wisdom that they become a tad embarrassed.

Such is the case with the general reaction to Dr. Coyne's latest contribution to humanity - a book called "Faith Vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible." Dr. Coyne doesn't believe in free will so I suppose he can't be blamed for writing yet another needlessly judgmental, philosophically unsophisticated and antagonistic work. Then again, since he doesn't believe in free will how could he blame the religious (or anyone really) for holding the views that they do? But Whatever.

Science writer John Horgan has written an interesting piece in Scientific American entitled "Book By Biologist Jerry Coyne Goes Too Far Denouncing Religion, Defending Science."  He also wrote up a review of the book in the Wall Street Journal called "Preaching to the Converted."  Here's a helpful excerpt from that piece:

Coyne’s defenses of science and denunciations of religion are so relentlessly one-sided that they aroused my antipathy toward the former and sympathy toward the latter… He overlooks any positive consequences of religion, such as its role in anti-slavery, civil-rights and anti-war movements. He inflates religion’s contribution to public resistance toward vaccines, genetically modified food and human-induced global warming.

Conversely, he absolves science of responsibility for any adverse consequences, such as weapons and ideologies of mass destruction. “The compelling force that produced nuclear weapons, gunpowder, and eugenics was not science but people.” Right. Science doesn’t kill people; people kill people.

Naïve readers of Mr. Coyne might conclude that science is rapidly filling in the remaining gaps in our understanding of reality and solving ancient philosophical conundrums. He claims that free will, the notion that “we can choose to behave in different ways,” is being contradicted by research in genetics and neuroscience and “looks increasingly dubious.”

As evidence, he cites scientific revelations that our choices are often influenced by factors of which we are unaware. Yes, Freud told us as much, and Sophocles for that matter. But it is absurd to conclude that all our conscious deliberations are therefore inconsequential…

Mr. Coyne’s critique of free will, far from being based on scientific “fact,” betrays how his hostility toward religion distorts his judgment. Evidence against free will, he says, “kicks the props out from under much theology, including the doctrine of salvation.” Mr. Coyne thinks that if religious people believe in free will, it must be an illusion.

Mr. Coyne’s loathing of creationism, similarly, leads him to exaggerate what science can tell us about our cosmic origins. Mr. Coyne asserts that “we are starting to see how the universe could arise from ‘nothing,’ and that our own universe might be only one of many universes that differ in their physical laws.” Actually, cosmologists are more baffled than ever at why there is something rather than nothing… And multiverse theories are about as testable as religious beliefs.

Mr. Coyne repeatedly reminds us that science, unlike religion, promotes self-criticism, but he is remarkably lacking in this virtue himself. He rejects complaints that some modern scientists are guilty of “scientism,” which I would define as excessive trust—faith!—in science. Calling scientism “a grab bag of disparate accusations that are mostly inaccurate or overblown,” Mr. Coyne insists that the term “be dropped.”

Actually, Faith vs. Fact serves as a splendid specimen of scientism. Mr. Coyne disparages not only religion but also other human ways of engaging with reality. The arts, he argues, “cannot ascertain truth or knowledge,” and the humanities do so only to the extent that they emulate the sciences. This sort of arrogance and certitude is the essence of scientism.

Well said, and oodles of fodder for future discussion (especially as Horgan then goes on to make some classical theological errors that, as he explains, have informed his religious worldview) but we'll save that for another post.

Religion: Just Some Speculations of Some Ancient Superstitious People

Here's (part of) a comment I received on my last piece:

"Dear Rabbi, Scientific paradoxes are rooted in empirical data. And they may be eventually resolved with more data and improved scientific theories. Theological paradoxes are not rooted in empirical data, not rooted in scientific theory, but instead are rooted in religious dogma and the speculations of ancient superstitious peoples."

Rather than just respond directly I thought it might be instructive to offer a bit of a fuller treatment.

Scientists are biased too

It's obvious to this reader that science is superior to religion.  Science, as he says, is rooted in empirical data.  That, of course, is true, but not necessarily relevant.  As I've written before in many places like here, here and here, scientific "facts" oftentimes have a shelf life and that what is accepted as indisputable fact today becomes tomorrow's phrenology.

Scientists are both significantly more biased than most people think and are getting caught more and more in fraudulent research due, in part, to that fact that they must publish in respected scientific journals to receive grant money, etc.  Very little research outside of the currently established norms makes it to print so that the scientists are essentially coerced into printing what the establishment wants - and not what the empirical evidence suggests.  Have a look at http://retractionwatch.com/ for a few good examples of that.

We could also do a little thought experiment.  What if there was scientific evidence that supported basic theological claims about Creation, God or any other "dogma."  Do you suppose that these scientifically-minded individuals would start keeping kosher or going to mass, etc?  Or is it more presumable that they would ridicule the findings and quickly "debunk" them - no matter thoroughly and professionally the research was conducted?  There is real research, for instance, that supports "Intelligent Design," Near Death Experiences (NDE's) and Bible Codes.  These may or may not be true ideas, but naturally, they are summarily dismissed by the scientific majority as rank quackery while research on topics like fracking, climate change and GMO's are accepted as proven beyond all doubt despite a large body of conflicting evidence.  See http://www.climatedepot.com/ for instance.

Science is only a methodology

The Scientific Method is a great tool (when untainted by bias) for improving our understanding of the natural world.  It provides raw information.  However, what that information means and how it may apply to our lives is the realm of philosophy - of which theology is one type.  A scientist's skill in gathering information on a particular topic in no way gives him or her the ability to extrapolate or draw particular conclusions about that information.  As such, both the scientist and the philosopher are making critical contributions towards humanity's general understanding of the nature of reality.

Theology has no Scientific Method in that it deals with ideas of transcendence that are the realm of metaphysics (ie: beyond physics). This is not to suggest that there is no rigor to it or that it can't contribute to our understanding of the physical (or non-physical) world.  Theology helps us to understand that logical inferences can be drawn from our physical world that teach us about the nature of the non-physical - which is by definition non-empirical.  So the suggestion that theology is somehow deficient since it doesn't (and can't possibly) function in the way that science does it simply false - like comparing apples to oranges.  On the contrary, theology is essential for making any sense of what science discovers.

Just Some Speculations?

One might be tempted to ask if there is any empirical evidence to support our reader's supposition that the ancient and the superstitious were merely speculating.  Is that a scientific fact or just an emotional position?  There is an unfortunate phenomenon by which many people hubristically suppose that people who lived long ago were basically stupid.  I wonder, when contemplating the distant future, of these same people pre-regard themselves as uninformed, backwards and ignorant as compared to our future progeny.  I doubt it, but if they do I would think that it would give them some pause.  Judaism tends to take the position that those who lived before us were mentally and spiritually superior - very much unlike most of our contemporaries.  In any event, there was no shortage of geniuses who lived long ago.  True, they did not create the Keurig Machine, but they may have had a pretty firm grasp of various aspects of the nature of reality - perhaps better than we do.

More often than not, people who buy into something tend to regard it as fact, proven, self-evident, etc.  Those that do not think the opposite and tend to be irritated that others can't appreciate the simple and obvious logic of their position.  Aspersions can certainly be cast on either group and as such it seems to me a better starting position would be one of mutual respect and understanding.  Has religion truly contributed nothing to the world?  Just some random speculations?  Fortunately, there are many who can, and do, acknowledge the folly of those sentiments.  Here's my favorite:

“Certainly, the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place. Humanity might have eventually stumbled upon all the Jewish insights. But we cannot be sure. All the great conceptual discoveries of the human intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they had been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jews had this gift. To them we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of human person; of the individual conscience and so a personal redemption; of collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind. Without Jews it might have been a much emptier place.”

-Paul Johnson

Thank God for all that ancient, superstitious speculation.