The Praxy Project

The Psychology of Religious Intuitions: Confirmation Biases & Tim Tebow

2012-02-01T21:24:00.000-08:00

This series explores the psychology of intuition and cognitive illusion, specifically as applied to religious intuitions. See background, representativeness, randomness & chance, and imagination & availability.

Confirmation Biases

Why does the phone always ring when you're in the shower? Why are there always more subways or buses going in the opposite direction? Was God helping Tim Tebow?

Answers: It doesn't, there aren't, and no. We are subject to "confirmation biases:" our experience, memory, and interpretation of events are frequently influenced not only by objective reality, but also by our expectations and motivations.

Some events are "one-sided," in the sense that people only really notice one of two outcomes. For example, you notice when the phone rings when you're in the shower: it's salient and annoying. When it doesn't ring, though, that's a "non-event" that doesn't register at all. ("Hey, did you hear that? The phone didn't ring just now. Hey, it did it again!") You develop a biased store of memories and believe in a false connection, because of noticing events that confirm it but not the non-events that disconfirm it.

Some events are "two-sided," such that you do notice either outcome--like a win or a loss in gambling. In those cases, though, people often explain away losses as "near wins," and feel even more sure they are right. ("I should have won that time, but XYZ happened! I'll get it next time.") People explain away unwanted data but unquestioningly accept desired data, allowing them again to confirm what they expect or want to see.

Sometimes, we have ambiguous facts, and we often interpret them to confirm what we expect or want to see. For example, consider the saying, "bad things happen in threes." There is no definition of "bad things" set ahead of time, and no endpoint specified in time. (If the stock market slumps a few points, does that count as bad? If three bad things happen over a year, does that count?) It is very, very easy to stretch the facts to fit an ambiguous story, if you have not specified clear criteria in advance as to what counts and what does not count as an event.

These biases show up frequently in religious thought. People cite miracles performed by rabbis, like curing someone through prayers. However, failures to cure are never reported--making them non-events that never receive attention and are not remembered. In the unlikely event that someone does hear of a failure, it is likely to be explained away as a "near-success" that failed for any number of reasons. (You can also imagine applying these points to alleged "personal miracles.")

Meanwhile, Tim Tebow's favorite bible verse--John 3:16--seemed to be appearing everywhere in his games. In one game, Tebow had 316 yards passing, averaged 31.6 yards, and the final quarter-hour television ratings for the game was 31.6 million! Aside from comedian Jamie Kilstein's response, is there anything else we can say?

As you may notice, there are no definitions here of what counts as a meaningful event. Should we only accept 3.16 as a sign from God, or does 316 count? What about other combinations of these numbers? Would his second-favorite verse count, or his fourth? Meanwhile, there are thousands of statistics you could examine for signs: viewers in the first quarter-hour, viewers in the second quarter-hour, the number of yards the Broncos collectively ran, yards passed in the first half-hour, etc. Without specifying in advance what counts, it is easy to find something that works, and then convince yourself it's what you were looking for all along.

This is why science a) defines its terms ahead of time, and is clear about what counts or does not count as evidence, b) insists on replicability of findings--by third parties, in particular--and c) uses formal statistical procedures to evaluate whether or not something happened due to chance. Because, that is, our intuitions and memory are subject to biases.

Further reading: Gilovich, T. (1991) How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. Chapter 4: Seeing What We Expect to See: The Biased Evaluation of Ambiguous and Inconsistent Data.

The Psychology of Religious Intuitions: Imagination, Science & Availability

2012-01-22T10:58:00.000-08:00

This series explores the psychology of intuition and cognitive illusion, specifically as applied to religious intuitions. See background, representativeness, and randomness & chance.

Availability

Consider the letter R in most English words: in words of at least three letters, do you think R is more likely to appear in the first position of a word or in the third position?

When Tversky and Kahneman asked this question to survey participants, a large majority answered that R appears more frequently in the first position. The correct answer is that more words in English feature R in the third spot. Why would people intuitively think differently?

It is easier, Tversky and Kahneman answered, to think of words that begin with R--and people use this ease of recall as a cue about frequency. The intuition goes something like: "Hmm...rabbit, road, race, rock, roll...it sure is easy to think of words where R comes first...card...care?...this one is harder. There must be more words where R comes first." This rule of thumb is known as the availability heuristic: we think what is more mentally available (i.e. easier to recall or imagine) is more likely.

A caveman would have a hard time imagining how a
computing machine would ever be built. That doesn't
change the likelihood it would happen.

In particular, people will often use the ease of imagining a scenario to judge how likely it is. For example, if you see a car accident, it becomes easier for you to imagine one, and you will have an increased estimate of the likelihood of getting in an accident.

In reality, though, the ease of remembering or imagining a scenario does not necessarily tell you how likely it is. So, for example, people heavily overestimate the number of deaths from tornadoes each year but underestimate the number of deaths from drowning each year, because we hear more on the news about tornadoes than drowning--it is more available.

Like all heuristics, this one can be useful in daily life, but it is just a best guess that can easily be wrong--especially when we are dealing with the nature of the universe, which is complex. Daily life simply doesn't give us a basis for imagining what happens over eons (i.e. evolution), or at the quantum level (i.e. quantum indeterminacy), or at the level of the astronomical (i.e. the big bang). Therefore, scientific explanations can often be true and well-evidenced, yet difficult to imagine and thus counterintuitive.

Religious intuitions often draw on what is easily imaginable. I.e., "I just can't imagine how all life could have evolved on its own without a Creator." A commenter once wrote on this blog:

Every facet of the universe is so unbelievably complex, that any single element within the whole sufficiently testifies to the handiwork of the Creator. If a magnificent work of art cannot be formed by merely spilling paint, certainly the entire world cannot have been fashioned by accident. For the logical mind, seemingly there is nothing more irrational than suggesting G-d not create the world.

This comment is largely based on the representativeness heuristic, which was previously discussed. Beyond that, though, the author's confidence comes from the difficulty of imagining any alternative. It is indeed difficult to imagine how something complex can come about without conscious design--but that doesn't actually make it unlikely! It is the availability heuristic that incorrectly transforms a difficulty of imagination into an intuition of probability, and a gut instinct into a false sense of logic.

Indeed, it takes work and careful reasoning--not simply imaginative impulse--to override intuition and figure out how each piece came to be. In the case of evolution, for example, one can read books that carefully map out each step, like The Blind Watchmaker. But some people stop before that; they just take the fact that something is hard to imagine and incorrectly use that difficulty as a cue that it is unlikely.

Philosopher Dan Dennett aptly writes that a failure of imagination should not be mistaken for an insight into necessity. The availability heuristic explains why.

The Psychology of Religious Intuitions: Randomness & Chance

2012-01-11T12:56:00.000-08:00

This series explores the psychology of intuition and cognitive illusion, specifically as applied to religious intuitions. See background and representativeness.

Randomness & Chance

Consider two questions:

1) You flip a fair coin six times. Which of the following two sequences is more likely to occur: H-T-H-T-T-H or H-H-H-H-T-H?

2) A basketball player is on a major hot streak, landing him a spot on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Soon afterwards, his performance drops and he is no longer noteworthy. Is this evidence for the "Sports Illustrated Jinx," according to which appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated jinxes athletes to bad performance?

1) If you're like most people surveyed in the experiments of famed psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, you probably think the answer to question 1 is the first sequence: it just looks more random, right? The correct answer is that they are both about equally likely under the laws of chance.

A random series of coin flips is expected to be half heads and half tails only in the very long run. But, people use a mental shortcut (the representativeness heuristic) that expects short runs to be representative of long runs: we think any sequence of coin flips should look as fair as a long run. This leads to a systematic bias called the clustering illusion: people think clusters are meaningful patterns even when they are frequently produced by chance, because that's not what we expect chance to look like. We are terrible intuitive statisticians. Randomness actually creates clusters, according to the laws of probability--but we intuitively think it won't.

Religious intuitions often involve claims about patterns that "could not possibly be due to chance." (I don't have in mind evolution here, because evolution is actually a systematic process, not a chance process--a point often misunderstood by creationists.) People cite supposed miracles or facets of the world that "could not be coincidence;" they see shapes of Jesus in crackers when elements cluster together more than they intuitively expect, and see divine signs in the world around them. But as we have seen, people are notoriously bad at judging intuitively what randomness looks like: we are very prone to seeing patterns where there are none. The only way to ascertain randomness is by using formal statistical procedures; logic and scientific thinking are trustworthy where intuition leads astray.

2) If you are like many people, you might intuitively think the Sports Illustrated jinx is real, or at least eery. But, it is easily explained by an overlooked fact called regression toward the mean. A basketball player's performance is due both to his actual skill level and to some degree of luck--aka random chance. If someone is suddenly performing well enough to make the cover of SI, they probably have been experiencing unusually good luck. Since unusually good luck is...well, unusual, we don't expect it to continue, meaning that they go back (regress) to how they normally play (their mean). Appearing on the cover of SI just coincides with the time of unusually good luck, which we expect to end anyway. The SI jinx is an example of a general tendency people have: we are very good at seeing cause and effect (or inventing explanations) when random fluctuations are actually at work.

In his book How We Know What Isn't So, psychologist Thomas Gilovich relates an experience he had on a trip to Israel:

"A flurry of deaths by natural causes in the northern part of the country led to speculation about some new and unusual threat. It was not determined whether the increase...was within the normal fluctuation in the death rate that one can expect by chance. Instead, remedies for the problem were quickly put in place. In particular, a group of rabbis attributed the problem to the sacrilege of allowing women to attend funerals, formerly a forbidden practice. The remedy was a decree that subsequently barred women from funerals in the area. The decree was quickly enforced, and the rash of unusual deaths subsided" (Gilovich, 1991, pg. 28.)

A string of deaths can be expected by chance fluctuations, just like the string of "heads" above. But, people saw a meaningful pattern because we wrongly expect randomness not to come in clusters. Meanwhile, the actual death rate at a given moment is due to the average death rate plus some degree of luck (chance); if the death rate rose unusually, it means there was a string of unusually bad luck that is unlikely to continue (the death rate should regress to its mean). So, surprise, surprise: the rabbis enacted their decree while there was unusually bad luck and the death rate went down to normal, and--voilá!--they see cause and effect.

The moral of the story is that people are biased to see patterns and cause and effect where there is randomness, leading to religious intuitions. Scientific thinking must be employed to understand complex phenomena and the nature of the universe. In this case, carefully applied statistics can tell us what is random and what is not, when our intuitions turn us into hyperactive pattern-detectors.

Further reading:
Gilovich, T. (1991) How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. Chapter 2: Something Out of Nothing: The Misperception and Misinterpretation of Random Data.

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1972) Subjective Probability: A Judgment of Representativeness. Cognitive Psychology.

The Psychology of Religious Intuitions: Representativeness

2012-01-05T08:08:00.000-08:00

This series explores the psychology of intuition and cognitive illusion, specifically as applied to religious intuitions. See background.

Representativeness

Consider the following:

Lisa is 30 years old, single, bright, and outspoken. She majored in philosophy in college, where she became very concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice. How likely would you judge each of the following possibilities to be?

-Lisa is a bank teller
-Lisa sells insurance
-Lisa is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement.

If you have the intuitions of most people surveyed in psychology experiments, you would report a low likelihood for the first option and a higher likelihood for the third option. It intuitively fits, right? In actuality, the third option is less likely than the first: the probability of A and B happening is always lower than the probability of A alone (see here for an explanation). So why do we intuitively think otherwise?

In the 1960s and 1970s, famed psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky found that people aren't usually as rational as we think. We rely on mental shortcuts called heuristics that save time and energy and are often useful, but are prone to systematic error. It is a tradeoff between speed and accuracy, and it makes us bad intuitive statisticians in predictable ways.

In this case, the mental juicer in our analogy delivers a cup of intuition about what is likely. The process that makes the juice, though, is not proper statistical calculation. It is a shortcut called "representativeness:" we judge each option in terms of how much it is representative of, or similar to, an imagined prototype. In this case, the image of Lisa as a bank teller and feminist is more representative of how we imagine someone like her, so we think it's more likely--even though it is not. Many judgments of probability can be shown to be wrong for this reason.

This heuristic leads people to expect that causes will resemble (be representative of) their effects; that outcomes will resemble the process that created them; that big effects will have big causes; etc. While this is true often enough to be useful, it is often not true: small viruses can cause massive epidemics, and cigarettes can create raging forest fires (small cause, big effect). Or, people incorrectly expect sons to be the same height as their fathers more often than would be predicted by the laws of chance (outcome does not resemble what created it).

The representativeness heuristic has been argued to underlie magical thinking: in superstition and in homeopathy, people believe that "like cures like"--i.e., tree bark that causes malaria-like symptoms supposedly cures malaria (causes should resemble their effects). Intuitively, many people think something as complex and intelligent as humans must have been caused by something complex and intelligent, rather than a systematic but "blind" natural process (outcomes should resemble the process that created them). Or, many people think that disasters like earthquakes must have deeper spiritual causes, rather than mere tectonic plate shifts (big effects should have big causes).

But, all these intuitions rely on a shorthand rule known to produce wrong results. As such, these intuitions cannot be taken at face value; it takes scientific investigation and critical analysis to determine probabilities and causes. (That being said, if any of these intuitions still have some pull on you, hold on until we get to later installments--I believe representativeness is one contributor to these intuitions, but that there are others as well.)

Further reading:
Kahneman, D, & Tversky, A. (1974). Judgments Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.

The Psychology of Religious Intuitions

2012-01-02T21:52:00.000-08:00

Intuitions are very useful. When it comes to complex decisions (like buying a house or deciding who to marry) or when using expertise (like a grand master in chess deciding on a move), intuition is undoubtedly the way to go, as evidenced by common sense and psychological research.

But people often also use intuitions to try to understand the nature of the universe or religious truth. At this point, are intuitions still reliable or do they lead us astray? If you have any interest in the psychology of intuitions and cognitive illusions, or if you wonder whether and when you should trust religious intuitions (and why or why not), you should find this series of interest. To be up-front about it: I will explore evidence suggesting that many types of religious intuitions are indeed based on cognitive illusions that yield fascinating insight into our minds.

Background

What are intuitions? As I will consider them, intuitions are judgments or feelings we come to without knowing how we came to them. If you reason through each step, it's logic. If you have a gut feeling that you don't know how you got, it's intuition.

Intuitions do not emerge magically or from a sixth sense, though: they emerge from non-conscious processing. They are like a mill, or the juicer shown above: our brains take input, do something to it inside our mental machinery, and out comes an intuition. Because the processing is non-conscious--hidden inside the machinery, in the juicer analogy--we only see the output (the intuition). However, experimental psychologists can study how the juicer works: what input does it take and what does it do to it in order to produce this intuition?

Consider catching a baseball. In a sense, this involves intuition: your brain takes visual input and must solve some complex physics problems to determine where the ball will go, when it will go there, and at what speed. Consciously, though, you just intuitively know. Again, this can be incredibly useful and time-saving.

So what could go wrong? A few things. For example: 1) Intuitions often involve shortcuts, also called heuristics. These shortcuts usually serve us well, but are fallible and may lead to illusions. 2) Our intuitions developed to handle our ordinary-thing world and ordinary time lengths. Their usefulness can break down at the level of the microscopic or the astronomical, or nanoseconds or eons--but people still feel intuitive tugs at those levels.

Therefore, there are many times when our intuitions about what is true must be critically examined or restrained by logic and scientific thinking.

In future installments, I'll use this background to explore specific intuitions and heuristics we often rely on, examine how they work and when they go wrong, and identify how they connect to religious intuition.

Hirhurim Does Philosophy!

2011-07-25T11:54:00.001-07:00

Hirhurim has a new post about philosophy and faith. I had been waiting for one of those as blog fodder!

His argument this time: philosopher Leo Strauss once argued "that neither religion nor purely secular philosophy can disprove each other." As such,

His conclusion is that since neither system can be be conclusively proven, the choice of either must be based on faith. Others would revise it to be that the choice of either must be based on non-rational reasons, such as tradition and personal predilections including faith.

What a mind-numbingly...mind-numbing argument. First, what's this abstract dichotomy of "religion" and "philosophy" being unable to disprove each other? I have not read Strauss, but this type of vagueness seems like meaningless hand-waving.

Second, Gil once more retreats into the sort of argument I have mentioned before. Instead of "X is true," he argues "I have the right to believe X without justification." This is intellectually lazy and, frankly, intellectually repulsive. Imagine the conversation:

"Why do you believe in Mormonism?"

"Oh, because I think you could still say that it's possible and plausible if you try hard enough."

"But why do you believe it?"

"Oh, because my personal predilections and upbringing lead me to believe in it as long as it hasn't been unquestionably disproven somehow."

"That's an explanation of why you believe in it, not a reason why you would believe in it."

"Er...Yes."

Unparsimonious Explanations

2011-07-11T20:42:00.000-07:00

(A follow-up to "You Assume the Outside World Exists" Part 2)

1. "The ball moved because her hand exerted force on it, and an invisible friction demon pushed it at the same time; the effect is identical to that of her pushing it alone."

2. "The balloon floated because helium is lighter than air, and there is a complex network of magic levitation force field wires hoisting it up; the effect is identical to what we see just if helium is lighter than air."

3. "Species evolved through natural selection, and God guided the process; the effect is identical to that of evolution through natural selection alone."

4. "The Torah was written by humans, and they were divinely inspired; the result is identical to what we would expect if it were written by humans alone."

What Limits of Rationalism?

2011-07-10T11:36:00.000-07:00

I'm kind of confused by this post. In discussing the limits of rationalism in Judaism, R' Slifkin writes:

In my view, although some of the Rishonim applied the rationalist approach to Judaism without limitations, we cannot do so. This is for both practical and theoretical reasons.

The practical problem is that

"there is considerable conflict between 21st century academic scholarship and 21st century Orthodox Jewish ideology."

The theoretical problem is that

"I think that there is an irreducible conflict between the very nature of emunah and rationalism."

I agree with both these points, and think they are problems for rationalists who want to believe in Judaism. But R' Slifkin also writes:

I don't see this as reason to entirely discard the rationalist approach. Besides, it's just not possible to do so; you can't make people shut their minds off, and Judaism does not expect people to do so....Nevertheless, I think it should be accepted from the outset that there can be limits to this approach.

This is the part I don't understand. Asking people to accept that there can be limits to where their reason takes them is, indeed, asking people to shut off their minds. I agree that you can't do that. So how does he still wind up with the last sentence of the paragraph, that there still must be limits?

Rationalism and reason don't really have limits; Judaism does. I sympathize with his aim--to keep rationalism and Orthodox Judaism together--but I think he realizes they don't really mesh well, and this piece just comes across as somewhat confused to me. Either you end up "limiting reason"--which he recommends, despite recognizing that this is irrational and likely impossible in the same paragraph--or you end up compromising Jewish belief.

"You Assume the Outside World Exists" Part 2

2011-07-08T00:01:00.000-07:00

After someone pointing out that his version of "divine revelation to multiple authors" is unfalsifiable, ModernOrthoprax commenter Moshe writes:

You mean like your strange idea that the world that you perceive actually exists, and that your consciousness is not, say, merely embedded in a memory chip?

I thought I would expand on my prior post on why this is a bad argument. Admittedly, this probably shouldn't be responded to that seriously, but I think it's interesting and I think his argument actually backfires on him.

1) Any time you see someone making an argument of this form, it is just about bound to fail. Moshe's argument here is not of the form, "God exists because [...]" or "The Torah is divine because [...]." Instead, it is of the form, "even though I don't have justification for believing the Torah is divine, I have the epistemic right to believe it is because [...]." The problem with this form of argument is that it can be applied indiscriminately to anything, from belief in the Koran to belief in Last Thursdayism. If you have the "right" to believe in things without justification, than so does everyone. And if everything is justified by your argument, nothing has been justified.

2) I think Moshe's argument backfires on him. The existence of the outside world is not, in fact, a strange idea. It's the simplest inference from and explanation of what we experience every time we open our eyes. Moshe's alternate interpretations of the data, in comparison, are extravagant, and so we reject them (beyond philosophical musings).

You can always make more and more complex interpretations of the same data:

-"The existence of dinosaurs is an unfalsifiable question, since God could have planted dinosaur bones and it would look the same."

-"The theory of gravity is unfalsifiable, since I propose a 'Gravity Demon,' whose tricky actions always make things look like they behave according to the theory of gravity."

This would be silly. A) Relative to the null hypothesis that dinosaurs never existed, dinosaur bones provide evidence that they did. B) Relative to different interpretations of the same data, we accept the simplest inference--that dinosaurs existed--and reject extravagant explanations that are interchangeable with the current evidence (e.g., God planted the bones). This point is the canon of parsimony, aka Occam's Razor. Same for a "gravity demon"--we cut down explanatory dead weight.

I don't see how our everyday experience is much different. A) Relative to the null hypothesis that the world does not exist, we have plenty of evidence and experience to suggest it does (i.e. open your eyes). B) Relative to alternate interpretations of the same data, we settle on the simplest one--that the world exists as we experience it. Proposing evil demons tricking us or brains in vats would be an extravagant interpretation.

This is where I think Moshe's argument backfires: the same reason that we accept that the the outside world exists is the same reason I reject divine revelation to the multiple authors of the Torah. Instead of the explanation "humans wrote this work," Moshe proposes, "humans wrote this work AND it was 'divinely inspired' AND it looks exactly the same as if humans wrote it." Obviously, the canon of simplicity dictates that we accept the first interpretation of the exact same data.

Thus, the same logic dictates that I accept the existence of the external world (the simplest interpretation) and reject divine inspiration of the Torah (an extravagant interpretation), rather than Moshe's claim to the contrary.

CAN one still doubt anything and everything? Sure; induction can always be mistaken, a complex explanation could end up correct, etc. But is it reasonable, consistent, and common-sensical to disbelieve in divine inspiration of the Torah in light of basic beliefs about the external world? I believe it is.

Morality without God

2011-06-27T22:49:00.000-07:00

I. Theists claim that there is no source of morality without God¹ and therefore a) skeptics are "deluding" ourselves by acting moral, b) society would ultimately fall apart without belief in God, or something like that.

II. Let's put aside for the moment the fact that there are serious problems with the idea of God as a source of morality. (See, for example, the Euthyphro Dilemma.) The charge is wrong from the get-go because it misunderstands what morality is. Morality is a fundamental part of human social life--it never was a metaphysical set of commands. In the words of philosopher Patricia Churchland², it is a "constraint-satisfaction problem" our brains solve: we have different needs and wants living within a society, and morality is the necessary way to balance them.

We are profoundly social creatures, wired to cooperate and flourish in a society. Indeed, cooperating with others has been found to activate pleasure and reward areas of the brain³. Interacting pleasantly with others is fundamental to who we are, and we need to belong with others: over a range of studies, the pain of social exclusion has been shown to activate areas of the brain associated with physical pain^4,⁵. Moreover, social support is linked to many positive outcomes, including physical health⁶. (Of course, no one but theists in the heat of argument needs this research cited: would you rather go for coffee with your best friend or stab your best friend in the back over $100? Even if you are religious, does your answer have anything to do with God? If you were an atheist, would YOU now want to kill a person for monetary gain?)

Social and moral intuitions run deep: research has found that infants as young as 5 months old prefer a helper to a harmer⁷. Moreover, our empathic capabilities are impressive: when we see a relevant other in pain, overlapping emotional brain regions respond as when we are in pain^8,⁹, and we feel motivation to respond. Descriptively, we have strong natural moral intuitions that guide us.

III. Prescriptively: The point is, we are very social creatures, and as social creatures, we need cooperation and trust. We all desire to live well and flourish, to borrow Sam Harris's terms¹⁰. Given these facts, there are certain things we ought to do to achieve those goals--such as cooperating with each other, creating social and legal institutions that regulate our interactions and create trust with strangers, obeying certain rules and laws, etc. These can be objective descriptions of the world: if we all decide to cheat and steal and kill each other, we will all have objectively less well-being than if we live together peaceably. (Consider: the maximally beneficial solution to a Prisoner's Dilemma is to cooperate). Why ought I not steal? Because I desire to live in a functional, friendly, and cooperative society rather than in a disjoint, terrorized, and broken society--and my not stealing is part of that.

IV. Objection 1: But, the theist may ask, why ought someone desire well-being of this sort? To that, you may answer: why ought someone desire health? Should we be afraid that without God, no one will take medicine prescribed by doctors because there is no objective command to be healthy? It's a silly question. We all want to be healthy. We all also want to live well and flourish as social animals (except for those with certain disorders, who have serious things wrong in their brain and are thus are not particularly relevant). Given that we desire this state, there are objective ways to achieve the goal and ways to get further away from this goal. If I see a tiger and have the goal of not being eaten, I ought to run away. If I am a social animal and have the goal of well-being as such, I ought to obey certain moral dictates.

Objection 2: "Not everyone wants well-being and flourishing! Religious extremists don't care about that stuff, for instance--they care about God's morality for it's own sake!" Answer: Of course they care about well-being. They just think they achieve the highest possible well-being by following certain dictates, i.e. not eating pork, blowing up infidels, disliking homosexuals. Imagine a religion that claimed the following revelation: "God wants you to do XYZ because it is Morally Right. But, if you do it, He will punish you with everlasting excruciating torment and distance from Him. If you violate these laws--which are still God's moral truths!--He will reward you with grace and closeness to Him and all goodness. Don't ask why--no one can understand God's logic!" How many people would follow the dictates of this religion?

V. In short:

1) We are wired to be social, cooperative creatures; we feel pain when we are socially excluded and when relevant others are in pain, and we feel pleasure when included or when cooperating successfully. Our physical and psychological well-being depends on successful social life.

2) Given that this is part of overall well-being we desire, just as we desire health, there are certain things we ought to do to achieve it and certain things we ought not do. The society in which women are mutilated at birth and free-thinkers are killed will objectively have less well-being than a free society, and we ought to move towards the latter.

3) We need no further metaphysical basis for morality; our everyday moral dilemmas are constraint satisfaction problems as we navigate solutions to our basic social needs.

_________________________________________________________

1 I came to many of the general conclusions here on my own, but was also much influenced by Patricia Churchland's BrainTrust and Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape. I highly recommend both to anyone interested in morality, science, and religion.

2 BrainTrust.

3 Rilling, J. (2011). The social brain in interactive games. In: Todorov, A. Fiske, S, Prentice D., eds. Social Neuroscience: Toward Understanding the Underpinnings of the Social Mind. Oxford Press.

4 Eisenberger, N. I.et al. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Science 302, 290–292.

5 Kross, E. et al. (2011). Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain. PNAS, 108, 6270-6275.

6 Eisenberger, N. I. (2007). Using neuroimaging techniques to explore the relationship between social status and health. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2, 159-160.

7 Hamlin, J.K., et al. (2007.) Social evaluation by preverbal infants. Nature, 450:22.

8 Singer, T. et al. Empathy for pain involves the affective but not sensory components of pain. Science 303, 1157–1162 (2004).

9 Ochsner, K., et al (2008). Your pain or mine? Common and distinct neural systems supporting the perception of pain in self and others. Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience 3, 144-160

10 The Moral Landscape.

Excerpts from the Orthoprax Haggadah

2011-04-21T11:53:00.000-07:00

"Now we are slaves, next year free."

The seder is both a celebration of our freedom and a recognition of the ways in which we still hope for freedom. On the one hand, we are relatively free from dogma and free from indoctrination. We have clarity of mind about religion and the natural world, which is a significant achievement.

At the same time, as orthopraxers, we often don't have freedoms we want. We may not have the freedom to speak our minds openly. We may not have the freedom to act as we want. More importantly, we may not be free from emotional confusion or cognitive dissonance about our lifestyles, and we may not have clarity about how best to live orthoprax lives. And so at the seder, we consider how we may be more free at this time next year--what we can change internally or externally to find emotional freedom and happiness.

"In the beginning, our forefathers were idolaters."

Here we recognize the chain that has led us to our present state. Our forefathers long ago were polytheists, who believed they had to appease many gods with religious rituals. Later generations recognized that the world could be more simply and better explained by one personal God. In our day, we recognize that there are even simpler and better explanations for the world and for the origin of religious ritual.

"Of four sons spoke the Torah..."

"The wise son:"

This is the orthopraxer who is "smart" about his orthopraxy, managing to fit in despite it. As you will notice, he does not speak of beliefs, or Torah and science. He simply discusses Jewish law and practice, and he is answered in kind--he lives in this world of practice and avoids conflicts with beliefs, happy to make meaning of the rituals to which he is accustomed. He is probably Zionistic, feels a sense of Jewish identity, and reads Kugel.

"The wicked son."

This is the "naughty" orthopraxer, who cannot help but point out what appears odd to him: why are people still following a Bronze age myth? He is considered wicked by the haggadah because he does not care to fit in; he would roll his eyes at this. This orthopraxer probably reads Dawkins and Pharyngula. It is notable, though, that he chooses to be at the seder to begin with. He may not know why and he may struggle with it, but for whatever reason, he is there.

"The simple son."

This refers to the simple believers or ba'alei tshuva who accept whatever they are told.

"The one who does not know how to ask."

Here are any frum people, particularly intellifundies, who simply don't understand the weight of the questions and conflicts in the minds of skeptics. They have faith that all questions can be answered, or else they read responses to biblical criticism or evolutionary theory without understanding the questions themselves. This is because they do not really know how to ask.

You will notice that there are not any orthoprax daughters listed. This is a shame.

On Responses to the Ami Orthopraxy Article

2011-04-16T21:26:00.000-07:00

"He just started asking questions and looking for answers in books. And like others before him, he could not find any that had any basis in his religious beliefs...Even though these people are not ‘missionaries’ about their atheism, when asked they are very effective at arguing their case – pointing to various internet sites that support their views...

If we are intellectually honest and have ever thought about some of the issues raised by science and other disciplines those questions have at least entered our minds. Most of us reject them immediately as our faith is stronger than our doubts..but there are a large number of people who cannot so easily dismiss those questions."

-R' Harry Maryles

"The intellectual challenges to Judaism are very real. Fortunate are those of us whose sense of Divine providence in Jewish history, and whose appreciation of the nature and role of the Torah, as well as other factors, enables us to maintain belief in revelation; but if we are honest, we will acknowledge that there are nevertheless intellectual challenges to which Judaism presently does not have a good response. Can we really be hostile towards those who consider the challenges overpowering?"

-R' Natan Slifkin

"They simply left their emunah behind, following instead a nonsensical thought process [editorial: I think that's Yeshivish for "logic"] into the thicket of apikorsus."

-The Ami Article

Goodness. No wonder Ami feels so intimidated by the orthoprax. The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that if you actually follow logic and scientific knowledge where they lead you, they lead away from orthodox dogma.

Wired for Religion...At the Expense of Science?

2011-04-05T21:04:00.000-07:00

In this excellent article, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom discusses some psychological origins of religious and supernatural beliefs. It nicely summarizes and expands on a number of ideas I have discussed elsewhere on this blog.

While I highly recommend the full article, I found one idea particularly noteworthy. To give some background--Bloom describes how we seem to have two separate innate systems for reasoning about inanimate or animate objects. This makes sense: inanimate objects are acted upon by causal forces, whereas animate beings can move on their own, so it is useful to divide the world into these categories. However, we naturally essentialize this difference, treating them as two distinct categories of things--matter and mind--and we thus become natural dualists. In Bloom's words:

First, we perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls. This helps explain why we believe in gods and an afterlife. Second, as we will see, our system of social understanding overshoots, inferring goals and desires where none exist. This makes us animists and creationists.

Our animacy detection is so hypersensitive to finding agents that we see intention and goals where there are none. This gets to the striking point in the last sentence above: it means that we are not just intuitive dualists--we are intuitive creationists as well. Bloom quotes Richard Dawkins as saying that it often seems "as if the human brain is specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism." (Spend five minutes in a blog thread with creationists and you will know what he means.) In a way, Bloom suggests, this is actually true--natural selection runs counter to innate intuitions about agency:

When we see a complex structure, we see it as the product of beliefs and goals and desires. Our social mode of understanding leaves it difficult for us to make sense of it any other way. Our gut feeling is that design requires a designer—a fact that is understandably exploited by those who argue against Darwin.
It's not surprising, then, that nascent creationist views are found in young children. Four-year-olds insist that everything has a purpose, including lions ("to go in the zoo") and clouds ("for raining")... And when asked about the origin of animals and people, children tend to prefer explanations that involve an intentional creator, even if the adults raising them do not. Creationism—and belief in God—is bred in the bone.

I have previously blogged about psychological roots for supernatural beliefs. Bloom points out, though, that these may actually come at the expense of scientific understanding. At least, I would add, in those who do not work past those gut reactions and understand the ideas involved. Finally, we can see yet another reason why gut intuitions about the universe are of very limited weight when discussing its origins and workings.

"Skeptics Are Third-Graders"

2011-01-11T10:26:00.000-08:00

I get tired of reading that "skeptics only attack their third grade notions of God and Judaism. They think it's all as they were taught back then, or it's nothing."

Rubbish. When I was still 'dox, I was a rationalist. I argued for the Rambam's position of treating outrageous stories in Tanach as allegories. I argued for the Maharal's style of decoding outrageous statements of Chazal as hidden, coded, allegorical wisdoms. I went through "the Torah is not a science textbook," followed by "the Torah is not a history textbook," and so on. I did everything you could expect from a Modern Orthodox intellectual trying to make Orthodox Judaism rational and understandable.

I reject that. Don't tell me Breishit is metaphorical: tell me what the metaphor stands for, and why I should accept that as true. Tell me why I should believe in any supernatural claims whatsoever, including dualism. Tell me why I should believe any form of Divine revelation occurred--not just the sort they teach you in third grade. Tell me why I should accord any intellectual authority to Chazal, not just simple belief or disbelief in their sayings.

And so on.

Vaccine Scare Doctor Exposed as Fraud

2011-01-10T16:34:00.000-08:00

Andrew Wakefield, the shamed doctor behind the discredited vaccine scares, is at last being shown to be a complete fraud. His paper claiming a link between MMR vaccines and autism was already retracted for sloppy methods and undisclosed conflict of interest; his license to practice medicine was already revoked for ethical breaches; his results, which examined exactly 12 children, have not only never been replicated, but have been disconfirmed repeatedly. At last, though, new investigations have shown that his study apparently actually faked data:

A new examination found, by comparing the reported diagnoses in the paper to hospital records, that Wakefield and colleagues altered facts about patients in their study.

The analysis, by British journalist Brian Deer, found that despite the claim in Wakefield's paper that the 12 children studied were normal until they had the MMR shot, five had previously documented developmental problems. Deer also found that all the cases were somehow misrepresented when he compared data from medical records and the children's parents.

Deer previously found motives as well: two years before the study, Wakefield was hired to discredit MMR vaccines by a lawyer who hoped to create a class action lawsuit against drug companies. Wakefield was paid an undisclosed $750,000 over time to do so. In addition, Wakefield filed a patent for his own version of a vaccine many months before his study, through which he stood to gain if the other MMR vaccines were attacked. (A brief summary with details can be found here.)

Infants have died because of this man. Measles is on the rise and children are sick because he took advantage of the worst fears of parents to get rich. He should rot in prison.

Arguments from Personal Incredulity

2011-01-06T14:48:00.001-08:00

Atomic Theory:

This theory actually claims that everything is made of the same subatomic particles in different arrangements. That's crazy! Try touching wood and then water. They are totally different! How could they possibly be made of the same subatomic particles? Obviously, each material on Earth has its own essence, made according to its kind.

Computer Science:

You're telling me that little gates opening and closing create Microsoft Word and me watching DVDs? That's ridiculous. How could one lead to the other? Obviously there's a typewriter and movie theater inside my computer.

DNA Theory:

You're saying the plan for our bodies is "coded" inside each cell? That's ridiculous! Who's there to read the code? Besides, different cells do different things--how would they know what to do if they all have the same instructions? Obviously, Someone tells each cell what to do.

What? Read a book? Why? Can't you just give me straight answers to these simple questions? Or would these theories only be believed by atheist scientists who don't want to accept the truth? Hmmmm?

Knowledge in Tradition or Modernity: Transmission vs. Production

2010-12-19T23:23:00.000-08:00

Yet another way to conceptualize the problems between traditional Judaism and modernity, of which the Torah-Science issue can be seen as an example:

Knowledge in centuries past--say, pre-Enlightenment, for convenience's sake*--was largely conceived as a process of transmission. Students took in the words of their teachers, and passed them along. Think of the emphasis on tradition in Jewish education--"mesorah:" the word has its root in something being passed from one person to another. In this model, knowledge was achieved in the past, and people in the present can write commentaries, and then super-commentaries, and then marginal notes on anthologies of commentaries on super-commentaries. Even the medieval European academies were largely focused on passing down the works of Aristotle.

The modern scientific and epistemological framework, on the other hand, treats knowledge as something to be produced. If you have a question, run an experiment and create knowledge. This phrasing of it is an oversimplification--we certainly stand on the legitimate production of knowledge of those who came before us. (Contrast to the opening line of Pirkei Avot, in which it is received transmission all the way back to the beginning.) Besides which, experiments can also shed light on a greater area of ignorance to be explored. Nonetheless, the focus of modern pursuit of knowledge looks forward, not backwards. The idea is implicit in that very phrase of "pursuit of knowledge:" we pursue knowledge, not receive it.

Many books and blogs that try to square off specific issues in Torah and science miss this in treating it as a problem of discrepancy of facts. Whether or not Genesis is taken literally has little to do with how I determine what I know about the world.

*A gross oversimplification, again. Alhazen in the Islamic world and Roger Bacon in the European world were emphasizing experimental methods in the 10th and 13th centuries, respectively. But the Enlightenment is a nice time to point to when it really became a big deal.

A Proof for Textual Divinity...Right?

2010-09-28T22:24:00.000-07:00

And if ye are in doubt as to what We have revealed from time to time to Our servant, then produce a Sura like thereunto; and call your witnesses or helpers (If there are any) besides Allah, if your (doubts) are true. But if ye cannot- and of a surety ye cannot- then fear the Fire whose fuel is men and stones,- which is prepared for those who reject Faith. (Qur'an 2:23-24)

Or do they say: "He (Muhammad^(P)) has forged it?" Say: "Bring then a surah (chapter) like unto it, and call upon whomsoever you can, besides Allah, if you are truthful!" [Qur'an 10:37-38]

(Culled from here, as is most of the following)

When Muhammad was challenged regarding the divine origin of the Koran, he pointed to the text itself as his defining miracle. Arab poetry at the time of Islam's origin had two styles: tightly constrained rhymed poetry with clearly set meters, and prose. On the other hand:

"The Qur'an is not verse, but it is rhythmic. The rhythm of some verses resemble the regularity of [rhymed prose], and both are rhymed, while some verses have a similarity to Rajaz in its vigour and rapidity. But it was recognized by Quraysh critics to belong to neither one nor the other category.^"

^{In other words, Muhammad offered a simple challenge: if the Koran was a fake, someone should produce Arabic writing--even just a bit of it--that approaches the linguistic majesty of the Koran, which is neither poetry nor prose, rhythmic yet meaningful. It was something as yet}

^{unseen in Arabic writing.}^{But as scholar EH}Palmer admitted, "the best of Arab writers has never succeeded in producing anything equal in merit to the Qur'an." Oxford Arabist Hamilton Gibb similarly wrote: "As a literary monument the Koran thus stands by itself, a production unique to the Arabic literature, having neither forerunners nor successors in its own idiom. Muslims of all ages are united in proclaiming the inimitability not only of its contents but also of its style."

The point should be obvious. Mohammad claimed his work's style reflected its divine origins. Now, if he was wrong, no one should have believed him, right? How would you start a mass lie about the nature of Arabic writing? Or was it a mass conspiracy? Unlikely. If even one talented Arabic poet in the last fifteen hundred years could write in the same style, surely people would have heard about it and rejected what Mohammad said. But the very fact that the Meccans accepted Mohammad's point--along with the Koran's claim being upheld, with no one paralleling it since--shows that he spoke the truth. Therefore, the Koran must be divine.

Right, Kiruv Rabbis?

The Real Kuzari Argument, and Why Rabbi Gottlieb Needs It

2010-08-25T19:09:00.000-07:00

I think Gottlieb recognizes an important point, and much of his bad argumentation is to try to make that point work. While The Kuzari is now most famous for its mass revelation argument, that idea is actually not the central one of the book. Rather, the main theme R' Yehuda HaLevi develops is that to a large extent, apologetics don't matter if you have a revelation. For example, HaLevi will discuss a commandment that seems to make no sense by saying: "First of all, it doesn't need to make sense. We have the brute fact of revelation, and even if we don't know why God told us this, the fact is that he did. An experience of God telling us something overrides our questions about why. Nonetheless, we can try to offer some reasons just for its own sake." Then he suggests some possible apologetics.

I think it's a great strategy in a lot of ways, and I think Rabbi Gottlieb gets this. In his web page on the age of the universe (I'll deal specifically with that page another time), he responds to the question of why God would plant misleading evidence in the world. While he offers a possible rationalization, he begins by noting: It doesn't matter, because the brute fact is that He did*. In Gottlieb's web page on Biblical Criticism, he says that any linguistic analysis of the Torah is irrelevant, because it's not written by humans and so the brute fact is that God wrote it however God wrote it. He just notes that he thinks there is reason to accept that the revelation happened, and then he moves on.

What does all of this depend on, though? Certain knowledge that the revelation actually happened, of course. That's the trick of it. I think Rabbi Gottlieb is on the right track with the apologetics to some extent: if the revelation actually happened, then the reasoning becomes less important, as R' Yehuda HaLevi points out--though arguably not entirely. The problem is, you need a good reason to believe in the revelation to begin with, which then has to serve as the foundation of everything else. That's the reason the "Kuzari Principle" about mass revelation is so important to Gottlieb. Without it, he lacks that bedrock of revelation to support the apologetics, and suddenly you have a lot of bizarre things to explain away.

*This is a poorer example since it also depends on the belief that the Torah is to be taken literally--one could believe in revelation but still trust the evidences of their senses over a literal interpretation of scripture. It gets the point across, though.

Rabbi Gottlieb: What a Putz

2010-08-23T11:25:00.001-07:00

I have to thank Shilton for pointing me to this, which I thought deserved its own post.

This man actually has a degree in mathematical logic, but everything he argues seems to consist of two rules:

1) Assign acronyms to things, and then make truth value statements with no regard to actual logical relationships. ("If we call belief in Torah 'BIT,' and we assign variable 'BIT' a truth value of 'true,' we find that belief in Torah is unquestionably true.")

2) Bring up simple-sounding examples that have no relevant relationship to what you are discussing. ("If Reuven and Shimon are on a boat and Reuven falls off, surely we would say there are now fewer people on the boat. Similarly, the Torah is unquestionably true.")

In the above link, Rabbi Gottlieb responds to the point that belief in mass revelation could have developed gradually by myth formation, as opposed to his strawman in his "Kuzari Principle." The first three-fourths of the response consists of rule #2 being applied. ("But you see, something can be possible but implausible." Yeah, thanks.)

His actual argument (in the last two paragraphs) consists of rule #1: A myth process would probably lead to a belief that is false. But a National Experiential Tradition ("NET") is true, so it cannot have come from a myth.

Sorry? Does he think that makes any sense? Yes, the point of the myth development idea is to show how it could be false. That you previously ignored the realistic scenarios in which it could be false does not mean that those scenarios are now inapplicable, just because you already labeled it as true.

MAYBE--and just maybe--this kind of thing would be forgivable (with an eye roll) for someone who truly had no way of knowing better whatsoever. But Rabbi Gottlieb should. And so: what a putz.

A Brief Overview of Materialism and Supernaturalism

2010-08-16T12:47:00.001-07:00

(Apologies to Idealists and Neutral Monists)

Empiricist Materialism: Stuff exists. Complex stuff is made of simpler stuff, until you get to the simplest stuff there is. We learn about stuff because we experience it with our senses and can reason about it--the combination of which leads to our ability to experiment on it.

Supernaturalism (aka Dualism): Two kinds of things exist. One kind we know about because we experience it and can reason about it, also letting us experiment on it, as above. The other kind cannot be experienced or understood, cannot be experimented on, and is nothing like the first kind of stuff.

Pantheism/Spinoza's God/Einstein's God: The basic nature of the first kind of stuff--the kind we do experience--is still mysterious, unknown, and awe-inspiring.

Supernaturalist religion: Option 1) The second kind of stuff is what is special, mysterious, and awe-inspiring, and has a truer reality than the first kind of stuff. Option 2) The first kind of stuff is mysterious, and so therefore it is explained by the unknown second kind of thing.

The Emotion Research Meme

2010-08-11T09:59:00.001-07:00

I've come across the following meme enough times now (most recently in a comment on GS' blog) that I'd like to respond to it and clarify. The meme says something along the following:

Research from psychology and neuroscience says people make better decisions with their emotions, so we should trust our emotions over our experience and intellect. So stop being so darn logical when it comes to God.

Reality check: that's a distortion of the research, which generally says something along the lines of, "emotion and cognition are more intertwined than we used to think." In contrast, the believer is acting as though emotions and logic are totally separate and emotion has been found to be superior.

The main research usually cited (though not in the latest case I'm responding to) is Antonio Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, when we make decisions, our brain creates a representation of the bodily state we would feel if we went ahead with the alternative under consideration. I.e., you are deciding whether you want to stick your hand in a fire, and your brain creates an affectively-laden representation of how you would feel, and you pull your hand back. Thus, decision-making and emotional cognition are intertwined, and can't be pulled apart neatly into logic vs. emotions.

The more recent example I saw cited neuroscience research, which suggests that emotionally-laden stimuli are treated as more salient by visual and attentional systems. (In other words, emotional things, like things that could hurt you, get higher priority in being processed by your brain.)

Does any of that mean we should "trust our emotions over logic?" Not really. It means that even when we think we are thinking logically, there may be emotional representations at play that guide our judgments. Or, that emotional overtones may determine what our brain finds important enough to attend to. Now, there is indeed research that suggests that in some cases a gut decision will be better than a deliberated decision, but that's about conscious vs. unconscious processing, not emotion vs. reason.

But we already knew the research couldn't have meant what the believers claim it does. Let's consider what it would mean if we should literally trust our emotions over experience and logic:

Fred is afraid of getting a shot, and so he refuses to do so. His doctor tries to persuade him that he needs the vaccine before he goes overseas, but Fred insists that he is better off trusting his emotions, which tell him not to get the shot.

Arthur feels a special high around his cult leader. Arthur's parents try to show him the facts about the leader's scamming history, but Arthur insists on following his emotions and giving up all his money to the cult.

Does anyone actually intend this? Of course not--they want it only to apply when it comes to emotions regarding religion. But it's important to note how the research is being distorted in these scenarios and the religion scenario: part of the reason these scenarios are bogus is that Fred also has a "somatic marker" of what it would be like to get malaria and die, which will also influence his decisions. That's the point--the research says emotions and logic are often intertwined on both sides of a decision, whereas the believer is acting as though logic and emotion are separate and emotion has been found to be superior. This is just plain wrong.

Obligatory Beliefs

2010-08-07T21:45:00.000-07:00

Orthodoxy is replete with discussions of what one may or may not believe. Some people are minimalists (e.g. Marc Shapiro), some are maximalists (e.g., I dunno, pick your anti-Slifkin-ite). But I don't find minimalism here much better: the very notion of a mandated belief seems bizarre and repugnant to me. How can you be obligated or forbidden to believe something? If it seems true, believe it, if not, don't, and if you're not sure, say you're not sure.

Now, one can be obligated by reason, in a manner of speaking. If a teachers shows you a perfectly clear geometric proof, you are forced to accept it, so to speak--it's not a choice. But how can there be an a priori discussion about what you may or may not believe, which forces you to choose beliefs?

It leads to some interesting consequences for the more rationally-inclined believers--the kind of thing XGH used to mock.

A couple months ago, I sat with a number of people, a couple of whom were wholeheartedly relating miracles and magical incidents that supposedly surrounded one of the Gedolei Hador. (Frankly, I found the supposed miracles to be parlor room stuff, but I'll put that aside.) One other person present made all the right skeptical points: was there any independent verification? For those people who claimed they were healed by the rabbis prayers, do we know the total number of people who asked for healing prayers?

But then he stopped and said: "But on the other hand, Judaism has some tenets of our faith that might sound silly to an outsider, but we believe them. Are we supposed to believe these kind of things are possible as well?"

I thought, exactly. Once one has admitted the concept of religiously mandated beliefs to the picture, how can one scoff at crazier beliefs? As far as I can tell, minimizing which beliefs are mandated does not help: once this is an acceptable notion at all, why not take all midrashim literally, or believe modern rabbis have prophetic powers? Etc. The reason, it turns out, is because our hypothetical rationalist doesn't think those beliefs are actually mandated--not because the beliefs are silly.

There is Grandeur in this View of Life

2010-08-04T15:00:00.000-07:00

I recently overheard two women talking. One was discussing her pregnancy, and how she had undergone her first ultrasound. She then exclaimed, "God is so amazing!"

This seems like a nice spring board to discuss a common accusation against skepticism. The religious believer sees wondrous miracles inhabiting her life, and the cold, rational skeptic turns it all into mechanisms and equations. The religious person sees the divine gift of life, and the skeptic sees only chemicals and processes by reducing everything scientifically.

I'd beg to differ, though, about that caricature. The baby developing inside her began as one single cell, containing half her DNA and half her husband's DNA. That cell then began dividing. Now, each daughter cell and granddaughter cell would get the exact same DNA as the original one--and DNA, of course, comprises the instructions telling a cell what to do. The cells have to eventually take on different jobs, though, throughout the body. And so over time, the cells differentiate in terms of which genes they express, first into simple groups based on small chemical or physical differences. Over more time, the differentiations accumulate until you have liver cells, nerve cells, skin cells, etc, each of which expresses only some of the genes in its DNA and thus performs a different job. Incredibly, no one guides this process, even though it begins from one cell with one set of DNA. The differentiations flows from local rules, as if a paper filled with magnets in the right way would fold into a beautiful origami pattern on its own.

This child will then be born with innate cognitive functions developed by evolution over hundreds of thousands of years, for more complicated ones, and millions of years for more basic ones. It will begin imitating others rapidly after birth. It will form attachment with its mother in a particular stage. It will learn language in a later stage, in the same age range as other children. It will go on to develop a theory of mind around age four. All of this is programmed to unfold, with no one having programmed it.

When I consider all of this--not to mention, for example, the complexities of the DNA code written in only four bases on a more micro scale--I am filled with awe and wonder at the complexity involved. That this complexity could emerge on its own over thousands of millions of years via a simple algorithm--and go on to allow the love, pain, and friendship the child will feel at some point--is all the more mind-boggling.

In comparison, isn't reducing it to "God is so amazing" a little cheap? If one were struck by the processes involved and felt an immanent God equated with nature behind it all, that would be one thing. Or if "God is amazing" were just an expression of gratitude and wonder, great. But doesn't Someone magically getting the baby in and out--and I don't mean to belittle her excitement, but that's how she seemed to mean it--pale in comparison to the truth, which is itself quite wondrous and awe-inspiring?

There can indeed be grandeur in this view of life.

The Torah of Science

2010-07-16T11:34:00.000-07:00

Rabbi Slifkin posted about a forthcoming book by Rabbi Moshe Meiselman to be named The Torah of Science. First of all, does anyone think a new Young Earth Creationist book will have anything original or intelligent to add? It would save everyone time and trouble if Rabbi Meiselman would just point to any other YEC screed, and Rabbi Slifkin would just point to any one of the many books thoroughly debunking and refuting YEC. In any case, here's my quick take on it.

If the book is actually to be named "The Torah of Science," Rabbi Meiselman has rendered his case irrelevant before it has begun. Torah--to an Orthodox Jew--is revealed knowledge that cannot be changed or questioned. Science, by its nature, needs to be questionable and challengeable. It must be placed under scrutiny, tested and retested, and modified when necessary. In other words, there is no and can be no "Torah of Science." Science must be fallible and fluid, not regimented and ruled in the way that there is "Torah of business practices" or "Torah of medical ethics." The phrase "Torah of science," used in this way, is an oxymoron and speaks to the intellectual dishonesty bound to be rife in Meiselman's pages: he will be trying to squeeze science into the set of conclusions he thinks it must obey. This concept is anathema to anyone who cares about science.*

Of course, I am assuming the above is the sense in which he means "The Torah of Science." I suppose it could also mean, "lessons for Torah to be gained from science." Something tells me this is not the way in which he means it, though. (As pointed out by others, it could also be a nonsense phrase trying to be the opposite of Rabbi Slifkin's book and to sound like it cares more about Torah. That's likely, but that would probably still contain the implicit message I'm describing above.)

*There are, of course, accepted rules or frameworks governing procedures of good science. However, those frameworks are themselves open to argumentation, questioning and development based on reason and evidence--which is how they came about to begin with. Moreover, they are about procedures, not about conclusions.

Dennett on Rational Inquiry into Religion

2010-07-14T12:36:00.000-07:00

I posted a comment based on the following on the OPR blog in response to some claims of, "truth is subjective, and you cannot rationally inquire into religion without psychological coloring," which somehow is being used to defend religion. In any case, the following is my regular response to that sort of thing. It is a quote from Dan Dennett responding to a slightly different charge that warrants the same response:

One reader of an early draft of this chapter complained at this point, saying that by treating the hypothesis of God as just one more scientific hypothesis, to be evaluated by the standards of science in particular and rational thought in general, Dawkins and I are ignoring the very widespread claim by believers in God that their faith is quite beyond reason, not a matter to which such mundane methods of testing applies. It is not just unsympathetic, he claimed, but strictly unwarranted for me simply to assume that the scientific method continues to apply with full force in this domain of truth.

Very well, let's consider the objection. I doubt that the defender of religion will find it attractive, once we explore it carefully.

The philosopher Ronaldo de Souza once memorably described philosophical theology as "intellectual tennis without a net," and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgement was up. But we can lower it if you really want to.

It's your serve.

Whatever you serve, suppose I return service rudely as follows: "What you say implies that God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tin foil. That's not much of a God to worship!". If you then volley back, demanding to know how I can logically justify my claim that your serve has such a preposterous implication, I will reply: "oh, do you want the net up for my returns, but not for your serves?

Either way the net stays up, or it stays down. If the net is down there are no rules and anybody can say anything, a mug's game if there ever was one. I have been giving you the benefit of the assumption that you would not waste your own time or mine by playing with the net down."

The point is straightforward. If truth were entirely subjective and rationality were impossible on this topic, we could not be engaging in discussion where I am supposed to answer rationally. In many cases, though, the very fact that someone proffers reasons for their beliefs (and tries to convince you of them!) belies their claim that we cannot engage in rational discussion or inquiry. If it were true, all bets would be off, and there would be no connection between a claim they make, their reasons for making it, and what I infer from it.

Edit: To clarify, the point is not simply that if rationality is out the window you may as well believe anything about God. The point is that if rules of rationality are out, we cannot have a discussion at all--and the believer wants me to follow those rules while he does not. As I write in the comments, the example could have read:

"What you say implies that you hate children! What kind of an argument is that?"

Or: "What you say implies that muffins have consciousness! Isn't that a little farfetched?"

It's a crazy inference by any standard of rationality, but that has been tossed out rather asymmetrically by the believer.

But Why a Good God?

2010-07-07T01:05:00.000-07:00

I wrote at one point about some psychological phenomena that suggest a root for religious tendencies, but I would like to reorder them to raise and take a stab at a new question. To recap, it is quite plausible that religion is a byproduct of cognitive abilities and tendencies including (but not limited to):

a) Theory of mind. We impute minds to others, including assuming they have beliefs, desires, goals, etc. This is a much more useful way to understand and predict the behavior of others than viewing them as complicated machines.

b) Essentialism. We tend to assume things have hidden essences that make them what they are, sort of like Plato's ideal forms. Probably useful for categorization of things.

c) Anthropomorphism. We are good at detecting patterns and are particularly attuned to detecting human (or otherwise agentic) features, but sometimes overdo it for a variety of reasons.

Cross these together, and you can get a disembodied agentic mind that constitutes an anthropomorphized essence of the universe (or something like that). But here's my question: why is God assumed to be good, and why is God looked at as a father figure? Why not a neutral essence? One important factor in exploring this is how universal the "goodness belief" is: if it's culture-specific, it may just be an add-on to the main religion package. That could change what level of explanation to look for--i.e. from evolutionary advantage or universal psychological phenomenon to a successful meme in particular cultures. (Admittedly, the gods did bad things in Greek myths, but as far as I know, they still expected piety from humans.) In any case, while I'm leaving the goodness issue open as an earnest question, I did think of two possible candidates, both of which I mentioned in that previous post without recognizing their significance.

1) One is the Just World Hypothesis: people are motivated to assume the world is a fair and just place, which seems to be comforting--if people get what they deserve, I can be good and therefore protected. And if the world is just, shouldn't we assume the agentic essence of the world is just and good? In this option, God's assumed goodness is a side effect of the Just World Hypothesis spilling over into the mix.

2) Another possibility is Illusions of External Agency. We all have "psychological defense mechanisms" that sometimes make us happier with what we have (for example, in post-decisional dissonance reduction). However, we usually aren't aware of the operation of those systems (would they work if we were?), and so people often assume that they got something objectively good, and go on to assume it must have been provided by a benevolent external agent. If religious belief arises in part from over-application of agency to the universe, this type of illusion could create the sense that it is a benevolent agent. In this option, God's assumed goodness is more intrinsically part of the anthropomorphic mix.

I'm not sure if these are the answer--or part of the answer--and again, I wonder how universal the goodness-belief is to begin with. I also still wonder where the parent part comes from. Why would a benevolent agentic essence be viewed as a father figure as well, or a creator? Perhaps this has roots in ancestor worship or crossovers from creation myths, but I don't know enough about those to say. Or is it connected to morality and parental relationships more directly somehow? Any ideas?

Evolution and Religion: Thoughts in Progress

2010-07-06T01:39:00.000-07:00

Many religious people--including many or even most Modern Orthodox Jews--view the fact of evolution as compatible with religious tradition: Genesis is not to be taken literally, and God had a guiding Hand over the process of evolution.

Now, I like this take on religion and evolution, mostly because a) it's what I believed when I still believed, and b) it's good for honest religion and honest science. Indeed, some point to commentators like Ramban, who seems to suggest that God may have inserted a soul into a man-like animal to create humans. However, it is obvious that many religious people find evolution threatening, and it's important to ask why. Moreover, I have come to question the idea that religion and evolution can be squared so easily; it can be done, I'm sure, but I think it's harder than I used to assume. Here's a list of issues evolution presents for religion, some of which are culled from recent points I or others have made around the blogosphere. I'd be interested to see if anyone has any other points to add, or thinks these aren't such serious issues for the conciliatory point of view.

1. Evolution contradicts Genesis. An obvious starting point, yes, but even for those who say the Bible shouldn't be taken literally, one might wonder why God would write an account that looks like an actual description of creation to those who don't know better. I assume it was taken as literal by many people over a very long stretch of time, so how come only those of us living in the last 151 years get to understand that it is metaphorical? Is this not theologically confusing? ("God is mysterious and had a reason," I suppose. Post hoc and vague, but not unusually so. "People couldn't have handled it back then, so God waited until we were ready," I have also heard. I say: have you been to modern day Texas?)

Beyond this more minor point, though, some of the details become challenging. For example, Genesis discusses the creation of different animals, clearly stating that God created each animal "l'minah"--"according to its kind." From an evolutionary point of view, though, there is no such thing as a fixed, stable species with its own essence. Any two species can be connected via a series of intermediates in some pattern, with no sharp dividing line between them: any animal in the series was very similar to its parents and offspring. At a certain point, two groups of animals are different enough that they can no longer interbreed, and we call them two different species. So, the allegorical reader of Genesis must not only understand "God created" as "God guided the process of evolution," but also understand details such as "l'minah" as using "lashon b'nei adam" ("the common language of people"). Alternatively, the "creation" of a species involves the insertion of some essential soul into random animals in a series. (As noted above, IIRC, the Ramban actually suggests something along these lines about the creation of humanity--but that's what set humanity apart from animals. And, which animal should get the special essential soul of the species, if none had previously been essentially different from the prior or following links in the chain?)

To sum it up: evolution is not creation, and Genesis contains a creation story. It seems like it might need to be understood as a myth that contains a moral message in order to get off the ground, doesn't it? And at that point, aren't we wondering why God is writing a creation myth?

2. Let's suppose God has indeed providentially guided the process of evolution. Again, this gets harder when you examine the details. For hundreds of millions of years, animals have been competing, suffering, and dying. As may be obvious, animals can feel pain, so it is easy to begin to see "nature red in tooth and claw" when you consider evolutionary history. All that time and all that suffering was mandated by God to have a mechanistic process that would eventually churn out humans, in a tiny blip in the timeframe? The problem of evil becomes magnified a thousandfold.

3 & 4. As noted in the last post I put up, Western religions assume humans have a special place in the universe. Evolution creates two problems for this. First, humans are a part of the same mechanistic process as all natural life, not on a special metaphysical plane--even though we still have unique abilities in the animal world. Second, at some point, presumably, a new species will branch out of Homo Sapiens--making it a little harder for us to be the be all and end all. Once again, you have to assume the insertion of a special essence into humanity. Cognitive science has not been kind to the "ghost in the machine," though, making it an unnecessary entity that has been posited.

5. Evolution explains away the appearance of design in the universe, and as such, makes it unnecessary to posit that Someone was guiding the process (explored in more depth here). Like the ghost in the machine in cognitive science, one is positing the unnecessary to explain the data.

Of course, it's certainly still possible to accept evolution and theology, and I hope many people continue to do so. However, it's interesting and worthwhile to consider why it is so threatening to so many religious people and how well it can actually be squared with religion. The above contains my first stab. Any thoughts?

"Humanity's Naïve Self-Loves"

2010-06-20T22:35:00.000-07:00

I recently came across the following quote from Freud:

"Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self‑love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe…The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world…But man's craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present‑day psychological research which is endeavoring to prove to the 'ego' of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind…This is the kernel of the universal revolt against our science." (A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Eighteenth Lecture)

(Freud's conception of the psychoanalytic unconscious is not the one accepted by cognitive scientists today, and I don't know whether or not the above was truly at the root of criticism he faced. But, Freud was perhaps more right than he could have known about the third "outrage" to humanity's naive worldviews. Modern research on the cognitive unconscious in psychology and cognitive neuroscience has presented a wealth of evidence that picks away at the notion of a unified, directly-known, causal, conscious self.)

In any case, sort of sums things up, huh?

The Arbitrariness of Gosse

2010-06-08T16:03:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me recently that I don't get the logical structure of the Gosse approach to evidence for the age of the Earth, evolution, etc--i.e., God planted mounds of evidence to test our faith. Let's say, for the moment, that we're ok with the bizarre theological implications of a trickster God. I still don't get it.

For the believer, theoretically, God created both nature and the Bible. The accounts in each clearly contradict each other (for a Biblical literalist, at least). So, what reason is there to claim that nature is the deceptive side, and the Bible true? Isn't it just as likely that the account contained in nature is true, and God is deceiving us in the Bible? From a logical standpoint, I don't see a reason to pick one over the other.

Obviously, the rest of the religion is built around the Bible, so that provides psychological motivation to protect that side. But I don't think I ever realized how arbitrary their choice seems on logical grounds, even putting aside the other problems with the idea (verifiability, Last Thursdayism, etc).

"You Assume Other People Exist, I Assume God Exists"

2010-06-02T23:11:00.001-07:00

For some reason, I keep coming across this argument for faith now. I'd like to explain here why it's a bad argument.

The argument generally goes something like this, as articulated by a couple commenters on XGH's blog:

"We all proceed under assumptions that cannot be properly scientifically tested. You assume other people exist. I assume God exist. Neither of us is bothered by the fact that absolute truthiness of either of those propositions can ever really be known. We simply proceed with our lives, you and me both."

or:

"The simple point is that there are some certainties in life that come prior to reason [such as the existence of the external world/other people]. Faith is one of them. Just because you can't prove it doesn't mean that it's not so."

The problem with the argument is that it's just a bad analogy. The real comparison would be, "You assume your direct empirical experience with other people is what it seems to be, rather than an elaborate hoax or dream. I assume God exists."

In other words, we have a great reason to assume the external world or other people exist--namely, our sensory experience. It's just that we can doubt these things with an extreme form of doubt, and we assume they are what they seem anyway. We're not making up an external world from a blank. Similarly we can have good reason to accept the results of a scientific experiment if it works--it's just that we can always doubt it based on the induction problem. In contrast, there's no empirical experience that provides a basis for faith in God.

To make this point clear: for the analogy to work, the believer would need to have direct empirical experience with or evidence for God, and then say, "Well, I could doubt this experience/evidence as the work of an evil demon, but I will assume it is real just like I assume the external world is real." This is not the case, unfortunately, which means that there is just no connection between the faith case and the other cases.

Without this connection, one would need some reason to put faith in the category of "things accepted even though they can be doubted." Otherwise, the argument basically goes, "You have what I am calling an unprovable belief [because it could theoretically be doubted], so I can believe anything." Literally. There's no discrimination between one belief and another--faith is automatically approved because something else can't be saved from Cartesian doubt, with no justification for putting faith in the same category. (Notice how they always say, "And faith is the same," without explaining why.) If that's true, rational discussion has been thrown out the window since all beliefs are fair game without justification, and it's pointless even to bother thinking about it or trying to justify faith (or anything else).

On Cognitive Dissonance

2010-02-14T22:36:00.000-08:00

In 1954, a housewife reported receiving mysterious "automatic writing" from aliens from the planet Clarion. Through these writings, she learned that the world was going to end via a Noah-like flood on December 21st of that year, and she began publicizing this fact. More specifically, she advertised that those who believed in the flood would be saved by a UFO that would rescue them.

Believers left jobs, colleges, and spouses to join the group that would be saved. They gave up their possessions and lives to prepare for the event. December 20th approaches, and they gather. The clock strikes midnight--the appointed time for salvation. There is no alien savior. The group waits--perhaps their clocks were fast. By five in the morning, though, it is clear no one is coming for them. But wait--the leader suddenly receives a new piece of automatic writing, declaring that the flood has been called off, thanks to the light spread by the group of believers.

The individuals here gave up their entire lives on the promise that they would be rescued from a flood at midnight of December 20th, 1954. You might expect that once they received clear and irreparable disconfirmation of that belief, they would angrily reject it, and demand compensation. Instead, psychologist Leon Festinger reports (in his book on the event), the crowd grew more attached to the belief.

This was a case study that grew into a robust literature in social psychology on cognitive dissonance theory. Bluntly, the theory states that if someone has two opposing cognitions--i.e. a belief and an opposing action--they will experience an unpleasant psychological tension. As such, they will resolve the tension somehow, most likely by changing their belief to accommodate their action. The individuals in the Clarion cult had devoted too much behavior to the cult. When push came to shove, there was no way for them to reconcile their actions with a belief that the UFO-flood story wasn't true--so they adjusted their beliefs in line with their actions. (Achrei ha'peulot nimshachim halevavot may be true, after all.) Participants in experimental psych labs do the same thing all the time, albeit with lower stakes. For example, participants will get paid only one dollar to write an essay they disagree with, and will end up agreeing with the position more than they used to--because if they don't agree with it, their unconscious reasoning goes, why are they defending it well for such little reward? Participants who are paid twenty dollars, on the other hand, do not need to rationalize their actions to themselves, and so do not change their beliefs.

The nimshal? If you are in the position of doubting your previous beliefs, you have a few options. You can look at your actions, and everything you have devoted to orthodoxy, and conclude that you simply must believe it after all--and come up with new justifications for said belief. Or, your actions can eventually change in line with your new beliefs. Or, you can become orthoprax, and just live with constant intellectual dissonance. If you're lucky, you'll alleviate some of the dissonance by finding some justification for the actions you are doing, such that they seem merited (for example, you like the community). Then you end up like an experimental participant offered $20 to write an essay you disagree with. You don't have to change your beliefs to match your actions, or change your actions to match your beliefs. You know exactly why you wrote the essay. It's not because you believe in it; it's because they gave you twenty bucks.

And if you're not lucky...cognitive dissonance it is.

Psychology, Religion, Orthopraxy

2010-02-11T23:47:00.000-08:00

Here is a list of psychological phenomena connected to religion I have come up with so far. (Of course, as any psychology article on this topic always notes, showing a psychological phenomenon related to religious belief neither proves nor disproves the belief itself.) Am I missing any? Connection to orthopraxy below.

-Anthropomorphizing of the universe. 1) Partly as error. Humans have a tendency to over-apply agency to things that aren't really agents. Kids do this as they are learning to apply concepts of agency (e.g. saying goodnight to their stuffed animals and meaning it), and adults yell at their cars and computers when they malfunction, see faces in the clouds, etc. In ancient times, people had pretty intense anthropomorphisms (like whipping the sea for misbehavior). 2) Partly as motivated approach to the world. Anthropomorphizing happens when people need social contact and feel lonely, or need to explain something unexplainable. Interestingly, one social psych study (Barrett & Keil, 1996) suggested that religious people were more likely to use an anthropomorphic concept of God than a classic theological one in daily life.

-Just World Hypothesis (referenced in a previous post). People have a need to believe the world is a just and ordered place, to the extent that if something bad happens to someone and we cannot help them, we will often assume it is in some way the victim's fault (either for causing it or having some flaw that "brought it upon them").

-Illusions of External Agency (Gilbert et al, 2000): We have psychological defense mechanisms that make us happy with what we have. However, they work unconsciously, so people often assume that what they have received is objectively good for them, rather than realizing that they their minds have subjectively made it seem good. Consequently, they assume there is an agent looking out for them, since they are getting all these good things.

-Fear of death. This one sort of speaks for itself.

-Supersense. I haven't read the book of that name yet--though it's on my list--but it shows how we develop a sense for the supernatural.

So the question for me now is, can orthopraxy relate to any of these psychological needs and principles? (Not really, as far as I can tell, which is why it seems pretty untenable as a movement to me.) It often feels to me as though being in the skeptic vein pits one's automatic psychological system against one's rationally-determined beliefs. From this lens, orthopraxy comes with the costs of religion without providing any of the core psychological benefits. One lives in constant intellectual dissonance, instead of gaining the relief the lifestyle should provide (in one ideal sense).

On the other hand, though, you can justify it by appeal to practical consequences, and--in theory--other psychological/emotional gains. You get a sense of community, some nice values and traditions, it's what you're comfortable with, etc. And maybe you've got it better than the full believers--you don't accept all the beliefs and whatnot, and get to do more of your own thing, but you get to gain the community (something a la this post).

I guess the point is, orthopraxy: a double-edged sword. Sometimes I love it, sometimes I hate it.

Evil as a Reason to Believe?

2010-02-03T07:53:00.001-08:00

Most people think of the problem of evil as one of the prime theological challenges facing religions throughout history.

A commenter writes on XGH, though:

There are many reasons to assume God exists -

1) why do bad things happen to good people?
2) Why do we exist?
3) what is our purpose?
4) How does something come from Quantum Soup if all there exists are laws of physics?

Ignoring 2-4 for now*, it was at first incredibly odd to me that someone cited bad things happening to good people as a reason to assume God exists. This was one of the prime arguments against religion for millennia!

But I realized how much sense that makes. One of the prime motivations for religious thinking, it seems, is to explain the universe in an ordered way. The Just World Hypothesis in social psychology states that we all have a need to view the world as ordered and just. If something bad happens to someone and we cannot help them, we will often tend to assume it must in some way be their own fault. By doing so, we keep the world ordered, and separate ourselves from the bad things that happen.

As such, while an argument from evil would be just about the worst logical argument for God ever envisioned, it gets directly to the root of the matter as an emotional argument for God.

*2 and 3, like 1, are psychological reasons we would like to assume God exists, not standalone reasons to assume God does exist. 4 is somewhat unintelligible to me as written.

Daat Emet

2010-01-27T17:42:00.000-08:00

Luke Skyhopper

I was reading Undercover Kofer, and I stumbled across his link to a Daat Emet article which brings Torah sources to essentially prove that the Torah and Halacha cannot have remained intact since Sinai.

Daat Emet is an Israeli site which seeks to to dismantle various dogmatic arguments often espoused by Orthodox Judaism and popularized by the Kiruv movement.

While I have yet to check Daat Emet's sources in the original texts, I figured I'd share the link.

http://www.daatemet.org/articles/article.cfm?article_id=9

enjoy

Raising Orthoprax Children

2010-01-21T23:13:00.001-08:00

This topic seems to me to be one of the most impossible facing both orthopraxy as a group (movement?) and orthopraxers as individuals. If it will stand as a group/movement (groovement?), orthopraxy should know if it will attempt to be passed down to children, or if it is only a transition stage for those who have lost their belief. Individuals, meanwhile, must face the question: what on earth do you teach children, and how do you raise them in an orthoprax home?

The options, as they appear to me:

1. Try to teach orthopraxy directly--no beliefs taught, but "these are the practices we do, just because this is what Ortho(something) Jews do. It's our community and lifestyle." This seems to get sticky, however, when getting into the cognitive dissonance of traditions like brachot and prayer. ("No, we don't believe in the God of Abraham. Now stop asking questions and go daven Shemoneh Esreh.") Or, when the child gets old enough to understand what Orthodoxy is, and wants to do things Friday night.

2. One parent is orthoprax, one orthodox. The orthoprax one stays quiet and lets the orthodox one do the talking. Perhaps this could actually work for some who don't care much or aren't strong disbelievers, but not a great idea in my view. People need intellectual honesty in their lives as best as they can reach it.

3. Parents recreate their exact life experiences by perpetuating a "noble lie," teaching orthodoxy until the child reaches a certain age. Then, they sit the kid down and reveal that it has been a lie, but the kid is now too emotionally/communally invested to walk away. A repulsive idea, of course, but I include it to point out that, quite frankly, it's the only actual way to perpetuate the orthoprax experience. Orthopraxy is a weird lifestyle, what can I say.

4. A more sensible combination of 1, 2, and 3: orthodox beliefs are taught just in the way many innocent beliefs are taught to or maintained for kids, in a light, left-wing MO manner. (There wasn't much focus on belief in my MO upbringing, now that I think about it--that was when I got to yeshiva.) As they get older, more and more serious age-appropriate discussion about the world ensues.

So, more or less normal LWMO upbringing, but parents will step in to undercut something taught in school if it's past a line to them, and get the child thinking critically about religion at an age-appropriate level.

5. Parent(s) is/are orthoprax, but raise kids more or less Conservative, coming to terms with an ebbing away from orthodoxy. Traditions are kept in the home for traditional reasons, but with greater flexibility than the parents' upbringing would allow. Jewish education is more or less Conservative, and children are given the freedom to do what they would like with the traditions with which they were raised.

Did I miss any?

Of these, #5 seems to me by far the most sensible, but I can see how for some people more invested in orthodoxy, #4 would be more realistic. #5 would mean orthopraxy is not really tenable as a movement for more than a one or two generations. Perhaps that's a shame, perhaps not. Either way, is there a better option?

Bits and Pieces 1

2010-01-12T17:13:00.000-08:00

Luke Skyhopper

I have been reading about Higher Biblical Criticism and academic scholarship on the Torah since I finished Shana Alef. I'm not a hundred percent sure why, but until I went to Yeshiva, the divine origins of the Torah was never a big deal for me. To me it was the book of our people, and the exact nature of it never really bothered me. I was only vaguely familiar with academic criticism in high school, to the point that I only knew it existed, but nothing of its veracity.

When I got to Yeshiva, Torah study was stressed all day to long, to the point that it was the end in of itself. Until this point I was religious, but lived in a modox household. When I came home, I was free to do what I wished, of course staying within the bounds of halacha. Being in Yeshiva, I felt myself bombarded from all sides by the forces of Orthodox Judaism, not necessarily the modern kind.

At the time I encountered a mental conflict that I've only recently come to understand. Essentially it boiled down to a clash of personal freedom versus being dictated to. Being in Yeshiva I began to feel, somewhat subconsciously at the time, that I had no control of my life. The morality of choices were being dictated by the people who wrote these books hundreds or thousands of years ago. These books were then being interpreted by individuals who I sensed were ignorant, while at the same time pushing their own agenda.

This led me to begin a fight to control my right to live as I pleased.

To clarify things, there was no one telling me what to do in the direct sense of it. The Yeshiva tended to turn a blind eye to most of our activities. Secular music, books etc were completely accepted. The philosophy was strictly halachic, modern scholarship and culture was either disdained or ignored by the Rebbeim. Sure, many had secular degrees, but their outlook was by no means modern.

What bothered me was the belief was that Halacha was dictated to man by God, in the objective sense of the word. Subjective belief was not presented as having any play here, God demanded Halchic adherence in the most direct sense.

Now you might ask youself, "What was this guy thinking? no kidding Modern Orthodox Rabbis believe this." Until then I had faith that Modern Orthodoxy could work as a faith that was humble before science and reality. I guess I wanted to believe that you could be skeptical of fundamentalist beliefs while still calling yourself Orthodox. But my experiences in Yeshiva ran to the contrary.

Rationally proving that God wrote the (through Moshe at Sinai) Torah and gave the laws was never really important to me throughout high school. I believed in my simple way because I thought that such was the approach of my people for thousands of years. The fundamentalist notions that this is objectively true never really got on my nerves until I was surrounded by them in Yeshiva.

At this point I realized that I had to retain my right to freedom and individuality. I suppose it was not until I felt Orthodox fundamentalism really encroach on my life that I cared enough to disprove it, and thus research the Documentary Hypothesis.

Some Things I Value in OJ

2010-01-12T09:56:00.001-08:00

Here is a non-exclusive list of some values and practices I love in Judaism, or at least ones for which Judaism offers a strong support structure:

-Family ties, kibud av v'em, kibud zekenim:

There is a strong sense of community built out of family structure. I do believe that in the modern world, there can often be a lack of respect for parents, or a lack of cohesion in a family. Judaism tries to provide structures by which all of the above are supported. Families are brought together through the structure of chagim, Shabbat, smachot, etc; children are taught about familial responsibility, and obligations towards parents; we are taught laws about how to honor the elderly.

-Tzniut:

No, not the prude sense of it, nor the idea that women need to be forced to hide themselves in silly ways. But I certainly appreciate the value that more attention should be paid to a person's interior; that there is value and dignity to living with some sense of modesty; that some things should be kept special between a married couple. (Say what you will about hair coverings, but isn't it important and valuable that some things between a married couple be kept only for each other?)

-Community bond:

Yes, I believe Orthodox Jews are, at least in a lot of circles, too insular--but that seems like the price paid for the benefits of a tight-knit community. And I do love being able to walk in a Jewish neighborhood on Shabbat and say "Shabbat Shalom" to strangers, and have a sort of instant bond.

-Shabbat

There is something unparalleled about having a forced day off from mundane matters, when one must spend time with family and/or rest from the everyday rush (even if there can at times be frustrating sides that come along with it).

-Tikkun olam

The notion that we live in an imperfect world, and it is our duty to fix it. When utilized correctly, what more inspiring mission could we have than that?

Bursting Bubbles

2010-01-05T15:44:00.001-08:00

One problem I keep facing with blogging is that I'm a softie when it comes to bursting other people's bubbles, even if I rationally think it would be best. Don't get me wrong--if a fundamentalist suggests something wrong or silly, I'll respond, and explain why. But I always feel bad going "on the offensive," explaining why something they think is wrongheaded (on other blogs, that is--I assume if someone is reading mine, they can deal with the kinds of things I'm going to say). If someone has a wrongheaded certainty that comforts them, or may even help them in some way, is it right to burst that? (Even if it is, what if I can't bring myself to do it?)

The former is one of the driving questions of Dennett's Breaking the Spell. Unfortunately, though very honestly of him, he does not offer a direct answer to the question. He more or less suggests that more research is needed on the possible benefits and costs of religion, which is probably true but frustrating.

On the one hand, after all, religious certainty can offer comfort, hope, and strength to a person. Taking away a person's sense of certainty--even if you follow up with "you can still be religious if you want, just don't claim you have a proof for it"--may impinge on all that. On the other hand, religious certainty is what drives so much terrorism, violence, oppression, and land disputes, affecting people of just about all religions. It would be pretty great to get those people to think twice about how sure they are about their claims.

So what do you do with nice religious folk who you don't think will commit any acts of violence, but who have some repugnant views about the non-religious? Or who don't actively work against a pluralistic society, but whose views undermine it? Or who do not engage in extremist action, but offer explicit or implicit ideological support to those who do? Is it cruel to burst their bubbles--from personal experience, this can be a pretty painful process, after all--or irresponsible not to make them think twice? Again, I'm not even talking about trying to make them full-blown skeptics--I don't think I'm going to do that with one or two blog posts, nor do I want to--but rather about contributing to more room for inquiry in their minds.

At the end of the day, Dennett is probably right; we need more research about the effects of religion, and how best to treat it. But does that mean I just stay quiet until provoked in the meantime? I'd love to hear some honest thoughts about this from other people.

A Shoutout from Dan Dennett

2010-01-03T22:05:00.001-08:00

by JG

From Breaking the Spell: Religion as Natural Phenomenon, pg. 224:

"[Some religious leaders] have come to realize that the robustness of the institution of religion doesn't depend on uniformity of belief at all; it depends on the uniformity of professing. This has long been a feature of some strains of Judaism: fake it and never mind if you make it...Recognizing that the very idea of commanding someone to believe something is incoherent on its face, an invitation to insincerity or self-deception, many Jewish congregations reject the demand for orthodoxy, right belief, and settle for orthopraxy, right behavior. Instead of secret pockets of festering guilty skepticism, they make a virtue of candid doubt, respectfully expressed."

Unfortunately, he gives no sources as to where the open orthopraxy is to be found. I wonder if he has the same thing in mind we do. (As a side note, does this make us a pocket of festering skepticism or a site of virtuous candid doubt?)

Contribute to The Praxy Project!

2010-01-01T11:49:00.000-08:00

The Praxy Project is a collaborative effort. We are devoted to exploring, broadly:

-Community

-Philosophy

-Inner life

of the frum skeptic/orthoprax life. Wherever you are on the frum/skeptic spectrum, if you would like to contribute your take on any of these, or share your thoughts or experiences, or tell or ask the public about anything else, please send an email to: jgadfly at gmail dot com.

We hope this blog can not only explore, but also contribute, to orthoprax community--whatever that is.

The Dating Question

2009-12-31T21:30:00.000-08:00

by Luke Skyhopper

Ever since I dropped the standard Orthodox approach to living, I've been in a funky dating quandary. I can certainly date anyone I wish, but I don't care to waste time, effort and money on incompatible broads.

My first premise is that Shiksas are for practice. The guilt never allowed me to get beyond the first few rounds, and for now my hopes of finding a Swedish Blonde Orthoprax chick are quite ridiculously small.

Although I don't wish to rant, dating your average Modox chick is somewhat pointless for me. Most of the time they have the standard seminary induced approach and know little to nothing about modern scholarship or skepticism in general. Nor do they find this to be remotely appealing. Perhaps an educated Stern girl exists, but I have yet to find them. On the positive side, at least they have the same background and thus have that connection which only Ortho Jews can relate to.

Secular/Traditional Jew-girls don't seem to get it. Judaism to them was never anything more than a bunch of holidays, foods and maybe a few rituals here and there. Jewish learning is cute, but not something they can spew in their sleep like any graduate of "the system". Thus the connection is somewhat tenuous and skin deep.

Of course in an ideal world, I would just clone a female version of myself and create further in-bred Ashkenazim, but then whats the fun?

I have never dated any right wing Conservative Jew girls aka Conservadox, and theoretically that is where my el Dorado of Jew-ass lies. But by the same token, I am not Conservative, nor have any affiliation with the movement.

Of course I realize that I'm stereotyping a bit, and that ultimately I am seeking an individual, not a brand. However placing myself in the proper situation would likely expedite this process.

I am quite curious as to what other Orthoprax Jews do with this dicey situation.

Is there an NYC Orthoprax single scene that I have yet to find?

Happy 2010 Yidden, non-Yidden and Muppets

Why I Blog Now (Part 1)

2009-12-29T16:10:00.001-08:00

by JG

I hear reports on other blogs of communities in which 50% of the community is more or less orthoprax. Where I live now, though, this is not the case; I certainly don't feel comfortable being forthcoming about my beliefs (or lack thereof). So in shul, I nod my head along with ideas I think are foolish--and wonder how I will ever find any other orthopraxers out there doing the same. (Well, actually, I don't literally nod my head in shul; that's more at the Shabbos table. In shul, I usually end up rolling my eyes a fair amount. But you get the picture.)

Consider, after all, the social life of the still-closeted orthopraxnik: On the one hand, you cannot fully enter the social circles of non-religious Jews/non-Jews. You can't go out on Friday nights or Saturdays, and you can't always do the things they do (non-kosher restaurants, clubs, etc). Besides which, you are committed to Orthodox lifestyle, which involves close-knit Orthodox communities. But, on the other hand, how do you make a home in a community where your conversations are filled with references to things you believe to be most likely false or misunderstood, and you don't feel comfortable speaking your mind about them? And you certainly can't have discussions about all your positive ideas about what could be true, what should be accepted, or where to go next. (But I have ideas about philosophy, about theology, about what's right! Can't I have friends in shul with whom to discuss those ideas?) Sure, you share values, and history, and culture, and everything nice with them. But how do you feel comfortable in a community in which you feel isolated and stifled?

The hardest day of the year for me was not Yom Kippur this past year. I fasted, and spent all day davening, and tried my very hardest to make it mean something in whatever way I could. No, the hardest day by far was Simchat Torah: watching the crowd dance with sheer excitement and joy around a document I looked at so differently than they did, and being fully expected to do the same; wanting to just "get into it," but feeling unable to do so with that distance between me and them; taking lots of breaks from dancing to get away from it all, feeling alone despite painful attempts at blending in.

The ironic thing is that if I had been in an orthoprax community, I probably could have danced. If I had known that the people around me understood where the Torah most likely comes from, but wanted to dance to show appreciation of what it means to them and their lifestyle; if I could have danced for the complexities, contradictions, and comforts of religious life; if I hadn't been bombarded all day with divrei Torah about a naive vision of Torah study from chasidic books; if I hadn't felt out of place, in short, I could have danced for whatever aspects of my lifestyle I willingly embrace.

But I couldn't dance on that Simchat Torah. I faked it as much as I could, but I couldn't really dance. So? So I blog.

Ideological Mapping

2009-12-28T23:41:00.000-08:00

by Luke Skyhopper

Orthopraxy has been established as an already existing, but not completely defined entity.
Numerous Jews with different relationship's towards "The Derech" might identify with the term Orthoprax, but what does this term really mean?

The standard definition, as briefly touched upon above, is Orthodoxy in practice. Many of us Jews keep the practices (to varying extant), but yet do not maintain all of the required assortment of beliefs.

As has been debated endlessly and established by bloggers with the likes of Dov Bear, XGH and countless others, the Torah was probably not wholly written by Moshe and presented in its entirety at Sinai, much of the history contained therein is likely skewed etc etc. On the whole Orthodox Judaism as a remotely rational system of beliefs, crumbles under the weight of modern scientific scrutiny.

With that said, many of us who acknowledge these issues will still continue to remain part of the established Orthodox Community (running the gamut from Chassidishe to LWMO). We will, for various reasons, maintain practices rooted in our Orthodox upbringing. That is not to say that we continue to be 100% halachic. Far from it, but then again, do all openly Orthodox Jews follow the Torah to its fullest extent?

Let me make an example of myself. I personally will eat anything as long as I can reasonably ascertain that it contains no significant non-Kosher animal product. I am certainly not Shomer Negia, read banned books, sometimes violate Shabbat in private.

By the same token I refuse to eat non-Kosher meat, and will not violate the Shabbos in public. I acknowledge that my spiritual roots stem from Orthodox Judaism. I have no desire to become secular, nor live an inside-outside paradox, what does that make me?

Orthoprax Judaism is less about practice or belief, which conceivably it could hold an endless variety, but rather it is about allegiance and origins. We are not Conservadox because we do not find our roots stemming from Conservative Jewish culture, nor are we Conservative simply because we do not come from that background.

Orthoprax Jews find their origins in the Heimishe atmosphere of their Orthodox experiences, (not that I wish for it to become unwelcoming to anyone else) and as such derieve the flavor from there. My own vision of Orthopraxy is parallel to Chulent in that we seek to preserve the great smell and taste of the food, without it's unpopular side effects.

I guess to a certain degree this would be Anarcho-Judaism. No rules would be etched in stone, and everyone is free to practice what they please free of social pressures. In essence, a gathering of INDIVIDUALS held together by a common ancestry and sweet tooth.

Do I know for certain that it is completely viable? No, but what the heck.

In the beginning....

2009-12-27T14:08:00.000-08:00

by Luke Skyhopper, with some JG

In the beginning, something created someone, and the rest was history.

After a while, a bunch of people decided that this something may or may not have created someone, by which I mean us. All the ways and means, which may or may not have been derived from something's creation of someone, were brought into question. Existence alone was all that could be taken for granted.

A Crisis set in.

Our heroes had broken with the established community, and the norms which were previously established. They were on their own, free to wreak havoc as they saw fit. Cast adrift in an ocean of ideas, or rather a hypothetical strip mall of such aforementioned concept, these gallant creatures realized that it was not a complete severance they sought. Rather they wanted to retain a connection to the past life and a semblance of community, if it could be salvaged.

While being free of previously assumed guidelines and rules, there was something holding them back. The norms, practices and routines of the culture which they had deconstructed in all essence remained, albeit in a relatively altered state of approach.

These individuals, held together by the banner of "Orthopraxy", live both within and outside that world which they previously called home. Their quest is to find the proper happy medium of practice and belief.

The world of Orthodox Judaism, from which we claim our origins, with all its strains and factions, was for many a relatively warm and cozy place to live. Like all things held dearly, some of us do not wish to, nor can we bear the burden, of casting off this community in its entirety. For others, Orthodoxy was not warm and cozy at all, but still holds some grasp on them, whether social, familial, or other.

However, half-assing such an all-inclusive life style carries its own burdens and often leaves us suffering from a large degree of isolation and loneliness. What would life be like with an openly Orthoprax community? A group of relatively like-minded individuals who enjoy a good pot of chulent, a vort and some zmiros, but frankly have a tough time believing in the various unfounded claims of our tradition. Is there room for an intellectual group with a sweet tooth for the flavor of Frumkeit?

IT IS THE GOAL OF THIS EXPERIMENT aka BLOG, to work through the issues of estrangement which arise from casting off many of the fundemental beliefs of Orthodox Judaism, while yet living a more or less Orthodox lifestyle. While certainly not the first to tackle orthopraxy in some way, we would like to discuss these issues in depth, and see to it that a community of sorts can possibly be created, examining:

Philosophy: Is there room for spirituality in life when you have already deconstructed spirituality?
Community: How do you live in an Orthodox community, or create an Orthoprax one? How do Orthopraxers raise kids, or date and marry?
Inner Lives: How do we deal with the ups and downs, manage the tradeoffs, handle the benefits and burdens?

It is not the goal as of this posting to immediately create a Orthoprax Synagogue or community within our geographic locale. However such an idea is indeed a hope of ours.

And now, without further ado, 21st Century Apikorsis presents to you THE PRAXY PROJECT (trumpets, kazoos and fireworks)

The Praxy Project

The Psychology of Religious Intuitions: Confirmation Biases & Tim Tebow

The Psychology of Religious Intuitions: Imagination, Science & Availability

The Psychology of Religious Intuitions: Randomness & Chance

The Psychology of Religious Intuitions: Representativeness

The Psychology of Religious Intuitions

Hirhurim Does Philosophy!

Unparsimonious Explanations

What Limits of Rationalism?

"You Assume the Outside World Exists" Part 2

Morality without God

Excerpts from the Orthoprax Haggadah

On Responses to the Ami Orthopraxy Article

Wired for Religion...At the Expense of Science?

"Skeptics Are Third-Graders"

Vaccine Scare Doctor Exposed as Fraud

Arguments from Personal Incredulity

Knowledge in Tradition or Modernity: Transmission vs. Production

A Proof for Textual Divinity...Right?

The Real Kuzari Argument, and Why Rabbi Gottlieb Needs It

Rabbi Gottlieb: What a Putz

A Brief Overview of Materialism and Supernaturalism

The Emotion Research Meme

Obligatory Beliefs

There is Grandeur in this View of Life

The Torah of Science

Dennett on Rational Inquiry into Religion

But Why a Good God?

Evolution and Religion: Thoughts in Progress

"Humanity's Naïve Self-Loves"

The Arbitrariness of Gosse

"You Assume Other People Exist, I Assume God Exists"

On Cognitive Dissonance

Psychology, Religion, Orthopraxy

Evil as a Reason to Believe?

Daat Emet

Raising Orthoprax Children

Bits and Pieces 1

Some Things I Value in OJ

Bursting Bubbles

A Shoutout from Dan Dennett

More on the Gay Question

Contribute to The Praxy Project!

The Dating Question

Why I Blog Now (Part 1)

Ideological Mapping

In the beginning....