Rabbi Sacks in NYT on Darwin and Religion

Rabbi Sacks penned an op-ed for the New York Times today, arguing that religion was and is evolutionarily adaptive because it strengthens the group bonds that give rise to altruism, and therefore is a Good Thing.

Minor point: I thought it was interesting that in his list of "New Atheists," Sacks leaves out Dan Dennett, who wrote an entire book arguing that religion may have served an evolutionarily adaptive function.

Anyway, here are my thoughts. I actually don't disagree with him that religion strengthens group ties, and I think it's possible this offered survival benefits in the past. (Of course, religion is not a precondition to group living, and it is group living that is probably the key to the evolution of altruism. Many non-human primates live in social groups with cooperative ties, and as far as I know, they don't attend church or shul.)

But, there is a side he ignores.  Religion is not just group-oriented--it is usually tribalistic. There is intense concern and strong altruism towards one's group, but often less concern--if not apathy or derogation--towards other groups. (A friend of mine recently told me a story about when he was in a modern orthodox high school and formed a group to raise awareness of ethnic cleansing in Darfur. A school rabbi expressed clear disapproval to him, because his time and effort could instead be used to help poor Jews in Israel.)

There is much evidence that social groups influence prosocial reactions, and the stronger the tribalistic ties within a group are, the more apathy or derogation will tend to arise towards other groups, or even to those seen as "black sheep" within one's group. (See: the Spanish Inquisition, or Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg being doused with bleach for speaking out against sexual abuse, thus betraying his community's norms.)

The point is, religion may have been adaptive in the past. But adaptiveness of a trait depends on the current environment--so this does not tell us whether religion is adaptive in a globalized world, in which countries are pointing nuclear weapons at each other. Rabbi Sacks cannot extrapolate from one to the other. In a world in which Syria's biological and chemical weapons might become up for grabs, does religious tribalism prove maladaptive in a way that outweighs the benefits of tight-knit religious communities? What about the ideology and norms that serve as a bedrock for communal interaction and trust, but may lead to discrimination against women and gay people?

Put more simply, most atheists probably recognize there are warm benefits of religion and religious communities. The question is, are the costs of tribalism and ideology even greater? And, are there ways to gain the social benefits of these types of communities while removing the ideology and tribalism? After all, one doesn't need a very tight-knit community to be altruistic and prosocial. If we face a tradeoff--communities that are less cohesive and committed, but which come with less tribalism--it is worth considering.

Science Does Not Require Faith

Rabbi Slifkin has claimed more than once that "the entire enterprise of modern science emerged from the monotheistic worldview."  He cites the following:

"The philosophy of experimental science… began its discoveries and made use of its method in the faith, not the knowledge, that it was dealing with a rational universe controlled by a Creator who did not act upon whim nor interfere with the forces He had set in operation… It is surely one of the curious paradoxes of history that science, which professionally has little to do with faith, owes its origins to an act of faith that the universe can be rationally interpreted, and that science today is sustained by that assumption."

I respectfully disagree. The assumption that stable laws govern our universe is an inference from the regularities we constantly see, not a random act of blind faith in a rational universe. Here is a naturalistic account of how humans would develop this type of reasoning:

1) A universe has regularities in it.  2) Intelligent lifeforms evolve.  3) The beings that survive best are those that evolve the cognitive abilities to abstract out regularities from their daily experiences, which lets them predict what will happen next.

This is exactly what we seem to do. Developmental cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik has argued--based on much evidence--that young children are constantly building theories as they learn about the world: they learn abstract rules from multiple experiences, make predictions from those rules, and update their theories when they are falsified.  They act like little scientists.  In this view, scientific experimentation is simply a formalized, more complex, adult, conscious version of the learning we are hardwired to do as children.

So no, there is no reason to assume science involves some blind faith in a creator; it simply involves the types of observation and inferential reasoning wired into us by evolution because they work.

Reparative Therapy Study Author Renounces His Work

Those committed to reparative therapy frequently point to the one published study that tried to suggest such therapy may have an effect.  This study, published by Dr. Robert Spitzer in 2003, interviewed 200 gay men and women who reported some "minimal change" in their sexual orientation lasting 5 years since reparative therapy. Now, the New York Times is reporting that Dr. Spitzer recently renounced the study (see here or here) .

They study's methodology was so problematic, it is stunning it was published.  First, the sample was entirely self-selected (i.e. people who had undergone reparative therapy and wanted to participate could volunteer), including ex-gay political advocates. This means the people who participated may have simply been those particularly motivated to convince themselves or others they were not gay, or those particularly motivated to believe reparative therapy works, or those of more ambiguous sexual orientation to begin with, etc.  (Even among this population, the changes reported were limited!) There was no random assignment to a therapy group and a control group, which is the hallmark of a proper experiment.

Worse, the study relied entirely on retrospective self-report: participants were asked, for example, how often they had desired someone of the same sex in the year before therapy--which was years prior at the time of the interview--and how much they had desired it in the past year. There is no guarantee whatsoever about the accuracy of their memories, or even that they were reporting the truth, which is particularly problematic amongst those so motivated to report change.

So, it is interesting to hear  that Dr. Spitzer himself has recently admitted to these problems and renounced the study.  Hopefully this study can be laid to rest in public discourse.

Study Finds Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief

A research article published in Science recently examined the relationship between analytic thinking and religious belief. The authors tested the following idea: an intuitive cognitive system can often give rise to religious belief (see my series on this topic for some background). An analytic thinking system can override the intuitive system.  Therefore, analytic thinking may be associated with religious disbelief.

To test this hypothesis, the authors had study participants complete an analytic thinking task that requires overriding intuitions to reach the correct response, e.g. "If it takes 5 machines 5 min to make 5 widgets, how longs would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?"  (The intuitive response is 100; the correct answer, if you reason it out, is 5).  Participants then reported on their religiosity.  As expected, analytic thinking was negatively associated with religious belief--i.e., the individual tendency to override intuitions with analytic thinking and get the right answers was associated with religious disbelief.

Of course, this is only a correlational result. In a series of four follow-up experiments, the authors directly induced analytic mindsets in randomly assigned participants by using subtle, previously validated manipulations. For example, prior work has found that when people read a piece of text written in a difficult-to-read font, the extra effort and engagement leads to greater analytic thinking (for example, people show increased performance on logic puzzles). In the present study, participants were randomly assigned to fill out the same religiosity questionnaire in an easy-to-read font or a difficult-to-read font.  As predicted, completing the questionnaire with difficult-to-read font led participants to report lower levels of religious belief.

Or, for example, prior tests had found that simply viewing the statue The Thinker primes an analytic mindset in people, relative to viewing a control statue (again, they show increased performance on logic puzzles). When randomly assigned participants were primed with viewing The Thinker, they again reported lower religious belief than a control group. And so on with other methods used to induce an analytic mindset.

These results suggest that analytic thinking tends to override religious intuitions. The authors carefully caveat that their results do not comment on the inherent truths involved or what one should believe, and that this is just a descriptive account of cognitive processes involved in religious belief/disbelief. But, given what we know about how misleading intuitions can be, I would say what the authors do not (and cannot in a scientific paper): the results fit perfectly with the idea that religious belief is often founded on intuitions, and these intuitions are often found to be flawed when examined critically.

For those who followed my series on the psychology of religious intuitions, this finding shouldn't be too surprising!

Further Reading: Gervais, W.M, & Norenzayan, A. (2012). Analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief. Science, 336.

The Psychology of Religious Intuitions: Confirmation Biases & Tim Tebow

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

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.

Further reading:

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1972.) Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability. 

The Psychology of Religious Intuitions: Randomness & Chance

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

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

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!

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

(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?

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

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

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

"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

"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?

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"

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

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

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?