During an orgy of basketball watching, I discovered that my distaste for a certain brand of conservative, evangelical Christianity is so strong that I cannot find it within me to pull for Oral Roberts University, a #15 seed playing for a spot in the Elite 8. Then I liked their team so well that I began feeling conflicted. Then at halftime I read up on Oral Roberts to fortify myself. From Wikipedia:
[H]e also pioneered televangelism and laid the foundations of the prosperity gospel and abundant life teachings. . . .
Until 1947 Roberts struggled as a part-time preacher in Oklahoma, but when he was 29 Roberts said he picked up his Bible and it fell open at the Third Epistle of John, where he read verse 2: "I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as your soul prospereth." The next day, he said, he bought a Buick and God appeared, directing him to heal the sick. . . .
In 1977, Roberts claimed to have had a vision from a 900-foot-tall Jesus who told him to build City of Faith Medical and Research Center, and the hospital would be a success. . . .
In 1983 Roberts said Jesus had appeared to him in person and commissioned him to find a cure for cancer.
Roberts' fundraising was controversial. In January 1987, during a fundraising drive, Roberts announced to a television audience that unless he raised $8 million by that March, God would "call him home." However, the year before on Easter he had told a gathering at the Dallas Convention Center that God had instruced him to "raise the money "by the end of the year" or he would die. Regardless of this new March deadline and the fact that he was still $4.5 million short of his goal, some were fearful that he was referring to suicide, given the impassioned pleas and tears that accompanied his statement. Late in March 1987 while Roberts was fasting and praying in the Prayer Tower [building at the center of the ORU campus], Florida dog track owner Jerry Collins donated $1.3 million. . . .
Roberts maintained his love of finery and one obituary maintained that even when times became economically hard, "he continued to wear his Italian silk suits, diamond rings and gold bracelets—airbrushed out by his staff on publicity photos. . . .
[T]he City of Faith Hospital was forced to close in 1989 after losing money. Roberts was forced to respond with the sale of his holiday homes in Palm Springs and Beverly Hills as well as three of his Mercedes cars.
In my Bible, the portentous verse from the Third Epistle of John appears on page 1490 of a total of 1514. If the book "fell open," or was opened at random, it seems likely to me that it would be to a page closer to the middle. Thin to win! Since mine is off the shelf now, I just opened the Bible at random and read. See if you can pick out the sentence my eye first fell upon:
A. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
B. He set it like a willow twig, and it sprouted and became a low spreading vine, and its branches turned toward him, and its roots remained where it stood.
C. Sell your possessions, and give alms.
D. He who loves money will not be satisfied with money; nor he who loves wealth, with gain: this also is vanity.
It was B. I was hoping for something more personal. The three wrong choices just go to show that the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. Arkansas held on for a 2-point win when ORU's star player had his 3-pointer skim off the rim at the buzzer.
The NHL has fired a referee who, during a game, was caught on a hot mic saying that he "wanted to get" a penalty on one of the teams, presumably as a make-up call. In the statement announcing the firing, the NHL stated: "Nothing is more important than insuring the integrity of our game."
I'm on the ref's side, sort of. The above graph, from FiveThirtyEight Blog, shows pretty convincingly that he's being fired just for acknowledging what everyone knows is true. I had to stare at it awhile before I comprehended the significance, so I'll point out that it simply plots what the likelihood is of the next penalty in an NHL game being called on the home team or the visitors, given how many penalties each team has incurred in the game so far. For example, if the home team has been whistled for two more penalties than the visitors, then there is about a 39 percent chance that the next penalty is called on them (and a 61 percent chance that the next penalty is on the visitors). If, however, the visitors have had two more penalties than the home team, then there is about a 58 percent chance that the next penalty is on the home team (and a 42 percent chance that the next penalty is on the visitors).
The referees like to keep the penalties roughly even. I don't think there's an alternative explanation. This is ten years worth of regular season data. According to the article—the graph is worth a lot of words but the accompanying article is also interesting—the tendency is even more pronounced in the playoffs. The explanation for that would be that the refs become more determined not to be the story when more is at stake. But, in trying not to be the story, they now have become the story. It's probably also worth noting that the home team has an advantage insofar as the next penalty is more likely to be called on the visitors if, as is the case at the start of every game, the teams so far have incurred the same number of penalties.
As for "the integrity of the game," the data suggest there is little or no reward for being disciplined, unthuggish, clean: you're going to get called for about the same number of penalties anyway. I suppose you could say that the sin of the fired referee was that he made a deliberate, conscious choice. It's different if a referee subconsciously prefers the team that is "owed a penalty." But once one ref has been caught on a hot mic it's harder to believe the stark data is explained wholly by the effect of subconscious preferences on a referee's judgment.
The issue of subconscious preferences, however, reminds us that referees are human. I'm more of a basketball fan and it's interesting to think of how the NHL data might apply to a different game. Suppose one basketball team is small but very quick and plays an aggressive person-to-person, chest-to-chest defense. Their opponents, comparatively huge and leaden-footed, sit back in a zone defense. You'd expect the one team to foul a lot more than the other, but the NHL data predict that the foul disparity will not be as great as the actual game play would warrant. The team that is constantly testing the referee's conception of what is a foul will get away with bumps and nudges that are called fouls against the more passive team. That would be the theory, and my impression, having watched ten jillion basketball games, is that in fact that's just what happens—although, since I'm watching, I probably want one team to win, and in that case I can't think of why you should trust my judgment over that of the referees I'm complaining about.
A blog post at Scientific American asks: "Should Scientists Take UFOs and Ghosts More Seriously?" If the question were instead whether anyone should take UFOs and ghosts more seriously, I think my answer would be that lots of people are already way too serious about them. The journalist interviewed in the post seems to be of the view that scientists unscientifically reject all sorts of paranormal phenomena that really ought to be investigated—the evidence for them is so strong! But wouldn't it be more accurate to say that all sorts of claims about UFOs and ghosts and communication with the dead and telepathy and psychokinesis and astrology, et cetera, et cetera, have indeed been investigated, and found deficient?
Most of it is manifest quackery. When magicians move inanimate objects with "mental energy," they are entertaining us. The contract between performer and audience is that the former will, by misdirection and trickery, create an illusion that will amuse and astound the latter. But if the performer claims for himself "gifts" and "powers" from a spirit world, that's something else. In the clip above, Uri Geller was unable to exhibit his supposed psychic powers on an episode of The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson. "I don't feel strong," he explains to Johnny, who had worked as a magician early in his career and perhaps for that reason was skeptical enough to have sought advice before the show from the paranormal investigator James Randi on what steps could be taken to ensure that Geller would have to demonstrate actual paranormal abilities rather than mere magic tricks. The result was Geller pleading for more time, I guess to gather his powers, and much fussing and fidgeting on his part while Johnny coolly smoked. Yes, kids, there was a time when you could smoke on TV. That's how long it's been since Geller was exposed as a fraud on The Tonight Show. But now it's 2020 and Scientific American is interviewing a New York Times journalist who thinks this kind of nonsense isn't getting a fair shake from scientists!
At one point, the interviewer, alluding to the journalist's book Surviving Death, asks: "What is the best evidence you've seen for life after death?" Her answer begins:
That is a huge question. The evidence that I have pulled together in Surviving Death comes from so many places, historical and contemporary, experiential and scientific. It's the full gestalt that provides the best evidence. I think the cases of very young children who report accurate details of a past life, complete with nightmares about the previous death and knowledge from the previous career, are compelling when the memories can be verified and the previous person is identified. If one does not accept rebirth as an explanation, then something else very "paranormal" is going on. . . .
So: it's either reincarnation or something else very paranormal-ly—heads she wins, tails she wins. The rest of the answer trails off into the truly bizarre—"actual-death experiences" (as opposed to less impressive near-death experiences), "mediumships" between the dead and surviving family members, name-dropping of the intellectual elite (William James, with no mention of his conclusions), and so on. But notice how, before really getting on a roll, she appears reluctant to site any specific evidence and instead invokes "the full gestalt." The interviewer doesn't press her for details but does provide hyperlinks to supposed studies about "the cases of very young children who report accurate details of a past life."
Scanning the list of these studies, I'm struck by how the field is apparently dominated by a single lead author, Jim B. Tucker of the University of Virginia. In this NPR interview from 2014, Tucker describes how a 2-year-old boy in Louisiana had nightmares and explained to his parents that he had been shot down in a plane at Iwo Jima in World War II. Turns out that several of the details of the boy's story "checked out"—an American pilot had been killed over Iwo Jima, he had taken off from a ship with the same name as the one provided by the young boy, he had been killed in a manner similar to the one described by the boy, and the pilot in the plane next to him had a name (Jack Larsen) that matched the name of a "friend" given by the boy.
I wish the interviewer had pursued Tucker on some of the details, beginning perhaps with the language abilities of 2-year-olds, who usually have a vocabulary of about 250 words and would therefore be incapable of telling a detailed story about how in a previous life they'd been killed in an air fight at Iwo Jima after taking off from an aircraft carrier named the Natoma. The interview continues:
Reporter: And how old was James when he was making these claims?
Tucker: Well, it started when he was 2—and a very young 2.
Reporter: That's amazing.
Tucker: Like with most of these cases, it faded away by the time he was 5 or 6 or 7, which is typical. But it was certainly there, quite strong, for some time.
How amazing? The church lady would probably say "How convenient!"—that it's typically very young children who have these memories, which then fade. Fortunately, Tucker has access to them before that happens. But you could still talk to the parents. I'm more interested in them, anyway. Are they, as my mom used to say, "a little different"? The NPR interviewer exhibits no curiosity on this point.
If you root around on the Internet for stuff about Jim B. Tucker and the paranormal, you are soon referred to another case, concerning a 10-year-old boy who reported having a previous life as a movie extra and, later, a Hollywood agent. The NBC Nightly News, with Lester Holt, did a credulous report about him. Being I guess a rare instance of an older kid with memories of his former life, he appeared on camera with his mother, and the two of them described to the reporter how in a movie book he had pointed to a picture of this obscure actor, Marty Martyn, and said, "That's me!" This made it possible to try and match details of Martyn's life with the boy's memories of his supposed former life, when he was Martyn. Tucker touts 50-some inexplicable matches, but to me they seem explicable in terms of their consistent generality—he was rich, he had nice cars, he had a swimming pool, he liked to sun bathe, his address had either a "Rock" or a "Mount" in it. This seems like an impressive list, but many are related: if one is true, others follow. ("In a previous life, I played basketball in the NBA; also, I was tall, athletic, affluent, and owned nice cars.") Notwithstanding the two proffered possibilities, the address is more specific, and Tucker discovered that Martyn once lived on a street named "Roxbury." Of course he regards this as a match, but, strictly speaking, it's merely similar to one of the two possibilities. (I'd be more impressed if the boy had said he'd lived on Rockymount Road and Martyn had lived on—Rockymount Road.) It seems the decisive piece of evidence establishing reincarnation, or "something paranormal," pertains to the usually unambiguous question of the date of someone's death. The boy indicated his previous life had ended at age 61, but Tucker knew that Martyn's death certificate said he died at age 59. Then, somewhat mysteriously, "new information" came to light suggesting Martyn had actually died two years after the date given on his death certificate. More amazingness! How exactly did that work? And if the boy is a better source than the death certificate for when Martyn died, because it was his former life, then why was he a little off on the name of the street he lived on? Jim B. Tucker doesn't seem interested. NBC News doesn't seem interested. It's more fun to be amazed.
As a philosopher once noted, people have a thirst for things that are against reason, and they do not want to make it too hard on themselves to slake it. Fine, let them have their fun. I'll only complain when they complain about not being taken seriously.
Well, good for Mitt Romney, but before he gets his own chapter in the sequel to Profiles in Courage it seems worth noting that the usual amoral considerations arguably apply. Romney is not up for reelection until 2024 and, maybe more to the point, Trump is not very popular in Utah. In the 2016 election, Independent Party candidate Evan McMullin, a Utah native, received about 21% of the statewide vote, and Trump, who won 68% of the vote in neighboring Wyoming, got less than 60% of the balance. If he'd been impeached for paying hush money to a porn actress and miscellaneous whore-dogging, instead of for trying to cheat in the next election, the conservative Mormons of Utah might have been lighting up Romney's switchboard demanding he vote to convict.
"Just saying," as my kids just say.
I also have to say that, while I like how in his speech Romney bluntly described Trump's behavior and applied to it the adjective "appalling," which is "inappropriate" to the 5th power (inappropriate5), I'm a little put off by the way in which he intimated that his religious convictions required him to vote as he did. If he intended a jab to the kidneys of his devout colleagues who reached the opposite conclusion, fine. But the religious preening on all sides suggests . . . that it's fair to call it preening. Everyone attributes their moral virtue to their religious faith but the universally accepted connection between the two seems dubious. The classic document on the topic is the Platonic dialog called Euthyphro, wherein Socrates advances an argument that might be summarized:
Assuming it's true that God commands people to act in a certain way, then either he has good reasons to command as he does, or his commands issue only from whim or brute caprice. The former must be true—else, it seems that things would be good only because God commanded them, when actually it's the other way around: he commands them because they're good. In that case, our actions should be in accord with his commands, not because he commands them, but for the reason that he commands them.
In the question before Romney and the other senators, Plato's Socrates wouldn't think much of the view that the correct resolution relates in any way to the religious sensibilities of individual jurors. That's why in the dialog Socrates's friend Euthyphro comes off as a fellow perhaps too enthralled with his own righteous piety, though it would be foolish to suppose that 2400 years later he wouldn't have a vote in the US Senate.
There's an old baseball story about a batter who ignores the coach's order to bunt and, swinging away, wallops a homer on the first pitch. He rounds the bases and returns to the dugout, where the coach berates him for failing to bunt. He listens patiently and then, when the tirade is done, says: "But how would you rate my results?" I feel like maybe I'm in the role of the coach and Romney swung away, but, thanks to his craven teammates, there aren't even any good results to celebrate: like a loud foul before strike three.
As a kid, I was a huge fan of The Lone Ranger television series starring Clayton Moore in the title role and Jay Silverheels as his faithful sidekick, Tonto. I see now that they stopped making new shows in 1957, so all my viewing pleasure in the mid 60s had to be courtesy of reruns. I'm watching reruns again in 2019, because one night, zipping around on the remote, I found a cable channel that airs several episodes in a row at off hours. Lots of air time to fill, no doubt. It's sort of fun to watch and wonder about what the attraction might have been for 6-year-old me. I haven't seen a single episode wherein the plot seemed at all familiar. Maybe that's partly because the plot lines are so similar that they would slur together in anyone's mind and then be forgotten altogether over 55 years. But I think it's more likely that they were beyond me. I do remember the opening sequence, especially the part where the Lone Ranger's horse, Silver, rears up, and the Lone Ranger, astride him, takes on the aspect of a colossus. What a man! Another thing I remember is a recurring technique, a kind of scene divider, where the camera backs away to watch Tonto and the Lone Ranger riding their faithful horses Scout and Silver, respectively, over rough terrain, in a mad sprint, like they were in the Preakness Stakes. It didn't occur to me then, but it does now, that, often as not, there is no reason supplied by the plot for them to be in such a hurry. It just looks cool, and I must have thought it looked cool, because it's familiar to me after more than 50 years.
The network that airs these shows is called WHT, channel 367 in my Direct TV lineup. Strange to say, their specialty is not old westerns but, rather, religious programming of the very battiest variety. I know this because sometimes, using Guide on the remote, I zip through their schedule for the day to see when I might be able to see "The Lone Ranger." Of course, the names of the shows come up, together with the "description." I wrote some of these down today.
At 8 this evening, you could watch "End-Time Insights" with host Steve Cochran, a show that "offers new 'Never Before Seen' Biblical End Time Revelations, one of which is called, 'The Graph' and offers a hidden timeline as seen in the Book of Revelation." I can't fill in any details, as I was watching the Ravens beat the Patriots, but something about the sentence does arouse my editorial impulses. For one thing, the capitalization is about as eccentric as in our president's tweets. Also, if the timeline is as seen in the Bible, is it, strictly speaking, accurate to say that it's hidden? I guess that's the hook: it's only hidden if you don't watch the show.
The 8:30 time slot this evening was filled by "End of the Age With Reverend Irwin Baxter." It seems WHT's Sunday night programming is devoted to the end of the world. The description for Rev. Baxter's show is bland: "The prophecies of the Bible explained." This was followed at 9 by "The Coming Apocalypse": "Understanding today's world events from a biblical perspective with Pastor Paul Begley." I'm going to guess that today's events pertaining to "the coming apocalypse" involve unrest and controversy in the Middle East. If Pastor Begley is smart, he will be "intrigued" by what is going on but not so confident about what he sees as to be able to assign a date to the apocalypse. That's a rookie mistake made by some of these clergymen. If you're wrong, you look sort of ridiculous, and there is no real pleasure in being right, because, due to the world having ended, no one can hear you say "told ya so"—not that anyone in a couple millennia has yet experienced this frustration.
At some time late at night, like maybe about now, there airs a show called "It's Supernatural" in which "investigative reporter Sid Roth verifies the supernatural," though probably not to everyone's satisfaction, since one idiosyncratic definition of supernatural is something like "that which cannot be verified." At 6 tomorrow morning, you can skip "Morning Joe" on MSNBC and watch instead "The Jim Bakker Show." I take it this is the guy who used to be married to Tammy Faye and that he's out of prison?
No "Lone Ranger" till 2 in the afternoon. Hi-yo Silver, away!
There's so much going on in the world that I would not know about but for TV--and I don't mean the news or other standard programming. For example, there's this Coravin outfit that relentlessly advertises the tiny drill they make that you use on a wine cork before pouring through the pinprick you've bored. The point is that "wine just isn't as good" after the bottle has been opened, but there is no deterioration if you drill this little opening instead of just removing the cork. The wine will be just as refined and full-bodied, or whatever, when you enjoy another glass tomorrow night!
So I guess it's a thing to open a bottle of wine and not drink it all down in a single episode. I don't think the ads mention the price, which I see now is about $300. Hope they aren't counting on expanding their market into Italy and France, because in those cultures people are willing to save a buck, even if it means having another drink.
As a kid, I remember receiving for a gift a commemorative coin set--a Kennedy half dollar and some kind of Lincoln coin set in a colorful piece of cardboard above a list of supposed eerie congruences between the assassinations of the two presidents. I guess it never goes out of style because today I saw a social media post on it, so I can list the congruences, many of which I'd forgotten:
Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846, Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946
Lincoln was elected President in 1860, Kennedy was elected President in 1960
Both were particularly concerned with civil rights
Both wives lost a child while living in the White House
Both presidents were shot on a Friday
Both presidents were shot in the head
Lincoln's Secretary was named Kennedy, Kennedy's Secretary was named Lincoln
Both were assassinated by southerners
Both were succeeded by southerners named Johnson
Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln, was born in 1808; Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy, was born in 1908
John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln, was born in 1839; Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated Kennedy, was born in 1939
Both assassins were known by their three names
The three names of both assassins have a total of fifteen letters
Lincoln was shot at the theater named "Ford"; Kennedy was shot in a car called "Lincoln" made by "Ford"
Booth and Oswald were both killed before their trials
A week before Lincoln was shot, he was in Monroe, Maryland; a week before Kennedy was shot, he was with Marilyn Monroe [Don't remember this one being on the list of my commemorative coin set.]
Kennedy was shot in a theater and the killer ran to a warehouse; Kennedy was shot from a warehouse and the killer ran to a theater
Have a history teacher explain this, if they can, says the header above the list.
I was quite impressed with the list when I was 8 or 10 years old, but I suppose I've grown jaded, because I feel like making fun of it now. Ford and Johnson are common names, and if you mean to kill someone, shooting them in the head is a common enough strategy. Both assassins hit what they were aiming for! And who are these "secretaries" anyway?
The real problem with this list relates to what people with secondary education call selection bias--"the bias introduced by the selection of individuals, groups, or data for analysis in such a way that proper randomization is not achieved, thereby assuring that the sample obtained is not representative of the population to be analyzed." So, here's another list:
Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809; Kennedy on May 29, 1917
Lincoln died on April 15, 1865, a Saturday; Kennedy on November 22, 1963, a Friday
Lincoln married Mary Todd; Kennedy, Jacqueline Bouvier
Lincoln's assassin was born in Maryland; Kennedy's, in Louisiana
Kennedy served in the US Senate, representing Massachusetts; Lincoln was from Illinois and never served in the Senate
Lincoln's vice president, first name Andrew, supported slavery; Kennedy's vice president, first name Lyndon, was a champion of civil rights
While in office, Lincoln and his wife lost an 11-year-old son named Willie; when Kennedy was in office, he and his wife lost a son, Patrick, who was born prematurely and lived for less than two days
John Kennedy was known as "Jack"; Abraham Lincoln was often called "Abe"
Lincoln's assassin was shot in a tobacco shed eleven days after he killed the president; Kennedy's assassin was killed in the basement of Dallas police headquarters two days after he killed the president
It's fun, and, by the way, Marilyn Monroe died, of a drug overdose, on August 5, 1962, more than a year before Kennedy was assassinated.
I was home baking cookies Saturday afternoon and so rediscovered that MPR chooses to air its best shows while productive members of society are grocery shopping or watching young children play ball. This American Life was pretty good but I liked even more Radiolab, which took as its subject stochasticity, or randomness. You can listen to the show here, if so inclined. Here's a little teaser to help you decide whether you're interested. A statistics professor asks one group of students to flip a coin a hundred times and record the results. A second group is tasked with setting out a likely result of a hundred coin flips; that is, instead of actually flipping a coin, and recording either an H or a T, they simply set out a 100-string-long sequence of Hs and Ts that in their opinion mimics the random result that will be achieved by the actual coin flippers. The professor leaves the room while the two groups do their work and then, returning to scan the two completed H-T strings, takes around five seconds to identify the one that is based on actual flips. Always. Without fail.
I'm enough of a contrarian to be attracted to the way in which students of probability are less apt to be taken in by "miracles" and assorted other fond beliefs. Take the notion that shooters in basketball games get a "hot hand." Years ago, another statistics professor, this one also a fan of the Philadelphis 76ers, tracked the result of every shot taken by individual 76ers over the course of a season. He then began looking for evidence of streaks when a shooter was "hot." Turns out that, while fans have a powerful impression that players "get hot," the notion is refuted by data. For example, Andrew Toney, who was at the time one of the team's leading scorers, made 46 percent of his field goal attempts over the course of the season. But supposing you look only at shots taken immediately after three successive "makes." He made only 32 percent of those attempts. It seems that the players themselves are victims of the "hot hand" fallacy. A little bit of success changes their conception of what's a good shot, and so their percentage slides until they recalibrate.
People love good stories and aren't inclined to look into them too closely. Every lottery winner seems to have a unique story but really they aren't different from the losers, who of course don't get interviewed in the media. If you determine before the numbers are drawn to do a story on the winner, it's a safe bet that word of a "miracle" is going to be promulgated. The "hand of God" will be detected in an unbelievable outcome. Indeed, the discovery of theological significance in necessary facts is pervasive. Another instance: it's not really a sign of God's great beneficence that he placed human beings here on earth, where conditions are such that we can live and prosper, instead of on some eternally frozen and poisonous orb where no one will ever sit down at a word processor to compose a sermon.
We're in Chicago for a few days and the thing that has made the biggest impression upon me so far, if you don't count the way the TV in our motel room compels you to click past several cost-added options (such as "adult") in order to watch television shows, has been the "Our Evolving World" exhibit at the Field Museum. The usual way to conceive of our insignificance concerns the speck in the great blob that is our sun but what about the age of the third planet revolving around it?--about 4.5 billion years. If human civilization is thought of as being 10,000 years old--a stretch, considering that the Homeric epics were created only about 3000 years ago--then it is to the age of the earth as 1 is to 450,000. Let's say that you were modeling the age of the earth with a tape measure a mile long. The period of human civilization would take up about the last eighth of an inch. God, besides favoring out-of-the way playhouses, has a lot of patience.
The exhibit gives a straight account of such matters without any on-the-other-hand b.s. to mollify the crackpots among us, as is required of science textbooks published in the United States. At the very start of the exhibit I remember a sign explaining that "theory," as in "theory of evolution," means something very different from "hunch" before concluding, firmly, that in science not much is better attested to than evolution by natural selection.
For some adult entertainment back at the motel, I googled "creationist museum" and was soon reading, at the site of Creation Museum, in Petersburg, Kentucky:
PREPARE TO BELIEVE
The state-of-the-art 70,000 square foot museum brings the pages of the Bible to life, casting its characters and animals in dynamic form and placing them in familiar settings. Adam and Eve live in the Garden of Eden Children play and dinosaurs roam near Eden's rivers. . . .
It only gets worse. What's needed is more antidotes to this sort of determined stupidity.
Everyone is talking about Lincoln, the movie, including one Edmund N Santurri, "a professor of religion and philosophy and director of the Ethical Issues and Normative Perspectives Program at St Olaf College in Northfield, Minn." It takes balls of brass to disagree with him, because "[h]e has taught a seminar on 'The Religious Sensibility of Abraham Lincoln,'" but here goes.
Dr Santurri's point is that the movie gives short shrift to Lincoln's religion. It's possible, however, that he overstates the case. I think at the very least he gives short shrift to Lincoln's skepticism, which, in his telling, is essentially the pose of a callow youth who in his mature greatness acquired a religious soul. That doesn't really stand up, however. When Lincoln, age 37, ran for Congress in 1846, his opponent, a Methodist minister, accused him of "infidelity." Presumably, the charge was something more than a pure fabrication, and Lincoln felt compelled to respond--in the form of a campaign handbill. Here it is--quite an interesting document, I think. Lincoln gives no explanation for not being a church member, a current fact. He has never denied the truth of Scripture but does not now affirm it. He says that he has never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion but does not say that he believes in it now. He does not now disavow the skeptical views to which he admits being attracted as a younger man. Now, Lincoln was an ambitious man, and being connected in any way with enmity toward religion wasn't going to aid his prospects for advancement. The handbill therefore is interesting mainly for what it does not say. Lincoln does not say that he is a believer.
The Lincoln who was seeking a seat in the House of Representatives in 1846 was not a posturing college student in the thrall of whatever philosopher he had last read. People do not often change their views on these questions after age 35, although I admit that presiding over the Civil War is the kind of thing that might cause one to rearrange some furniture. Santurri's account of Lincoln's spiritual development, however, has the effect of reducing Lincoln. Yes, two sons died, but who really thinks Lincoln was the kind of man whose view of things would be overturned by death under his roof? It's indisputable that he used religious language in his presidential oratory--most memorably, in his Second Inaugural address. It's possible, I think, that Lincoln knew his audience at least as well as Dr Santurri knows Lincoln's mind.
Super-storm Sandy and the dearth of election polls has so wrenched my daily routine that I find myself pursuing arguably more worthy pastimes--a perusal of David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion while the storm raged and Messrs Gallup et al left off placing calls.
Hume is not one of those philosophers, like Plato or Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or Russell, that some people read just for pleasure. His Treatise of Human Nature, which I recently slogged through, is no page-turner. It was finished before Hume was 30, and he summarized the book's reception by saying it "fell dead-born from the press." Pick it up, start reading: you'll see why. The Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, on the other hand, was published posthumously and is fun to read. It could have been sent to the press while its author lived, but being publicly skeptical about Christianity in 18th-century Britain was not good for one's career, or health, and Hume's friends advised him to keep it in a desk drawer. His nephew oversaw its publication in 1779, three years after Hume died.
Nothing sparkles more than the tenth chapter, concerning the question of whether ours is the best of all possible worlds. Here is the contribution of one of the characters in the dialogue:
Were a stranger to drop, on a sudden, into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures; whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to opera, to court? He might justly think, that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow. . . .
When he is contradicted by one with a more cheeful view, this same character replies:
Ask yourself, ask any of your acquaintance, whether they would live over again the last ten or twenty years of their life. No! But the next twenty, they say, will be better.
And from the dregs of life, hope to receive What the first sprightly running could not give.
Thus at last they find (such is the greatness of human misery; it reconciles even contradictions) that they complain, at once, of the shortness of life, and of its vanity and sorrow.
The couplet is from the English poet Dryden; Hume changes the verb in the first line from "think" to "hope." Inevitably we arrive at familiar, "unanswered" questions:
[God's] power we allow is infinite: Whatever he wills is executed: But neither man nor any other animal is happy: Therefore he does not will their happiness. His wisdom is infinite: He is never mistaken in choosing the means to any end: But the course of nature tends not to human or animal felicity: Therefore it is not established for that purpose. Through the whole compass of human knowledge, there are no inferences more certain and infallible than these. . . .
Epicurus's old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?
Hume in all his works appears to anticipate modern biology in denying that human beings are somehow set apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. "Neither man nor any other animal is happy." Schopenhauer perhaps was thinking of Hume, whom he admired, when he memorably weighed in on this general question:
A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.
If you are of the right-wing, Christianist persuasion, and find this all too dismal to contemplate, allow me to suggest the election prognostications of Power Line's John Hinderaker. Following Michael Barone, he has the following line-up of states in the Romney column: Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin--and a total of 315 electoral votes for Willard. The notable thing about the "analysis" behind this prediction is that it is unconnected from any polling data. There were 22 polls of battleground states published yesterday. Here are the results (courtesy of Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight blog):
John diagnosed his own case when, in a long-ago post (2004), he wrote: "One of the most powerful forces in human affairs is wishful thinking. It's impact is incalculable." Hume would concur.
The essay "Theology and Falsification" by the British philosopher Antony Flew is, as the author is modest enough to admit, "probably the most widely read philosophical publication of the second half of the twentieth century." It is around a thousand words long and raises the objection that God-talk is meaningless. When someone says, for example, "God is love," it appears that something is being asserted. But what, exactly? If something is asserted, then something must be denied ("if p, then not the opposite of p"), which suggests that the assertion could theoretically be proven false. Regarding "God is love," what is being denied? What event, or proposition, if shown to be true, would disprove the "assertion"? We are told that "God is love" is not disproven by cancer in young children, "because His love isn't a human love," etc., etc. Okay, what would disprove it? If there is nothing that, if true, would cause the assertion to be withdrawn, then nothing is actually being asserted. It's just empty happy talk, a fake assertion, the expression at most of a mere "picture preference." That's the argument of the very brief essay.
To me it seems cogent and generally applicable. The success of Clinton's economic program, despite the Republicans' dire predictions of what would be wrought, did not shake their confidence in their economic views. What would? The medical literature does not dissuade devotees of certain "alternative treatments." Is there anything that could? What would it take to turn practitioners of occult practices into materialists on the ground that the former had been proven to be bunk? If the answer to all these questions is "nothing," then we don't have to take them very seriously. Whether or not they're right isn't an interesting question compared to why they believe as they do. The psychology of belief is a large field. Flew's phrase "picture preference" (which he borrows from another philosopher, John Wisdom) usually has a larger role than the merits of the particular case.
A six-ton satellite falling out of the sky might seem like a metaphor for something, though if it were falling back to Earth on a trajectory aimed roughly at your garage the metaphors would presumably dissipate. Yesterday's news was that the satellite had landed and that, as there were no reports of damage or injuries, the Pacific Ocean apparently took one for the team.
I was struck by the following sentence from the article that appeared in the edition of our local daily sent to my e-reader:
While NASA did receive reports of people who saw lights in the sky that they thought were pieces of the disintegrating satellite, none of them occurred at a time and place where the satellite would have been passing by, and people looking at the correct time and place did not see anything.
This raises a question about what the people who were looking at the wrong place, and the wrong time, nevertheless did "see." It wasn't the satellite. Maybe they saw a flying saucer. But there is an explanation for "seeing flying saucers" that's related to this general phenomenon I want to talk about. As far as I know, there were no reports of flying saucers before human beings had at least begun to contemplate sending up our own flying objects. It was only then that people reported seeing the flying objects of other civilizations.
It seems like what people report "seeing" can be influenced by what they expect to see. I see no reason to limit skepticism about their reports to heavenward gazes. In criminal investigations, for example, the testimony of eyewitnesses can surely be influenced by the way the investigators put their questions. There doesn't have to be an elaborate conspiracy to "frame" someone. The police need only suggest their own suspicions to the eyewitnesses, who will then corroborate the preferred theory of the crime. The psychology of the witness is another important factor. People who saw the falling satellite in the sky, or the suspect commit the crime, or had a "religious vision"--in every instance, isn't it a little suspicious that one effect of their reports is to make themselves at least temporarily important, candidates for fame, the object of attention?
But the people looking at the right time, at the right place, saw nothing. That they knew where and when to look places them in a different demographic group. They could also have been influenced by what they expected to see. After all, they knew they were looking in the right place and at the right time. Nevertheless, they saw nothing. Possibly this group self-selects for possessing the skeptical sensibility that guards against delusion.
Sometimes--frequently--I get so annoyed by stuff I hear or read that I can hardly think of anything else till I've expressed my annoyance, thereby achieving a sort of exorcism. Thus a blog. It doesn't even matter if anyone reads it. I doubt the therapeutic effect could be any greater if my posts were published on the editorial page of The New York Times.
Yesterday the Star Tribune newspaper printed on its editorial page a long, pompous editorial by Mitch Pearlstein, the director of a local conservative think tank. He really annoys me. Yesterday's piece was about family breakdown. Oh woe! woe! woe! Nobody wants to acknowledge that family breakdown is a leading cause of the gap between "haves" and "have nots." But he will trod where only big thinkers dare go. Oh woe! woe! woe! The sociologists all concur it's terrible! Oh woe! woe! woe! We must permit vouchers for private school education. And so on.
Here's a typical Pearlstein gambit. Having appealed to reasonable people by fussily charging "liberals" and "conservatives" of different sins on the issue of wealth inequality, he writes:
Might I respectfully add here that it is impossible for me to imagine how liberal friends could not be at least as concerned as I am from the conservative side of the aisle about the thinning of marriage and its straight line to social class rupture.
Emphasis in original. He is so concerned. He can't imagine why his "liberal friends" aren't. Permit him to respectfully point out that he's better than they are. His actual meaning would be clearer if the italics came two words later.
You might think that the need for private school education does not necessarily follow from data about wealth inequality and family disintegration. But Pearlstein has decided that vouchers would be a good thing and consequently every possible social observation attests to the necessity of adopting his view. Here he is performing the pivot:
I asked [the] principal of a Catholic elementary school in the Twin Cities what her institution's mission was. "To manifest God's love in every child," she said, or words close to that. As educational mission statements go, this was one of the briefiest yet meatiest ever drafted.
No, it's tied with a million others for the most meaningless. "To manifest God's love in every child" is just the empty cant of a dull nun. It doesn't mean anything. I hate the way we are all expected to bow down and pay obeisance soon as anyone suggests that their view is supported by religion. I guess if you disagree with Mitch Pearlstein, then you must be against making God's love manifest in children.
Well, count me among that small group. No tax dollars should support religious schools. No God's love manifest in young children. No taking time out from math and reading for lessons concerning the Virgin Mary. I'm against it, and I'm feeling better.
I sent the following letter to the editor of the Star Tribune today. The body of the letter includes a link to the home page of the reporter who wrote the story I'm complaining about. It purports to include a link to the story itself, but, as of 3:00 p.m. Central Time on Sunday, June 27, the link doesn't work. He ought to be relieved.
June 27, 2010
To the editor:
While reading Jeff Strickler’s credulous paean, “Faith healing: From fringe to the masses”(June 27, page 1A), I kept expecting to get to the part where some skeptic is quoted for “balance.” That is the rule, after all, for journalistic treatment of the creationism versus evolution dispute.But for some reason evolution by natural selection must be subjected to the scrutiny of crackpots whereas “faith healing” gets a pass.
All I want is some evidence that there’s anything to it.Sure, Strickler quotes one man with a back ache who says he got better after submitting himself to “the circle of 10 healers at a recent service at SpiritUnitedChurch in southeast Minneapolis.”A balanced piece might have here made mention of the placebo effect, but Strickler concludes instead that “[i]t’s time to update the clichéd image of faith healing.”
Update it to what? The story includes a picture of a healer suspending her hand over a man’s head “in an effort to bring some good energy.”Another healer elaborates: “It’s about dynamic energy.Every cell in the human body is dynamic, it’s constantly moving, and energy can pass from one cell to another.”
I learned today, while listening to Car Talk on NPR, that Martin Gardner has died. He's responsible for the update of Thompson's Calculus Made Easy that I've been working through as my wife, Amanda, has been enrolled first in Calculus I and now Calculus II at a local college. The Wikipedia article on Gardner lists sixty other books he wrote. I've read only Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?--one in a series debunking pseudoscience--and the essay collection called The Night is Large. I recommend both, but there are at least 59 others, and, like me, you've probably never read Little Dorrit or Middlemarch, either. For 25 years, Gardner wrote a column on recreational mathematics for Scientific American. I think the Car Talk guys were subscribers because their weekly "puzzler," they acknowledged on air, is borrowed from his "Mathematical Games" column. Gardner was 96.
Here is his introduction to his essay "The Laffer Curve," reprinted in The Night is Large:
I would have expected supply-side theory to die a slow death after Ronald Reagan's failed promise to balance the budget by cutting taxes, emasculating the federal government (but without touching social security), and increasing military spending. Alas, it is still alive and well. As I write (1995), many Republican leaders are promising to balance the budget by cutting taxes (especially on the rich), emasculating the federal government (but without touching social security), and increasing military spending.
My spoof on the Laffer curve ran in Scientific American (December 1981).
The 61 books show what can be done by someone who combines intelligence, curiosity, and a devotion to learning and work. You feel you could be like him if only you were a little smarter, a little better.
Back in December, reviewing a review of a biography of Arthur Koestler, I noted, in connection with Koestler's interest in paranormal phenomena, that the blind spots of geniuses is an interesting topic. Koestler's is actually a fairly pale case compared, say, to Isaac Newton. Martin Gardner's essay on Newton in Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?--I recommend the whole thing--begins with the observation that there are three Newtons. The first is the one most of us know about, the genius who "invented calculus, discovered the binomial theorem, introduced polar coordinates, proved that white light was a mixture of colors, explained the rainbow, built the first reflecting telescope, and showed that the force causing apples to fall is the same as the force that guides the planets, moons, and comets and produces tides."
The second Newton was an alchemist and the third a Protestant fundamentalist. The alchemist "struggled for decades to turn base metals into gold." The fundamentalist was obsessed with biblical prophecies and left behind a million words on the Book of Revelation and the dream visions of the Old Testament's Daniel. What a lot of intellectual energy he devoted to these topics! Had he been otherwise a miscreant I'd say it is good he had amusements to keep him off the street. But for Isaac Newton--what a waste!
If Newton was prone to large errors, you should probably consider the possibility that your most cherished belief is bunk--even if you are a genius.
Dr. Johnson famously called patriotism "the last resort of a scoundrel." My immediate reaction is to agree, and my more considered reaction is that, no, he was wrong, patriotism is the first resort of a scoundrel.
And here is a discouragingly common, cant expression: "My country, right or wrong." As if stupidity were a virtue.
Amanda and I were listening to public radio recently when a fellow being interviewed rather mincingly suggested that perhaps education should be valued apart from its beneficial financial effects. She says to me, "Hey! You listening? They found someone who thinks like you." Yes, me and one other guy!
When people ask of students what they're taking up at school, they want to know what profession they mean to enter. If the answer is something like "literature" or "history," the next question is: So you want to teach? And the answer to that is: No, law school. All education is now vocational training. Politicians who "support education" are really just in favor of high-paying jobs. Education is a means, the end is affluence.
Everyone just assumes the role of education is to fit you for remunerative employment. But an education worth having should fit you for unemployment, too.
I've mentioned before how, in his first lecture, Richard Feynman asks the question about what single, short statement captures the most important bit of scientific knowledge--the one thing we'd like to preserve if everything else was lost in some cataclysm and we had to begin again to understand the world as best we can. He proposes the atomic hypothesis, which he puts as follows: "All things are made of atoms--little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another."
I've mentioned it before but haven't stressed how serious he is about it. He asks and answers the question about the single most important idea to preserve near the beginning of the lecture. Toward the end, he says:
Everything is made of atoms. That is the key hypothesis. The most important hypothesis in all of biology, for example, is that everything that animals do, atoms do. In other words, there is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics [emphasis in original].
Perhaps those for whom the theory of evolution is a particularly despised thing should turn their attention to the atomic hypothesis. "Everything is made of atoms." An alternative way of saying it: Atoms is all there is.
Writing in The New York Review, Richard Lewontin takes up a question that interests me: how the slow pace of adaptive evolution cannot keep up with the rapidly changing human world. Indeed, selection has no chance to operate on traits that do not manifest until after the age of reproduction. Lewontin uses the example of surfer boys who may be susceptible, in the sixth or seventh decade of life, to aggressive skin cancers. The surfers who are resistant to skin cancer do not reproduce at different rates. (They're all alive and potent at 30.) If you were determined to increase the human life span and were given a lot of time to work with, you should consider outlawing reproduction among people under, say, 35. If memory serves, Richard Dawkins makes this point in The Selfish Gene.
Along the same line, it is worth observing that the increase in life expectancy is due mainly to losing fewer people along the way. It is not that the elderly are living longer; it's that the young are. The most intractable diseases are those of old age--partly on account, probably, of the fact that nature cares for your genes but not for you. Once your reproductive years have passed, medical science is not aided in its efforts by an elemental force of nature.
Then there are nearly universal and destructive emotions to consider. If people, no matter how successful and admired (think: Tolstoy), nevertheless feel restless and unhappy, it might be because in the biological past of our species the well-adjusted, happy ones were not roaming the territory, ejaculating in as many women as possible. Genes predisposing one toward quiet and contented reflection did not therefore fare very well. Or, to take up an emotion that seems to have been much on the mind of Will Shakespeare, there is the related case of sexual jealousy. Othello's killed him before he could procreate, and it is the motivating agent in a lot of the sordid crimes reported in the local news. So why hasn't evolution rooted out this harmful emotion? Because in the youthful days of our race, when our character was being formed, the jealous ones were more successful at passing on their genes, and conditions have changed far too quickly for evolution to be of any help. We're stuck with dangerous and violent impulses that, before the invention of criminal law and birth control, helped our forebears pass on their genes to the next generation. It seems lke an impossibly long time ago to us but nature has different measures.
Claiborne Pell, Democratic senator from Rhode Island from 1961 to 1997, died Thursday at age 90. The obituaries duly note that he is responsible for Pell Grants, for co-sponsoring legislation creating the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, for his ardent opposition to the Vietnam War and consistent support for labor and environmental concerns, and, generally, for championing liberal causes in the US Senate for 36 years. Sometimes called Wellborn Pell on account of his rich father, the deferential Pell was a formidable vote-getter in blue-collar Rhode Island: in six senate campaigns, he received an average of 64% of the vote.
Many of the obituaries mention Pell's "quirkines," often in connection with his wardrobe of ill-fitting tweed suits, which he sometimes wore while jogging. He also had a keen interest in paranormal phenomena and, according to Martin Gardner, who devotes a chapter to Pell in Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? Debunking Pseudoscience, was unrivaled among Washington politicians "in combinging ignorance of science with extreme gullibility toward the performances of psychics." Pell was a great fan of the discredited mentalist Uri Geller (see the nearly iconic video from The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson below), served on the advisory board of the International Association of Near Death Studies, promoted government research on paranormal phenomena, and for years employed on his Senate staff the crackpot Cecil B. Scott Jones, who is best known for his work on UFOs entitled Phoenix in the Labyrinth.
There is a tradition of slanting the truth about the recently deceased that perhaps explains the recurrences of "quirky" and "eccentric" in obituaries of Pell. Regarding the paranormal, he was a dope. Regarding his jogging attire, he was a quirky eccentric. In nearly every other regard, he was a mensch, and his passing may remind us of the way good and bad qualities mix in us all. At Salon, the comment section appended to his obituary is filled with thank-yous from recipients of Pell Grants who say they owe their college educations to him.
Easter. The invitations to church and brunch, the closed stores, the media reports on the activities of the pope and of "local pilgrims" such as the gravely ill for whom the Easter story has "special meaning"--together, they make one rehearse why one remains on the outside.
The story makes no sense.
We are sinners. Yes, there is evidence of that, though I think there are superior, non-theological ways to understand the diverse phenomena grouped beneath the "sin" heading. Nevertheless let us stipulate that we are sinners. In order that we be redeemed from our sorry state, God becomes a man, lives among us for some thirty years, preaches and teaches, is crucified, dies, and is buried. Only he doesn’t stay dead. He rises again and walks the earth for another month or so before ascending to heaven in the seam of a cloud. At this point, we are still sinners, but for reasons never set out with any clarity it’s now okay--or, at least, it’s okay if we believe this story. If we don’t, there is literally hell to pay. It would be terrible if it were true but there is no good reason to think that it is.