More Thoughts on Religion

This post builds on my view of the human condition presented here.

Is it possible to find yet another reason to turn away from religion, organized or not?

I think my initial, basic reason was the attraction of skepticism, which always seemed to me a necessary frame of mind for a scientist. I don't suppose I have ever been a "real" scientist, but they seemed to me to be the ones on the track of genuine insights about reality. This frame of mind goes all the way back to my earliest memories at about age 5.

More recently, I have despaired about the role of authority in religion. Surrender of one's own common sense and will to an authority seemed to be the core of religion and a special case of many of the problems that beset humanity in general.

After spending a year or so studying psychology, neuroscience and especially neuroanatomy, I have gained some confidence in my understanding of how the brain (and, by extension, humans) work. This lead me to yet another source of discomfort with religion. It's just wrong. This is more than rejections of the fantasies underlying religion (God, heaven and hell, the moral underpinnings of the universe, karma, reincarnation). It's about the nature of the "soul", which is assumed by all religions I know about but rarely explicitly discussed.

A close look at the structure of the human brain does not, of course, discover anything like a "soul" or a connection to a higher realm. What it does discover is a deep connection between humans, human bodies and the world we find ourselves inhabiting. It is therefore sensible to work with a world view that:

• Does not look for a "higher reality" but seeks meaning in relationships, the human experience, and the "real world"
• Does not assume an immortal "soul", but assumes a rather ephemeral, ever changing "self" whose reality depends deeply on relationships with other "selves".

The Abrahamic religions, especially Christianity and Islam, place a heavy emphasis on the eternal soul - the idea that we will pack up everything that's important to us and migrate to a better world at death. Of course, this is all made worse by the untenable idea of God, but the core problem is a misconception of who we are. No amount of theological tinkering can fix this.

Buddhism makes a different error. Different schools of Buddhism differ in whether or not they regard the "self" as real. At most, they regard the atman to be "kinda" real.

But the goal of Buddhism seems to be to separate the believer from the world - at least as much as possible. This runs counter to the way the brain is constructed. It's like rigorous training to avoid walking. Buddha himself abandoned his wife and child to sit under a tree for months to find "enlightenment", which, it turns out, basically justified his decision to abandon the world. Interestingly, in the long run, he gave in to his need for human contact by establishing bands of panhandlers who had, like him, abandoned the world except for depending on regular folks to feed them.

It's only by acceptance of authority, generation after generation, that such absurdities can take root. Fundamentally, humans are always perfectly aware of their real nature. They live in a constant state of "double think". Knowing the truth, knowing the dogma and somehow believing both at the same time.

John Horgan's Skepticism

John Horgan is a journalist, not a Scientist. A very successful journalist.

You can get the thrust of his approach in

The End of Science

or a short video

Soft vs. Hard Targets
Interview

Science is a vast endeavour and Horgan is bound to miss as often as he hits. His main technique is to go around and interview famous Scientists, then write articles for the layman exposing the flaws in the reasoning of the experts. His main thesis, which he has tirelessly defended for decades is that there nothing fundamentally discovered in Science since, say, the 1950's. This is ridiculous on its face and he's buried with opposition. He's just plain annoying.

His response to the critics is

• Lots of "advances" are simply not true. He especially likes to cite fads in medicine, but these are "straw men". Does proving that some results are false establish that no advances are being made? Anyone who follows the subject is stunned at how often we find answers to questions we never thought of asking. For example, knowing how a cell "knows" how to grow into a horse instead of a tulip sounds like fundamental knowledge to me.
• The promise of many discoveries is over-hyped. The promise implied in decoding DNA is in this category. But he's confusing public confusion and Science Fiction with actual claims and assuming that major breakthroughs are not possible since they have no already happened. For example, we don't know how DNA is decoded into proteins. Paradoxically, there may be a good reason why we will never know, but this is, itself, a major discovery.
• All discoveries are simply working out of existing theory. This is "reductionism", the idea that you can understand the whole by understanding the parts. Reductionism is on its death bead. The explosive growth of the field of complex systems (including chaos, self-organizing systems) is challenging all branches of Science to re-think fundamental assumptions. It's a revolution on a "Copernican" scale and Horgan doesn't see it. I suspect that he doesn't understand how Science works or how Scientist think. That's why he's likely to miss major change to the culture.
• He loves to bash the modern theologies of Multiple Universes, String Theory and Super Symmetry because they are (so far) immune to disproof. But just because many Scientists have followed unproductive lines of research doesn't prove that no productive lines of research remain.
• He is particularly abstruse when it comes to Biology. This field has grown explosively since Darwin provided its organizing principal - Evolution. "Natural Selection" must now take it place among dozens of other theoretical frameworks. 
• He is resolutely ignorant of the fundamental differences between the various branches of science. Why is it so difficult to use Quantum Mechanics to predict useful things in Chemistry? Why do economists so famously fail to predict anything about the economy? There are very good answers to these questions and these answers qualify as major breakthroughs. If, as he claims, we have hit some kind of wall that prevents further progress, the discovery of that wall is itself progress. We are, in fact, learning a lot about these walls. Horgan suffers from a common misconception about Science. Many major findings tell us what is not possible.

As a journalist, Horgan lacks a solid grounding in advanced mathematics, or possibly any mathematics. He was an English major in University and took a few undergrad courses in Physics and Math that left him with a seriously warped idea of what science and math is all about. Undergrads don't "do" science or mathematics. They just learn the answer to exam questions.

His grasp of philosophy also seems wobbly at times. He often mentions Relativity and Quantum Mechanics as fundamental breakthroughs, but these fields cannot be understood without grasping the philosophical and mathematical underpinnings. He underestimates the breakthroughs achieved by Galileo and Newton, chiefly because he's a bit weak when it comes to the history of Science, which is, in the end, his subject. You can't plausibly claim that Science is "over" if you have no idea what Science has been doing in the past. What, exactly is "over"?

I wound up reading Horgan, the journalist, just after I read two books by Laughlin, the Nobel Prize winning scientist. Horgan thinks science (not really his field) is over. Laughlin thinks science is finally purging itself of its fundamental misconceptions and it's just getting started. If I hadn't read Laughlin, I think I might have been seduced by Horgan's writing style without instantly spotting his pathetic ignorance of his subject.

In spite of the fact that he constantly passes judgement on scientists, Horgan doesn't claim to know anything substantial about science itself. But is he a good journalist? He seeks out outrageous comments by "leading" scientists, then quotes them out of context to support his thesis. "The End of Science" is packed with this kind of stuff: completely wrong assertions presented without a shred of evidence. In the end, it's just bad journalism.

Horgan can be safely ignored.