Content & Context

THE FAITH OF SCIENCE

I‘m amazed at how the residue of the Enlightenment has endured postmodernism; faith is still widely considered to be a suspension of reason. There are logical, factual things, which can be empirically demonstrated, and then there’s religious faith and other fantasies. So I was glad to see a recent feature* on scientists’ leaps of faith in the New York Times Science section. The Times excerpted an intriguing collection at John Brockman’s Web site Edge.org. Brockman asked prominent scientists and other thinkers this question: “What do you believe to be true, even though you can’t prove it?” Brockman comments: “If pushed to generalize, I would say it is a commentary on how we are dealing with the idea of certainty,” and adds, “Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the ‘esprit de divination’).”

You know the Intelligent Design crowd is going to have a field day with Richard Dawkins’ statement that he can’t prove that all life is the product of natural selection. (“See? It’s just one leap of faith versus another!”) Meanwhile, it was a brilliant move to bring in Hope College psychologist David Myers, one of the most underrated Christian thinkers alive. Note, too, Nicholas Humphrey’s quasi-Cartesian claim that consciousness is a ruse. Here are their responses and others Brockman received, as featured in the Times:

• Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, Oxford University:

I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all “design” anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. …

• Roger Schank, psychologist and computer scientist:

Irrational choices. I do not believe that people are capable of rational thought when it comes to making decisions in their own lives. … When they try to rationally analyze potential options, their unconscious, emotional thoughts take over and make the choice for them.

• Kenneth Ford: Physicist; retired director, American Institute of Physics:

I believe that microbial life exists elsewhere in our galaxy. …

• Joseph LeDoux, neuroscientist, New York University:

I believe that animals have feelings and other states of consciousness, but neither I nor anyone else has been able to prove it. …

• Alison Gopnik, psychologist, University of California, Berkeley:

I believe, but cannot prove, that babies and young children are actually more conscious, more vividly aware of their external world and internal life, than adults are. …

• David Myers, psychologist, Hope College:

1. There is a God.

2. It’s not me (and it’s also not you). …

• Robert Sapolsky, neuroscientist, Stanford University:

There is no god(s) or such a thing as a soul. …

• Nicholas Humphrey, psychologist:

I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. …

• Philip W. Anderson, physicist and Nobel laureate, Princeton

String theory [is] a futile exercise. …

• David Buss, psychologist, University of Texas.

True love exists.

What I gathered from this collection was that science requires its own kind of faith. I don’t mean that as an anti-intellectual dismissal, but rather an endorsement of the magnificence of the scientific enterprise. Science (which derives from the Latin word for “knowledge”) is not just a business of measurements and rote facts; it is among humanity’s deepest engagements with transcendence and mystery.

Related:
My unpublished essay, In Search of Certainty
Science and religion dialogue in Martin Marty’s Sightings

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New York Times:

CAPE TRAFALGAR, Spain* – Near this blustery headland where Admiral Nelson won his great naval victory over the French two centuries ago, a new battle of Trafalgar is brewing. But the ships involved today are only small fishing boats, wanting to protect their livelihood. Two companies plan to build large clusters of windmills in the sea just off this stretch of Spain’s southern shore, a gritty place of sand dunes, lagoons and sharp brown reefs. .. Fishermen respond that the phalanxes of giant towers near the coast will make their tough jobs even tougher. … They say the towers, to be based some 10 miles offshore, will force their small vessels to make large detours in the already treacherous waters near the Strait of Gibraltar. … The windmill projects are part of a drive by Spain to expand its output of native renewable energy. Spain is already one of Europe’s largest producers of wind power, second only to Germany.

TRURO, Mass.*- In an unusual last-ditch move to find clues to the three-year-old killing of a freelance fashion writer, police investigators are trying to get DNA samples from every man in this Cape Cod hamlet, all 790 or so, or as many as will agree. Raising concerns among civil libertarians and prompting both resistance and support from men in Truro, the state and local police began collecting the genetic samples last week, visiting delicatessens, the post office and even the town dump to politely ask men to cooperate. Legal experts said the sweeping approach had been used only in limited instances before in the United States – although it is more widely used in Europe – and in at least one of those cases it prompted a lawsuit. Sgt. David Perry of the Truro Police Department and other law enforcement authorities here say that the program is voluntary but that they will pay close attention to those who refuse to provide DNA.

WEEKLY DIGEST

• Who makes better decisions—a group or a quick-thinking expert? James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds (discussed earlier, second item here) says that group consensus, in more cases than you’d expect, filters out individual errors and produces the best results. Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink argues that “decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made consciously and deliberately.” How are the two books alike, and where do they disagree? Slate asked the authors to embark on a week-long “Book Club” e-mail exchange to explore this. The authors agree that both of their books challenge what they call the “Standard Model,” which holds that one expert individual’s deliberate consideration of a decision produces the best results. But they disagree on the role of so-called “Rapid Cognition.” Gladwell says it can be a way to “protect judgments against corruption”; Surowiecki says Blink actually shows that “going with your gut will often lead you astray.” Exchange

Also from Slate: How linguists picked the words of the year

• Imagine the kind of book Surowiecki or Gladwell could write about Jay Greenberg. A student at New York’s Julliard School and a composer of five symphonies, Greenburg has been heralded as the kind of talent that comes along once a century or two. And he’s 12 years old. In a profile recently re-aired on 60 Minutes, one fellow composer calls Greenburg “of the level of the greatest prodigies in history,” along with “the likes of Mozart and Mendelssohn.” Greenburg, the son of two non-musicians, began composing at the age of three. How does he do it? “It’s as if the unconscious mind is giving orders at the speed of light,” Greenburg says. “I just hear it as if it were a smooth performance of a work that is already written.” It’s a burden as well as a blessing; often, he hears multiple new compositions in his head at once. Companion article

Also from 60 Minutes: Lang Lang, 22-year-old piano prodigy

• Is keeping a secret a helpful or hurtful to mental health? By the age of six, some children can keep their mother’s birthday present a secret. But from then on, the most serious secrets people keep are about themselves. “Psychologists say that most normal adults are well equipped to start a secret life, if not to sustain it,” says the New York Times ‘ Science section. “The ability to hold a secret is fundamental to healthy social development, they say, and the desire to sample other identities—to reinvent oneself, to pretend—can last well into adulthood.” The Times quotes one psychologist as saying, “In a very deep sense, you don’t have a self unless you have a secret.” From illegal activities to harmless hobbies and vividly real computer

games, people seek out secret lives, perhaps “motivated by curiosity, mischief or earnest soul-searching.” One the one hand, the story says that people’s secret lives can represent “a more lively, more intimate, more energized part of themselves.” On the other, trying to keep serious secrets about yourself can cause mental breakdown. Article*

• Emerson read his writings while working on “Nature,” and later called him “the most extraordinary man and highest genius of the time.” Thoreau had his civil disobedience in mind when he wrote “Civil Disobedience,” and wrote later that he was “the sanest man … of any I chance to know.” Abolitionist, educational reformer, and co-founder of the Fruitlands commune, Bronson Alcott might have made his mark on history with his big ideas and bold actions. “Yet, if Alcott is remembered at all, it is usually as the improvident loser whose daughter was the author of Little Women and who lived as a parasite on her earnings,” writes Geraldine Brooks in the New Yorker. Few biographers of Louisa May Alcott have found it a coincidence that Little Women‘s cast of characters closely parallels the author’s family, while the father in the book is nearly invisible. “None of Louisa May Alcott’s twentieth-century biographers are kind to Bronson: at best, he is portrayed as hapless, at worst abusive. How did Bronson Alcott become such a belittled man?” Brooks tells his story. (Unavailable online; one blogger’s summary here).

• Miscellaneous: The ambiguity of the tsunami’s death toll,* from the Washington Post, and an update on the Andaman aborigine survivors, from the Boston Globe – Why the earth quakes, from The Week magazine (more* from the New York Times ) – Rebuilding Iraq’s library, from National Public Radio – Russia’s Yukos oil purchase, from the Guardian – Napoleon and the wealth of nations, from the Boston Globe – Ups and downs in urban crime, from the Christian Science Monitor – Subway photography, from the Boston Globe – Black women’s magazine campaigns against sexist rap, from the Christian Science Monitor – Was Einstein a plagiarist, and was York, PA, ever a U.S. capital? From the Chicago Reader – Archibald Alexander and Princeton Seminary, from Banner of Truth online – Commercials: the new opiate of the masses, from Banner of Truth online – Forgeries and other flattering imitations,** by Cullen Murphy in the Atlantic Monthly – Triumph of the upright wheeled suitcase,* from the Chicago Tribune