Adam and Eve

I was reading a captivating article¹ by Stanley Fish at the NY Times, in which he “reviews” (read - debunks) three books on atheism vs. theism, etc – one by Sam Harris, one by Richard Dawkins, and one by Christopher Hitchens. While, I myself find these three books to be particularly ingenuous and unconvincing, with their arguments stretched, stale, staid, ill-conceived and extremely simplistic, - I was not entirely pleased with the eloquent sophistry of Fish himself. For example, about the biblical story of the Fall – Fish has this to say:

 

Dawkins asks why Adam and Eve (and all their descendants) were punished so harshly, given that their “sin” – eating an apple after having been told not to – “seems mild enough to merit a mere reprimand.” (We might now call this the Scooter Libby defense.) This is a good question, but it is one that has been asked and answered many times, not by atheists and scoffers, but by believers trying to work though the dilemmas presented by their faith. An answer often given is that it is important that the forbidden act be a trivial one; for were it an act that was on its face either moral or immoral, committing it or declining to commit it would follow from the powers of judgment men naturally have. It is because there is no reason, in nature, either to eat the apple or to refrain from eating it, that the prohibition can serve as a test of faith; otherwise, as John Webster explained (“The Examination of Academies,” 1654), faith would rest “upon the rotten basis of humane authority.”

 

 

Very nice on the face of it, but it conceals a deeper fallacy, that pervades much theological and religious thinking. As one of the posters in the comments sections responded:

 

I’ve only read Hitchens’ book, not the others, but I’ve thought about this for some time. (Atran’s book, “In Gods We Trust” published a few years ago may be the best of them.) Since we seem to be looking at the matter from the inside here, let me take another look at the “Fall,” as described by Prof. Fish, who makes much of this text as the origin of evil, which, he says, lies in the immorality or bad faith of Adam in eating from the tree. I concede he says it is not a very satisfying explanation, but Im not convinced it is an explanation at all. So, think again. Before eating from the Tree of the Knowing of Good and Evil (the term comes from Everett Fox’s translation), Eve and the (trickster) snake discuss the matter in a highly rational discourse: Nonsense, s/he says (the serpent is often depicted at least in medieval representations as both male and female), you won’t die; god knows that if you eat that fruit, you will become like gods, knowing good and evil. Eve agrees with this logic, and eats from the tree, sharing with Adam. And their eyes are opened. And the snake was right: they don’t die, and they do gain moral knowledge (e.g., clothes for starters).

The key point is that up to this point it’s impossible for either Adam or Eve to do something immoral or evil. Rational, yes; moral, no.

But then as we know from Prof. Fish’s earlier discussion of spin, it all depends where you start.

I maintain that this is not immoral, or sinful, or evil. Adam and Eve are amoral, and have no morality with which to evaluate the situation. They cannot be immoral in the same way that a dog or a mouse can’t; they don’t have the equipment.

What’s interesting is that they do seem to have a rational capacity; they reason themselves into a lot of trouble. Most critical, if you take this text seriously, it’s really hard to see how it can mean what people so often say it means. Only if kittens can sin is there “original sin” here. And without that, what is there, even from a perspective of “faith?”

 

Reading through the comments on his article, I came another one that reflects my own thoughts very well:

Prof., I am dismayed that you could write such a trite, flippant article! From the outset, you appear intent to mock the authors you mention (S for Sin and Satan, indeed! and “tossing bouquets to each other”, etc.), and to grind your own ax, rather than give your usual high standard of thought-provoking analysis.

Turning to the subject matter, though, 1 Corinthians 2:14 reads “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.”

This is the crux of the circular argument advanced by Christian believers (I cannot speak for Islam, or any other religion, but I guess there’s similar stuff) and is a convenient catch-all for any who profess an atheistic world view: If you don’t believe this, then you must be a) devoid of Spirit, b) possessed by the Devil, c) too stupid to understand. But, if you do believe, why then, by self-fulfilment, you must be filled with Spirit!
Bush echoed this thinking in his “you’re either for us or against us” remark.

Thank God there are people in the world who are a bit more subtle and nuanced than that!

¹ http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/the-three-atheists/

A history of quaternions

A very delightful account of the story, the logic and the personalities behind
Hamilton's development of quaternions and versors at
http://www.jstor.org/view/00255572/ap060385/06a00280/0

Betting on ideas

The September edition of Spectrum¹ ran a piece² on how some companies and institutions are using a stock-market/betting/speculative-investment model to test out new ideas, products and to make forecasts. A basic outline of this model:

 

So how do prediction markets typically work? First of all, they use real money. That’s important for keeping bettors honest. The price you pay is set by the market’s opinion on the odds of that outcome. If, for example, you have to pay 33 cents for a bet that former U.S. Senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee will be the Republican candidate for president of the United States next year (the price in mid-July), and 40 cents to bet on Rudolph Giuliani, former mayor of New York, then the market says there is a 1 in 3 chance of Thompson getting the nomination, while Giuliani’s chances are 2 in 5.

 

 

I thought it was a very neat idea, and though it has been around for a long time (150 years according to the article), I had never heard of it before. It is really a brilliant and effective method of using distributed and imperfect, localized information of people in-the-know to predict larger trends and mine for deeper knowledge embedded in the system. To quote from the article:

 

As explained by financial journalist James Surowiecki, who wrote the 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds, “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.”

 

This system is a classic example of economic thought – with respect to the value of money, and how betting games are a great way to test a certain theory or claim:

Prediction markets work so well because they ferret out those confident enough to back up their beliefs with cash. Suppose a marketer wants to predict what his company’s sales figures will be in the next quarter. He can set up a prediction market that puts the question directly to his salespeople, ­marketers, accountants, and others. The market gives those people an incentive to express their knowledge. The hope of winning money smokes out people who think they know the right answer, so the group of bettors is self-selecting.

Of course, some people don’t know as much as they think they do, and some will make lousy bets. But as it turns out, that’s a feature, not a problem. As long as there are people with both money and expertise, they will trump the bad betting of the ill-informed and overconfident with additional wagers of their own.

 

It is a very nice article – definitely worth reading through. It makes some very good points and raises interesting questions about the wisdom of the crowds.

 

¹ http://www.spectrum.ieee.org

² http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/5488

 

 

Rejected thoughts

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

 

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

Left vs. Right Brain

This site http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,22492511-5005375,00.html?from=mostpop has a putative test to see which of the two hemispheres of one’s brain is more dominant. Apparently, if you see the figure going clockwise – you are right hemispherical™ – if you see her going anti-clockwise you are left.

 

I can only see her going clockwise – and there is no way I can force myself (or hypnotize myself) into seeing her go anti-clockwise. So am I right-side dominant – the side of feeling and emotion? Ballocks. The test is bogus.

I doubt that it’s even possible to see her go counter-clockwise. Unless anybody corrects me … that is …

 

 

 

Swearing

Recently read an article in the New Republic by Steven Pinker, an eminent psychologist at Harvard, on the cause and effect of swearing in human culture, ancient, modern, and even post-modern – and the taboos on swearing in the broadcast media.

 

The following quote sums up the tone of the article:

Also deserving of reflection is why previous generations of speakers bequeathed us a language that treats certain topics with circumspection and restraint. The lexical libertines of the 1960s believed that taboos on sexual language were pointless and even harmful. They argued that removing the stigma from sexuality would eliminate shame and ignorance and thereby reduce venereal disease, illegitimate births, and other hazards of sex. But this turned out to be mistaken. Sexual language has become far more common since the early '60s, but so has illegitimacy, sexually transmitted disease, rape, and the fallout of sexual competition like anorexia in girls and swagger-culture in boys. Though no one can pin down cause and effect, the changes are of a piece with the weakening of the fear and awe that used to surround thoughts about sex and that charged sexual language with taboo.

Those are some of the reasons to think twice about giving carte blanche to swearing. But there is another reason. If an overuse of taboo words, whether by design or laziness, blunts their emotional edge, it will have deprived us of a linguistic instrument that we sometimes sorely need. And this brings me to the arguments on the pro-swearing side.

To begin with, it's a fact of life that people swear. The responsibility of writers is to give a "just and lively image of human nature," as poet John Dryden wrote, and that includes portraying a character's language realistically when their art calls for it. When Norman Mailer wrote his true-to-life novel about World War II, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948, his compromise with the sensibilities of the day was to have soldiers use the pseudo-epithet fug. (When Dorothy Parker met him, she said, "So you're the man who doesn't know how to spell fuck.") Sadly, this prissiness is not a thing of the past: Some public television stations today fear broadcasting Ken Burns' documentary on World War II because of the salty language in his interviews with veterans. The prohibition against swearing in broadcast media makes artists and historians into liars and subverts the responsibility of grown-ups to learn how life is lived in worlds distant from their own.