dime_novel_hero | Entries tagged with religion

I have had it argued to me that science and religion are wholly compatible because, in fact, Christianity invented science. Not merely that many great and foundational scientists, such as Copernicus, Newton, Pascal, Kepler and even Galileo, were believers, but that it was their Christian faith that allowed them to reveal the secrets of God’s creation. What’s more, I recently watched a documentary called “The Privileged Planet” (2004) which claims that we can explore the universe only because it was fine-tuned by God. That things like continents and mountains were put in place specifically to encourage our human need to explore, that the Earth’s atmosphere was made transparent specifically so that we could see the stars and discover God’s creation.

I wonder what Aristarchus and Ptolemy would have to say about Christianity being given credit for science.

Well, I have been reading “History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom” by Andrew D. White. Published in 1898, it completely destroys that notion even before it was posited by modern apologists. It details how, from the sphereicity of the Earth, through heliocentrism, to, of course, evolution, at every turn when science and discovery revealed something other than that set in scripture, the Church doubled down with denunciations and hostility. Rather than creating science, the Church did everything it could to crush it and, only when it had no other choice to accept reality, did it begrudgingly amend their theological views and retcon their beliefs to make it seem that they believed the new paradigm all along.

For example, the Inquisition charged Galileo with heresy and effectively destroyed his life for his confirmation of the Copernican theory that the sun, and not the Earth, was the center of the solar system. Only later, when it was so thoroughly proven to be the case did the Church change the narrative to claim that they believed that the Earth did go around the sun and that Galileo’s crime was being obstinate in the face of Papal authority or that he had been sanctioned by lower church functionaries and not by the supreme authority of the church. The Church advanced this lie even through 1870 when papal documents were released that “exhibited the incontrovertible evidences that the papacy had committed itself and its infallibility fully against the movement of the earth.”

The Church finally apologized to Galileo in 1992, 350 years too late. And even with that, there are still many who pretend that science and religion are not antagonists. They never read Andrew White, or rather, refuse to accept documented history.

“But the war grew still more bitter, and some weapons used in it are worth examining. They are very easily examined, for they are to be found on all the battlefields of science; but on that field they were used with more effect than on almost any other. These weapons are the epithets "infidel" and "atheist." They have been used against almost every man who has ever done anything new for his fellow-men. The list of those who have been denounced as "infidel" and "atheist" includes almost all great men of science, general scholars, inventors, and philanthropists.”

In reviewing White’s work I find it engaging and informative, employing a clarity of language and thought. The prose is as dynamic if not more so than any modern authors writing on similar subjects. Example this:

“And Kepler comes: he leads science on to greater victories. Copernicus, great as he was, could not disentangle scientific reasoning entirely from the theological bias: the doctrines of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as to the necessary superiority of the circle had vitiated the minor features of his system, and left breaches in it through which the enemy was not slow to enter; but Kepler sees these errors, and by wonderful genius and vigour he gives to the world the three laws which bear his name, and this fortress of science is complete. He thinks and speaks as one inspired. His battle is severe. He is solemnly warned by the Protestant Consistory of Stuttgart "not to throw Christ's kingdom into confusion with his silly fancies," and as solemnly ordered to "bring his theory of the world into harmony with Scripture": he is sometimes abused, sometimes ridiculed, sometimes imprisoned. Protestants in Styria and Wurtemberg, Catholics in Austria and Bohemia, press upon him but Newton, Halley, Bradley, and other great astronomers follow, and to science remains the victory.”

This is why I so much enjoy reading 19th century primary sources. It was a time that the Enlightenment was beginning to bear scientific fruit. The time when science could finally stand in the light of day and not be summarily crushed by the Church. And you can hear the authors’ realization that they are standing at the dawn of a new age in their language. That there are still creationists and geocentrists to this day means that science still has not won the day but it was a little over a century ago that science finally earned itself a fighting chance and White’s book chronicles what it took to finally get there.

“History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom” available at Project Gutenberg.

Last week, the Sounds of Steam podcast with Travis Sivart and Wendy Callahan featured Charlie Stayton and Michael Jankowski speaking on Freemasonry. The general crux of the interview was essentially that the masons are just a bunch of guys who get together to “better themselves.” No big secrets. No vast conspiracies. Just a bunch of guys hanging out on a Friday night.

So much for the mystique of secret societies.

But a few things they talked about rubbed me the wrong way. And it’s not that I didn’t already know these things but to hear how casually they condescended without realizing it made it clear that the masons would never have me and I would never join them.

“The only thing you’ve got to believe in to be a mason is some type of great architect or a deity, and the reason for that is that you take an oath. and we believe that unless you have that belief in some type of supreme being, any oath you take doesn’t mean anything. it is a hollow promise.”

“So a man of his word is not worth anything if he’s not believing in a higher being?”

“Not necessarily, a man of his word is very important, but if you take an oath there is always a chance that even a man of his word realizes there is no consequence for that oath, he might just blow it off and disown it.”

Bullshit. If your oath worked, if your fear of consequences worked, then few people would lie in court. Criminals would place their hands on the Bible and, fearing eternal damnation or whatever else their god would mete out as punishment for oath-breaking, confess to their crimes.

Doesn’t happen does it? Instead, they lie their asses off because their fear of consequence has been completely circumvented by their sure and certain knowledge that THEIR personal deity has sanctioned their actions. They believe that their lie is justified by their god or that they will be forgiven the indiscretion.

On a deeper level, if a man of his word keeps that word only because he was fearful of breaking his oath to an invisible sky daddy, is he acting morally? Is he truly a man of his word? If one is compelled out of fear to commit an act of evil, say, for example, someone was holding a gun to your head, are you morally responsible for that evil? Conversely, if you are compelled out of fear to commit an act of goodness, are you morally responsible for that good?

I submit that a man of his word is trusted to be a man of his word, not because he said so and placed his hand on a book, but because he has shown a history of keeping his word.

And while we are on the subject of men, the question came up wondering why women were not permitted to be masons.

“Well, one word, we’re a fraternity, were not a sorority, and it’s a tradition.”

Those are two of the weakest arguments I have ever heard and, if that’s all you have, then you are way, way behind the curve.

“We’re a fraternity” is easily changed by using the word “social organization.”

And you need to ask yourself, if you were creating this social organization from scratch, would you exclude women? If not, then why are you continuing such a discriminatory practice? If you can’t think of any good reason other than that you are following tradition, you are sexist.

Oh, sure, they have the Eastern Star sister organization but separate is not equal. Freemasonry in France has decided that women have equal opportunity and equal rights within freemasonry, what’s your excuse?

What, indeed.

The Greeks knew that the world was round. Eratosthenes calculated it's circumference with a reasonable accuracy given that he did so with little more than sticks, strings and some simple math. Even during the religiously dominated Dark Ages, Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology.

In spite of Washington Irving's biography of Christopher Columbus, the people of Columbus's time knew that the world was round. They just thought it was bigger than Columbus did. And they were right. If America wasn't there, Columbus would have died at sea trying to get to China.

So why would it be that in the later half of the 19th Century, with over two millennia of science and practical experience with the sphericity of the Earth, was there a sudden insistence that the earth was flat?

It likely began with an English writer named Samuel Rowbotham who, in the summer of 1838, performed an experiment. He waded into the river and used a telescope held eight inches above the water to watch a boat with a five-foot mast row slowly away from him. He reported that the vessel remained constantly in his view for the full six miles, whereas, had the water surface been curved it should have disappeared below the horizon. Writing under the pseudonym "Parallax", he produced a pamphlet in 1849 called Zetetic Astronomy, with a number of additional "proofs" for the Earth being flat, such as "It has been shown that the moon is not a reflector of the sun's light, but is self-luminous."

And nobody cared. He was generally considered just another crackpot until 1859 when Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species."

Before the birth of what we understand to be modern science, those who studied the universe were known as Natural Philosophers. Many were highly religious men who looked at the wonder's of God's creation and felt called to understand it in minute detail. To describe God's works was to them a holy thing. And for centuries, that worked well enough as they found few things that contradicted their faith directly or couldn't be re-imaged as metaphor.

But then Charles Darwin's theory of evolution changed all that. If man was descended from ape-like ancestors then Adam and Eve never existed. Without them, there was no original sin of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Without original sin there was no need for the sacrifice of Jesus to save mankind from damnation. Faith could survive an Earth that was millions or billions of years old rather than merely six thousand, faith could survive continental drift, faith could survive without aether or phlogiston, faith could survive the existence of dinosaurs, but the elimination of sin and blood sacrifice undercut the very purpose of Christianity.

Natural philosophy died and biblical literalism was born, including the otherwise indefensible proposition that the Earth was flat.

"After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth holding back the four winds of the earth,
that no wind might blow on the earth or sea or against any tree."

It wasn't a sudden or complete change, to be sure, but vocal and convincing orators were able to take what was previously a fringe idea and, with the mantle of faith, push it further into the mainstream. In 1864 Rowbotham agreed to an actual test. Astronomy writer Richard Proctor and others had calculated that the light of Eddystone lighthouse off the coast of Devon should have just been visible, the rest of the lighthouse concealed by the curvature of the sea. In looking through the provided telescope it turned out that only half the light was visible, which, given Rowbotham's assertions that it was perspective and not curvature that created the "illusion" of curvature, should have been even more convincing. He was not moved. In fact, his counter arguments, though wrong, were so convincing that many left agreeing that "some of the most important conclusions of modern astronomy had been seriously invalidated"

In 1870, a Parallax supporter by the name of John Hampden offered a wager that he could show, by repeating Rowbotham's experiment, that the earth was flat. The noted naturalist and qualified surveyor Alfred Russel Wallace accepted the wager in what became known as the Bedford Level Experiment. Even though the judges ruled in favor of a spherical earth, Hampden simply refused to admit that he could not see the boat and sued Wallace.

Wallace won the bet never saw a shilling.

The Flat Earth Society, heir to Parallax's Universal Zetetic Society, survives to this day, though thankfuly much diminished in power and influence. Certainly the advent of the space age and the ability of humans and cameras to be put into space to actually see the curvature of the Earth directly has turned most away from the idea that the Earth is flat. Zetitics counter that globularism is a false religion, scientists are witch doctors engaged in a vast conspiracy and spaceflight is a hoax.

Keep that in mind when you're thinking the 21st Century is a very different world from the 19th.

The conversation started to go bad when she said her house was haunted.

The discussion on the steampunk chat room had started out normal enough and went through many of the strange associations that conversations take: Doctor Steel. The Time Machine. Books for children. H. P. Lovecraft. Dreams. Nightmares. When she said that part of the stress that caused her insomnia was in seeing a ghost in her house, I suggested ignoring it because it was a figment of her stressed imagination.

I know from experience that when I am stressed, I will not sleep well. I will wake up but still be in a dream state, seeing dream-things in my room. I will also have night paralysis where I will wake up from a bad dream and not be able to move. My life isn't as stressful as it used to be so these things don't happen as often as they used to but, when they do, I understand that they are dreams, semi-dream hallucinations and an electrochemical failure. There is a part of the brain that is supposed to turn off when you're sleeping so that you don't move about while dreaming. Well, sometimes you can wake up but still have that part of your brain shut off so that you can't move. It can be pretty scary but, knowing what it is, I am not terrified by it anymore.

The person I was talking to, however, was convinced of the reality of the supernatural. I wont go into all the paths that we went down (damn, I wish there was a chat log) but it ranged around quite a bit on her part trying to convince me it was true because she had first hand experience and my asking for the real evidence, something not based on eyewitness accounts and feelings because those are proven to be unreliable.

But where things went really wrong is when she tried to convince me that the odds of the supernaturals existence were even.

See if you can follow this logic (which I have paraphrased. I hope I got it right.): Either the supernatural exists or it doesn't. Therefore, it is even odds and my belief is just as valid as yours.

Now, I've read of this logical fallacy before but I'd never encountered it directly and I'd never done the dance to try to challenge it. I relied on the lightning analogy. What are the odds of me being struck by lightning? If I remember the numbers correctly, the odds are about 1 in 3 Million. I could get struck by lightning but, the vast majority of the time I am not going to be so that small possibility is not worth paying attention to. The same with the existence of the supernatural. Sure, it's possible but, with absolutely no physical or scientific evidence, there is no reason to believe the odds of its existence are very high. Very likely much less that the odds of being struck by lightning. So low as to say it probably doesn't exist.

Her counter, over and over again, was that if I step outside I could be struck by lightning or I could not be struck by lightning. That's 50/50.

No. No. No. That's not how probability works. The outcome does not define the probability of that outcome. To say that something is possible does not make it equally probable. If the odds really were 50/50, then a lot more people would be struck by lightning. Half of all people. She said that there are variables that can change that but it's still basically 50/50 and I responded that all those variables are factored into the 1 in 3 Million number.

I only thought of this analogy after the conversation: Let's say I have a 6 sided die. When I roll that die there are two possible outcomes. I could roll a one or I could roll something other than a one. 50/50, right? No. Not at all. On a 6 sided die the probability of rolling a 1 is clearly 1 in 6. So, if I had a 3 Million sided die and on a one I get struck by lightning and on a roll of something not a one I don't get struck by lightning, what are the odds? Not 50/50. Because there are 2,9999,999 different ways not to roll a 1.

The analogy probably wouldn't have worked, anyway. At some point they (there was a second person who was taking the woo side) started using arguments like "2+2=22" and implying that different perceptions lead to different answers.

And this person claimed to be a physics teacher. I wonder what would happen if one of her students attempted to use that creative math. Odd are, she'd flunk him.

"What if you were struck by lightning tomorrow?" they asked, trying to get me to admit that such a thing would have not been coincidence.

"It would be an incredible coincidence but nothing more because I have used the 'struck by lightning' analogy nomerous times and not been struck by lightning. We tend to remember the successes and ignore the misses, imagining a pattern where there really is none."

When the primary "even odds" proponent left the room, the second string stepped up and started invoking the name of god and faith, again, trying to trap me in some sort of admission of sciencism. That I have faith in science. That it is some sort of religion.

"Do you have faith that your wife won't cheat on you?"

"No. I cave confidence that she won't."

"What's the difference?"

"Confidence is based on observational evidence. I have known my wife for over 20 years. She hasn't cheated on me in that time. I understand how she behaves. Why she acts the way she does. Those decades of experience given me confidence that she will not cheat on me in the future. It's possible she could. I can imagine the circumstances that would lead to such a thing but the evidence leads me to conclude that the probability of her cheating on me is so low as to not bother considering.

On the other hand, faith is not based on observational evidence. In fact, faith is a belief in spite of evidence. The sort of faith that women of domestic abuse have that their husbands love them when all the evidence is that they are filled with nothing but hate. Faith is a delusion that flies in the face of all evidence."

She didn't have a counter to that argument except to say that I can't prove the supernatural doesn't exist, a common tactic of apologists. While it is true that you can't disprove the negative, it's not for me to debunk your assertion. It is the responsibility of the claimant to provide positive proof of their claim. If the supernatural exists, show me the evidence. Real, verifiable evidence.

She then said that I sounded like a bible thumper, which is another common tactic of religious apologists. I again stated that I was merely asking for evidence, not demanding that you believe the way I do with the alternative being eternal damnation.

Then she tried the, "we believe what we want, why can't you just leave us alone?" invoking the persecution complex. Once more I said that I was asking for the evidence of their claim. If they had any evidence at all then they wouldn't have to put up with people asking for it all the time. Like those conspiracy theorists who claim secret knowledge or the UFOlogists who claim they have the evidence but never actually produce any of it. One alien body. One piece of bigfoot DNA. A cup of ghostly protoplasm. Produce it and you get to be king of the world.

Then came the coup de grâce, she said that I was just trying to drown her out so I could get the last word.

Admiral Ackbar: "It's a trap!"

But I walked into it. No, the last word would be your presentation of actual evidence. If it was verifiable, testable, independently verified and real, there would be nothing I could say after that. I would have no choice but to accept the reality. Where is it? Where is your evidence?

Then she said that I proved her point and bid me good night.

And the evening started out so well.