Quantum phenomena as shadows

My Yahoo groups have been very philosophical of late. Yesterday, I pulled my discussion on free will and omniscience from a discussion I was having on one group, and today I am going to pull another topic off of one of my groups for my post. Its funny how a single comment can sometimes open up a floodgate of ideas, and thats sort of what happened in this case.

On free choice and omniscience

A recent conversation on one of my Yahoo groups has brought up an old issue for me, one that goes back to my university days. Ever since my early days in my first philosophy class, and even before, I’ve been fascinated by issues of free will. Though I’ve never been particularly religious, the discussion of the interaction between free will and Christian omniscience is one of the “classic” issues in early philosophy classes, something of a clash of opposites. The classic line in answer to the problem tends to be that fore-knowledge of an event does not predestine the event.

Drowning in the Sea of Information

Seth Lloyd, over at Discover Magazine, writes a fascinating story, You Know Too Much, about the exponential increase of information in general, and science in particular, that we are subjected to in today’s world. Its fascinating to me not just because he uses one of my posts as an illustration of “The development of the scientific history of the universe, which now threatens religious creation myths” … its fascinating because he makes some excellent points about the glut of information that floods into our consciousness every day and the ways we must deal with it.

I was hungry, did you feed me?

I haven’t raved much about The Hour this year … I like their new format, and I continue to enjoy George’s direct style (I do wish he’d get a bit more in-depth in some cases, but in others, he does fine), but he’s fallen into the curse of excellence … the expectations are so high, it takes something even more spectacular to provoke comment. This past week, he had an especially wonderful interview with Tony Campolo, Bill Clinton’s spiritual adviser. He said something so profound, I’ve rarely heard it from another “Christian” since the main Man himself …

Stereotype thy neighbour?

For several weeks now, the town of Herouxville, Quebec has been embroiled in something of a controversy over some guidelines published by town council for immigrants to Canada. I’m the first person to be in favour of Canada, and supporting Canadian identity, but the tone of voice you use in that is vitally important, as is the focus of your comments. The town of Herouxville is finding that lack of tact in those departments is a dangerous thing in today’s world of media sound-bites. Its easy to see how many of the pronouncements generated the controversy they did … here’s a small sample:

The limits of religious and parental freedom

We tend to think of religious freedoms in the west as absolute, and on the face, we will defend very vigorously our right to believe whatever we want without criticism, without sanction, and the right to act on those beliefs in private reflection of our relationship with the divine. Even atheists claim this right, even if they do it by denying religion all together … without the freedom to believe anything, or nothing, an atheist’s belief’s are just as ridiculous to a religious person as the other way around. To demand the right not to believe in anything, we MUST accept the right to believe in anything.

Past and Future Paradigms

I haven’t raved lately about Modern Mechanix, that ultra-modern purveyor of the yesterday’s tomorrows for us, but day in and day out they put up articles from the past that are both fascinating and challenging, making us think about yesterday, as well as today and tomorrow. One of the key themes there that I find so compelling is the idea of showing the “mistakes” of the past, the eddies and backwaters of history’s rivers. Whether its the electric harpoon and its efficient aid in the whaling industry, or the plans for the “do-it-yourself dive helmet,” many posts at Modern Mechanix use real examples from the past to remind us the things that didn’t quite work out as planned in all cases.

Pacifists as Cowards? Tell that to Gandhi and Jesus

Ian Robinson is a columnist for the Calgary Sun, and today he weighed in on his Remembrance Day yesterday, expressing his gratitude that he didn’t run into anyone wearing a white poppy. While I agree in general with his opinion that selling or wearing the white poppy at this time of year is insulting to veterans (see my post from a few days ago on the subject, Reds vs Whites: Poppies at War), the rest of his rant was so completely off base, its hard to know where to start.

First of all, I should say that Robinson does an excellent job of giving a history of the red poppy, what it symbolizes for Canadian Veterans, and why its become our primary symbol of Remembrance. The first few paragraphs of the column are a great example of some much needed Canadian history. And Robinson is even free to criticize the White Poppy Organization … one of the advantages of having a newspaper column (or even a blog, for that matter) is that you can voice your opinions, but beyond that, one of the great things about living in a free society is that we all have contrary opinions on things … its really what makes the world go ’round, so to speak.

The roots of fundamentalism

On the Big Picture with Avi Lewis this week, he had the Canadian premiere of Richard Dawkins‘ documentary, The Root of all Evil, discussing the dangers of religion in general. Unlike other authors on the subject, Dawkins doesn’t separate the radical fundamentalists in a religion from the moderates … in fact, he makes the point that moderate people in a religion actually give cover to the fundamentalists, and allow them to claim more honourable motives than they would otherwise be able to.

There’s no doubt Dawkins makes some excellent points, and looked at from a certain perspective, its pretty easy to see history as endless stream of religious atrocities committed by one particular group on another. Very few groups are immune, historically speaking, and very few groups are immune from charges of fundamentalism rising from a literal reading of their theological treatises. From that perspective, Dawkins’ argument is pretty convincing.

The trouble is, Dawkins doesn’t look deeply enough at things, IMO. He dismisses the notion that religions like Christianity can, and have, produced good as well as evil, largely by equating moderates with the extremists. He seems to ignore the fact that prior to a few hundred years ago, the ONLY place any human encountered the notion of tolerance, or love of fellow man, was in theory through their religion, and while in practice, that tolerance was usually less than advertised, the fact remains that prior to the Enlightenment, the only place it existed, even in theory, was in religious thought.

Further, Dawkins seems to ignore his own fundamentalism. He speaks very eloquently for the scientific method, and he explains pretty clearly (and accurately) how that method applies to empirical information gathering in the “real world.” He contrasts this with attempts by religious fundamentalists explain the empirical world through theological study, and he quite rightly shows the difference between the two method, and why the latter will rarely produce the right answer. But at the same time he does this, he ignores the greater truth, the truth that science and religion explore many of the same questions, but they do so using vastly different tools, and expecting different results. Dawkins dismisses religion’s tools, and only endorses science’s tools, and in that way he betrays his own scientific fundamentalism.

A look at evolution is probably in order here. Much of Dawkins argument is with Creationists who take the Genisis account of Creation literally, and in that, I have to say I fully support him. He seems to take great delight in trying to convince Creationists of how wrong they are, but he never once steps outside of the Creationist camp to talk to a Christian who views the Genesis account differently. His own fundamentalism forces him to continue attacking the nasty Creationist, while ignoring more moderate voices.

The fact is, Genesis is not incompatible with scientific explanations for the ‘beginning of the universe we know today.” Taking a large scale view of time, from the Big Bang through the evolution of humans on Earth, the structure of Genesis largely matches the structure of the scientific story. Genesis may get the time-line wrong (or perhaps the tools that theologists use to explore these questions aren’t so interested in specifically accurate time-lines, caring instead for getting the ideas right), but given that it comes from verbal ‘stories’ that are well over 4000 years old, it gets the sequence of events pretty accurately.

Back in May, in these pages, I did a piece comparing Genesis with scientific origin theories. I won’t re-post it here … you can go back and read it there if you like, but the fact is that Genesis and Science largely agree on WHAT happened, just not on when or how it happened, and again, these discrepancies speak to the different tools theology brings to the question vs science. Science doesn’t ever speak to WHY something happens … science will tell us in great detail the sequence of events surrounding the big bang, but it will not tell us so much about why the big bang happened. Likewise, evolution talks about the process of life developing on our planet, but has very little to say about how that process gets started, definitively. In many ways, science asks “What happened” and theology asks “Why did it happen” … but the “it” in question here is the same for both sides.

I took the title of this post from the Dawkins documentary, obviously, and I did it for a reason. The very argument Dawkins uses to advance his case that religion is the root of all evil is as fundamentalist a position as the Creationists advance, to my way of thinking. A Creationist looks at science and says “My Holy book says something different, and so I will completely reject everything about your methods and conclusions.” Trouble is, Dawkins seems to say exactly the same thing to the Creationists … “My scientific method says something different, and so I will completely reject everything about your methods and conclusions.” Frankly, I tend to think that fundamentalism, not religion, is the root of all evil, and that fundamentalist scientists can be as dangerous to the world as fundamentalist preachers.

Be careful who you quote

BBC NEWS | Europe | Pope’s speech stirs Muslim anger

The Vatican is trying to backtrack today from a statement made earlier this week by Pope Benedict XVI. In a speech discussing the general role of reason and faith, and the use of violence to advance religious causes, the Pope quoted Manuel II Paleologos, a 14th Byzantine Emperor, in an attempt to make a larger point about using violence and war to spread faith. I won’t print the quote here, as having read it, I find it reprehensible, and you can find it in the link above anyway. Suffice to say, whatever the Pope’s larger point may have been, one of the quotes he chose to make it with equates everything new that Islam has brought to the world with violence and evil … that’s never going to be a way of making friends or influencing people.

Further, its ironic that the Pope didn’t expound on the historic circumstances that the Christian Byzantine Emperor he quoted lived in. He chose to use a quote from the 14th century to show the ‘violence and evil’ inherent in Islamic proselytising, without looking at Christian behaviour at the same time. The 14th century was a time of Inquisition in the Christian World, and a time of Crusade, a time when the very man Benedict quoted would have been involved in using violence to promote his own ‘Christian’ aims. He picked a quote that tried to show the worst about the Islamic world, without once addressing the world the quote was issued from.

There is never a reason to denigrate an entire religion, and that’s what the quote does … It tries to equate Islam with violence and evil. Surely, the Pope could not read those words without seeing the over-all insult to Islam contained in them. The only legitimate context for a quote like this one would as an example of religious bigotry … to use it in any other context shows you agree with its basic premise against Islam.

There are plenty of less controversial ways to discuss the roles of reason and faith, plenty of quotes that wouldn’t insult a brother religion, that the Pope could have picked. He could have chosen to use a speech like this to reach out to other communities, as I believe his predecessor, John Paul II did … instead, Pope Benedict XVI chose to use a bigoted quote from a Crusade-era Emperor to isolate and point fingers at others. I can’t believe a quote this volatile got into his speech by accident, and so I find the Vatican protestations after the fact a bit disingenuous.