Tetherd Cow Ahead

11 Responses to “ Same Planet, Different Worlds ”

1. queenwilly says:

   September 6, 2011 at 9:08 am

   TCA – a sanctuary of reason and sanity (and also very pretty pictures).

2. dinahmow says:

   September 6, 2011 at 9:11 am

   Much nicer than the recent Melbourne-bashing bigot. :-)

3. Sir Joey Polanski says:

   September 6, 2011 at 12:03 pm

   At the risk of waxing a bit too serious in the midst of a light frolic, I offer the following.

   Part of what this cartoon reflects is a difference between two types of mind — the “scientific” mind and the “religious” mind. And perhaps the most crucial difference between the two involves the exact nature of their respective desires for answers. The scientific mind desires answers, has an appreciation for good answers, but also has an unwillingness to consider any answer to be “final,” and indeed has an eagerness always to tackle the next question. By contrast, the religious mind seeks an answer in the face of which no unanswered questions will be left. It lacks the burning need for there to be more with which to wrestle.

   I’m probably sinning against some Cowmandment here in saying that I don’t find either of these minds to be intrinsically worthy of criticism. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that I think what the world needs most is for folks on one sort of mind to understand better the nature of the other sort of mind — and, yes, for each to be more tolerant of the other. The religious mind will never find adequate the sorts of answers that will satisfy the scientific mind precisely because those answers are never final and unchallengeable. And the scientific mind will never find adequate the sort of answer that will satisfy the religious mind precisely because the only sort of “answer” that could cut off all further questioning would be seen in essence to be only a “placeholder” for answers to all the particular questions that vex us. “God done did it,” specifies nothing. It simply posits a repository for all the answers as to the hows and whys, rather than actually providing them. The needs of the religious mind are satisfied by that. Those of the scientific are not. Each type of mind, I say, should understand and be tolerant of the other. The world’s big enough for ’em both.

   Now before you balk, keep in mind that I haven’t yet addressed the whole of what the cartoon reflects. In regard to the religious mind, the cartoon suggests not merely a particular individual attitude toward questions and answers; it also suggests an intolerance on the part of the religious mind toward the scientific. There’s a command being issued in the lower panel. “Stop asking questions.” THAT’s cause for concern; and that IS something that is seen in a lot of religious folk — and seen in forms that are of great PRACTICAL concern. Such intolerance, I say, is NOT to be tolerated. Indeed, it’s to be combatted.

   But I think I’d also like to see scientific folk be more circumspect in their own … (*a-HEM*) … crusade. I can’t help but bristle whenever I see a legitimate and laudable defense of science, and especially a defense of the social preservation of and support for science education, lapse into gratuitous religion-bashing, or the bashing of religious folk. That, to my mind, hurts the noble cause more than it helps it. It smacks of mean-spirited self-indulgence.

   I think we sort of see that sort of thing here in the cartoon’s overgeneralization; and we saw it a few posts back in the uncritical portrayal of a conspicuously Catholic looking figure as a Young Earth Creationist (and later in the comments as a geocentrist). Now, again, I realize I’m being overly serious about these lighthearted cartoons, but as the Cow has become more exclusively focused on the themes of critical thinking, I claim justification here. Say what you will about the Catholic church — and there’s plenty to poke fun at, to be sure, and plenty to question from a critical-thinking standpoint — but you simply can’t seriously lump the present-day Catholic church together with those fundamentalist Christians who are always cooking up some scheme in hopes of undermining the confidence the commonfolk have in the expertise of trained scientists. Speaking as the product of ten straight years of education in American Catholic schools, I’d put my scientific education up against that of anyone else — at least at the proper “level” (grades 2 – 12) — and I say that precisely because there was NO friggin’ religion injected into our science classes. Indeed, I was shocked to learn, only in adulthood, that there are folks who consider their Christianity to preclude acceptance of such scientific staples as the theory of evolution and the age of the earth at well more than 6,000 years or so. Spinning in their graves at the very thought would be the likes of Teilhard de Chardin and Georges Lemaitre — Catholic priests both — to say nothing of Copernicus, who was not only a Catholic priest but a Polack to boot.

   So the target, I would say, should be those who would actively, concretely, and significantly work to impede the unencumbered pursuit & progression of science. That’s not theists as such, or Christians as such. It’s those sola scriptura fundamentalist nutjobs, whether Christian, Islamic, Judaic, or whatever.

   — Pope Polanski

4. anaglyph says:

   September 6, 2011 at 3:18 pm

   I don’t find either of these minds to be intrinsically worthy of criticism.

   I’d be inclined to agree with you on this point, and many of the others you have raised, with one fundamental proviso: that the religious person or the science person has come to their ‘mind’ through considered reflection. Unfortunately this is simply not the case with most religious people. They believe what they believe uncritically, and with little thought. It is, for many, simply a status quo.

   Let’s take your differentiation between the questing scientific mind and the ‘satisified’ religious mind. Very few religious people I know are content with the explanation ‘God Did It.’ At first flush it appears that I am contradicting the standpoint of the cartoons above by saying that, but in fact, it seems to me that it is the ONLY acceptable true religious view.

   Follow me here: if you believe that there is a supreme being who is omnipotent and omniscient, then, by definition, you cannot presume to know the mind of that being. That being is inscrutable to human thought. It follows, therefore, that you are unable to know whether that being has good intentions or bad intentions or is merely ambivalent. This is the end of the story as far as religion is concerned. It is a magical belief and if you should choose that as your explanation, then fine – there is no rationality inherent in that choice, and therefore no point continuing a discussion with a scientific person.

   If you take one small step toward attempting to explain what that being is doing, or to presuppose that being is interested in humans for any reason – indeed, to assume to know the mind of that being – then you have asserted that you are capable of apprehending that being’s motives. You have declared the possibility of understanding the cosmos. You can’t simply ‘state’ that the being has a purpose without providing a basis for that contention.* You must give up your evidence for that conclusion.

   This is now a quest for knowledge. You have, in fact, begun on the road to science.

   Religion understands this paradox all too well. It is the entire point of the story of Adam & Eve. What is God’s solution to Adam and Eve’s acquisition of knowledge? To punish them. To throw them out of Paradise. The message is clear: at the very core of Christian belief is the idea that faith and knowledge are incompatible.

   Modern Christians (other religions too, but I’ll stick with Christians for the purpose of this discussion) are grappling with this problem but is essentially as insoluble as it was when that unknown writer penned the conundrum in Genesis. The only way to stop people from reasoning God out of existence is to punish them if they ask too many questions.

   It is admirable that your Catholic schooling gave you a good science education. Catholicism (like other Christian sects) is not unaware of the need to ‘keep up with the Joneses’. Nevertheless, if you persist in being inquisitive, you must eventually reach a point where you will be told to stop asking questions. Christian religion must inevitably have this barrier because it is inscribed in its very foundations. Your school taught evolution to you, but there was a time when that would have been anathema, as was anything but geocentricity in time of Galileo. This capacity for the Church to ‘change’ might look admirable, but it has done so out of expediency rather than as a genuine quest for knowledge, and is a process that is highly problematic. It’s an issue of inherent dishonesty: science is able to re-examine and redefine itself because it explicitly includes that process as part of its structure. Religion can only redefine itself by being dishonest to its basic premise, that is, by going against the fiat of an all-powerful being.

   I am not, and have never been, inclined towards gratuitous religion bashing. I think deeply about what I say and especially about what I post here, and I try to make statements such as the one above as streamlined, meaningful and pithy as I can. Of course I don’t think all Christians are as simple-minded and blinkered as this cartoon suggests, but a great number of them are. And I don’t think all atheists are as optimistic and filled with wonder as this cartoon suggests, but a great number of them are.

   If I’m evincing mean-spirited self-indulgence it’s in direct response to the appalling bile in the Transforming Melbourne document – a diatribe written by a member of the Anglican Church to which I once belonged. This person distances himself from the ‘sola scriptura fundamentalist nutjobs’ in his writings, but in many visceral ways he is just like them. He would be considered by most to be a moderate Christian, but the cartoon above is firmly aimed at people like him. I really wish it wasn’t so, Pope Joey, but there it is in his own hand. He and his ilk have pretensions to the science, but when it delivers up something they don’t like, well, they really don’t care to hear it.

   ____________________________________________________________________

   (*As I have done before, I exclude epiphany from this equation. If you can have epiphany – that is a direct communication from God – then the rules are very different and a whole subset of new questions are thrown up: Why did you get the epiphany and not me? How do we rationalize epiphanies that contradict one another, and so forth.)

5. anaglyph says:

   September 6, 2011 at 10:00 pm

   Spinning in their graves at the very thought would be the likes of Teilhard de Chardin and Georges Lemaitre — Catholic priests both — to say nothing of Copernicus, who was not only a Catholic priest but a Polack to boot.

   And just to take up another thread here – it is important to realise that at the time of de Chardin, Lemaitre and Copernicus, religion and science were very much closer to being the same thing than they are today. Religion, after all, probably came about as an attempt to understand the world (an attempt that is fundamentally flawed, in my view, because it presupposes an explanation and then tries to hammer everything into shape to fit that explanation). Science is really an extension of religion, but far less permissive in its extent. Instead of presupposing an outcome (a highly contentious practice by any measure) it assumes nothing, and builds on what can be observed and agreed by consensus.

   I feel that someone like Copernicus would not be ‘religious’ if he lived in this era. I think we could say that Galileo certainly wouldn’t have been, and Newton probably not either. The truth is that very few people in those days were non-religious because it was culturally unthinkable. To hold them up as examples of religious thinkers who were also scientists is therefore, in my opinion, questionable.

   Modern scientists who exhibit obeisance to religion are on very shaky ground, I think, as I have demonstrated in the past here on TCA.

   • Sir Joey Polanski says:

     September 7, 2011 at 5:02 am

     I’ll likely have more to say on the main issues we’re touching on here — a more extensive response to your main reply — but I can’t help wondering in connection with this second thread whether you really meant to say that “religion and science were very much closer to being the same thing than they are today” as much with respect to the times of de Chardin and Lemaitre (20th century figures) as with respect to those of Copernicus (a 16th century figure). Surely, the former two fellows were doing both their sciencing and their religioning during times of considerable conflict between authorities within the two domains — i.e., during times that are much more like ours than the are like those of Copernicus.

     This is a relatively minor point, of course; and it doesn’t challenge the plausibility of your speculation that 16th and 17th century figures like Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, in an era where rejection of church teaching is neither as socially stigmatizing nor as overtly dangerous as it was during their actual days, would probably themselves be inclined to reject church teaching themselves. But I think there’s still an important point to be made — made by bringing up more modern figures like de Chardin and Lemaitre — about the attitudes of the modern-day Catholic church in relation to science and to science education (most notably the stark contrast with the attitude of the much more vocal contingents who yammer on about flood geology and irreducible complexity and scriptural genealogy).

     And this last point isn’t meant to ignore what you said in the “keeping up with the Joneses” paragraph of your first reply to my comment. In fact, some of what you say there touches upon what I referred to only opaquely in saying “Say what you will about the Catholic church — and there’s plenty to poke fun at, to be sure, and plenty to question from a critical-thinking standpoint”. In that paragraph, there’s a bit with which I agree and a bit with which I think I’d take issue.

     But I won’t be able to elaborate for another day or so. Liquor cabinet’s nearly empty …

     • anaglyph says:

       September 7, 2011 at 9:12 am

       I can’t help wondering in connection with this second thread whether you really meant to say that “religion and science were very much closer to being the same thing than they are today” as much with respect to the times of de Chardin and Lemaitre (20th century figures) as with respect to those of Copernicus (a 16th century figure).

       I expressed it badly (in my case the liquor cabinet doesn’t help my cause any…)

       What I was trying to say was that ‘men of religion’ who are also scientists are continually struggling with the widening schism between science and religion. The names we’ve mentioned – Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Lemaitre, de Chardin – represent religious people who are also scientists and as such they are in a constant state of ‘parting ways’ with religion rather than working from the premise of science. I don’t think the worldview of de Chardin and Lemaitre would have been fundamentally different from Copernicus, science notwithstanding (I confess I thought that de Chardin was 19thC rather than 20th, and it seemed to me that the spread across the centuries with those names was a good illustration of my point)

       It is really only in the last 50 – 60 years or so that I think we could say it was culturally acceptable to be publicly non-religious (and in the US in particular, there are still many places where people would not want to voice that position).

       To me, someone like Lemaitre is in essentially the same boat as Copernicus, and it confuses me greatly. Copernicus must have had his religious preconceptions turned upside down when he realised the earth wasn’t the centre of all things – and yet it didn’t make him question the nature or existence of God. It just made him move God somewhere else. I don’t know anything about Lemaitre’s religious beliefs, but his science quite plainly allowed him to push God back to some remote point in time, rather than question the necessity to even have such a being in the first place.

       I find this a puzzling problem: a religious scientist looks in a place where God is supposed to be and doesn’t find Him. So, instead of wondering about his presupposition about God and what God is, he makes a new presupposition to make up the short fall. When someone finds the new presupposition is in error, another presupposition is made. Religion and science have been playing this odd hide-and-seek since well before the time of Copernicus.

       This distant, ‘man behind the curtain’ God is an unsatisfactory and weak religious conceit in my opinion.

     • anaglyph says:

       September 7, 2011 at 10:47 am

       Oh, and just to be clear: yes, I do acknowledge the (apparent) difference between the simple-minded one dimensional insistence of the fundamentalists and the rather more complex approach of the Catholic Church. The Jesuits in particular are admirable in their pursuit of knowledge. But that only serves to confuse me all the more. How do you profess a rational, ordered quest for knowledge when that quest plainly and unequivocally places God (as Francisco Alaya would have it) outside the quest itself?

       The fundamentalist view is easily explicable by bad education coupled with fear and a simplistic appraisal of the world. I totally understand that problem. The Catholic (and other Christian) apprehension is rather more difficult for me to understand, unless I factor in another flavour of ignorance, or a kind of wilful ‘blindness’ (or malice, conspiracy theories notwithstanding).

       Consider: let’s say the Catholic Church truly is in pursuit of knowledge. And let’s say the acquisition of that knowledge really does start to make it seem like things can happen without the intervention of God (I think we’re already at that point and have been for some time, but stick with me). What would the Church do if it came up against something that questioned its very foundations?

       Let’s speculate, for instance, that science finds a plausible mechanism that shows that life arose on Earth from inert chemicals. Would the Catholic Church accept that God was not involved in one of the greatest mysteries of our existence? I say to you (and you know it to be true) that they would not. They would just change the rules again. They would move God one step further back, and say He ‘made it possible’ for the chemicals to come together to make life. That kind of God seems quite suspicious to me – ever elusive, always behind the curtain. To believe that that God cares about you, or us, or anything at all is to embrace a simplistic and fearful appraisal of the world. Right back there with the fundamentalists.

6. Gilbert Einstein says:

   September 7, 2011 at 11:19 am

   Don’t worry, folks. There are still some of us real scientists out there who believe in God.

7. Zoid says:

   September 8, 2011 at 1:00 am

   There is no god, only root.

   • anaglyph says:

     September 8, 2011 at 7:59 am

     Thank you Zoid. Your input is appreciated.

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